COLE: While the program was educational, the citizens' movement was also considered to be a tool to recruit non-voters and people who were apolitical to the Republican Party.

The message that was used in AOW was considered to be one that would be particularly useful for Republicans and that could not be used for Democrats.

The program, however, was deliberately free of any references to Republicans or any partisan politics because Mr. Gingrich believed that such references would dissuade the target audience of the program -- that being non-voters -- from becoming involved.

AOW started off as a project of GOPAC. GOPAC is a political action committee which is dedicated to, among other things, achieving Republican control of the United States Congress.

The methods GOPAC uses to achieve this goal include developing and articulating a political message, and disseminating that message as widely as possible.

One avenue of dissemination for GOPAC's message was AOW. The program, however, consumed a great deal of GOPAC's resources. Because of this, Mr. Gingrich and others at GOPAC decided to transfer the American Opportunities Workshop to a 501C(3) organization in order to attract tax-deductible funding.

The organization that was chosen was called the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation. It is referred to as ALOF.

At the time that the organization was used, it had been dormant. It had been formed years earlier by a Mr. Callaway (ph), and its activities had ceased for a number of years. It was revived in order to take over the AOW project, and was using offices at GOPAC, using staff from GOPAC and using GOPAC's facilities.

The program, when it moved to the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation, was known as American Citizens' Television. It had the same educational aspects as the American Opportunities Workshop, and it had the same partisan political goals.

The principal difference between the two was that ACTV, as it is known, used approximately $260,000 in tax deductible contributions to fund its operations.