2022_REPORT_BRIEF

2022 REPORT BRIEF I

ROME'S NEFARIOUS DARK MONEY COMPLETING DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Supreme Court Decision in 'Citizens United v. FEC' Empowers New Citizen Action (Article in Catholic Online dated 1/22/2010):

The decision handed down in 'Citizens United' opens the door for our work. It is a 'game changer'.

The fact that the Court overruled its prior decisions is very significant to anyone who has set their sites on overturning Roe v Wade and engaging in the kind of massive political action such a result will require. We must persuade the Court to reverse Roe and Doe. This will take massive organizational development as well as effective and sustained political and legal activism. It will also take a lot of money. . .

The decision handed down in Citizens United v. FEC is what they call in political and policy activism circles a "game changer." . . .

We must change this Nation’s laws in order to ensure that the Fundamental and inalienable Rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are protected for all of our neighbors - including our young, our infirm and our elderly. This opinion helps us along the path to victory.

We should be emboldened by this Supreme Court decision. We should also use it as a blueprint for our future political and legal activism. It is time to follow our President’s example in at least one way, by becoming “community organizers.”

Wielding the language set forth in this opinion we need to build – and massively fund - the organizations, associations, and movements desperately needed in this urgent hour. It is time for boldness! A truly free nation must recognize the first freedom, the freedom to be born, or it will lose freedom itself. In the Wake of the March for Life, the Supreme Court Decision in “Citizens United’ Empowers a New Citizen Action." (Emphasis added)

The following is the US Senate transcript of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's speech in the June, 2021, Senate debate on the "For the People" voting rights bill. Some passages in the transcription are lacking in clarity, but the message of the speech is clear:

The senator from Rhode Island, Mr. Whitehouse: Madam President, this past weekend is our annual reminder as a country of the courage and suffering and sacrifice and passion and love and energy that so many of our fellow Americans put into protecting our democracy. When in a democracy one group of citizens can deliberately, purposefully make it more difficult for another group of citizens to vote, they have put a dagger into that democracy. We cannot let that happen, and I'm here today to focus in particular on one voting right that we have in this country, and that voting right is when you're voting to know what the hell is going on around you in that election, to know who is saying what, to know who the players are around you. If we're supposed to sit here as Americans and just act like indolent consumers, passive in this democracy, that's not the way it's supposed to work. Citizenship is an office, and that office has duties, and the duties include being informed of what is going on around you, and what is stopping American citizens from knowing what is going on around them is the cascade, the torrent, the Nile River of dark money that has begun to flow into our democracy since Citizens United. It wasn't enough that the Republican members of the court let unlimited money flow; they then had to refuse to react when that unlimited dark money went underground, when it went dark, when it became anonymous. They have had chance after chance to fix it, and they've refused, and we are left with this mess of matters -- it matters that citizens know who's talking in a democracy. In my circuit, the first circuit court of appeals where Jack Reed and I have occasionally an opportunity to elect a president, there is a dean, a Reagan appointee, he's a very distinguished judge and he has said it's crucial that the electorate can understand who is speaking and thus to give proper weight to different speakers and messages when deciding how to vote. That curable right is denied to Americans wholesale because of an unprecedented dark money campaign of interference in our democracy. You see it whenever it's election season, you're watching a television show and suddenly your tv screen is occupied by advertisement that somebody is a bum, somebody is no good, that somebody is terrible and it smears then and at the end it says, this was brought to you by Americans for peace, puppies and prosperity. Some imaginary group that was cooked up just to launch those advertisements, and whatever filth those advertisements are contained is then disappeared with the end of that front group. It's the political equivalent of toilet paper. You flush it when you're done with the filth and whoever's behind it keeps their hands clean. So we now have a tsunami of slime, as one writer put it, flowing through our country and it is denying our citizens the most fundamental right when it comes to vote which is knowing who is doing what to whom. In this bill is the disclose act that would fix that. If you spend more than $10,000 in an election, you have to report it. And I don't care had you how many -- care how many shell corporations and phony trusts and 501(c)(3)s, if you block your identity, our bill will get through it. It super drills through however many screens you put up and the American public will at last, once again, know who is really talking to them in their elections. Dark money, Madam President, takes away voters' right to know who is talking to them and what's going on in their democracy. It is a fundamental right. and, unfortunately, doesn't end there. Because the other rights that my colleagues have so eloquently talked about to get to the ballot to be treated fairly at the ballot, to not be harassed on their way to the ballot, to get a ballot mailed to you. The Republican efforts around the country to attack those rights to suppress votes those ways, you know how that's being done? It's being done with dark money. We know it because they've been caught. It's not a matter of debate or dispute. When these enterprises are set up to deprive what Reverend Warnock calls some people -- some people of their right to vote and when the laws are done so that that is accomplished against, particularly against African American voters with what one voter called surgical precision. It is not happening at random, it is happening because anonymous amounts of -- of anonymous money is coming in. Heritage action, which is the current state of the art, you set up a phony 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4), and the Heritage Foundation and 501(c)(3) and Heritage Action is 501(c)(4), and they were talking to the secret donors and they said, “we work quietly with the legislators, we made sure activists were calling the State legislators, getting support, showing up at their hearings, giving testimony. In some cases we actually drafted the bills for them or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots from the bottom-up type of vibe,” she said, “and we did this with little fanfare. Honestly nobody noticed. My team looked at each other and were like, it can't be that easy.” Well, the disclose act will stop it from being that easy to have an out of State dark money campaign and get them to pass voter suppresser laws without the state legislatures knowing who is behind this. I am not making this up. It is on tape. The only ones are the friends at the Honest Election Project, which doesn't actually exist. What exists is something called the 85 fund, and the 85 fund is allowed under Virginia law, Senator Kaine, to have a fictitious name and to operate as if it is operating under the fictitious name which helped to stock the court with right-wing judges, but the other one is the Honest Elections Project and Honest Election Project Action are the pair that work on this. Money has poured into this effort and the Honest Elections Project has been smack in the middle of it. In 2012, 77% of its money came through donors trust, which is a great identity laundering device, in 2014 88%, 2015 84%, in 2017 84.6%. In this 2020, the year that the Honest Election Project waged dark money donor suppression, they received over $45 million identity laundered through donors trust and much of that money came from one single $19 million contribution. somebody wrote a $19 million check to suppress votes. Folks, if we don't get to the bottom of this, -- to the bottom of this, we're going to have a real problem on our hands. And when we get to the bottom of this, the American public will be with us because they hate this, you can be a Bernie bro or tea partier, you can agree that dark money has no place in elections. They did whatever minioning they do together and their conversation got out to Jane Mayer, who wrote about it and this was the issue they said to each other, we can't dirty this up. No matter how hard we try to put a good spin on this, voters hate dark money corruption. Our voters hate it just as much as their voters so this is our chance to fix this, to take out the dark money behind the voter suppression effort in all of these States. This isn't happening, folks. It is being done and we've got to pay attention to who is doing it. And when we do, we'll restore that fundamental voting right of all Americans to know who is talking to them in their elections, to have ours be a democracy without masks, without subterfuge and without dark money. I yield the floor.

In a 49-51 vote, Senate blocked the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021 from advancing to a final passage vote. Sixty votes were needed. Members also failed to change the filibuster rules, 52-48. Democrats Manchin (WV) and Sinema (AZ) voted for the voting rights bill but against changing the filibuster rules. Vice President presided during vote on the voting rights bill.

'Dark Money' Is Funding The 2020 Election Challenge — And Could Challenge 2024 (August 5, 2021)

President Biden was sworn into office more than six months ago, but officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., are still searching for evidence that Biden's victory in their state was based on massive voter fraud — even after multiple audits found no issues.

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer says the Arizona audit is an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

Mayer notes that although the audit appears to be the work of local extremists, it's actually being funded by sophisticated national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country's wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives.

"The 2020 election is long since over in most people's minds and settled and decided," Mayer says. "But these groups are doubling down in the money they're putting into, and the effort they're putting into, trying to push the idea of fraud — potentially in order to challenge the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election." . . .

The following investigative report is teeming with importaant facts in every paraagraph; so although quoted at length here, a huge amount of valuable information is left out. Internal hyperlinks are added to provide specifics about organizations named by Jane Mayer:

The Big Money Behind the Big Lie (By Jane Mayer, August 2, 2021)

Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs. . .

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election. Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—t he film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies.Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy. . .

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.

Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared ****less.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.” . . .

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions. Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues. . .

Alarmism about election fraud in America extends at least as far back as Reconstruction, when white Southerners disenfranchised newly empowered Black voters and politicians by accusing them of corruption. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some white conservatives were frank about their hostility to democracy. Forty years ago, Paul Weyrich, who helped establish the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, admitted, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed 2000 election, in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes. A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court.

Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.” . . .

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down. But the 2013 Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation.

Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values. By 2017, Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. But George has continued to serve as a director, even as the foundation has heavily funded groups promulgating the falsehood that election fraud is widespread in America, particularly in minority communities, and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton. He has written in praise of Pence’s refusal to decertify Biden’s election, and has lamented that so many Americans believe, “wrongly,” that “the election was ‘stolen.’ ” But he declined to discuss with me why, then, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board. . .

It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.

One of the group’s directors is John Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, in California. On January 4, 2021, he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded.

Two days later, Eastman spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally in Washington, hours before the crowds ransacked the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. “This is bigger than President Trump!” Eastman declared. “It is the very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done!” He thundered that election officials had robbed Trump by illegally casting ballots in the name of non-voters whose records they had extracted, after the polls had closed, from a “secret folder” in electronic voting machines. He told the crowd that the scandal was visible in “the data.” There is no evidence of such malfeasance, however. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it. The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities. . .

Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”

The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”

More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.

Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of the Independent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”

Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.

Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.

Although the law bars charitable organizations such as the Council for National Policy from engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”

By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president, echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.” . . .

At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.” . . . (Internal hyperlinks and underscored passages added.)

The ultimate Big Steal is pending!