Two Unmissable Stories: TNR Exposes Dark Money Behind the Attacks on KBJ’s SCOTUS Confirmation –And Connections to Clarence Thomas

In the chaos of this week of confirmation hearings on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court, True North published two deep-dive threads on Twitter that illuminate what’s really going on behind the scenes of this fight.  Both expose the dark money that has engulfed the right-wing packing of the Court for years. 

If you thought Clarence Thomas couldn’t be more corrupted given yesterday’s documented revelations about Ginni Thomas’ texts to Mark Meadows urging that the 2020 election be overturned, you’re in for a treat. (We’ll have more to come on Ginni’s record soon, too.)

Below, we unspool and expand on these threads in two stories below:

1. Fast Recap: Why GOP Complaints about “Liberal” Dark Money Are Disingenuous

2. The Receipts: What a $1.5M Ad Campaign AGAINST Judge Jackson and FOR Clarence Thomas’ “Documentary” Reveals about Thomas’ Corruption and Links to Dark Money

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Fast Recap: Why GOP Complaints about “Liberal” Dark Money Are Disingenuous

Read and retweet the Twitter thread here.

Over and over in the confirmation hearings of Judge Brown Jackson, we’ve heard Republicans make accusations about “liberal dark money.”

There's a glaring problem with those attacks: when they had a chance to vote for financial disclosure and transparency for dark money groups, those Republican Senators opposed it.

In 2010, Senator Whitehouse introduced the DISCLOSE Act to combat dark money in response to the Court’s Citizens United decision which struck down bipartisan fair election rules. Senate Republicans, with Mitch McConnell at the helm, the Senator instrumental in gutting the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, filibustered it.

In 2019, Dems introduced HR1, the broad voting rights bill also called the “For the People Act”, and included provisions that would require disclosure of sources of dark money spent to influence elections. A recording obtained by The New Yorker revealed that Charles Koch's “advocacy” arm Stand Together had a secret call with GOP aides, lamenting the popularity of the bill and strategized about how to sink it. Sure enough, Senate Republicans blocked the reform.

Meanwhile, one of the loudest critics of “liberal” dark money is Capital Research Center, a right-wing “think tank” whose funders include Koch, the Bradley Foundation, and ExxonMobil. In 2021, CRC was asked to be the GOP witness at a Senate hearing on dark money and the courts. When asked if he supported stronger disclosure laws to curtail dark money in politics, CRC's head Scott Walter said "no." You can read from the amazing testimony of Lisa Graves as she exposed CRC in front of the Senate committee at that same hearing here.

As Democrats sought more transparency, the right-wing State Policy Network (SPN) launched a project called "People United for Privacy” intended to look like a grassroots group. PUP served as an attack dog opposing rules requiring disclosure of large donors to government oversight agencies to prevent misuse of non-profit status. OpenSecrets published an excellent exposé on its role in overturning a crucial IRS oversight rule.

In 2019, People United for Privacy got 100% of its funding from Rule of Law Trust, a fund whose sole listed trustee is Leonard Leo. Leo is the kingpin of a well-documented dark money network intent on remaking the courts, and our report released earlier this week showed that this network has now raised nearly $600 million dollars from mostly secret donors.

Rule of Law Trust also funds Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), the key node in Leo’s operation to capture the courts. And yet, JCN has been one of the loudest voices in the last week decrying “liberal” dark money and attacking Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

They didn’t stop at blocking legislation on financial transparency — they used the courts too. Koch’s political arm Americans for Prosperity (AFP) sued California to keep its biggest donors secret from government non-profit oversight in a case that in 2021 reached the Supreme Court, AFP v. Bonta. So many right-wing Koch and Leo-linked groups lined up to file amicus briefs to the Court in support of AFP that it looked like what Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has famously called “a flotilla of amicus briefs.”

Following that flotilla of briefs, all of the GOP appointees to the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Koch and AFP, overturning decades of oversight laws governing groups given the privilege of non-profit status, i.e. not paying taxes on their revenue. Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that the majority’s approach was “wholly inconsistent with the Court’s precedents.”

So, to recap this vicious cycle: dark money helped Republicans pack the Court with justices who have held open the floodgates to more dark money and have blocked much-needed oversight. The GOP simultaneously blocked disclosure laws in Congress.

But somehow, the right blames KBJ and the Democrats for the scourge of dark money in our political system.

Read and retweet the Twitter thread here.

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The Receipts: What a $1.5M Ad Campaign AGAINST Judge Jackson and FOR Clarence Thomas’ “Documentary” Reveals about Thomas’ Corruption and Links to Dark Money  

Read and retweet the Twitter thread here.

On Monday, big news broke: the dark money/court capture group Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) announced a massive $1.5 million ad buy. The ad takes a jab at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, mocking her for saying years ago “I don’t understand you” when recounting her thoughts about Justice Clarence Thomas. But that’s not the ad’s main focus: it mostly peddles a vanity project “documentary” about Clarence Thomas. 

The story behind this hagiography and ad campaign is incredibly revealing. So we followed the money.

First, the ad buyer: JCN is part of Leonard Leo’s web that has raised nearly $600 million in recent years to capture the Supreme Court and reshape the law. The network’s ultimate goal seems to be to reverse a century of legal precedents disliked by Leo and his super-rich secret funders. That agenda would revert much constitutional and federal law to the pre-New Deal Lochner Era. (The Lochner Era, usually understood as lasting from 1897 to 1937, was marked by extreme judicial activism where the court struck down democratically adopted protections to regulate the business activities of industrialists whose wealth and agenda had dominated U.S. law, destroyed the economy, and impoverished millions.)

JCN’s ad directs viewers to a seemingly revamped website, justicethomas.com, listing Clarence Thomas as its copyright holder. There, you can see the fawning, 70-minute “documentary” on Thomas’ life, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.”

The film’s final credits list the project’s funders, which we’ll take up one by one.

Charles Koch Foundation 

Koch’s agenda has long been to limit government's ability to protect people from corporate power. 

It’s no wonder, then, that he pumped money into a glorifying biopic about a judge who votes his way. Koch is one of the biggest funders of the Federalist Society, the right-wing association of lawyers chaired by Leo and from which Leo handpicked Trump’s three SCOTUS nominees: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett. 

In a 2017 memo to its funders, the Seminar Network — one of the names for Koch’s network, later rebranded as Stand Together — bragged that it was “engaging in under-the-dome tactics with allies like the Federalist Society” to prepare to confirm a new Supreme Court justice when Justice Kennedy retires. [The right-wing activist Brett Kavanaugh was later narrowly confirmed.]

Then, in 2021, Koch’s political arm Americans for Prosperity brought a case to the Court — AFP v. Bonta. That is one of several lawsuits where Koch-linked groups have inundated the Court with “a flotilla of amicus briefs.” Clarence Thomas ruled in favor of Koch and AFP, just one year after Koch’s foundation funded Thomas’ biopic.

(Gorsuch also ruled in favor of AFP and Koch. Koch had helped get him confirmed too, with the help of funding from Leonard Leo’s group America Engaged. [The Koch network also backed Kavanaugh big time, despite the testimony and evidence against his fitness for the bench.]) 

Diana Davis Spencer Foundation 

Formed from the banking fortune of a former chair of the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation, Diana Davis Spencer Foundation distributes massive amounts of money to right-wing groups. It gave an eye-watering $10 million grant to Leo’s Federalist Society — where Diana Davis Spencer herself sits on the board. DDSF has funded others pushing right-wing activists onto the Supreme Court, including the Independent Women’s Forum, to which it has given at least $1.5M since 2014.

Sarah Scaife Foundation 

The Sarah Scaife Foundation is devoted to the libertarian and right-wing religious agenda of  billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking and oil empire.

It has significantly funded groups aiding Leo’s agenda to remake the law, such as the Federalist Society and Independent Women’s Forum.

Before Scaife’s foundations poured millions into right-wing infrastructure, the St. Louis Dispatch wrote in 2014, “there was a world where extremist ideas weren’t repackaged as mainstream by outfits like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Judicial Watch, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Cato Institute or the Federalist Society. Without those early Scaife-paid efforts, there might have been no Fox News, no Tea Party, no Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz…Without the Federalist Society, whose members include four justices of the Supreme Court, there would be no corporate personhood decisions like Citizens United and Hobby Lobby.” [The number of sitting Supreme Court justices who were members of the Federalist Society is now six, the faction that controls the majority on the high court.]

Judicial Education Project 

Thomas’ biopic was also financed by Judicial Education Project (JEP), which has filed amicus briefs to the Court. JEP is a legal alias of The 85 Fund, which shares its director — Carrie Severino — with Judicial Crisis Network. So yes: JCN is spending $1.5M on an ad to attack Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson using a “documentary” financed by its sister group. 

[And the timing of that ad is right as Clarence Thomas is about to be embroiled in new revelations of his wife’s role in trying to subvert our democracy by overturning the 2020 presidential election. That blockbuster reporting required calls to the Thomases and their cohorts before the stories could run.]

Notably, in 2020, The 85 Fund filed to use another fictitious name, “Honest Elections Project” (HEP) and swelled to $66M in revenue.  HEP quickly became a go-to group for the the right wing’s assault on free and fair elections, attacking vote by mail and  pushing states to purge their voting rolls ahead of the 2020 presidential election. HEP’s misleading rhetoric has buttressed and fueled Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, and it now works with ALEC to peddle “model bills” to state legislators and strategies that undermine foundational pillars of American democracy.

Harlan Crow

Crow is a billionaire who has let Clarence and his wife Ginni Thomas use his private planes and yacht. They became friends after Thomas became a judge.

Crow also gave $500K to Ginni's group Liberty Central, which attacked the Affordable Care Act, a law her husband later ruled against. 

Thomas Klingenstein

Klingenstein is an investment banker, right-wing megadonor, and chair of the Claremont Institute, which employs John Eastman as a “senior fellow.” When Eastman came under scrutiny for his role in advising Trump on how to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Klingenstein issued a full-throated defense of his actions. 

Klingenstein recently founded a new super PAC called American Firebrand to win “the cold civil war” against “woke communists.” He gave $100K to support the Thomas film.

The Psalm 103 Foundation 

Psalm 103 Foundation is funded by the John Templeton investment banking fortune, founded in 1988 to “enhance Christian education.” Templeton provided substantial funding for the religious right, and through Psalm 103 the Templeton fortune distributed $5 million in grants in 2019 alone. (The Foundation, however, reportedly has no employees.) [This has been updated to reflect that it is Templeton money.]

Psalm 103 Foundation publicly opposed gay Boy Scout leaders. It contributed funding to Clarence Thomas’ “documentary.”

The Others 

A small handful of the family foundations of other major donors provided funding for “marketing and educational outreach” for the Thomas biopic, according to the closing credits.

There’s David Sokol, who used to work for Berkshire Hathaway; Dennis Washington, a billionaire from mining and shipping interests; and the half-billionaire John Dicke, a global forklift manufacturer. 

But there’s more.

The Bradley Foundation

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation isn't listed in the film's credits, but its 2019 report shows it gave $100K to The Public Media Lab for “educational and outreach activities related to “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.”

The Bradley patriarch, Harry Bradley, was a member of the far-right John Birch Society with Fred Koch, the father of Charles and David Koch. The Foundation went on to become one of the most massive funders of right-wing causes and right-wing infrastructure in states across the country. 

On Leo’s advice, Bradley secretly funded JEP’s amicus briefs attacking laws like the Affordable Care Act (which, again, Clarence Thomas ruled against). Bradley is also the top non-donor-advised fund that underwrites the Federalist Society. 

Anonymous 

Someone anonymous to the public also funded promotion of the film glorifying Thomas’ words. That leaves us with some burning questions: do Thomas or Ginni know who or how much? Who is funding the $1.5M ad buy about the film? Does “anonymous” have cases before the Court or fund briefs?

A final group helped promote the film but was not named in the credits: CRC

“CRC” was listed as press contact on the film’s press release. CRC is a right-wing PR firm that received $4 million from JCN in 2019 and also did PR for Thomas' 2007 memoir. Other CRC clients have included the Federalist Society and Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. 

In 2020, CRC rebranded as “CRC Advisors” under the leadership of Leonard Leo and planned, according to Leo himself, a "minimum $10 million issue advocacy campaign focused on judges in the 2020 cycle." 

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Though invisible at first glance, behind the JCN ad is an interlocking web of groups and people tied to the right-wing capture of the Court. Some funders are known and some are kept secret, allowing them to hide as they distort public opinion and the law. 

A Justice with integrity would renounce an ad buy funded by secret donors to promote the film about his life or its use to attack Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. A Justice with integrity would also oppose secret financing of his biopic or funding from past or future litigants or amici. 

But the Thomases are very close to the man orchestrating the right-wing court capture operation...

We leave you with a curious oil painting depicting that friendship, unearthed by a True North researcher this week. It was reportedly commissioned by Harlan Crow, seated to the far right.

Alyssa Bowen and Ansev Demirhan contributed to this report.