Von Spakovsky has long been at the forefront of efforts to undermine US elections by claiming falsely that fraud is endemic. He helped spearhead the attack on voting by mail during the pandemic, holding private briefings with Republican state election officials – a drive that became a core part of Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Heritage and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, have spent tens of millions of dollars promoting their own model bills that impose strict restrictions on voting. They have targeted the investment on key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan that could hold the balance of power in the 2024 presidential race.
Heritage began hosting annual gatherings of Republican secretaries of state at the start of the Trump presidency in 2017. February’s in-person conference was the first to be sponsored by three rightwing powerhouses of election denial and voter suppression – Heritage, together with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), and the Honest Elections Project (HEP).
Pilf is a conservative legal group that sues election officials to force them to purge voter rolls, a process that has affected eligible US voters. The group is led by J Christian Adams, a former justice department lawyer who tried to use the Voting Rights Act to claim voting discrimination against white people.
Trump’s former lawyer Cleta Mitchell also sits on the Pilf board.
HEP is a conservative dark-money group closely tied to the Republican operative Leonard Leo who was instrumental in engineering the current conservative supermajority on the US supreme court. Reporting by ProPublica and the New York Times last year revealed that Leo has received control of a staggering $1.6bn to advance rightwing causes.
Concern about the potential of top election officials to subvert democracy intensified during the 2022 midterm elections when a number of individuals committed to Trump’s stolen election lie also ran for office. They formed the “America First Secretary of State Coalition” which became a conduit of far-right conspiracy theories linked to QAnon.
Most of those candidates failed in their bid to take over the reins of election administration in their states. But the Heritage conference suggests that the desire to deploy Republican secretaries of state as channels of voter suppression and election misinformation remains very much alive.
Though chief election officials are tasked with ensuring that ballots are fair and impartial, the Heritage conference was attended only by Republican secretaries of state.
The Guardian asked Heritage to explain why its conference was held in secret and with only Republican attendees. The group did not answer those questions.
Von Spakovsky said that the event was an “educational summit intended to provide information on current issues in elections and ensure that our election process protects the right to vote for American citizens by making it easy to vote and hard to cheat”.
He disputed the argument that security measures at the ballot box such as voter ID suppressed turnout. “The claim that secure elections somehow promote greater restrictions is outrageous and has been clearly disproven,” he said.
Von Spakovsky also pointed to Heritage’s election fraud database, which he said sampled “proven instances of election fraud from across the country”. The database records 1,422 “proven instances of voter fraud” stretching back to 1982 – a 41-year period during which billions of votes have been cast in the US.
Several of the participants at the conference have election denial and voter suppression track records. They include Florida’s secretary of state, Cord Byrd, who, soon after being appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis last spring, refused to say whether Joe Biden had won the 2020 presidential election.
Byrd runs Florida’s “election integrity unit” that was set up by DeSantis last year to investigate election crimes, even though there is scant evidence of substantial voter fraud. More than a dozen citizens accused of illegally voting have been arrested at gunpoint under DeSantis’s crackdown on supposed voter fraud.
Another attendee – Jay Ashcroft, secretary of state of Missouri – has been a leading proponent of that state’s new restrictive voting law. His office has been named in numerous lawsuits in the last year for imposing extreme constraints on voter registration, including a recent lawsuit accusing Ashcroft of illegally blocking a ballot measure.
Tennessee’s secretary of state, Tre Hargett, another listed participant, has been accused by Democratic leaders in Tennessee of purging thousands of voters from the official rolls.
Panel discussions laid out in the agenda were held on several of the core talking points of the current Republican party. The opening discussion, moderated by Von Spakovsky, was on “Auditing Expertise”.
The main speaker was Paul Bettencourt, a state senator in Texas who has sponsored several bills making it harder to vote including a measure that would deploy armed “election marshals” to oversee polling stations.
Before the conference-goers attended a cocktail reception and dinner held at an upscale restaurant in downtown Washington, day one ended with a session entitled: “Realistic Eric Fixes and Reforms”. Eric – the Electronic Registration Information Center – is a non-profit group run collectively by 28 states which is used to finesse the accuracy of state voter rolls.
In recent months it has become the target of rightwing conspiracy theories fueled by Trump who claimed falsely that it was rigged to benefit Democrats.
Ashcroft, the Missouri secretary of state, was one of the speakers in that session. Earlier this month he announced that he was pulling Missouri out of Eric, making it one of the first Republican-controlled states to quit the organization along with Alabama, Florida and West Virginia.
This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Jamie Corey is a senior researcher with Documented
[Boldface added]
“Group that fought ‘dark money’ ballot measure files lawsuit to block Arizona voter-approved law”
A new state law that requires disclosure of major anonymous campaign contributors is facing another legal challenge.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court, comes as the voter-approved Proposition 211 was already challenged in Arizona courts.
Americans for Prosperity and its foundation filed the new lawsuit. The organization, which advocates for limited government, argues the law violates its First Amendment free-speech rights by compelling disclosure of contributors to nonprofits that take positions in political contests, for both candidates and ballot measures.
The lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court in Phoenix to find the law unconstitutional and to issue a permanent injunction barring its enforcement. The argument is similar to the complaint filed in December by the Free Enterprise Club and the Center for Arizona Policy in Maricopa County Superior Court.
“Democratic dark money juggernaut behind Biden-allied group targeting House GOP”
A President Joe Biden-allied nonprofit group aiming to investigate House Republicans next Congress has been almost completely bankrolled by an influential Democratic-linked dark money organization, records reveal.
The Democratic strategist-led Congressional Integrity Project has raked in $1.5 million combined from Sixteen Thirty Fund, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group managed by Arabella Advisors, the largest left-wing dark money network in the United States. This sum accounts for nearly all of the funding that CIP received between 2020 and 2021, according to its tax forms reviewed by the Washington Examiner, providing a further glimpse into how Arabella wields significant influence over the liberal pop-up group ecosystem.
Mark Meadows Exchanged Texts With 34 Members Of Congress About Plans To Overturn The 2020 Election
Meadows’ exchanges shed new light on the extent of congressional involvement in Trump’s efforts to spread baseless conspiracy theories about his defeat and his attempts to reverse it. The messages document the role members played in the campaign to subvert the election as it was conceived, built, and reached its violent climax on Jan. 6, 2021. The texts are rife with links to far-right websites, questionable legal theories, violent rhetoric, and advocacy for authoritarian power grabs.
Meadows’ messages also provide an indication of the support the election objection received from right-wing dark money groups. The text log shows how the Republican efforts to fight the electoral certification at the Capitol became more organized and gained steam in the days after Biden’s victory. On Nov. 9, Edward Corrigan, the president and CEO of the Conservative Partnership Institute, wrote Meadows to say Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) would be holding a meeting about legal strategies with his colleagues at the organization’s Capitol Hill townhouse.
CPI, which would go on to employ Meadows after Trump left office, is a dark money group that has been described by NPR as “among the most powerful messaging forces in the MAGA universe.” It hosted meetings for the far- right House Freedom Caucus and, according to Meadows’ log, served as something of a headquarters for members of Congress working to overturn the election. Corrigan did not respond to a request for comment.
CPI was not the only conservative dark money group that aided the push to overturn the election. On Dec. 2, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) wrote Meadows and indicated he was participating in Georgia rallies organized by Club For Growth. While those events were focused on that state’s Senate runoff race, Gohmert and Greene reportedly brought up the presidential race in their remarks. In his text to Meadows, Gohmert was hoping for a ride on Air Force One or a White House visit.
Big Donors Working to Overturn the 2020 Election Are Backing Election Denial Candidates in 2022
America’s False Idols
Today’s tech billionaires think they’re self-made geniuses who deserve veneration. But we don’t have to believe that.
Senate Republicans block bill to require disclosure of ‘dark money’ donors
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/senate-republicans-campaign-finance/
[Excerpt:]
Before the vote Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted that, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United, the dissenting justices had warned that the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.”
“Sadly, they turned out to be right,” Schumer said. “By giving massive corporations the same rights as individual citizens, multibillionaires being able to have their voice … drowning out the views of citizens, and by casting aside decades of campaign finance law and by paving the way for powerful elites to pump nearly endless cash, Citizens United has disfigured our democracy almost beyond recognition.”
“Now the choice before the Senate is simple. Will members vote today to cure our democracy of the cancer of dark money, or will they stand in the way and let this disease metastasize beyond control?” Schumer added. “Members must pick a side. Which side are you on? The side of American voters and ‘one person, one vote’ or the side of super PACs and the billionaire donor class rigging the game in their favor?”
How a Secretive Billionaire Handed His Fortune to the Architect of the Right-Wing Takeover of the Courts
In the largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history, industrialist Barre Seid funded a new group run by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, who guided Trump’s Supreme Court picks and helped end federal abortion rights.
https://www.propublica.org/article/dark-money-leonard-leo-barre-seid
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
Today’s big news is an eye-popping $1.6 billion donation to a right-wing nonprofit organized in May 2020. This is the largest known single donation made to a political influence organization.
The money came from Barre Seid, a 90-year-old electronics company executive, and the new organization, Marble Freedom Trust, is controlled by Leonard A. Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, who has been behind the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Leo has also been prominent in challenges to abortion rights, voting rights, climate change action, and so on. He announced in early 2020 that he was stepping back from the Federalist Society to remake politics at every level, but information about the massive grant and the new organization was broken today by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times.
Marble is organized as a nonprofit, so when Seid gave it 100% of the stock in Tripp Lite, a privately held company that makes surge protectors and other electronic equipment, it could sell the stock without paying taxes. The arrangement also likely enabled Seid to avoid paying as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the stock. Law professor Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School, who specializes in philanthropic policy, told the New York Times: “These actions by the super wealthy are actually costing the American taxpayers to support the political spending of the wealthiest Americans.”
This massive donation is an example of so-called “dark money”: funds donated for political advocacy to nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. In the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision, the Supreme Court said that limiting the ability of corporations and other entities to advertise their political preferences violates their First Amendment right to free speech. This was a new interpretation: until the 1970s, the Supreme Court did not agree that companies had free speech protections.
Now, nonprofit organizations can receive unlimited donations from people, corporations, or other entities for political speech. They cannot collaborate directly with candidates or campaigns, but they can promote a candidate’s policies and attack opponents, all without identifying their donors.
“I’ve never seen a group of this magnitude before,” Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) told Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, and Drew Griffin of CNN. “This is the kind of money that can help these political operatives and their allies start to move the needle on issues like reshaping the federal judiciary, making it more difficult to vote, a state-by-state campaign to remake election laws and lay the groundwork for undermining future elections.” Our campaign finance system, he said, gives “wealthy donors, whether they be corporations or individuals, access and influence over the system far greater than any regular American can ever imagine.”
CNN Staff Fears Right-Wing Billionaire Will Turn It Into a Dumpster Fire
In this week’s edition of Confider, we look at how CNN’s shock firing of Brian Stelter has stoked internal fears centered around one libertarian billionaire board member.
Survey finds bipartisan support for HR 1, especially some of its components
https://thefulcrum.us/hr-1-public-opinion-polling
The survey — conducted by Data for Progress, a progressive think tank and polling firm, for Vox — found that 69 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat support the bill when told it would “make it easier to vote, limit the influence of money in politics, and require congressional districts to be drawn by a non-partisan commission so that no one party has an advantage.” That breaks down as 85 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans.
The following accounts suggest a good starting point for such bipartisan efforts would be to curb the out-sized influence of “dark money” billionaires like these:
The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters
Likewise, his Twitter account is an endless stream of insular right-wing watchwords. In April, he called the Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson a “pedophile apologist.” In November, he tweeted, “When a society celebrates Antifa looters, arsonists, and pedophiles as heroes, while turning brave people like Kyle Rittenhouse into villains, it is a society that is not long for this world.” He frequently amplifies Mr. Trump’s 2020 election lies and he recently suggested that Democrats will “cheat” in the midterms.
But Mr. Masters also represents a distinctive innovation upon the swaggering MAGA message of other Republican hopefuls. A quintessential nerdy jock, he seems more Menlo Park than Capitol Hill; even in his pastoral campaign videos, he can sometimes be seen holding an iPad. He keeps a great deal of his wealth in cryptocurrencies. He is the well-groomed avatar of a hard-right Silicon Valley brain trust, including his former employer, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, and an array of farseeing, anti-democratic titans of industry who see America as a stagnant and feeble empire in desperate need of vitalist reinvention.
Where Mr. Trump was merely a vehicle for disruption, Mr. Masters sees himself and his allies — including his fellow Thiel-backed Senate hopeful J.D. Vance of Ohio — as midwives of transformation.
Mr. Masters’s life and political trajectory changed in 2012, when, as a law student at Stanford, he took a class taught by Mr. Thiel, the early Facebook investor who co-founded PayPal and Palantir.
When they met, Mr. Thiel was on his own journey away from hard-core libertarianism toward a more traditionalist and muscular nationalism. Like Mr. Masters, he had backed Ron Paul for president in 2008. And in a programmatic essay published the following year, Mr. Thiel declared that he no longer believed democracy and freedom were compatible: “The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.”
“The fate of our world,” Mr. Thiel wrote in his 2009 essay, “may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
What’s distinctive about Mr. Yarvin is his hostility to democracy as such, which Mr. Masters and Mr. Thiel seem to share.
In a rambling conversation with a former Trump administration official, Michael Anton, on a podcast last summer, Mr. Yarvin described in detail how a future Trump-figure (or Mr. Trump himself) could seize dictatorial power, even elaborating a blueprint for a more organized and successful version of Jan. 6. It would require federalizing the National Guard, the participation of sympathetic law enforcement, and a mass mobilization many orders of magnitude bigger than Jan. 6.
Of course, Mr. Masters and Mr. Thiel have never endorsed such a plan. And Mr. Anton is careful to emphasize repeatedly that he and Mr. Yarvin are having a merely “theoretical” discussion.
Republicans Confront Unexpected Online Money Slowdown
In an otherwise favorable political climate, small-dollar donations have dropped for Republicans, making the party more reliant on mega donors to compete.
This article is part of our Midterms 2022 Daily Briefing
Online fund-raising has slowed across much of the Republican Party in recent months, an unusual pullback of small donors that has set off a mad rush among Republican political operatives to understand why — and reverse the sudden decline before it damages the party’s chances this fall.
The total amount donated online fell by more than 12 percent across all federal Republican campaigns and committees in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, according to an analysis of federal records from WinRed, the main online Republican donation-processing portal.
Working in the party’s favor is that Wall Street billionaires and other industry titans have cut seven- and eight-figure checks to Republican super PACs, offsetting some of the party’s small-dollar struggles, which some attributed to inflation and others to deceptive tactics that are turning off supporters over time.
Still, when it comes to billionaire mega donors giving to super PACs, the Republican Party is easily outpacing the Democrats in 2022.
The main Senate Republican super PAC had nearly $40 million more cash on hand than its Democratic counterpart entering July. The House Republican super PAC’s cash edge was even bigger: nearly $70 million.
Kenneth C. Griffin, the chief executive of Citadel, a giant hedge fund, has poured nearly $50 million into various federal super PACs ahead of the 2022 election, including $10 million to the main Senate arm and $18.5 million into the House super PAC.
Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman of Blackstone, another hedge fund, has contributed a combined $20 million to the main House and Senate Republican super PAC this year.
Timothy Mellon, the banking fortune heir, and Patrick R. Ryan, who became a billionaire through the insurance industry, each contributed $10 million to the main House G.O.P. super PAC.
And Miriam Adelson, a physician whose husband, Sheldon Adelson, was long one of the party’s most generous contributors until his death last year, made her first $5 million donation of the 2022 cycle this month.
Andrew Fischer, Bea Malsky, and Rachel Shorey contributed research.
Shane Goldmacher is a national political reporter and was previously the chief political correspondent for the Metro desk. Before joining The Times, he worked at Politico, where he covered national Republican politics and the 2016 presidential campaign. @ShaneGoldmacher
Tucker Carlson Calls Him the Future of the GOP. First He Has to Get Elected.
Blake Masters is running on a hard-line nationalist agenda to reshape the Republican Party. But can the Peter Thiel protégé make it to the Senate?
But another figure — who won’t be mentioned much at all today — is an even more important benefactor for Masters. That would be Peter Thiel, the conservative Silicon Valley billionaire who has been increasingly wading into GOP politics. Thiel has pumped $13.5 million into Masters’ candidacy, but that understates his influence on the candidate. “Acolyte” may not even be enough.
As a law student at Stanford, Masters was so gripped by Thiel that he literally blogged his own notes on a class Thiel taught on startups — and those notes helped form Thiel’s best-selling book, “Zero to One,” which is credited to the two men. Thiel hired Masters to be president of the Thiel Foundation in 2015 and then to be chief operating officer at his investment firm, Thiel Capital, from 2018 to 2022.
The last candidate Thiel backed, the populist author and financier J.D. Vance, came from behind in the polls to win his Ohio Senate primary, and is a favorite to win in November.
Masters will be the next test of Thiel’s influence, and a new style of politics: candidates from elite schools and even more elite financial backgrounds embracing “the National Conservative” or New Right movement, a particularly populist, nationalist and even authoritarian strain of conservatism. The movement is certainly Trump-inflected, but also aligned with and increasingly bankrolled by Thiel.
Billionaire Larry Ellison Joined Trump Allies in Call Plotting Ways to Contest Biden Win: Report
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
May 20, 2022
And then, this afternoon, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Shawn Boburg, also of the Washington Post, reported that the billionaire co-founder, chair, and chief technology officer of the computer technology corporation Oracle, Larry Ellison, also participated in a call about the 2020 election. Legal filings in a court case against True the Vote, an organization that has spread lies about widespread voter fraud, contained a note from True the Vote’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht that read: “Jim [Bopp, a lawyer for True the Vote] was on a call this evening with [Trump lawyer] Jay Sekulow, [South Carolina Senator] Lindsey O. Graham, [Fox News Channel personality] Sean Hannity, and Larry Ellison…. He explained the work we were doing and they asked for a preliminary report asap, to be used to rally their troops internally, so that’s what I’m working on now.”
Ellison, whom Stanley-Becker and Boburg identify as the 11th richest person in the world, gives significant money to right-wing causes and candidates, including Lindsey Graham, to whom he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2018. More recently, he pledged $1 billion of the $44 billion deal for Elon Musk to buy Twitter.
INSIDE THE NEW RIGHT, WHERE PETER THIEL IS PLACING HIS BIGGEST BETS
Donations Steered to Trump Super PAC by Canadian Are Found to Be Illegal
The Federal Election Commission fined a Canadian steel billionaire, Barry Zekelman, $975,000 in the case, one of the biggest penalties it has ever assessed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/us/politics/trump-super-pac-illegal-donations.html?
Dissatisfied With Their Party, Wealthy Republican Donors Form Secret Coalitions
Eager to offset a Democratic advantage among so-called dark money groups, wealthy pro-Trump conservatives like Peter Thiel are involved in efforts to wield greater influence outside the traditional party machinery.
A new coalition of wealthy conservative benefactors that says it aims to “disrupt but advance the Republican agenda” gathered this week for a private summit in South Florida that included closed-door addresses from former President Donald J. Trump and an allied Senate candidate at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, according to documents and interviews.
The coalition, called the Rockbridge Network, includes some of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors, such as Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and has laid out an ambitious goal — to reshape the American right by spending more than $30 million on conservative media, legal, policy and voter registration projects, among other initiatives.
The emergence of Rockbridge, the existence of which has not previously been reported, comes amid escalating jockeying among conservative megadonors to shape the 2022 midterms and the future of the Republican Party from outside the formal party machinery, and often with little disclosure.
In February, another previously unreported coalition of donors, the Chestnut Street Council, organized by the Trump-allied lobbyist Matt Schlapp, held a meeting to hear a pitch for new models for funding the conservative movement.
If those upstart coalitions gain momentum, they will likely have to vie for influence among conservatives with existing donor networks that have been skeptical of or agnostic toward Mr. Trump.
One that was created by the billionaire industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch spent more than $250 million in 2020. Another, spearheaded by the New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, hosted top Republican politicians in February.
The surge in secretive fund-raising does not end there — a number of nonprofit groups with varying degrees of allegiance to Mr. Trump are also vying to become leading distributors of donor funds to the right.
Taken together, the jockeying highlights frustration on the right with the political infrastructure that surrounds the Republican Party, and, in some cases, with its politicians, as well as disagreements about its direction as Mr. Trump teases another presidential run.
The efforts to harness the fortunes of the party’s richest activists could help it capitalize on a favorable electoral landscape headed into this year’s midterm elections, and — potentially — the 2024 presidential campaign. Conversely, the party’s prospects could be dimmed if the moneyed class invests in competing candidates, groups and tactics.
The willingness of donors to organize on their own underscores the migration of power and money away from the official organs of the respective parties, which are required to disclose their donors, to outside groups that often have few disclosure requirements. It also reflects a concern among some influential Republicans that the political right faces a disadvantage when it comes to nonprofit groups that support the candidates and causes of each party.
[Boldface added].Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson,
March 16, 2022
Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that sanctions would remain until there is no chance that Russia could ever again launch the sort of invasion Putin has launched against Ukraine. The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Justice launched a task force with Australia, Canada, the European Commission, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and the U.K. to freeze and seize assets of sanctioned oligarchs. The Treasury Department also began today to offer bounties of up to $5 million for information leading to “seizure, restraint, or forfeiture of assets linked to foreign government corruption.”
All but about 40 American companies have pulled out of Russia, according to Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby of Popular Information. Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned business in America, is staying put. Political groups affiliated with right-wing billionaire CEO Charles Koch oppose broad sanctions and have suggested the U.S. should remain neutral in the crisis.
Billionaire-Backed Group Enlists Trump-Supporting Citizens to Hunt for Voter Fraud Using Discredited Techniques
The Voter Reference Foundation is putting the nation’s voter rolls online while making unsupported claims suggesting election fraud. The group’s funding can be traced to a Super PAC funded by the CEO of Uline.
By Megan O’Matz
March 7, 2022
https://www.propublica.org/article/voter-ref-foundation
Turning the Focus on America’s Oligarchs
Could the scrutiny of Putin’s favored billionaires hastened by the war in Ukraine extend to the hidden money that subverts democracy in the United States?
By Evan Osnos
March 7, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/turning-the-focus-on-americas-oligarchs
[Excerpts:]
The push to expose hidden flows of Russian money has renewed calls to illuminate darker corners of American finance and politics, as well—not only the vast sums that are secreted to tropical islands to avoid taxes but also the fortunes that exploit U.S. campaign-finance law to bankroll the manipulation of democracy, without fingerprints.
In his State of the Union address, Biden asked Congress to pass the Disclose Act, which seeks to limit the role of dark money in elections, so that Americans “can know who is funding our elections,” as Biden put it.
Offshore fortunes made it hard to tell who was lavishing money on American politicians, too. In 2017, the I.C.I.J. published another leak, known as the Paradise Papers, that included records from nineteen tax havens, and exposed the financial engineering used by more than a dozen advisers, donors, and Cabinet members of President Donald Trump.
[Trump’s] Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was found to have a stake in a shipping company registered in the Marshall Islands, which received millions of dollars a year from a Russian firm controlled by Putin’s son-in-law. (At the time, a Commerce Department spokesman said that Ross had never met the son-in-law and that he “recuses himself from any matters focused on transoceanic shipping vessels.”)
More to the point, the emerging details on hidden money flows have shown how they deeply disfigure democracy in other ways. In 2018, a group of European news organizations published the lesser-known CumEx Files, which exposed an intricate stock scheme that had cost European countries an estimated sixty-three billion dollars in taxes. A participant was quoted as saying, “Anyone who takes issue with the fact that there’ll be fewer kindergartens in Germany because of the trade we do is in the wrong place.”
Freedom House, a Washington think tank, has described the use of tax havens and other hidden maneuvers as a “multifaceted threat to democratic governance.” The efforts to escape an ordinary obligation of citizenship, while sometimes legal, “hollow out public services, and they fuel populist resentment by magnifying the perception that the system is rigged in favor of wealthy elites,” the group declared. Over time, they “set a country on a path toward institutional breakdown or even state failure.”
In the United States, the threat to democracy posed by hidden sources of cash has taken on particular urgency since Trump tried to overturn his loss in the 2020 election. Since then, public records and investigations have revealed the role that American oligarchs have played in delegitimizing Biden’s victory, fueling misinformation, and trying to rewrite state election laws.
Richard Uihlein, an heir to the Schlitz beer fortune and the founder of the Uline shipping-supplies company, has donated millions to right-wing groups. Among them is the Conservative Partnership Institute, which lists as its senior legal fellow for election integrity the Trump campaign attorney Cleta Mitchell, a participant in the infamous phone call in which Trump pressured Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes for him to win the state.
Julie Fancelli, an heir to the Publix supermarket fortune, who lives in the Tuscan countryside, is the largest known donor behind the pro-Trump rally on January 6th that preceded the riot at the Capitol. (In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Fancelli said that she had “real concerns associated with election integrity, yet [she] would never support any violence, particularly the tragic and horrific events that unfolded on January 6th.”) In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer has tracked a web of nonprofits that promote conspiracy theories about purported voter fraud in ways that could help challenge the results of the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election.
The political effects of Putin’s war on Ukraine are rippling across the world and, potentially, into the workings of American politics. Harrington, the sociology professor, said, “The main shift that’s relevant here is not about whether it’s going to be illegal to do this stuff. It may be, but law is very slow” to change.
The larger shift, in her view, concerns what social scientists call norms, the unwritten boundaries of what is considered socially and politically acceptable. Harrington recalled the 2016 Presidential debate in which Trump bragged that he was “smart” for avoiding income taxes. She said, “He wasn’t laughed off the stage. It didn’t end his political career. That, I think, is changing, and that may be a permanent normative change, where it is no longer O.K. to say, ‘I’m evading the law.’ ” She added, “That, to me, is much more important than what the law says, because there’s no fun in being an oligarch if you can’t be out and proud about looting your country.”
Whether Harrington is right, and whether voters will punish élite corruption and have their votes fairly counted, could affect transparency, accountability, and democracy worldwide.
[Boldface added]
Trump’s Dark-Money Machine Gets a Makeover—and New Owners
The dark-money machine that has funded Donald Trump’s political operation for years has almost completely turned over and was “sold.” Experts say that doesn’t really make sense.
By Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter
The Big Money behind the Big Lie
By Jane Meyer
August 2, 2021
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie
Excerpt:
Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.
Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century
On a leaked conference call, leaders of dark-money groups and an aide to Mitch McConnell expressed frustration with the popularity of the legislation—even among Republican voters.
By Jane Mayer
March 29, 2021
“In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.
A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.
Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”
“The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.”