Suddenly after my presentation, Republicans actually want to talk #DarkMoney! I’m excited. Here are a couple bills to get us started:
My DISCLOSE Act, to require public disclosure of the big anonymous donors drowning our politics in dark money. Bill applies to both sides – left and right. Problem solved.
Or my Judicial Ads Act with @SenFeinstein, that would require big dark money groups seeking to influence our courts to disclose their donors. Also applies to all sides.
Usually Republicans blame us for playing their dark money game, but omit that THEY won’t clean up the mess. All Ds voted for DISCLOSE; zero Rs.
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Something is not right around the Supreme Court and #DarkMoney has a lot to do with it. Follow the money around Supreme Court nominees.
One lane of dark money activity is through the conduit of @FedSoc. It is managed by a guy named Leonard Leo, and it has taken over the selection of judicial nominees.
Then in another lane, we have again anonymous funders running through something called the @judicialnetwork, which is run by Carrie Severino, and does PR and campaign ads for Republican judicial nominees.
We know bad actors behind climate denial; we recently examined bad actors behind Court capture; there’s news reporting of bad actors behind the Republican voter suppression apparatus; & we know pretty well who funds most Republican politics. No surprise: it’s the same crew.
The blood pumping through that beast is dark money; expose that & the beast shrivels. The beast knows this. So the race to capture the Court is also a race to establish that dark money is protected by the 1st Amendment rights of association & petition. newrepublic.com/article/156172…
That seems ludicrous, & it only got Thomas in Citizens United, but he’s the dark money crowd’s leading indicator. This theory now pops up all over the right wing’s ideology hothouse, & dark-money entities have begun “pleading the First” to questions. scotusblog.com/case-files/cas…
Wow — quite a confession. “Tremendous investment,” indeed. But not just time — money too, covertly, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Hmmm, I wonder why... foxnews.com/politics/behin…
McGahn: working on this were “at least six, sometimes as many as 10... very serious people... who knew what they were looking for...." You bet they did. After all, they were “shaping ‘the future of the country’ in... ‘an increasingly wide range of issues’" for big secret donors.
Now dark-money-funded Carrie Severino (see @judicialnetwork in our Captured Courts report) runs "a large team of extraordinarily talented lawyers” who know what is wanted at “the intersection of law and public policy” and will “do it right." democrats.senate.gov/dpcc/press-rep…
I guess Barr thinks back to the US Attorney scandal of the Bush/Rove era as the good ol’ days. But remember that cost the Attorney General his job. washingtonpost.com/national-secur…
And why would Jay Clayton want to be part of this Barr “drug deal”?
Not to mention the reaction of the ‘Sovereign District of New York’ to being run by a US Attorney from... New Jersey.
Strap in; gonna be quite a ride.
Chairman Graham says he will honor “blue slip” (bravo on that!), which means Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand hold the keys to removal of the SDNY US Attorney. thehill.com/homenews/senat…
These German reporters went undercover to expose @HeartlandInst’s “pay to play” climate denial operation. Worth. A. Watch. zdf.de/politik/fronta…
To summarize: right-wing donors who wish to remain fingerprint free donate to dark money groups like DonorsTrust. DonorsTrust doesn’t have to reveal its donors because technically the donors don’t get final say on where the money goes. But realistically everyone’s in on the game.
DonorsTrust then funnels the now anonymous money to @HeartlandInst, which uses it to spread climate denial & misinformation. One way Heartland does this is by paying influencers to speak out against climate science.
Here’s how the impeachment outcome looked to leading editorial & opinion pages:
“Republican senators are shockingly unaware of their constitutional obligations and unable to provide a coherent explanation for their actions.” washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…
“What a reasonable senator could not do was what happened here: wholesale shirking of the Senate’s constitutional responsibility to assess — which includes a responsibility to obtain — all the evidence of potential wrongdoing.” washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-p…