Anonymous $130 Million Goes To Back Harris for President

Some may be from Soros; Maria Shriver quotes Laurene Powell Jobs’s Concord sage

A campaign event in Michigan for Vice President Harris yesterday concluded with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the favorite sage of Laurene Powell Jobs.

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,

Alexander Soros, a son of George Soros who regularly posts pictures to social media of himself with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, is listed in tax filings as, along with longtime Soros aide Michael Vachon, a director of the Fund for Policy Reform. The Fund for Policy Reform gave $60 million to the Democracy Pac, which in turn has given $10 million to Future Forward Pac, the group that the Times article highlights.

Or for example, the Democracy Pac has also given $3,550,000 to the AB Pac, a hybrid pac that says it has spent $33,850,980.35 opposing Donald Trump. The AB Pac also took in $1.9 million from the American Bridge Research Fund, which collected $500,000 from Paul Sagan, who is the chairman of ProPublica, which describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” 

One intriguing possible clue about a potential source of some of the funding came at the end of a Harris campaign town hall event yesterday in Oakland County, Michigan, where Vice President Harris appeared with former Congressman Liz Cheney and Maria Shriver. Shriver, President Kennedy’s niece and Governor Schwarzenegger’s ex-wife, has said she is friends with Laurene Powell Jobs. Shriver concluded the event by saying, “I want to leave you with this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, that I think speaks to this moment. It says, ‘Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to the end requires great courage.’” 

Laurene Powell Jobs, who FEC records show has given $2,017,200 this cycle to the Harris Victory Fund and the Democratic National Committee, owns the sharply anti-Trump Atlantic magazine. She also is founder of the Emerson Collective, inspired by the transcendentalist New England writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the so-called Sage of Concord, who lived from 1803 to 1882. Bloomberg estimates her fortune, inherited from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, at $11.7 billion. I emailed the Emerson Collective yesterday to ask whether Powell Jobs or Emerson is doing political spending above what has been disclosed in the FEC records. I haven’t yet received any response. 

The Times reported back in September that Powell Jobs “has quietly contributed millions of dollars to an organization backing Ms. Harris, according to three people briefed on the gifts.” It didn’t say how many millions, but it did say, deep into the article, “Ms. Powell Jobs prefers to make undisclosed contributions, and she has donated millions to Future Forward’s dark-money vehicle, according to three people briefed on the donations.” Again, the Times headline wasn’t “Apple heiress pours undisclosed millions into Harris campaign,” it was the totally anodyne “Power Figure Who Elevated Harris Profile.”

When this sort of spending goes to back Republicans, the New York Times and ProPublica breathlessly and disapprovingly describe it as “dark money.”

Program notes: If you haven’t yet caught up with the series we’ve been publishing on how America can best promote freedom, democracy, and rule of law abroad, I recommend checking it out. The most recent installment, “Let Argentina, Israel, Italy, Taiwan and Others Lead, Daniel Pipes Says,” by Daniel Pipes, appeared earlier today.

Other, earlier answers: “Don’t Lose Any Countries” Is Elliott Abrams’s Advice, by Elliott Abrams

Counter Communist China in the U.S. and at the U.N., Ellen Bork Recommends, by Ellen Bork

Help Ukraine and Israel Prevail, Says Carl Gershman, by Carl Gershman

Resist Redefining “Democracy” as Elite Preferences, Kontorovich Says, by Eugene Kontorovich

Spend More on Defense and Less on Everything Else, Mandelbaum Warns, by Michael Mandelbaum

More Building, Less Lecturing, Mansour Recommends, by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Tell the World the Truth About Iran, Says Richard Perle, by Richard Perle