Dem. Senator EXPOSES dark money scheme that propped up Kavanaugh and Barrett

i'd like to ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business for let's say 22 minutes without objection thank you mr president these speeches on the scheme by dark money interests to seize control of the supreme court are designed to describe it in all its repulsive intricacy my last speech discussed in operation in this scheme within the federalist society this speech will take you literally down the hall from the federalist society to something called the judicial crisis network or jcn they share the same purpose the same hallway and likely the same controlling donors remember david koch's disastrous bid for vice president on the libertarian party ticket that showed how unappetizing his right-wing extremism was to normal people and remember the lewis powell playbook which advised and i quote here strength lies in organization and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations no one corporation or wealthy individual needs to as powell said get too far out in front and make itself too visible a target end quote let intermediaries do that work corporate interests like big tobacco and the fossil fuel industry have for a long time used coordinated webs of national front groups in their plots to fend off accountability for the dangers of tobacco and carbon emissions these front group webs grew and multiplied and specialized all while concealing their true interests and funders they got more numerous and they also got smarter and more strategic over time polishing up front group names like the not too subtle tobacco institute to names like the more wholesome sounding heartland institute it's quite a web they created science groups to counter real scientific research on public health and climate change with fake science think tanks to churn out white papers and hire sound bite friendly fake experts legal organizations to challenge and delay government regulation of harmful products academic hot houses in which to grow donor-friendly right-wing judicial philosophies identity laundering screens to hide the true donors and controllers and their interests and political attack groups to pressure elected officials people who study this have reported these groups numbering in multiple dozens and their backers play the front groups like keys on a piano apply this method to the scheme to capture the court and you see that the dark money donors needed more than just the nominations turnstile that they ran out of the federalist society they also needed a bare-knuckle political brawler one night in early 2005 at an upscale italian dinner with special guest justice antonin scalia major donor and corporate lawyer ann corkery california real estate tycoon robin arkley and federalist society executive vice president leonard leo got together and celebrated george w bush's second term the political importance of the supreme court would have been on everyone's mind there as it was the five republicans on the supreme court who gave george w bush his first term according to reporting by open secrets and the daily beast this dinner linked to the creation of a 501c4 dark money group then called the judicial confirmation network by the end of that year this group would spend money lots of money lots of big donor money and they would spend it anonymously first to boost john roberts as chief justice and then samuel alito as associate justice cementing right-wing corporate control over the court and shifting its decisions further in big donor's favor there are a few things to note about the judicial confirmation network's early days one it began work fast just months after starting jcn ads hit the air in support of bush nominees two it had lots of money beginning in 2008 ann corkery took control of something called the wellspring committee a dark money identity laundering group seeded with funding from charles and david koch's donor network thereafter wellspring funneled seven or eight-figure dark money donations to jcn every year millions of anonymous dollars three they brought on a lawyer with heavy right-wing chops to run the place wendy long a former clerk to justice clarence thomas became chief counsel and mouthpiece thus in just a few months jcn appeared and became a polished powerful anonymized campaigner for the big donor scheme to take over the court and then came the election of barack obama and jcn had to go from offense four nominees to defense against nominees that see in jcn for confirmation no longer made much sense and the scheme now faced a crisis the crisis for it of a president nominating judges who had not been screened by them judges whose fealty to the corporate right wing could not be confirmed judges who might even rule against the right-wing donors agenda so they quickly rebranded jcn as the judicial crisis network but even in the obama years the republican five to four majority on the captured court delivered big things for jcn and its secretive backers in the administration's first term the roberts court handed down citizens united and other decisions opening donor pipelines to 501c4 groups like jcn this caused the tsunami of slime we saw in our politics and corporations and right-wing donors rushed to the feast anonymous money flooded in annual donations laundered through wellspring to jcn rose from millions of dollars to many millions of dollars jcn even expanded the scheme to seek to influence state supreme courts and state attorney general seats the scheme was flourishing then on a 2016 all-expenses-paid trip for justice scalia to a luxury hunting ranch in texas the justice died leaving a supreme court vacancy with the better part of a year left before the presidential election now there really was a crisis the big donors suddenly faced the prospect of a democratic president appointing scalia's replacement shifting the balance of the court five to four against them taking away their precious majority undoing the scheme so the donors swung into action within days mitch mcconnell quickly pledged to hold the seat open and within days republican senators uniformly lined up behind that decision a decision very possibly explained by the overlay between dark money donors to the scheme and dark money donors to republican senate political operations history will have to judge the extent of that overlay in any event dark money funding of jcn hit escape velocity during this period according to tax records obtained by open secrets and others jcn received big donations in fiscal year 2015 to 2016. one single anonymous donation alone told 17.9 million dollars wellspring separately channeled 23.5 million dollars in dark money to jcn in 2016. then another 14.8 million the next year when wellspring dissolved in 2018 big slugs of dark money continued to flow through other conduits jcn received four separate individual anonymous donations each of 15 million dollars or more following justice scalia's death we cannot say for sure because the donors hide behind the dark money screen but these donations over 60 million dollars in all could well have all come from the same donor and one wonders what are the odds that someone willing to spend 60 million dollars anonymously to influence the makeup of the supreme court is someone who has business before the court pretty high i would say but dark money scheming keeps this information secret how did jcn spend all this money attack leonard leo's federalist society operation had handed trump a list of approved nominees jcn spending poured into tv ads pressuring senators into media blitzes to sell the federalist society list the group spent seven million dollars to attack merrick garland 10 million dollars to boost neil gorsuch 10 million dollars or more to prop up brett kavanaugh's deeply troubled nomination with its now we know fake fbi tip line and 10 million dollars in under two months to support amy coney barrett on its own this anonymous 37 million dollar barrage smells terrible but it's only part of the judicial crisis network operation jcn has a corporate twin the judicial education project each group backing up the actions and finances of the other let me walk you through this setup because it is a capsule summary of how political scheming is accomplished in our corrupted dark money era first you pair a 501 c 3 and a 501 c 4. the judicial crisis network was chartered as a 501c4 social welfare group the judicial education project as its allied 501c3 nonprofit organization under a perverse reading of the law the 501c4 organization is allowed to operate as a dark money political attack group we see this arrangement commonly now in the clandestine world of dark money politics in fact the recent supreme court case about dark money was brought by a group called americans for prosperity foundation which was the 501 501c3 associated with americans for prosperity which is the koch brothers 501c4 that spent millions of dollars to help amy coney barrett get her seat and yet she didn't recuse herself from the case involving the 501 c3 so second you operate the two as one unit judicial crisis network judicial education project are connected by staff by dollars and by location according to the most recent tax records long-serving jcn staffer carrie severino is also the sole and principal officer of you guessed it the judicial education project severino is not listed on jcn's tax forms but she serves as its public-facing quote chief counsel and policy director jcn and jep tax records both list the same address in washington dc which by the way is right down the hall from the federalist society at the same address and both groups share day-to-day staff there is a doctrine in the law called piercing the corporate veil in this case the corporate veil between these two is a web of holes what's the next thing you do you soak up dark money together it's hard to know much about these two groups dark money funding that's why they keep it dark but we know the wellspring committee has funded both groups both have also paid money to something called bh group which is a mysterious llc that leonard leo once disclosed as his employer and that made a one million dollar mystery donation to trump's inaugural it seems to do no other business they used the 501c3 and the 501c4 status precisely because it lets them hide their donors and controllers and the last thing is that you get to play shell games with your name a couple of years ago those two organizations formally changed their legal names in virginia now follow this for a minute judicial crisis network changed its name and it became the concord fund judicial education project changed its name and it became the 85 fund the concord fund then registered its old name judicial crisis network as was called a fictitious name a kind of corporate alias under virginia law and continue to operate as the judicial crisis network here's the virginia law that allows them to do that a fictitious name is a name that a person individual or business entity uses instead of the person's true name usually in the course of transacting or offering to transact business it also registered the name honest elections project action as an additional fictitious name to carry out a new voter suppression project the 85 fund likewise registered its old name the judicial education project as a fictitious name and it separately registered as the honest elections project as an additional fictitious name and it gets even better than this because as i've said before when the washington post exposed the 250 million dollar scheme that leonard leo is at the center of to pack and control the supreme court to capture it like a captured agency he wasn't much use any longer he was like a blown agent in a covert operation he had to go someplace where did he hop to he hopped from the federalist society to the honest elections project so he could get to work on the presiding officer's favorite cause voter suppression same guy same corporate network new name and new purpose voter suppression as if this weren't enough both of these groups have now filed new fictitious names so this is to help them wade into the right wing fuss over what the right wing likes to call critical race theory so the concord fund has now added the fictitious name free to learn action and the 85 fund has now added the fictitious name free to learn again you see the pairing of the 501c3 in the 501c4 as part of the basic structure for dark money political influence operations and by the way the same person filled out all these forms for both organizations and is listed with various titles on each so now we have one group that calls itself the concord fund that operates simultaneously as the judicial crisis network the honest elections project action the free to learn action and we have its sister organization the 85 fund that operates simultaneously as the judicial education project the honest elections project and free to learn all with overlapping staff locations and funding and by the way when you are the funder of these groups you are their controller now imagine this level of complexity multiplied many times over because that is what the washington post disclosed and i borrow a photograph from their video of their investigation that washington post expose on the covert court capture operation exposed the judicial crisis network as one part just one part of a massive there it is judicial crisis network one part of a massive web of groups a web of groups that took in over 250 million dollars in dark money between 2014 and 2017. this effort to capture the supreme court they're not kidding around spending 250 million dollars in dark money is a serious investment that demands a serious return and guess what expert testimony before my senate court subcommittee has since raised that number to 400 million dollars through 2018. through all these allied and coordinated front groups the keys on the dark money piano that the big donors can play and chords and singly as they wish dark money donors can from hiding covertly channel tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymized money toward the schemes court capture goals colleagues this is a scheme akin in complexity and tradecraft to an intelligence agency covert operation only this one is not being run by one country against another this one is being run in and against our own country by a handful of creepy billionaires and their foundations trying to impose their self-serving ideology on the rest of us through our least democratic branch the branch that doesn't care if normal people hate this stuff because they're in robes for life that's our federal courts and particularly it's our supreme court and the big dark money donors have pretty well pulled it off too following lewis powell's old admonition to use strength in organization and united action of all this complexity they've just made it all clandestine which is why i'm going to keep digging to be continued i yield the floor

Channel: The Hill

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Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021