Anonymous $130 Million Goes To Back Harris for President
Some may be from Soros; Maria Shriver quotes Laurene Powell Jobs’s Concord sage
More than $130 million of money from unknown donors has flowed into backing Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign, with hardly any scrutiny from the press or watchdog organizations about the source of the funds.
The New York Times buried the fact in the 30th paragraph of an article that focused on the data-driven methods that an independent expenditure group was using to select campaign commercials for airing. “The super PAC has shielded from disclosure the source of over $130 million in contributions, nearly 40 percent of what it has raised. It has done so by receiving money in a secret-money nonprofit arm and then transferring those undisclosed donations to the super PAC,” the Times said.
The $130 million is a significant sum, even by the standards of a modern presidential campaign. By contrast, the largest political donor who shows up in the Federal Election Committee database for this cycle is Timothy Mellon. Mellon has given $100 million to Make America Great Again Inc., which backs Trump.
The Times print headline for its article is “Super PAC Places $700 Million Bet On Harris’s Bid,” entirely avoiding the point about transparency and disclosure. Democrats used to profess to care about this; President Obama once went so far as to denounce the Supreme Court justices who were in attendance at his State of the Union address over the issue. My own view has long been that political expenditures deserve the First Amendment protections of free speech, petition, and assembly, that those protections apply to anonymous speech as well as contributions from named individuals, and that none of that is outweighed by the public interest of preventing corruption. Yet just because the government doesn’t require disclosure does not mean that the press shouldn’t try to dig out who is giving, as a service to the public who may be curious to know.
The donors could have ties to countries or industries that would be affected by Harris’s decisions while in office. They could be pushing policy agendas or be hoping for jobs in the administration. Or they could be wealthy individuals, the public disclosure of whom may undercut Harris’s campaign message that she is of the middle class while Trump just cares about his rich friends. (That’s not an exaggeration; that really is one of her campaign messages.)
A little digging sometimes pays off. For example,
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