Elon Musk secretly routed tens of millions of dollars into the 2022 election to fund Citizens for Sanity and other dark money groups, the @WSJ reports.

A few items to note: 🧵

wsj.com/politics/polic… Musk routed his 2022 political spending through a 501c4 nonprofit called “Building America's Future," @WSJ reveals.

BAF then sent $43M to Citizens for Sanity, a group housed at the Conservative Partnership Institute, as @ItsDocumented reported in May theguardian.com/us-news/articl…

The myth of noncitizen voting is being pushed by a well-funded network of far-right groups, as part of an intentional and coordinated strategy to erode democracy for all Americans.

They've manufactured this false narrative for at least 3 reasons: 🧵documented.net/investigations… First, elevating conspiracies about noncitizen voting lays the groundwork to call the 2024 results into question if far-right Republicans don’t like the outcome.

One of the big trends this election cycle has been the Trump campaign outsourcing its ground game operation to super PACs backed by Elon Musk and other billionaires.

But a big question is how these supposedly “independent” operations can lawfully share data with the campaign.1/

https://twitter.com/teddyschleifer/status/1823773782890430810

This outsourcing trend has been supercharged by a recent FEC advisory opinion that allows “independent” super PACs and outside groups to coordinate directly with campaigns on canvassing activities. fec.gov/files/legal/ao…

NEW: secret materials from ALEC’s July meeting reveal the nationally-coordinated effort to manufacture conspiracies about noncitizen voting…in order to push longstanding right-wing policy priorities that undermine the freedom to vote for U.S. citizens. rollingstone.com/politics/polit… Last month, Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell told a room full of ALEC lawmakers that the fake threat of noncitizen voting should be used to justify making it harder for college students to vote.

What an embarrassing example of misinformed right-wing social media conspiracy theories triggering real world official action.

🧵

https://twitter.com/JasonMiyaresVA/status/1819408614248808586

Earlier this year, an election conspiracy theory group misinterpreted FEC data to declare a prolific Virginia donor as a “ghost donor.”

They didn’t mention that the donor is a wealthy Republican giving to Trump and other Republicans through the GOP fundraising platform WinRed.

As I told @schwartzbCNBC, what most important about this Elon Musk-funded operation is that it amounts to a billionaire-backed super PAC engaged in door-to-door canvassing in coordination with the Trump campaign.

cnbc.com/2024/08/02/elo… Increasingly, super PACs are spending money on ground game activities—a trend has been supercharged by a recent FEC advisory opinion that allows “independent” super PACs and outside groups to coordinate those efforts directly with campaigns.

New piece from @ItsDocumented and @GuardianUS:

A dark money group housed out of the Conservative Partnership Institute and led by a Project 2025 author spent over $90M on shockingly offensive ads in 2022, as it now gears up to influence voters in 2024. theguardian.com/us-news/articl… The group, called “Citizens for Sanity” drew attention in 2022 as it flooded the airwaves with often misleading ads described as vile, racist and transphobic.

Newly-obtained tax records show that the group spent a stunning $93 MILLION in 2022, almost entirely on ads, like this:

Over roughly the past two years, seemingly every MAGA-aligned “election integrity” group—from Leonard Leo’s Honest Elections Project to Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA—has begun targeting ranked-choice voting.

Here's why. 🧵

https://twitter.com/RollingStone/status/1763270514775126064

2 / What is ranked-choice voting? It allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, disrupting the traditional winner-takes-all model.

Alaska & Maine use RCV, and it has been gaining momentum in dozens of other states and municipalities, often with bipartisan support.

The Conservative Partnership Institute, a 501c3 led by former Trump officials and intertwined with GOP political orgs, raised a stunning $45M last year—and its donors got a charitable tax deduction.

@SenWhitehouse is inquiring into whether CPI has violated its tax-exempt status.

https://twitter.com/SenWhitehouse/status/1597364188979961858

Because CPI is a 501c3 charity, its donors get a lucrative tax deduction. But in exchange for those tax benefits, CPI cannot engage in partisan political campaign activities, or operate to benefit a political party.

CPI is pushing the envelope.
npr.org/2022/08/31/111…

John Eastman, who authored the blueprint for Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election, is laying the groundwork for rejecting votes in 2022, according to audio obtained by @ItsDocumented and shared with @HeidiReports at @politico politico.com/news/2022/10/2… “If Republicans lose in New Mexico, [Eastman] is laying the groundwork for legal challenges and to give MAGA-aligned county officials a pretext to reject the results.”
politico.com/news/2022/10/2…

Looks like Trump developed a scheme to transfer upwards of $100M in Save America funds—which cannot be used to back Trump’s candidacy—to a super PAC that can eventually spend the money backing Trump’s 2024 presidential run. 🧵 politico.com/news/2022/09/2… Once Trump becomes a candidate, it is illegal to transfer Save America $ to a super PAC.

But Trump has more deniability by making the transfer before the midterms, and spending some of those funds backing Trump-endorsed candidates.

The leftover $ will then be used for 2024.

Read this deeply reported piece from @andrewperezdc, @AndyKroll & @JustinElliott on how a secretive 90-year-old billionaire maneuvered to dodge taxes & give Leonard Leo control of an astonishing $1.6 billion—the largest donation of its kind in US history propublica.org/article/dark-m… Historically, billionaires looking to create a legacy have put their fortunes into foundations. Those offer substantial tax benefits, but face limits on how the funds may be used for political activity.

Barry Seid managed to sidestep both taxes and limits on political spending.

Backed by key figures in the effort to subvert the 2020 election, a coalition of election fraud conspiracy theorists are running for the offices that control elections in key battleground states.

Brief🧵 nytimes.com/2022/06/05/us/… The America First coalition is led by NV SOS candidate Jim Marchant, who says he created the coalition and ran for office at the behest of a Qanon leader, and who is backed by Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne.

Some of these America First candidates actually stand a chance.

Not enough attention has been paid to how powerful dark money interests mobilized to pressure Manchin and Sinema to maintain the filibuster—and, in turn, to maintain the power of those wealthy special interests at the expense of voters.

🧵 For example, last April, the dark money group Heritage Action described a $24M plan to “block federal legislation & tackle state based reform."

A key part of that anti-voter effort was blocking filibuster reform: “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment," said a top Heritage official.

Last week, the FEC dismissed our 2020 complaint alleging a secret donor to Democratic super PACs violated the law.

The FEC’s Democrats wanted to pursue the case, but the GOP Commissioners shut it down.
fec.gov/data/legal/mat… In 2018 & 2020, a mystery donor gave millions to newly-created nonprofits, which turned around and donated to Dem super PACs.

The super PACs disclosed receiving money from the nonprofits, but not the name of the donor who actually provided the funds.

From our complaint:

BIG: leaked Facebook docs show that "America Progress Now," which reached hundreds of thousands of swing state voters with ads promoting Green Party candidates in 2018, was run by a right-wing political consulting firm tied to Turning Point USA.

theguardian.com/technology/202… We filed an FEC complaint against APN in 2019.

One FEC Commissioner accused us of “wild speculation” when we raised concerns that APN may have been “the work of a major party political operative promoting spoiler candidates in swing states.”

But it looks like we were right.

It is no surprise that the Koch network is trying to protect a broken status quo, where billionaires & corporations are free to secretly buy influence in order to rig the political system in their favor.

But why on earth should Joe Manchin listen to them?
cnbc.com/2021/06/08/joe… The Koch network has poured millions into groups that push voter suppression, has long fought to end limits on money in politics, and is asking SCOTUS to make dark money darker.

The Koch network has no interest in creating “positive solutions” when it comes to democracy reform.

NEW: following our 2020 complaint, FBI is investigating illegal contributions to Susan Collins & her super PAC from a federal contractor, Navatek.

Collins helped Navatek land an $8M contract, and in the months that followed, Navatek illegally laundered funds into Collins’ race.

https://twitter.com/lachlan/status/1394756087862239234

In Feb 2020, we spotted a mysterious LLC that gave $150k to Collins’ super PAC just 5 weeks after forming. That timeline indicated that the money came from elsewhere.

We filed an FEC complaint alleging the donation violated federal law’s straw donor ban. campaignlegal.org/update/clc-cal…

An astonishing $1 BILLION in dark money was spent on the 2020 election, @OpenSecretsDC reports, with more spent backing Dems than Republicans. opensecrets.org/news/2021/03/o…

We’ve got a new report that shows how #HR1/#S1 would do something about it. campaignlegal.org/sites/default/… There are two layers to the dark money problem.

First, most dark money is never reported to the FEC, because current law narrowly defines the types of ads that trigger reporting.

Second, when spending IS reported to the FEC, the donors who gave the funds are kept secret.

Floor votes today and yesterday added several amendments to #HR1, a bill to crack down on political corruption in both parties and strengthen our democracy. 

I want to highlight 3 of the amendments and the problems they aim to solve: 1) In 2018, @CampaignLegal and @lachlan documented how former candidates-turned-foreign agents used leftover campaign funds to donate to the same politicians they were lobbying on behalf of foreign interests... thedailybeast.com/ex-pols-took-y…

Today is the 11th anniversary of Citizens United, the SCOTUS decision that ushered in the era of super PACs, dark money, & megadonors.

But there are solutions. Here are some of the #HR1 reforms that address the impact of CU and protect the voices of voters in our democracy. First, ending dark money. Citizens United opened the door to unlimited spending by corporations, including nonprofits that hide their donors. Thanks to CU, in the 2020 cycle, $750M was spent by secretly-funded “dark money” groups (most of it by Democrats). opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/d…