To start, it was founded by three people: Ann Corkery, Robin (Rob) P. Arkley II, and Leonard Leo.
Corkery - an attorney for Stein Mitchell Cipollone Beato & Missner in D.C.
Arkley - CEO of Security National Master Holding Company LLC
Leo - VP of The Federalist Society
Corkery - an attorney for Stein Mitchell Cipollone Beato & Missner in D.C.
Arkley - CEO of Security National Master Holding Company LLC
Leo - VP of The Federalist Society
Hidden beneath The Federalist society is a network of dark funding. One such avenue is a group called "DonorsTrust" which is the donation arm of "Donors Capital Fund", a group created with the intention of circumventing reporting laws and guaranteeing anonymity of donation:
All grants from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund are made based upon the intent of the donor themselves, creating a dark money funnel. If you want to donate $100,000 to a group that, say, runs scams trying to trick news agencies into picking up false claims to discredit them..
You can just donate directly to DonorsTrust and ask that they funnel your donation to Project Veritas. Which they did. And this totally happened. Repeatedly. But that's another thread.
Donors Capital Fund is for the high rollers. Per the wikipedia page:
In 2014 The Federalist Society received $1,336,500 from Donors Capital Fund. In the same year they received $3,328,600 from DonorsTrust. That's a total of $4,665,100 in donations from this dark money network which is funded by the Koch Brothers and their buddies.
In addition to working for The Federalist Society, Leonard Leo is listed as the attorney for BH Group, LLC on a campaign filing for Jay Webber's campaign.
BH Group, LLC was the root of the mysterious $1,000,000 donation to the Trump inauguration committee (opensecrets.org/news/2018/05/m…) as well as the recipient of $750,000 from the Wellspring Committee.
The Wellspring Committee's President is Neil Corkery, husband of Ann Corkery (founding member of JCN - remember?). It was founded in 2008 on the same premise of DonorTrust - hiding the identity of donations by funnelling large sums of money in a 501(c)(4), a "social welfare" grp.
Wellspring contracted BH Group LLC for $750,000 for "Public Relations" who then, in turn, donated $1 Million to the Trump inauguration committee. They also "hired" Creative Response Concepts for $600,000 for the same purpose.
In 2016, Wellspring raised $32.2 million. This was the product of only eight donors, one of which donated $28,475,000.
The recipients? $2,000,000 to American Future Fund (founded by Alex and Jill Vogel of the consulting agency Holtzman Vogel), $2,500,000 to Illinois Policy Action (a partner association of the Koch Bros who also received $1.5 mil from DonorTrust/Donor Capital) and...JCN.
JCN, originally named the Judicial Confirmation Network, was renamed the Judicial Crisis Network following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. In 2016, Wellspring Committee donated $23,554,997 to JCN which accounted for 80% of all grants issued by Wellspring in 2016.
JCN and Wellspring have become a circuit in and of themselves. In 2015, Ann and Neil's daughter Kathleen was on the board of Wellspring alongside the son of the political director of JCN, Daniel Casey. Both groups have donated to American Future Fund (JCN tossed them 750k).
Both groups are Koch aligned. It is widely reported they are also funded by the Kochs, but due to the nature of 501(c)(4) donations, its difficult to trace. What we do know is that the Koch Brothers own many different versions of these sort of money funnels and they each...
Donate money to one another creating a circuit that is nearly as complex and dirty as anything in the Panama Papers. Speaking of, if you were a foreign national and wanted to influence an election, how could you donate without actually *donating*?
Just food for thought.
Just food for thought.
Speaking of education, there's one group I haven't mentioned yet. Judicial Education Project. Frequently referred to as an "affiliated group" of JCN, Judicial Education Project is the "educational arm" of JCN.
This relationship is convenient as it ties our thread back together. JEP, the former employer of consultant Kellyanne Conway, received $8,007,000 from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund in 2014.
There are two primary differences between JCN and JEP. The first is the way in which each organization receives funding. JCN receives almost all of its funding through large donations to Wellspring.
JEP (with the exception of two donations from Wellspring in 2010 and 2011) has received all of its donations from as many as a hundred unique donations through the funnel of Donors Trust and Donors Capital where Koch, DeVos, Searle, Pope, the Bradleys and others funnel cash.
The second difference is that JCN plays politics (Gorsuch said Leo was the first person to call him about a potential SCOTUS position in 2016) while JEP plays court and writes amicus curiae briefs to influence the judges placed by JCN.
Anyone familiar with Shelby v. Holder?
americanbar.org/content/dam/ab…
If you were a foreign agent and wanted to impact American democracy but couldn't directly donate to a candidate...what would you do?
/end
americanbar.org/content/dam/ab…
If you were a foreign agent and wanted to impact American democracy but couldn't directly donate to a candidate...what would you do?
/end
