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We unraveled the $122 million web of climate denial, political extremism, and Trump ties to Project 2025

Mapped: How 6 Billionaire Family Fortunes Fund Project 2025 - DeSmog

As scrutiny of Project 2025 continues to grow, defenders of the Heritage Foundation-led initiative, which would reshape federal governance and give the next Republican president unprecedented new powers, say it’s the criticism — not the 922-page plan itself — that’s too extreme.

In a piece published last month, Fox News cited prominent conservatives who feel there’s “nothing radical” about the endeavor. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has accused detractors of “panic-mongering” and tried to reframe Project 2025’s sprawling “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint as more boring than scary — a milquetoast white paper that simply “melds the work of some 400 scholars and analysts from an eclectic mix of center-right groups.” This echoes Heritage’s insistence that Project 2025, while conservative, is anything but fringe.

But the findings from DeSmog’s recent investigation into Project 2025’s funding sources tell a very different story. Our wide-ranging analysis of public financial disclosure forms found that the groups on Project 2025’s advisory board — whose experts largely helped to draft the plan — are heavily funded by just six family fortunes. Since 2020, foundations linked to these billionaire families have contributed over $122 million to Project 2025 groups, including at least 290 individual donations to 49 nonprofits that contributed to the Mandate for Leadership documents or are on the initiative’s advisory board. We’ve mapped the funding ties between the billionaire families and the Project 2025 individuals and organizations in an interactive graphic, below.

Groups that received funds from the six family fortunes are far from the political mainstream, according to DeSmog’s analysis, including entities that actively deny the science of anthropogenic climate change — as well as organizations that have been classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. DeSmog’s review also uncovered additional ties between the six families and the Trump/Vance ticket, though both candidates have tried to distance themselves from the initiative in recent months. Indeed, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein — the billionaire founders of the Uline packaging company, whose charitable donations tie them closely to Project 2025 — are among the former president’s biggest donors.

Project 2025 styles itself as populist, moderate, and far from the politics of Washington. Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts hails it as a plan for the perennially downtrodden, hard-laboring folks “who shower afterwork instead of before.” Its funding sources — elite, extreme, and closely tied to the Trump campaign — suggest exactly the opposite.

The Donors

Though the Mandate pledges to “prioritize the economic prosperity of ordinary Americans” and pry influence away from “America’s corporate and political elites,” the funding that produced it comes from the upper echelons of the billionaire class.

And not just any billionaires. The six family dynasties providing significant support to Project 2025 — Bradley, Coors, Koch, Scaife, Seid, and Uihlein — all have long histories of fighting for financial and environmental deregulation. Three of the six families have promoted climate denial consistently enough to appear in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database, which tracks the people and organizations doing the most to undermine decarbonization efforts.

They include oil and gas magnate Charles G. Koch and his Koch Family Foundations; the Scaife Family Foundations, which tap vast wealth from the Mellon aluminum, oil, and banking fortune; and chemicals-and-electronics industrialist Barre Seid, whose recent, record-setting $1.6 billion gift to a nonprofit controlled by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard A. Leo has been a major source of Project 2025 money.

While the Heritage Foundation suggests a diverse conservative coalition gave rise to the Mandate for Leadership, the six family fortunes’ giving patterns were remarkably similar. Of the 49 Project 2025 groups, 37 percent received funding from at least three of the six families. 70 percent of the 49 groups received funding from at least two of the families. (In a few cases, the donations were to sister 501(c)4 lobbying arms that share offices and staff.) The average donation was over $420,000.

*Related:See DeSmog’s coverage of Trump Megadonor Tim Dunn’s Plan That’s More Extreme Than Project 2025

Links to Climate Denial

For decades, oil and gas magnate Charles G. Koch and his late brother David fought vigorously for environmental deregulation, including by supporting groups that sow doubt about the science of manmade climate change. Foundations linked to Koch gave at least $9.6 billion to 15 Project 2025 groups since 2020. But four of the lesser-known families — Bradley, Scaife, Seid, and Uihlein — gave even more, and all six family fortunes helped to fund Project 2025 groups that have denied the science of manmade climate change.

Of the 10 groups that the six families funded most heavily, seven are in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database. That includes more than $11 million to the Heritage Foundation; $8.3 million to Turning Point USA, which has provided a platform for well-known climate deniers like Alex Epstein; and $4.6 million to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which in 2015 published an op-ed claiming warming is “obviously not initiated by the burning of fossil fuels”. In total, foundations linked to the six families gave to 15 Project 2025 groups with entries in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database.

That wasn’t the only form of extremism DeSmog uncovered. Four Project 2025 organizations that received donations from the six billionaire fortunes since 2020 are classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a leading civil rights watchdog group. These include the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ group that received over $1.6 million in donations from Bradley and Koch; The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group that received $650,000 from Scaife; Eagle Forum, an anti-government and anti-immigrant group that received over $100,000 from Koch and Uihlein; and Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group that received $25,000 from Seid.

Of the six billionaire families, only Coors-linked foundations — run by heirs to the Coors brewing fortune — did not donate to at least one SPLC-designated hate group.

Links to the Trump Campaign

For months, Donald J. Trump has publicly disavowed Project 2025, claiming to know nothing about the initiative. That stance conflicts with subsequent media reports, including resurfaced video of the former president and current Republican presidential nominee saying, as a keynote speaker at a 2022 Heritage Foundation event, that Heritage would “lay the groundwork & detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” The Washington Post reported that Trump flew in a private plane to the event with Heritage President Kevin Roberts.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, has also been the subject of intense scrutiny for numerous ties to Project 2025 — including writing the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book. DeSmog’s investigation also uncovered numerous ties between Vance and Project 2025 advisory groups, including a previously unreported 2017 keynote speech at a Heritage event.

But while the candidates continue to downplay any Project 2025 connections, one link is unavoidable: a billionaire family that heavily supports Project 2025 groups is among their campaign’s biggest donors, according to Federal Election Commission data.

In May, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the founders of the Uline packaging company, each donated $5 million to Make America Great Again, Inc., a super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection. That’s not including the more than $48 million Richard contributed to Restoration PAC, a pro-Trump political action committee, last quarter alone. Restoration PAC has spent over $12.9 million this year on political advertising, including ads supporting Trump and attacking his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Since 2020, the Ed Uihlein Foundation, which is run by the Uihleins and named in honor of Richard’s father, has donated at least $13.4 million to 13 different Project 2025 groups.

The map below is interactive. Click on a donor to see the groups it funded with dollar amounts, or a nonprofit to see which of the six family fortunes made donations.

[GFX]

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https://newrepublic.com/article/172480/barre-seid-leonard-leo-dark-money-king

no lnx

a few months before the midterms, with pollsters spewing red wave predictions and post-Roe conservatives planning to force raped children to give birth, a bit of political news added to progressives’ gloom. A Chicago billionaire had gifted anti-abortion Supreme Court fixer Leonard Leo the largest known tranche of dark money in U.S. history: $1.6 billion. The sum is staggering; it will finance at least a generation of extreme right-wing political proselytizing. And almost no one—except for the conservative cabal that bagged the whale—had heard of him.

The gift from nonagenarian electronics magnate Barre Seid (pronounced Barry Side) is effective altruism in reverse: a fire hose of cash aimed at destroying American liberal culture through lawsuits and support for politicians challenging gay rights, unions, environmental protection, voting rights, and public education. The money will last a good long while. Philanthropic recipients usually follow a 5 percent rule: They try not to spend more than 5 percent of the endowment per year. Seid’s pile is so large that it could return an average $136 million a year, or north of $230 million on a good year, to influence U.S. law and policy. Without ever having to touch the nut. For a sense of how enormous that is, consider this. The Heritage Foundation and its affiliates spent about $86 million in 2021. Heritage is a huge, and hugely influential, conservative think tank. Leo could create two Heritage Foundations and one more sizable organization on the side—all, again, without having to dip into the principal at all.

Leo, a New Jersey Roman Catholic and grandson of an Italian immigrant who worked for Brooks Brothers, hobnobs around the upper echelons of American power in natty suits with vests and a pocket watch on a gold chain.This foppish dandy is the Penguin in the pantheon of Washington, D.C., DC Comics villains. Leo is a proud “Knight of the Sovereign Order of Malta,” and his long career has been motivated by fanatical opposition to women’s rights to reproductive choice. Since Seid handed the money over in 2021, part of the pile has been funneled into black boxes like Donors Trust, a mega-donor money-washing machine. Having succeeded at subjecting American women to forced pregnancy, Leo, 57, is directing the money toward other goals: stopping “woke” culture, ending federal regulations on climate change, and limiting voting rights. Ultimately, Seid’s money will be used to shore up society’s winners—the American oligarchy, inherited trusts, CEOs, self-made billionaires, corporations—against the demands of the weak. It will be used to make the United States a tougher and, for many, a nastier country, where big money always wins, under the eye of Rambo Jesus.

All that from a man nobody knows.

Mr. 999

Steven Baer is, like Leonard Leo, a career anti-choice fanatic, but with a political style from the Roger Stone School of Ratfuckery. The Illinois fringe conservative built himself a minor national reputation by shaming enemies like Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy with salacious dirt. Even the conservative National Review finds Baer hard to stomach, calling him “the world’s most successful email harasser.” After decades in Illinois conservative politics, Baer now resides in Florida part-time, and spends his time sipping tequilas and IPAs, and texting streams of Atlantic Coast sunrises, cats, bloody aborted fetuses, and the sins (he uses that word) of Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy to email addresses and phone numbers of right-wing donors, politicians, and journalists.

Baer had his fetal rights epipha  ny as a student at Brown in the early 1980s, when he “saw photographs of piles of corpses at Auschwitz juxtaposed to photographs of piles of dead babies,” he told me, suggesting that legal abortion was equivalent to the Holocaust and abortion clinics the feminist version of Hitler’s gas chambers. He then spent much of his career raising hell and money from a wacky corner of fringe right-wing politics. He famously mass-emailed a rumor about Kevin McCarthy and an extramarital affair in 2015, and before that Baer became known as a kind of right-wing merry prankster, with stunts like holding a press conference in Illinois with fake lawmakers dressed as pigs. He was known in the local press as “a major irritant,” forever pulling political pranks and “high jinks,” but always good for a quippy quote and some political gossip.

And now, he is the mystery donor’s self-appointed Boswell.

When The New York Times broke news of the bequest in August, Baer was the only source among Seid’s friends and acquaintances who talked to journalists. And he’s still at it. He told me that he wants to talk about the old man because he’s afraid that Seid, whom he describes as a father figure, will die without ever getting his proper due as one of the great right-wing financiers of the age.

In 1986, Baer was a twentysomething conservative with a job soliciting money for a fringe offshoot of the Illinois GOP called the United Republican Fund. The organization wasn’t doing so well. Baer studied the Lotus spreadsheet and noticed one consistent donor who repeatedly gave $999. The guy had, as Baer saw it, “a funny name, looked Arabic.” But the precision of the number and regularity of the gifts suggested a money tree that might be shaken a little harder.

He decided to track down the donor he had taken to calling Mr. 999. He found Barre Seid at the helm of a company called Trippe Manufacturing, in a rented building in the city’s downtown, “a rat warren” packed with carrels—a phone operation. The company was just then transitioning from one that produced police and ambulance lights to one that sold digital-age electronic gadgetry. The president explained that he had chosen the $999 number to keep himself anonymous. “He didn’t know if it was solicitors or [Federal Election Commission] types or government,” Baer recalled. “He had just intuited that nine-nine-nine keeps you off more radars than a thousand. He did it out of a kind of a shyness or a desire not to be in the targets.”

Baer quickly recognized in Seid a cultivatable mark. He began spending long evenings talking politics with the old man, who liked to work late after his employees went home. He bought Seid a copy of Chris Matthews’s book Hardball to help the older man understand that politics, as generations of Chicago politicians would say, ain’t beanbag. Seid, a secular Jew, didn’t seem to care much about the abortion issue, but Baer saw his potential. He describes their relationship as a kind of father-son situation (Baer’s father was born exactly one day before Seid, who is childless). Mr. 999 was happy to contribute to Baer’s United Republican Fund and its events, but he remained adamant about avoiding attention. Nevertheless, by 1990, Baer had persuaded Seid to poke his head above the anonymous parapet. Seid made local news with a $500,000 loan to Baer for a failed gubernatorial run. After that baptism by media, Seid was ready to meet other conservative donors.

“Elbert Howell”

Baer likes to say of his father figure that “he’s shy,” and indeed Seid, who turned 91 in April, has gone to great lengths to protect his “anonymity paranoia,” as Seid calls it. Baer noticed that he kept his donations just under the reporting limit. He’s been implicated in covert endeavors like trying to transform a broke liberal arts college into a capitalist incubator and rename a public law school after one of the Supreme Court’s staunchest right-wingers. Seid even used an alias, Elbert Howell, on official papers as CEO of his own company.

But the shadowy Mr. Howell has lived too many years into the internet age to erase his story entirely. His father and grandparents arrived in New York from Russia before the turn of the last century. Father Reuben heaved himself out of the garment trade, became a prominent Chicago optometrist, and had two sons. Young Barre was very smart. He built a TV remote control as a child. He entered the University of Chicago at age 14 as part of an advanced program for teens and got degrees in English and economics from the universities of Colorado and Pennsylvania.

After a short stint in the Army, Seid went to work. He was good at a lot of things. He had a natural aptitude for engineering and a head for numbers. In 1959, he joined a company that made rotating lights for police cars and ambulances and later became a de facto chief engineer, even though he was not trained in engineering. Within a decade, Seid bought Trippe Manufacturing and became president of Tripp Lite—the company that he expanded into the global electronics concern that Leonard Leo sold for $1.6 billion.

Neither Seid nor Leo would talk to me. Baer would—in fact, he wouldn’t stop talking, albeit with brazen exchange demands that involved, at one point, a request that I phone up Herschel Walker and ask him about abortion (I didn’t).

To try to cut through the veil, I decided to do my own tour of Barre Seid’s Chicago, hoping to coax out former colleagues and friends and relatives. I started with a drive-by of a factory he owns, not far from the shores of Lake Michigan in Michigan City, Indiana. Seid made his fortune in electronics, but his business interests have included industrial chemicals and related manufacturing. While at Tripp Lite, Seid was also president of a chemical company, Yates Manufacturing, in Chicago.

In 1975, he bought a company called Fiber Bond, then located in a heavily polluted industrial swath of Chicago. The company had been in the fiber and fabrics division of Union Carbide, producing padding and fibers, which at the time contained asbestos, for the car industry. Fiber Bond’s original Chicago site is fouled with lead paint and asbestos. Seid moved the Fiber Bond factory to Michigan City, and from a blue-and-white plant on an expanse of prairie weeds, it still makes high-tech, nonwoven materials and “paint/finishing filtration” products for HVACs and industry.

From Michigan City, I tooled back to Chicago via the hectic expressway that rims Lake Michigan and passes Gary, Indiana. That city is best known as the birthplace of the Jackson 5. It is also home to the Ninth Avenue Dump, one of the Superfund sites that Fiber Bond and other companies used. Three decades of environmental remediation and lawsuits have still not cleaned the 17-acre site of a witches’ brew of poisons including cyanide, chlorinated ethane, PCBs, volatile organic compounds, and ketones, dumped by a large group of polluters. The Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent report states that concerns about area groundwater are still being addressed.

I could find no evidence that Seid ever contributed to the cleanup.In a building application in Chicago, Seid acknowledged that Fiber Bond was notified in 1986 and again in 1989 that it was deemed potentially responsible for dumping at Superfund sites in Michigan City and Gary, but he rejected responsibility. He wrote in the application that “Fiberbond, during the time it has been an ‘affiliated entity’ of Applicant, did not dispose of waste at such landfills.” He added that the company had not been ordered to pay “damages, costs, or expenses.”

Seid expanded Tripp Lite’s products from ambulance, fire truck, and police car lights to electronics in the mid-1980s and started selling surge protectors, power strips, and other digital-age electronic hardware. These products proved to be the old man’s ticket to donor Valhalla, ensuring the uninterrupted power supply every man, woman, child, office, hospital, and video gamer needs. “As the computer boom took off, people would get really pissed when there was a power blip, and they’d lose all their Lotus 1-2-3 data,” Baer recalled of Tripp Lite’s surge protector. “Barre was just an incredibly brilliant Jewish entrepreneur.” (Baer is a Christian.)

Seid was perfectly positioned as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were inventing their products on the West Coast. But he was the opposite of a disruptor. He was not looking to make something to change the world. If a product could be made for less and still work, that was more than good enough for him. His fortuitous timing and penny-wise approach made him very rich. Seid’s annual income exploded in the mid-2000s, hitting $157 million in 2018, of which $136 million was from Tripp Lite, according to tax records obtained by ProPublica.

After a visit to Tripp Lite headquarters, I drove north on the first long night of November, the night before the 2022 midterms, to Seid’s house. By billionaire standards, the man lives very humbly, in a modern brick two-story, valued at around $2 million, on a street in the upper–middle-class neighborhood of Lincoln Park. It is a family-friendly enclave of wine bars, restaurants, stately homes with porches, sidewalks shaded by large maples, and residential apartment buildings. Seid’s five-bed, four-bath, 3,848–square-foot with a three-car garage and roof deck is no fortress, but it’s not inviting either—nestled behind ivy-covered walls. The few windows, very high and very small, look like factory exhaust portals.

The arc of Seid’s personal life lies entirely in Chicago. It includes two wives and a playboy period spent buying and racing Porsches. In 1968, he married Adrienne Gruber, the child of a Ukrainian immigrant who was apparently hit so hard by the Depression that he sent his son (but not his daughter) to live with foster parents in central Illinois. Adrienne Gruber Seid was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, or SAIC. In June 1970, two years after their wedding, she died. Seid later founded a small fellowship in her name at SAIC. Next came the decade-long playboy phase. Then, in the early 1980s, with Tripp Lite’s surge protectors about to make him superrich, he settled down and married an aspiring Greek American opera singer 25 years younger.

Around the time of his second marriage, he pulled a Charles Foster Kane and founded the Chamber Opera Chicago, a small company that for the next decades showcased Chicago-born mezzo-soprano Barbara Landis Seid in teeny-tiny operas performed at various venues, including a theater not far from their home. A reviewer of the Chamber Opera’s production of Il Trovatore in 2003 wrote, “Mezzo soprano Barbara Landis Seid, an attractive young woman, seems to delight in playing deranged ladies, which makes her just right for Azucena.”

The couple tried, but never had children. No pets. They favor a spartan lifestyle. They order in, eat at home, and watch old movies, Baer said. Seid fancies himself an aesthete, and, like David Koch in New York, he has donated to his city’s cultural institutions. “I’m a successful adult male who gets pleasure out of seeing nice things happen,” Seid once told a journalist about founding the opera. “I’m not a musician but I have a talent for running things.” He has donated millions to the arts in Chicago, including the University of Chicago, area orchestras, and the School of the Art Institute, where he’s an honorary member of the governing committee.

It’s a good bet that the School of the Art Institute’s administrators and other culture beneficiaries do not support, say, the seating of homophobes and right-wing extremist justices on the nation’s highest court, who will reinstate back-alley abortions, discrimination against gays, and limiting voter rights to favor a fascist minority. But school officials I reached out to declined to talk about him. Former and current Chamber Opera creative directors, musicians, and set directors also ran for the hills. A Bulgarian sculptor whose work is planted in the Tripp Lite HQ parking lot was the only one who talked. In the aughts, Seid bought a large work—a delicately wrought iron model of a ship—by Boyan Marinov, and invited him to his office to close the deal. Marinov remembers a small man with a large telescope near his desk. “It was like meeting Bruce Wayne,” he said.

Entering the Big Leagues

After Baer came along, Seid was dabbling in the political influence game, but mostly on local candidates who supported issues like school choice. He made four- and five-figure donations in local races in Illinois and Wisconsin and Iowa where candidates were pushing his pet issues. Baer introduced Seid to the Koch network. “Around 2005, 2004, 2005, I’m pushing Barre to swing for the fences regarding applying his money to affect American politics and culture,” Baer said. “I spoke at two of Koch’s big famous donor gatherings in Palm Springs and Aspen.” Seid, of course, didn’t attend these events, but through Baer he started “fraternizing” with Charles Koch, who had just set up the Cato Institute as a nonprofit think tank. In the early 1990s, Seid forked over what Baer reckons to be many tens of millions for a Cato spin-off, U.S. Term Limits. The project was an early test of the power of Koch dark money, and an incubator for rising right-wing politicos like Mike Pompeo. “Barre had this low profile and a kind of a fearlessness,” Baer said. “When he intuited yeah, this is really good and it’s compelling, he would then drop unbelievable amounts of money, by my standards. I remember one year it was $20 million. All of it 501(c)(4) invisible.”

During those years, Baer encouraged Seid to deepen his support for Israel, introducing him to a project that connected Israeli right-wingers with American evangelicals, so-called Christian Zionism. Seid then became a generous donor to Israeli causes. In 2011, he traveled to Israel with his wife to accept an honorary degree from Bar-Ilan University for “supporting those organizations which will fortify Israel’s position in the world.” A photo from the award ceremony is one of the few publicly available pictures of Seid.

Besides the cultural recipients of Seid’s largesse, political beneficiaries have largely maintained omertà. To mangle an idiom: Why expose a gift horse with your mouth? The Chicago-based climate-denial Heartland Institute, for example, received many of Seid’s millions. Its leaders refused to acknowledge him publicly, even after he was outed, continuing to refer to him as “anonymous.” “He is entitled to his privacy,” said Joseph Morris, the chairman of Heartland’s board of directors, when I called his office.

The only chatterer has been Steve Baer, a man who, before retiring, dabbled in reverse mortgages for senior citizens. As I reported on this story, Baer veered between helpful and avenging-angel righteous, hell-bent on converting a feminist into an “abortion abolitionist.” He put me on a text string that he boasted included Ohio Representative Jim Jordan and Leonard Leo. Few recipients replied to his memes and effusions, with the exception of one or two delicate flowers from the anti-choice movement, presumably female, horrified at Baer’s repeated use of the word “pussy,” who begged to be removed. He ignored them.

As crude as he is, Baer has clearly been useful to both Seid and Leo. Baer was a key link in the chain between the reticent Midwestern billionaire and the powerful D.C. fixer whom The Washington Post has anointed as a man “on a mission to turn back the clock,” and whom Clarence Thomas has called “the number three most powerful person in the world.”

About 20 years ago, as Seid was turning 70 and rolling in the dough, he started thinking about his legacy, Baer recalled. His younger brother Richard is a liberal with six kids—Seid refers to one of the children as “nepot” and tried to help get that one into law school. Gifting already comfortably well-off relatives didn’t appeal to him. Nor did buying a “Seid” wing for a hospital or a university. Baer recalled: “He’s 70. He’s making maybe 30 million a year on S-corp profits. He joked about the Edifice complex. He would give what he wanted to give, but he was never motivated by the plaque or the name.”

Seid had very particular political interests, simultaneously regressive and grand. In 2007 and 2008, a tiny, nearly broke Chicago-area college that focused on the Great Books received an anonymous infusion of $825,000. The money saved Shimer College but it came at a price. First, the college’s board of trustees was expanded, with 13 new members, who all turned out to be right-wing activists. Most had financial ties to Seid, either as employees, colleagues, or recipients of his political donations. They included John C. Marienau, at the time president of Fiber Bond, and an array of beneficiaries of Seid’s political money, including Joseph Bast, the president and chief executive of the Heartland Institute; television producer Bob Chitester, who founded the right-wing Palmer R. Chitester Fund; and Dennis Katz, a rabbi of the Congregation Shaare Tikvah B’nai Zion in Chicago.

Shimer’s new president, Thomas Lindsay, who served in the Bush administration as deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, installed the new trustees. Soon, the tiny school (enrollment around 100) was offering a new class called the Morality of Capitalism, created and taught by Marsha Familaro Enright, a member of the adjunct faculty. Enright was also talking about creating a college, to be called the College of the United States, which was going to offer a “curriculum that demonstrates the virtues of Western culture, capitalism, and markets.”

Before the school could be turned into anything resembling the College of the United States, a former student ferreted out the source of the funds: the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation. The school’s students and faculty rebelled, and the takeover failed. But the goal of selling capitalism as a moral virtue never died. Prior to his death in 2011, Seid’s CEO Marienau arranged for an annual posthumous symposium in his name at his alma mater in Nebraska. The John C. Marienau Symposium on the Morality of Capitalism appears to still be functioning. Just before the Covid shutdown in March 2020, the symposium sponsored a two-day event in Omaha promoting the benefits of market-based rural health care. The theme of the symposium was “Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction: How Market Forces and Technology Will Reshape Rural Health Care.”

Elbert Howell moved on to bigger institutions. Between 1998 and 2006, Seid pumped more than $3 million to the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank at George Mason University.

Seid soon bankrolled a much more successful right-wing school takeover at GMU’s law school. In 2016, the George Mason School of Law announced it was changing its name to the Antonin Scalia Law School. At the time, The Washington Post reported that a $20 million grant from an anonymous donor had made the name change a condition of the gift. A former student discovered the likely source, gaining access to a trove of emails through the Freedom of Information Act. The group UnKoch My Campus eventually issued a report, based on a public-records request, implicating Seid as the anonymous donor behind the name change.

Besides that revelation, the 800 pages of FOIA’ed emails showcase the fawning obsequiousness of GMU’s law school dean and others. They flatter Seid’s intellect.They trash climate change, the welfare state, and the “ugly apparatus of modern government” with him, hurl loathing at the American Bar Association for its judicial accreditation process, and sneer at the university accreditation system. The men never miss a chance to turn an interaction with the whale into an opportunity for personal puffery, book promotion, and general unctuousness.

In August 2019, Seid shot Francis H. “Frank” Buckley, a conservative GMU law professor, a link to an article about how lawyers had moved dangerously to the left.“This change in an important class of citizens contributes greatly to the restless state of our republic,” wrote the author, John O. McGinnis. “Lawyers as a group also pose the greatest obstacle to a revival of a sound jurisprudence, like an originalism that appropriately respects precedent.” Buckley shot back: “Yeah. And I’m teaching them! My hope is that the Scalia brand tends to inoculate them.”

The emails also suggest Seid was pushing certain people on to GMU faculty, such as Douglas Ginsburg, a former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In addition, according to UnKoch My Campus volunteer advocate Allison Pienta, Seid may have had a say in appointing Brett Kavanaugh as an adjunct. He was appointed three months after GMU notified a donor—believed to be Seid—regarding potential faculty hires. Any hint of a Seid-Kavanaugh connection is catnip for researchers and conspiracy theorists who have tried and failed to learn who paid Kavanaugh’s credit card debt (estimated to be between $60,000 and $200,000) before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. There has never been an on-the-record answer to this question. The FBI briefed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Kavanaugh behind closed doors. Among the attendees was Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Judiciary Committee member and opponent of dark money.

Whitehouse told me he wouldn’t rule out a Seid connection. “It would not surprise me,” Whitehouse said. “Kavanaugh was a very enthusiastic and energetic campaigner auditioning for the Supreme Court. He made 50 appearances at the Federalist Society, where Leo was executive vice president for many years. He managed to get himself on the Leo-managed Trump list. Clearly there was a lot going on behind the scenes.”

The Seid-Leo Relationship

The first public connection between Barre Seid and Leonard Leo is believed to have happened around 2011, when Leo joined the board of an entity Seid had founded, the Chicago Freedom Trust, which was in some ways a predecessor to Marble Freedom Trust, the portal through which Seid’s $1.6 billion entered Leonard Leo’s right-wing dark money sphere.

Seid could have donated his fortune to any number of right-wing players. But he chose a Catholic fanatic whose main issue has been forcing women to give birth—

never an issue Seid was really moved by.Why Leonard Leo? Precisely because of Leo’s control over the court system.

Seid could have donated his fortune to any number of right-wing players. But he chose a Catholic fanatic whose main issue has been forcing women to give birth—never an issue Seid was really moved by, according to Baer. Why did he choose Leo? Precisely because of Leo’s control over the court system. “The intersection is the Supreme Court,” Baer said. “Because the Supreme Court deals in all subject matter, and if you could get a Supreme Court that’s originalist along Scalia/Thomas lines, then that’s great. And Leonard’s famous skill building the Federalist Society and then eventually, most famously, becoming the guy who holds the hors d’oeuvre tray up to Trump that says: Here, pick Amy [Coney Barrett] or pick Neil [Gorsuch]. That, I believe, is what closed the sale for Barre. I think [the deal] was going before, say, Amy, but that proximity to power and the ability to serve up originalist judges, because it really covers all of American life, business, as well as the one thing Leonard cares about.” (Leo pulled back from the Federalist Society in 2020 but has remained involved in right-wing judicial activism.)

Seid’s bequest to Leonard Leo was a complex tax maneuver long in the planning. The legacy involved cashing in not only his own businesses, but his brother’s pigeon repellent company. In 2021, Seid’s brother’s company, Bird-X, and Tripp Lite formally combined. Seid donated 100 percent of the shares of Tripp Lite to Marble Freedom Trust, just before Tripp Lite was sold to an Irish company for $1.6 billion. The operation was cloaked in secrecy. Eaton, the Irish company that bought Tripp Lite in March 2021, revealed nothing in its purchase announcement. As a private company, Tripp Lite was not required to disclose the donation.

As trustee and chairman of the Marble trust, Leo makes $350,000 a year and has “primary authority” to decide how the money is spent, according to a tax filing reviewed by The New York Times. And in its filing, Leo’s Marble trust never named Tripp Lite, “to protect donor confidentiality,” according to the Times. The scheme enabled Seid to avoid about $400 million in federal and state tax.

Leo has only made one statement about the bequest—comparing Seid to the Hungarian billionaire George Soros, the mythic bogeyman for the right wing. “It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors, and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our Constitution and its ideals,” Leo said to The New York Times.

Since the bequest was revealed, researchers and journalists have been trying to identify how the money is being used. Leo appears to be funneling it into a dark money network that buys election influence through what the IRS classifies as “social welfare” and indirectly through the courts. Some of the money already appears to be influencing the 2024 election: According to an April report in The Lever, Leo has directed funds to a super PAC backing Ron DeSantis and to nonprofits affiliated with Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.

The amicus curiae brief is one of the network’s favored weapons. ProPublica has identified at least six groups funded by Leo’s network that have filed amicus briefs supporting a Colorado web designer, Lorie Smith, who wants to refuse to work for gay people, and whose lawsuit, now at the Supreme Court, would overturn Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. Twenty Republican attorneys general have also filed an amicus brief in support of the case through the Republican Attorneys General Association. RAGA has received huge tranches of Leo’s largesse for years. In 2022, a Leo-connected group donated $6.5 million to RAGA, according to ProPublica. RAGA money went into PACs targeting Democrats in the midterms. RAGA coordinates Republican attorneys general in pro-corporate, anti-progressive legal action. Those include 19 attorneys general who are pressuring investors like BlackRock to abandon environmental, social, and governance, or ESG,investments aimed at curtailing climate pollution. RAGA money has also been traced to organizations involved in the January 6 insurrection, and the group filed an amicus brief in support of dismissing federal criminal charges against Michael Flynn, the Trump administration’s former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Other organizations linked to Leo, including the Judicial Crisis Network and the Republican State Leadership Committee’s Judicial Fairness Initiative, are pouring money into state judge races. A Grid News investigation found that Leo-connected groups have put “$31 million in campaign funds into at least 42 races for seats on state Supreme Courts or other high-level state judgeships in 15 states since 2010.” These obscure, low-interest races are increasingly critical as the Supreme Court tosses decisions about everything from abortion to elections down to the states.

Senator Whitehouse has devoted himself to tracking dark money, especially money aimed at reshaping the law and court-packing. He has given much thought to what motivates a man to leave his entire fortune to a regressive, dark money funnel. “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king,” Whitehouse said, quoting Bruce Springsteen. “That’s the song. If you are a creepy right-wing billionaire and you know the public hates your view of the world, the only way to be king is to work your way around democratic processes, go clandestine, and find a scamp like Leonard Leo who knows how to move levers secretly.”

What $1.6 Billion Means

Seid’s bequest is believed to be the largest dark money donation in U.S. history. Charitable nonprofits are required to disclose their major donors, but the IRS class of political recipients defined as “social welfare” groups like Leo’s Marble trust are not. “Seid’s donation seems to be one of the largest, if not the largest, single political donation ever given,” said Kathleen Enright, president of the Council on Foundations, a nonprofit association of philanthropic entities. “But to be clear, this is not a charitable contribution by any means. It is a political contribution made to support a political agenda.”

How it works is: If Warren Buffett sets up a charitable foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization under IRS rules, it must spend transparently. Political action committees engaging in candidate support also must disclose donors. But when a billionaire throws a fortune at a “social welfare,” 501(c)(4) status organization, the IRS doesn’t require donor disclosure. Beyond Leo and his coterie, nobody knows how the money is being spent, or whether Seid put any restrictions on it. If Leo’s past is precedent, the money will support cherished right-wing goals: expanded gun rights, further erasure of the wall between church and state, rollbacks of civil rights on various fronts, and federal and state judges who will rule favorably on those issues.

Some of the money might wind up in the pockets of Leo and his pals. In March, Politico published an investigation finding that Leo-controlled nonprofits moved $43 million into his for-profit political consultancy, CRC Advisors, which he has been running since around the time of the Seid donation. The investigation dated the start of Leo’s “lifestyle upgrade,” with real estate and other perks, to 2016, the year he became Trump’s judge-picker.

In the wake of the Politico report, Senator Whitehouse and others are calling for an IRS investigation. “Leonard Leo’s new lavish lifestyle appears to be his reward for helping anonymous right-wing billionaires capture our Supreme Court,” Whitehouse said in a statement to The New Republic. “But questions remain about how he is getting paid and by whom, and who is behind the front groups communicating instructions to the justices through amicus briefs. People need to understand the level of coordination among dozens of supposedly independent groups that are played like piano keys by a manipulative donor elite. It’s an operation, not a coincidence.”

Whitehouse cited “Republican political battering of a previous IRS Commissioner” for the agency’s oversight “ineffectuality.” Kathleen Enright concurred. “The charitable sector has always valued and supported fair oversight,” she said. “However, the IRS division that regulates these organizations has been hollowed out in recent years, so the mechanisms to ensure the checks and balances that preserve the credibility of nonprofits, and the people and organizations that fund them, is woefully inadequate. Rebuilding that accountability and enforcement capacity is an important first step to rebuilding trust in the sector.”

Besides the question of what to spend Seid’s pile on, Leo can also decide how long to hold on to the money. He could spend Seid’s money all at once, essentially dropping a billion on a candidate or cause on one or a few cycles. Or he could treat it more like an endowment, invest it, and spend the income. That choice is not available to most charitable entities, since they rarely receive such large gifts, Enright said. “An operating nonprofit that received a gift of this size would be wise to put some portion into an endowment for future needs, given that it’s unlikely they will receive similar gifts in the future.”

Gara LaMarche is a past president of Democracy Alliance, a group of liberal donors, and no stranger to allocating big money. In his previous position as president of Atlantic Philanthropies, LaMarche spent half a billion dollars a year in the process of doling out a $4 billion fund according to the wishes of billionaire Chuck Feeney, who made his fortune in duty-free shops. Feeney had mandated that the money be spent over a short time on four program areas: population health, aging, disadvantaged youth, and human rights and reconciliation. Atlantic laid a great deal of grassroots groundwork for the passage of Obamacare.

Still, LaMarche is impressed by the Seid donation, which he compared to the endowment of a very significant charitable foundation. The Democracy Alliance has never spent more than $100 million a year, he said. He wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what Leo plans to spend it on, but LaMarche suggested several possible spending styles. Leo could spend it fast—say, $400 million over four election cycles. “Shorter time, bigger impact,” said LaMarche. “Or he could save it and spend it as an endowment. It’s enough money so you could have a very significant program just off the interest of the endowment—hundreds of millions of dollars without touching the nut. My guess is it will be a combination.”

Besides legally saving him hundreds of millions in taxes, Seid’s structuring the gift as a stock transfer increased the size of the gift by 20 to 25 percent over what it would have been if Seid first sold his shares and then made the donation. “Under current law, that approach just makes sense,” Enright said. “However, the broader questions remain of whether this scale of influence on our elections is good for our democratic system, and whether donors to political causes should be able to reap tax benefits by structuring gifts in this way. If you believe unchecked political giving is unhealthy, as we do, that requires changes to the law.”

Philip Hackney is associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in nonprofits and their tax exemptions. Hackney explained that the IRS has been battered from the right, first in 2014, after a manufactured scandal alleging that the Obama IRS targeted conservatives, and further with a Trump-era IRS decision to stop requiring recipients of political dark money to reveal the names of donors. “The system is allowing people to completely avoid wealth tax on future generations and accomplish political goals,” Hackney said. “Then the IRS moves in 2019–2020 made it very hard to see these wealth games happening. We are ensconcing dynasties and giving federal money to accomplish that. Why would you allow a billionaire to use this system to get more money from government to accomplish their goals?” Hackney offered an answer to his own question: “There is a part of our institutional structure that believes wealthy people are brilliant and deserve the right to ample political speech.”

The Barre Seid bequest should alert all Americans to the extent of the damage Citizens United does to democracy. So far, it has only caused ripples of fear through the political junkie class on the progressive side. But it should freak you out, and here’s why.

The Federalist Society, with an annual expenditure of around $20 million, remade the Supreme Court and seeded the federal bench with enough extremists to overturn gun control laws in places like New York and Chicago, chip away at the Affordable Care Act, and overturn the Food and Drug Administration when it comes to approval of an abortion pill. Leo’s people spent a mere $6.5 million to gin up an amicus curiae machine that, for example, aims to ensure that discriminating against gay people is federally protected.

With Seid’s help, Leo and friends can blow $30 million a year – almost twice the Federalist Society’s old budget, a drop from the Seid bucket, pushing the federal bench further to the right. They could blow another $30 million promoting lies about fossil fuels. And on and on and on.

Why stop there? With Seid’s help, Leo and friends can blow $30 million a year—almost twice the Federalist Society’s old budget, a drop from the Seid bucket, pushing the federal bench further to the right. They could blow another $30 million promoting lies about fossil fuels. And another $30 million helping radical right-wing state legislators ban the teaching of slavery. They could found a whole institution dedicated to the cherished extremist goal of ending the progressive income tax. Spend $100 million on that project—and still not have touched the principal.

All that, and Mr. Leo will have spent just $200 million, a mere 12.5 percent of the Seid bequest, easily covered by the average income it accrues annually. Leonard Leo, Sovereign Knight of Malta, can run such projects, and anything else that strikes his regressive fancy, year after year, remaking American society in as many ways as there are right-wing causes, as long as money exists.

Medieval popes had less power.

Nina Burleigh @ninaburleigh

Nina Burleigh is working on a memoir about growing up Iraqi American.

8 22

https://www.cnn.com/**2022/08/**22/politics/dark-money-donation-conservative-group-invs/

cnn

A new group led by a prominent conservative lawyer has received $1.6 billion from one donor -- the largest single contribution to a politically focused nonprofit that's ever been made public, and a fortune that could be used to fuel right-wing interests.

The nonprofit, Marble Freedom Trust, received the contribution in the form of stock and then funneled more than $200 million to other conservative organizations last year, a tax form CNN obtained from the IRS shows.

Marble Freedom is led by Leonard Leo, the co-chairman of the conservative Federalist Society, who advised former President Donald Trump on his Supreme Court picks and runs a sprawling network of other right-wing nonprofits that don't disclose their donors, which are often referred to as dark money groups.

A CNN review of financial documents connected the donation to Barre Seid, a low-profile, 90-year-old Chicago electronics company executive and philanthropist who has previously been tied to smaller anonymous contributions to other right-wing groups. The New York Times, which first reported the contribution on Monday, also identified Seid as the donor.

the massive donation instantly makes the Utah-based group one of the most well-funded organizations bankrolling conservative causes in the US -- a staggering distinction for a group with zero public profile or even a website. In comparison, the single contribution is more than double the total amount raised by Trump's presidential campaign committee during the entire 2020 election cycle.

Robert Maguire, the research director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the donation "stupefying," and "by far" the largest known contribution to a dark money political group.

"I've never seen a group of this magnitude before," Maguire said. "This is the kind of money that can help these political operatives and their allies start to move the needle on issues like reshaping the federal judiciary, making it more difficult to vote, a state-by-state campaign to remake election laws and lay the groundwork for undermining future elections."

Leo said in a statement that "it's high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our Constitution and its ideals" -- referring to two liberal-leaning billionaires and a consulting firm that manages several smaller dark money groups on the left.

Seid did not respond to requests for comment left on phone numbers listed for him and his longtime assistant.

Huge anonymous donation has ties to Chicago executive

"Dark money" generally refers to nonprofits that get involved in politics but do not disclose their donors, a practice that significantly ramped up after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010. Many dark money groups, like Marble Freedom, are 501(c)4 organizations -- nonprofits that are allowed to participate in politics as long as it is not their primary activity.

Groups on both sides of the political spectrum have increasingly turned to dark money in recent years to sway voters or push agendas without revealing their ultra-wealthy benefactors -- but the Marble Freedom donation dramatically eclipses even the largest of the previously known groups.

Marble Freedom's tax return covers its initial year of existence between May 2020 and April 2021. The gift of just over $1.6 billion came in the form of 100% of the stock of a privately held company, which Marble Freedom then sold to another company, according to the tax form.

The arrangement likely saved Seid a large amount of money in taxes, according to Marcus Owens, an attorney and former director of the IRS division on tax-exempt organizations, who reviewed the form for CNN. If Seid had personally sold the stock in the company, he would likely have had to pay capital gains tax on the proceeds of the sale. By donating the stock to Marble Freedom, he avoided having to pay that tax, and the nonprofit would be exempt from paying it.

Marble Freedom wrote that it was withholding information about which company was donated and who it sold to because "disclosing it would effectively disclose the identity of its donors."

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But details about the donation connect it to the sale of the Chicago-based electrical device firm Tripp Lite, whose longtime chairman was Seid.

After receiving the donated stock, Marble Freedom sold the company on March 17, 2021, according to the tax form. The same day, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents, the American-Irish power company Eaton acquired Tripp Lite for $1.65 billion.

During the sale, "the sole shareholder of Tripp Lite" was represented by New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, Law360 reported at the time. Less than two weeks later, Marble Freedom paid Sullivan & Cromwell $940,000 in legal fees, the tax form shows. A spokesperson for Eaton said the company would not provide more details about the acquisition, and several lawyers involved in the transaction did not respond to requests for comment.

Seid served as chairman and CEO and listed himself as the "owner" of Tripp Lite in federal campaign donation records from 2008. He worked at the company, which produces power strips, surge protectors and other devices, for more than 50 years, according to a Facebook post from Tripp Lite. He grew up in Chicago, the son of immigrants from Russia, according to Census records, and graduated from the University of Chicago.

Seid has previously had a history of donating anonymously to conservative political groups and causes. An internal 2015 document from the Bradley Foundation, a right-wing nonprofit, stated that the conservative think tank Foundation for Government Accountability had received support from "Barre Seid (anonymously)." The document was part of a trove of records from Bradley that was hacked and released, and was later included as an exhibit in Senate testimony.

In addition, Salon reported in 2010 that "Barry Seid" was listed in tax documents as the identity of an anonymous donor who gave nearly $17 million to a group that produced an anti-Islam documentary and sent DVDs of the movie to millions of households during the 2008 election. An assistant for Seid told Salon that he did not contribute to the organization, although she didn't address whether he made the donation by routing it through another group.  

And publicly released emails suggest that Seid may also be the anonymous donor who pledged $20 million over five years to George Mason University's law school in order to rename it for former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. The emails were obtained through a public records request and published by George Mason Law alum Allison Pienta in 2019. The school has refused to identify the donor but has said that Leo coordinated the gift.

Seid and his wife make public donations through another nonprofit, the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation, which mostly funds Chicago-based cultural organizations and universities but has given to conservative and libertarian groups such as the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute. Seid also donated to various political campaigns in Illinois and elsewhere in the 1990s and 2000s.

Big spending and opaque groups

Even in its infancy, Marble Freedom Trust has already funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to other dark money groups.

Leo, Marble Freedom's chairman and trustee, is one of the most influential figures in the world of conservative dark money. A longtime executive at the Federalist Society, a national network of right-leaning lawyers, Leo has led or served on the board of more than a dozen different nonprofits. Several of his groups have been associated with political campaigns promoting conservative Supreme Court nominees, operating in complex networks of spending.

The new $1.6 billion donation "solidifies Leo as just an absolute gravitational force within the conservative political and legal world," Maguire said. "He was already the man behind the scenes raising money for reshaping the American judiciary, and this amount of money just takes it to a stratospheric level."

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On the Marble Freedom tax form, Leo is listed as being paid a $350,000 annual salary for 25 hours a week of work for the group.

The form states that the group's mission is to "maintain and expand human freedom consistent with the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States." While politics can't be its primary focus, it can use at least some of its huge resources to influence this year's midterms or future elections.

"This is such a significant amount that it would be a game-changer if they do decide to devote even a portion of that to election-related spending," said Anna Massoglia, the Editorial and Investigations Manager at OpenSecrets, a group that researches campaign finance.

Marble Freedom reported making four donations to other nonprofits -- transactions that appear to have taken place between the sale of the stock in mid-March 2021 and the end of April 2021.

The largest contribution was a $153 million gift to the Rule of Law Trust, a dark money nonprofit led by Leo that has funded other conservative organizations. The group's tax returns show it received just under $80 million in donations in 2018 and no contributions in 2019 or 2020, so the gift from Marble Freedom represents a massive funding boost for the organization.

Marble Freedom contributed $41.1 million to Donors Trust, a nonprofit that distributes money to conservative and libertarian groups in addition to nonpolitical organizations. The group is a donor-advised fund, which means its contributors can recommend where their donations to the fund are sent. 

In the past, Donors Trust has funneled millions of dollars to groups that have amplified false claims about election fraud and advocated for more restrictive voting rules. The group has previously said that its donations are intended to "serve the public good."

Marble Freedom also donated $16.5 million to The Concord Fund, a nonprofit that has advocated for conservative nominees to the Supreme Court and other judgeships and is associated with a group that has pushed restrictive voting laws. Concord, which was previously known as the Judicial Crisis Network, raised $20.4 million from July 2019 to June 2020, according to its most recent tax return.

In addition to the three groups with political connections, Marble Freedom gave $18 million to Schwab Charitable Fund, another donor-advised fund.

Marble Freedom lists two other board members in addition to Leo, both of whom are unpaid.One is Tyler Green, the former solicitor general of Utah, who has represented the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups in multiple voting-related lawsuits in recent years. Green, who is listed as Marble Freedom's administrative trustee, is also a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The trust's address is listed as a home in North Salt Lake, Utah, that Green owns.

The board's third member is Jonathan Bunch, a former Federalist Society vice presidentwho has been involved with various groups led by Leo. Bunch is listed as Marble Freedom's successor trustee. Green and Bunch did not respond to requests for comment.

At the end of April 2021, Marble Freedom had more than $1.4 billion in assets -- positioning it to play a major role in conservative causes potentially for years to come.

"This group is emblematic of the corrosion and the breakdown of our campaign finance system," Maguire said -- and how it gives "wealthy donors, whether they be corporations or individuals, access and influence over the system far greater than any regular American can ever imagine."

CNN's Yahya Abou-Ghazala contributed to this report.

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an 8 22

The Republican Party has had its share of ultra-wealthy donors. But according to New York Times reporters Kenneth P. Vogeland Shane Goldmacher, the most generous GOP donation of 2021 came from “electronics manufacturing mogul” Barre Seid.

In 2021, Vogel and Goldmacher report, Seid donated a whopping $1.6 billion dollars to a group led by Republican activist and Federalist Society Co-Chairman Leonard A. Leo.

“This windfall will help cement Mr. Leo’s status as a kingmaker in conservative big money politics,” Vogel and Goldmacher report in a Times article published on August 22. “It could also give conservatives an advantage in a type of difficult-to-trace spending that shapes elections and political fights. The cash infusion was arranged through an unusual series of transactions that appear to have avoided tax liabilities. It originated with Mr. Seid, a long-time conservative donor who made a fortune as the chairman and chief executive of an electrical device manufacturing company in Chicago now known as Tripp Lite.”

READ MORE: Peter Thiel announces departure from Facebook parent Meta to focus on far-right politics

The reporters add, “The nonprofit, called the Marble Freedom Trust, then received all of the proceeds from the sale, in a transaction that appears to have been structured to allow the nonprofit group and Mr. Seid to avoid paying taxes on the proceeds.”

In a tweet posted on August 22, Vogel emphasized just how big Seid’s donation was. Vogel wrote, “When I describe this as ‘likely the biggest single political donation,’ I mean biggest EVER. Like in the history of US politics.”

Vogel and Goldmacher explain, “For perspective, the $1.6 billion that the Marble trust reaped from the sale is slightly more than the total of $1.5 billion spent in 2020 by 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with Democrats, according to an analysis by The Times. That spending, which Democrats embraced to aid the campaigns of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and his allies in Congress, dwarfed the roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the Republican Party.”

According to Vogel and Goldmacher, the Marble Freedom Trust “could help conservatives level the playing field — if not surpass the left — in such nonprofit spending, which is commonly referred to as dark money because the groups involved can raise and spend unlimited sums on politics while revealing little about where they got the money or how they spent it.”

READ MORE: Robert Reich delivers brutal reality-check for Dem — and urges 'an agenda of radical democratic reform'

“The Marble Freedom Trust’s formation in May 2020, the donation of Tripp Lite shares by Mr. Seid, and Mr. Leo’s role have not been previously reported,” Vogel and Goldmacher note. “The funds are difficult to trace through public records. Tripp Lite is a private company that is not subject to corporate disclosure rules for public companies. On its tax filing, Marble indicated that the $1.6 billion came from the ‘sale of gifted company and subsidiaries,’ but indicated that it withheld identifying information ‘to protect donor confidentiality.’ And Eaton, the publicly traded Irish company that bought Tripp Lite, does not refer to Marble in statements related to the sale.”

Campaign finance reform suffered a major blow in the United States in 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its widely criticized 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC. Defining political contributions as a form of “speech,” the Citizens United ruling gutted restrictions on the size of campaign donations and, critics say, paved the way for a flood of “dark money” into political races.

READ MORE: 'Today’s Republicans are fascist': Conservative activist slams authoritarian GOP candidates

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https://publicintegrity.org/politics/news-outlets-unearth-more-donors-trust-recipients/

donors use charity to push free-market policies in states

By Paul Abowd

February 14, 2013

Charity acts as screen for conservative foundations that feed network of state-based think tanks, media outlets.

Virginia-based charity Donors Trust has promised anonymity to donors who seek to fund “sensitive or controversial” issues.

A Center for Public Integrity report last week lifted that veil — at least partially — revealing dozens of conservative foundations that together in recent years have given tens of millions of dollars to Donors Trust .

Donors Trust, in turn, has funded a nationwide network of free-market think tanks, media outlets and university programs to the tune of nearly $400 million since 2002.

Recently, much of that funding has gone toward state-based policy efforts. For example, Donors Trust provided 95 percent of the funding for a conservative media clearinghouse called the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which runs a network of state-based blogs.

While many of the charity’s 193 donors remain anonymous, a variety of media reports have shown where Donors Trust money ends up:

Climate change-denial

In late February, The Guardian GUK reported that 46 percent of Donors Trust grants in 2010 went to groups opposing climate science. Between 2002 and 2010, the group gave $118 million to about 100 such groups.

A detailed 2012 report published on DeSmog Blog ties Donors Trust to a vast climate science denial machine through its generous support for the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank that mobilized support for the tobacco industry before shifting its focus to climate change. BUCHHOLTZ?]

An October episode of PBS Frontline said Donors Trust has become “the number one supporter” of climate denial groups like Heartland and the Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity after industry giants such as ExxonMobil curtailed funding to Heartland following public protest.

Islamic radicalism

Donors Trust made its largest grant in 2007 to a New York-based group called Clarion Fund. The $17 million donation went toward the production of a documentary called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.”

Seven weeks before the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president, Clarion distributed millions of copies of the movie, which stirred fear about Islamic radicalism, by inserting DVDs as ads in daily newspapers nationwide.

Reports later suggested that Chicago businessman Barry Seid may have passed the $17 million through Donors Trust to Clarion. Seid and Donors Trust director Whitney Ball co-chair another foundation called Chicago Freedom Trust.

Academic coups?

In 2010, a free-market professor of economics whose research is funded through Donors Trust laid out his “Free State” plan for libertarians to migrate to and take over the state of New Hampshire.

In 2009, Donors Trust passed about $600,000 in donations to Shimer College while conservative Chicago businessmen, including Seid, attempted unsuccessfully to take control of the small liberal arts school.

‘Fair representation’

A Donors Trust subsidiary called the Project for Fair Representationhas led legal challenges to affirmative action programs and, more recently, to the Voting Rights Act, according to reports by Reuters and The New York Times.

The project sought out and tapped the majority-white Shelby County, Ala., as plaintiffs in a challenge to Section 5 of the Act, which gives the U.S. Department of Justice power to approve or reject changes to electoral laws in 16 states, mostly in the south. The case will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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1220 cmd

Friday, December 4, 2020

Contact: David Armiak, david@prwatch.org

MADISON, WI – The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in federal court on Thursday, December 4, 2020, for illegally withholding tax documents for five right-wing funders.

CMD filed the complaint after exhausting every option to obtain grant lists from tax filings from the IRS, and argues that the agency’s actions have violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In June 2020, CMD submitted a FOIA request seeking missing Part XV, “Grants and Contributions Paid During the Year or Approved for Future Payment,” from 23 tax returns from the nine right-wing funders. In October 2020, the IRS produced some of the attachments without explanation in a response to CMD, but not all. A few days later, CMD received another letter from the IRS stating that, “the Disclosure Specialist properly denied your requests.”

CMD is filing suit to obtain the Part XV section for the following:

• • • Asness Family Foundation (2016 990 Form, 2017 990 Form, 2018 990 Form)
    • Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation (2016 990-PF Form, 2018 990-PF Form)
    • Dunn Foundation (2014-PF Form)
    • Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund (2013 990 Form, 2014 990 Form, 2015 990 Form)
    • The Randolph Foundation (2018 990-PF Form)

CMD’s December 3 lawsuit follows an April 20 lawsuit against the IRS for failing to produce 2018 tax records for 18 right-wing groups that it claimed did not exist. In May, the IRS informed CMD’s counsel, Courtney T. DeThomas from Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, that it would not contest CMD’s request for records and provided all but one of the filings. “The IRS’s response to CMD’s FOIA requests points to a pattern of arbitrary and capricious procedural dodges that undermines the core principles of government transparency that are enshrined in the law,” said Ms. DeThomas.

===

che

december 18, 2019; Chronicle of Higher Education

Maybe money can’t buy you love, but on university campuses at least, it may buy you access and influence. When the power of that money combines with donor anonymity, it creates a toxic brew that can poison an organization’s values and culture.

The pressure on colleges and universities to raise funds places donors in a position of privilege that is strengthened as their wealth and ability to make larger gifts grows. For donors with a mission, whether it’s to reclaim a stained reputation or to advance a political philosophy, that leverage becomes a tool to be used.

In 2016, George Mason University announced with great fanfare and immediate controversy that it had raised $30 million from two donors and would, as a result, be renaming its law school in honor of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. At the time, Ruth McCambridge reported on the strong negative reaction that the renaming drew and pointed to concerns not just with having Scalia’s values tied to George Mason, but also with the two donors:

One donor is anonymous, but approached the school through the conservative Federalist Society with a $20 million gift; the other donor is the Charles Koch Foundation for $10 million. The strong donor politics leave many worried, both about the potential for an abrogation of academic freedom and the probability that the combination of donor and honoree will give the perception that the school is essentially a conservative legal stronghold.

This week, we may have learned who the anonymous donor might have been and about the ongoing ability of that donor to influence the university’s operations. Based on documents obtained from the university, Allison Pienta, a lawyer working for the nonprofit UnKoch My Campus, identified the $20 million donor as Barre Seid, a Chicago billionaire industrialist with strong conservative beliefs.

George Mason’s interim president, Anne Holton, could neither confirm nor deny the identity of the anonymous contributor, according to the :{Chronicle of Higher Education:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:. But if Pienta’s conclusions are correct, then, based on the treasure trove of communications now available, he has been actively using the access his donor status provides to quietly push the university to agree with his political agenda.

As the Chronicle observed, once it reviewed the information about Seid and George Mason, “People who are concerned about undue donor influence often envision clear-cut quid pro quos or prescriptive gift agreements that grant wealthy people too much control over the academic enterprise. These documents imply a subtler form of influence, one in which a donor elevates concerns about a professor or a regulatory body just by passing information along to university decision makers.” Subtle, yes, but influence nonetheless.

The documents contain evidence Seid was willing to use large and regular gifts to help him influence the university’s law school. Seid committed $1,875,000 over five years to support the hiring of a specific law professor. The gift, to be made anonymously through “Donors Trust,” would be terminated if the professor Seid favored left the school. He was also, through the select forwarding of blog posts, able to have an audit triggered on the program of Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason.

NPQ’s coverage of the pernicious effect of big money and secrecy had us worried about the future of colleges, universities, and the nonprofit sector overall: “Anonymity and secrecy may make fundraising easier, but they don’t build trust.” With each new case, our worry grows.—Martin Levine

==

https://www.chronicle.com/article/to-court-a-secretive-donor-law-deans-at-george-mason-blasted-climate-scientists-and-their-own-accreditor/

no lnx

Chronicle.com

To Court a Secretive Donor, Law Deans at George Mason Blasted Climate Scientists and Their Own Accreditor

By Jack Stripling and Nell Gluckman

DECEMBER 18, 2019

Dean Henry N. Butler, left, and the artist Greg Wyatt unveil a statue of Antonin Scalia at George Mason U. law school in the fall of 2018. In the audience are Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Chief Justice John G. Roberts and his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts; Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner Alito; Justice Elena Kagan, and Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Leaders of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, which has been criticized for its ties to conservative donors, have spent years courting a wealthy Chicago philanthropist who has steered money toward organizations that promote skepticism of climate change or finance conservative and libertarian journalism on college campuses.

Newly released documents show the extent to which Barre Seid, the philanthropist, sought to engage law-school deans on hot-button political topics. On several occasions he raised alarms about political activism by climate scientists at George Mason, prompting assurances from the dean that “some of our friends on the board” were “all over it (behind the scenes).”

The documents, which include more than 800 pages of emails and other communications, were obtained through a public-records request filed by UnKoch My Campus, a national group that seeks to expose the Charles Koch Foundation’s influence on higher education.

In 2016, George Mason announced that it had received a $10 million grant from the Koch Foundation, along with $20 million from an anonymous donor, who asked that the law school be named in honor of Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice and a conservative icon. In a news release on Thursday, Allison Pienta, a lawyer working with UnKoch My Campus, argued that the documents she had obtained “prove that Mr. Seid is the Scalia Law donor.”

Taxpayers, students, Virginia citizens, we have a right to know who is donating to a public law school and asking the law school in return to serve their interest.

Pienta, who had requested records that contained the anonymous donor’s name, suspected that Seid had been the benefactor in part because people associated with him are referred to in a number of exchanges. She concluded that he was the donor after cross-referencing those emails with others that mention Seid by name.

Anne Holton, George Mason’s interim president, said in a letter to Pienta that the university could not “confirm or deny your conclusion” that Seid is the anonymous donor, “as universities have an obligation to respect a donor’s right to anonymity.”

After reviewing the records, which contained numerous redactions to protect donor privacy, The Chronicle could not independently verify the identity of the donor. What the records do show, however, is a yearslong, politically tinged dialogue between Seid and two successive deans of George Mason’s law school.

People who are concerned about undue donor influence often envision clear-cut quid pro quos or prescriptive gift agreements that grant wealthy people too much control over the academic enterprise. These documents imply a subtler form of influence, one in which a donor elevates concerns about a professor or a regulatory body just by passing information along to university decision makers.

An Activist Donor

As told through the documents, the story of Seid’s relationships with Daniel D. Polsby, former dean of the law school, and his successor, Henry N. Butler, begins at least nine years ago. By that time, Seid had already been working to transform a tiny part of the higher-education landscape. Through the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation, he gave $825,000 to Shimer College, an institution that enrolled about 100 students and followed the Great Books curriculum. After the donation, several people with financial ties to Seid joined the college’s Board of Trustees, and a fierce battle over governance of the college followed.

(In 2017, Shimer was absorbed by North Central College, which added the Shimer Great Books School as an academic program).

Between 2011 and 2016, Seid had or had scheduled at least seven meetings with one or both of George Mason’s law deans.

The deans found in Seid an inquisitive communicator, particularly when it came to conservative causes. In 2012, for example, he wrote to Polsby asking for “any insight” into a new program, housed at George Mason, that was established by the former Republican Congressman Bob Inglis. The question was notable given Seid’s apparent interest in the politics of climate science. Inglis had been voted out of office two years earlier during his primary, largely because he supported a tax on carbon. Now he was being embraced by George Mason.

Inglis’s program, the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, was meant to “promote conservative solutions to America’s energy and climate challenges.” Polsby responded to Seid right away, appearing to distance himself and the law school from the program.

“Inglis’s new center is in a different college from us,” Polsby said. “The law school has no role and wasn’t asked before the announcement was made.”

The conversations at times took on an antiregulatory flavor. In one exchange with Seid, in 2013, Polsby launched into a broadside against the law school’s accrediting agency. The American Bar Association, he wrote, “has added all kinds of dubious nonsense in its accreditation standards.”

“Poking them in the eye,” Polsby continued, “would be a genuine pleasure.”

Seid seemed particularly curious about the powers of higher-education regulators. Who was to say whether a person could operate a school, he wondered? Did you need the state’s permission, he asked Polsby? Did you need accreditation?

The impetus for that discussion was a Chronicle article that said the state of Virginia was shutting down an unaccredited university.

‘Outrageous Behavior’

In 2015, the year Butler became dean, a controversy in climate science captured Seid’s attention. Butler assured the philanthropist that he, too, was aghast.

A group of 20 professors, including some at George Mason, signed a letter urging the Obama administration to open a racketeering investigation into fossil-fuel companies and their allies. The companies had “knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change,” the professors wrote, and could be investigated under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly known as RICO.

This wasn’t the professors’ idea. Several months earlier, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, had proposed the possibility of suing fossil-fuel companies under RICO, just as the Justice Department had done to Big Tobacco more than a decade earlier. Tobacco companies had engaged in a “massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public,” the department had argued. The same might be said of fossil-fuel companies, Senator Whitehouse wrote, which had sponsored climate-change research that contradicts peer-reviewed consensus.

Seid forwarded to Butler a blog post by Judith A. Curry, a high-profile skeptic of climate science and former chairwoman of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Curry wrote that “the consensus on human caused climate change is not as overwhelming as you seem to think.” She admonished the professors for engaging in “irresponsible advocacy,” accusing them of trying to “silence scientists that disagree with you.”

“Is it significant that 6 GMU guys,” Seid wrote to Butler, “were the originators” of the letter.

“This is really outrageous behavior,” Butler repliedon September 18, 2015. “I do not know the GMU folks who signed the letter, but they should be embarrassed. I wonder if they really understand anything about RICO, which was the source of much abuse by prosecutors (and the plaintiffs’ bar in follow on private suits) until the Feds went totally crazy and criminalized almost all behavior (which meant there was less need to use conspiracy theories).”

A few weeks later, Seid forwarded to Butler another blog post on the same subject from Powerline, an outlet for conservative commentary.

“Not your problem — but. … ” Seid wrote to the dean.

The post, titled “An Instance of Warmist Corruption,” took aim at Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason and the first signatory to the professors’ letter calling for a RICO investigation. The blog described Shukla as “remarkably well paid” and suggested some form of financial malfeasance on his part.

Shukla was one of the lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore Jr., in 2007.

Responding to the Powerline post, Butler assured Seid that powerful people at George Mason were involved with the matter.

“This is such absurd behavior,” Butler wrote to Seid on October 9, 2015. “Totally indefensible.

“Some of our friends on the board,” he continued, “are all over it (behind the scenes).”

That same month, George Mason began an internal audit of Shukla’s handling of grants, a university spokesman confirmed to The Chronicle.

By this time, Shukla had run smack into a political buzz saw. Lamar S. Smith, a Republican Congressman from Texas, had announced plans to investigate a nonprofit research group led by Shukla.

On November 5, 2015, Seid forwarded to Butler an email about Shukla from Joseph L. Bast, then the president of the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. Seid’s foundation has donated at least $1 million to the institute, which rejects as “propaganda” the idea of scientific consensus on the causes and consequences of climate change. George Mason’s own “multimillionaire government trough-feeder,” Bast wrote, was finally being exposed.

In response to Seid, Butler wrote, “The president is freaking out about this,” referring to Ángel Cabrera, George Mason’s president at the time.

For climate scientists like Shukla, criticism often comes with the job. But the newly released emails, Shukla told The Chronicle, suggest that those attackers had the ear of George Mason’s Board of Visitors.

“The ferocity of their attack was totally expected,” Shukla said in an email. “The fact that these guys had access to GMU board members, as the emails show, that is very unusual.”

Michael Sandler, a spokesman for George Mason, told The Chronicle that George Mason’s audit “concluded no wrongdoing on the part of Professor Shukla.”

The Chronicle requested a copy of the audit, but George Mason officials said it was a personnel record and not subject to public-disclosure laws.

As for congressional scrutiny, a politically connected board member says he came to Shukla’s defense. Thomas M. Davis III, the rector of George Mason’s board and a former Republican congressman from Virginia, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had quietly urged Representative Smith not to call a public hearing.

“I said ‘Look, lay off this guy,’” Davis said. “I made it clear we stood behind him and they ought to lay off him, and they did. I met with Shukla and told him we supported him.

“When one of our professors is under attack, either from the right or the left, we are behind them,” Davis continued.

Butler, the dean, declined an interview request and did not answer specific questions from The Chronicle about his emails. In a statement, Butler said he had nothing to do with the university’s response to Shukla.

“I had no influence in this matter, nor did I attempt to exert any influence in this matter,” Butler’s statement reads. “I support academic freedom at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School and across the university. Academic freedom and an open marketplace of ideas, including room for robust debate, is the very foundation of higher learning.”

A spokeswoman for Tripp Lite, a manufacturing company where Seid served as president, did not respond to emails this week seeking comment from Seid, who did not respond to a phone message on Wednesday.

A University on the Defensive

For George Mason, the release of a new cache of documents related to donor influence marks a chapter in a continuing saga. For years the university has fought in courts of law and public opinion, defending its relationships with conservative philanthropists. Only recently, however, did the university acknowledge that it hasn’t always gotten it right.

Last year when Cabrera, then the university’s president, announced a review of George Mason’s gift-acceptance policies, he conceded that some of its grant agreements “fall short of the standards of academic independence.” The agreements gave donors opportunities to weigh in on faculty hiring and stated with some specificity what professors would study.

But donors can still keep their identities secret, making it difficult to discern their intent.

By channeling a gift through a third party, a donor can further obscure the source of the money. That appears to have happened at George Mason. Several of the newly released emails refer to Donors Trust, a nonprofit organization that, among other things, offers donors anonymity.

Donors Trust describes itself as a public charity that was created to work with donors who are “dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise.” Mother Jones described it as “the dark-money ATM of the right.” In her book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer explained that donors could give to the fund, which in turn donated to conservative groups and, in effect, “erased the donors’ names from the money trail.”

That kind of opacity troubles some at George Mason, who say the public deserves more information about who may be exerting influence on a public university’s leadership and its faculty members. Pienta, the lawyer working with UnKoch My Campus, said “Mason has become basically ground zero for improper donor influence on a public institution.”

“Taxpayers, students, Virginia citizens, we have a right to know who is donating to a public law school and asking the law school in return to serve their interest,” said Pienta, a graduate of George Mason’s law school.

Virginia code, however, exempts from disclosure any records that could reveal the identity of a donor who has requested anonymity. (The state’s Supreme Court ruled last week that George Mason’s fund-raising arm is exempt from public-records laws).

It is still not clear what Seid’s involvement in renaming the law school may have been, if anything. But when the school unveiled a 4,300-pound “Bill of Rights Eagle” statue in front of its building, Butler wanted Seid to know about it.

“Yesterday was a really cool day at Scalia Law,” he wrote to Seid in May 2017, just over a year after the school was renamed. The sculptor had another project in the works, Butler explained: “a larger-than-life statue of Justice Scalia.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Nell Gluckman is a senior reporter who writes about research, ethics, funding issues, affirmative action, and other higher-education topics. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.

Dan Bauman and Megan Zahneis contributed to this report.

A version of this article appeared in the January 10, 2020, issue.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/18/1065989/-Who-is-the-Anonymous-Donor-behind-:{Denialgate-:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:Here-s-one-possibility-

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/18/1065989/-Who-is-the-Anonymous-Donor-behind-Denialgate-Here-s-one-possibility-?detail=hide

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 srcwtch:

Barre Seid is a Chicago industrialist and funder of right wing and climate inactivist causes through his Seid Foundation, and likely also through Donors Capital Fund.

Business

Seid's Trippe Manufacturing Company makes Tripp Lite surge protectors.

Organizations funded

See the Seid Foundation page for the organizations it has funded.

Actions

Caveat

It appears that Seid's preference is to influence quietly; he has used Donors Capital Fund, a donor-advised fund, to make contributions anonymously, and in at least one case a group of people, some with clear ties to him and some just ideologically aligned, will move into positions where they can wield influence, in an organization which has acquired significant funding by him or an anonymous donor or both. This apparent action-at-a-distance can make it difficult to be 100% certain that he's behind a particular effort.

Clarion Fund and 2008 DVD-insert Islamophobia push

"[The Clarion Fund distributed ] millions of DVDs about radical Islam in newspaper inserts...28 million in all ... [which] arguably helped fuel the anti-Muslim sentiment that boiled over in the "ground zero mosque" fight."^[1] According to Salon, documentation from Clarion indicates that Seid bankrolled the operation - but not directly, more likely through Donors Capital Fund which is run by Koch Network attendee Whitney Ball:

...[A Clarion document showed] a donor listed as Barry Seid gave Clarion nearly $17 million in 2008, which would have paid for virtually the entire "Obsession" DVD campaign. ... There's only one Barry Seid Salon could find who might fit the profile of a $17 million donor to Clarion. That would be businessman Barre Seid (note the different spelling) of Illinois.... But his representative flatly denied to Salon that he has ever given money to Clarion."^[1] [but neither Ball nor Seid's assistant would say whether Seid had given the money through Donors Capital Fund - which dispensed $17.7 million to Clarion that year.^[1] ]

Shimer College attempted takeover

In 2010, Chicago-area "Great Books"-focused Shimer College narrowly fought off an ideological takeover effort bankrolled by an "anonymous donor", who is widely understood to be Seid^[2] (whose foundation gave $800+ thousand to Shimer in 2007-2008); the "takeover faction" joining the Board of Trustees included the (Seid-funded) Heartland Institute's**Joseph Bas**t, Eric O'Keefeof the Sam Adams Alliance and (Seid-funded) U.S. Term Limits, ^[2],^[3],^[4]

Articles and resources

References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Justin Elliott (2010-11-16). Mystery of who funded right-wing "radical Islam" campaign deepens. Salon.com. Retrieved on 2011-07-02.
   1. 1. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1} Deanna Isaacs (2010-02-25). Who's Buying Shimer?. Chicago Reader. Retrieved on 2011-07-06.
      2. ↑ Shimer Trustees Honored. Heartland Institute (2011-02-03). Retrieved on 2011-07-02. “Members of the reform faction of the board of trustees of Shimer College. Top row from left: Chuck Lang, Bill Escamilla, Tom Lindsay, Milt Rosenberg; lower row, John Marienau, Kathleen McCreary, Joseph Bast, and Eric O’Keefe.”
      3. ↑ Shimer's Board of Trustees. Shimer Alumni Alliance (2010-01-26). Retrieved on 2011-07-02. “links to bios of Lindsay and Shimer's current Board members. Where available, we've included links to their stated opinions about governance at Shimer.”

Related SourceWatch articles

External resources

External articles

• • • S Henderson, "Who is the "Anonymous Donor" behind Denialgate? Here's one possibility," Daily Kos, Feb. 18, 2012.

Categories: Climate change | Stubs | Islamophobia

=

Donors Capital Fund (DCF) formed in 1999 "is an IRS-approved, 501(c)(3), 509(a)(3) supporting organization that is associated with DonorsTrust, a public charity and donor-advised fund formed to safeguard the charitable intent of donors who are dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise." ^[1]

Funding Islamophobia in the United States

Research from the Center for American Progress (CAP) indicates that DCF has funded various organizations and individuals contributing to an anti-Islamic hysteria in the United States. Between 2007 and 2009 the Donors Capital Fund contributed $21,318,600 to "groups promoting Islamophobia, some of which included the Middle East Forum, Clarion Fund, Investigative Project on Terrorism, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. In 2008, Donors Capital contributions amounted to 96% of Clarion Fund's financial resources, which allowed the organization to distribute a controversial video called "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," which attempted to persuade Americans of the supposed Islamist threat during the 2008 election cycle. ^[2]

Board

Accessed October 2010: ^[3]

• • • Adam Meyerson, Chairman - President, The Philanthropy Roundtable
    • Kimberly O. Dennis, Vice Chairman - President, Searle Freedom Trust
    • Whitney L. Ball, Director - President & CEO, DonorsTrust
    • Christopher DeMuth, Director - D. C. Searle Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
    • Steven Hayward, Director - F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
    • Kris Alan Mauren, Director - Executive Director, The Acton Institute
    • William H. Mellor, Director - President, Institute for Justice
    • Stephen Moore, Director - Economist
    • John A. Von Kannon, Director - Vice President, The Heritage Foundation Officers
    • Whitney L. Ball, President - President & CEO, DonorsTrust
    • Kimberly O. Dennis, Secretary - President, Searle Freedom Trust
    • Steven Hayward, Treasurer - F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
    • Jeffrey C. Zysik, Assistant Treasurer - CFO & CIO, DonorsTrust Founding Benefactor
    • Bruce H. Jacobs, 1918-2010

Contact

URL: https://www.donorstrust.org

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch

References

1. 1. 1. ↑ About, Donors Capital Fund, accessed October 28, 2010.
      2. ↑ Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir, Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, CAB, August 2011. See specially pages 15-17.
      3. ↑ Board, Donors Capital Fund, accessed October 28, 2010.

Categories: Foundations | United States

===

salon:

In the heat of the 2008 presidential election, an obscure nonprofit group called the Clarion Fund made national news by distributing millions of DVDs about radical Islam in newspaper inserts in swing states.

The DVDs, 28 million in all, were a boost to Republican candidates who were trying to paint Democrats as weak on terrorism — and they arguably helped fuel the anti-Muslim sentiment that boiled over in the “ground zero mosque” fight last summer. The film, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West,” was widely criticized for its cartoonish portrayal of Muslims as modern-day Nazis.

But who put up the money to send out all those millions of DVDs?

Clarion, which has strong links to the right-wing Israeli group Aish HaTorah and is listed in government records as a foreign nonprofit, would never say.

Indeed, the group does not have to release detailed donor information because of its nonprofit tax status. We knew only that there was serious money behind the effort: Clarion spent nearly $19 million in 2008, the year it sent out the DVDs.

Now, just as Clarion is gearing up to release a new film hyping the threat of Iran, the money mystery has deepened: According to a document submitted to the IRS by Clarion and obtained by Salon, a donor listed as Barry Seid gave Clarion nearly $17 million in 2008, which would have paid for virtually the entire “Obsession” DVD campaign.

Nonprofit groups must submit financial information including the identity of donors to the IRS — but ordinarily only basic revenue and spending data are made available to the public. In the case of Clarion, an extra page with donor information seems to have been inadvertently included in its public filing. See it here. (It was previously available on public websites that collect IRS forms submitted by nonprofits.)

There’s only one Barry Seid Salon could find who might fit the profile of a $17 million donor to Clarion. That would be businessman Barre Seid (note the different spelling) of Illinois, a longtime contributor to right-wing and Jewish causes. But his representative flatly denied to Salon that he has ever given money to Clarion.

The elderly and press-shy Seid is president of Tripp Lite, a large Chicago-based manufacturer of power strips that got into the personal computer market on the ground floor back in the 1980s. Seid has personally poured millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and conservative causes, and his foundation has given generously to the Cato Institute, the Americans for Limited Government Foundation, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This year, Seid received an honorary degreefrom Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv for his work “supporting those organizations which will fortify Israel’s position in the world.”

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2. Heartland Financials (H.1) is augmented with data from the February Heartland Exposed documents. It was known that much of Heartland Institute's funding came via DONORS, and that there was one large donor, speculated by some to be reclusive Chicago businessman Barre Seid. The combination of IRS Form 990s, February documents, and other information proves his identity, as the numbers simply do not work otherwise. (H.1.4-1). More detail on donations (H.1.5) shows explicit funding of climate anti-science activities whose tax-free status seems dubious.

3. DONORS TRUST (and DONORS CAPITAL FUND) have been studied in more detail. Robert Brulle found another Charles Koch fund, Knowledge and Progress, which seems to give money only to DONORS. Added to the others he controls (Charles Koch and Claude Lambe), money can flow through three separate funds. Then some of it goes through DONORS TRUST and DONORS CAPITAL FUND, which anonymize it, as Whitney Ball actually writes the checks. Some "Kochtopus" tentacles are difficult to see.

Some of this tax-advantaged money lands at George Mason University, including its Mercatus Center or even better Institute for Humane Studies ... Chaired by Charles Koch. SeeFunding and A.5-A.6 in the report there.

DONORS' grants have been analyzed in detail (I.4). Of ~500 "charities" examined 2002-2010, the Top 40 (I.4.2-1) got 66% of the total, and of that $205M, all but $43M went to policy organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute ($17M) Heartland Institute ($14M), or Americans for Prosperity Foundation ($11M). About 75% of the $311M given over those 9 years went to policy groups, all tax-free, with real donors anonymized. They must like this, as 2007-2010 accounted for $265M, following a big expansion in 2007.

Finally, in "Whitney Ball, her brother and her father" (I.5) some strange history is explored. Barre Seid funds and Chairs the Chicago Freedom Trust, C/O John Ball (Whitney's brother), located in Salt Lake City. Trustees include Whitney Ball and Adam Myerson, who Chairs DONORS CAPITAL FUND. In tracking all this, I also found discussion of their father, a lawyer whose repeated financial manipulations lost him the right to practice law in West Virginia.  mashey

The Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation, the funding vehicle of Chicago industrialist Barre Seid, is a funder of right wing organizations espousing climate denial. It also funds cultural organizations.

Contents

  [hide] 

• • • 1 Personnel
    • 2 Recipients
    • 3 Articles and resources
      • 3.1 References
      • 3.2 Related SourceWatch articles
      • 3.3 External resources
      • 3.4 External articles

Personnel

• • • Steven P. Baer was Director from 2001-2008^[1]
    • Joan Frontczak is listed as Director 2004-2008^[2]

Recipients

Grant recipients from 1998-2008 include:^[3]

• • • The Heartland Institute; Seid was its greatest funder from 1986-2009, giving it over a million dollars according to Media Matters^[4].
    • George Mason University ($3+ million)^[5]
    • Shimer College ($825k, 2007-2008)^[5]
    • Americans for Limited Government Foundation ($750,000)^[5]
    • Cato Institute ($427k)^[5]
    • Competitive Enterprise Institute ($343k)^[5]
    • Donors Capital Fund ($25k)^[5]

Articles and resources

References

1. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ Steve Baer. Media Matters Action Network. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
   1. 1. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ Joan Frontczak. Media Matters Action Network. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
      2. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation. Media Matters Action Network. Retrieved on 2011-07-10.
      3. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:↑ No byline (undated). Heartland Institute - Funders - All Years (1986-2009). Media Matters. Retrieved on 2011-03-22.
      4. ↑ ^Jump ^up ^{to:5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5} No byline (undated). Seid Foundation - Grants - All Years (1986-2009). Media Matters. Retrieved on 2011-03-22.

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surge protectors

golden rule insurance http://www.lib.niu.edu/1996/ii960230.html

wiki delete by bushranger mil wacko

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