DC: A dark money group with links to several high-profile liberal activists contributed $2 million to The Democracy Integrity Project, an organization founded by a former Dianne Feinstein staffer that has contracted with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to investigate President Donald Trump.
Fund for a Better Future (FBF) donated $2,065,000 to The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) in 2017, according to IRS filings reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
TDIP was founded on Jan. 31, 2017, by Daniel Jones, a consultant who worked for Feinstein, a California Democrat, when she controlled the Senate Intelligence Committee. Jones has disclosed to the FBI that he hired Fusion GPS and Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier, to continue an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
He also told an associate that TDIP operated as a “shadow media organization helping the government.” Jones suggested to the associate, Adam Waldman, that his TDIP team planted several anti-Trump articles.
Little is known about the donors behind both TDIP and FBF. Both of the organizations are 501(c)(4)s, the type of public advocacy group most closely associated with “dark money” contributions. FBF has contributed to a mix of environmental organizations and politically active groups, including Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Priorities USA — the political group that backs Democrats — and the League of Conservation Voters, a progressive dark money group.
Scott Walter, the president of Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog that tracks liberal groups’ funding, said the arrangement is a prime example of “dark money.”
“You’ve found one ‘dark money’ outfit providing dark millions to another ‘dark money’ outfit and refusing to reveal anything to you. That’s ‘dark’ two or three times over,” Walter told TheDCNF.
“Ironically, ‘dark money’ is most often applied only to conservative funding,” said Walter, who noted that “the Left has a vast empire of ‘dark money’ groups, including the Fund for a Better Future and The Democracy Integrity Project.” MORE
So is the new AG same as the old AG? This sounds like a manipulation of the political contribution system that is either threads the this line between legal and illegal or outright illegal. You want to see Democrats blow a headpipe? Take away political contributions and finance political campaigns with government grants base on the number of registered and verified voters in a district. Kick the PAC’s and all the other vehicles of shoveling hidden money and services to a candidate. People that wanted to contribute still can as long as it’s only their time working a phone, knocking on a door or filling an envelope.
It seems the system has gotten so corrupt that only a good water-boarding will set things straight.
@scr_north March 11, 2019 at 7:46 pm
Making the people that print the cards “play by the rules”, while allowing the dealers, the players, and all the side betters to have no rules, won’t stop cheating. But it may get a few more rubes to put a few more dollars on the table.
@Anonymous; I may have misunderstood your comment but I would say that the way I outlined would make it awfully easy to check to see whose cheating and whose not. Use forensic accountants in realtime to check on the candidates campaigns and to ensure their budgets are being kept to. Outside money (or extra, somehow found money) reduces the candidates war chest and adds a fine to the campaign as well as a whopping one to the outside money source. I’m not saying this is the way to do it but the current system of untraceable dark money doesn’t work very well.
@scr_north March 12, 2019 at 9:27 am
Your describing a “fix” by working on what the current (whatever “current” is) regime defines as “the campaign” (whatever the “current” “definition” of “campaign” is). Bloomberg buying millions of dollars in TV ads that “Guns. Bad!” is not “the campaign”. Even if only one of the candidates in that broadcast area is saying “Guns. Bad!”. Facebook suppressing what the current regime defines as “hate speech” is not “the campaign”. Even if only one team of candidates’ “vision for the future” is (currently) defined as “hate speech”. And full disclosure of the millions and millions buying influence (public and political) does not dissuade that influence. (Though it may make it even more expensive.)