For all their talk about reining in dark money, Democrats don’t seem to mind it when it’s flowing into their coffers.
One major dark-money group tied to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is working to preserve the Democrats’ hold on Congress’ upper chamber with $50 million in donations from undisclosed donors, per election filings reported by Fox News.
The big money is coming from Majority Forward, a nonprofit that is able to legally mask the names of its funders. According to the Federal Election Commission, Majority Forward on October 12 gave $20 million to the Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC (SMP) as part of the Democrats’ effort to retain power.
The latest sum is on top of a previous $27-million donation, making Majority Forward SMP’s top giver for the 2022 midterms.
It should be noted that Majority Forward and SMP have an extremely tightknit relationship. J.B. Poersch, an ally of Schumer, is president of both groups. As a matter of fact, the two entities even share employees and an office in Washington, D.C.
And with all the money pouring in, it’s no wonder Majority Forward has been able to devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to employees, IT security, and insurance, per official filings.
The vast amount of money going to Democrats from anonymous donors prompted Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, to remark to Fox News Digital: “Liberals decry dark money, unless it’s their own. The fact that this Schumer-backed group funneled $20 million to help Schumer keep his gavel, just weeks after his diatribe on the evils of money in politics, is the height of hypocrisy.”
Despite his willingness to use dark money, Schumer has publicly been outspoken against it. For example, he pushed the DISCLOSE Act, which, in Schumer’s words, would “fight the cancer of dark money in our elections and require dark money groups to report campaign contributions.”
“Americans deserve to know who’s spending billions to sway our democracy,” he tweeted in September.
Yet Schumer’s actual record on dark money has been one of “do as I say, not as I do.” As Fox News notes:
Schumer has championed the For the People Act, which contains provisions to make political nonprofits disclose donors who give more than $10,000. The bill also calls for nonprofits to file disclosure reports to the Federal Election Commission when they inject more than $10,000 into election-related activities — much like Majority Forward, which chooses to obscure its financial backers.
Additionally, Schumer, outspoken dark money critic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and other Democratic politicians previously called on the Judicial Crisis Network, a right-leaning organization, to release a list of donors who provided the group with more than $10,000.
The senators criticized the group for concealing “the identity of its donors” who “have contributed tens of millions of dollars used to fund political advertising campaigns in support of nominees like Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.”
But they have no issue with concealing the identity of donors when it comes to their own political activities. Since Majority Forward got its start in 2015, it has brought in increasingly vast amounts of money from donors whose identities remain hidden. Between July 2020 and June 2021 alone, the group took in $105 million — $13 million more than it did the previous calendar year.
Of course, dark money has been one of the top mechanisms by which Democrats have been funding their efforts this election cycle.
The New American previously pointed to the case of Mandela Barnes, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin. Barnes has made opposition to “dark money” one of the central planks of his candidacy, yet has benefited from millions of dollars in dark money spent on his behalf in this cycle.
The Left’s use of dark money, in fact, is openly trampling legality. As TNA reported earlier this year, Hansjörg Wyss, an 86-year-old Swiss billionaire with ties to high-profile left-wing insiders such as George Soros and John Podesta, has reportedly donated tens of millions of dollars to Democratic politicians and liberal causes through his “dark money” network of nonprofits, despite being a foreign national — something federal election law explicitly prohibits.
