Don't ask, don't tell.

After the Christian Coalition fired Judy Liebert last year, it offered the chief financial officer a year's severance pay -- $80,000 -- plus attorney's fees and a favorable letter of recommendation.

But there was a catch. To collect the money she would have to sign a seven-page document agreeing, among other things, never to say another negative word about the Coalition or its officials,

"I couldn't sign it," Liebert said recently. "I would never have been able to tell the truth for the rest of my life, and I couldn't live with that."

It's not hard to understand why the Coalition, which has been instrumental in bringing evangelical Christians to the forefront of Republican politics, made such an offer to Liebert. The 53-year-old Bible college graduate has become a key player in two separate government investigations involving the Coalition.

In one inquiry, Liebert has been questioned by lawyers and has turned over hundreds of pages of documents as part of a lawsuit by the Federal Election Commission accusing the Coalition of contributing to federal campaigns -- which, as a corporation, it is not allowed to do.

In the other -- the one that cost the Chesapeake resident her job -- she told federal authorities of her suspicions that the Coalition was being overcharged by a direct-mail vendor with close ties to Ralph Reed, the Coalition's executive director.

Reed, 35, left Sept. 1 after eight years with the group to start his own political consulting firm. His boss, Pat Robertson, 67, is stepping up from president to become the Coalition's chairman of the board.

By going to the authorities in the direct-mail case, Liebert triggered a federal grand jury investigation of the alleged over-billing. Six months later, she was fired.

Liebert said she arrived at the Coalition in 1990 an idealist, believing she was joining a group that was doing the Lord's work. Six years later she left, disillusioned and hurt.

"They weren't what I thought they were," she said. "I was naive."

The FEC's allegations, in particular, touch a tender nerve with the coalition. Since it was formed in 1989, the organization has paid no federal taxes, claiming an exemption for groups that promote public welfare. Such groups can dabble in politics, but that cannot be their primary purpose.

After more than seven years, the Internal Revenue Service has not ruled on the claim. It is one of the longest delays ever for such an application.

If the IRS were to reject the claim, the Coalition could be forced to pay millions of dollars in past and future taxes.

In a deposition taken by lawyers April 9 in the FEC case, Liebert said, "I have felt intimidated and at some times afraid of the people at the Christian Coalition as far as the upper level."

She described an anxious scene at the group's Chesapeake headquarters during a hot state Senate race in Virginia Beach in 1991.

That was the year Republican Kenneth W. Stolle upset the Democratic incumbent, Moody E. "Sonny" Stallings Jr. Reed later bragged of the Coalition's role in Stallings' defeat.

"A person from the mail room had come in, a young mail, and told me that he was nervous because letters were going out endorsing Ken Stolle," Liebert told the lawyers. "And I asked him for copies."

The letters, copies of which Liebert provided to the lawyers, were appeals to various voter groups accusing Stallings of being soft on drugs and crime. They were signed by the candidate, Stolle. There was no letterhead or any other indication that they were sent by the Christian Coalition.

"A young woman came in the next morning crying and telling me that she was afraid that she was going to jail," Liebert told the lawyers. "And I said, "What have you done?"

"She said, `I was called last night and I was told to go over with Rob Cowart,' who was the computer person, `to erase data,'" Liebert said in the deposition.

Cowart is a computer programmer at Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network who was hired as a consultant to maintain the Coalition's computer system in the early years.

Liebert's computer was used as a backup for the system. "The data that was erased was on my machine," Liebert told the lawyers. When she checked the machine that morning, she said, she found the hard drive missing.

In an interview, Cowart confirmed that the Stolle letters were sent out on Reed's orders.

"I questioned the whole deal, but Ralph said it was perfectly legitimate," he said.

Later, in a written clarification, Cowart said, "it is my understanding that the Christian Coalition billed for the mailing at full market value" and "consulted with their attorneys to ensure they were in full compliance with the law."

Cowart said he has no knowledge of the text of the letters being erased afterward. "I was never told to delete or destroy files," he said.

Reed declined to be interviewed for this story. A Coalition spokesman, Arne Owens, said no one was ordered to erase the letters.

Stallings, a lawyer, later represented Liebert for several months when she was trying to negotiate a severance package with the Coalition. In a letter to the Coalition's lawyer in February 1997, he suggested that Liebert would accept a year's pay. But when the offer came, it was contingent on Liebert's agreement never to portray the Coalition in a negative light. Liebert balked, and the negotiations broke off.

Another document Liebert turned over to the lawyers in the FEC case is a copy of a $25,000 Christian Coalition check, dated Nov. 12, 1991 -- one week after the Stolle-Stallings election -- made out to the 2nd District Republican Committee.

One factor in Stallings' defeat was a blitz of negative TV ads run on Stolle's behalf in the final week of the campaign, catching Democrats by surprise.

The ads were unusual because they were bought by the 2nd District Republican Committee rather than by the Stolle campaign, which would have been required to report the contributors.

Gordon P. Robertson, Pat Robertson's son, who was 2nd District Republican chairman at the time, would not reveal the source of the money. After a state police investigation, the Norfolk commonwealth's attorney determined that the party did not have to say who had paid for the ads.

Owens, the Coalition spokesman, described the $25,000 as a one-time contribution for "general party-building purposes."

Also in the sheaf of documents are several others that might relate to the FEC's charges of Coalition involvement in Republican politicking:

* A $14,000 Coalition check to the group's North Carolina chapter on Oct. 30, 1990, bearing the notation "GOTV calls." The reference is to a "get out the vote" telephone bank operation. In its complaint against the Coalition, the FEC has alleged that the group acted in concert with Republican Sen. Jesse Helm' re-election campaign.

* A March 23, 1994, in-voice for $5,131.40 for the rental of a 36,000-name Coalition mailing list by Republican Oliver North's Senate campaign in Virginia. The FEC complaint also alleges that the Coalition cooperated in that campaign. Reed has said the list rental was at fair market value and was a legal transaction.

* A 1990 memo from Reed about a $64,000 contribution to the Coalition from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The FEC complaint alleges that the two groups worked together to distribute millions of voter guides in seven states. Owens said the contribution "was for general support and was not provided for a specific purpose." The Coalition subsequently adopted a policy of shunning contributions from political parties, he said.

* A Jan. 13, 1995, request from theirs seeking copies of the Coalition's 1994 fund-raising materials. A notation Liebert made on the document indicates that copies of the scripts used by telemarketers soliciting donations by phone were withheld on orders from Reed. Owens denied this. Reed "always instructed subordinates to fully comply with all document requests" from the IRS, he said.

Alan P. Dye, a Washington lawyer representing the Coalition, said the group "has turned over large quantities of fund-raising materials, including hundreds of pages of telemarketing scripts," to the IRS. "No fund-raising scripts of which we are aware raise any tax issues which would have any bearing upon the organization's entitlement to tax-exempt status," Dye said. "Accordingly, there would be no reason to withhold them."

Dye characterized Liebert as "a disgruntled former employee."

Liebert also was questioned about a $60,000 contribution to the Coalition in 1992 from John W. Wolfe, an Ohio businessman, that was earmarked to help re-elect President George Bush. In an accompanying letter, Wolfe wrote that he understood the Coalition "is very supportive of President Bush and that you will be doing a massive distribution of literature on his behalf."

In her deposition, Liebert said it is her recollection that Reed told her to treat the donation as an anonymous gift and that "he didn't want the letter on file anywhere." Owens denied the allegation. The origin of the Wolfe contribution was fully reported to the IRS, he said.

Liebert also has turned over a 10-page memo she sent the Coalition's board of directors a year ago, with supporting documents, describing the chain of events that ultimately got her removed from her job.

As Liebert tells it, she was pilloried for doing her job too well -- diligently safeguarding the interests of the thousands of contributors who trusted the Coalition to spend their donations wisely.

"My loyalty and fiduciary responsibilities are first and foremost to the Christian Coalition and only secondarily to Ralph Reed and to the board of directors," she wrote in the memo. "I have always felt a great sense of responsibility to the people who donate and entrust us with their hard-earned money."

It troubled Liebert that so much of that money was spent to generate still more money. According to the Coalition's annual report to the IRS, the group took in more than $25 million in donations in 1996, and more than half of that -- $13 million -- was spent, at least in part, on fund raising.

In the fall of 1995, Liebert did an analysis of the Coalition's direct-mail operations that showed a significant increase in printing costs. Unit costs for some items had doubled or tripled over three years, and the difference amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The price jump coincided with the appearance of invoices ill early 1994 from a new vendor called Federal Printing and Mailing Services, based in Northern Virginia.

By accident, Liebert discovered that Federal Printing was a wholly owned subsidiary of Hart Conover Inc., the Coalition's chief fund-raiser and direct-mail vendor. Moreover, Universal Lists, another entity that rented mailing lists to the Coalition, turned out to be a Hart Conover subsidiary as well.

"Federal Printing appeared to be, for all practical purposes, a `paper' company...," she wrote in her memo to the board. "Federal Printing apparently did no actual printing, and was co-located h Hart Conover and Universal Lists in the same small suite of offices." The actual printing, it turned out, was farmed out to subcontractors.

The president of Hart Conover was Benjamin Hart, a conservative activist and author who had been a speechwriter for a variety of Republican politicians. He also was a close friend of Reed.

From the beginning, Liebert had been excluded from Hart's and Reed's business dealings. Now, as she began quizzing Reed, members of the board and the Coalition's outside auditors, she became increasingly concerned. She was told that there was no written contract -- just a verbal agreement between Hart and Reed -- and that the Coalition had no competitive bidding process in place.

Donald Black, the Coalition's marketing director at the time, shared Liebert's concern.

"This `closed circle' of business provides Hart Conover with an extraordinary income stream," Black wrote in an October 1995 memo to Liebert. "It doesn't give us the benefit of a competitive bidding environment. Consequently, our `above the line' cost for direct mail fund-raising is astronomical (somewhere in the 50-70% bracket).

"Even if this relationship is legally justifiable, it reflects an appearance of impropriety."

In April 1996, Liebert asked Hart point-blank if he was marking up the Coalition's printing bills. "Ben said `no,' that we (the Christian Coalition) were billed the same amount as he paid his vendors," Liebert wrote in her memo.

Liebert got a different story from a former Hart employee.

In a telephone conversation with the ex-employee, Liebert wrote, "I asked her directly if Ben Hart marked up invoices received on printing for the Christian Coalition. She said `yes -- on a routine basis.'"

Based on documentation provided by her source, Liebert calculated that Hart had collected an $85,000 mark upon a single printing job. Any such markups would have come on top of Hart's $8,500 monthly consulting fee and an average 15 percent commission on mailing list rentals.

In the end, there was no one in the Coalition hierarchy whom she felt she could turn to, Liebert said in a recent interview at her dining room table in the suburban Great Bridge, Va., area.

"I thought I was losing my mind," she said. "Nobody was listening to me."

So on April 18, 1996, she took her concerns to the U.S. attorney's office in Norfolk. The fallout was immediate.

According to an affidavit filed recently in the FEC case by Coalition attorney David N. Ventker, allegations of improper billing by a Coalition vendor in the spring of 1996 resulted in the vendor's records being subpoenaed by a federal grand jury.

In a stormy meeting with Reed on May 9, 1996, Liebert laid out her suspicions about Hart.

"I told Ralph I thought Hart Conover was marking up our invoices," she wrote. "Ralph said he didn't see that there was anything we could do about it since there was no written contract .... Ralph said we would just have to tell Ben to quit doing it.'"

By the end of the meeting, Reed was loudly proclaiming his own innocence, Liebert wrote. "I told him not to be defensive; that I was not accusing him of anything. I could hardly talk for his loud protesting."

"I am above reproach!" the memo quotes Reed as bellowing.

Shortly after that meeting, Liebert wrote, Reed told her he had asked the Coalition's outside auditors to look into her allegations.

Later that month, Liebert wrote, she learned that Hart, with Reed's help, was seeking access to the Coalition's entire 1.8 million-name mailing list -- a prized asset worth about 900,000 each time it is used. That raised alarms with Wayne Welpe, head of the Coalition's computer systems department.

"Providing our database to other organizations is a sure way to dilute its effectiveness," Welpe wrote in a May 1996 memo to Liebert. "In my opinion, there is no legitimate reason for Mr. Hart's organization to need our complete database."

Owens denied that Reed helped Hart get access to the list.

In response to a Virginian-Pilot inquiry about the Hart Conover matter, lawyer Ventker said an outside audit of the vendor's billings "found some instances in which the Coalition overpaid for services provided."

"At the conclusion of the audit, the vendor repaid the Coalition in a settlement agreement," Ventker said. The agreement includes a confidentiality provision that prohibits either party from disclosing its terms, he said.

Ventker also said the audit confirmed that "no Coalition employee or officer personally benefited from the organization's relationship with any outside vendor," and said Liebert's attorney acknowledged that she "had absolutely no evidence or knowledge of criminal activity on the part of anyone at the Coalition."

Owens said that the Coalition is not currently doing business with Hart and that "we competitively bid to receive the lowest price possible."

Hart declined to be interviewed for this story. Steven Chameides, a Washington lawyer representing Hart Conover, said the company and the Coalition reached an "adjustment" after auditors examined the billing records and found "some invoicing errors that went both ways."

Chameides described the amount of the adjustment as "insignificant given the volume of the transactions over the years."

Chameides also said the auditors found "no pattern of overcharging."

As for Liebert, she was summoned to a May 28, 1996, meeting of the Coalition's board of directors, chaired by Robertson,to discuss her allegations. Two days later, she was suspended with pay for taking the matter to outside authorities before bringing it to the board. She was ordered to turnover her files and keys and to stay off the premises.

Six months after that, she was fired.

"It greatly upset me to go to the U.S. attorney about the Hart Conover matter," Liebert said in the interview. "But I felt that there was nothing more to say or do to correct the problem." She recalled a tearful phone conversation during that period in which she told a Coalition board member, "I felt like a tadpole swimming in a tank of sharks."

She once confessed her disillusionment in a meeting with Reed, she said. "He looked at me and said, `It's a tough business.'"

Liebert has vocal supporters among other ex-Coalition employees.

Chris Hunnefeld, a Peninsula resident, worked at the Coalition for nearly two years in 1995-96, working her way up to coordinator of the group's phone banks. She characterizes the Coalition as a hard-nosed political machine.

"We were never supposed to tell anybody who to vote for," she said. "But we'd always get people saying, `Well, who do you think we should vote for?' And we'd say, `I can't tell you who to vote for, but I do have a voter guide in front of me with the different candidates and how they stand on certain subjects.' And of course you make the Democrat sound bad and you make the Republican sound good."

Owens, the Coalition spokesman, denied Hunnefeld's characterization of the phone bank operations. "Scripts provided to telecommunicators for get-out-the-vote calls never advocated the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate....," Owens said.

"Deviations from these scripts are grounds for termination."

Hunnefeld believes Liebert was treated unfairly. "I know that in every dealing I had with her, she was always extremely kind, honest and aboveboard," she said.

"I think that the majority of people who worked there did it with very altruistic motives," Hunnefeld said. "But it's just gotten tainted. Greed takes over.

"Sometimes I opened the mail, and I would find a $1 bill with a scrawled note saying, `I wish I could give more.' It was heartbreaking."

"I have a real problem with them calling themselves Christian Coalition," Hunnefeld said. "Call yourself Conservative Coalition. Call yourself the right arm of the Republican Party."

Black, the marketing director, left the Coalition in September 1996 after working in various Robertson enterprises since 1984. He now works for a Christian TV network in Charlotte.

His departure, he said, "was largely due to this whole issue surrounding Judy. I can't support a group that treats it's employees like that."

"What Judy did was really try t&& her job," Black said. "She shouldn't be penalized. In a nonprofit, you serve your donor base. They're giving you their money to serve a mission. If we don't act as good stewards of the money that's been put under our care, we're being less than diligent."

Linda Lourey, a certified public accountant, worked under Liebert as controller for 10 months in 1995.

"I moved all the way from the West Coast to the East Coast with the thought that I was really going to be doing something for the Lord," she said. But her feelings toward the group quickly soured.

"Basically, everybody reported to Ralph," Lourey said. "You didn't have a normal corporate structure. He would hire people and give them a title, but the title meant absolutely nothing. There was responsibility but no authority.

"Judy was the secretary of the corporation, but they wouldn't even let her attend board meetings."

What finally sent Lourey packing was a discovery about a book.

"I stumbled across Ralph's new book, Contract with the American Family," she said. "And in the preface it said that all proceeds of this book would be donated to inner-city ministries that were helping the homeless. Well, that just thrilled me, because I thought, `Wow! They're finally going to do what they're supposed to do. They're going to walk the talk.'"

Lourey went to Liebert with a plan for setting up a special fund and a grant process for distributing the proceeds.

The only proceeds turned out to be a single $50,000 advance. Soon after it came in, Reed had a $50,000 check issued to Operation Blessing, Robertson's humanitarian operation, which the televangelist frequently promotes on his daily TV show, "The 700 Club."

"The way I found out about it was, I was in one of our prayer meetings and Ralph came in, and he was all excited," Lourey said. "He had just gone on `The 700 Club,' and the words that came out of his mouth were the last straw for me.

"He said, `Wow, what a great way to kiss up to your boss! I just gave him a $50,000 check for operation Blessing on national TV.'"

Lourey resigned soon afterward. She is now back on the West Coast, where she and her husband run a nonprofit ministry.