rebekah MERCER

capt 3/17 see mercer 3 and tag and renn tech

see happer and co2 bs

1798 cap

new

===

gil bk

rockbridge buskirk rebecca mercer

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/13/heritage-foundation-voter-suppression-lobbying-election-action-plan

guk

tax filings reveal advocacy arm of Heritage Foundation spent $5m on lobbying in 2021 to block voting rights in battleground states

Brendan Fischer and Ed Pilkington

Fri 13 Jan 2023

The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative thinktank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.

Previously unreported 2021 tax filings from Heritage Action for America, which operates as the foundation’s activist wing, shows that it spent $5.1m on contracting outside lobbying services. The outlay comes on top of $560,000 the group invested in its own in-house federal lobbying efforts that year, as well as registered lobbying by Heritage Action staffers in at least 24 states.

The 990 tax filing was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian. It points to the pivotal role that Heritage Action is increasingly playing in shaping the rules that govern US democracy.

The efforts help explain the unprecedented tidal wave of restrictive voting laws that spread across Republican-controlled states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.The Brennan Center reported that more voter suppression laws were passed in 2021 than in any year since it began monitoring voting legislation more than a decade ago.

The expenditures also signal a dramatic increase in Heritage Action’s advocacy activities. In 2020, Heritage Action had reported no spending at all on outside lobbying.

[An attendee at the Poor People's Campaign march on Washington on 18 June 2022.

Republicans filed record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022 – report

Mercer Family Foundation

Background

The Mercer Family Foundation is a 501(c)(3) foundation run by Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund manager Robert Mercer. The Mercer family has funnelled millions of dollars to conservative causes including climate deniers like Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (:{OISM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:). [1], [2]

According to a 2013 study by Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle’s titled “Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations,” the Mercer Family Foundationspent at least :{$3,824,000 between 2003 and 2010:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:600"):}:directly funding groups opposing climate change action. That money went to organizatons including The Heartland Institute, Manhattan Institute, Media Research Center, and Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (:{OISM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:). [3]

While Mercer and his daughter joined the Koch brothers’ political donor network after the 2010 Citizens United v. :{FEC:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Politico reports it was Rebekah Mercerwho decided they should establish their own political foundation. After becoming frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the Koch’s network, the Mercers shifted their focus to their own foundation. Eventually they stopped attending twice-a-year Koch donor summits and dialled back their support of the network. At the same time, the Mercer Family Foundation nearly doubled its giving between 2011 and 2014, donating $34.6 million to 30 nonprofits including The Government Accountability Institute, which produced “Clinton Cash,” a book criticizing Hillary Clinton, and Heritage Foundation where Rebekah sits as a board member. [4]

*The Washington Post* notesthat the Mercer Family Foundation is so difficult to find online, that it is often mistaken for the Web site of a West Coast Mercer Family Foundation that gives small grants to aspiring math and physics students. [5]

Offshore Investments

In November 2017, The “Paradise Papers,”a trove of millions of leaked documents reviewed by The Guardian, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and others, revealed how Robert Mercer used offshore investment accounts to shield investements made by the Mercer Family Foundation—which helped the Mercers build a $60m war chest for conservative causes—while legally avoiding US taxes. [12]

Mercer was director of eight Bermuda companies listed in the papers. The Guardian outlined how the Bermuda companies “appear to have been used to legally avoid a little-known US tax of up to 39% on tens of millions of dollars in investment profits amassed by the Mercer family’s foundation, which funded Bannon’s book [Clinton Cash] and a who’s who of conservative groups, along with a $475m retirement fund for the staff of Mercer’s hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies.” [12]

The Paradise Papers suggest that the Mercer Foundation, which has used its investments in Mercer’s Renaissance Technologies to fund its operations, was able to avoid paying unrelated business income tax (UBIT) by routing investments through an offshore company. While Renaissance Technologies’s main fund is based in the U.S. it also maintained “feeder funds” in Bermuda, registered to the office of Appleby, a legal and financial services firm. [12]

The UBIT is a tax designed to prevent nonprofits from competing unfairly with regular businesses, and only applies to investments financed by debt. However, nonprofits can legally route investments through an offshore company known as a “blocker.” The Mercer Family Foundation’s public IRS filings confirm it has never paid UBIT. [12]

The Bermuda-based Medallion Capital Investments was set up to accept investments from American charities or foundations “closely affiliated with an owner or employee” of Renaissance. 2004 and 2005 IRS forms confirmed that the Mercer Family Foundation had sent month through Medallion Capital Investments, suggesting that it was operating as a blocker for the foundation. [12]

Stance on Climate Change

The Mercer Family Foundationspent nearly $4 million between 2003 and 2010 fundinggroups that devote much of their time to stalling climate change action including groups like The Heartland Institute, Manhattan Institute, Media Research Center, and Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (:{OISM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:). [3]

In 2018, MapLight highlighted more than $4.4 million in spending by the Mercer Family Foundation to climate change deniers, according to the foundation’slatest tax return. Groups who received donations included Heartland, the CO2 Coalition who received $170,000.[13]

“The Energy & Environment Legal Institute, a coal-funded nonprofit that uses lawsuits and public record requests to challenge environmental regulations and climate scientists, emerged as a new recipient of Mercer family largesse in 2017,” MapLight noted. [13]

Funding

According to a 2013 study by Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle’s titled “Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of :{U.S.:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: climate change counter-movement organizations,” The Mercer Family Foundationspent at least :{$3,824,000 between 2003 and 2010:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:600"):}:directly funding groups opposing climate change action. That money went to organizatons including The Heartland Institute, Manhattan Institute, Media Research Center, And Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (:{OISM:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:). [3]

The following data is compiled from theConservative Transparency Project as well as public 990 forms as recent as 2016. Note that not all individual funding values have been verified by DeSmog.[6]

See the attached spreadsheet for additional details on the :{Mercer Family Foundation’s donations by year (.xlsx):(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:600"):}:.

...[huge chart]

Key People

:{Rebekah Mercer:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:600"):}:— Director [7]

In addition to her role as director of the Mercer Family Foundation, Rebekah Mecer is also a board member of a number of the groups that the Mercer Foundation regularly donates to, including the following:

:{Moving Picture Institute:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:600"):}:— Board Member.[8]
:{Manhattan Institute:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:600"):}:—Board of Trustees.[9]
American Museum of Natural History— Board of Trustees. [10]
Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation— Board of Trustees. [11]

Location & Contact Information

According to the Mercer Family Foundation’s 2014 990 form, they held the following address:

119 West 72nd Street 248

New York, NY 10069

Resources

“What Kind of Man Spends Millions to Elect Ted Cruz?” Bloomberg, January 20, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/Oe3hY
“Robert Mercer,” Inside Philanthropy. Archived November 1, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/:{M0:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:nxs
“Study Details Dark Money Flowing to Climate Science Denial,” DeSmog, December 23, 2013.
“The most powerful woman in :{GOP:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: politics,”Politico, September 7, 2016. Archived November 2, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/c2xts
“How a reclusive computer programmer became a :{GOP:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: money powerhouse,” The Washington Post, October 6, 2015. Archived November 2, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/:{SB:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:mwI
“Mercer Family Foundation,” Conservative Transparency. Data retrieved November 1, 2016.
“Rebekah Mercer,” LittleSis Profile. Accessed November 1, 2016.
“Staff :{&:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Board,” Moving Picture Institute. Archived November 2, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/t417f
“About: Board of Trustees,” Manhattain Institute. Archived November 2, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/oggU4
“Board of Trustees,” American Museum of Natural History, February 8, 2016. Archived August 29, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/6FvwU
“Board of Trustees,” Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. Archived November 2, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/lQsme
Jon Swaine. “Offshore cash helped fund Steve Bannon’s attacks on Hillary Clinton,” The Guardian, November 7, 2017. Archived November 7, 2017. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/df1bt
Andrew Pere. “Tax Return Shows Mercer Family Fueled Climate Skeptics Last Year With More Than $4 Million,” Maplight, December 14, 2018. Archived May 13, 2019. Archive.fo URL: https://archive.fo/pv4J2

Other Resources

“Mercer Family Foundation,” Wikipedia.
“Rebekah Mercer,” Littlesis Profile.

february 4, 2018

In January 2018, more than 200 scientistsendorsed an open lettercalling on the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to remove climate change denier Rebekah Mercer from its board and to “end ties to anti-science propagandists and funders of climate science misinformation.” *The New York Times* reported that those among the AMNH letter calling for Mercer to step down were Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, and Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. [60]

Milloy was among a group of climate change deniers whoresponded with their own open letter, calling for the AMNH “not to cave in to this pressure.” The letter was signed by numerous individuals with ties to groups funded by the Mercer Family Foundation such as Will Happer of the CO2 Coalition; Richard Lindzen, a fellow at the Cato Institute; and Craig Idso, the chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. There are a number of signatories affiliated with theHeartland Institute, which has received over $5.78 million from the Mercer Family Foundation since 2008. [61]

The letter reads: [62]

“The Earth has supported abundant life many times in the geological past when there were much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is quite likely that future generations will benefit from the enrichment of Earth’s atmosphere with more carbon dioxide.

“Make no mistake, the agitators are not defending science from quackery — quite the contrary!”

https://www.vox.com/recode/:{2020/7:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:/27/21333636/peter-thiel-kris-kobach-kansas-senate-primary

no lnx many

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is searching for new political allies. He’s found one in Kansas.

A Silicon Valley outsider has spent almost $1 million to reshape a US Senate race in America’s heartland.

By Theodore Schleifer@teddyschleifer Jul 27, 2020,

Kris Kobach on the left and Peter Thiel on the right.

Kris Kobach and Peter Thiel have struck an unlikely alliance. Drew Angerer/Getty Images; Adam Jeffery/NBC/Getty Images]

At his Park Avenue penthouse — 62 floors high and with a sparkling nighttime view of the Manhattan skyline — billionaire Peter Thiel last fall introduced to his friends an immigration hardliner who he would back with over $1 million to try and transform the Republican Party.

The guest of honor was not President Donald Trump. It was Kris Kobach.

Thiel, a California venture capitalist, and Kobach, who is running in Kansas for the Republican nomination for the US Senate, were quite far from Kansas that evening. But the alliance between the two iconoclasts has reshaped the race in that state, giving Kobach a puncher’s chance to beat the GOP establishment — possibly upsetting Republicans’ hopes to hold their Senate majority.

In the months since that fundraiser, Thiel has pumped $850,000 into a super PAC behind Kobach — and that could be just the start if he wins. The investment in Kobach is Thiel’s most significant political bet since he risked his standing in Silicon Valley to support Donald Trump in 2016. And the wisdom of that bet will be tested just next week, when Kobach faces the voters of Kansas in a race that polls show to be tight.

If Kobach is elected, it could give Thiel a loyal ally in the Senate because of how powerful he is proving to be in the race. That alliance becomes all the more key if Trump loses this fall, which would weaken the Washington influence of Thiel, a board member at Facebook and a founder of Palantir, which has deep ties to the government.

Patrick Miller, a political scientist at the University of Kansas who is closely following the primary, told Recode Thiel’s money was “absolutely critical to Kobach being a viable candidate.”

“I don’t want to overstate it and say that Kobach wouldn’t have a campaign without him. But I think the money that that super PAC is putting into the race — primarily through this one rich guy — is absolutely the lifeblood of the pro-Kobach campaign at this moment,” Miller said. “You take that money away and Kobach doesn’t have a lot of campaign left.”

Thiel and Kobach, neither of whom returned requests for comment, are not personally close. Friends of Thiel’s say his support of Kobach hasn’t come up in recent conversations. But Thiel likes to “collect” politicians who he finds well-credentialed and intellectual, particularly those who fight with the elites or the media.

“He has a really strong preference for people who stick their middle finger up to the status quo and conventional wisdom,” said a person familiar with Thiel’s political thinking. “There is nobody who I think was more obviously sticking his middle finger up at conventional wisdom quite like Kris Kobach.”

Both with a zest for the controversial, the litigious, and the troll, Kobach and Thiel have also each collected enemies in their political crusades. They both inveigh against identity politics, the Washington establishment, and a globalism that doesn’t put America first.

Kobach has said Thiel first reached out to him in 2005, which is when Kobach, then a lawyer, began challenging a California state law that gave in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. A self-professed libertarian, Thiel, who was born overseas and is himself an immigrant, has long had sharply restrictionist views on immigration; back in 2008, he reportedly donated $1 million to NumbersUSA, a hardline immigration group which today is a prominent backer of Kobach’s.

Kobach, as Kansas’s secretary of state from 2011 to 2019, emerged during the ensuing decade as one of the most polarizing figures in national politics, urging the GOP to more seriously investigate voter fraud (of which there is limited evidence) and to crack down on illegal immigration. He had, however, always been seen as a fringe player. That was until Trump arrived.

Kobach has since advised Trump’s administration on implementing a “Muslim registry” that would have specifically tracked immigrants to the US from Muslim-majority countries. He’s also weighed in for the administration on voting issues, wasconsidered for Cabinet posts by a transition committee on which Thiel served, and earned Trump’s endorsement during his unsuccessful bid for governor of Kansas in 2018.

That race was when the Thiel-Kobach bond was tied. Thiel secretly put somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000, delivered in two tranches, into an outside group backing Kobach’s gubernatorial bid, according to a person familiar with the gifts. Some details of Thiel’s stealth donations in that race were previously reported by the Kansas City Star.

For Thiel, the Harvard graduate in Kansas fits in with a new crop of Ivy League-bred, pugilistic Republicans Thiel has cultivated as friends. Despite his proud support for Trump in 2016, Thiel’s influence in Trump’s orbit has faded and he has reportedly soured on the president, not even yet making a donation to his campaign in the 2020 cycle, compared to the over $1 million he spent to back Trump four years ago. Nowadays, Thiel has instead grown closer to rising stars such as Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who has made a name for himself by fiercely going after Google, which the tech billionaire wants to investigate.

Thiel’s only checks to candidates this cycle have gone to Tom Cotton, another ambitious, Harvard-educated GOP senator, and Kobach. Unlike Hawley, though, Kobach has barely, if ever, weighed in on tech issues.

But part of their alliance can be explained by more personal reasons. A key lubricant binding Thiel to his new candidate is Ann Coulter, the conservative provocateur who last week called Democrats the “antifa party.” She is close with Thiel, and is a Kobach super-fan.

Asked by Recode why she thought Thiel and Kobach felt such a kinship, Coulter took a dig at the GOP establishment and offered that “it might have something to do with Kobach having twice the I.Q. of Mitch McConnell.”

Coulter and Thiel have been fellow rabble-rousers in the conservative movement since at least 2010, when Thiel introduced her to speak to “Homocon,” a conference for gay conservatives held at his apartment. Coulter would even dedicate one of her books to him the following year. The two remain close, attending Hollywood parties together.

It was Coulter who co-hosted that Kobach fundraiser at Thiel’s apartment last fall,an event that brought Kobach before wealthy people like GOP power brokerRebekah Mercer and Erik Prince, the founder of the military contracting firm Blackwater.

“You couldn’t turn around last night without stepping on a billionaire,” Coulter said of the Thiel event in one radio interview.

All that billionaire money has drawbacks, though. While there is a history of rich out-of-staters spending big money to influence Kansas politics, Thiel’s involvement poses a vulnerability.

“Kris’s support comes from those who don’t care about the people of Kansas. He is relying solely on help from Democrats, Hollywood, and New York City,” said Eric Pahls, the campaign manager for Rep. Roger Marshall. Marshall, currently a US representative for Kansas, is the main Republican rival Kobach faces in the primary for the Senate seat.

Thiel made the decision to donate to the super PAC, called Free Forever, after meeting with its leadership in New York last year and hearing a pitch on Kobach’s chances and why the Senate race wouldn’t turn out like the governor’s race, according to a source familiar with the matter. The tech billionaire has no direct decision-making power at the super PAC — he is merely briefed on the ads and other content it produces after it’s made. But Thiel is pleased enough that he’s cut at least three successive checks to the group, the most recent for a half-million dollars last month.

The expectation that Thiel will sink in even more money — rumors swirl in Kansas politics about the precise size of Thiel’s budget — has kept rival campaigns on their toes.

The super PAC Thiel is backing has spent more than four times what Kobach’s campaign itself has spent on television and radio ads,according to data shared with Recode by the media tracking firm Medium Buying. The heavy amount of mailers sent by the PAC have run the gamut of attacking Marshall as “anti-American” for being insufficiently tough on immigration, alleging that he voted to fund “Rosie O’Donnell summer camp,” “global warming musicals,” and “transgender plays,” and promising that Kobach will “stop the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Thiel may not be making decisions, but the messaging feels Thiel-esque.

If Kobach wins next week, he’ll have a tough general election on his hands, too. Even more Thiel money would almost certainly be needed.

And if Thiel does donate more in the fall, he will likely end up spending more money on Kobach’s behalf than he had on behalf of his previous bet: Trump.

nix work wife?!

Crucially, this recording sets in context the claim by a senior Trump campaign source that “we have three major voter suppression operations under way”,made to Bloomberg in October 2016.By then Cambridge Analytica was working simultaneously with the Trump campaign; the Defeat Crooked Hillary Super PAC, overseen personally by Rebekah Mercer; an underground platform doing psychographic microtargeting of congregations and religious communities;the far-right Media Research Center; theNational Rifle Association; and a massive, secretively funded campaign by the National Sports Shooting Federation of gun companies.

How to make black youth not vote

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/06/exxon-mobil-progressive-policy-institute-climate/

kate a

PROGRESSIVE POLICYInstitute, a centrist Democratic think tank that grew out of the party’s pro-business wing in the 1980s and ’90s, received$50,000 from Exxon Mobil in 2018via itsparent organization, the Third Way Foundation, according to the oil giant’s 2018 Worldwide Giving Report.

Exxon Mobil did not return The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment. In an email, PPI Executive Director Lindsay Lewis said the money was used for general support and that “we only accept general support funding from corporate interests, we do not do paid for work/research or have any donor run programs.”

Lewis also confirmed that this is the first time Exxon Mobil has donated to the Third Way Foundation.

Though it’s a first, PPI’s new donor isn’t so dramatic a shift from its fundraising record. The Intercept’s Akela Lacy has also found that PhRMA — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — has annually donated between $25,000 and $75,000 to the Third Way Foundation since 2009, upping its donation to $265,000 in 2016 — the same year that Medicare for All, which the trade group and PPI both oppose, entered the national spotlight.Donations dipped back to normal levels in 2017, although documents were not yet available for 2018 when the piece was published in late April.

https://theintercept.com/2019/04/26/medicare-for-all-democrats-phrma/

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PhRMA Is Funding a Democratic Think Tank Trying to Derail Medicare for All

In the last couple years, Exxon has taken up softer messaging on climate than either the Koch brothers or the Mercer family. With business all over the world, Exxon — like every other multinational oil company — is well-accustomed to operating in environments where denying the reality of the climate emergency outright is politically unthinkable. As climate concerns spike around the U.S., the company is still plenty opposed to environmental regulations and the lawsuits being lobbed its way from climate-vulnerable communities and attorneys general, who are each calling into question Exxon’s rule in fueling both the climate crisis and misinformation campaigns about it. Rather than paying people to say that there’s no problem at all, it can rebrand as a good-faith actor in the climate fight with paeans to carbon capture technology, low-carbon fuels (algae!), and carbon taxes that also conveniently exempt it from some of the lawsuits and regulations it’s most worried about. The decades of climate denial Exxon helped fund — and now the Trump administration — have dragged the national debate on climate change so far into the gutter that there are influential liberals willing to give the company credit simply for not denying the science.

This all dovetails well with a centrist approach to climate politics that’s long sought common ground with industry and harbors both temperamental and ideological opposition to big, confrontational proposals like the Green New Deal. The upshot is that they’ve started to sound a lot alike. Carbon capture, R&D, and carbon pricing — while not mutually exclusive with the Green New Deal framework that the Sunrise Movement, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others have begun to flesh out — have reliably been wielded as a cudgel by establishment types against calls for more sweeping action.

Kert Davies, founder and director of theClimate Investigations Center, noted that the report indicates the money PPI received was through a “corporate” grant, rather than through the ExxonMobil Foundation. “We have never sussed how thesetwo black boxes of money are managed or dolled out. So if you grab the ExxonMobil Foundation 990s, there are sometimes different descriptions or breakdowns of the funding, but this grant won’t be there,” he wrote in an email. “There is no need for public accounting of such grants. No obligation. But they have seemed compelled to disclosed them through the years.”

Of course, $50,000 is not an enormous amount of money either for PPI or Exxon Mobil. But it may well signal a shift in the fossil fuel industry’s relationship to climate politics.

In March, [who?] Goldberg co-authored areportfor the industry front group Grow America’s Infrastructure Now on how to bring legal action against anti-pipeline organizers. “Allowing vigilante regulation to go unchecked undermines our democracy. We honor civil protests in this country, but we should not have to accept improper efforts to overturn the rule of law,” Goldberg said in a press release. “People who violate the law by improperly interfering with legitimate business activities, even to advance a political or public policy preference, can be held accountable for their actions through civil litigation.”

While not disclosed on the group’s website, GAIN spokespersonCraig Stevensis a partner at the DCI Group, which specializes in astroturf campaigns that have fought everything from anti-smoking laws to climate legislation.From 2005 through 2016,Exxon Mobil was a DCI client. In another detail not mentioned on the GAIN site, the group’s strategic adviser is James “Spider” Marks,who as of 2017 was the advisory board chair of the security firm TigerSwan, which — as The Intercept hasdocumentedextensively — engaged in “military-style counterterrorism measures” against anti-pipeline protesters.

For years, Exxon Mobil prolifically funded climate denier groups like the Heartland Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute. Under pressure, the companypledgedto stop funding deniers in 2007, although itkept bankrollingpoliticianswho deny the reality of the climate crisis. Exxon also still support right-wing think tanks like theManhattan Institute,which received $970,200 from Exxon between 2008 and 2018. As recently as 2011, MI Senior Fellow Robert Bryce said“the science is not settled”on climate change. Another MI Senior Fellow,Oren Cass,last year — the year after three of the five most expensive hurricanes to have ever hit the Atlantic — authored areportarguing that the potential costs of climate change are overblown, suggesting that many peopleprefer warmer temperaturesand could adapt easily to global warming. In addition to Exxon, MI is — like other flagrant denier groups — funded by the Mercer Family Foundation; Rebekah Mercer,a key financier of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, runs the foundation and sits on the MI board. Exxon also continues to give large donations the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and remains a member of the American Petroleum Institute, each of which has fought hard against environmental regulations and climate measures. The oil company only left the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council in 2017, four years after it pushedmodel legislationin Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona that described global warming as a “theory.”

Itai Vardi reported atDeSmogthis summer that Phil Goldberg, director of PPI’s Center for Civil Justice, has come out swinging against climate lawsuits being brought by cities and states against fossil fuel companies. The law firm at which Goldberg is a partner — Shook, Hardy & Bacon — defended the tobacco industry**for decades**and was theinspirationfor the fictional firm Smoot, Hawking in the 2005 film “Thank You For Smoking.” As a slew of lawsuits has begun to call into question fossil fuel companies’ role in fueling and spreading misinformation about the climate crisis, the industry has stepped into high gear to fight off litigation.

Goldberg is a former lobbyist for the coal company Peabody Energywho wasbrought onas special counsel by the National Association of Manufacturers in January as part of its Manufacturers Accountability Project, founded in 2017 to take on “activist litigation” against big oil companies; Exxon Mobil is a NAM member, and the MAP project has been among the most active bodies fighting off climate-related legal action. Both Peabody and NAM have also donated generously to climate denial groups over the years. Both, for instance, were members of the now-defunctGlobal Climate Coalition, which through the 1990s sought to undermine U.N. climate negotiations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Goldberg has also been anadviserfor ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force. In addition to the model legislation on global warming, ALEC has vigorously opposed climate and clean energy legislation around the country.

...

milloy desmog

February 4, 2018

In January 2018, more than 200 scientists endorsed an open letter calling on the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to remove climate change denier Rebekah Mercer from its board and to “end ties to anti-science propagandists and funders of climate science misinformation.” The New York Times reported that those among the AMNH letter calling for Mercer to step down wereMichael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, and Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. [60]

Milloy was among a group of climate change deniers who responded with their own open letter, calling for the AMNH “not to cave in to this pressure.” The letter was signed bynumerous individuals with ties to groups funded by the Mercer Family Foundation such as Will Happer of the CO2 Coalition; Richard Lindzen, a fellow at the Cato Institute; and Craig Idso, the chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. There are a number of signatories affiliated with the Heartland Institute, which has received over $5.78 million from the Mercer Family Foundation since 2008. [61]

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/03/12/trump-taps-climate-denier-to-lead-a-secret-white-house-climate-panel

david a

Emeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton University and well-known climate science denier William Happer will lead the Presidential Committee on Climate Security, the *Washington Post* has reported. Happer, a National Security Council senior director since last September, and his panel will “assess whether climate change poses a national security threat,” according to documents obtained by the Washington Post.

Happer is a well-regarded researcher in the field of atomic physics and adaptive optics, but has no formal training in climate science. Happer’s name is notorious among climate scientists and environmentalists for his staunch denial of climate change and the science supporting it.

Last Thursday, the leaders of four U.S. House Committees sent a letter to Trump protesting the move, saying:

We are deeply concerned about recent reports that the National Security Council (NSC) is planning to assemble a secret panel, led by a discredited climate change denier, to undermine the overwhelming scientific consensus on the nature and threats of climate change, including to the national security of the United States.

The panel will not operate under the standard rules for Federal Advisory Committees, which require open meetings, transparency and public involvement. If the panel meets in secret, its conclusions will not be open to peer review or criticism, hallmarks of science.

Trump, who has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, rolled back the Clean Power Plan, revived plans for Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, and deregulated the fossil fuel industry, has yet to respond to the congressional letter.

Happer’s “CO2 Coalition” Well-Funded by the Far Right

Before joining Trump, Happer served as president of a group called the CO2 Coalition.

After a few years of flatlining, global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels jumped to an all time high in 2018, but that is not a problem for the CO2 Coalition.

CO2 Coalition describes its mission as “educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.” In a section on its website dubbed, “CO2 Fundamentals,” CO2 Coalition says, “The debate about global warming and climate change has shifted from genuine scientific exploration to a campaign demonizing CO2.”

CO2 Coalition has received $100,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in 2016 and 2017, according to IRS filings examined by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). In an internal Bradley Foundation grant proposal record for CO2 Coalition dated 6/14/2016, Bradley staff writes, “Through strategic public discourse techniques, it will use science to counter the campaign demonizing the use of fossil fuels — a campaign that has effectively replaced scientific inquiry in the climate change debate.”

Bradley internal documents show that it is a major funder of the web of climate change denying organizations and that it “has made significant grants to support energy policy think tanks, attack-dog groups that target environmentalists, and efforts to discredit climate science,” CMD found.

An internal spreadsheet from Bradley shows a matching grant of $130,000 ($132,000 on its 2016 IRS Form) from Scaife Foundation for CO2 Coalition. The Scaife Foundation funds many organizations that dispute the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change including: Heartland Institute, Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Scaife Foundation gave another $135,000 to CO2 Coalition in 2017, its IRS filing shows.

The Mercer Family Foundation led by Trump supporter Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, is the top supporter of CO2 Coalition with $320,000 in donations in 2016 and 2017 IRS filings show. A *Huffington Post* reportlate last year detailed more than $4 million from the foundation in grants to climate skeptics in 2017.

Charles Koch, billionaire owner of one of America’s biggest polluters Koch Industries, has also given to CO2 Coalition but an examination of IRS filings raises some questions. Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) details $32,409 to CO2 Coalition in 2016 and 2017 and Charles Koch Institute (CKI) $10,000 in 2017 on their individual IRS filings, but CO2 Coalition’s detail no contributions from CKF and $46,409 from CKI in 2016 and 2017.

Other major contributors to Happer’s climate science denial outfit include many of the major right-wing funders:

$125,000 from Searle Freedom Trust (2016-2017)
$125,000 from Thomas W. Smith Foundation (2016-2017)
$50,000 from Achelis and Bodman Foundations (2016)
$40,000 from the Randolph Foundation (2017)

Rebekah Mercer Standing by Cambridge Analytica After Blackmail Scandal

A source close to the family says that she intends to remain on the company’s board, and is ‘working to be part of the solution.’

BETSY WOODRUFF

03.19.18 6:10 PM ET

Billionaire heiress Rebekah Mercer is standing by embattled data firm Cambridge Analytica—at least for now. A person close to Mercer, who sits on the firm’s board, told The Daily Beast she has no immediate plans to leave her post there, despite a bombshell report alleging the company used Ukrainian sex workers to try to get compromising material about its clients’ political opponents.

“She is working to be part of the solution,” said the source, of one of American conservatism’s most powerful mega-donors.

“She has always worked to make sure she observes and abides by all established norms and legal mandates,” the source added.

The source said Robert Mercer, former co-CEO of America’s most lucrative hedge fund, is just a passive investor in Cambridge Analytica and has never been on its board. Rebekah Mercer is his daughter, and conducts broad business oversight as a board member.

Cambridge Analytica broke into the American political scene in 2015, working for Sen. Ted Cruz’s primary campaign and touting its “psychographic” voter modeling program. During the primaries, it also worked alongside allies of Ben Carson and Donald Trump. Steve Bannon has long been close with the firm, and once owned a stake in it, per McClatchy. The firm drew the attention of Congressional investigators looking into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. And its head, Alexander Nix, once reached out to Julian Assange to offer the firm’s services in releasing emails hacked from Hillary Clinton’s email account. Assange confirmed the outreach to The Daily Beast, and said he turned down Nix’s overture.

The Mercers were among Trump’s most generous supporters, spending millions to support his campaign.

ref

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-trump-consultant-and-cambridge-analytica-ceo-alexander-nix-offered-to-blackmail-politicians-with-prostitutes

no linx

Executives from Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by the Trump presidential campaign, have been caught on tape promising an extraordinary package of propaganda strategies to potential clients including filming opponents in compromising situations with Ukrainian sex workers.

Over the weekend a whistleblower who worked with Cambridge came forward to claim that the company had surreptitiously misused the Facebook data of 50 million people in order to win election campaigns

Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was seen on tape talking to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News saying that his operatives would never be caught because they worked all over the world using a number of front organizations.

The U.K. information commissioner responded to the Channel 4 News footage by announcing that she would apply for a warrant to enter the Cambridge Analytica offices to seize evidence. Hours later, at around 11 p.m. local time, a senior politician announced that Facebook “auditors and legal counsel” had just been ordered to leave the Cambridge Analytica offices by British officials.

British Prime Minister Theresa May backed an investigation into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica on Monday, and the European Union said it would launch a probe into the alleged misuse of private data.

On the undercover film, Nix’s colleague Mark Turnbull, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica Political Global, explained that the plausible deniability was a crucial element and said it was vital that people seeing false rumors online never discovered where they were coming from.[vid]“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again,” he said. “Like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘That’s propaganda,’ because the moment you think, ‘That’s propaganda,’ the next question is, ‘Who’s put that out?’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/01/05/rebekah-mercer-the-billionaire-backer-of-bannon-and-trump-chooses-sides/?noredirect=on

Ssecurity guards were done up as Hell’s Angels. Kellyanne Conway was wearing a Superwoman suit. And as then-President-elect Donald Trump slipped out of an SUV onto the grounds of a Long Island estate in December 2016, a gaudy “Villains and Heroes”-themed costume party swirling around him, the press pool reportedly asked the next president who he was dressed as.[thiel?]

Trump — wearing his standard-issue baggy suit and long tie — pointed a finger at himself. “Me,” he mouthed.

Party-going is not normally a top priority for a president-elect in the middle of a transition. But Trump was not calling on just anyone.

The fete was thrown by Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire turned conservative donor who, along with his daughter Rebekah, had played a key role in Trump’s White House run. As The Washington Post’s Matea Gold reported last year, the Mercers have given at least $36.6 million to GOP candidates and super PACs since 2010. The family had also poured money into Breitbart News, the populist platform previously run by Stephen K. Bannon before he took over Trump’s campaign. The strategist was also at the December party. Bannon’s planning and Mercer’s money were among the key drivers of Trump’s success. Trump, Mercer and Bannon were enjoying a moment of victory.

“The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution,” Bannon told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer last March. “Irrefutably, when you look at the donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.”

Billionaire Rebekah Mercer attends a conference hosted by the Heartland Institute in March 2017 in D.C. (Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post)

But the once-close bond between candidate, strategist and mega-donors was torched this week. On Wednesday, excerpts of Michael Wolff’s new book on the administration hit the news cycle, including explosive comments Bannon reportedly made about Trump’s family. The president responded with a blistering attack on his former adviser, who left the White House last August and returned to Breitbart News as chairman. “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” the president said Wednesday. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” Thursday night he called Bannon “Sloppy Steve” in a tweet.

The rift between the two deepened Thursday, when the notoriously press-shy Rebekah Mercer — whom Newsmax Media owner Christopher Ruddy has admiringly called “the First Lady of the alt-right” — publicly rebuked Bannon and stood by the president in a statement. “I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected,” Mercer said. “My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements.”

And although Rebekah Mercer remains a stakeholder in Breitbart News, the significance of her public slap at Bannon can’t be overstated. Long before Trump stepped onto the campaign trail, the Mercer family and Bannon were drawing up schematics for an outsider populist presidential candidate who could topple the establishment. It was a dream years in the making. And now Trump, who fulfilled their hopes, has come between Mercer and Bannon, a further escalation of the conflict ripping through the president’s base.

Robert and Rebekah Mercer’s rise as Republican power brokers was unique.

Robert Mercer is a former IBM computer scientist who made billions later in life by applying complex programming techniques to financial trading as the co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, Bloomberg reported. Quiet and socially awkward — he once told a friend he preferred the company of cats to people, according to the Wall Street Journal — Mercer has an extreme views on small government and wealth.

“Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make,” a colleague told the New Yorker. “If someone is on welfare they have negative value. If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he’s a thousand times more valuable.”

Rebekah, the middle of the Mercer’s three daughters, studied biology and math at Stanford, and earned a master’s degree there in management science and engineering, The Post has reported. She worked for a brief period at her father’s hedge fund, then raised four children with her husband, a French-born Morgan Stanley managing director. The couple live in a $28 million apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Bloomberg.

As her family became more involved in conservative causes, Rebekah took the reins of the family foundation. According to an analysis by The Post, the foundation put $35 million into right-wing think tanks and policy groups between 2009 and 2014.

The Mercers’ journey to the White House began in 2011. It hinges on a Jimmy Stewart character.

1:59

A list of striking quotes from the new book on Trump

Here are some of the most striking quotes from the book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” by Michael Wolff. (Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

In 2011, the future president first met Bannon to discuss a possible presidential run. The same year, the Mercers were introduced to conservative flamethrower Andrew Breitbart and Bannon, agreeing to invest $10 million into Breitbart News,according to the New Yorker. One stipulation of the Mercers’ deal was to place Bannon on the news company’s board. Breitbart died months later, which left the news operation in Bannon’s hands.

The key figure in the Bannon-Trump-Mercer White House success is Patrick Caddell, a former Democratic pollster. If the Mercers were the money, Bannon the strategist and Trump the candidate, Caddell was the player who first wrote the instruction manual. For years, the pollster conducted extensive public opinion research showing Americans were sick of the two-party system and “ripe for an outsider candidate to take the White House,” Mayer wrote in the New Yorker. The longtime political operative would eventually term this the Candidate Smith project, a reference to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” a 1939 Jimmy Stewart film about an outsider political candidate.

The data increasing showed “mounting anger toward wealthy elites, who many Americans believed had corrupted the government so that it served only their interests,” Mayer wrote. By 2012, Caddell was sharing the populist trend in the numbers with Bannon. The data began to shape Bannon, and Breitbart’s, worldview.

The same year, the Mercers became fed up with the Republican establishment after President Barack Obama’s reelection. After Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s loss, Rebekah Mercer chewed out a room full of party donors at a meeting at New York’s University Club for bungling the election.

In 2013, Caddell showed his polling data to both Robert Mercer and Bannon at a conservative conference in Palm Beach. The donor was so intrigued with the populist trend he would keep Caddell polling data right up to the 2016 election. The results eventually found their way to Roger Stone, who shared them with his longtime confidant, Trump. As the Republican presidential primary season started, Caddell tested the field as potential Mr. Smith upstarts.

“People didn’t think Trump had the temperament to be President,” Caddell told Mayer. “He clearly wasn’t the best Smith, but he was the only Smith.”

The Mercers, born number-crunchers, were impressed with Caddell’s work. When their initial preferred presidential candidate — Ted Cruz — left the campaign trail, the family switched to Trump. And when Trump’s campaign lagged in the middle of the 2016 campaign, the Mercers were quick to push their own associates — Bannon and Conway — into the campaign’s powers structure.

cf cotton cambr anal

town & cty 2x?

...

Robert has spent at least $32 million supporting conservative candidates for office, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. And the Center for Responsive Politics points out that he was one of the largest donors in the 2016 Republican race.

Though

he's not shy about throwing his weight behind conservative causes,

Robert prefers to remain in the background. According to a recent *Wall Street Journal* profile,

the hedge fund titan once told a colleague he preferred the company of

cats to humans. So, it's his more sociable middle daughter who has

become the face of the family, meeting with power players and initiating

deals. She sits on boards of conservative foundations he funds,

including the Heritage Foundation, and has reportedly been seen walking

arm-and-arm with him at events he funds like the Jackson Hole Summit, a

conference promoting the gold standard. Politico just put her as 21 on

their PlayBook Power List.

By Rebekah's most public—and influential—role so

far is as an executive on Trump's 16-person transition executive

committee, which advises the president-elect on Cabinet appointments and

organizing his White House.

A cookie shop for presidents

A decade ago, Rebekah was selling cookies. In 2006, one of her favorite New York bakeries, the tiny Ruby et Violette in Hell's Kitchen, was shutting down, so she and her sisters jumped in to rescue it.

"It was our favorite place for cookies," Heather Sue, an avid poker player, told Fox News.

"We'd get them for parties, weddings, christenings. We'd make up

reasons to get them. Then one night, I'm playing poker at the Borgata

and I get a call that Ruby et Violette is closing." She said she called

her sisters declaring: "We're going to buy a bakery."

This

would be no ordinary bakery. The company no longer maintains a

storefront; now based in Queens, according to its LinkedIn page, it

delivers—and counts Bill Clinton and George W. Bush among its fans. In

fact, both former presidents sent personal thank you letters, posted on

the bakery's website.

"Dear Jenji, Bekah, and Heather Sure: Laura and I were delighted to

receive your cookies," starts the hand-signed note from Bush. "Thank you

for all the delicious gourmet cookies — they were gone fast! You were

kind to send them, and I appreciate your thoughtfulness," reads the

Clinton letter. According to Bloomberg, billionaire conservative

activists Charles and David Koch's Virginia-based nonprofit Freedom

Brothers also caters events with their cookies.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

It's no wonder politicians fawn over the treats.

With pockets as deep as the Mercers, it doesn't hurt to try to curry

favor however you can.

The Mercers weren't

always this rich. Rebekah, known as Bekah to friends, grew up in

Yorktown, Westchester, with older sister Jenji and younger sibling

Heather Sue. At the time, Robert worked at IBM.

"Rebekah

is not a Marie Antoinette," Amity Shlaes, a member of the Calvin

Coolidge Presidential Foundation board, which gets Mercer funding, told *The Washington Post*.

"Her father was a research scientist at IBM. Her family did well late.

She understands what it means to make economic decisions."

Rebekah is not a Marie Antoinette. She understands what it means to make economic decisions.

The big Mercer money came when Robert began working

for the ultra-mysterious Renaissance Technologies hedge fund on Long

Island in 1993. In 2009, Robert became the co-CEO of Renaissance, which

author Sebastian Mallaby called "perhaps the most successful hedge fund

ever" in his 2011 book [More Money Than God](https://www.amazon.com/More-Money-Than-God-Relations/dp/0143119419?tag=townandcountry_auto-append-20&ascsubtag=[artid|10067.a.9204[src|[ch|).

Robert and his wife Diana moved into an extravagant

Long Island mansion, which they dubbed "Owl's Nest," closer to the

Renaissance offices. The home is so palatial, the family created Owl's

Nest Inc., a company used to manage household staff. In 2013,

the service staff sued Robert for allegedly penalizing them for doing

things like failing to close a door or not refilling the shampoo. The

case was dismissed a few months later and appears to have been quietly settled.

While

her father climbed the ranks at Renaissance, Rebekah attended Stanford

University from 1994 to1997, studying biology, mathematics and

operations research, according to her LinkedIn page. (Though her degrees

come from Stanford, she also lists four years spent at Cornell from

1991 to 1994.)

At Stanford, Rebekah met her future husband, French-born Sylvain Mirochnikoff, according to The Washington Post.

Mirochnikoff has gone on to become a managing director at Morgan

Stanley. Rebekah flirted with finance as well, working a short stint on

Wall Street after Stanford, according to reports.

The

couple went on to have four children, and it's been reported that today

Rebekah homeschools them. But Rebekah and her husband have donated to a

foundation for Manhattan's elite Dwight School, as indicated by the

organization's annual reports. And in a 2012 newsletter for the

bilingual Ecole Internationale de New York, Rebekah praised the school,

saying:

"My

husband is French, and his entire family lives in Paris. Our children

require fluency in French so that they can understand their heritage and

converse with their relatives … We couldn't ask for a better school for

our children."

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Rebekah and Mirochnikoff's paper trail of donations

and real estate give a peek into their intensely private Manhattan

life. The pair donates regularly to the Frick Collection, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and the Central Park

Conservancy. They've even made gifts to GLAAD, according to the

organization's annual reports.

Still, while they

were making a name for themselves in donor circles, the Mercers managed

to stay unknown to the general public for years. In 2015, they began

making headlines when they connected with then-Texas Senator Ted Cruz. A

Page Six article

highlights a party at Rebekah and Mirochnikoff's $28 million apartment

in the 41-story Heritage at Trump Place on the Upper West Side (they

bought six apartments and combined them, according to public records).

The event was in honor of Cruz, whose defeat in the 2016 Republican

primaries would lead them straight to Trump.

Bringing Steve Bannon Into the Fold

Until

2006, Rebekah was registered as an independent. Since becoming a

Republican, she has, according to the Center for Responsive Politics,

supported a wide range of conservative politicians, from Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and junior Nebraska Ben Sasse to

businesspeople-turned-presidential candidates Carly Fiorina and Herman

Cain....

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/02/06/climate-science-deniers-new-york-american-museum-natural-history-rebekah-mercer

With friends like climate science deniers and alt-right megaphones like Breitbart, you have to wonder whether New York’s iconic American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) needs any enemies right now.

As the New York Times and others are reporting, the museum is facing calls from hundreds of scientists, its own curators, campaigners, and the public to drop rich benefactor and major Trump funder and ally Rebekah Mercer from its board of trustees.

As DeSmog reported in 2017, the foundation of the billionaire Mercer family has given millions to the museum, with latest figures putting their generosity at $3.8 million since 2013.

Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, heads the Mercer Family Foundation that has also been giving millions to climate science denial groups, including the notorious Heartland Institute.

But now the museum finds itself in the unenviable position of being defended, perhaps not surprisingly, by the Mercer-funded hyper-partisan outlet Breitbart and climate science denial characters from other Mercer-funded groups.

Deniers on the Defense

In a typically verbose screed on Breitbart, climate science denier James Delingpole called the scientists who had signed a letter protesting Mercer’s presence “basically frauds” and “imbeciles.”

Now climate science deniers have begun to circulate their own “open letter” calling for the AMNH to keep Mercer on the board and “not to cave in to this pressure.”

The letter reads: “The Earth has supported abundant life many times in the geological past when there were much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is quite likely that future generations will benefit from the enrichment of Earth’s atmosphere with more carbon dioxide.

“Make no mistake, the agitators are not defending science from quackery — quite the contrary!”

That statement itself is contradicted by every major scientific institution in the world and thousands of scientific studies over many decades.

Many of that letter’s signers are affiliated with groups funded by Mercer’s family foundation in recent years. There’s retired Professor Will Happer of the CO2 Coalition; Richard Lindzen, a fellow at the Cato Institute; and Craig Idso, the chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

In a footnote, the letter states: “The views represented in this letter are those of the individual signatories and not the institutions they are affiliated with. Institutions are listed simply for identification purposes.”

The first signatory is Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the University of Pennsylvania.

Marketing professor Armstrong has spoken at several Heartland Institute conferences and was handed a “lifetime achievement” award at the institute’s March 2017 conference in Washington D.C.

The Mercer’s family foundation, which Rebekah leads, has given some $5.78 million to Heartland since 2008. Both Rebekah and father Robert attended Heartland’s D.C conference and have recently extended their funding to other anti-science groups.

As DeSmog reported, at the D.C conference Armstrong compared the apparently heroic work of climate science deniers to New York’s brave 9/11 firefighters.

Many of the names on the pro-Mercer petition have also signed numerous other letters denying the risks of human-caused climate change.

Pro-Science Petition Spammed

What’s more, it appears that some have targeted the pro-science public petition calling for Mercer's removal — which is separate from the open letter signed by scientists — by adding fake names.

In a statement, Beka Economopoulos of the Natural History Museum, a mobile science museum which is helping co-ordinate the letters, and petitions, said:

“There have been about a dozen fake names added to the public sign-on list, ranging from the inventor of the steam engine James Watt, to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

“It’s not clear if the names were added as a simple prank or in a deliberate attempt to damage our credibility, but either way we quickly removed them and are keeping a close eye to ensure only legitimate names are added. It’s sad that people will go so far to protect Rebekah Mercer as to invoke the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, but here we are.”

The museum’s famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is known for his impassioned attacks on climate science deniers.

In 2017 when DeSmog asked Tyson about the Mercers' financial support, he stressed how his position showed the independence of science from funding, but added: “All knowledge has value, especially knowledge of how people distort knowledge.”

In response to questions about the current protests, Tyson told DeSmog: “I have nothing to add or subtract from my previous correspondence with you on this matter.”

charlie rose

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mercers/

Last December, about a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rebekah Mercer arrived at Stephen Bannon’s office in Trump Tower, wearing a cape over a fur-trimmed dress and her distinctive diamond-studded glasses. Tall and imposing, Rebekah, known to close friends as Bekah, is the 43-year-old daughter of the reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer. If Trump was an unexpected victor, the Mercers were unexpected kingmakers. More established names in Republican politics, such as the Kochs and Paul Singer, had sat out the general election. But the Mercers had committed millions of dollars to a campaign that often seemed beyond salvaging.

That support partly explains how Rebekah secured a spot on the executive committee of the Trump transition team. She was the only megadonor to frequent Bannon’s sanctum, a characteristically bare-bones space containing little more than a whiteboard, a refrigerator and a conference table. Unlike the other offices, it also had a curtain so no one could see what was happening inside. Before this point, Rebekah’s resume had consisted of a brief run trading stocks and bonds (including at her father’s hedge fund), a longer stint running her family’s foundation and, along with her two sisters, the management of an online gourmet cookie shop called Ruby et Violette. Now, she was compiling lists of potential candidates for a host of official positions, the foot soldiers who would remake (or unmake) the United States government in Trump’s image.

Rebekah wasn’t a regular presence at Trump Tower. She preferred working from her apartment in Trump Place, which was in fact six separate apartments that she and her husband had combined into an opulent property more than twice the size of Gracie Mansion. Still, it quickly became clear to her new colleagues that she wasn’t content just to chip in with ideas. She wanted decision-making power. To her peers on the executive committee, she supported Alabama senator Jeff Sessions for attorney general and General Michael Flynn for national security adviser, but argued against naming Mitt Romney secretary of state. Her views on these matters were heard, according to several people on and close to the transition leadership. Rebekah was less successful when she lobbied hard for John Bolton, the famously hawkish former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to be deputy secretary of state. And when Bolton was not named to any position, she made her displeasure known. “I know it sounds sexist, but she was whiny as hell,” says one person who watched her operate. Almost everyone interviewed for this article, supporters and detractors alike, described her style as far more forceful than that of other powerful donors.

Rebekah Mercer is rarely photographed. However, occasionally she can be found in the background of news photos, uncredited in the captions. Here she is arriving at Trump Tower on December 8, with Nick Ayers and Kellyanne Conway.

But then the Mercers aren’t typical donors in most senses beyond their extreme wealth. (The exact number of their billions is unknown.) Robert Mercer is a youthful-looking 70. As a boy growing up in New Mexico, he carried around a notebook filled with computer programs he had written. “It’s very unlikely that any of them actually worked,” he has said. “I didn’t get to use a real computer until after high school.” Robert went on to work for decades at IBM, where he had a reputation as a brilliant computer scientist. He made his vast fortune in his 50s, after his work on predicting financial markets led to his becoming co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful quantitative hedge funds. Alongtime colleague, David Magerman, recalls that when Robert began working at Renaissance in 1993, he and his wife, Diana, were “grounded, sweet people.” (Magerman was suspended from Renaissance in February after making critical comments about Robert in The Wall Street Journal.) But “money changed all that,” he says. “Diana started jetting off to Europe and flying to their yacht on weekends. The girls were used to getting what they wanted.”

At Renaissance, Robert was an eccentric among eccentrics. The firm is legendary for shunning people with Wall Street or even conventional finance backgrounds, instead favoring scientists and original thinkers.Robert himself, by all accounts, is extremely introverted. Rarely seen in public, he likes to spend his free time with his wife and three daughters. When, in 2014, Robert accepted an award from the Association for Computational Linguistics, he recalled, in a soft voice and with quiet humor, his consternation at being informed that he was expected to give “an oration on some topic or another for an hour, which, by the way, is more than I typically talk in a month.” Sebastian Mallaby’s account of the hedge-fund elite, More Money Than God, describes him as an “icy cold” poker player who doesn’t remember having a nightmare. He likes model trains, having once purchased a set for $2.7 million, and has acquired one of the country’s largest collections of machine guns.

For years, Robert has embraced a supercharged libertarianism with idiosyncratic variations. He is reportedly pro-death penalty, pro-life and pro-gold standard. He has contributed to an ad campaign opposing the construction of the ground zero mosque; Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, a group that is associated with fringe scientific claims; and Black Americans for a Better Future—a vehicle, the Intercept discovered, for an African-American political consultant who has accused Barack Obama of “relentless pandering to homosexuals.” Magerman, Robert’s former colleague at Renaissance, recalls him saying, in front of coworkers, words to the effect that “your value as a human being is equivalent to what you are paid. ... He said that, by definition, teachers are not worth much because they aren't paid much.” His beliefs were well-known at the firm, according to Magerman. But since Robert was so averse to publicity, his ideology wasn’t seen as a cause for concern. “None of us ever thought he would get his views out, because he only talked to his cats,” Magerman told me.

Robert’s middle daughter Rebekah shares similar political beliefs, but she is also very articulate and, therefore, able to act as her father’s mouthpiece. (Neither Rebekah nor Robert responded to detailed lists of questions for this article.) Under Rebekah’s leadership, the family foundation poured some $70 million into conservative causes between 2009 and 2014.[1]

According to The Washington Post, the family donated $35 million to conservative think tanks and at least to $36.5 million to individual GOP races. The first candidate they threw their financial weight behind was Arthur Robinson, a chemist from Oregon who was running for Congress. He was best known in his district for co-founding an organization that is collecting thousands of vials of urine as part of an effort it says will “revolutionize the evaluation of personal chemistry.”Robinson didn’t win, but he got closer than expected, and the Mercers got a taste of what their money could do. In 2011, they made one of their most consequential investments: a reported $10 million in a new right-wing media operation called Breitbart.

“I DON’T KNOW ANY OF YOUR FANCY FRIENDS,” ROBERT MERCER TOLD SHELDON ADELSON, “AND I HAVEN’T GOT ANY INTEREST IN KNOWING THEM.”

That the family gravitated toward Andrew Breitbart’s upstart website was no accident. The Mercers are “purists,” says Pat Caddell, a former aide to Jimmy Carter who has shifted to the right over the years. They believe Republican elites are too cozy with Wall Street and too soft on immigration, and that American free enterprise and competition are in mortal danger. “Bekah Mercer might be prepared to put a Democrat in Susan Collins’ seat simply to rid the party of Susan Collins,” a family friend joked by way of illustrating her thinking. So intensely do the Mercers want to unseat Republican senator John McCain[2]

Some have speculated that McCain may have angered the Mercers in 2014, when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, on which McCain was the ranking member at the time, asserted that Renaissance had used complex financial methods to underestimate its taxes by $6 billion. Renaissance has told The New York Times its tax practices are lawful. that they gave $200,000 to support an opposing candidate who once held a town hall meeting to discuss chemtrails—chemicals, according to a long-standing conspiracy theory, that the federal government is spraying on the public without its knowledge. In short, unlike other donors, the Mercers are not merely angling to influence the Republican establishment—they want to obliterate it. One source told me that, in a meeting with Sheldon Adelson and Robert Mercer a few years ago, the casino mogul asked Robert if he was familiar with certain big Republican players. According to the source, Robert shut him down. “I don’t know any of your fancy friends,” he replied, “and I haven’t got any interest in knowing them.”

And so it seemed almost inevitable that their paths converged with Bannon’s when he took over Breitbart in 2012. The Mercers recognized Bannon as an ideological ally. They also appreciated how quickly he improved the website’s finances. Unlike many people in their orbit, Bannon wasn't obsequious: According to one person who often spends time with them, he made zero effort to dress up around his benefactors, often appearing in sweatpants and “looking almost like a homeless person.” Bannon was respectful around Robert, says this person, but with Rebekah he was more apt to say precisely what he thought: “He worked for Bob; he worked with Rebekah.”

Although the Mercers had initially been persuaded to back Texas senator Ted Cruz in the Republican primary, Bannon preferred Trump, and by the time of the Republican National Convention theMercers were with him. Rebekah made her move last August, at a fundraiser at the East Hampton estate of Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets. According to two sources, one who strategized with the Mercers and another who worked closely with Trump, Rebekah insisted on a 30-minute face-to-face meeting with Trump, in which she informed him that his campaign was a disaster. (Her family had pledged $2 million to the effort about a month earlier, so she felt comfortable being frank.) Trump, who knew her slightly, was willing to listen. He had been disturbed by recent stories detailing disorganization in his campaign and alleging ties between Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and pro-Russia officials in Ukraine. Rebekah knew of this and arrived at her meeting with “props,” says the source who strategized with the Mercers: printouts of news articles about Manafort and Russia that she brandished as evidence that he had to go. And she also had a solution in mind: Trump should put Bannon in charge of the campaign and hire the pollster Kellyanne Conway.[3]

Conway had worked for the Mercers' super PAC.

By the following morning, Rebekah was breakfasting at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with the two people he trusts most, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, to talk through the proposal in more detail. Within four days, Trump did exactly as Rebekah had advised. Manafort was out. Bannon was in charge. Trump also brought on David Bossie, the president of Citizens United, with whom the Mercers and Bannon had been close for years. Less than four months later, Mercer's handpicked team had pulled off one of the greatest upsets in American politics. Through a bizarre combination of daring and luck, the insurgents had won. Now, they were Trump’s version of the establishment—which is to say, a very volatile one.

(From left to right) Patrick Caddell, Stephen Bannon, Lee and Alice Hanley

On July Fourth weekend in 2014, members of the Mercer clan (Robert, Rebekah and her husband, Sylvain Mirochnikoff) went to visit some new friends. They traveled on Robert’s 203-foot luxury superyacht, the Sea Owl, and anchored just off the WASP enclave of Fishers Island in New York’s Long Island Sound. Their destination, a medieval-style granite castle called White Caps, towered over the shoreline.This was the summer home of Lee and Alice Hanley, Reagan conservatives who’d made their fortune in Texas oil and gas but lived mostly between Greenwich, Connecticut, and Palm Beach, Florida. Like the Mercers, the Hanleys were convinced that the American political establishment was rotten to its foundations. Unlike the Mercers, though, they were popular and vigorous socialites. They loved to entertain and to act as connectors between politicians and donors in their assorted properties, even on their private jet.

That holiday weekend, Lee Hanley revisited the subject of a poll he’d commissioned in 2013 from Pat Caddell, a longtime friend. Hanley had wanted to truly understand the mood of the country and Caddell had returned with something called the “Smith Project.” The nickname alluded to the Jimmy Stewart movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” because its results were so clear: Americans were hungry for an outsider. It didn’t matter whether the candidate came from the left or the right; voters just wanted somebody different.They had lost all faith in the ruling class—the government, the media, Wall Street. “It showed the entire blow-up of the country coming,” Caddell told me. “A whole new paradigm developing.”

No Republican had yet emerged as a front-runner in the 2016 primary, but the Hanleys believed Ted Cruz could take Caddell’s insights and ride them all the way to the White House. They saw Cruz as a unicorn: a dedicated fiscal and social conservative who had broken with his party repeatedly. They were dismissive of Trump. “He doesn't understand politics or geopolitics or anything about the running of the government,” Alice Hanley told me recently.

REBEKAH MERCER SAW THE KOCH NETWORK AS HOPELESSLY SOFT ON TRADE AND IMMIGRATION AND WAS HUNGRY FOR A WAY TO PROMOTE HER OWN MORE HARD-LINE IDEOLOGY.

Robert Mercer and Cruz had met before during a conference in February 2014, when Lee Hanley had invited them to the five-diamond Breakers resort in Palm Beach for a grilling session. Robert was impressed by Cruz’s intellect, according to a person at the meeting, but worried that the 43-year-old senator was too young and might struggle to capture voters’ imaginations. Still, Robert warmed to him over the course of many weekends at various Hanley homes. Apparently, Cruz can hold his alcohol (his preference is cabernet), which is a prized attribute in the Hanleys’ circle.

As the Mercers weighed whether to get involved in a presidential race, their calculus was quite different from that of other megadonors, most of whom run massive corporate empires. Various people who have worked with the Mercers on campaigns told me they didn’t pressure their candidates to adopt policies that would benefit the family’s financial interests, such as favorable regulations for hedge funds. Instead, their mission was a systemic one. Steve Hantler, a friend of Rebekah’s, says she was determined to “disrupt the consultant class,” which she saw as wasteful and self-serving. She wanted to disrupt the conservative movement, too. Rebekah saw the Koch network as hopelessly soft on trade and immigration and was hungry for a mechanism to promote a more hard-line ideology. According to Politico and other sources, she was frustrated at the time that no one was taking her seriously. As it happened, however, the family owned what seemed to be an ideal vehicle for achieving her goals.

Around 2012, Robert Mercer reportedly invested $5 million in a British data science company named SCL Group. Most political campaigns run highly sophisticated micro-targeting efforts to locate voters. SCL promised much more, claiming to be able to manipulate voter behavior through something called psychographic modeling. This was precisely the kind of work Robert valued. “There’s no data like more data,” he likes to say. Robert had made his money by accumulating piles of data on human behavior (markets might move in a certain direction when it rains in Paris, for instance), in order to make extremely precise and lucrative financial bets. Similarly, SCL claimed to be able to formulate complex psychological profiles of voters.These, it said, would be used to tailor the most persuasive possible message, acting on that voter’s personality traits, hopes or fears. The firm has worked on campaigns in Argentina, Kenya, Ghana, Indonesia and Thailand; the Pentagon has used it to conduct surveys in Iran and Afghanistan. Best of all, from the Mercers’ perspective, SCL operated entirely outside the GOP apparatus.(A source close to Rebekah said she wanted a “results-oriented” consultant.) As Rebekah saw it, SCL would allow the Mercers to control the data operation of any campaign they supported, giving the family enormous influence over messaging and strategy.

And it would be Rebekah who would actually carry out this plan. Robert preferred to focus on his work at Renaissance, often operating from his Long Island mansion, Owl’s Nest. “He wouldn’t look under the hood, because that’s not what he does,” says Bob Perkins, one of Caddell’s associates who worked on the Smith Project. Besides, Rebekah was the political animal in the family. (Her older sister Jenji has practiced law; her younger sister Heather Sue is, like Robert, a competitive poker player).

This was a relatively new phenomenon. Rebekah isn't known to have been particularly political earlier in adulthood, while gaining a master’s degree in management science and engineering from Stanford, or in early motherhood. (She has four children with her French-born husband, who became an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.) But, after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which significantly loosened restrictions on political spending, Rebekah decided it was time to “save America from becoming like socialist Europe,” as she has put it to several people.She started attending Koch events and donating to the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Arizona. The family’s political advocacy accelerated rapidly. It was in 2012 that she really attracted attention in GOP circles when, not long after Mitt Romney lost the presidential race, she stood up before a crowd of Romney supporters at the University Club of New York and delivered a scathing but detailed diatribe about his inadequate data and canvassing operation. “Who is that woman?” people in attendance asked.

With SCL, Rebekah finally had the chance to prove she could do better. The company’s American branch was renamed Cambridge Analytica, to emphasize the pedigree of its behavioral scientists. And Rebekah started flying Alexander Nix, the firm’s Old Etonian CEO, around the country to introduce him to her contacts. Nix, 41, is not a data scientist (his background is in financial services), but he is a showy salesman. Dressed in impeccably tailored suits, he is in his element on stage making presentations at large conferences. He can, however, come across as arrogant. (“I love the fact that you're telling your story, but I'm the one giving the interview,” he told me in a conversation.)

Alexander Nix at Cambridge Analytica's New York office. Rebekah Mercer was impressed by Nix's command of data and artistry on the polo field.

According to Perkins and Caddell, Rebekah and Nix met with them a few times to discuss how CA could use the Smith Project. Rebekah was clearly impressed by Nix. In one meeting, according to Perkins, she gushed about his polo prowess and asked him to show off cellphone photos of himself on horseback. (Nix says he doesn’t recall this meeting or others with the three. He also doesn’t remember displaying such a picture and can “think of no good reason why Bob or Pat would be interested in horses.") The political veterans were skeptical. “I didn’t understand what Nix was talking about,” Perkins told me bluntly. Caddell says he was perplexed when Nix wouldn’t show him the instruments CA used to predict voter behavior. He also thought the firm didn’t grasp the seismic shift underway in American politics. And yet to his great surprise, Bannon vouched for CA, telling Caddell its scientists were “geniuses.” Caddell knew that Bannon was beholden to the Mercers—they were, after all, Breitbart’s part-owners. According to The New York Times, however, Bannon was also vice president of CA’s board. “Even if he did not have a financial investment, he intellectually owned it, which was invaluable,” says a fellow political strategist. After he learned of Bannon’s involvement, Caddell stopped asking Bannon questions about CA.

In the end, Bannon helped seal the deal between the Mercers and Cruz, with CA as the glue. In the fall of 2014, Toby Neugebauer, a garrulous oil-and-gas billionaire from Texas, took Cruz and his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, to the “Breitbart Embassy,” the website’s Washington headquarters near the Capitol. Bannon flitted in and out. Nix, as usual, did most of the talking. After Neugebauer and Roe visited SCL’s London headquarters, the Cruz team agreed that CA could play a key role in their operation, running models and helping with research. However, it was made clear to Rebekah and Nix that the entire data analytics operation would be supervised by Chris Wilson, CEO of the research firm WPA. A source close to Cruz told me that Wilson’s operation had played a crucial role when Cruz ran for the Senate with only 2 percent name recognition in Texas and defeated a far better-known opponent. Why, then, was CA necessary at all? “No one ever said directly that the quid pro quo for hiring CA was that the Mercers would support Cruz,” says someone close to Roe. Nevertheless, after CA was engaged, Neugebauer took a private jet to the Bahamas to meet Robert Mercer on the Sea Owl. When Neugebauer asked him to donate to Cruz’s bid, Robert was matter-of-fact. The family would start with $11 million.

(Clockwise, starting top right) Jeff Roe, Ted Cruz, Alexander Nix

All modern political campaigns have to balance their need for exorbitant sums of money with the obsessions of the people who want to give them that money. Roe, the straight-talking manager of the Cruz operation, has observed that running a campaign is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube of complicated personalities and uncomfortable dependencies. He has also told people that he is careful not to get too close to the donors who make his campaigns possible, because they can be so easily annoyed by the most trivial of things—his laugh, for instance, or the way he eats a bread roll.

In the case of the Cruz campaign, the donor obsession in question was Cambridge Analytica. And it wasn’t long before Roe and his team suspected that Nix had promised them a more impressive product than he could deliver. On March 4, 2015, Cruz, Roe, Wilson and others gathered in the Hyatt in Washington D.C. for an all-day meeting with Nix and a group of CA senior executives. Wilson took notes on his computer. According to multiple members of the Cruz team, Wilson was dismayed to learn that CA’s models weren’t fully ready for his focus groups the following week. As far as the team could tell, the only data CA possessed that the campaign didn’t already have appeared to be culled from Facebook. In addition, they recalled, CA hadn’t set itself up with Data Trust, the Republican National Committee’s repository of voter information. At one point, they recall, Nix explained that the National Rifle Association’s database of members would be a valuable way to target donors. Wilson typed an emoji with rolling eyes next to the statement because it was so obvious. He told people that he came away thinking, “Red flag, red flag, red flag.”

In response to an extensive set of questions, Nix disputed this account of the meeting. He denied that Cambridge Analytica had obtained any data via Facebook—a source of controversy for the firm ever since The Guardian reported in 2015 that CA based its data on research “spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission.” Nix also claimed that it was the Cruz team that didn’t have access to the RNC’s Data Trust for much of the cycle and that “all data used for the majority of the campaign was provided by Cambridge Analytica.” However, Mike Shields, then the RNC’s chief of staff and Data Trust’s senior adviser, told me the Cruz campaign was in fact the second to sign an agreement with Data Trust, in 2014.

Meanwhile, the red flags kept coming. Wilson found the data scientists that CA sent to Houston to be highly efficient at the day-to-day work of his research operation. But according to Cruz staffers, when he began to test CA’s specialized models, he found that they were notably off, with, for example, some male voters miscategorized as women. In phone surveys, staffers said, CA’s predictions fell short of the 85 percent accuracy the campaign expected. (“Different models have differing levels of accuracy,” Nix said in his response. “I suspect these numbers have been taken out of context to make us look bad. In many previous articles the Cruz campaign have highly rated the quality of our data scientists.”) By September, CA’s first six-month contract was up. A CA employee in the campaign’s Houston office accidentally left the invoice in the photocopier, and Wilson happened to fish it out. The invoice totaled an eye-popping $3,119,052 for work that Wilson estimated to be worth $600,000 at most. “I can’t fucking believe it,” Wilson told Roe, who concurred.

Jeff Roe (left) with Ted Cruz (right), who ultimately fell out of Rebekah Mercer's favor. “We felt to some extent she was being manipulated by Bannon," a Cruz adviser said.

Nix disputed this account too, noting that the firm’s fee was “clearly stated in our statement of work and contract.” However, a former consultant for the campaign, Tommy Sears, attended budget meetings “for two if not three days” over the matter. “There was an understanding between both parties that the totality of the contract through March 2016 would be $5.5 million,” he says. “The heartburn felt by the Cruz team was that over $3 million had already been spent by September 1, 2015.”

When the Cruz team decided not to pay the full $3 million, bedlam ensued. A phone call was scheduled with Rebekah, Bannon and CA’s attorney. “I understand she’s a nice lady,” Wilson says politely of Rebekah. According to multiple people on the call, she accused Wilson of undermining CA. Bannon, meanwhile, unleashed a torrent of profanities at the Cruz team. Someone on the call gave me a censored version of his outburst: “The only reason this campaign is where it is right now is because of our people and I. My recommendation to the Mercers is just to pull them out of there and we’ll have them on another campaign by Monday.” Bannon’s language was so foul it was difficult to listen to, says one person on the call who had never met him before. Another of the political pros, who knew Bannon well, wasn’t shocked. “That’s Steve doing business,” he says.

The Cruz team was taken aback by Rebekah’s reaction. Some even wondered if she’d been given all the facts. One person who was close to the campaign says, “She is somewhere between the daughter of a brilliant hedge fund manager and mathematician and somebody who runs a bakery in New York. She clearly has a skill set, but the skill set we’re discussing here regarding the understanding of the value of data and analytics doesn’t fall into that area. She is operating under the information she’s been given.”

“IF REBEKAH MERCER WAS BROKE AND WASN’T A MAJOR DONOR IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY,” SAYS A CRUZ ADVISER, “NOBODY WOULD SPEND TWO SECONDS TRYING TO KNOW HER… SHE’S NOT FUN. SHE’S JUST LIKE A SERIES OF AMOEBA CELLS.”

The two sides were also diverging ideologically. In the summer of 2015, according to two sources, Rebekah reprimanded Cruz for an April article he’d co-authored with House Speaker Paul Ryan in The Wall Street Journal in support of free trade. She and Bannon told Cruz that he should adopt the positions of Jeff Sessions, whose views on trade and immigration were more in line with the conservative base. By this time, Cruz and his team were becoming increasingly concerned about Bannon’s relationship with Rebekah. Bannon (who declined to comment for this article) was now blatantly pro-Trump. Over the course of the primary, Breitbart would publish around 60 pieces disputing that Cruz was eligible to be president because he had been born in Canada. Cruz repeatedly called Rebekah to complain, but she insisted that she had to be “fair and impartial.” One of his advisers says, “We felt to some extent she was being manipulated by Bannon.” A person close to Bannon counters: “There's absolutely no way anyone could manipulate Rebekah Mercer."

After the first debate in South Carolina, Rebekah gave Cruz a “dressing down” on his performance, according to three sources. “Given what was going on around him—and what he must have truly felt—he behaved like an absolute gentleman,” says a person close to Cruz. Rebekah was incensed that Trump had a tougher immigration policy than Cruz did—she particularly liked Trump’s idea for a total ban on Muslims. Subsequently, Cruz proposed a 180-day suspension on all H1-B visas.

Meanwhile, even though the Cruz staffers generally got along well with their CA counterparts—they sometimes took the visitors country-western dancing —the firm remained a source of friction. In retrospect, Wilson told people, he believed that Nix resented the campaign for allocating work through a competitive bidding process, rather than favoring CA. Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Wilson assigned a contract to a firm called Targeted Victory. CA then locked its data in the cloud so it couldn’t be accessed by Roe’s team. The data remained unavailable until, a Cruz campaign source said, it was pretty much too late to be useful. Cruz won the Iowa caucuses anyway.

The Cruz operation became so fed up with Nix that they pushed back, hard, on CA’s bill for its second six-month contract. Wilson was able to negotiate the fees down after, as Cruz staffers recalled, a CA representative accidentally emailed him a spreadsheet documenting the Houston team’s salaries. (Nix said CA had intended to send the spreadsheet.) Still, the campaign wound up paying nearly $6 million to CA—which represented almost half of the money the Mercers had pledged to spend on Cruz’s behalf.

The acrimony lingered long after Cruz exited the race in May. When he decided not to endorse Trump at the GOP convention, the Mercers publicly rebuked him. In a statement, Cruz was diplomatic: “We were delighted to work with Cambridge Analytica, they were a valuable asset to my campaign, and any rumors to the contrary are completely unfounded.” (The source close to Rebekah added, “I was with Rebekah the other day and Ted Cruz was falling all over her. It’s not fair to blame CA's methodology for Cruz's loss.”) Others from Cruz’s team, however, remain bitter about the whole experience. “If Rebekah Mercer was broke and wasn’t a major donor in the Republican Party,” says one, “nobody would spend two seconds trying to know her. … She’s not fun. She’s just like a series of amoeba cells.”

(Clockwise, starting bottom left) The Mercers, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, David Bossie, Stephen Bannon, Jared Kushner

One of the great challenges in reporting this story was that almost every single person in Trump’s orbit claims sole credit for his extraordinary victory on November 8. The multiplying narratives of his win can be difficult to untangle, but it istrue that his operation ran somewhat more smoothly after Rebekah Mercer helped to replace Manafort with Bannon. This wasn’t necessarily because Bannon himself was a particularly deft manager—he much preferred to focus on big-picture strategy, especially Trump’s messaging in rallies. Most of the details were left to his deputy, David Bossie—at least until October, when Bossie and Trump got into an argument over Trump’s impetuousness on Twitter and Bossie was kicked off the campaign plane, according to multiple sources. But one undeniable benefit of having Bannon in charge was that Rebekah trusted him.

Bannon, several sources said, can be charming when he chooses to be. And he has a record of successfully cultivating wealthy patrons for his various endeavors over the years. At the same time, certain of his ventures have involved high drama. The most spectacular example is the Biosphere 2, a self-contained ecological experiment under a giant dome in the Arizona desert that was funded by the billionaire Texan Ed Bass. Hired as a financial adviser in the early 1990s, Bannon returned in 1994 and used a court order to take over the project, following allegations that it was being mismanaged. He showed up one weekend along with “a small army of U.S. marshals holding guns, followed by a posse of businessmen in suits, a corporate battalion of investment bankers, accountants, PR people, and secretaries,” according to a history of the project called Dreaming the Biosphere. In an effort to thwart Bannon’s takeover, some of the scientists broke the seal of the dome, endangering the experiment.

Because of his relationship with the Mercers, Bannon was able to avoid some of the tensions over Cambridge Analytica that had plagued the Cruz campaign. Before taking the job, he phoned Brad Parscale, a 41-year-old San Antonio web designer who had made websites for the Trump family for years. Although Parscale had never worked in politics before, he now found himself in charge of Trump’s entire data operation. According to multiple sources, Parscale told Bannon that he had been hauled into an unexpected meeting with Alexander Nix earlier that summer. Parscale, who is fiercely proud of his rural Kansas roots, immediately disliked the polished Briton. He informed Nix he wasn’t interested in CA’s psychographic modeling. Parscale and Bannon quickly bonded, seeing each other as fellow outsiders and true Trump loyalists. Bannon told Parscale: “I don't care how you get it done—get it done. Use CA as much or as little as you want.” Parscale did ultimately bring on six CA staffers for additional support within his data operation. But he had his own theory[4]

Parscale has told people that the campaign’s previous models had been based on high turnout figures. “I started to run models with lower turnout which looked like the midterm elections of 2014,” he has said. “I mapped out how, based on that, we could get to 305 electoral college votes.” Trump got 304. of how Trump could secure victory—in the final weeks, he advised Trump to visit Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, three states no one thought Trump could take. The campaign never used CA’s psychographic methodology, as a CA staffer who worked on the campaign later publicly acknowledged at a Google panel.

For the most part, Rebekah kept a low profile during the last phase of the election. On the few occasions that she appeared at Trump Tower, she sat in Bannon’s 14th-floor office. “Most people had no idea who she even was,” says one person who was there regularly. “The idea that she was on the phone to Trump or anyone all the time, that’s nonsense,” says a different source from the transition. The Mercers did intervene when a tape surfaced of Trump bragging to NBC’s Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women—by making a rare statement in Trump’s defense. In a statement to The Washington Post, they said: “If Mr. Trump had told Billy Bush, whoever that is, earlier this year that he was for open borders, open trade and executive actions in pursuit of gun control, we would certainly be rethinking our support for him. …. We are completely indifferent to Mr. Trump’s locker room braggadocio.”

Bannon in the East Wing of the White House on January 22, with Mercer (uncredited) in the background. ANDREW HARRER-POOL/GETTY IMAGES

On election night at Trump Tower, Robert Mercer was nowhere to be seen. Rebekah was in Bannon’s office. Staffers and Trump children wandered in and out of Parscale’s office, because he was usually the first person to have any actual information. Parscale, unlike almost everyone else, including Trump’s children, was convinced his boss was going to win. Trump himself remained glued to the television, refusing to believe anything until victory was officially declared. No one I talked to recalls where Rebekah was in the blur of the celebration.

But people certainly remember her presence during the transition. One night, Rebekah called Trump and told him he absolutely had to make Bannon his White House chief of staff. Trump himself later described the phone call—in a manner an observer characterized as affectionately humorous—to a crowd of about 400 people at the Mercers’ annual costume party at Robert’s mansion on December 3. This year’s theme: “Heroes and Villains.” A guest recalls that Rebekah was dressed in something “that fitted her very well, with holsters.” To the gathering, Trump recounted being woken up at around midnight— Rebekah told friends it was around 10 p.m.—and being bewildered by the late-night tirade. “Rebekah who?” he eventually asked. Everyone laughed,” says the observer. As it happened, Bannon didn’t actually want to be chief of staff, believing himself to be ill-suited to the role. He was named chief strategist instead.

Rebekah had more than personnel decisions on her mind, however. She was particularly focused on what was referred to on the transition as the “outside group.” After the election, it was widely agreed that the GOP needed a nonprofit arm, supported by major donors, to push the president’s agenda across the country, much as the Obama team had set up Organizing for America in 2009.The most important component of any organization like this is its voter database, since it can be used to seek donations and mobilize supporters behind the president’s initiatives. Rebekah wanted CA to be the data engine, which would essentially give her control of the group. And if the venture were successful, she would have an influence over the GOP that no donor had ever pulled off. Theoretically, if the president did something she didn’t like, she could marshal his own supporters against him, since it would be her database and her money. A friend of Rebekah explains: “She felt it was her job to hold the people she’d got elected, accountable to keep their promises.”

“I’M EXPECTING TO BE FIRED BY THE SUMMER,” BANNON HAS TOLD FRIENDS.

On December 14, there was a meeting to discuss the outside group in a glass-walled conference room on the 14th floor of Trump Tower. Brad Parscale sat at the head of the table. Around him were roughly 12 people, including Rebekah; Kellyanne Conway; David Bossie; Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer; Jason Miller, then Trump’s senior communications adviser; and Marc Short, Mike Pence’s senior adviser.Parscale was known to be livid that Alexander Nix had gone on a PR blitz after the election, exaggerating CA’s role. Even worse, Parscale had heard that Nix had been telling people, “Brad screwed up. We had to rescue Brad.” (Nix denied this, saying, “Brad did a brilliant job.”)

And so when Rebekah pushed for CA to run the new group’s data operation, Parscale pushed back. “No offense to the Mercers,” he said, according to multiple attendees. “First, this group is about Trump, not about the Mercers. Second, I don’t have a problem with hiring Cambridge, but Cambridge can’t be the center of everything, because that’s not how the campaign ran.” (He did, however, suggest that Rebekah be on the board.) “No offense taken,” Rebekah replied.

But she would subsequently complain about the exchange to Bannon and others, and continued to lobby for CA to be at the center of the new organization. The situation became so testy that before the inauguration, Jared Kushner brought in Steve Hantler, Rebekah’s friend, to referee. Hantler, a quiet, gentlemanly sort, proposed that the venture be led by someone he knew would be acceptable to both sides: Nick Ayers, a senior adviser to Pence. The “outside group” is now named America First Policies. Parscale is a member, and its first national TV ads have appeared. Ayers has also been cultivating a friendship with Donald Trump Jr., who, sources say, may eventually want to lead the group himself.

The Mercers, however, have withdrawn completely. When it came to the question of whether America First should employ CA, it was Parscale’s view that prevailed: CA has no role in the group at all. “Tens beat nines in poker,” says someone involved with the formation of America First, meaning that Parscale’s close rapport with the Trump family carried greater weight than Rebekah’s connection with Bannon. Rebekah’s relationship with Jared and Ivanka is said to be diminished. Nearly every person I spoke to—Trump supporters, Cruz supporters, fellow donors, friends of Rebekah—agreed on one point: to regain some of her standing, she should fire Alexander Nix. (“We are hoping that she reads your piece and does it,” says a person she works with closely.)

On December 19, Rebekah attended a memorial service in Palm Beach for Lee Hanley, who had died four days before the election. Someone who spoke to her there was expecting her to be thrilled about the election and the position she now occupied. Instead, Rebekah was very low, says this person. She complained about John Bolton being passed over.[5]

Mercer seems to have favored Bolton less for his foreign policy predilections and more for his popularity with the base. The family donated at least $3 million in 2015 and 2016 to Bolton’s super PAC, which helped elect a number of conservative congressional candidates. Perhaps not coincidentally, his super PAC paid Cambridge Analytica at least $700,000 in 2014 and 2016, according to FEC filings. She was also said to be furious at the appointment of Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel, to chair the RNC: To Rebekah, McDaniel personified the very GOP establishment that her family had worked so hard to cast out. “She was emotional,” says the person who was there. “She was talking about how there's no rhyme or reason to the people he's appointing, and that Ivanka was acting like first lady, and Melania was very upset about it.” When asked about this, a person very close to Rebekah said, "She thinks Ivanka is wonderful and amazing and she thinks Melania is wonderful and amazing. She's very policy-oriented and not involved in personalities.”

In the end, Rebekah Mercer’s mistake was that she thought she could upend the system and then control the regime she had helped to bring to power. Helping to elect a president wasn’t enough: She wanted the machinery to shape his presidency. Instead, the chaos simply continued. An administration full of insurgents, it turns out, functions in a near-constant state of insurgency.

Bannon is said to be exhausted and stretched. He is largely responsible for the relentless pace of initiatives and executive orders in the early weeks of the administration, because he doesn’t expect to be in the White House forever. “I’m expecting to be fired by the summer,” he has told friends, likening himself to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, who was instrumental in enforcing Britain’s Reformation but ended up being beheaded by his boss. A source close to Bannon says that he may have “joked about being fired,” but disagreed that Bannon is tired: “I don't think he even thinks in those terms. He is used to an intense schedule.” His focus, the source says, “is working for the president to deliver on the promises to the American people for the first 100 days and then beyond on the overall agenda of Making America Great Again.” Bannon returns Rebekah’s phone calls when he can. But, according to someone who knows both well, “relations are strained.” Another person who works with both of them says, “I think Bannon, once he finally built a relationship with Trump, didn't need Rebekah as much … and he doesn't care about that. He only cares about the country.” The source close to Bannon says that Rebekah and the chief strategist remain “close friends and allies.”

As this piece was going to press, several sources warned me not to count Rebekah out. She still has a stake in Breitbart, which holds tremendous sway over Trump’s base and has recently gone on a no-holds-barred offensive against the GOP health care plan. And on March 13, Politico reported that some Trump officials were already disillusioned with America First, which they felt had been slow to provide much-needed cover for his policy initiatives. There was talk of turning instead to a new group being launched by Rebekah Mercer. And so she may yet get another chance to realize her grand ambitions. “She’s used to getting everything she wants, 100 percent of the time,” says another person who knows her well. “Does she like getting 90 percent? No.”

...

Climate Denial Funded

Very little is known about what the Mercers think about climate change or, for that matter, anything else. Both father and daughter avoid media interviews.

But Rebekah has been described as the mostpowerful woman inGOPpolitics and is a pivotal member of the Trump team. Rebekah also runs her father’s charitable foundation.

So, the best way to get a handle on what the Mercers think, is to see where they spend their millions.

DeSmog has analyzed theMercer Family Foundation’s tax returns since 2005 and finds some $22 million has gone to groups pushing climate science denial.

Across the board, the groups funded by the Mercers have misrepresented climate science, promoted fossil fuels, denigrated renewable energy, and pushed to strip powers from theU.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The Chicago-basedHeartland Institutehas received $4,988,000 from the Mercers, cashing its first $1 million check in 2008.

The Heartland Institute holds regular “international climate change conferences” where denialists, fossil fuel-funded scientists, and politicians come together to talk tactics.

In 2012, the institutefamously started a billboard campaignthat used a picture of terrorist Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski next to the phrase: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”

Despite the generosity of the Mercers, the Heartland Institute does not publicly acknowledge the funding, perhaps indicative of the Mercers' desire to stay below the radar.

The Mercer name was even left out of internal Heartland budget documents leaked in 2012. If the Mercers had asked for anonymity, then Heartland’s coyness is not unusual.

Another organization shy about getting cash from the Mercer Family Foundation is the George W. Bush Foundation, the organization set up in 2006 to look after the official archive of the George W. Bush presidency.

The George W. Bush Foundation publishes alengthy list of its financial supportersand the Mercers are not on it. But tax records show the Mercers have given the Bush Foundation $4.1 million since 2010.

Oregon Petition

Alongside funding for Breitbart and the Heartland Institute, Robert Mercer has also spent $1.25 million supporting an obscure group known as theOregon Institute of Science and Medicine, led byArt Robinson.

Robinson was behind a long-debunked “survey” of university graduates, known as theOregon petition. First published in 1998, the petition claimed that 30,000 “scientists” had declared humans were not to blame for global warming.

Robinson also thinks climate change is a hoax. His institute sells nuclear survival manuals, is currentlystockpiling human urine for testing, and sells home schooling kits for parents worried about their children being exposed to socialism.

Robert Mercer alsosupported Art Robinson’s failed 2010 Republican runfor Congress.

As well as Robert and his familydonating to Robinson’s campaign committee,Robert Mercer personally gave $643,750 to a super-PACthat ran attack ads against Robinson’s Democratic opponent(that opponent, Peter DeFazio, hasnoted that he had co-sponsored legislation to tax hedge fund transactions).

view this map on LittleSis

The biggest beneficiary ofMercer Family Foundationcash is theMedia Research Center (MRC), a group which claims credit for convincing Americans that most of the media has a “liberal” bias.

TheMRC’s outlets regularly give favorable coverage to climate science denialism, while ridiculing credentialed climate scientists and others who place a priority on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

MRCalumnus Marc Morano, communications manager atthe Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, recruited his former employer to help him produce the climate science denial documentaryClimate Hustle.Rebekah Mercer is anMRC director.

TheManhattan Institute for Policy Researchis another group on the receiving end of the Mercers' generosity, to the tune of more than $1 million since 2011.

The institute’s researchers tend to argue against renewable energy while promoting fossil fuels and underplaying or ignoring the impacts of climate change.

Rebekah Mercer recently joined the institute’s board of trustees.

TheHeritage Foundationis a relative newcomer to the Mercer family’s giving, but the think tank’s positions on energy, political ideology, and climate science fit the pattern perfectly — underplay and misrepresent the science, promote fossil fuels, and push for low government regulations.

Predictably, Rebekah Mercer is a trustee at Heritage, a think tank seen as influential in the Trump camp. TheTrump team is drawing heavilyfrom Heritage Foundation staff for its transition teams.

On theEPA“landing team”is Heritage’s David Kreutzer, whoclaims the recent run of record-breaking hot years globally is nothing unusual.

Rebekah Mercer is also on the board of the Moving Picture Institute (MPI), a group that helps finance and distribute movies which, according to its website, “make an impact on people's understanding of individual rights, limited government, and free markets.”

MPIeven has a program to support stand-up comedians who promote this “freedom” ideology in their stand-up routines.

...

illegal coordination trump coop pdf

http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/sites/default/files/10-06-16%20RBA%2BMAN1%2BTrump%20final.pdf

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/white-house-propagandist-bannons-gravy-train-secretive-radical-right-wing-billionaire

Trump’s elevation of Breitbart News CEO Stephen Bannon to chief White House strategist is prompting many to ominouslypredictthe Trump presidency will be like the worst of the campaign. But there’s an even more disturbing power play in the works.

Before Bannon turned “Breitbart News into Trump Pravda,” as one ex-Breitbart writerput it, Bannon backed 2016’s darkest ideologue, Republican Ted Cruz. Bannon went all-in for Cruz, not just because of his libertarian economics, but because his patron and ally, the family of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, enlisted him and other Mercer-funded political assets for Cruz.

“Breitbart News was cranking out a stream of favorable Cruz stories,” Politicorecountedin September. “And both the Mercer-backed pro-Cruz super PAC, ‘Keep the Promise I,’ and the Cruz campaign signed up Cambridge Analytica [Mercer's data research firm]. And only hours after the Texas senator officially launched his campaign at the Christian university Liberty University, he and his wife appeared at [daughter] Bekah Mercer’s extravagant Upper West Side apartment for a fundraiser.”

The Mercers, led by Rebekah, didn’t quit after Cruz's bid failed. They met with Trump’s children and the nominee, and in August their team, including Bannon and pollster Kellyanne Conway, were running Trump’s presidential campaign. As Politico noted, people who know the Mercers and their team said they were working for a far-right agenda, not any particular Republican candidate.

“I don’t think it’s about Trump. Trump is just a vehicle,” a Mercer family colleague told Politico. “It’s about wanting to be a player and wanting to beat Hillary, in that order. Because if you remember, they wanted to use Cruz as a vehicle before that. They do want to beat Hillary, but they also want to beat the Kochs and Paul Singer and the Ricketts [other far-right billionaires].”

This week, when Bloomberg described how campaign CEO Bannon directedCambridge Analytics to test-market Brexit-like messages to white voters in Rust Belt states,Bannon had chilling words for anyone who believes in progressive federal government.

“This is not the French Revolution,” Bannonsaid, characterizing Trump's achievement and goals. “They destroyed the basic institutions of their society and changed their form of government. What Trump represents is a restoration—a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism. Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans.”

Who’s Calling Who Elite?

Bannon’s revolution is being led by the very people Trump demonized in his final political ads in Rust Belt states—the elite players in American finance and media. No one epitomizes that contradiction as clearly as the billionaire Mercers, and their long embrace of Trump’s new White House strategist, Bannon, who made a fortune at Goldman Sachs and in Hollywood before taking over Breitbart.

Bannon, who grew up in a Democratic household in Virginia, was a Navy veteran who became a Wall Street trader before turning to media. He is among a handful of grantees and causes that have been boosted by multimillion dollar investments or infusions from the Mercer family. Breitbart received $10 million, and in turn, as Politico said, dutifully publicized Mercer grantees and causes, including some of the most notorious right-wingers, such as the activists who made the 2008 anti-Hillary Clinton movie that led to the Citizens United lawsuit and U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down the few remaining limits on campaign cash.

Breitbart, under Bannon, has relished vulgar attacks on liberals. It’s compared feminists and Planned Parenthood to Nazis, has had anti-Semitic headlines and embraced a spectrum of white supremacist causes. Two decades ago, Bannon’s wife filed domestic abuse charges that were eventually dropped. Early in the campaign, a Bannon-run non-profit, the Government Accountability Institute, astoundingly convinced the New York Times and other mainstream papers to partner with it and publish reports based on its latest attack on the Clintons, a book called Clinton Cash. As Bannon told Bloomberg in an extensive profile later in 2015, that "weaponized" the attacks, because old attacks broke out of the right-wing echo chamber and spread like a virus through the mainstream media.

Establishment Republicans have criticized Bannon's so-called alt-right publications, and he has drawn considerable wrath from Democrats. But his uncompromising posture and no-holds-barred tactics appealed to the Mercers, who saw other libertarian activists, such as the Koch brothers, as being too genteel—despite spending multi-millions against Democrats.

As AlterNet’s February profile of the Mercer family detailed, they embrace virtually every ultra-right posture, from backing the most ardent climate science deniers (Heartland Institute), to reviving the gold standard behind the dollar (American Principles Project), to encouraging physicians to stockpile drugs in response to Obamacare (Doctors for Disaster Preparedness). Their fights with the Internal Revenue Service make Trump’s $900 million write-off in the mid-1990s seem paltry. Mercer’s computerized trading firm, Renaissance Technologies, has spent years fighting a $6.8 billion tax bill, Bloomberg has said.

Family patriarch Robert Mercer is notoriously publicity averse. But one daughter, Rebekah, isn’t, and has become one of the most powerful women in Republican circles. Last summer, according to a series of reports in the New York Times, Politico, The Hill and other outlets, she persuaded the Trump family—the candidate, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner—to replace his campaign team with Bannon and their longtime pollster Conway, and to incorporate their data-mining operation, Cambridge Analytica, to expand the campaign’s voter targeting. That came after a series of conversations at Trump fundraisers and private dinners.

“A few days later, one of the guests, Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, would become Mr. Trump’s campaign chief in a sudden shake-up,” the Timeswrotein mid-August. “But it was a guest without a formal role in the campaign, a conservative philanthropist named Rebekah Mercer, who has now become one of its most potent forces.”

The Timesdescribedthe family's relationship to Trump’s new team. “Mr. Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is a veteran Republican pollster who previously oversaw a super PAC financed by the Mercers. Mr. Bannon oversaw Breitbart, an outlet that has often amplified Mr. Trump’s message and attacked his perceived enemies. Mr. Mercer reportedly invested $10 million in Breitbart several years ago, and most likely still has a stake: A company sharing an address with Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund Mr. Mercer helps lead, remains an investor in Breitbart, according to corporate documents filed in Delaware.”

“Mr. Trump is also relying on Cambridge Analytica, a voter data firm backed by Mr. Mercer, whose staff members are working with Mr. Trump’s vendors to identify potential Trump supporters in the electorate, particularly among infrequent voters," the Timessaid. "A Mercer-backed super PAC supporting Mr. Trump is now being shepherded by David Bossie, a conservative activist whose own projects [Citizens United] have been funded in part by the Mercers’ family foundation, according to tax documents. Mr. Bannon has worked particularly closely with the family in recent years.

“I think they have complete confidence, and rightly so, in Steve Bannon’s decisions and what he brings to the table politically,” Bossietoldthe paper. “He has been smart and successful in running these different political operations. And those things have come to the Mercers’ attention.”

It has become a cliche that no one knows how Trump will really govern because of a lack of specifics during the campaign. But it is clear what libertarians like the Mercers want—to remove any obstacle preventing corporations and the super-rich from enlarging their wealth; and what ideologues like Bannon want—the dismantling of federal safety nets, from the 1930s New Deal to Obamacare, the expansion of policing and immigration enforcement, and no action on climate change to create a post-carbon energy system.

For years, Robert Mercer quietly poured tens of millions of dollars into far-right political causes. But it took his daughter, Rebekah, to embrace the bulls in the GOP china shop—first Cruz and then Trump. When Trump assumes office in January, Bannon will be on the podium. And quietly observing the spectacle will be one of the real powers behind the throne, the libertarian billionaire Mercer family.

Steven Rosenfeld

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-rise-of-gop-mega-donor-rebekah-mercer/2016/09/13/

Politics

The rise of GOP mega-donor Rebekah Mercer

Conservative donor Rebekah Mercer, pictured at the Media Research Center’s 2015 annual gala at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of the Media Research Center)

By Matea Gold September 14

Mitt Romney had just lost the 2012 presidential election, and a group of wealthy donors assembled in New York’s University Club was trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Suddenly, a young woman stood up before the largely male crowd and delivered an unsparing critique of the Republican’s technology and canvassing operations.

Thomas Saunders III, chairman of the Heritage Foundation’s Board of Trustees, was impressed. “Who is that?” he asked the man next him.

Soon, there would be few in conservative policy and political circles who did not know the name Rebekah Mercer.

Galvanized in part by the Republicans’ 2012 White House loss, the middle daughter of billionaire hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer has rattled the status quo by directing her family’s resources into an array of investments on the right. In the past six years, the Mercers have poured tens of millions into Republican super PACs, Washington think tanks, state policy shops, a film-production company, a data analytics operation and one of the country’s most provocative online conservative news outlets.

This year, Rebekah Mercer has emerged as a heavyweight presidential player, leading a super PAC financed by her father that was the biggest outside benefactor of Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) during the Republican primaries.

After Donald Trump clinched the nomination, the Mercers rallied to his side. Their imprint is now evident on the real estate developer’s campaign, which is led by three close associates who ran Mercer-funded enterprises: former Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen Bannon, pollster Kellyanne Conway and Citizens United President David Bossie.

Meanwhile, Rebekah Mercer has taken up the day-to-day management of her family’s super PAC, which is producing a string of searing ads attacking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Mercer exemplifies a new breed of activist donors that has risen since the Supreme Court kicked off a flood of big money into elections in 2010. As one of the most influential figures in Trump’s orbit, she threatens to undercut the candidate’s insistence that he is free from the influence of elite contributors. And her access shows how donors can easily move between a campaign and a super PAC that is supposed to operate independently.

In response to a question about Mercer’s influence on the campaign, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement: “The only special interest Mr. Trump is beholden to is the American people.”

The 42-year-old former Wall Street trader is not your typical mega-donor, and not just because of the vast wealth of her father, who earned an estimated $150 million last year, according to Forbes.

Unlike other GOP financiers

Mercer home-schools her four children and runs an online gourmet cookie company with her sisters.

And unlike many veteran GOP financiers, Mercer feels more aligned with the anti-establishment movement that has buffeted the Republican Party. Although she and her family live in a sprawling triplex in a Trump-branded residential building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she maintains a keen sense of what will resonate with the conservative base, friends and colleagues said.

GOP mega-donor Rebekah Mercer backed Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, shown here in Nevada, in the GOP presidential primary before switching allegiance to nominee Donald Trump. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

“You would never think that this would make sense coming from the daughter of a billionaire, but she has an incredible understanding of the grass roots,” said L. Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, who is close to the family. “She is grounded in that, and she will ground you in that by constantly bringing you back and pulling you away if you are in any way drawn to the Beltway.”

[How Trump charms wealthy donors in private — by seeking their advice]

Mercer is now applying those instincts and her family’s vast fortune to the biggest insurgent play yet: propelling Trump into the White House.

People close to her say that she admires how Trump challenges orthodoxies, even though she has flinched at some of his more unvarnished comments. An even bigger driver is her deep-seated opposition to Clinton, who she believes would further expand the size and influence of the federal government.

“One is faced with a binary choice right now, and you know the country would be taken in one very clear direction with Hillary Clinton, and that’s a direction she would find extremely objectionable,” said Leonard Leo, a friend who serves as executive vice president of the Federalist Society.

Intensely private, Mercer declined repeated requests for an interview.

“If she could be anonymous, I bet she’d prefer that,” said friend Alexandra Preate, a public relations executive.

‘Not a Marie Antoinette’

Mercer was shaped by her upper-middle-class upbringing in the New York suburb of Yorktown Heights, where her father then worked at IBM, pulling down a comfortable salary but not enough to cover college tuition for three daughters, friends said.

“Rebekah is not a Marie Antoinette,” said Amity Shlaes, an author who chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, which gets Mercer funding. “Her father was a research scientist at IBM. Her family did well late. She understands what it means to make economic decisions.”

Mercer, known as “Bekah” to close friends and family, is one of three sisters. The eldest, Jennifer, who goes by Jenji, has a law degree from Georgetown. The youngest, Heather Sue, made headlines in the early 1990s when she successfully sued Duke University for sex discrimination after she was cut from the football team.

Rebekah followed her older sister to Stanford University, where she studied biology and math and, in 1999, earned a master’s degree in management science and engineering. There, she met her future husband, Sylvain Mirochnikoff, a native of France, who now works as a managing director at Morgan Stanley.

Mercer, herself, did a short stint on Wall Street as a trader until her children were born. In 2006, when Heather Sue discovered that their favorite bakery, Ruby et Violette, was up for sale, the Mercer sisters bought it.

At the time, their website joked that Rebekah “washes the dishes.” But she approached the enterprise with characteristic thoroughness, filing trademarks for luxury cookie gift-basket names, such as Chenonceau, named after a chateau in France’s Loire Valley, patent records show.

Still, her interests lay elsewhere. Mercer shares her father’s free-market philosophy and views a bloated federal government as a threat to enterprise, associates said. In 2010, around the time Robert Mercer became co-chief executive of the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, Rebekah Mercer began deepening her involvement in conservative circles.

[How a reclusive computer programmer became a GOP money powerhouse]

Darcy Olsen, chief executive of the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based libertarian think tank, recalled meeting her at a breakfast for prospective donors in New York.

“This woman walks in, and she is tall and she has this gorgeous mane of brunette hair and this baby sling and a tiny, beautiful baby,” Olsen recalled. “Politics is still a bit of a man’s world, and when I saw her walk into this meeting with a baby, I was like, ‘This is my kind of woman.’ We got to talking policy, and I realized that she was smart and as committed to the same set of principles as I am.”

Mercer joined the board of the Goldwater Institute and threw a cocktail reception at her Manhattan home to introduce Olsen to her friends and colleagues. Her family foundation gave nearly $1 million to the institute between 2011 and 2014, tax records show.

Still, until recently, “I had no idea of the extent of her enthusiasm for the cause, or her ability to contribute to it,” Olsen said.

‘She thinks out of the box’

Since 2010, Robert Mercer has climbed the ranks of the country’s biggest political donors, giving at least $36.5 million to federal GOP candidates and super PACs. Rebekah has contributed an additional $814,500, campaign finance records show.

At the same time, the Mercers have steadily upped their nonprofit investments. Run by Rebekah, the family foundation went from doling out $1.7 million in 2009 to $18.3 million in 2014, according to tax records.

In all, the foundation gave nearly $35 million to conservative think tanks and policy groups in those five years, according to records compiled by The Washington Post and GuideStar USA.

[Meet the wealthy donors who are pouring millions into the 2016 elections]

The Mercers’ largesse has catapulted Rebekah Mercer onto the boards of conservative organizations across the country, including the venerable Heritage Foundation, which she joined as a trustee in 2014.

“She thinks out of the box,” said Saunders, the Heritage board’s chairman, who first noticed Mercer’s “fiery” delivery at the Romney post-mortem in 2012. “She will immediately question what we are doing. It is constituents who are changing things in this election, and she’s on things like that, saying, ‘What is the best way to reach the American people?’?”

One of the efforts Rebekah is most proud of, according to friends, is a watchdog group called Reclaim New York that she started in 2013 with Bannon, the longtime executive chairman of Breitbart News, which counts Robert Mercer among its investors. Reclaim New York is using the state’s freedom-of-information law to try to disclose every local public expenditure and is working to train citizens to function as watchdogs in their own communities.

At times, the Mercers’ insistence that they know best has rankled others in the conservative movement.

“One thing to know about the Mercers: They always think they have a better mousetrap,” said a Republican strategist who knows them and requested anonymity to avoid angering the family. “Whatever you are doing, they have something they are doing in a better way.”

Until now, the family’s political spending has had uneven returns. This summer, Robert Mercer gave $200,000 to a super PAC backing a GOP primary challenger to Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who won handily. McCain said he believes that the donation was retribution for a 2014 congressional subcommittee report that found Mercer’s hedge fund evaded taxes, which the firm has denied.

“So far, I wouldn’t say they have been particularly effective,” said GOP strategist John Weaver, a former McCain adviser. But with their resources and determination to influence politics, he added, “I am concerned about what kind of role they will play in the future.”

The Mercers declined to comment. A friend familiar with their thinking said the family’s “time and resources are dedicated to preserving freedom and protecting the Constitution. Many elitist politicians and strategists in Washington profit with the current system at the expense of their fellow Americans.”

From Cruz to Trump

After the 2012 elections, Robert Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm, driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities, associates said. Rebekah Mercer has urged the organizations that her family funds to hire the company, according to people familiar with her advocacy.

Cambridge was a major vendor to Cruz’s presidential campaign, which paid it $5.8 million before he dropped out in May, campaign finance records show. Trump, who has expressed skepticism about the value of data analytics, brought Cambridge aboard in July, paying it $100,000.

Cambridge shares a Beverly Hills, Calif., address with other Mercer investments. The company’s Wilshire Avenue office suite is also the home of Breitbart News and a movie production company called Glittering Steel, which helped finance the films “Torchbearer,” starring “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson, and “Clinton Cash,” a documentary based on the book by Peter Schweizer.

In the GOP primaries, Robert Mercer poured $13.5 million into the family super PAC — then called Keep the Promise 1 — in support of Cruz.

In May, shortly after the senator from Texas dropped out of the race, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, invited Mercer and Conway to lunch at Trump Tower.

Over sandwiches and salads in a conference room, Ivanka and Rebekah bonded over parenting young children and being the daughters of hard-charging, successful fathers, according to people familiar with their conversation.

[Meet Donald Trump’s ‘basket of deplorables’]

Rebekah’s sister Jenji and her mother were already fans of the real estate developer, according to a friend. And now Rebekah was on board: The family would help Trump.

By late June, the Mercer super PAC had been relaunched as an anti-Clinton vehicle called Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC.

Last month, Rebekah Mercer was among those who privately urged Trump to retool his campaign leadership. At a fundraiser in the Hamptons, she and Trump discussed the merits of hiring Bannon. Within days, the candidate had tapped Bannon as chief executive, pushing aside then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Trump also named Conway campaign manager. A few weeks later, Bossie, who has been close to the billionaire for years, was hired as deputy campaign manager.

In a statement, Trump called Mercer “a spectacular woman and leader.”

“Her greatest desire is to make America great again,” the statement read. “Our country is lucky to have her support.”

Friends were not surprised by the turn of events. Rebekah Mercer is not known for giving up, they said.

“It would have done no good in June to sulk around and say, ‘I lost.’ These are people who are doers, they are not talkers,” said Saunders. He added that he believes Rebekah and her associates have had an influence on Trump, who has been a relatively more disciplined candidate in the past month. “What better job can you do, if you can turn him into a winner?”

guard uk no links

Data firm in talks for role in White House messaging – and Trump business

Trump strategist Steve Bannon apparently involved in talks despite being on board of Cambridge Analytica, which helped president-elect to victory

Peter Stone in Washington

Wednesday 23 November 2016 12.20 EST Last modified on Wednesday 23 November 2016 12.42 EST

A data mining company that helped Donald Trump win the presidency is in early talks to snare two potentially lucrative new contracts, one to boost the incoming Trump White House’s policy messaging and the other to help the Trump Organization expand its sales, the Guardian has learned.

Trump disavows the white nationalist 'alt-right' but defends Steve Bannon hire

Cambridge Analytica, a data company that uses personality profiling and boasts billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer as a key investor, is in discussions about potential deals with the Trump Organization and Steve Bannon, the CEO of the campaign and now Trump’s senior counselor and chief strategist,according to a conservative digital strategist familiar with Cambridge. Despite his apparent role in the talks as a representative of Trump’s incoming White House team, Bannon is also on the board of Cambridge Analytica, the source said, an assertion also reported elsewhere. Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, who ran a pro-Trump Super Pac that plowed $2m into digital ads and other efforts backing Trump, andAlexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge, are playing lead roles in the talks with the Trump Organization and with Bannon, the digital source said.

Historically, the Republican National Committee has picked up the tab for White House communication and messaging consultants, which means that Bannon – who has said he will step down from his job as executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News when he starts his White House job – would have to get the RNC to approve such a deal.

Alternatively, there has been discussion about possibly creating an outside advocacy group that would focus on messaging and communications to support White House goals, which Cambridge might work for, according to the source.

The talks with the Trump Organization and Bannon underscore the rising influence of the reclusive Mercers as mega-donors on the right, and their tight ties to Trump’s inner circle.Rebekah Mercer, who oversees much of the family’s political philanthropy, is on the 16-person Trump transition executive committee.

If the deals in discussion come to fruition, some outside watchdogs say they could create new controversies over conflicts of interest for Trump.

“The web of potential conflicts between President Trump and the Trump Organization will only be made stronger and more difficult to untangle” if Cambridge winds up working for the president’s business interests and crafting messages to push the White House’s agenda, said Larry Noble, the general counsel for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

For both the Trump Organization, which has already been criticized for a visit to the president-elect by business partners from India, and for generating support for Trump’s policy goals, Cambridge Analytica could prove useful. The London-based company claims it has key marketing and psychological data on some 230 million Americans, information that might help increase the size and value of a real estate empire, or build backing for Trump’s policy agenda.

Cambridge’s data could be helpful in both “driving sales and driving policy goals”, said the digital source, adding: “Cambridge is positioned to be the preferred vendor for all of that.”

Cambridge and the Trump Organization both declined requests for comment. A spokesman for the Trump transition said Cambridge would not be working for the White House, but did not address whether it might work for the RNC or an outside group to help the new president.

The potential windfall for the company comes after the Mercers and Cambridge played key roles in Trump’s victory. Cambridge Analytica was tapped as a leading campaign data vendor as the Mercers, who originally backed Senator Ted Cruz in the presidential race, flexed their muscle after endorsing Trump. The Mercers reportedly pushed for the addition of a few top campaign aides, including Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, who became campaign manager. In September alone Cambridge was paid $5m by the Trump campaign for its services.

Trump did not ask Argentina's president for business favor, spokesman says

Robert Mercer, his wife and his daughter have donated more than $40.1m to political committees and Super Pacs since the start of 2012 presidential election cycle, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. This year, the Mercers gave $13.5m to a pro-Cruz Super Pac run by Conway and then $2m to Make America Number 1, the pro-Trump Super Pac led by Rebekah Mercer.

Bannon and the Mercers have deep ties: Robert Mercer has reportedly donated $10m to Breitbart News. And this year, Bannon was in London at least once and met with Cambridge Analytica top brass, according to the digital source who noted that Bannon was on the company’s board. (Before Cambridge secured office space in Virginia it worked out of a Bannon office on Capitol Hill, the source said.)

Make America Number 1 paid Glittering Steel, a film company that Bannon heads which made an anti-Clinton film, $187,000 in October and November while Bannon served as Trump’s campaign CEO, unpaid.

“These payments appear to be clear evidence that the Super Pac was subsidizing Bannon’s work at the campaign,” the Campaign Legal Center’s Noble said. Super Pacs are not allowed to coordinate their spending with campaigns.