CBSNews Story on $64 Million Anonymous Dark Money Contribution to Help the 2020 Biden Campaign
CBS News Daniel Klaidman has a story describing efforts to determine who donated $64 million to a section 501(c)(4) organization called the Impetus fund that the story suggests went on to help President Biden defeat former President Trump in the 2020 election.
It is described as a story to evaluate dark money, but it focuses solely upon the use of dark money by the Biden 2020 campaign. It discusses no dark money organizations associated with Republican groups and makes it a question of whether the Biden campaign is hypocritical.
From the story: “Democrats have long decried the lack of transparency in the campaign finance system and have advocated to close the dark money loophole that currently exists in the law. But some critics say it smacks of hypocrisy.
“For too long the left has been playing a game of decrying dark money while at the same time being fully dependent on it, even supercharging Mr. Biden’s reelection campaign,” says Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the right-leaning government watchdog group Americans for Public Trust.
Others say that it’s unrealistic to expect Democrats to unilaterally disarm. “That would be a big ask of Biden not to set up a super PAC and not to accept dark money,” Holman of Public Citizen said.”
The money flow was described as such: “First, $55 million of that initial donation moved to the nonprofit arm of the Biden super PAC, Future Forward USA Action, which had been anointed by allies of President Biden as the primary super PAC supporting his reelection. Then, a few weeks before the 2020 election, Future Forward USA Action moved $60 million to FF PAC, as the main campaign committee is commonly known. That committee, also a super PAC, is required to disclose its donors. But since it received the money from its own nonprofit, the original source of the contribution remained under wraps. Future Forward was then able to spend freely on electioneering, including explicit endorsements of candidates, so long as it did not explicitly coordinate those efforts with the Biden campaign.”
The story is not wrong that dark money is an issue, (I have written about it extensively here and here) but I think it does its readers a disservice by focusing on one old donation solely benefitting the Democratic side of the ailse. It feels more like this was a story primed by right leaning groups like the Conservative Partnership Institute that writes often about Arabella Group that was ultimately involved with this particular contribution. And the reality is that Republicans though they complain about the matter have made it all but impossible to do anything about what is complained of here.