DARK MONEY 2

3/18

SEE main and tag

see related category DAFs / Donors trust (tag dnrs)

see LEO lnrd tag

no merri

see social welfare 501c4

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tool:

In addition the new Dark Money Illuminated (pdf) report, which identifies about 400 donors and organizations bankrolling these 15 secretive groups, the researchers also developed profiles for each dark money group and an "extensive, first-of-its-kind database containing nearly 1,200 transactions, each supported by primary source documents."

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tool:

https://www.factcheck.org/players-guide/2018/

eg

leanings: Republican/Pro-President Trump

Spending target: Unknown

America First Policies is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit devoted to promoting the agenda of President Donald Trump. According to its website, the group’s main goals are repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, overhauling the U.S. tax system, securing the border with Mexico, building a strong national defense, rebuilding infrastructure, and providing choice in education.

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trump dark money 2019

at the outset of Donald Trump’s bid for the White House, he blasted super PACs on Twitter as “scams” and “unfair” and disavowed such outside help.

This story also appeared in PRI

Then he changed his tune. By the end of his 2016 campaign, more than a hundred super PACs and similar groups had spent more than $72 million on his behalf, helping him defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s army of organized support has expanded since then, with a dozen or so major nonprofits and super PACs pushing his policy platform and priming the public for Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. Many of the groups feature former Trump staffers or campaign aides. Trump and his surrogates frequently appear at events hosted by some of the ventures.

Other pro-Trump groups, however, spent four, five or even six figures paying their own leaders and employees, filling the coffers of their consulting firms instead of spending money to boost Trump’s political future.

The Center for Public Integrity has this month analyzed the activities of each of these organizations. Read on to make sense of what political committees, super PACs and nonprofit groups are actively in orbit around Trump’s own 2020 re-election committee:

America First Action Inc.

Type: super PAC

A group of former Trump aides designed the super PAC America First Action and a nonprofit arm, America First Policies, to push Trump’s policy platform. Even Vice President Mike Pence traveled across the country to attend America First events and help raise money. Dallas investor Doug Deason and Roy Bailey, a partner at Giuliani Partners LLC, handled the finances for the two groups. Former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., is the groups’ vice chairwoman. The super PAC collected $39 million from 2017 through 2018. It spent $29.2 million on political messages during that time, mostly attacking Democrats such as former Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Sen. Jon Tester of Montana.

Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle hold hands during a rally for Republican U.S. Senate candidate John James in Pontiac, Mich., on Oct. 17, 2018. (AP/Paul Sancya)

America First Action attracted multimillion dollar contributions from real estate developer Geoffrey Palmer, philanthropist Cherna Moskowitz, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and Adelson’s wife, philanthropist Miriam Adelson. Trump last year awarded Miriam Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors.

The group has also hired and paid firms associated with former Trump employees or backers. They include: Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway’s former firm, the Polling Company ($476,000); former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s firm, Green Monster Consulting ($75,000); former Milwaukee sheriff and Trump booster David A. Clarke’s firm, DAC Enterprises ($92,000); current Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his firm Parscale Strategy LLC ($184,000); and Trump campaign aide Katrina Pierson’s Pierson Consulting Group ($60,000). The super PAC also paid former White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s firm RIGWIL LLC $46,000. Spicer is now the super PAC’s senior adviser and spokesman. Additionally, the group chose to frequent Trump properties, paying about $415,000 to the Trump International Hotel and restaurants inside.

America First Policies

Type: nonprofit

High turnover has plagued this nonprofit, which has chosen not to disclose its donors. Rebekah Mercer, daughter of conservative megadonor Robert Mercer, considered funding the group, but left for another nonprofit called Making America Great. At its outset in January 2017, this 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofit hosted big names in Trump’s orbit. Among the co-founders and initial staffers:

• Parscale, Trump’s current campaign manager
• former deputy White House Chief of Staff Katie Walsh, who left to return to the Republican National Committee as a senior adviser
• adviser Nick Ayers, who left to become Pence’s chief of staff
• former Pence aide Marty Obst
• Pierson, who is now a senior adviser for Trump’s 2020 campaign

Brad Parscale, campaign manager for President Donald Trump, waits for his arrival during a campaign rally for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, at Houston Toyota Center on Oct. 22, 2018, in Houston. (AP/Evan Vucci)

Trump’s former deputy campaign manager, Rick Gates, also co-founded the group. But he left in March 2017 and has since been indicted and has pleaded guilty, in a matter unrelated to America First Policies, to making a false statement to prosecutors and violating foreign lobbying laws.

The nonprofit and its sister super PAC were chaired by Thomas Hicks Jr., now co-chair of the Republican National Committee. Hicks was a national finance chairman for Trump’s 2016 campaign. The nonprofit’s 2017 board of directors includes Dallas financial executive Bailey, oil billionaire Harold Hamm and Douglas Ammerman, a retired partner at auditor KPMG LLP, according to the group’s latest tax filing. The nonprofit’s president is Brian Walsh, former president of conservative outside groups American Action Network and the Congressional Leadership Fund.

Walsh declined to speak with the Center for Public Integrity. Communications director Erin Montgomery said the group is “not prepared to share our 2020 plans publicly at this time.”

Because it’s a nonprofit, the organization isn’t required by law to disclose its donors. But a review of Internal Revenue Service filings indicate Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America gave America First Policies $2.5 million, tobacco company Reynolds America donated $1.4 million, Southern Company donated $1 million, CVS Health gave $500,000 and Dow Chemical gave $100,000. In total, the nonprofit raised $22.2 million in 2017.

The group paid for advertising, telephone calls and “grassroots advocacy” to support repealing the Affordable Care Act and boost Trump’s’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, immigration reform and confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nonprofit’s 2017 tax filing shows it also paid $2.8 million to Parscale’s company for “media advocacy services” and $160,000 to Obst’s firm for “consulting.”

Committee to Defend the President

Type: hybrid super PAC

Formerly named “Stop Hillary PAC,” the Committee to Defend the President spent $3.4 million during the 2016 election on anti-Hillary Clinton ads, using messaging centered around the 2012 Benghazi attacks, in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya was killed. The group raised $6.9 million from 2015 to 2016, and $8.9 million during the 2018 election. It spent $4.4 million on Trump-positive messages. The super PAC also attacked Democrats such as failed Senate candidate Phil Bredesen in Tennessee and Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. The group has $720,000 in the bank as of Dec. 31.

“The Committee is focused on defending President Trump — and when necessary his allies in Congress and elsewhere, as it did to great effect in Tennessee last cycle where we spent over $1 million to elect Marsha Blackburn [to the U.S. Senate in Tennessee],” said Ted Harvey, the group’s chairman and a former Colorado state senator. “Our efforts will take whatever form makes the most sense at the time…”

In April 2018, the hybrid PAC sued the FEC, alleging the agency failed to act on a complaint the PAC filed against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. The Committee to Defend the President charged that Clinton violated federal law by funneling $80 million in contributions through state parties. The case is pending.

Great America PAC

Type: hybrid super PAC

Great America PAC, which aims to re-elect Trump and pro-Trump candidates, probably won’t involve itself in the Democratic primary.

“We’re fine letting the Democrats publicly out-crazy one another for the next year before we tar whatever looney tune comes out of their ‘process,’” Great America PAC attorney Dan Backer said in an email.

Ed Rollins, President Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, is chairman of this hybrid super PAC, formerly known as TrumPAC. The super PAC’s executive director, Brent Lowder, is also the president of Apex Strategy Group, which Great America PAC paid $492,429 in 2016 and $150,000 in 2018. Rollins received a total of $240,000 in 2017 and 2018 for “payroll and strategic consulting.”

Eric Beach, the finance chairman for Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign, was a former co-chairman of Great America PAC. Beach is a managing partner at Frontline Strategies & Media, a public affairs firm that Great America PAC paid more than $5 million from 2015 to 2018, more than any other committee paid it during both cycles.

The committee raised close to $29 million during the 2016 election, spending almost $24 million of those funds on pro-Trump ads. From 2017 to 2018, the group spent $5.4 million to support Trump. It also spent a few hundred thousand dollars backing Republicans running in U.S. House and U.S. Senate races, including Roy Moore in Alabama. Its top donors from 2016 include Marvel Entertainment CEO Isaac Perlmutter ($5 million), now-deceased Houston Texans owner Robert McNair ($2 million) and banker Andy Beal ($2 million). In 2018, megadonors such as Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies ($400,000) and Richard Uihlein of U-Line Corp ($100,000) topped its list of contributors.

Attorney Dan Backer (right) speaks with Shaun McCutcheon (left) at a Federal Election Commission meeting in February 2015. (Center for Public Integrity/Dave Levinthal)

“Our ability to be nimble and adapt is what made Great America PAC the largest pro-Trump group in 2016, and his biggest champion since,” Backer wrote.

The super PAC has been riddled with scandals.

In May 2016, Jesse Benton, a former leader of the group, was found guilty on campaign finance charges in connection with his 2012 work on Republican Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. A federal appeals court upheld the charges, which preceded Benton’s work with Great America PAC, in May 2018. Before that, The Telegraph published an investigation in which reporters posed as consultants for a Chinese national wanting to donate to pro-Trump groups, which is illegal. Benton allegedly said he was a consultant for Great America PAC and apparently offered the reporters a way to disguise the foreign donation to the group. Backer, the super PAC’s lawyer, denied the super PAC engaged in any activity of the sort. Benton left the group in May 2016.

Also in 2016, the super PAC mistakenly published donor information not normally made public, such as email addresses and cell phone numbers for hundreds of its backers. A month later, it erroneously published credit card numbers for 49 donors. The super PAC offered free security monitoring to the donors and said it changed its data collection and compliance processes.

Great America Alliance

Type: nonprofit

The nonprofit Great America Alliance shares staff and resources with its partner super PAC, Great America PAC. Tomi Lahren, the conservative political commentator, was a senior aide to the nonprofit before leaving it for a job at Fox News. Andy Surabian — a former Steve Bannon aide and war room director of Trump’s 2016 campaign — also was a senior adviser. The nonprofit reported it spent $1.5 million in 2017 to educate voters about health care, taxes, national security and trade. It spent $291,000 on political campaign activity, according to a filing with the IRS.

Tomi Lahren seen at Politicon 2016 at The Pasadena Convention Center on June 25, 2016, in Pasadena, Calif. (Invision via AP/Colin Young-Wolff)

News reports from 2017 stated Gingrich and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani were in talks to become co-chairmen of Great American Alliance, but Backer, the group’s attorney, said that did not happen. The nonprofit’s 2017 tax filing lists Brent Lowder as president, Beach as executive director and Christina Needham, a senior associate attorney at political.law, founded by Backer, as director.

The 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofit raised $3.5 million in 2017, according to the latest tax filing available. It also paid $955,000 that year to public affairs firm Frontline Strategies, which is owned by Eric Beach, a former director of the group now “retained to provide management services.” It also paid $369,000 to Campaign Solutions, the political consulting firm of the Committee to Defend the President’s Ted Harvey, and $123,000 to Apex Strategy Group, owned by the nonprofit’s president Brent Lowder.

Future45

Type: super PAC

Future45 is a super PAC heavily funded by the deep-pocketed Ricketts family, which owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team. Future45 brought in $6.3 million in 2018, including from other megadonors such as philanthropist Helen Schwab, Elliott Management Group’s Paul Singer and Citadel LLC’s Kenneth Griffin. The super PAC poured $5.8 million into 2018 midterm messaging attacks on Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Maxine Waters of California, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

The group is led by Brian Baker, longtime political adviser to the Ricketts family.

“The Democrats tried to nationalize the midterms around Trump, and we tried to push back against that, and show the extreme elements in the Democratic Party,” Baker told the Center for Public Integrity. “Little did I imagine the conversation would stay the same but the characters would change. It used to be all about Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters but nowadays it’s all about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.”

45Committee

Type: nonprofit

The super PAC Future45 also has a sister “social welfare” nonprofit, 45Committee, which raised about $48.6 million from 2015 to 2017, according to federal tax filings.

“In 2017 and 2018, we were one of the leading groups pushing the tax reform bill, and really fought the nomination fight for the high profile nominees like the Supreme Court or Secretary of State,” said Baker, the president. 45Committee has not publicly reported its donors and is under no legal obligation to do so. But other tax filings show it received grants from Wellspring Committee ($750,000), the Judicial Crisis Network ($250,000) and Ricketts-connected Ending Spending ($75,000). That’s only a fraction of what’s in its bank account: the nonprofit’s tax filings show it received four donations in 2017 that were each worth $7.5 million.

45Committee distributed its own grants in 2017 to the Mercer-funded Secure America Now ($2 million), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($350,000), Judicial Crisis Network ($200,000) and the NRA Institute for Legislative Action ($70,000), among others. The group reported spending $21.6 million on political campaigning and $18.9 million on issue ads.

45Committee’s latest tax filing shows Baker became chairman and president after conservative strategist Brian Walsh left the role in September 2016. CNBC contributor and former George W. Bush aide Sara Fagen is on the board of directors, as well as Randy Scheunemann, a lobbyist for foreign governments at Orion Strategies, and Rob Collins, a lobbyist and strategist who helped push Neil Gorsuch’s appointment to the Supreme Court.

Rebuilding America Now

Type: super PAC

This super PAC was started by California financier Tom Barrack, a Trump confidant and chairman of the president’s inaugural committee. It spent more than $21 million during the 2016 election attacking Democrat Hillary Clinton and boosting Trump, although it’s been mostly dormant since. Now-U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., led the committee.

Tom Barrack, CEO of Colony Capital, takes the stage to speak during the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 21, 2016. (AP/Mark J. Terrill)

The group’s past activity has caught Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s attention. Prosecutors note former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was “instrumental” in setting up Rebuilding America Now at the same time he was Trump’s campaign chairman, an apparent violation of federal law. (The super PAC also began paying Ken McKay, a former Trump campaign adviser, days after he left Trump’s campaign, seemingly violating the 90-day cooling-off-period rule.) The group also hired Manafort’s longtime associate, Laurance Gay, as chairman. During the 2016 cycle, the super PAC paid Gay $330,000 and McKay $295,000 for “political strategy consulting.”

A spokesman for McKay and Gay told Reuters they were Trump volunteers who didn’t “possess strategic information,” so they said the cooling-off-period rule didn’t apply.

In court filings, prosecutors say Manafort lied to investigators about a $125,000 wire transfer in 2017 to the super PAC in order to cover a debt, The New York Times reported. A federal judge ruled in February 2019 that despite agreeing to cooperate, Manafort lied to Mueller’s team during its Russian interference investigation. He will be sentenced in March.

In 2016, the super PAC accepted six-figure donations from megadonors such as Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, real estate developer Palmer and former WWE wrestling executive Linda McMahon, now Trump’s Small Business Administration administrator. It also took $100,000 from Anthony Scaramucci, later Trump’s communications director for one week; $200,000 from coal outfit Murray Energy and $225,000 from private prison operator GEO Corrections. (The nonpartisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center filed an FEC complaint accusing GEO of violating the federal contractor donation ban. The case is pending.)

“Although GEO Corrections Holdings Inc., the company that made the donation, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the GEO Group, it is a non-contracting legal entity and has no contracts with any governmental agency,” company spokesperson Pablo Paez told VICE News in a statement, saying the donations to Rebuilding America Now are “compliant with all applicable federal election laws.”

In 2018, Rebuilding America Now received $30,000 in donations, with $25,000 coming from Florida real estate developer E. Llwyd Ecclestone Jr.

From 2017 to 2018, Rebuilding America Now spent most of its $2 million on paying Gay ($775,000) and McCay ($210,000) for consulting fees. It also used its money to fund travel and high-priced dinners — at places such as The Trump International Hotel in Washington and BLT Prime in Washington. It reported no money during that time on overtly pro-Trump communications.

Great America Committee

Type: leadership PAC

Great America Committee is the first leadership PAC that a vice president created while in office.

Pence formed Great America Committee — not to be confused with the two other pro-Trump groups starting with “Great America” — in May 2017 to help boost other Republicans. The move was so unusual that many believed Pence was setting himself up for his own presidential run. That didn’t happen — instead, Pence doled out $886,000 in 2018 to candidates such as Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky. and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. The leadership PAC also gave $5,400 to Trump’s presidential campaign.

In this March 15, 2016 file photo, Donald Trump’s then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski (left) listens as Trump speaks in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP/Gerald Herbert, File)

The PAC raised $4.1 million in 2018. Since forming, it spent $70,000 for consulting services at Green Monster Consulting, the firm of Trump’s former campaign manager, Lewandowski. It also paid $332,000 to MO Strategies, the firm of Obst, Pence’s senior political adviser, who was also the senior adviser of pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies and executive director at the Trump super PAC Great America Committee. The PAC paid the firm for “finance and political strategy consulting.”

America Fighting Back

Type: hybrid super PAC

“We must protect Donald Trump and his agenda from impeachment,” declares America Fighting Back, led by former 2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain.

Cain appears in an America Fighting Back ad in which he says Democrats’ “mission is to remake America and implement their socialist agenda.” The group asks viewers to call a 1-800 number to pledge their support for President Trump. The phone number directs a dialer to a recording of Cain bashing the “phony Russian delusion witch hunt.”

Businessman Herman Cain, who ran for president as a Republican in 2012, appears in an advertisement for his America Fighting Back PAC committee. (Screenshot)

Cain then asks callers to make a contribution. America Fighting Back, formed in July 2018, raised $347,000 during 2018, accepting donations from Citizens United founder and America Fighting Back co-chair Floyd Brown ($45,000) and the family trust of Edward Robson, a retirement community developer ($10,000). It reported spending $171,500 on pro-Trump messaging, although some of that messaging — such as Cain’s advertisement — serves the dual purpose of soliciting money for America Fighting Back itself.

The PAC’s executive director is Lori Klein Corbin, former Arizona state senator and national committeewoman for the state. Its chief strategist is Todd Cefaratti, a former 2012 campaign aide to Newt Gingrich.

Make America Number 1

Type: super PAC

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Make America Number 1 has yet to make the splash it did in 2016. Previously a Ted Cruz-backing super PAC named Keep the Promise I, the group rebranded to Make America Number 1 and spent $4.4 million attacking Clinton. Before Citizens United Chairman David Bossie left in 2016 to work as Trump’s deputy campaign manager, he ran the super PAC. Megadonor Rebekah Mercer took over managing the group.

Robert Mercer with his wife Diana Mercer (right) and daughter Rebekah Mercer (left) at the 2014 World Science Festival Gala. (Sylvain Gaboury/PMC, ©Patrick McMullan)

It was primarily funded by Robert Mercer, Marcus and Clarium Capital’s Peter Thiel, as well as Erik Prince, brother of Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the founder of the controversial security firm formerly known as Blackwater USA. The super PAC also paid $5.7 million to Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct data firm that harvested Facebook users’ data without permission.

During the 2018 midterms, the super PAC raised only $807 in small donations, and spent $379,000 mostly on legal expenses and upkeep. The super PAC starts 2019 with $699,000 in the bank.

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Other political groups and nonprofits that don’t primarily advocate for Trump have nevertheless been instrumental in advocating for his election. They include:

National Rifle Association

Type: nonprofits, PAC, super PAC

The National Rifle Association spent about $30.3 million to directly boost Trump during the 2016 presidential election, more than any other group that cycle.

The association may have gone a step further: An investigation by *The Trace* found that Trump’s campaign and the NRA used the same consultants to air TV ads, an apparent violation of the law that prohibits campaigns and outside groups from coordinating.

What’s more, federal investigators are exploring ties between NRA officials and the Russian government. Russian national Maria Butina pleaded guilty in December 2018 to conspiring to illegally act as a foreign agent. She admitted trying infiltrate the NRA and convince its members that Russia is a friend, not an enemy, to the U.S. The effort was apparently backed by at least one Russian official, Alexander Torshin, a former deputy governor of the Russian Central Bank. Russian President Vladimir Putin may have even approved the effort, according to a U.S. intelligence report reviewed by The Daily Beast. NRA officials did not respond to the Center for Public Integrity’s numerous requests for comment.

Citizens United

Type: nonprofit

The organization behind the pivotal campaign finance U.S. Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC, Citizens United’s super PAC spent $182,000 on pro-Trump messages in 2016.

Donald Trump, left, reacts to the crowd as he shakes hands with co-host David Bossie at the Freedom Summit, Saturday, May 9, 2015, in Greenville, S.C. (AP/Rainier Ehrhardt)

People affiliated with the group have had a hand in other organizations backing Trump: Its president, Bossie, was Trump’s 2016 deputy campaign manager, while founder Brown is co-chairman of the super PAC America Fighting Back. Citizens United hasn’t reported any pro-Trump expenditures since he was elected.

“I am an outspoken supporter of this president and will help him in whatever way is most beneficial to his re-election,” Bossie told the Center for Public Integrity.

Committee to Restore America’s Greatness

Type: super PAC

Two months after Roger Stone exited the Trump presidential campaign, the notorious political operative formed a pro-Trump super PAC in October 2015.

The group stayed in business a little more than a year, raising $587,000 yet only spending $16,000 on pro-Trump billboards. The group’s largest donor was film and television producer John Powers Middleton.

Roger Stone leaves federal court on Feb. 1, 2019, in Washington. Stone appeared for a status conference just three days after he pleaded not guilty to felony charges of witness tampering, obstruction and false statements. (AP/Andrew Harnik)

Most of the PAC’s spending covered legal fees, consulting and travel. As the Center for Responsive Politics reported, Special Counsel Mueller subpoenaed a few vendors of the PAC, including John Kakanis, whose firm was paid $137,000 for “voter fraud research”; social media specialist Jason Sullivan; and Andrew Miller, who Stone paid $4,000 for consulting.

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has reich used the c word before?

rr an 11 23

as an ever-greater portion of the nation’s total wealth goes to the top, it’s hardly surprising that ever more of that wealth is corrupting American politics.

In the 2020 presidential election cycle, more than $14 billion went to federal candidates, party committees, and Super PACs — double the $7 billion doled out in the 2016 cycle.

Total giving in 2024 is bound to be much higher.

Most of that money is not supporting American democracy. Increasingly, it is supporting Donald Trump and his anti-democracy allies.

There is a certain logic to this.

As more and more wealth accumulates at the top, the moneyed interests fear that democratic majorities will take it away through higher taxes, stricter regulations (on everything from trade to climate change), enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, pro-union initiatives, and price controls.

So they’re sinking ever more of their wealth into anti-democracy candidates.

Donald Trump is going full fascist these days, and gaining the backing of prominent billionaires.

On Veterans Day, Trump pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” whom he accused of doing anything “to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.” (Notably, he read these words from a teleprompter, meaning that they were intentional rather than part of another impromptu Trump rant.)

Days before, Trump claimed that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” The New York Times reports that he’s planning to round up millions of undocumented immigrants and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

Trump has publicly vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “ go after” President Joe Biden and his family, and has told advisers and friends that he wants the Justice Department to investigate officials who have criticized his time in office.

This is, quite simply, full-throated neofascism.

Who’s bankrolling all this? While Trump’s base is making small contributions, the big money is coming from some of the richest people in America.

During the first half of the year, multiple billionaires donated to the Trump-aligned Make America Great Again Inc. Super PAC.

Phil Ruffin (net worth $3.4 billion), the 88-year-old casino and hotel mogul, has given multiple $1 million donations.

Charles Kushner (family net worth $1.8 billion), the real estate mogul and father of Jared, who received a late-term pardon from Trump in December 2020, contributed $1 million in June.

Robert “Woody” Johnson (net worth $3.7 billion), Trump’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom and co-owner of the New York Jets, donated $1 million to the MAGA PAC in April.

And so on.

But Trump is not the only extremist pulling in big dollars. Nikki Haley — who appears moderate only relative to Trump’s blatant neofascism — proclaimed in her campaign launch that President Biden is promoting a “socialist” agenda.

During her two years as U.N. ambassador under Trump, Haley was a strong proponent of his so-called “zero tolerance” policy, under which thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents and guardians. She supported Trump’s decision to pull out of the U.N. Human Rights Council and to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

Though she briefly criticized Trump for inciting the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Haley soon defended Trump and called on Democratic lawmakers to “give the man a break” when they impeached him for a second time.

Haley recently told Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that while Trump’s floating the idea of executing retired General Mark Milley might be “ irresponsible,” it does not disqualify him from running for the White House again.

Haley’s billionaire supporters include Stanley Druckenmiller, Eric Levine, and Republican megadonor Ken Griffin.

Notably, Haley has also gained the support of JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, who’s about as close as anyone in America comes to being a spokesperson for the business establishment. Dimon admires Haley’s recognition of the role that “business and government can play in driving growth by working together.”

The moneyed interests have been placing big bets on other Trumpist Republicans.

Peter Thiel, the multibillionaire tech financier who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” contributed more than $35 million to 16 federal-level Republican candidates in the 2022 campaign cycle, making him the 10th largest individual donor to either party.

Twelve of Thiel’s candidates won, including Ohio’s now Senator J.D. Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “ more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is creating a new fundraising committee that will be soliciting contributions of up to $586,200 a pop.

Elon Musk is not a major financial contributor to Trump nor other anti-democracy candidates, but his power over one of the most influential megaphones in America gives him inordinate clout — which he is using to further the neofascist cause.

Witness Musk’s solicitude of Trump, his endorsement of antisemitic posts, his embrace of Tucker Carlson and white replacement theory, and his avowed skepticism toward democracy.

Democracy is compatible with capitalism only if democracy is in the driver’s seat, so it can rein in capitalism’s excesses.

But if capitalism and its moneyed interests are in charge, those excesses grow to the point where they are able to extinguish democracy and ride roughshod over the common good.

Hence the reason Trump’s neofascism, and the complicity of today’s Republican Party with it, are attracting the backing of some of the richest people in America.

What’s the alternative? A loud pro-democracy movement that fights against concentrated wealth at the top, enormous CEO pay packages, a politically powerful financial sector, and tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations.

And fights for higher taxes on the top (including a wealth tax) to finance Medicare for all, affordable housing, and accessible child care and elder care.

The willingness to make this a fight — to name the moneyed interests backing neofascism, explain why they’re doing this, and mobilize and energize America against their agenda and in favor of democracy — is critical to winning the 2024 election and preserving and rebuilding American democracy.

Biden and the Democrats must take this on, loudly and clearly. (Incidentally, Biden’s age — Happy 81st, Joe! — would be far less of an issue if he showed the grit and guts to do this.)

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-right-wing-dark-money-is-trying-to-kneecap-the-biden-doj

NO LNX

OPINION

How Right-Wing Dark Money Is Trying to Kneecap the Biden DOJ

TIME TO FIGHT

A shadowy group is fighting DOJ appointees Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke. Their crime? Their desire to use their skills to defend Americans’ right to vote.

Sheldon Whitehouse

Published Mar. 22, 2021

OPINION

Someone is targeting Biden Justice Department nominees Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke with attacks. Why? Both nominees hold exceptional records as litigators and civils rights activists. The respect they’ve earned extends beyond the civil rights movement and progressives to law enforcement and leading conservatives. They ought to be consensus picks.

But pull back the curtain, and strategy and motive take shape. Gupta and Clarke are poised to use their skills to defend Americans’ right to vote, just as the Republican Party is going all in on voter suppression as its path to political victory in 2022.

Unraveling the strategy starts with the dark-money group running the ads: the so-calledJudicial Crisis Network (JCN).This group’s ordinary work has been to translate big donors’ money into political attack ads in the “Court capture” mission that set out to remake the Supreme Court to the donors’ advantage. JCN has placed more than 10,000 ads since 2012 in pursuit of that mission, and they’ve kept secret the identity of those big donors.

[Biden’s AG’s the Perfect Person to Clean Up Trump’s Cesspool

CLEANUP IN AISLE 5

Jay Michaelson]

In Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell’s court-packing machine, this Judicial Crisis Network spent $7 million to oppose President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, and then spent another $10 million to boost Trump’s nominee Neil Gorsuch. JCN pledged $10 million or more for Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. It spent $10 million in under two months to support Amy Coney Barrett’s bid. These campaigns were funded with tens of millions of anonymous dollars, primarily through four separate donations of at least $15 million. Those donations may well have been the same donor.

Eye-popping as that is, those millions are a tiny slice of the funding behind the overall dark-money operation. A 2019 Washington Post investigation revealed JCN is one of a web of front groups coordinated by Leonard Leo, the long-time executive vice president of the Federalist Society. The Post tracked more than $250 million in dark money flowing through Leo’s groups.

The groups see to the grooming and selection of reliable nominees, the lobbyists needed to shepherd nominees through confirmation, and the attack ads to motivate the confirmation votes. Then, more groups lobby the selected judges through amicus curiae briefs, signaling how their donors want the judges to rule.

The dark-money network has won an avalanche of victories for its donors. There are 80 partisan, 5-4 Supreme Court decisions that limit workers’ rights and access to reproductive health care, erode environmental protections, block commonsense gun safety laws, undermine civil rights, and protect corporations from courtrooms. It is an astounding 80-0 rout for big right-wing donors.

After The Washington Post exposed the $250 million operation, Leo stepped back from his Federalist Society role and turned up at a new organization improbably named the Honest Elections Project. This project began voter suppression work in political swing states like Florida, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan that included: negative ads against Democrats; threatening letters to election officials challenging voter rolls; and a barrage of lawsuits seeking voting restrictions for November’s election.

“Trump’s cronies at the Justice Department showed dark-money donors the value of a captive Department that would look away from voter suppression schemes. ”

The media soon uncovered that the Honest Elections Project was a rebrand of the Judicial Education Project—which shared connections, donors, and aims with its sister group — yes, the Judicial Crisis Network. As a reporter for The Guardian observed, the Honest Elections Project melds two goals of the right-wing dark-money operation: first, pack the federal judiciary; and second, bring voting rights cases before the packed courts. Rigging elections through the courts is now a Republican judicial priority.

This brings us back to Gupta and Clarke. Gupta once ran the Civil Rights Division. She prosecuted hate crimes and human trafficking, promoted disability and LGBTQ rights, and fought discrimination in education, housing, employment, lending, and religious exercise. But most important, she challenged voter suppression. Gupta, if confirmed as assistant attorney general, will supervise the Civil Rights Division she once ran.

Accomplished civil rights attorney Clarke will fill Gupta’s former role running the Division and enforcing voting rights. The Honest Elections Project, kin to the Judicial Crisis Network, wants no part of these two women, because they will be strong, motivated leaders against unlawful voter suppression. They preferred Trump’s Civil Rights Division, which didn’t bring one single Voting Rights Act case until late May of 2020.

That’s the motive. The donor-approved Republican appointees to the Supreme Court may handcuff the Civil Rights Division with further judicial assaults on voting rights. But Trump’s cronies at the Justice Department showed dark-money donors the value of a captive Department that would look away from voter suppression schemes. As Republicans hinge their election strategy on keeping Americans from voting, an active Civil Rights Division is a deadly threat.

I get it. If I were a right-wing special interest group, the last thing I would want is these two experienced lawyers wielding the power of the Justice Department to defend voting rights. But for everybody else, these women are two appointments to applaud.

[TONY ORTEGA

Even Trump Can’t Make Sense of His Own Dark-Money Maze

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/analysis-explains-how-trump-s-dark-money-fiasco-is-so-out-of-control-he-can-t-even-make-sense-of-it/

A federal inquiry is shedding light on the mysterious financial connection between more than a dozen political committees and dark money organizations aligned with former President Donald Trump.

According to The Daily Beast, the issues with the organizations also appear to be connected to former Trump White House aide Corey Lewandowski. In fact, the news outlet reports that: "Anyone who’s taken even the quickest of peeks at Trump’s personal financial disclosures would recognize the pattern."

Speaking to The Beast, Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the government accountability organization, Documented, weighed in with details about the extent of the questionable nature of these Trump-aligned organizations.

Per The Beast, a list of more than 12 political committees and dark money groups has been released. In fact, all of the organizations contain similar names and wording.

• Make America Great Again PAC (converted from the old Trump campaign)
• Make America Great Again Action (super PAC)
• Make America Great Again, Again! (super PAC)
• Trump Make America Great Again (small-dollar joint fundraising committee)
• Make America Great Again Policies Inc (a 501(c)(4) nonprofit)
• America First Policy Institute (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit)
• America First Works (formerly America First Policies; a 501(c)(4) nonprofit)
• America FirstLegal Foundation(a 501(c)(3) nonprofit)
• America First Action (super PAC)
• Save America (leadership PAC)
• Save America JFC (joint fundraising committee)
• Trump Victory (high-dollar joint fundraising committee)

“Typically, former presidents focus on their presidential library, or start a charitable foundation, but Trump is staying in the political game and raising a staggering amount of cash,” Fischer said.

“It is worth emphasizing: All of this is totally unprecedented for a former president,” Fischer told The Daily Beast. “Even if Trump kept it simple, and just had one hard money PAC, asingle super PAC, and a pair of 501(c)(3)/501(c)(4) nonprofits, there would be no parallel with any former president in American history.”

The handling of each organization also includes distinctive activity patterns which The Beast has pointed out.

"His first such disclosure revealed positions with more than 500 entities, nearly 400 of which used his name or initials. And Trump has 'organized' the mess in a stultifying Russian-nesting-doll structure—companies within companies within companies. Frequently, one company will be held under multiple Trump companies at the same time, each with stakes in still other Trump companies."

It has also been noted that the structure of each entity has given the Trump Organization a substantial advantage for "financial flexibility while making it difficult to follow the billions of dollars that Trump, his family, and his accountants move across the organization."

Brett Kappel, a campaign finance specialist who also focuses on nonprofit law for Harmon Curran, offered his assessment of the situation.

“The central lesson of Watergate is ‘Follow the money,’” Kappel told the news outlet. “And this byzantine structure of different types of legal entities—which are subject to different fundraising restrictions and file different reports with different agencies according to different filing schedules—appears to be designed to make that task as difficult as possible.”

ref no lnx

https://www.thedailybeast.com/even-donald-trump-cant-make-sense-of-his-own-dark-money-maze

[Pay Dirt is a weekly foray into the pigpen of political funding. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.

An inquiry from the feds has thrown new light on the murky relationships between a dozen Trump-aligned groups. And the problem traces back, as do so many other problems in Trumpworld, to a familiar name: former top aide Corey Lewandowski.

When Lewandowski got himself fired from a pro-Trump super PAC last fall—after allegedly sexually assaulting a big donor—the group brought in a clean-up crew. When Lewandowski refused to step down, they opened up a new super PAC without him.

That super PAC—the preposterously titled “Make America Great Again, Again!”—was the 12th in a sprawling labyrinth of political groups and nonprofitsthat comprise the Trump fundraising network. And in terms of the incestuous confusion, it may have been the one that finally tipped the scales; federal election officials now want to know why some of the super PAC’s payments aren’t being properly reported.

[Trump’s Dark-Money Machine Gets a Makeover—and New Owners

BILL OF GOODS

Roger Sollenberger]

Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of good government group Documented, said the extent of Trump’s network is unparalleled.

“It is worth emphasizing: All of this is totally unprecedented for a former president,” Fischer told The Daily Beast. “Even if Trump kept it simple, and just had one hard money PAC, a single super PAC, and a pair of 501(c)(3)/501(c)(4) nonprofits, there would be no parallel with any former president in American history.”

Anyone who’s taken even the quickest of peeks at Trump’s personal financial disclosures would recognize the pattern.

His first such disclosure revealed positions with more than 500 entities, nearly 400 of which used his name or initials. And Trump has “organized” the mess in a stultifying Russian-nesting-doll structure—companies within companies within companies. Frequently, one company will be held under multiple Trump companies at the same time, each with stakes in still other Trump companies.

This isn’t an accident. The structure gave the Trump Organization an enormous amount of financial flexibility, while making it difficult to follow the billions of dollars that Trump, his family, and his accountants move across the organization.

When Trump hauled his private life into politics, he brought this practice with him, too.

The full Trump-aligned apparatus counts a dozen separate political committees and dark money organizations. Almost all of them share one of three names.

Here they are:

Make America Great Again PAC (converted from the old Trump campaign)

Make America Great Again Action (super PAC)

Make America Great Again, Again! (super PAC)

Trump Make America Great Again (small-dollar joint fundraising committee)

Make America Great Again Policies Inc (a 501(c)(4) nonprofit)

America First Policy Institute (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit)

America First Works (formerly America First Policies; a 501(c)(4) nonprofit)

America First Legal Foundation (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit)

America First Action (super PAC)

Save America (leadership PAC)

Save America JFC (joint fundraising committee)

Trump Victory (high-dollar joint fundraising committee)

“Typically, former presidents focus on their presidential library, or start a charitable foundation, but Trump is staying in the political game and raising a staggering amount of cash,” Fischer said.

It is staggering.

Want a closer look inside the pockets of the government’s most powerful players? Subscribe to the Pay Dirt newsletter here for exclusive reporting every Thursday.

For instance, the Trump-endorsed America First Action super PAC pulled in nearly $200 million between 2017 and 2020. Its sister nonprofit, America First Works—formerly America First Policies—posted $51.3 million in revenue for 2020, doling out nearly $40 million in grants.

[Dark-Money Group Paid Former Trump AG to Ask for Pardons

BEG YOUR PARDON

Roger Sollenberger]

The TMAGA PAC raised $884 million for 2020, with Trump Victory tossing in another $336.3 million. Those guns mostly fell quiet last year, while Trump’s three new PACs built up a $124.4 million stash, with another $12.5 million in the MAGAA! super PAC.

And we won’t know how much those other dark money nonprofits raised in 2021, or what they did with it, until after the midterms.

As Trump and the Republican Party gear up for 2024, these groups are in various stages of repair. However, that also appears to have created some internal problems. In fact, according to a filing on Wednesday, even the Trump campaign admits it isn’t always able to follow its own money.

Fischer chalked up the mess to a few factors, including Trump’s will-he-or-won’t-he candidate status, his relationship with the Republican National Committee, and disarray among his associates.

But Brett Kappel, a specialist in campaign finance and nonprofit law at Harmon Curran, perceived something more designed.

“The central lesson of Watergate is ‘Follow the money,’” Kappel told The Daily Beast. “And this byzantine structure of different types of legal entities—which are subject to different fundraising restrictions and file different reports with different agencies according to different filing schedules—appears to be designed to make that task as difficult as possible.”

To illustrate, these organizations can be divided into two groups: PACs and joint fundraising committees, and “dark money” nonprofits.

The PACS and joint fundraising committees are Trump’s political organizations. They disclose their finances to the Federal Election Commission. But they don’t all follow the same filing schedule, and, depending on what kind of committee they actually are, they can raise and transfer different amounts of money from different types of people and organizations.

[The GOP Dark Money Group Giving Big to White Supremacists

UNWORTHY CAUSES

Roger Sollenberger]

Of these groups, Save America leadership PAC is currently Trump’s main squeeze. Most of the money he raises goes there.The Save America JFC is a joint committee that splits donations between Save America and MAGA PAC, which used to be the Trump campaign. Weirdly, MAGA PAC doesn’t get much out of this joint arrangement—more than 90 percent of every contribution goes to the Save America PAC.

And the super PACs are, as mentioned above, something of a mess.

As for the “dark money” nonprofits, unlike the PACs, these groups file with the IRS. They don’t have to disclose their donors at all (hence “dark money”). They also only file once a year, and because those deadlines are so late, it can take nearly two years for a transaction to become visible to the public.

The IRS restricts their activities, too. Some groups have leeway to be political (the 501(c)(4) groups). Some must focus on social welfare (the 501(c)(3) groups). The Trump network has a healthy helping of both.

Sometimes, however, these PACs and nonprofits can overlap, even sharing employees and office space, like America First Action and America First Policies did during the Trump administration.[shuffle?]

And while they appear to be giving that another go, as the FEC found, it hasn’t been so clean this time.

Enter Lewandowski.

After Trump left the White House, the industriously sycophantic Lewandowski wormed his way back into his graces, winning the right to run the Make America Great Again Action super PAC. At the same time, he quietly created a Florida nonprofit, Make America Great Again Policies Inc.

But MAGA Policies didn’t appear to do anything—at all. There has been no reporting on any actual activity since it was created. Zero. It is a black box.

Then Lewandowski reportedly sexually assaulted a Trump donor and got himself booted from orbit. More experienced hands took over the new MAGAA! super PAC, led by former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, and that also got complicated.

[Trump PAC Lavishing $37K a Month on Trump Tower Rent: WaPo

DONATIONS WELL SPENT

According to a new corporate filing in Florida, Bondi—who also happens to lead the massive America First Policy Institute nonprofit—also took over Lewandowski’s mysterious MAGA Policies nonprofit, adding former Trump administration officials Ric Grenelland Matt Whitaker, as well as Donald Trump Jr. paramour Kimberly Guilfoyle. All of those people are also on the new super PAC’s payroll.

But here’s the rub: The super PAC hasn’t been paying them directly. The nonprofit has, as part of a “cost share agreement.”

On Tuesday, the FEC sent the super PAC a letter saying that’s not cutting it. The group needs to explain exactly what they mean by “cost share agreement,” the letter said, because what they provided is not adequate.

Kappel said the FEC may be trying to figure out whether the two groups are “financially and operationally independent.” If the super PAC was found to be “connected” to the MAGA Policies nonprofit, he said, that meansit can only raise money from people tied to the nonprofit—and not from the general public. That would be a death blow, and the group would be forced to reorganize itself yet again.

Fischer said he wouldn’t be surprised to see more groups strategically shut down, like Trump Victory began doing last year.

“It might be more straightforward for Trump to shut down MAGA PAC,” he said, though he pointed out that MAGA PAC appears to own the campaign’s valuable supporter data, which might make it more cost-effective to retain for joint fundraising efforts.

But, Fischer pointed out, even though the constellation of Trump-aligned groups is basically unnavigable, it always could have been worse.

“Recall that Brad Parscale also started the ‘American Greatness’ super PAC in 2021, which never really got off the ground,” he said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trumps-dark-money-machine-america-first-policies-gets-a-makeoverand-new-owners

no lnx

Trump’s Dark-Money Machine Gets a Makeover—and New Owners

BILL OF GOODS

The dark-money machine that has funded Donald Trump’s political operation for years has almost completely turned over and was “sold.” Experts say that doesn’t really make sense.

Roger Sollenberger

Political Reporter

Updated Dec. 13, 2021 6:00AM ET / Published Dec. 12, 2021

EXCLUSIVE

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

While ex-President Donald Trump spent the last year licking his election wounds and consolidating power in the Republican Party, his allies were busy reconfiguring a constellation of outside spending groups that have helped bankroll his political movement for years.

Trump’s influential “dark money” machine appears to have almost entirely turned over, capping the overhaul off with the apparent sale of a pro-Trump nonprofit earlier this year, The Daily Beast has learned.

The changing of the guard at the nonprofit, formerly known as America First Policies, illustrates how difficult it is to get a clear picture of the outside money fueling Trump’s movement. It reflects a turbulent year within the circle of Trump’s top advisers and fundraising chiefs, but also casts another layer of opacity over millions of dollars in already obscured donations the group made to controversial far-right causes in 2020, as Trump fought to cling to the White House.

“Whatever your views of so-called ‘dark money’ may be, these groups are further obscuring money flows.”

— Lloyd Mayer, University of Notre Dame

Lloyd Mayer, an expert in nonprofit law at the University of Notre Dame, cast these anti-transparency developments as “troubling,” saying they strike at the heart of federal sunshine laws.

“Whatever your views of so-called ‘dark money’ may be, these groups are further obscuring money flows,” he said.

How the money flows was already in little danger of becoming too clear.

America First Policies, a nonprofit which does not have to disclose its donors, was the core of a pro-Trump dark money network, with an organizational scheme that seems confusing by design.

If you were looking for an illustration of how difficult it is to track how these groups operate, America First Policies offers a prime example.

According to IRS records first obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, America First Policies filed to change its name to America First Works in October. But on Friday, a spokesperson for America First Works told The Daily Beast it wasn’t a name change—America First Policies had been “sold” to America First Works “in a private deal” earlier this year, he said.

“This is a different organization, under completely new ownership,” the spokesperson said. He declined to reveal the selling price.

Asked about the sale, Mayer said he did not understand exactly what the spokesperson was trying to say.

“Nonprofits generally do not have owners as a matter of state law, so I am not sure what they mean by ‘sold,’” Mayer said. “Nonprofits can sell their assets, including their name, as long as they do so for fair market value,” he explained, but pointed out that in this instance, “the nonprofit itself would have received the proceeds.”

“Control of a nonprofit can change, but the persons originally in control generally cannot sell control, as they do not own an equity interest,” he continued, noting that the rules would also depend on where the nonprofit was incorporated and what its governing documents provide.

The sale also shows that the byzantine pro-Trump dark money machine is reconfiguring itself ahead of the 2022 midterms, as well as Trump’s possible candidacy in 2024.

[The GOP Dark Money Group Giving Big to White Supremacists

UNWORTHY CAUSES

Roger Sollenberger]

According to tax records, Ashley Hayek is president of America First Works. Hayek’s LinkedIn page says she is also the “chief engagement officer” for the America First Policy Institute—another Trump-aligned group that sprung up earlier this year, and boasts a number of former administration and campaign officials on its roster.

It appears that the walls between the groups are thin. Last month, CNBC reported that America First Works has joined forces with AFPI, which is backing Trump’s lawsuit against social media companies.

Over the course of the year, these groups appear to have fully replaced the old infrastructure.

America First Policies was co-founded in 2017 by some of Trump’s top administration and campaign officials. It soon gave rise to a sister super PAC called America First Action, and the two entities were so close that they shared office space and even employees.

But in August, The Daily Beast reported that America First Action was also winding down, throwing its resources to the new Make America Great Again Action super PAC—a move which appears to have reflected the changing allegiances among Trump’s inner circle at the time.

All the confusion has one immediate upshot: It makes it even more difficult to understand who exactly is responsible for millions of dollars in shady grants that America First Policies doled out last year.

Those grants appeared in the tax report covering America First Policies’ activity last year, which was filed by America First Works and first obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. Some of the listed recipients have been tied to voter-suppression activity, and one of them is a hotbed for bigoted anti-LGTBQ rhetoric.

But paper trails vanish almost immediately, with some entities appearing to have evaded scrutiny after failing to file tax reports for several years—a pattern which raised concerns among experts in nonprofit law.

Robert Maguire, who tracks outside spending groups at government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the filing illustrates how political machines like the Trump network can shield controversial affiliations from public view.

“The nature of what they’re doing is legal, but they’re also absorbing the expenses and establishing distance from the actions of groups that could be seen as controversial. It gives the party and the campaign plausible deniability,” Maguire told The Daily Beast.

[Dark-Money Group Paid Former Trump AG to Ask for Pardons

BEG YOUR PARDON

Roger Sollenberger]

Take one recipient—Vision America Mobilized, a nonprofit which got half a million dollars from America First Policies last year, according to its tax filing.

Despite that donation, no group called “Vision Mobilized America” appears in the IRS database. That’s because the entity changed its name several years ago, to Million Voices Inc, a faith-based organization headquartered in Texas which does not appear to have filed with the IRS since 2016, according to the agency’s public database.

Mayer explained that groups sometimes change names to slough off negative publicity, allowing them “to distance themselves from bad press.” He noted that white supremacist groups—such as Identity Evropa—have tried this strategy.

And it turns out that Vision America Mobilized does indeed carry a dark past. But by listing the wrong name, America First Works blew the group’s cover—and possibly its own.

Vision America’s founder, Texas-based pastor Rick Scarborough, has a history of bigoted anti-LGBTQ statements. In 2013, he floated the idea of a class-action lawsuit against the gay community for “subjecting people to becoming AIDS sufferers.” Two years later, Scarborough—who once threatened to light himself on fire if the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage (spoiler: he did not)—called AIDS “God’s judgment on a sinful generation,” according to video posted by Right Wing Watch.

Scarborough is listed as a board member on the disclosure that Million Voices filed in 2016. He’s also a director for another nonprofit at the same address, called Vision America Action, whose last available tax return is from 2018.

However, Million Voices hasn’t filed a tax return since 2016. The IRS automatically revokes a group’s tax status if they fail to file returns for three years. Still, the disclaimer on its donations portal claims the group is registered with the IRS as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization.

“I don’t know why this organization hasn’t had their status revoked,” Mayer said, upon reviewing the filings. “The IRS has over the years revoked hundreds of thousands of groups based on the three-year statute. The only speculation is that the IRS is so overwhelmed and under-resourced that, together with the demands of getting money out the door for COVID relief last year, it has fallen behind on this task.”

The America First Works spokesperson declined to comment on the grants, and, upon divulging the recent sale, referred questions back to America First Policies.

The Daily Beast reached out to Brian Walsh, former head of America First Policies, who declined comment. Million Voices did not respond to a request for comment.

“The IRS is terrible at keeping track of entities supposed to be filing tax returns,” Maguire said. “You can have these shell groups where, if the IRS did conduct some analysis, they might find they’re in violation. But when they do go after them, the IRS often gets accused of some sort of political witch hunt, so it shies away from that activity.”

The group’s largest gift, about $4.8 million, went to a conservative dark-money clearinghouse called Donors Trust. It appears to have been earmarked for something called the “Honest Elections Project,” a dark-money group which has been tied to voter suppression efforts. (Its website domain was at one point apparently quite open about this goal: hardtovote.honestelections.org.)

Last year, the Honest Elections Project also filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court laying out a scheme in which state legislatures could unilaterally overturn election results.

[How Right-Wing Dark Money Is Trying to Kneecap the Biden DOJ

TIME TO FIGHT

Sheldon Whitehouse]

However, the Donors Trust filing does not show contributions adding up to anything like America First’s $4.8 million—the Honest Elections Project only got $170,000, per the filing.

Asked about this discrepancy, the America First Works spokesperson replied, “Huh.”

But this trail twists again. Donors Trust reported that all its grants to the Honest Election Project had actually gone through another group first, The 85 Fund. But even that relationship is misleading—documents obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics show that The 85 Fund actually is the Honest Elections Project.

That relationship is a cakewalk compared to another voter-suppression group America First Policies supported last year—a flat $2 million contribution to an “election integrity” group calledBe Counted, with almost no public footprint whatsoever.

Outside of a CREW report from 2016, which details a voter-shaming campaign which individuals and local officials described at the time as “creepy” and “a form of intimidation,” Be Counted appears in hardly any press. The group appears tied to the Republican Governors Association, according to its most recent IRS filing, from 2019, which lists a slate of directors affiliated with the RGA.

But it turns out that, like Million Voices, Be Counted also appears to have changed its name. In 2019, it became Be Registered LLC, but with no 2020 tax filing on the books for either group, it’s unclear whether America First Policies contributed yet again to a group under an incorrect name.

Yet another beneficiary, Ohio-basedMoms for America, has also not filed a return since 2018. Moms for America held Trump rallies ahead of the election, and helped organize the “Save the Republic” rally by the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 5. It got $100,000 from America First last year.

Of course, the Trump money machine has never been easy to follow. But the connections appear even blurrier now that Trump is out of office. And thanks to IRS filing deadlines, voters may not know what these groups are currently up to until next November, after the midterms.

“Timing matters,” Mayer said. “The longer it takes for the information to come out, the less it’s on the public’s mind. And by delaying flings and obscuring who these groups are, that information only gets older and colder and staler. Even if it all comes out accurately and on time in 2022, it still may not make the news.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/11/2024-presidential-campaign-dark-money-00024241

no lnx grf tbl

2024 ELECTIONS

2024 hopefuls are already in a dark-money arms race

At least a dozen potential candidates for president have nonprofit groups that can raise undisclosed money aligned with them.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaks at the CPAC on Friday, Feb. 25, 2022, in Orlando, Fla. | John Raoux/AP Photo

By SCOTT BLAND

04/11/2022

When Mike Pompeo announced his political action committee last June, he set off a wave of news stories heralding the move as a potential step toward a 2024 presidential campaign. But the former secretary of State kept his next big launch behind the scenes.

Two months later, Pompeo allies including Ulrich Brechbuhl, a close friend, West Point classmate and former State Department official, quietly formed a nonprofit group — Champion American Values Fund — to work alongside Pompeo’s Champion American Values PAC. According to corporate records from Delaware and Virginia, Brechbuhl serves as president of the organization, which can raise and spend unlimited funds without disclosing its donors — an increasingly popular feature for politicians eyeing the White House.

At least a dozen potential candidates for president in 2024 have active nonprofit groups aligned with them, according to a review of corporate filings, campaign disclosures and financial records obtained by POLITICO. Some of them, like the nonprofits affiliated with Pompeo or Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), have never been publicly revealed before. Others, like those supporting President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, have been operating in the open for years.

What they all have in common is the ability to pay staffers, fund polling and policy research, run ads and accept money from megadonors without divulging those funders’ names — or much information about any spending until many months after the fact. It’s the latest escalation in a fundraising arms race that has seen personal benefactors, super PACs and now secret money become common building blocks of presidential campaigns.

Every candidate who seeks the White House in 2024 will have to start disclosing their campaign fundraising and spending once they officially declare their campaigns. But in the meantime, and in the absence of new legislation or an enforcement crackdown from tax or campaign-finance regulators, prospective presidents can use nonprofits to shield their donors — and much about their preparations — from the public eye.

“Anybody thinking seriously about running for president in 2024 needs to have a large, sophisticated soft-dollar operation up and running by no later than this year’s general election,” said Luke Thompson, a Republican strategist who runs Protect Ohio Values, the super PAC backing J.D. Vance in Ohio’s Senate race.

“With a small number of donors, you can do a lot of list-building, a lot of polling and research, and another really valuable thing you can do is keep staff members you’re going to hire and lock them down,” Thompson continued.

It’s unclear just how big many of these groups are now, since they don’t have to file tax returns detailing their financial activities until 11-plus months after the end of each fiscal year. Nonprofits can’t spend more than half of their money on expressly political activity, but they can still make a big mark on the electoral landscape.

Advancing American Freedom, the group founded in 2021 by former Vice President Mike Pence, estimated it would raise $5 million and spend nearly that much last year, according to a filing with state regulators in North Carolina. And the Pence nonprofit announced plans earlier this year for a $10 million TV ad campaign targeting 16 House Democrats. By comparison, Pence’s PAC — Great America Committee, which cannot accept individual contributions of more than $5,000 per year — has raised over $557,000 and spent $787,000 since January 2021.

Pompeo’s Champion American Values Fundand the Scott-aligned Opportunity Matters Network, which also formed in 2021, have yet to make any filings detailing their size. But the Scott-aligned group has taken in $650,000 from its sister group, a super PAC funded by donors including tech billionaire Larry Ellison, according to the super PAC’s campaign finance disclosures. Scott’s political operation declined to comment on its activity.

Pompeo’s political operation also declined to comment.

But one of the larger known 2024-affiliated nonprofits, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s Stand for America,shows just what potential candidates can do with such a vehicle leading up to a presidential election.

Haley’s group raised $9.3 million in 2020, according to its most recent federal tax filing, which was obtained by POLITICO. The largest donor gave $750,000, and another six donors gave at least $100,000 apiece. But most of the nonprofit’s money came in smaller increments, and it spent big on mail and digital fundraising activities, building up a money-raising program for Haley, who last ran for office in 2014.

Stand for America spent more cash — $9.9 million — than it raised in 2020, including $3.1 million on fundraising expenses, its tax filing says. The group’s biggest vendor was Coldspark Digital, a vaunted Republican consulting firm that boasts on its website of “building a low-dollar fundraising operation from scratch” for the former South Carolina governor. The firm also works with Haley’s PAC, according to FEC records.

“The last time she had been a candidate was 2014 — an eternity in the digital age,” the site notes. Now, she has a growing list stocked with fresh email addresses and engaged supporters. If Haley chooses to run for president, her campaign could rent or buy the list built at Stand for America.

There’s more to the machinery than fundraising, too. The nonprofits are also housing staff and promoting policy that could become foundational pieces of presidential campaigns. Stand for America’s executive director, Timothy Chapman, previously ran the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The Haley group published a policy book and sends out daily and weekly policy-focused newsletters to hundreds of thousands of people on its list, and it has worked with GOP members of Congress and Hill staff on policy pushes related to China and other issues, according to the nonprofit.

The top ranks of Pence’s organization include board president Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff as vice president, and executive director Paul Teller, another Pence aide during the Trump years who was Sen. Ted Cruz’s Senate chief of staff during his 2016 presidential run. The group has been hard at work developing Pence’s newly released policy platform.

Pence has already given a handful of major policy speeches over the last year and is likely to continue the series working off major themes in his new “Freedom Agenda,” according to a person familiar with Advancing American Freedom’s plans. The group is also convening big donors, like at the retreat it held last year in Jackson, Wyo.

As far-reaching as the 2024 nonprofit activity already is, the track record of similar groups that operated in the 2016 primaries show how much more they can do with dark money.

A dark-money group laid groundwork for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid in secret for a year before he launched his campaign. The nonprofit, Conservative Solutions Project, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Rubio’s data-analytics consultants to conduct detailed research on voters in early caucus and primary states. It later spent millions on an ad campaign boosting Rubio and ultimately raised more than $22 million — almost all of it from at most two secret donors, OpenSecrets found.

Before New Hampshire’s 2016 primary, another nonprofit group used pushy “social pressure” tactics to induce people there to vote, generating backlash. But since the group’s origin was unclear, it didn’t generate blowback against John Kasich, the candidate the nonprofit was formed to support.

And the shadows created by the nonprofit world’s scant, time-lapsed disclosure requirements even give cover to supporters of presidential rivals colluding against another opponent, CREW found. Right to Rise Policy Solutions, the nonprofit aligned with Jeb Bush, sent $500,000 in 2016 to the nonprofit linked to then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, America Needs Leadership — which financed mailers in 2016 attacking Rubio and Kasich in New Hampshire.

It was nearly two years later that the pro-Bush group finally disclosed the donation that linked it to the Christie group’s attacks against their mutual rivals.

The biggest of the dark-money groups — also known as 501(c)(4) organizations, after their section of the tax code — associated with 2024 contenders are the ones aligned with Biden and Trump. Building Back Together, the group charged withbuilding public support for Biden’s agenda, has spent at least $22.8 million on advertising since the beginning of last year, according to AdImpact, a TV and digital ad-tracking service.

Then there’s America First Works, the nonprofit group paired with Trump’s super PAC in the 2020 election. It raised $51.3 million that year as Trump ran for reelection and ended the year with $7.7 million in the bank, its latest tax filing showed. The group has also formed an alliance with another newer nonprofit, America First Policy Institute, CNBC reported. America First Policy Institute was launched by Trump White House officials Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow soon after his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s PAC sent a $1 million contribution to the group in June 2021.

With Biden expected to run for reelection, there’s been more nonprofit activity on the GOP side so far. But several prominent Democrats have affiliated dark-money groups, too, which could be involved in a national campaign at some point in the future.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a wealthy former investment banker, immediately raised questions about whether he was considering a future presidential run when some of his closest political aides and his wife launched Stronger Fairer Forward, a new nonprofit, in February. (Murphy already benefits from another supportive nonprofit that has backed his agenda as governor.)

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also has a nonprofit associated with the PAC he launched after ending his 2020 presidential run, though both entities have been quiet since Buttigieg joined Biden’s cabinet.

But the bulk of the build-up has centered around ambitious Republicans. Others with supportive nonprofit groups run by allies include Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). Axios reported Rubio, the Florida senator, has used an email list built up by a nonprofit group, Stand Up to China, run by one of the same operatives who helmed his 2016 outside groups.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is term-limited and declined entreaties to run for Senate this year, has said he’s considering seeking the presidency. Meanwhile, a group founded by close political allies in 2019 has been running national digital ads, promoting Hogan as a problem-solver and calling attention to his statement that Trump running for president in 2024 would be bad for the country and the GOP.

The new nonprofit got off to a slow start, raising only $340,000 in 2020, according to its tax filing, as Hogan suspended fundraising efforts for the group to focus on managing his state through the coronavirus pandemic, according to a person familiar with the group’s activity.

But in 2021, the nonprofit aggressively promoted a number of Hogan’s signature policies, including boosting police funding and decrying gerrymandering. The group was also involved in bringing together bipartisan members of Congress to discuss national infrastructure legislation.

Notably, Hogan already had a supportive nonprofit group founded in 2019, Change Maryland, backing his agenda as governor. The two groups together raised between $3 and $4 million in 2021, according to the person familiar with their activity.

But the new group has a name more befitting a politician with national ambitions: An America United.

FILED UNDER: CAMPAIGN FINANCE, MARCO RUBIO, JOE BIDEN,

POLITICO

===

raw story

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/clarence-thomas/

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' right leaning political views have been obvious for decades in his writings for the Court. A new report in the Daily Beast, however, spotlights just how intertwined his financial connections are to an ultra-conservative judicial activist.

When Thomas was looking to promote the release of his memoir last October he chose to hire a public relations firm, CRC Advisors, run by the former chief of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo. Leo is a top fundraiser for right-wing judicial activist groups. The Daily Beast reports that "Leo has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the three decades on behalf of right-wing dark money groups to influence the federal judiciary and Supreme Court. He advised and persuaded Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump in their appointments of Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—and prepped Justice Thomas for his nomination hearings."

The report also says that Leo is the "hub" of dark money groups that stealthily fund and link up with parties who argue cases before the Supreme Court, something that Supreme watchers have dubbed an "amicus flotilla."

Leo’s affiliations with the court - and especially Thomas - are especially pronounced. He made the justice the godfather of one of his children and has hosted him on vacation at his New England retreat.

Paul Collins is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of several books about the high court. He says Thomas’ choice of Leo’s firm is “strange” and “unnecessary.”

“It signals that this world of the Federalist Society is even smaller than we thought,” Collins told The Daily Beast.

===

an 3 22

Dark money groups have silently influenced election campaigns for many years but now some are complaining because it appears the tables have turned. The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler highlighted remarks from political action committees (PACs) raising concerns about U.S. Supreme Court Justice nominee Ketanji Brown.

On February 4, the Judicial Crisis Network released an ad that included a voiceover that said:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s “justices were to uphold the Constitution, to be above politics. Now, that legacy is being tarnished by secret money from liberals … a record amount of dark money, over a billion, put them [Democrats] in office, so they will put up an Arabella judge, a liberal activist, a Biden rubber stamp." [twt?]

then, on February 25, American Rising Squared tweeted, “Dark money groups, including Demand Justice, have been pushing Ketanji Brown Jackson for a SCOTUS spot for over a year. Once again, Joe Biden delivered for dark money groups and their wealthy donors.”

While it's not surprising that Republican conservatives are sounding off about the possibility of a Black woman joining the Supreme Court, Kessler highlighted the real problem with the groups' complaints: hypocrisy. According to Kessler, the same group complaining about Brown is actually funded by dark money themselves.

"What do the Judicial Crisis Network and American Rising Squared have in common?" Kessler asked, adding, "They are both 'dark money' groups complaining about the influence of dark money — when it comes from the other side of the political spectrum."

Offering facts about both groups, Kessler explained the pipeline funding both organizations.

He wrote:

"The conservative Judicial Crisis Network works to fill judicial vacancies across the country, including in state supreme courts and appellate courts. It received $17.9 million in 2016 and $17.1 million in 2017 from an undisclosed donor (or maybe two). It then turned around and used that money (and other contributions) to fight against the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 ($7 million) and for the nominations of Neil M. Gorsuch ($10 million), Brett M. Kavanaugh ($10 million) and Amy Coney Barrett ($10 million)."

Kessler also noted the problem with American Rising Squared and its own hypocrisy. "American Rising Squared’s tweet at least just focuses on Demand Justice," Kessler wrote. "But still, it’s another example of a conservative dark money group complaining about dark money."

He concluded with his take on the level of hypocrisy expressed between both organizations. "We can only marvel at the hypocrisy of these attacks. Perhaps the point is that only liberal dark money is a bad thing," Kessler wrote. "But if these groups are going to air such complaints, they need to disclose they engage in the same practice of collecting huge sums of money without revealing donors. They earn an upside-down Pinocchio — which is ordinarily for flip-flops — for their hypocrisy."

===

aha yikes scotus supposed to be the least political branch thus best insulated from bribery/corruption?!

an 2 22

As President Joe Biden weighs his options for a U.S. Supreme Court nominee to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, far-right MAGA Republicans are running ads claiming that Biden is up to something sinister. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, in an op-ed published by the Washington Post on February 17, finds those fearmongering ads to be an example of projection — as GOP dark money has helped Republicans obtain the 6-3 hard-right majority they presently enjoy on the High Court.

“When Supreme Court vacancies occur, a Republican dark-money operation swings into action,” the Democratic senator explains. “Now, an anonymously funded right-wing group is airing an ad aimed at the yet-to-be-picked nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer. The group alleges that liberal dark-money interests will guide President Biden’s choice. The music is ominous, the central claim false, and the hypocrisy thick.”

The group that Whitehouse is referring to calls itself the Judicial Crisis Network. And its anti-Biden ad, Whitehouse writes, is total hypocrisy in light of all the Republican dark money that has been spent on the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The ad, launched by the same right-wing donor interests that captured our Supreme Court under President Donald Trump, is an effort to distract from their own dark-money operation,” Whitehouse notes. “Their accusations of dark-money corruption are a bizarre reimagining of the very strategy that they, themselves, hatched and executed.”

The Judicial Crisis Network and other “dark money groups,” according to Whitehouse, are “linked to Leonard Leo, Federalist Society co-chairman and former executive vice president.”

“Leo has been a force behind dark-money court-capture dating back to the George W. Bush Administration,” Whitehouse notes. “When Trump was elected, this operation ramped up: The network selected reliable right-wing judicial nominees, its trusted advisers shepherded nominees through the Senate, and millions in dark-money PR campaigns and ads propelled nominees’ toward confirmation. Thus, today The Court That Dark Money Built reliably hands down decisions favorable to the donors.”

The Judicial Crisis Network, according to Whitehouse, is accusing Democrats of the very thing that it is doing: spending dark money to influence the federal judiciary.

“It’s an old propaganda technique: Accuse your adversary of the exact wrong you are committing,” Whitehouse writes. “Russian President Vladimir Putin uses it regularly.”

==

a corp that hired pvt security, sold rights to another corp oann, which is being sued for libel but raising dark $ for audit?? ~ trans b/c proprietary, NDA's

TERM DARK $ BECOMES GENERIC?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/arizona-audit-oan/

ah

no twt

With devotees of former Present Donald Trump currently conducting a blatantly partisan audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Arizona, One America News Network has been offering glowing coverage of that event. Journalist Sarah Mimms, in an article published by BuzzFeed News on May 18, examines the connection between OAN employees and the audit — which was ordered by Republicans in the Arizona State Senate and is being conducted by the Florida-based firm Cyber Ninjas, whose founder Doug Logan is a far-right Trump supporters who pushed the former president's false claims of voter fraud in 2020.

"Two reporters at One America News, a far-right TV station, are running a dark money organization that they say is helping fund a counter-reality 'audit' that former President Donald Trump and his supporters believe will overturn Arizona's 2020 election results in his favor," Mimms explains. "What's more, one of those reporters, Christina Bobb, is the network's most visible correspondent covering the very 'audit' that she is helping scare up money for on OAN's airwaves, while she and the network enjoy unique access to the process where private contractors and volunteers are searching for fraud and have examined ballots for nonexistent watermarks and 'bamboo fibers.' OAN has a deal as the exclusive livestream partner for the audit."

Bobb hosts a program on OAN called "Weekly Briefing," and Mimms points out that on April 9, she tweeted that she had founded a group devoted to promoting the audit: Voices and Votes.According to Bobb, the group raised $150,000 that day.

"According to its website," Mimms observes, "Voices and Votes is run by Bobb as the CEO and president, as well as OAN's White House correspondent Chanel Rion, who is listed as the chief marketing officer, and Courtland Sykes, Rion's fiancé, who is listed as the group's chief operations officer."[twt dANGEROUSLY UNDERFUNDED"

although the Maricopa County audit is being slammed as a joke by Trump's critics on both the left and the right, legitimate audits or recounts of the election results in Arizona have been conducted — and they showed that now-President Joe Biden won Arizona fair and square. Biden's Arizona victory was reported by the decision desk at Fox News on Election Night 2020 and was later certified by conservative Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

Mimms explains why the current Maricopa County audit is a "farce," noting, "It's important to pause here and note that the audit itself is not really an audit at all. What happened is the Arizona Senate, which is controlled by 16 Republicans to 14 Democrats, sent a subpoena to Maricopa County — which was upheld by a judge, forcing the county to hand over 2.1 million ballots,as well as vote tabulators and a bunch of election data. The 'audit,' which is being run by outside contractors hired by the Senate, will have no force or effect on the 2020 election results; Joe Biden is president, andArizona already did an audit of Maricopa County in the presidential race and didn't find a single ballot discrepancy.The county itself, which is not involved in the current Senate audit either, also hired two independent firms to review its elections equipment in February, which came back clean as well."

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/corporate-seditionists-are-no-better-than-the-seditionists-who-attacked-the-capitol/

Capitalism and democracy are compatible only if democracy is in the driver’s seat.

That’s why I took some comfort just after the attack on the Capitol when many big corporations solemnly pledged they’d no longer finance the campaigns of the147 lawmakers who voted to overturn election results.

**

Btw, if you’d like my daily analyses, commentary, and drawings, please subscribe to my free letter: robertreich.substack.com

**

Well, those days are over. Turns out they were over the moment the public stopped paying attention.

A report published last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shows that over the past year, 717 companies and industry groups have donated more than $18m to 143 of those seditious lawmakers. Businesses that pledged to stop or pause their donations have given nearly $2.4m directly to their campaigns or political action committees.

But there’s a deeper issue here. The whole question of whether corporations do or don’t bankroll the seditionist caucus is a distraction from a more basic problem.

The tsunami of money now flowing from corporations into the swamp of American politics is larger than ever. And this money – bankrolling almost all politicians and financing attacks on their opponents – is undermining American democracy as much as did the 147 seditionist members of Congress. Maybe more.

The Democratic senator KyrstenSinema – whose vocal opposition to any change in the filibuster is on the verge of dooming voting rights – received almost $2m in campaign donations in 2021 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Most of it came from corporate donors outside Arizona, some of which have a history of donating largely to Republicans.

Has the money influenced Sinema? You decide.Besides sandbagging voting rights, she voted down the $15 minimum wage increase, opposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and stalled on drug price reform– policies supported by a majority of Democratic senators as well as a majority of Arizonans.

Over the last four decades, corporate PAC spending on congressional elections has more than quadrupled, even adjusting for inflation.

Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union PACs contributed about as much as corporate PACs. Now, corporations are outspending labor by more than three to one.

According to a landmark study published in 2014 by the Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.

Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Lawmakers mainly listen to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.

It’s probably far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002: before the supreme court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, before Super Pacs, before “dark money” and before the Wall Street bailout.

The corporate return on this mountain of money has been significant. Over the last 40 years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.

Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations (most recently, Build Back Better). They’ve attacked labor laws, reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a third 40 years ago to just over 6% now.

They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for big pharma, big oil, big tech, big ag, the largest military contractors and biggest banks now dwarfs the amount of welfare for people.

The profits of big corporations just reached a 70-year high, even during a pandemic. The ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to 320-to-1 now.

Meanwhile, most Americans are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was 40 years ago, when adjusted for inflation.

But the biggest casualty is public trust in democracy.

In 1964, just 29% of voters believed government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves”. By 2013, 79% of Americans believed it.

Corporate donations to seditious lawmakers are nothing compared with this 40-year record of corporate sedition.

A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy they are willing to believe blatant lies of a self-described strongman, and willing to support a political party that no longer believes in democracy.

As I said at the outset, capitalism is compatible with democracy only if democracy is in the driver’s seat. But the absence of democracy doesn’t strengthen capitalism. It fuels despotism.

Despotism is bad for capitalism. Despots don’t respect property rights. They don’t honor the rule of law. They are arbitrary and unpredictable. All of this harms the owners of capital. Despotism also invites civil strife and conflict, which destabilize a society and an economy.

My message to every CEO in America: you need democracy, but you’re actively undermining it.

It’s time for you to join the pro-democracy movement. Get solidly behind voting rights. Actively lobby for the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Use your lopsidedly large power in American democracy to protect American democracy – and do it soon. Otherwise, we may lose what’s left of it.

***

Btw, if you’d like my daily analyses, commentary, and drawings, please subscribe to my free letter: robertreich.substack.com

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and writes at robertreich.substack.com. Reich served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.

igor salon

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/glenn-youngkin-2655355138/

A billionaire Trump donor who funded a group that marched on the Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is bankrolling a dark-money group boosting Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin's attacks on Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe.

The Republican-aligned Restoration PACthis week launched attacking McAuliffe, who served a previous term as governor, over crime rates. (Virginia's unusual term limits restrict governors to one term, but does not bar them from running again after leaving office.) The PAC has spent $1.767 million funding ads against McAuliffe, making it by far the largest independent expenditure group in the race.

The group is funded almost entirely by Republican mega-donor Richard Uihlein, co-founder of the Wisconsin shipping supply giant Uline. Uihlein contributed $24.5 million to the group in the 2020 election cycle, making up 97% of its funding, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. He put another $1.5 million into the group in May, according to FEC filings.

Uihlein and his wife Liz are among the biggest Republican donors in the country, having given more than $65 million to former President Donald Trump,Republican candidates and conservative groups since 2019. The Uihleins have also contributed $4.3 million over the past five years to theTea Party Patriots, including $800,000 in October 2020, making them by far the group's biggest donors.

The Tea Party Patriots participated in the "March to Save America" rally that preceded the Capitol riot and were one of 11 groups listed as part of the "#StopTheSteal coalition," according to WBEZ. The group also contributed to Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who was accused by "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander of helping plan the rally, which Brooks has denied. Tea Party Patriots also contributed to Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who led objections to the certification of Electoral College results in the Senate.

Restoration PAC last month also gave $942,000 to Women Speak Out Virginia — 2021, a PAC affiliated with the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List that launched a $1.4 million campaign to attack McAuliffe on abortion.

Uihlein's foundation also contributed $275,000 to Trump booster Charlie Kirk's Turning Point Action between 2014 and 2016. The group was listed as a participant in the Capitol protest and Kirk took credit for "sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president" in a since-deleted tweet.

Turning Point Action also previously received $50,000 from the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative dark-money group that helped Trump fill federal courts with conservative judges and is pushing to restrict voting. The group also funds theRepublican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), giving it $2.1 million last October and a total of $12.7 million since 2014. RAGA's fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund,**sent out robocalls**urging supporters to "march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal" on Jan. 6.

The Judicial Crisis Network has multiple legal aliases it uses for other initiatives, including The Concord Fund and Free to Learn Action.That latter group has launched a $1 million ad campaign focused on "critical race theory" in schools, an issue Youngkin and other conservatives have seized on. The group is spending $1 million attacking McAuliffe for arguing that parents should not dictate school curricula.

The Judicial Crisis Network is also closely aligned and shares staff with the Judicial Education Project and its Honest Elections Project, a conservative initiative pushing voting restrictions. The Judicial Education Network is almost entirely funded by the Donors Trust, a dark-money group backed by the Koch network. Donors Trust in 2019 gave more than $20 million to at least a dozen groups who would later question the results of the election. Last year, the Honest Elections Project announced a six-figure ad campaign stoking fears of a "brazen attempt to manipulate the election system for partisan advantage" before the election even happened.

Youngkin has tried to walk a fine line on Trump's election lies as he tries to solidify his Republican base without alienating independent and suburban voters in the increasingly blue state. He refused to acknowledge President Biden's election victory while seeking the Republican nomination, doing so only after he had already triumphed over Republican rivals. And while Youngkin has said he would have voted to certify the election results, he is nonetheless calling for an "audit" of voting machines in Virginia (something the state already does) and boosting election conspiracy theorists.

Youngkin, the former CEO of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group, is also the primary funder of Virginia Wins, contributing $1 million to back Republican candidates in down-ballot races. The PAC has funneled tens of thousands to candidates who attended the Stop the Steal rally, organized transportation for others to attend the event, defended Capitol rioters or pushed election conspiracy theories, Mother Jones reported on Thursday....

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/dark-money-groups/

ah

Earlier this year, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives took a stand against voter suppression when they passed House Resolution 1, a.k.a. the For the People Act — a comprehensive voting rights/election reform bill that now faces an uphill climb in the U.S. Senate under the rules of the filibuster, which requires 60 or more votes for most legislation. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and many other Senate Republicans are vehemently opposed to HR 1, and according to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government, "dark money" from "the Koch network" is helping to fuel that opposition.

In an article published on May 28, CREW members Meghan Faulkner and Miru Osuga explain, "There's a whole lot of dark money behind the opponents of democracy reform. The Koch network alone has spent tens of millions backing many of the senators who are opposing the For the People Act, which would overhaul campaign finance rules and enforcement and make it harder for dark money groups, like those in the Koch network, to secretly influence our elections."

Faulkner and Osuga note how much "the Koch network" has spent "backing" GOP opponents of the For the People Act, including $5.6 million spent on Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, $1.3 million on Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, $4.9 million on Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, $4.3 million on Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, $5.7 million on Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and $4.3 million on Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

"All told," Faulkner and Osuga note, "groups associated with the Koch network have spent over $100 million boosting the campaigns of current Republican senators, none of whom are supportive of comprehensive campaign finance reform. That total doesn't even include millions of dollars in additional dark money spending from these groups that was never reported to the Federal Election Commission."

KochPAC is a political action committee funded by employees of Koch Industries and their allies. Billionaire oligarch Charles Koch, the 85-year-old brother of the late David Koch, has been a major supporter of right-wing causes.

According to CREW, one of the things that troubles "the Koch network" is how "popular" the proposals of the For the People Act are. The bill comes at a time when Republicans in state legislatures all over the United States are aggressively pushing voter suppression bills.

"The Koch network and other dark money groups know exactly how popular this democracy reform is and how much it threatens the broken campaign finance system they depend on," Faulkner and Osuga stress. "That's why they're doing their best to defeat it quietly in Congress, aided by the senators whose campaigns they've boosted with millions of dollars of secret money."

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maybe not technically dark b/c declared? but no limits?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-campaign-and-republicans-have-now-spent-nearly-60-million-on-lawyers-for-the-president

as evidence mounts that the Donald Trump campaign is going broke, you might be wondering just how the heck a presidential incumbent could manage to churn through a nine-figure amount of donations and be coming up short only weeks after its own national convention.

We don’t know, but this might be a clue: The New York Times and Campaign Finance Institute counted up the latest totals of just how much Republican “donation” money is being spent not on Trump’s campaigning, but Trump’s lawyers. The new total? At least $58.4 million. Trump, his allies, and the Republican National Committee have spent nearly $60 million, since 2015, on Dear Leader’s lawyering.

Yikes.

The *Times*‘ report makes it clear that this level of legal spending is absolutely not normal. In addition to defending Trump from the Russia probe and the near-countless sexual harassment and corruption scandals surrounding him, Trump has also used donor cash to file lawsuits against ex-campaign and White House staff members who he says broke “nondisclosure” agreements and to file lawsuits against major news outlets after they published damaging opinion columns about him, thus turning the supposed legal fund into a slush fund for settling Trump’s personal vendettas.

if you’re thinking Trump is bilking small-dollar donors out of their money, with all these legal bills: yes and no. The Trump campaign has provided some of the money, but a large chunk is coming from the Republican National Committee’s legal “recount account” fund, an established party fund that is allowed to accept donations far in excess of normal campaign contribution limits. That means it’s funded by some of the richest Republicans in America.

Oh, but don’t worry. The Times reports that a National Republican Committee spokesperson “rejected” the notion that wealthy Republicans are pouring money into the legal slush fund in an attempt to “influence” Trump.

So this is all very interesting, but it’s not immediately clear that you can blame the party pissing away nearly $60 million on Trump’s personal defenses, scandals and vendettas for its apparent new money woes. It does seem a risky choice, however, for the party to be so freely spending money intended to fight election-related legal issues only months before a presidential election that (shudder) stands a very good chance of being litigated to hell and back, if Trump has his way.

Then again, the lesson of 21st-century America is that the nation’s fabulously rich have, literally, All The Money. There doesn’t seem to be any upper limit on how much money fascist-friendly but tax-averse Trump allies are willing to send his way. And as top Republican donors like Louis DeJoy keep demonstrating, don’t assume they’ll be letting petty things like federal laws block them from giving however much the conservative “movement” needs.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/dark-money/

salon

More than a decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic ruling in _{Citizens United v. FEC}_, opening the door for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on political causes (although not directly to political candidates). As corrosive as that decision was to democracy, it came with a slight proviso. As Justice Anthony Kennedy _{wrote}_: while "the Government may not suppress [corporate] speech altogether," it may "regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements." Citizens United found, in other words, that corporations could spend without limit, but government had a right to force public disclosure that spending to the public.

Since then, it's become abundantly clear that money in politics takes numerous forms, far beyond the obvious subterfuge of a corporation donating to a political action committee that then funds a political candidate. In the nonprofit world, big-money donors pump hundreds of millions into politically-motivated 501(c) organizations, which are not required to disclose their donors. Those groups then funnel this money into _{patently political ventures}_, even though they are technically forbidden from engaging in significant lobbying. That two-step process describes the phenomenon known as "dark money," which allows wealthy individuals and corporations to exert enormous influence on the political system behind a veil of anonymity.

Last year alone, more than _{$1 billion in dark money}_ was spent in the 2020 election, a record high. Contrary to some people's assumptions, "both sides" actually do it — dark money flows to and from Democrats as well as Republicans. In truth, anonymous money has been part of America's political bloodstream for _{decades now}_, but not until relatively recently has the debate around it rose to a national level. Last month, in the firs major case of its kind since Citizens United, the issue of nonprofit donor disclosure returned to the highest court in the land.

In this case, _{**Americans for Prosperity Foundation** v. Bonta}_ (consolidated with another, functionally identical case, _{**Thomas More Law Center**v. Bonta}_) the Supreme Court will decide whether political nonprofits can be compelled to disclose who their largest donors are. This case in question specifically concerns donor disclosure rules in California, but its implications are unmistakably nationwide. And while the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity and the Christian-oriented Thomas More Center are distinctly right-wing in ideological terms, they have some surprising allies before the high court.

As things work now, the IRS annually collects from every nonprofit a form called Schedule B, which lists the personal information of each nonprofit's largest donors. The stated legal purpose is to regulate or prevent various financial crimes like fraud and money laundering. California is unique in requiring nonprofits to submit their Schedule B forms to the state attorney general's office — if they want to keep on raising tax-deductible donations.

To be clear, California collects the information, but does not release it to the public. But this seemingly innocuous bureaucratic regulation has sent shockwaves throughout the conservative nonprofit world — not to mention a number of liberal-leaning or civil-libertarian nonprofits as well, _{including}_ the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign.

Broadly speaking, the strange coalition of plaintiffs in the Americans for Prosperity argue that the state's interest in collecting Schedule B's — which, once again, would not be made publicly accessible — does not outweigh the burden that the law would impose upon them. They further argue that this burden may be acute for nonprofits that advocate for or against controversial causes, like abortion. Furthermore, the plaintiffs have argued that if their donors are unmasked — by means of a hack or leak, for instance — these donors could be at risk of severe reprisal, causing a chilling effect on future donations.

John Bursch, vice president of appellate advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative-libertarian group, told Salon in an interview he sees this as "a free association problem."

"Whether it's a conservative organization or a liberal or progressive organization," Bursch said, "they all recognize that publicly exposing donors to groups that engage in public advocacy risks chilling — causing people to not donate, or to donate below thresholds where they won't appear on a Schedule B."

Bursch currently represents the Thomas More Law Center,a Christian conservative legal nonprofit that briefly embraced Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the presidential election and is now battling on behalf of donor privacy. He alleges that there have been several cases when donors have felt threatened because of their connections to Americans for Prosperity Foundation or Thomas More. _{Court documents}_ detail purported instances of doxing, death threats and even assassination attempts. It's worth noting that the plaintiffs also fear "economic reprisal," such as boycotts or criticism of their businesses, activities that are clearly _{legal and constitutionally protected}_ expressions of free speech.

To make their case, the plaintiffs draw upon an unlikely parallel: the Supreme Court's seminal 1958 ruling in _{NAACP v. Alabama}_, where the justices found that Alabama officials could not force the NAACP to turn over its membership list due to the possibility of violent public retaliation against its members.

At the time of that decision, Justice John Marshall Harlan _{wrote}_ that the NAACP had made "an uncontroverted showing" that the "revelation of the identity of its rank-and-file members has exposed these members to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility." Alabama's effort to expose NAACP members was largely understood by racial justice advocates as a clear attempt to dismantle the civil-rights group through the use of racial terror.

Bursch acknowledged that the historical circumstances around NAACP do not resemble those of the current case, but insisted, "To think that [Thomas More] donors might not face life or death is not really accurate."

Unsurprisingly, many critics of the corrosive force of money in politics reject any comparison between the cases. In a statement to Salon, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., drily observed "an enormous gap between the Supreme Court case cited by petitioners — a civil rights-era decision where NAACP members had reason to fear state-sanctioned bombings, assassinations and other violence — and theproblem of billionaires secretly running dark-money-funded political covert ops in our country."

Daniel Weiner, deputy director of the Brennan Center's Election Reform Program, echoed that analysis in an interview with Salon: "I always pause at any contemporary actor analogizing themselves to the NAACP in the South in 1958. And that includes folks on the right and left. AFP, whether or not it is right on the merits, represents some of the most powerful interests in the country. This is not comparable to the NAACP in the South prior to the civil rights movement."

There's another important difference between the two cases: While the plaintiffs in the Americans for Prosperity case are alleging a largely hypothetical risk of reprisal, they are demanding a result that in goes further than in the NAACP decision. As Vox's Ian Millhiser _{explained}_, "the plaintiffs insist that they are entitled to facial relief — meaning that the state's disclosure rule must be tossed out for all nonprofits, regardless of whether donors to those nonprofits face harassment, or even if they want to keep their donations secret."

Weiner said that a universal ban on mandatory donor disclosures is not warranted, arguing that the plaintiffs' case goes no further than claiming "that the law should not be applied to them. It's hard to see how all this adds up to 'the law is facially invalid,' which is a really sweeping position to take in light of a couple incidents."

Bursch responded that Americans for Prosperity "is precisely the type of case where a facial ruling would be appropriate," saying, "It's almost nonsensical to suggest that thousands of charities should have to individually sue California to keep their donor information confidential."

Even though California has no plans to release "dark money" donors' names, Bursch argues there is still likely to be a chilling effect, claiming that the state does not maintain a secure record-keeping system and leaves an "_{open door}_" for hackers. It's true that in 2012, a Schedule B for Planned Parenthood was leaked in California, potentially revealing hundreds of donors' names and addresses. But such occurrences have been rare.

As mentioned above, nonprofit donor disclosure is a particularly hot topic when it comes to dark money, which typically moves through 501(c)(4) nonprofits, or "social welfare organizations," which collect money from anonymous donors and then spend it on campaigns or candidates on said donors' behalf.

Americans for Prosperity Foundation, however, is a (501)(c)(3), meaning that in order to preserve its tax-exempt status, it's supposed to designate its funds for "charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals," according to _{IRS rules}_. However, Americans for Prosperity, the group's sister organization, is a 501(c)(4), meaning that it can more significantly engage in political advocacy and lobbying — largely in favor of reduced taxes, deregulation and other business-friendly policies — and has done so _{vigorously}_.

Bursch claimed earnestly that dark money has "nothing" to do with the current Supreme Court case, reminding this reporter that 501(c)(3) charities like AFPF are barred by federal law "from participating in any political advocacy, which is where the dark money issue arises." Explaining the relationship between Americans for Prosperity and its affiliated foundation, he said, "My understanding is that the 501(c)(3) can't fund the 501(c)(4). So, although they share a name and perhaps some common goals, the work they engage in is completely different. You can't cross those lines."

AFP did not respond to Salon's request to comment on its relationship with AFPF, which has been known to cross some lines.In 2010, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee_{accused}_ AFPF of financing blatantly political commercials that criticized the Obama administration, alleging that the ads "made the Americans for Prosperity Foundation a de facto political action group in violation of the federal tax code," according to the New York Times.

Bursch said that he believed or understood that AFP and AFPF had a "different office, different directors, different employees and different purposes." In fact, a comparison of _{AFP}_ and _{AFPF's}_ 2018 tax filings shows that a significant number of officers, directors, trustees and key employees work at both entities, including Nancy Pfotenhauer, Mark Holden, Robert Heaton, Emily Seidel, Slade O'Brien and various others.

Supplemental information on AFPF's filings also states that "certain employees of Americans for Prosperity Foundation may perform services for Americans for Prosperity, a related organization, through a service contract between the organizations." (This relationship also goes the other way.) AFPF is additionally listed as AFP's "direct controlling entity," a designation whose legal meaning is not entirely clear but certainly suggests an intimate relationship.

Not all contributors to political nonprofits count as "dark money donors," to be sure. Some are ordinary citizens, no doubt, genuinely interested in contributing to what they believe are nonpartisan endeavors. But it's precisely the lack of donor disclosure that makes the whole process opaque.

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., a staunch critic of money in politics, affirmed the need for more effective disclosure in light of the AFP and AFPF's purposefully mysterious relationship. "Because we're dealing with dark money, we don't really know the relationship between AFPF and AFP," he said. "When a 501(c)(3) gives money to a 501(c)(4) to engage in electioneering activities, that's what dark money is all about." (Salon could not find clear evidence that money has flowed from AFPF to AFP, let alone how it might have been used.)

"The Federalist Society and the Federalist Society Foundation both share the same goals and aspirations," Johnson expressed. "People are trying to exert influence. That's the reason why they contribute to these organizations that have a political agenda."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/mitch-mcconnell-is-pouring-dark-money-into-maine-to-save-susan-collins-from-electoral-disaster

A dark-money group aligned with Senate Majority Leader _{Mitch McConnell}_, is dropping more than half a million dollars on an advertisement shielding Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, an embattled Republican incumbent, from criticism of her response to the coronavirus outbreak.

The group, One Nation, is a political nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors. It also _{shares offices and staff}_ with the Senate Leadership Fund, a McConnell super PAC. The 30-second will run across Maine on radio, TV and the web.

The ad responds to, called “Scrounging,” that criticizes Collins for neglecting to secure enough protective gear and other equipment for the state’s beleaguered frontline health care workers.

“Susan Collins defends the president,” the narrator of that ad says, over a graphic that quotes Collins claiming, “The president did a lot that was right in the beginning."

That ad was paid for by a competing Democratic dark-money organization, Majority Forward, linked to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority super PAC, which sees Collins as particularly vulnerable in 2020.

The One Nation ad comes to Collins’ defense, claiming she has been “working to get that help, but dark money groups are spreading false information about those efforts.”

The 2020 race between Collins and Democrat Sara Gideon, current speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, is one of a handful of Senate races that will determine whether the GOP, which currently holds a 53-47 majority, will maintain control of the upper chamber, and keep McConnell in the majority leader’s office.

One Nation and the Senate Leadership Fund have raised a combined $190 million to protect the most vulnerable Republican seats: Those held by Martha McSally in Arizona, Cory Gardner in Colorado, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Joni Ernst in Iowa and David Perdue in Georgia.

One Nation is also affiliated with Karl Rove, top political strategist to former President George W. Bush, and financially backs organizations that promote conservative positions on abortion and gun rights.

One Nation_{ dropped more than $58 million}_ on Republican Senate candidates in the 2018 midterms, and the group has already spent more than $1 million to boost Collins this year, including a $400,000 ad that ran in early _{January}_ and touted her work to knock down the cost of insulin.

Collins voted against the _{Affordable Care Act}_, as well as legislation to close the Medicare Part D coverage gap.

“Our investors understand the Senate is the ultimate firewall against socialism, and we are gearing up for a massive fight next year,” said Steven Law, a McConnell associate who chairs the group, in a 2019 statement.

“The Supreme Court, Green New Deal, Medicare for None — it’s all going to be on the line,” he added.

It was Collins’ pivotal vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — combined with her ACA votes and her _{transparently cynical }_waffling on Trump — that earned her a challenge from Gideon, one of the state’s most prominent elected Democrats.

Last summer Collins _{drew sardonic criticism}_ when her campaign posted several minutes of B-roll of the senator meeting with Mainers in factories, a classroom, a kitchen and so on. The video was mocked as a transparent gift of content for outside groups to pull from.

FEC rules bar candidates from coordinating with outside groups. The B-roll trick, however, has proven to be a popular end-around.

Last September a Republican super PAC ran an ad that used a lengthy clip from that B-roll, leading the Maine Democratic Party to _{complain to the FEC}_ that it was an illegal in-kind contribution, “almost entirely comprised of footage that the campaign created.”

Though Maine’s politics can be peculiar (and Donald Trump won one of its four electoral votes in 2016) it has drifted toward Democrats in recent years. Collins, a nominally pro-choice, middle-of-the-road Republican was a good fit for Maine for decades, but now appears increasingly vulnerable. In January she nabbed the title of “most unpopular senator” — previously held, of course, by Mitch McConnell.

Watch the full ad from One Nation below via:

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https://theintercept.com/2020/02/15/dark-money-irs-reporting-501c

DARK MONEY GROUPS backed by foreign corporate donors are supporting the Trump administration’s decision to roll back one of the last remaining ways for authorities to monitor the flow of unlawful campaign cash in American elections.

In recent years, 501(c) nonprofits have become the entities of choice for secret campaign spending.These nonprofit groups, which do not have to report any donor information to the public, can receive unlimited contributions from any source and, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, spend unlimited amounts on elections.

Foreign spending, whether by a foreign national or a foreign-owned corporation, is still illegal under federal law. But the law has been poorly enforced, and the few instances in which penalties have been applied in recent years have come in reaction to publicly reported foreign corporate spending to Super PACs, such as The Intercept’s reporting on Chinese corporate donations in 2016 and the recent federal indictment over a shell company owned by a Russian national that gave to President Donald Trump’s Super PAC in 2018.

The one check on foreign contributions to dark-money groups has been the Schedule B form, which reports 501(c) donor information confidentially to the Internal Revenue Service. Under a new rule proposed last September by the Treasury Department and the IRS, nonprofits will no longer be required to report donor information, even to the government, allowing an unprecedented level of secrecy.

Lobbyists for foreign-funded groups have pushed the administration to move forward with the rule, which is close to being finalized.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby organization in the world, spent over $10 million to influence the last 2018 midterm election cycle using its general fund. The group, which has foreign corporate donors, has lobbied in support of the IRS rule to repeal the Schedule B requirement, claiming in a letter to officials that the accidental leak of donors could reduce corporate free speech rights.

“Identifying, harassing, and intimidating the organization’s supporters is a chief means of silencing that organization’s speech,” wrote Caroline L. Harris, the Chambers’ chief tax policy counsel, and Ryan P. Meyers, the deputy general counsel of the group, in a regulatory letter to officials overseeing the rule change. “The Chamber applauds the work of Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in eliminating onerous reporting requirements.”

The National Association of Manufacturers, which counts several corporations based in foreign countries as members, in a letter to IRS officials, similarly called the Schedule B requirement an “unnecessary administrative filings that raise the potential for misuse in a way that chills protected speech.”

Both NAM and the Chamber of Commerce, which spends more than $160 million a year, are organized as 501(c)(6) trade associationsand under no obligation to disclose donor money to the public — only to the government through the annual Schedule B form to its 990 annual filing. After the Citizens United decision, the two groups led an effort to defeat the DISCLOSE Act, legislation that would have forced groups engaged high-dollar election advocacy to reveal donor information. The Chamber also lobbied successfully to stop President Barack Obama from issuing an executive order to force government contractors to disclose grants to 501(c) groups.

Foreign-based firms such as Brazilian petrochemical firm Braskem, Al Zayani Investments in Bahrain, and Turkish conglomerate Tekfen are listed on the Chamber’s website as dues-paying members. Faced with criticism in the past that its foreign funding might bleed into the Chamber’s vast domestic lobbying and campaign spending budget, the group has claimed that any foreign donations are walled off from domestic funds, and that foreign donors make up a small percentage of its overall budget.

But the removal of the Schedule B requirement could make those claims impossible to verify. A large foreign national firm could provide multimillion-dollar donations for use in U.S. elections to the Chamber under the new rule and such giving would never be reported to government officials.

That’s precisely the danger of removing Schedule B forms, campaign finance experts warn. The Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance watchdog that has filed the ethics complaints that led to enforcement action on foreign money in the past, cautioned the IRS that the rule would simply open the door to more foreign spending.

“Congress has failed to pass new transparency legislation, and the FEC has failed to enforce the transparency laws that are on the books,” said Brendan Fischer, director of Campaign Legal Center’s federal reform program. “As a result, the only donor disclosure reports that dark-money groups file with any federal agency are the confidential Schedule B reports filed with the IRS. These confidential donor reports are one of the few ways that federal agencies could detect and deter foreign money in U.S. elections.”

It’s not hard to comprehend the many ways in which completely secret legal entities could incentivize illegal election behavior. In 2016, reporters from the Telegraph conducted a sting operation on a Republican campaign operative working in support of Trump. The operative was offered a $2 million check from a Chinese businessman by the reporters. He responded by offering a plan for how to conceal the money, suggesting that it be routed through his consulting firm to a pair of 501(c)4 groups and then to a pro-Trump Ssuper PAC.

The FBI is also investigating the National Rifle Association over allegations that the group, which is organized as a 501(c)4, may have received financial support from Russian sources. McClatchy reported that counterintelligence officials believe that Russian interests may have contributed to the NRA’s $30 million election advertising campaign in 2016.

Foreign firms increasingly finance major American business associations. As The Intercept has previously reported, a major Chinese chemical company joined the American Chemistry Council, a 501(c)6 that routinely lobbies lawmakers and spends money in elections.

The Trump administration had originally tried to remove the Schedule B form last summer in a surprise decision. A federal judge in Montana, however, ruled that the IRS had failed to follow proper regulatory procedure and ordered the agency to conduct a formal rule-making to allow the public and stakeholders to weigh in on the change.

“The rise of ‘dark money’ in U.S. elections has made it easy for foreign entities to contravene these laws by funneling money into U.S. elections through groups that that [sic] do not publicly disclose their donors, such as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and 501(c)(6) trade associations,” wrote the Campaign Legal Center in a letter to the IRS.“This change would further enable foreign entities to donate millions of dollars to such organizations for the purpose of influencing U.S. elections without any risk of scrutiny by federal regulators.”

Republican-aligned think tanks have joined the business-backed push to eliminate the Schedule B.Several nonprofits backed by billionaire Charles Koch, including his marquee group Americans for Prosperity, testified on February 7 in support of the rule change. FreedomWorks, a conservative grassroots group backed by business interests, has also mobilized hundreds of letters to the agency.

Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member now with the Heritage Foundation, appeared at the hearing alongside other conservative activists in support of the rule change.

Von Spakosvsky, an avowed critic of campaign finance regulations and voting rights laws, testified that “their claim that this will somehow allow foreign money to suddenly flood into American elections is absurd,” according to a transcript of his remarks. Von Spakovsky said the FEC had plenty of authority and expertise in combating foreign money during his tenure, despite the fact that the agency has historically only intervened to investigate foreign money through disclosed political action committees on a few occasions in its 45-year history. He did not cite any examples of the FEC investigating 501(c) groups.

==

==

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Center for Responsive Politics:An analysis of federal campaign finance filings shows that Super PACs brought in more than $65 million from groups bankrolled by secret donors in 2019.  Super PACs aligned with congressional Republican and Democratic Party leadership have already received millions of dollars from so-called “dark money” groups during the 2020 election cycle. Read more.

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Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst denounced ‘dark money’ as her campaign privately embraced it

By Karl Evers-HillstromDecember 23, 2019

Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, said she wasn’t connected to “dark money” groups backing her. A new report calls that into question.

==

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/12/political-ads-impeachment-fight-wesleyan/

Political candidates and groups shelled out millions on impeachment-related TV ads before the House impeached President Donald Trump Wednesday, according to a new report from the Wesleyan Media Project. 

The analysis, produced in partnership with OpenSecrets, reveals that ads mentioning impeachment accounted for at least $16.9 million worth of TV ads in presidential, Senate and House races.

That spending is largely concentrated in the presidential contest. Billionaire Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Steyer spent $8.5 million on the air backing impeachment, with 18 percent of his ads mentioning the subject. Almost all of Trump’s TV ads since October — totaling $4.4 million — are focused on impeachment.

The Trump campaign is fundraising heavily off impeachment, sending out email blasts minutes after the House vote to impeach promising to triple-match donations during the next 24 hours with a hefty $4 million goal.

Impeachment has leaked into House races, too, where related TV ads are largely funded by “dark money.” Conservative dark money group American Action Network hammered swing district Democrats with roughly $2.4 million in.Pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policies, which also keeps its donors secret from the public, chipped in $664,000 to pressure House Democrats. This spending is not reported to the Federal Election Commission because the ads don’t expressly advocate for or against candidates.

America First operation also raked in significant cash fundraising off impeachment, raising a combined $6.9 million along with its affiliated super PAC America First Action in the week following House Democrats’ announcement of the impeachment probe.

Despite pressure from conservative groups, all but two Democrats voted to impeach Trump for abuse of power. Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), a freshman representing a conservative leaning district, voted for the first article but voted against the obstruction of Congress charge. Republicans believe they can take back House seats in Trump-won districts from Democrats who supported impeachment.

Defend American Democracy is the biggest pro-impeachment group spending on TV ads. The dark money group, which is backed by the liberal dark money network Sixteen Thirty Fund, spent at least $178,590 on TV ads urging House Republicans to impeach Trump.

No Republicans voted for impeachment Wednesday. Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich), who left the GOP in July over its defense of Trump, voted for both articles of impeachment.

“It seems that Republicans are going on offense when it comes to the issue of impeachment, while Democrats are remaining mostly quiet on the issue,” said Travis Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project. “The one exception here is Democrat Tom Steyer who has long advocated for impeaching the president.”

Limited transparency

Groups that do not disclose their donors sponsored more than 90 percent of all ads from outside groups in Senate races and at least three out of every four ads in House races. 

Nearly three times as many Senate dark money airings in 2019 came from liberal groups than conservative. This follows the first election cycle where liberal dark money groups reported more spending than their conservative counterparts to the FEC.

A mysterious pop-up dark money group called Doctor Patient Unity has spent roughly $28 million on ads, purchasing more ads mentioning federal candidates than any other group this year, followed by American Action Network and America First Policies on the right then House Majority Forward and Majority Forward on the left. Not a single group in the top-10 list of ad sponsors based on the number of ads purchased discloses its donors. 

Digital ads take on TV among presidential hopefuls

The 2020 election cycle has seen more than $150 million in political ad spending from presidential candidates on broadcast TV on top of another $40 million airing on cable, according to Welseyan’s report in partnership with OpenSecrets.

Digital ad spending by 2020 presidential campaigns alone has topped $100 million. Compared to TV and radio ad buys, digital ads make up more than a third of all 2020 presidential election ad spending.

Trump’s re-election campaign, boosted by its joint fundraising committee’s spending, continues to be the top-spending online ad sponsor in the 2020 election. Trump’s re-election effort spent more than $40 million on digital ads since tech companies and social media platforms started releasing their advertising data in 2017. But that dynamic may change now that other wealthy candidates like Michael Bloomberg and Steyer have thrown their hats in the ring.

Steyer has spent roughly $20 million on digital ads since his campaign launched in July, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of digital ad data from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. In the weeks since his campaign launched, Bloomberg has already poured more than $12.7 million into digital advertising.

Bloomberg’s roughly $90 million combined TV and digital ad spending during the last month put his campaign ahead of every other presidential contender as well. The second biggest overall ad spender among presidential contenders during the last month and overall is Steyer.

Bloomberg and Steyer each spent more on ads than all other current presidential candidates combined this year, including Trump.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-extraordinary-way-red-states-are-steamrolling-blue-cities

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The extraordinary way red states are steamrolling blue cities

Written by Maresa Strano, Lydia Bean / Washington Monthly December 4, 2019

The Florida Legislature is strongly opposed to gun control. Even in the aftermath of the shooting in Parkland, state legislators opposed strict restrictions on the sale and use of firearms. But there’s another kind of control that they do believe in: the control of gun control.

In 1987, Florida passed a bill that prohibits localities from enacting their own gun ordinances. This was an act of “preemption”—the name for when a higher level of government, like a state, withdraws or limits the authority of a lower level government, like a city or town.

For a while, the bill was not fully enforced. Cities like Miami and Tallahassee created and maintained additional gun regulations, designed to minimize violence in their more urban communities. But that, like so much about America’s political landscape, changed in 2011. That year, the legislature passed an updated version of the law, backed by the National Rifle Association, that imposed harshpenalties on local officials who enacted or enforced gun ordinances, including a $5,000 fine and up to $100,000in damages.

Three years later, two gun-rights organizations sued the city of Tallahassee, its mayor, and several city commissioners for not purging a pair of inherited ordinances that outlawed firing guns in public parks, one of which had been on the books since 1957. Because the law also forbids the use of public funds in gun ordinance cases, the defendants (including eventual Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum) had to secure pro-bono legal representation. This summer, a circuit court judge struck down the fine, and Governor Ron DeSantis, who narrowly bested Gillum for the office in 2018, appealed the decision.

The escalation of state preemption laws is happening everywhere. For the last decade, preemption has spread to all states and across virtually every salient policy area—from environmental and labor protections to immigration and housing rights. The vast majority of preemption bills stem from special interests and industry groups with anti-regulatory agendas.

These laws are extraordinarily damaging to our society. They result in increased racial and gender inequality. They correlate with lower life expectancy. They inhibit citizens from meaningfully engaging in politics. Like gerrymandering and dark money, we should consider preemption to be a serious threat to democracy.

The seeds of modern preemption were planted in the 1980s, when the tobacco industry began to push for state laws barring tobacco taxes and smoke-free ordinances. Over the next two decades, other industry groups and special interests adopted big tobacco’s strategy. During the crime wave of the 1990s, for example, the National Rifle Association aggressively lobbied states to stop American cities from enacting local firearms regulations.

The tobacco industry and the NRA are members of the modern conservative coalition, comprised of industry groups and trade associations, small-government libertarians, and social conservatives. These groups were the first to recognize state preemption as a powerful mechanism to rein in progressive cities and spread conservative policies. To wield it effectively, however, they had to gain control of state governments. In 2010, as the Republican Party swept into power in statehouses across the country, conservatives gained newfound ability to preempt localities.

As a result, the last decade has seen an unprecedented swell in the number of preemption bills introduced and passed by state legislatures. As of 2019, twenty-five states have passed laws preempting local minimum wage ordinances (up from ten states in 2010). Twenty-three states have banned ordinances requiring paid sick days (up from one state in 2010). Between 2014 and 2019, an astounding forty-four states removed or prevented employment and labor protections for Uber and Lyft drivers.

Some of these laws are notorious. North Carolina’s House Bill 2, or “the Bathroom Bill,” famously mandated that individuals use the bathroom corresponding to the gender assigned to them at birth. A direct attack on the transgender community, HB 2 was passed to stop the City of Charlotte from increasing its anti-discrimination protections. The same bill also explicitly preempted local regulation of employment standards, such as increasing the minimum wage and mandatory paid sick days.

But other preemption bills have targeted issues that, to the average American, appear to have no political salience. These include regulations of wireless alarm systems, Styrofoam products, milk and frozen desserts, and even beekeeping. Sixteen states have preempted local regulation of residential fire sprinklers in the last decade.

Why sprinklers? By 2009, a national, nonpartisan grassroots movement led by members of the fire service had successfully fought to get nearly 400 localities to require that new residential buildings have fire sprinklers. In response, the National Association of Home Builders, the group that represents large developers, turned to preemption. The developers saw such ordinances as pricey nuisances and, determined to avoid any additional profit loss (however negligible), successfully pressured many state legislatures to thwart the firefighter’s movement.

The increase in volume, sweep, and frequency of preemption laws is hardly driven by grassroots concerns. Instead, it reflects a pattern in which industries have used preemption to promote their putatively pro-business, anti-regulation agendas with no regard for public health and safety, nor the public will. They have found happy advocates in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization bankrolled by industry lobbyists that drafts conservative state legislation and shares it across the nation.ALEC provides the templates for many of the preemption bills circulating today. A recent report from the Local Solutions Support Center and State Innovation Exchange noted thataboutone in five of the over 1,000 ALEC bills introduced each year are signed into law.

Still, this is not an exclusively red state problem. In Democratic strongholds like California, special interests use preemption just as aggressively to hamper local policy innovations. Last year, the California Legislature passed a bill prohibiting local governments from imposing taxes on sugary drinks. The decision undercut local lawmakers, who had passed soda taxes in a variety of jurisdictions to curb type 2 diabetes and obesity and to raise funds for schools and other public services.

Why would California’s democratic-controlled legislature pass such a regressive law? In short, they were blackmailed. To gain leverage over an unsympathetic legislature, the beverage industry mounted a lavishly funded ballot initiative campaign that would have changed the vote threshold for localities to approve tax increases from fifty-one percent to two-thirds. If passed, the resulting logjams would have hindered funding for vital public services, including fire, transit, and law enforcement. When beverage companies offered to scrap the initiative in exchange for the preemption bill, legislators accepted.

Old preemption gave deference to judicial determination. It respected citizen initiative and the role of local governance. It allowed municipalities to work with states in pursuit of the right regional policies. That has all vanished. Now, preemption “is being used as a blunt instrument to destroy local democracy,” said Mark Pertschuk, director of Grassroots Change and Preemption Watch.

In many states, aggressive preemption is dismantling any illusion of cooperation between state and local government. In 2016, Arizona passed Senate Bill 1487, known as “the mother of all local preemption bills,” which allows the state to strip funding from localities that pass any regulations that deviate from state law. Texas’ 2017 law banning sanctuary cities, like Florida’s law banning gun control, threatened officials who “adopt, enforce, or endorse” a sanctuary city policy with fines of up to $25,500 per day and removal from office (the law has since been struck down).

Punishing local officials and governments for flouting preemption may seem harsh, but fair. In most cases, localities are still treated as creatures of the state. They cannot violate its laws. But preemption laws have produced a“chilling effect” on local policymaking and innovation, particularly in large, diverse cities in red states, where local action and creative problem solving is needed most. As Andrew Gillum told the New York Times: “It is intended to put everyone across this state and across this country where these efforts are taking place on notice: Don’t come near it…And if you do, we’ll come after you personally, we’ll come after your government, we’ll come after the very survivability of your community by cutting off resources to you.”

Such an aggressive approach to preemption might still be justified if preemption were advancing the public’s interest. Defenders argue that is indeed the case: preemption is necessary to prevent regulatory patchworks, which hinder economic prosperity.“A statewide company has to follow so many different ordinances that they end up choosing to leave those communities due to lack of uniformity,” said one Georgia lawmaker.

But what preemption is being used for shows such arguments are, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, patently untrue. The Arizona legislature’s decision to preempt Tempe’s ordinance regulating dark money in local politics has no real relationship to economic growth. It does not cut red tape. And today’s preemption is making life economically worse for the vulnerable. Nationwide, preemption presents one of the greatest barriers to raising wages and living standards for low-wage workers. More than 60 percent of U.S. workers now live in states where minimum wage ordinances are preempted, and more than 40 percent of workers live in states where paid sick time ordinances are preempted. In 2000, those percentages were less than 2 percent and 0 percent, respectively.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/10/29/dark-money-climate-senate-hearing-whitehouse

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Today Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) led a hearing of Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis, which examined “Dark Money and Barriers to Climate Action.” The testimony of the expert panel and the questions and observations from senators reinforced the overwhelming influence of money — and specifically untraceable donations known as “dark money” — working against action on climate change.

Sen. Whitehouse called out the considerable investment by the fossil fuel industry and dark money interests in the Republican Party, which has gained a reputation as the party of climate science denial.

“Much of it was used to impose climate denial orthodoxy on the Republican party,” said Whitehouse. “And why not spend a few billion dollars? Buying or renting the Republican Party or seizing it in a hostile takeover … was a total bargain.”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) noted that funding from powerful special interests has mired congressional action on other issues, such as gun control. He pointed to strong public support for reducing gun violence but a lack of response by Congress.

“We’ve already won the battle for public opinion” on guns, said Schatz, who went on to draw a comparison with climate change because a majority of Americans want politicians to take “aggressive” action, but elected officials continue to fall far short.

Sen. Schatz asked Harvard researcher Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science and expert on climate science denial, to comment on the role of fossil fuel industry funding in fostering this disconnect between public opinion and Congressional action, calling it “structural control of Congress.”

“I think that we make a mistake,” said Schatz of some members of Congress, “to misunderstand their willingness to incur political risk on the ‘I had a bad day in the newspaper’ side when their true fear is ‘I had a bad day on the Super PAC side.’ And that’s what this is all about.”

“Clearly this is the case,” Oreskes affirmed, “We are seeing the ways in which members of Congress are controlled by the fossil fuel industry.”

The hearing featured a number of insights from the witnesses, but perhaps the most important points came from Sen. Whitehouse and Sen. Schatz: that the fossil fuel industry has “structural control” of Congress, and that is why the U.S. has failed to address the climate crisis.

Testimony on Dark Money Influence

Justin Farrell, Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University, testified about his research into the influence of dark money in funding climate science denial efforts. His comments will be familiar to readers of DeSmog. Farrell discussed fossil fuel funding of climate science-denying think tanks, fake grassroots groups, and fringe scientists, which create a disorienting web of disinformation for the American public.

“These financed efforts created the appearance of scientific credibility,” said Farrell, “so when the average American citizen turned on cable news, listened to talk radio, or read the morning newspaper, they could not tell the difference between fossil fuel propaganda and trusted science.”

Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) echoed Farrell's point,recalling how some constituents once said to him, “Here is the problem. How do we know what to believe?”

In his opening comments, Farrell highlighted how the rise of untraceable dark money has made efforts to expose climate science denial propaganda more difficult. “Specifically, the rise of untraceable donor-directed philanthropy — such as Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund — has made it very difficult for researchers to continue their work,” he said.

Multiple experts during the hearing reiterated that exposing the funders of misinformation campaigns could “inoculate” the public against the impacts of their efforts. That is why dark money — which is so hard to expose — is so effective.

Bottom Line: Get Money Out of Politics

During the hearing, Oreskes explained that when she asked climate scientists about the best way to address inaction on the climate crisis, they often told her, “We need campaign finance reform.”

Oreskes agreed but also stressed the need to remove dark money, in particular, from politics. “We need both,” she said. “Working on campaign finance and exposing the dark money.”

Sen. Whitehouse traced the current uphill battle to the pivotal 2010 Supreme Court decision, which opened the door to limitless election spending by corporations on matters like climate change, and led to the rise of Super PACs (political action committees).

“There is sort of a cascade that has happened,” said Whitehouse. “A cascade into darkness that happened with the Citizens United decision that opened unlimited special interest money.”

He then went on to say that even if the public knows how much dark money is being spent in politics and can trace the source of the money, one major challenge remains:

“The hardest part is to try to figure out about the conversations that took place — powered by the unlimited dark money capability that these special interests have. The hardest thing to find around here is the small room where the lobbyists and the candidate met and the lobbyists said, ‘We are coming after you, you are toast, if you don’t do what we say.' And the candidate realizing that with millions, billions of potential dark money spending to drop, that is a very real threat … Ultimately, the threats that Citizens United enabled are the darkest part of this.”

In other words: Until the U.S. political system changes and limits the amount of money, and its corresponding power, in politics, the deck will remain stacked in favor of the fossil fuel industry when it comes to Congressional action on climate.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-dark-money-festers-in-the-gaps-of-our-broken-campaign-finance-system/

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Why ‘dark money’ festers in the gaps of our broken campaign finance system

Written by The Conversation October 25, 2019

Richard Briffault, Columbia University

With the 2020 campaign season upon us, “dark money” is again in the news.

Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins has decried what she contends is a “dark money” campaign against her. Montana’s Gov. Steve Bullock has made opposition to dark money a centerpiece of his Democratic presidential campaign.

But what exactly is “dark money,” and why is it considered a problem?

As a law professor who studies campaign finance, I’d like to answer those questions and explain how improved disclosure laws could shed some light on dark money.

1. What is ‘dark money’?

Election campaigns run on money.

Money pays for salaries, travel – and especially advertising. Candidates who are not personally wealthy depend on contributions to cover those costs, or on supportive spending by political parties and other political groups. Since the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, federal laws have imposed limits on political contributions and required that candidates disclose to the Federal Election Commission the sources of most donations used in federal campaigns. Most states have similar laws governing their elections.

In the first several decades after the enactment of disclosure requirements, most federal campaign spending was disclosed. But changing campaign practices, particularly the growing role of outside groups that are neither candidate committees nor political parties, has enabled some large donors to hide more of their giving. Starting in 2010, campaign finance observers at the Sunlight Foundation began to refer to some of these unregulated funds as “dark money.” The term was popularized by a best-selling 2016 book by Jane Mayer.

“Dark money” refers to campaign money whose sources are not disclosed. An expenditure – for example, for a television ad criticizing an opponent – will often be publicly reported to the FEC but not the identities of the people, firms or organizations that pay for it.

2. Is ‘dark money’ a problem?

Many scholars think it is.

A lack of disclosure makes it harder for journalists, regulators and opponents to detect violations of campaign finance law, such as illegal contributions from foreign donors or government contractors and contributions over the legal limit.

It also hides legal contributions from disreputable sources like Harvey Weinstein or Bernie Madoff.

That’s not all. The lack of disclosure also denies voters valuable information. As the U.S. Supreme Court observed in Buckley v. Valeo, the landmark 1976 decision that upheld federal campaign disclosure laws, identifying a candidate’s financial backers “alert(s) the voter to the interests to which the candidate is most likely to be responsive.” This is particularly significant in primaries when all the candidates are in the same party, and voters can’t rely on party labels to decide whom to vote for.

In the current Democratic presidential race, for example, disclosure allows voters to verify candidates’ claims about donors, revealing that former Vice President Joe Biden has courted lobbyists, Sen. Elizabeth Warren gets nearly 30% of her money from large individual donors, or that some Silicon Valley donors are supporting South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Knowing these details helps voters understand what interests a candidate may favor if elected.

To be sure, disclosure has its critics. Last summer’s kerfuffle over Rep. Joaquin Castro’s tweeting the names and employers of large donors to President Trump – all of which had been disclosed as required by law – underscores the concern of some people that disclosure is an invasion of donors’ privacy.

3. How much dark money is out there?

Due to its very “darkness,” it is hard to know just how much dark money is being spent, but there is reason to believe the number is large and growing.

Remember: Some dark money spending is reported to the Federal Election Commission without disclosing donors and some dark money spending isn’t reported at all. The campaign finance watchdog Center for Responsive Politics found that dark money groups reported spending US$181 million in the 2016 federal elections. Dark money accounted for nearly a fifth of all spending by groups other than candidates and parties in the last decade.

But these figures account only for spending reported to the FEC and likely represent only “the tip of the iceberg,” according to the center. As long as campaign spending is not subject to disclosure the total amount of dark money is unknowable.

4. Why is it possible to hide donations?

Dark money grows out of gaps in our campaign finance law.

Federal election law most clearly addresses reporting and disclosure by candidates, political parties and political committees that exist primarily to support candidates and parties. But other organizations also participate in elections. These include business groups and trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, membership organizations like the National Rifle Association or the League of Conservation Voters, labor unions, and ideological groups like Americans for Prosperity or Patriot Majority USA.

These groups do not have to report their donors because they claim to work on issues and not on behalf of specific candidates.

There are some exceptions. If the group spends a significant amount on a campaign ad, it will have to report the spending and any donors who specifically helped buy it. But the law covers only some campaign ads. The Buckley decision held that only ads literally calling for the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate – what the law calls “express advocacy” – are campaign ads subject to disclosure.

That means that organizations can sharply attack or warmly praise a candidate in ads but avoid disclosing donors by stopping short of telling people how to vote. These “issue ads” are not subject to disclosure.

In 2002, Congress passed the McCain-Feingold law, which extended disclosure to include broadcast ads that mention a candidate 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election, but similar ads aired earlier in the campaign season are not covered.

Following the money is made more difficult because many nominally non-political organizations fund campaign ads indirectly. They do this by donating to another group which buys the ad. Sometimes, even that second group transfers the money to a third organization before the ad purchase it made.

This “daisy chain” or “nesting Russian doll” practice is an end run around disclosure.

Even though the organization that actually does the spending must disclose its large donors to the Federal Election Commission, these reports simply list a contribution from the next link in the chain – which tells the voters nothing about who actually paid.

5. What can be done?

The problem of “dark money,” while serious, can be addressed with legislative fixes.

First, all organizations – including corporations, labor unions and non-profits engaged in election-related spending – could be required to disclose large donors whose funds are used for campaign ads. The Citizens United decision struck down limits on corporate spending, but it also sustained the law requiring corporations to disclose their spending.

Second, when the disclosed donations are from an organization further down the daisy chain, the disclosure could include the major donors to that organization. Several states, such as New Jersey and Colorado, have recently passed laws requiring that information.

The U.S. House of Representatives this spring passed similar legislation addressing large dark money donors and spenders in federal elections, although Republicans in the Senate seem unlikely to take it up.

To be sure, some constitutional issues remain – particularly the definition of what constitutes an election-related ad. But because disclosure does not limit or bar the use of campaign money and increases voter information, the court has regularly found disclosure to be consistent with the First Amendment.

In other words, unlike many other issues in campaign finance reform, the obstacle to improved disclosure is political, not constitutional.

Richard Briffault, Joseph P. Chamberlain Professor of Legislation, Columbia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New pop-up ‘dark money’ group targets Martha McSally with six-figure ad buy

A secretive new “dark money” group is hitting the airwaves — and the road — to help Democrats win Arizona’s hotly contested Senate seat in 2020. Advancing AZ, which also goes by Honest Arizona, is hammering Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) over her vote to repeal much of the Affordable Care Act.  The new group purchased nearly $155,000 worth of TV ads in Arizona to run through much of September. Read More

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A secretive new “dark money” group is hitting the airwaves — and the road — to help Democrats win Arizona’s hotly contested Senate seat in 2020. 

Advancing AZ, which also goes by Honest Arizona, is hammering Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) over her vote to repeal much of the Affordable Care Act. The new group purchased nearly $155,000 worth of TV ads in Arizona to run through much of September, according to Federal Communications Commission records in OpenSecrets’ political ad database.

“Tell Martha McSally to stop attacking our health care,” the 30-second ad tells viewers, displaying a phone number that redirects to McSally’s Washington, D.C., office.

Incorporated as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit in April, Advancing AZ is not required to disclose its donors, leaving the public in the dark about who is bankrolling these ads. The group did not respond to a request for comment about its funding.

Like similar dark money groups that have materialized to influence high-stakes Senate races, Advancing AZ has nebulous ties to Democratic establishment groups.

The group’s chairman, Arizona resident Steve Gomez, was from Democratic dark money group Majority Forward that aired just before the 2018 election. In the ad, Gomez criticizes McSally for voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act, noting that his son “will forever be labeled as a pre-existing condition” due to a heart transplant he underwent shortly after birth.

“Martha McSally voted to allow insurance companies to deny coverage to people like our son,” he says in the ad.

Majority Forward was the top dark money spender of last year’s midterms, dumping more than $40 million into Senate races and shelling out $7 million in ads opposing McSally. The 501(c)(4) effectively functions as an arm of Senate Majority PAC, the flagship super PAC aligned with Senate Democrats known for proliferating the spread of its own pop-up PACs.

McSally is likely to face well-funded Democrat Mark Kelly in 2020. Democratic groups see the Arizona Republican as particularly beatable after she lost to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) in 2018 then was appointed to fill a vacant Senate seat.

GOP senators in Iowa and Maine face similar attacks

Advancing AZ is the latest in a string of Democratic dark money groups to pop up in states where a vulnerable Republican incumbent faces reelection next year.

Another alliterative nonprofit, Maine Momentum, is running ads in the Pine Tree State lambasting Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) over her vote on the 2017 tax bill, arguing that it will lead to cuts to Medicare and Social Security. The anonymously-funded nonprofit Iowa Forward, which also goes by the name Iowa Voices, is running similar ads attacking Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) over her vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

All three nonprofits were incorporated between April and May. None of the groups have a donate button on their remarkably similar websites, but nonetheless raised enough anonymous cash to fund six-figure ad campaigns in a matter of months.

While Iowa Forward wheels around a billboard that attacks Ernst’s record on health care, Advancing AZ drives the “McSally Truth Truck” that attacks McSally’s record on health care.

Both the Iowa and Arizona groups buy ads via Washington firm Targeted Platform Media, which was one of the highest-paid vendors during the 2016 election thanks to its work with Democratic super PAC Priorities USA Action.

As the ads do not explicitly advocate for or against the Republican candidates’ elections and are not run in close proximity to the 2020 election, the spending is not required to be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. That means Advancing AZ’s financiers and even details of its activities may remain hidden from voters whose opinions it is spending to influence.

Advancing AZ is staffed by Arizona Democratic players. Sam Coppersmith, a one-term congressman from Arizona and former state Democratic party chair, is listed as a director for Advancing AZ. He’s currently a partner at Coppersmith Brockelman PLC, a Phoenix-area law firm. Hunter Henderson, one of the group’s advisory board members, works for the Democrats’ state-level super PAC, Forward Majority.

Current or former Democratic aides make up the ranks of the Iowa and Maine groups, too.

Majority Forward and Senate Majority PAC did not respond to a request for comment about whether they are connected to the groups.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/rich-republicans-sell-a-woe-is-me-story-seeking-to-hide-big-dollar-campaign-contributions/

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Rich Republicans sell a woe-is-me story seeking to hide big-dollar campaign contributions

Written by Laura Clawson / Daily Kos August 9, 2019

Days after one of its star reporters jumped on the Republican faux-outrage bandwagon over a Democratic congressman’s use of publicly available campaign finance information, The New York Times offers up a furrowed brow of a story about whether it might be a good idea to hide the names of political donors—after all, people who’ve donated the legal maximum to Donald Trump don’t like the response.

“Calling out the people who fund campaigns is not a new tactic in politics,” Katie Rogers and Annie Karni write, “but the question of how much should be publicly disclosed about those donors has been an issue that Republicans, led by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, have repeatedly raised in recent years.” In other words, Republicans want all dark money, all the time. No accountability, no sunlight.

Because otherwise, people who can afford to write $2,800 checks—and more—to Donald Trump might get calls saying things like, “Hey, we were going to use you for business, but we found out you’re a racist,” and we can’t have that!

In an article about public disclosure and Republican opposition to such disclosure, nowhere does the Times say in so many words that information on people who give more than $200 to a campaign is publicly available on a government website. Probably the closest is this: “While the Supreme Court ruled in the 2010 Citizens United case to uphold public disclosure—with Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s conservative stalwart, arguing later that without such revelations ‘democracy is doomed’—Republicans and wealthy allies like the Koch brothers have argued that it results in donor harassment and has a chilling effect on free speech.” So the Supreme Court, including its leading right-wing voice, was for disclosure … BUT!

This is The New York Times dedicating 1,400 words to the wish of rich Republicans to change the law to provide less transparency and accountability, only it’s not reporting on that campaign, on the fact that this is what rich Republicans want to do and why that might be and how they’re going about it. Instead, it’s dutifully reporting their cover story as if it has merit and substance. It’s stenography on the “woe is me” of rich people who got some angry—but apparently not threatening, since heaven knows, if anyone had been threatening, we would have heard about it—phone calls because they gave thousands of dollars to a racist.

When we talk about the rules being written for rich people, this is a perfect example of how it happens.

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https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/06/bipartisan-push-to-crack-down-on-money-laundering-and-dark-money-shell-companies

A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to require obscure corporations and limited-liability companies to disclose their true owners to law enforcement to snuff out laundered cash and political “dark money” flowing into the U.S. from foreign-influenced shell companies.

Members of Congress have introduced a number of bills mandating disclosure of companies’ beneficial owners — the person or persons who enjoy the benefits of ownership and control the company — to federal investigators. Lawmakers are mostly attempting to crack down on money laundering and the financing of other illegal activities. But the proposed legislation could also impact foreign interference in U.S. politics.

Foreign nationals and governments are prohibited from directly or indirectly engaging in activity to influence U.S. elections. But opaque LLCs, which are not required to disclose their beneficial owners to the public or law enforcement, frequently contribute to politically-active outside groups. This untraceable process has prompted concerns that they are anonymously injecting foreign money into the U.S. political process.

More than 4,000 LLCs contributed to groups in 2016, nearly quadruple the number in 2012. In the 2016 election cycle alone, nearly $46 million came from LLCs at the federal level, nearly double the $24 million from LLCs in the 2012 presidential election cycle.

Overall, direct spending in U.S. federal elections by groups that do not disclose their donors has exceeded $1 billion since OpenSecrets began tracking dark money in 2006.

Opaque foreign money has also found its way to political committees. Jho Low, a fugitive Malaysian financier accused of stealing billions, allegedly used a shell company to funnel more than $1 million to a pro-Barack Obama super PAC ahead of the 2012 presidential election. Low has not only been charged in relation to his alleged illegal foreign contributions in support of Obama, but has also been tied to suspicious money transfers funneling money into President Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee.

These anonymous shell companies also show up in Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, masking the source of money behind influence campaigns and undermining the intent of the law to provide transparency on foreign influence activities.

Lax corporate disclosure laws have turned the U.S. into a top destination for shell companies. Last year, the U.S. surpassed the Cayman Islands to become the second largest haven for secretive offshore accounts and shell companies, according to a report from London-based Tax Justice Network.

“We’re becoming second only to Switzerland in the place people pick to put their money,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said during Wednesday’s hearing on shell companies. “Being second in a lot of things is good … not here.”

Lawmakers have introduced a number of bills to address the flow of untraceable money. Senate Judiciary Committee members Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced legislation Tuesday that would require corporations to turn over beneficial ownership information to law enforcement in the event of a subpoena or summons.

A bipartisan group of senators in early June proposed their own bill to combat abuse of shell companies, requiring that corporations and LLCs disclose their beneficial owners to the Treasury Department. Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) introduced similar legislation in May.

Whitehouse and Grassley, along with Graham and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have also introduced legislation to specifically address political contributions from shell companies. The bill, first introduced last year, would make it a felony for individuals to use or help set up a shell company to conceal illegal political activity such as foreign political contributions.

The Treasury Department’s financial crimes enforcement unit finalized a rule last year that requires financial institutions to collect beneficial ownership information for customers opening accounts. But experts say the rule won’t stop the flow of money from foreign shell companies, making Congressional action necessary.

“This was a step in the right direction. But the primary responsibility for identifying the owners of a company cannot lie with banks. It should lie with the companies themselves, at the time of incorporation or when their ownership changes,” former Acting Treasury Secretary Adam Szubin toldthe Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday. “And FinCEN’s rule does nothing to illuminate the ownership of shell companies incorporated in the U.S. that exclusively open bank accounts abroad, a route that many dirty companies have followed.”

The House passed the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Rewards Act, which would reward whistleblowers who notify the U.S. of assets linked to corrupt foreign individuals, in May. The legislation is currently being considered by the Senate Banking Committee, which will hold a hearing Thursday on the topic of beneficial ownership collection. Among the organizations testifying are the Bank Policy Instituteand Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, both groups pushing for disclosure of beneficial ownership to law enforcement.

These kinds of measures find support from a number of powerful trade associations, public interest groups and think tanks, ranging from the American Banking Association to Public Citizen to the American Enterprise Institute.

Center for Responsive Politics Executive Director Sheila Krumholz testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, detailing how shell companies inject money into U.S. politics and advocating for greater transparency of beneficial ownership.

A few organizations have come out against the proposed measures. The National Federation of Independent Business has voiced opposition to some of the disclosure measures, expressing concern over the regulatory burden it would place on small businesses. The American Bar Association also expressed concerns about privacy.

None of the beneficial ownership proposals would propose creating a public registry of beneficial ownership information for businesses. Although some foreign countries keep their own running registries of these owners, U.S. lawmakers have not shown interest in expanding disclosure to that level, citing privacy concerns.

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we filed our opening brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Lieu v. FEC.

This was an important step on the path to getting the court to review the notorious SpeechNow v. FEC decision for the first time since 2010 -- and potentially overturn it.

Here’s the back story: SpeechNow.org v. FEC was the case that originally unleashed super PACs on our democracy. For nearly a decade, the SpeechNowruling has allowed big money donors to evade federal campaign contribution limits and further corrupt our political process.

Many scholars and constitutional law experts said that the ruling was legally erroneous at the time, and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts has even given signals that suggest he would be willing to sustain limits on contributions to super PACs.

Lieu v. FECis our opportunity. Filed in federal district court on behalf of a bipartisan coalition of Members of Congress and 2016 congressional candidates, the case seeks the reversal of the SpeechNow.org v. FEC ruling. And yesterday’s opening brief pushes it along on its journey!

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https://truthout.org/articles/corporate-cash-leaks-into-democratic-campaigns-despite-anti-pac-pledge/

4/19

Money remains an influential factor in campaign outcomes. Nearly 90 percent of top spenders in 2018 House races claimed victory in their campaigns. And more than 85 percentof top spenders in Senate races won.

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CMD?

In a victory for environmental and shareholder activists, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) has denied ExxonMobil’s request to prevent a shareholder vote on a resolution requiring the oil giant to disclose its political spending, including “dark money” contributions to advocacy groups and trade associations.

The SEC ruling comes on a shareholder proposal brought by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) that would require Exxon to compile a semiannual report on its “political contributions and expenditures (direct and indirect) with corporate funds,” as well as related company policies, and post it on the company’s website.

The SEC also rejected Exxon’s attempt to prevent a vote on a resolution brought by an activist shareholder to create a board-level committee to review and oversee the company’s strategy on climate change.

The SEC rulings were first reported by Climate Liability News.

Dark Money

Dark money is money used to influence elections that is passed through trade associations and advocacy groups in a way that obscures its true source. These groups can take money from corporations, unions, and individuals, and, for example, air TV ads to influence elections, without disclosing where the money came from.

In trying to deny the resolution’s place on the shareholder ballot, to be voted at its May 29 annual meeting, Exxon claimed that it did disclose its policies having to do with political contributions. UUA correctly noted, however, that Exxon only discloses direct contributions to candidates, candidate committees, PACs and party committees. Money run through other nonprofit groups is not disclosed.

According to the Climate Investigation Center, fossil fuel and corporate trade groups spent $1.4 billion on PR firms and ad buys between 2007 and 2018. How much of that money is Exxon’s is unknown.

Taking Climate Change Seriously

The climate shareholder proposal, brought by Arjuna Capital, calls for Exxon to create a new board committee to “assess the company’s responses to climate related risks and opportunities, including the potential impacts of climate change on business, strategy, financial planning, and the environment.”

Exxon claimed that it already considers climate change through a committee with a broad mandate to evaluate the company’s health and safety and environmental performance.

According to Climate Liability News, Arjuna Capital argued that Exxon “has no specific mention of climate change in its charter and while it may address climate change to an extent, the wide array of issues under its jurisdiction do not provide the specialized focus necessary to address the ‘more strategic climate change issues concerning investors, including the emissions associated with burning the company’s product.'”

Most people would think that Exxon has a committee at the board of director level to tackle climate change by itself, but it does not.

Arjuna Capital noted that with only one climate expert on its board, the company is ill-prepared to deal with the biggest threat to its business and shareholders in this century....

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https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/02/somp3-billion-dollar-dark-money-tip-of-the-iceberg/

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Secret donor-funded “dark money” spending reported to the Federal Election Commission has officially exceeded $1 billion according to a new analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, and that barely begins to scratch the surface of political spending by groups that don’t fully disclose their donors.

Along with another billion dollars spent by partially-disclosing groups that keep some donors hidden or are funded by dark money sources, spending by groups that don’t fully disclose donors has exceeded $2 billion since the 2006 election cycle.

Direct dark money spending by groups funded entirely by anonymous donors hit nearly $150 millionreported to the FEC for the 2018 election cycle alone. That doesn’t include additional money funneled to other groups spending in elections or spent on political ads couched as issue advocacy and digital advertising that remains largely untouched by FEC disclosure requirements. Dark money has hardly waned. Instead, it has begun manifesting in new forms that are often harder to track and quantify.

More than half of all 2018 election spending by outside groups, excluding party committees, was by groups that do not fully disclose their donors.

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Altogether, the 2018 election cycle attracted more than $539 million in spending by groups that don’t fully disclose their donors, setting a record for reported spending by these groups during non-presidential years and nearly edging out the all-time high of $619.4 million spent during the 2012 presidential election cycle. In 2006, groups that don’t fully disclose donors made up less than 2 percent of outside spending excluding party committees. Since then, that portion has jumped precipitously, making up more than half of all outside spending excluding party committees for three election cycles in the past decade — including 2018.

Partially disclosing groups are playing an increasingly important role in the political area, as evidenced by record spending by groups that keep some donors secret or are funded by dark money sources.

The percentage of outside spending made up by partially disclosing groups spiked to a record high in 2018 elections, totaling more than $391 million and accounting for more than a third of money spent by outside groups excluding party committees.

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Even among groups that do report spending to the FEC, donor disclosure is checkered at best. Recent FEC guidance requires all groups that spend at least $250 explicitly advocating for or against a candidate to report every donor giving at least $200 for “political purposes” in the calendar year, but some of the biggest spenders in the 2018 election cycle found ways to skirt this requirement — leaving the financiers behind tens of millions of dollars spent to influence elections unaccounted for.

Some spenders claim to have adopted policies against accepting funding earmarked for political purposes despite spending tens of millions of dollars on politicking and a little else, a loophole that can continue to be exploited without a settled definition of “political purposes” in this context. Others reported dark money groups as their donors, simply adding an extra layer of insulation between a spender and its ultimate source of funding.

More than $176 million was funneled from dark money groups to super PACs and hybrid PACs during the 2018 election cycle alone. Many of those dark money groups are closely tied to the political committees they fund, sharing staff, office space and other resources. In the 2018 election cycle, 20 partially disclosing groups made up of a super PAC and affiliated dark money arm spent over $1 million each. In multiple cases, they spent tens of millions.

That number does not include spending by “pop-up” super PACs that are legally allowed to hide their donors until after election day by strategically submitting formation paperwork after FEC deadlines then quickly pouring millions of dollars into a race.

Moreover, dark money spending reported to the FEC does not take into account millions of dollars spent on issue ads that praise or attack candidates using carefully crafted language that does not explicitly advocate for or against their election. The vast majority of ads airing under the guise of issue advocacy fall outside of the FEC’s reporting requirements — meaning the actual amount of dark money spending in 2018 elections was likely much higher. This not only leaves political donors secret but also obscures the actual amount spent to influence elections.

The digital dark money boom

Digital advertising has also become an increasingly common vehicle for dark money groups to dodge disclose requirements, with digital media spending reported to the FEC rising with each election cycle. CRP’s conservative calculation of digital spending reported to the FEC by House candidates exceeded $33.3 million in the 2018 election cycle, more than twice the $16.2 million spent in the 2016 election cycle.

As more and more money pours into digital political ads, the scope of loopholes only continues to expand. The Internet largely remains a regulatory Wild West, leaving the most common platform for American voters to get information subject to significantly less stringent disclosure requirements than television or even political mailers.

Although the information about digital spending made available through FEC disclosures is limited, social media and digital advertising platform resources for tracking political ads shined additional light on spending in the final months of 2018 elections.

More than $350 million was spent on Facebook advertising labeled as political from when the social media platform began publishing the spending data in May 2018 through Election Day, according to data from the Facebook Ad Archive.

Google took in roughly $75 million in political ad spending during that same period, according to data from Google, but covers a smaller subset of ads limited to spending mentioning candidates or officeholders.

Twitter saw over $3 million in political spending by certified “political campaigning” accounts paid for by political committees and candidates registered with the FEC or ads using express advocacy language about a clearly identified candidate for federal office. Non-disclosing groups make up just $56,655 of spending by political and partially disclosing groups make up $13,747. However, Twitter’s spending does not account for a breadth of issue advocacy ads and ads by groups that have skirted detection despite political messaging.

Liberal vs. Conservative: Which side is the darkest?

The 2018 election cycle also saw record levels of dark money spending supporting Democrats with liberal groups accounting for over half of all spending by groups with secret donors.

Liberal dark money groups spent over $81.7 million on 2018 elections, nearly twice the $43.3 million spent by their conservative counterparts.

Liberal groups may have warmed to dark money spending but conservative groups have continued spending through other less apparent channels. While liberal groups dominated direct dark money spending, conservative groups that only partially disclose their donors spent nearly four times as much as their liberal equivalents with $311.2 million by conservatives and $79 million by liberal groups.

In total, conservative groups that do not fully disclose their donors outspent liberal groups by hundreds of millions of dollars during the 2018 election cycle. Conservative groups that don’t fully disclose their donors spent more than $354.47 million while liberal groups spent just over $161.5 million.

c hrtt]  The biggest dark money spender reporting to the FEC for the 2018 election cycle was Majority Forward, a liberal 501(c)(4) nonprofit that does not disclose its donors despite spending more than $45 million on 2018 elections.

While the top dark money spender was Majority Forward, the top spender overall was the conservative Congressional Leadership Fund, a partially-disclosing super PAC fueled by a closely-aligned dark money group. Over $26.5 million of the group’s coffers were filled with money from American Action Network (AAN), the 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization that shares much of the Congressional Leadership Fund staff and resources but is funded entirely by secret donors.

Despite the large investment in political contributions, AAN spent nothing directly supporting or opposing candidates during the 2018 election cycle, a marked shift from prior years.

In the 2016 election cycle, AAN spent more than $5.5 million and made just $771,295 in political contributions. Continuing that trend, AAN spent around $8.9 million in the 2014 election cycle and roughly $11.7 million in 2012 while giving just only a few hundred-thousand in political contributions each year.

The dark money landscape is more than just direct spending, hundreds of millions more is being funneled through other kinds of groups that don’t fully disclose their donors.

This adulteration of new technology with gaping holes in disclosure rules has bred an environment ripe for effectively unlimited secret political spending. Some of the biggest financiers pulling the strings of U.S. elections will remain hidden if the 2020 election cycle continues on the same path as 2018, potentially leaving voters in the dark about whether messaging may be paid for by a billionaire with stake in an election outcome or even foreign powers trying to interfere.

2/21: Partially disclosing group data for ideology was modified to reflect $311,204,038 in spending by conservative groups and $79,725,462 in spending by liberal groups.

Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics.

For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center: info@crp.org

RELATED TOPICS

• 2018 election
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• twitter

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https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/01/dark-money

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Dark money’ groups funneled millions to powerful super PACs during 2018 midterms

By Karl Evers-Hillstrom

January 3, 2019

(AP Photo/Jon Elswick, File)

Even in the most expensive midterm election cycle ever, outside spending reported by “dark money” 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) nonprofits was surprisingly sparse, falling to $126 million from $161 million in 2014.

Don’t let that fool you. Rather than spend it themselves, dark money groups instead chose to funnel their funds through super PACs, with which they are often closely linked or directly connected.

Groups that do not disclose their donors and shell corporations gave more than $176 million to super PACs and outside spending hybrid PACs during the 2018 election cycle, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The surge in dark money giving came as super PACs spent nearly $818 million in the 2018 elections, a monumental increase from the $345 million they spent in the previous midterm cycle.

The top outside spending super PAC this cycle, Congressional Leadership Fund,also got the most dark money, receiving more than $26 million from the closely-linked American Action Network. The same officials run the two conservative groups and share a Washington, D.C. office.

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Similarly, conservative dark money groupOne Nationgave more than $18.5 million to the neighboring Senate Leadership Fund, with which it shares an office and president.

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The Democrat-aligned Senate Majority PAC, the second-largest outside spending group this cycle, got $6.8 million from dark money sources, including $4.5 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade association that does not disclose its donors. The super PAC also took in $1.4 million from the closely-tied Majority Forward, by far the top dark money spender this cycle.

Looking beyond the biggest political players, several super PACs directly connected with political nonprofits got significant funds, if not all their money, from the corresponding non-disclosing nonprofit.

One prominent example of this isDemocrat-supporting Environment America Action Fund, which got pretty much all of its money from dark money sources and more than $14 million from its own subsidiaries.

Even super PACs supporting single candidates get in on the dark money action. Hometown Freedom Action Network, a single-candidate super PAC supporting Tommy Pope — a Republican who lost the primary in South Carolina’s 5th District race — got nearly all of its $3.4 million fromCitizens for A Working America,a non-disclosing group.

Change Now PAC emerged as a large spender seemingly out of nowhere, shelling out $7.9 million to aid House Democrats despite popping up a few months before the election. The group took nearly $3 million from dark money group Sixteen Thirty Fund and another $1.8 million from partially-disclosing groups, which include fellow super PACs that accept dark money.

In total, 33 super PACs and hybrid PACs received more than $1 million from dark money sources.

These groups are allowed to spend unlimited sums on advertisements and other literature supporting or opposing candidates. Super PACs must disclose their donors, but large givers can shield their identities by contributing to dark money nonprofits that funnel the funds to super PACs. Those super PACs then identify the respective dark money group as the donor.

“It is clear that any long-term solution to the dark money problem will require addressing transfers between groups,” said Tyler Cole, legislative director at Issue One, a cross-partisan Washington, D.C. group that aims to reduce the influence of big money on politics. “Real disclosure requires identifying what individual donors are behind the groups that spend millions to influence American elections.”

It’s possible dark money’s influence is greater than CRP’s numbers convey, as super PACs also accept funds from fellow partially-disclosing groups — groups that take money from dark money sources. Contributions from these groups could be dark money, but it’s nearly impossible to tell.

Additionally, dark money groups have been known to spend funds on issue advocacy advertisements that they do not register with the FEC.

Though not considered dark money in CRP data, “Pop-up PACs” are a new kind of strategy to dodge donor disclosure. These super PACs waited until Oct. 18 to spend for or against candidates, allowing them to hide their donors until after election day.

“The American public is fed up with our broken political system and their anger is starting to boil over,” Cole said. “Political consultants and dark money groups know this, but they are still not willing to engage in meaningful disclosure.”

RELATED TOPICS

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Pop-up PACs

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Super Pac

ref

https://publicintegrity.org/federal-politics/pop-up-pacs-are-spending-big-in-election-2018s-final-days-but-theyre-hiding-their-bankrollers/

Want to influence Tuesday’s midterm election but keep your identity secret from voters?

No problem. Here’s how you do it:

Step 1. Pick a super PAC name, treasurer and bank account.

Step 2. File a short form with the Federal Election Commission.

Step 3. Wait until Oct. 18 to begin spending your money. That way, you won’t have to report your donors until an entire month after Election Day.

This isn’t just theory — it’s happening now. And Democrats are leading the way despite decrying political efforts funded by “dark money” — political cash that can’t be traced to its ultimate source.

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal campaign records indicates thatthree super PACs that have formed since Oct. 18have reported spending a combined $1.4 million across three hotly contested U.S. Senate races and one U.S. House race. Super PACs may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against political candidates, but they can’t contribute money to candidates’ campaigns directly.

As of Thursday night, these three groups are among 44 political action committees that have formed since Oct. 18.

These groups must by law disclose their donors. But this election cycle, the final pre-Election Day deadline for PACs and super PACs to reveal their donors came and went on Oct. 25 — a deadline covering financial activity from Oct. 1 to Oct. 17. Any group that formed after Oct. 17 isn’t subject to this deadline and must first report the identities of their contributors, and the amounts they contributed, on Dec. 6, per federal regulations.

Most notable among these just-formed groups is Texas Forever, a super PAC bashing Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. To date, Texas Forever has spent more than $1.29 million on anti-Cruz TV ads just in the past two weeks.

(Update, 10:49 a.m., Nov. 6, 2018: As of Election Day morning, Texas Forever has spent more than $2.3 million on anti-Ted Cruz ads. Update, 5:49 p.m., Dec. 6, 2018: Texas Forever revealed in a filing with the FEC that two donors funded its operations: the Democratic Party-backed super PAC Senate Majority PAC, which gave $2.35 million, and director and producer, James Brooks, who gave $10,000. Senate Majority PAC has used this disclosure delay strategy in the past, including in the :{Alabama :(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;box-sizing:border-box"):}:and :{Arizona:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;box-sizing:border-box"):}: U.S. Senate races. Senate Majority PAC’s major backers this election cycle :{include liberal megadonors:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;box-sizing:border-box"):}: such as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Paloma Partners’ Donald Sussman andRenaissance Technologies’ James Simons.)

Who gave that money to Texas Forever is a mystery, and will remain so until Dec. 6. Cruz is battling Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke in a race that a University of Texas at Tyler poll Wednesday indicates is very close and the Cook Political Report has declared a “toss-up”.

“BBQ. Football. … There’s a lot in Texas you shouldn’t mess with. Your health care is one of them. But Ted Cruz did,” the

The treasurer of the Texas Forever super PAC is Democratic Texas political consultant Christopher Lippincott, who from 2006 to 2011 served as the director of media relations for the Texas Department of Transportation.

Lippincott acknowledged an interview request from the Center for Public Integrity, but did not respond to several follow-up attempts. In a recent interview with the Dallas Morning News, he declined to reveal the group’s donors but nevertheless called Cruz out for benefitting from conservative political groups’ secretive money: “Ted Cruz is a phony politician propped up by millions of out-of-state dark dollars who has spent the past six years doing favors for his special interest donors.”

Said Cruz campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier to the Center for Public Integrity: “That’s an awfully hypocritical charge given that Beto O’Rourke is being propped up by this very super PAC and has taken money for his campaign bundled by multiple PACs.”

Although little is known about Texas Forever, it hired a media buying firm, Waterfront Strategies, that has ties to the national Democratic machinery.

O’Rourke has routinely boasted of not accepting corporate PAC or special interest money.

But as Texas Forever is a super PAC, and therefore not controlled by the O’Rourke campaign, it can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money as it sees fit — to benefit O’Rourke or any other political candidate. O’Rourke has also financially benefited from the effort of JStreetPAC, a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” political committee that’s served as a “conduit” and directed individuals’ contributions to O’Rourke’s campaign, as the Associated Press has reported.

“We’re not interested in the help of any super PACs or special interest groups and don’t want their involvement in this race, which is why our grassroots campaign has accepted exactly zero dollars from PACs in this election,” Chris Evans, the O’Rourke campaign communications director, told the Center for Public Integrity.

But Democrats of late have not hesitated to use untraceable money as part of their efforts.

A prime example, from late last year, is the super PAC Highway 31.

Highway 31 spent millions in Alabama’s special U.S. Senate race without disclosing its donors — which turned out to be Democrat-aligned super PACs Senate Majority PAC and Priorities USA Action, as well as the League of Conservation Voters — until after the election.

In Montana this month, a super PAC named Forward Montana has spent about $9,900 on mailers, printouts and digital ads supporting Democratic Sen. Jon Tester and Democrat Kathleen Williams, a water conservation expert running for Montana’s U.S. House seat. Forward Montana reported receiving no donations as of Oct. 17, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Forward Montana’s website says University of Montana students founded the group in 2004, with its “first fights … focusing on recycling, renewable energy, sexual assault and tenant rights.” It boasts being the largest youth civic engagement organization in Montana with staff in Billings, Bozeman and Missoula.

Forward Montana registered a super PAC arm on Oct. 19 this year. On Thursday, the super PAC filed paperwork with the FEC changing itself into a traditional PAC, which is subject to fundraising limits but may donate money directly to candidates.

>> READ: Understanding political committees 101

Forward Montana members did not return the Center for Public Integrity’s requests for comment.

David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, which advocates against campaign finance regulations, said it’s “ironic” that liberals are engaging in such activity.

“If [Democrats] think disclosure is such a good idea, then why aren’t they doing it?” Keating mused.

Federal statutes governing campaign finance disclosure were written in the 1970s and need updating to address the loophole allowing some super PACs and other political committees to hide their donors until after Election Day, said Brett Kappel, an election law attorney and partner at law firm Akerman LLP.

Republican groups are also using this donor disclosure loophole to keep their funders secret for now.

And Ryan Alsayegh of the Philadelphia-based PAC Second Generation, which formed on Oct. 24, said it has no donors and doesn’t plan to fundraise until 2019. The group wants to encourage immigrant communities to be politically engaged.

But, by law, if someone wants to form a super PAC and spend unlimited amounts of “dark money” between now and Election Day 2018, it has four days left to do so.

Take Scottsdale, Arizona-based super PAC Restore Our Healthcare Inc. It formed on Halloween, the same day it reported spending almost $46,250 on radio and digital ads, as well as an “air banner” supporting Republican Rep. Martha McSally, who is running for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat.

Restore Our Healthcare Inc.’s treasurer is Randy Pullen, the former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party and former treasurer of the Republican National Committee.

The amount of PAC and super PAC money flowing through this legal loophole is significantly more than in previous election cycles.

At least 28 pop-up PACs formed in the final days of the 2016 presidential election. Together, they spent $220,000 in money whose donors weren’t disclosed until after the election, according to a Center for Responsive Politicsanalysis.

The largest-spending pop-up PAC that cycle, Truth PAC, dropped $92,000 on anti-Donald Trump ads. One ad overlaid Russian nesting dolls on the faces of Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. At least 27 pop-up PACs materialized in the final days of the 2014 election, spending relatively little.

PACs and super PACs that formed earlier in the year, but waited until late October to actually spend money in elections, also are allowed to hide their donors until after Tuesday’s midterm election.

Alexandria-based super PAC American Potential Fund, created Oct. 3, waited until after Oct. 17 to spend $186,000 on digital ads opposing incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., in his U.S. Senate race against Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

Throughout the 2017-2018 election cycle, political groups, especially on the Democratic side, have been creatively filing their registration and campaign finance disclosure paperwork with federal regulators, allowing them to temporarily delay revealing who funds them.

In all, 63 committees this cycle together spent more than $22 million on politicking before they were required to reveal who was bankrolling their activities, according to a ProPublica and *Politico* analysis of Federal Election Commission filings from the beginning of 2017 through Oct. 17, 2018. This is in addition to the PACs and super PACs that have formed since Oct. 17.

Not all PACs and super PACs that pop up days before Election Day are doing so with the intention of hiding their donors until after the 2018 midterms are complete.

At least six such groups told the Center for Public Integrity that they don’t plan on spending money until the 2020 election — or that they were unaware they could keep their donors a secret until December.

Kelly Werder, a hospitality law professor and administrator at Florida Gulf Coast University, formed a new political action committee, called 5050 by 2020 Committee, on Oct. 23.

“We’re just some pretty frustrated women in a post-[Brett] Kavanaugh world, and that’s pretty much it,” Werder said.

Werder shared her “very exciting donor list including me, friends from college, and my mom!” with the Center for Public Integrity. She collected about $500, as well as spending almost $300 herself on a post office box, web hosting and graphics.

The group is mostly boosting social media posts and hopes to start a podcast on female politicians. It has endorsed female candidates from both parties.

Matthew Resh, the treasurer of a new Houston-based super PAC called Center for Real News, said he hasn’t received any money yet.

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https://www.opensecrets.org/dark-money/top-donors

dark $ open sec crp

Total Grants to Political Groups since 2008: $1,154,917,601

(Includes grants to politically active nonprofits, their affiliates and pass-through groups that have been uncovered by the Center for Responsive Politics)

https://www.alternet.org/strategies-let-super-pacs-delay-revealing-their-donors-until-after-elections-are-gaining-popularity

NEW

Strategies That Let Super PACs Delay Revealing Their Donors Until After Elections Are Gaining Popularity — With Both Parties

In total, super PACs have spent at least $21.6 million this cycle in 78 congressional races before disclosing who donated that money — $15.7 million of it during primary races. In many cases, that disclosure came after voters had gone to the polls.

ProPublica October 10, 2018, 2:21 AM GMT

no many lnx

Allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a blind spot in campaign finance laws to undercut a candidate from their own party this year — and their fingerprints remained hidden until the primary was already over.

Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money in elections, are supposed to regularly disclose their funders. But in the case of Mountain Families PAC, Republicans managed to spend $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a mustachioed former coal baron who was a wild-card candidate for a must-win West Virginia Senate seat, in May without revealing who was supplying the cash.

The move worked like this: Start a new super PAC after a deadline for reporting donors and expenses, then raise and spend money before the next report is due. Timed right, a super PAC might get a month or more undercover before being required to reveal its donors. And if a super PAC launches right before the election, voters won’t know who’s funding it until after they go to the polls.

The strategy — which is legal — is proving increasingly popular among Democrats and Republicans. The amount of super PAC spending during the 2016 congressional primaries in which the first donor disclosure occurred after the primary election totaled $9 million. That figure increased to $15.6 million during the 2018 congressional primaries and special elections.

Backers of Mountain Families PAC didn’t respond to a request for comment. It is one of 63 super PACs this election cycle that have managed to spend money to influence races and postpone telling voters who funded them, according to an analysis by Politico and ProPublica of Federal Election Commission data.

Voters bear much of the cost when they head to the polls without information on who funded a PAC that tried to sway their votes, said Meredith McGehee, executive director at the nonpartisan watchdog group Issue One.

“The whole idea behind disclosure is that one of the factors that voters can, and understandably should, take into account in judging the message is who the messenger is,” McGehee said.

In total, super PACs have spent at least $21.6 million this cycle in 78 congressional races before disclosing who donated that money — $15.7 million of it during primary races. In many cases, that disclosure came after voters had gone to the polls.

Super PACs were created after the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision ruled that people and corporations had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent expenditures such as funding ads or mailers, but that they couldn’t hide that spending from the public.

But while they can’t keep donors secret forever, super PACs are increasingly figuring out methods of temporarily masking donor identities that are either legal or fall into gray areas that rarely attract regulators’ attention.

One tactic is the one Mountain Families PAC used, which is likely to be replicated for the general election. A new super PAC that starts between Oct. 18 and Nov. 6 could spend money right before Election Day without having to disclose its donors until after the midterm results are tallied. (There are 11 super PACs that together have spent at least $5.8 million since the primaries but should begin disclosing their donors on Oct. 15, when the next FEC filing is due.)

Another involves going into debt to pay for advertising and other campaign-related activities, and fundraising later to pay off those debts. A super PAC that does this would not have to disclose donors until well after the money is spent.

In the case of Mountain Families PAC, Blankenship was increasingly popular among the state’s anti-Washington set. So D.C. Republicans behind the PAC avoided disclosing they were behind ads attacking Blankenship — “Isn’t there enough toxic sludge in Washington?” asked one of them — until after the primary.

Then they revealed their identity and dissolved the super PAC entirely.

Here are more examples of PACs that have delayed disclosing their donors this cycle — and how they did it:

As Republican Martha McSally battled two opponents in the Arizona Senate primary, a super PAC called Red and Gold spent $1.7 million attacking McSally, airing television ads that said McSally had supported an “age tax” on older people’s health insurance. But shortly after filing its initial paperwork with the FEC, Red and Gold notified the commission it was going to file on a monthly basis, which meant its first disclosure wasn’t due until Sept. 20, three weeks after the primary election.

When Red and Gold finally disclosed its funders, it was revealed that Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, was the main funder of Red and Gold and had meddled in the primary in an attempt to hurt McSally’s chances of victory and boost a weaker Republican. Chris Hayden, spokesman for Senate Majority PAC, said that “Senate Majority PAC and Red and Gold have followed the FEC reporting schedule and follow the law governing super PACs.”

A super PAC called Ohio First PAC has been in operation since the start of April and has spent $774,822 helping Republican Jim Renacci in the Ohio Senate race. But it has only disclosed raising $79,200 from donors. Instead of disclosing donations, Ohio First’s filings with the FEC show the committee has hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to vendors for advertising and mailers, and almost no fundraising yet. The PAC did not respond to a request for comment.

The FEC has sent the PAC twoletters about possible late filings for some of its spending; the committee said in correspondence in August that it is working to resolve any issues.

During the week leading up to a seven-way Democratic primary in Illinois in March, a super PAC called SunshinePAC blitzed the battleground 6th Congressional District with $130,000 in mailers and phone calls. Because it started spending money so late in the race, SunshinePAC didn’t have to reveal its donors before the primary.

But nearly a month after the election, SunshinePAC revealed its lone funder: Tom Casten, the father of primary contender Sean Casten — raising questions about whether the super PAC was really independent from the campaign. By then, Sean Casten had eked out a victory in the primary by 2,177 votes.

Tom Casten said in an interview that “there was no effort or conversation about reporting in the delayed form” when he gave to SunshinePAC, and that “I certainly didn’t ask for it.” Greg Bales, campaign manager for Casten for Congress, said in an email that “as with any outside group, there was no coordination between Sean or the campaign and that group on their spending or disclosure practices.” SunshinePAC did not respond to a request for comment.

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https://www.propublica.org/nerds/shedding-some-light-on-dark-money-political-donors

pro publ

Wednesday we added details to our FEC Itemizer database on nearly $763 million in contributions to the political nonprofit organizations — also known as 501(c)(4) groups — that have spent the most money on federal elections during the past eight years. The data is courtesy of Issue One, a nonpartisan, nonprofit advocacy organization that is dedicated to political reform and government ethics.

These contributions often are called “dark money” because political nonprofits are not required to disclose their donors and can spend money supporting or opposing political candidates. By using government records and other publicly available sources, Issue One has compiled the most comprehensive accounting of such contributions to date.

To compile the data, Issue One identified the 15 political nonprofits that reported spending the most money in federal elections since the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC in early 2010. It then found contributions using corporate filings, nonprofit reports and documents from the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Labor and Federal Election Commission. One of the top-spending political nonprofits, the National Association of Realtors, is almost entirely funded by its membership and has no records in this data.

For each contribution, you can see the source document detailing the transaction in FEC Itemizer.

The recipients are a who’s who of national political groups: Americans for Prosperity, the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Planned Parenthood Action Fund Inc. account for more than half of the $763 million in contributions in the data. There’s also American Encore, formerly the Center to Protect Patient Rights, one of the main conduits for the conservative financial network created by Charles and David Koch.

The largest donor is the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a Koch-organized business association that has contributed at least $181 million to the leading political nonprofits. Other donors include the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which has given at least $25 million to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and major labor unions like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, which has given at least $2.8 million to Democratic political nonprofit organizations.

Also among the donors are major corporations like Dow Chemical (mostly giving to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), gun manufacturers (to the NRA), 501(c)(3) charities and individuals.

You can read Issue One’s report on its work as well as its methodology for discovering the contribution records. Because many of the sources are documents that are filed annually, this data won’t be updated the same way that FEC Itemizer is for campaign finance filings, but it represents the most comprehensive collection of dark money contributions to date.

See the Project

FEC Itemizer: Browse Federal Campaign Finance Filings

Itemizer allows you to browse electronic campaign finance filings from the Federal Election Commission and to see individual contributions and expenditures reported by committees raising money for federal elections.

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https://www.alternet.org/citizens-united-just-15-groups-account-75-percent-dark-money-spent-us-elections

Just 15 groups were responsible for more than 75 percent of dark money political spending from 2010 to 2016, and together poured more than $600 million—out of a total of $800+ million—into campaigns in the wake of the landmark Citizens Unitedcase, according to a new analysis from Issue One, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for stricter campaign finance rules.

:{

"Dark money groups hold enormous sway over what issues are, and are not, debated in Congress and on the campaign trail," the report explains. "But the donors behind these groups rarely discuss their motivations for bankrolling these efforts, leaving the public in the dark about who funds these increasingly prominent and potent organizations."

}:

In addition the new *Dark Money Illuminated* (pdf) report, which identifies about 400 donors and organizations bankrolling these 15 secretive groups, the researchers also developed profiles for each dark money group and an "extensive, first-of-its-kind database containing nearly 1,200 transactions, each supported by primary source documents."

"Right now, the dark money groups and anonymous donors behind them that endlessly bombard Americans with television ads spouting half-truths and outright lies do a disservice to voters," said Issue One CEO Nick Penniman. "In the internet age, every American should be able to know where the money is being spent and who is giving it in near real-time."

Of course, overall political spending since 2010 is in the many billions of dollars, but the Issue One report specifically focuses on groups that have been allowed to conceal their donor lists.

While the groups examined by Issue One have supported both Democrat and Republican candidates at various levels of politics, the only ones to break $100 million primarily back the GOP. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce—which gets substantial funding from big banks, pharmaceutical companies, and polluting industries—spent $130 million, and Crossroads GPS, co-founded by former White House strategist Karl Rove, spent $110 million. The third highest spender was the right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity.

Check out the full list:

"Whether you're a conservative Republican or a progressive Democrat, policy ideas and candidates' positions should be promoted by organizations who are proud to be engaged in our public arena, not secretive front groups designed to deceive voters, hide donors, and deploy deceptive tactics," declared Tim Roemer, a former congressman and U.S. ambassador who co-chairs Issue One's ReFormers Caucus, a coalition of former politicians.

Emphasizing that "transparency and disclosure are the building blocks necessary to empower citizens with information to fully and accurately assess the source and credibility of the groups trying to influence their votes," the report includes five recommendations for doing so:

1. Increase donor disclosure, such as including the names of a dark money group's top donors on television, radio, print, or digital advertisements;
2. Pass the Honest Ads Act, legislation before Congress that would create new disclosure standards for paid online political advertising modeled on the nationwide requirements for paid ads that appear on television or radio;
3. Develop new, national reporting rules to prevent donors from hiding their identities while bankrolling election-related advertisements;
4. Encourage or even require groups to great CREATE? special accounts that are exclusively for political expenses; and
5. Restructure and strenthen "the feckless, and deadlocked-by-design," Federal Elections Commission (FEC) "to ensure there is an effective cop on the beat to stop groups from breaking the rules that already exist.

Other critics of political spending by wealthy Americans and corporations have argued for far more radical reforms, including the reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens Unitedruling and a transition to publicly-funded elections.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court ruled that a pair of dark money groups, including the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, must disclose top donors to California's attorney general—though, as the Los Angeles Timesnoted, state officials "are required to keep the information confidential unless ordered by a court."

Last month, in a case that ethics watchdogCitizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) brought against Crossroads GPS, a federal judge issued a ruling that invalidated an FEC regulation enabling dark money donors to avoid disclosure.As Common Dreamsreported, Center for Responsive Politics' Robert Maguire said that if the ruling stands, it "could fundamentally change the role dark money plays in elections (if it has a role at all)."

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ranked:

:{

}:

:{

Americans for Prosperity 29 $154,654,879

National Rifle Association 37 $145,422,955

American Future Fund 27 $87,551,309

U.S. Chamber of Commerce 127 $85,647,005

Planned Parenthood Action Fund 32 $62,772,876

League of Conservation Voters 33 $49,951,741

60 Plus Association 29 $46,786,787

Americans for Tax Reform 23 $38,900,667

Americans for Job Security 80 $37,648,639

American Action Network 23 $22,082,250

VoteVets Action Fund 42 $15,412,320

Patriot Majority USA 20 $9,248,353

Crossroads GPS 10 $5,810,000

45Committee 3 $1,075,000

National Association of Realtors 0 $0

Grand Total 402 $762,964,780

Source: Issue One analysis of Fe

}:

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Understanding the tax code:

What is a 501(c)(4) vs. a 501(c)(6) vs. an LLC?

The main vehicles through which dark money enters elections are three groups that

are often identified by their corporate structure and/or associated section of the U.S.

tax code.

First, “social welfare” organizations, which are organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the

tax code. By law, these organizations must be “operated exclusively for the promotion

of social welfare.”

Second, trade associations, which are organized under Section 501(c)(6) of the tax code.

This section encompasses business leagues, chambers of commerce, real estate boards,

boards of trade and professional football leagues.

Third, limited liability companies (LLCs) may also be a source of political dark money.

In most states, it’s easy to identify the actual human beings who are behind an LLC.

But in some states — most notably Delaware and Wyoming — public records need

not identify any living, breathing people associated with an LLC, making them

tantamount to black boxes.

These three types of organizations may buy political advertisements or donate to

other groups, such as super PACs, that may also buy political ads.

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https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/08/report-secretive-nonprofits-remain-a-major-player-in-2018

Dark money groups have accounted for more than half of all outside group spending on broadcast television ads this election cycle,according to a new report by the Wesleyan Media Project in partnership with the Center for Responsive Politics.

The report published this week, along with another Wesleyan study in June, shows that while FEC-reported spending by dark money groups appears to be down since 2014, dark money advertising may be on the rise.

Dark money breakdown

More than 1.5 million political ads have aired on TVs nationwide at this point in the election cycle, the study found. That’s an 86 percent jump from the same point in the 2014 cycle.

Since June 5, dark money groups have been behind about 77 percent of ads purchased by pro-Democrat outside spending organizations in House races, according to the study. In the full election cycle, roughly 68 percent of ads purchased in House races by pro-Democrat organizations have come from dark money groups.   

About 62 percent of ads purchased by pro-GOP groups in House races this cycle came from non-disclosing sources, according to the study. That number dropped to roughly 53 percent since June 5.

Outside Group Donor Disclosure in House Races

Figures are from either January 1, 2017 through July 29, 2018 (full cycle) or June 5, 2018 through July 29, 2018. Numbers include broadcast television. “Full” means the outside group discloses its sources of funding to the FEC. (Kantar Media/CMAG with analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project)

Outside Group Donor Disclosure in Senate Races

Figures are from either January 1, 2017 through July 29, 2018 (full cycle) or June 5, 2018 through July 29, 2018. Numbers include broadcast television. “Full” means the outside group discloses its sources of funding to the FEC. (Kantar Media/CMAG with analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project)

In Senate races, non-disclosing organizations accounted for about 51 percent of ads purchased by pro-GOP groups this cycle. About 38 percent of the ads purchased by pro-Democrat organizations in Senate races this cycle have come from non-disclosing groups, according to the study.

The Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC that supports Democratic candidates running for Senate seats, was the top ad spender in House, Senate and gubernatorial races since June 5, the study found. SMP, which has accepted money from dark money groups this cycle, spent roughly $5.1 million on nearly 20,000 ads in races nationwide from June 5 to July 29.

Other top political ad spenders since June included the conservative Florida Grown PC, which spent about $3.3 million on nearly 8,000 ads, and the conservative One Nation, a dark money nonprofit tied to Senate Republican leadership, which spent about $3 million on about 9,500 ads.

:{Despite its considerable spending, One Nation has not reported any of its spending to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). This is because the group’s ads are framed as “educational” or “issue” ads — like }:{ that doesn’t tell viewers how to vote, but asks them to “Tell Senator Heller to keep fighting for us and to improve V.A. nursing homes.”}:

Such ads only have to reported to the FEC 30 days before a primary election or 60 days before a general election. As OpenSecrets has reported in the past,dark money groups use these reporting windows to flood TV stations with ads that won’t be reported to the FECso that the group can claim the expenditures as part of its social welfare function activities when it files its tax returns with the IRS.

One Nation certainly isn’t alone. Liberal and conservative groups — like Majority Forward, which supports Senate Democrats, and the Koch-flagship group Americans for Prosperity — have spent millions of dollars on ads, while reporting almost none of it to the FEC.

As more groups take advantage of this loophole, less spending by dark money groups is actually reported to the FEC. In the 2018 cycle, dark money groups have reported $39.5 million to the FEC compared to $44.1 million at this point in 2014. However, as the WMP/CRP report showed in June — when the same trend was evident — dark money spending was up both in terms of volume and percentage of overall ads run by outside groups.  

Candidates outspend outside groups

In the last two months, candidates have outspent outside groups on ads in House, Senate and gubernatorial races.

Candidates have sponsored more than 83 percent of all ads in gubernatorial races, 70 percent of ads in House races and 53 percent of ads in Senate races, according to the study.

And ad spending in gubernatorial races is vastly outpacing spending in House and Senate races.

:{More than half of the roughly 400,000 political ads that have aired since June 5 have broadcast in gubernatorial races. Candidates, outside groups and political parties have spent more than $93 million on ads in gubernatorial races, according to the study. The top races by ads aired were in Florida, Tennessee and Michigan.

}:

Federal Ad Airings and Cost Since June 5

Figures are from June 5 through July 29, 2018. Numbers include broadcast television. (Kantar Media/CMAG with analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project)

Read the full report here.

RELATED TOPICS

• dark money
• One Nation
• Senate Majority PAC
• Wesleyan Media Project

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https://scholars.org/sites/scholars/files/torres-spelliscy_what_do_corporations_have_to_hide-_glimpses_of_dark_money.pdf

What do Corporations Have to Hide? Glimpses of Dark Money May 31, 2016

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy Introduction

Playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda told the graduates of the University of Pennsylvania, “[e]very story you choose to tell, by necessity, omits others from the larger narrative.”1 This is true. But American elections are missing a key part of the story: exactly who is funding political ads. Between 2010 and 2014, there was $600 million of dark money spent in federal elections alone. But now that corporate money is allowed in politics through perfectly legal independent expenditures, the open question remains, why is corporate money going dark? Post-Citizens United, the press has shown a renewed interest in hidden corporate political spending.2 They have reported on inadvertent and court ordered disclosures by corporations. These reports provide an admittedly limited glimpse into what corporations are doing on the down low and allows us to start to explore what exactly are corporate political spenders hiding and why. Because of the brevity of this piece a definitive account of all that is hidden in the realm of corporate political spending is not possible. But this piece can offer a starting point for both discussion and further research. Defining the Modern Dark Money Problem Here “dark money” does not refer to the excellent book by Jane Mayer of the same title, but rather, it refers to untraceable political spending.3 Dark money is money that has been routed through an opaque nonprofit — thus concealing its true source from voters and investors alike. The source of dark money could be from individuals, unions, associations, nonprofits or for profit

1 Lin-Manuel Miranda, Full Transcript: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Commencement Speech at UPenn, HEARST (May 16, 2016 5:23 pm), https://heatst.com/entertainment/full-transcript-lin-manuel-mirandas-commencent-speech-at-upenn/. 2 Kathy Kiely, Former IRS Official Sees Dark Money Scandal Brewing As demonstrators continue weeklong protest on Capitol Hill, an expert talks about the toll Citizens United is taking, MOYERS & CO (Apr. 12, 2016), http://billmoyers.com/story/former-irsofficial-sees-dark-money-scandal-brewing/; Michael Isikoff, Secret $1.5 million donation from Wisconsin billionaire uncovered in Scott Walker dark-money probe, YAHOO NEWS (Mar. 23, 2015); Karoli Kuns, How Dark Money Shields Political Donors, NEWS WEEK (June 30, 2015), http://www.newsweek.com/how-dark-money-shields-political-donors-348852; Most expensive midterms EVER: The power of Citizens United and anonymous 'dark money' revealed as spending nears $4billion, AP & REUTERS (Nov. 4, 2014), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2819897/Most-expensive-midterms-power-Citizens-United-anonymous-darkmoney-revealed-spending-nears-4billion.html#ixzz48kE7j11f. --Discussion Draft--Not for citation-- 2 businesses.

Here I will focus on dark money from for profit businesses.4 Dark money is also used to shape policy between elections. Corporations do not have a constitutional right to spend money darkly. If anything, corporations have no right to privacy at all.5 But corporations have been clever at exploiting the gaps in regulation between the IRS and elections regulators, which make dark money possible.6 As I explain in my new book Corporate Citizen?, corporate dark money was a problem that predated Citizens United v. FEC (2010).7 Arguably, corporate dark money was the original sin in Watergate.8 The reason for keeping the corporate money raised by the 1972 reelection campaign of Richard Nixon secret was easy enough to discern. (1) There was a gap in the law which failed to require disclosure for months in early 1972; 9 thus Nixon’s fundraisers thought they could get away with hiding it. And (2) corporate contributions to the campaign were illegal.10 S

...

Leaks

Dark money can be spent in state or federal elections. Most leaks have dealt with spending at the state level. For instance, the Alabama House Republican Caucus, which is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, inadvertently provided their Form 990 Schedule B to reporters, which listed 16 contributor names and their contribution amounts. 23 The companies on the list included, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, and Alabama Power as well as FedEx Corp.’s PAC.24

The Republican Governors Association (RGA) is a 527, which reports its donors to the IRS.25 But the RGA made more of its funding opaque by creating dark nonprofit affiliates like the Republican Governors Association Public Policy Committee.26 In 2014 a there was a leak of a document from the Republican Governors Association Public Policy Committee which showed what corporations were giving money to it and at which level.27 Included in this leak were records of bankroll politically active nonprofits in recent years are “energy giant Exelon Corp., health insurer WellPoint Inc. and technology titan Microsoft Corp.” …

“As part of the investigation, the center created an interactive database with information about each of the donor companies and how much they gave. It can be found at https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/01/16/14121/pulling-back-veil-corporate-contributions”). 23 Michael Beckel, Documents reveal GOP group’s secret donors, CTR. FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY (Mar. 12, 2014), https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/03/12/14413/documents-reveal-gop-groups-secret-donors (stating that Rachel Adams, the communications director for Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard, accidentally provided journalists with the Alabama House Republican Caucus a version of the group’s Form 990 that the IRS usually only sees. The form is available at http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1005383-alabama-house-republican-conference-inc-2012- irs.html). 24 Id. 25 Andy Kroll, The Republicans' Dark-Money-Moving Machine Inside the GOP group that skirts election rules by shuffling millions across state lines and then "wiping the fingerprints off the money.", MOTHER JONES (Jan./Feb. 2012), http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/republican-governors-association-perry-michigan. 26 Paul Abowd, Governors’ groups rely increasingly on 'dark money' affiliates shift to nonprofits obscures donors, CTR. FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY (May 19, 2014), https://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/04/04/12431/governors-groupsrely-increasingly-dark-money-affiliates. 27 Jonathan Weisman, G.O.P. Error Reveals Donors and the Price of Access, N.Y. TIMES (Sept. 24, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/us/republicans-corporate-donors-governors.html?_r=0 (“Such an error by the Republican Governors Association recently resulted in the disclosure of exactly the kind of information that political committees given tax-exempt status usually keep secret, namely their corporate donors and the size of their checks.”).

--Discussion Draft--Not for citation--

6 privately held corporations and their trade associations that gave at least $250,000 to the RGAincluding: American Beverage Association, Health Care Service Corporation, Koch Companies Public Sector, Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, Ryan Industries, and USAA. The RGA leak also showed publicly traded companies giving at the $250,000 “Statesmen” level including: Aetna, Inc., Centene Corporation, Coca-Cola, Corrections Corporation of America, ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Motorola, Pfizer, Pike Electric, Inc., Range Resources Corporation, Reynolds American, Sanofi, United Health Group, WalMart, WellCare Health Plans Inc., and WellPoint, Inc.28 In the same year (2014), the IRS provided additional inadvertent disclosures for this RGA group to the Center for Public Integrity, which included a page of the “Schedule B” list of donors, which the IRS does not require to be made public. The corporate donors included in this IRS disclosure were HCA Inc. ($89,000), and Healthsouth Corp. ($10,500). 29 This secretive funding of the RGA’s Policy Committee is significant because the RGA is typically one of the largest political spenders in state elections across the nation.30 And they are wildly successful at electing governors as there are 34 Republicans in governors’ mansions across the land.3

...

negative ads 2018

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/03/big-revenues-for-group-providing-cover-for-gop-donors-too-embarrassed-to-publicly-support-trump-in-2016/

billionaire-funded political organization operating out of a P.O. Box in Herndon, Virginia, with no employees or volunteers doesn’t exactly scream “social welfare.” But that’s precisely what a pro-Trump group, called 45Committee, claims it exists to do.

New tax documents obtained by OpenSecrets show that the group spent $45 million from the run-up to the 2016 presidential election into the early days of President Trump’s administration. The money that fueled the spending was raised from just a handful of wealthy, anonymous donors — most of whom gave more than $1 million each.

Groups like 45Committee are not political committees, and therefore don’t have to disclose their donors to the public. They’re also not supposed to have politics as their primary purpose, but the IRS and Federal Election Commission have proven to be woefully ill-equipped at policing nonprofit political activity. As a result, these “dark money” groups have become the vehicle of choice for wealthy corporate and individual donors who want to spend heavily in elections without the public knowing who is filling their war chest.

The filing, which was first reported by CREW, shows that $30 million of the $46.3 million raised by 45Committee came from just four anonymous donors who gave $7.5 million each.

Reluctant Trump embrace

The 45Committee and its sister super PAC, Future45, were formed in October 2015 with an aim to destroy Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential campaign.

The groups were backed by hedge-fund billionaires like Ken Griffin and Paul Singer, according to news reports, and by early “Never Trumpers”-turned-Trump supporters, Joe and Marlene Ricketts, the owners of the Chicago Cubs.

The Rickettses had been early backers of Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-Wis.) short-lived presidential campaign, giving $5 million to Unintimidated PAC, a pro-Walker super PAC. Early in 2016, Marlene Ricketts also gave $4 million to Our Principles PAC, a super PAC for wealthy “Never Trump” donors.

When the news came out that Ricketts was fueling the group, Trump launched a threatening tweet, saying the “Rickets [sic] family … better be careful, they have a lot to hide!” ...If the IRS were to look at this activity, it may decide that the 45Committee provided excessive benefit to a single person — a big no-no for nonprofits. That person of course is Donald Trump. But for the IRS to rule on something like this, it would have to audit the 45Committee and conduct a “facts and circumstances” analysis of the groups activities, which is a longshot: The IRS only audits seven out of every 1,000 returns it receives from nonprofits every year.

Categories: 501(c) groups Outside Money

Tags: 45 Cmte, 45Committee, 501(c)(4), 501c, 501c4, dark money, Donald Trump, fec, irs, Joe Ricketts, Ken Griffin, marlene ricketts, Paul Singer, Robert Maguire, Shadow Money Trail

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