On Tuesday morning, I posted on social media a private memo from Kathleen Sgamma that revealed criticism of Donald Trump from within his own circle. Trump is well known to demand absolute loyalty from his nominees. By Thursday afternoon, just hours before her confirmation hearing, Kathleen Sgamma withdrew her nomination to lead the Bureau of Land Management. It has been widely reported that it was the memo that forced her out.

Sgamma Memo To Wea Members January 7, 2021

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In February Donald Trump nominated Sgamma to oversee the BLM. Few were surprised by his choice. Sgamma has been a longtime advocate for the oil and gas industry and president of the Western Energy Alliance, a prominent trade group representing the industry.

Trump's position on climate change has been well reported since before his first term. Since his 2020 victory, he has openly pushed for expanded drilling, vowed to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, and said (once again), "We will drill, baby, drill," during his inauguration address.

During that speech, Trump also stated that the U.S. has the “largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth—and we are going to use it.”

Sgamma seemed like a natural fit, albeit one that was horrifying for many environmental groups. Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity called her nomination an "unmitigated disaster," citing her "breathtaking disdain" for protecting public lands.

But behind the scenes, we uncovered a revealing internal memo buried among internal Western Energy Alliance documents from 2021, written by Sgamma to the group's member companies. In it, she strongly criticized Trump’s actions around January 6th.

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Crucially, the Sgamma memo was sent to WEA members on January 7th, amid intense political backlash following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and when Trump's leadership faced widespread condemnation and calls for impeachment. Some dissent (or honesty) was possible in that brief window.

In the memo, Sgamma expressed being “disgusted” by the violence on January 6th, placing blame squarely on Trump’s "role in spreading misinformation that incited it.” She went further, offering supportive words to incoming President Joe Biden, hoping he could restore “normalcy and moderation” to a nation shaken by unrest—even as she openly acknowledged their obvious policy differences.

Here is what Sgamma wrote in 2021:

I don’t usually bother you with reactions to major events shaping the country and world, because there is plenty of coverage on those. We take positions on issues in our portfolio, and I usually do not like to stray into larger issues that are outside the lanes directed by our committees and boards. We stick to our issues in social media, and I personally limit engagement on most other issues because of my professional position and general intolerance for a medium that quickly devolves into people yelling past each other.

However, the events yesterday at the Capitol were so shocking that our policy engagement with and PAC support for the Trump Administration compels me to speak up. I am disgusted by the violence witnessed yesterday and President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it. I’m disgusted he discredited all the good work he did reorienting the judiciary back toward respect for the rule of law and constitution by dishonoring the vote of the People and the rulings of those very same judges on his numerous challenges. I’m disheartened he besmirched his smart, well-intentioned people in the agencies who did such good work on important policies that advance the crucial mission of making life-sustaining, affordable energy accessible to all Americans, no matter their race, gender, and political orientation.

Senator Mike Lee, Chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources announced Ms. Sgamma's withdrawal as the committee gathered on Thursday. “We accept her withdrawal and look forward to putting forth another nominee,” said a White House spokesperson.

Former Trump Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, now in private practice at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, tweeted after the withdrawal: "Individuals who know their views don’t align with the president, yet seek political appointments hoping such divergence won't be noticed, cause needless harm. Sad. Self-inflicted."

This article was produced in partnership with The Guardian.

In May 2024, a flashy ad went viral on social media warning that “across the country, there are real cases of fraud and abuses of the [election] system that have eroded our trust”. The ad pledged that “whistleblowers” who shared evidence of election fraud “will be rewarded with payment from our $5m fund”.

This reward was courtesy of a just-announced group, the Fair Election Fund, which has deep connections to Elon Musk’s political network, according to materials obtained by Documented.

The Fair Election Fund pledged that “the bulk of the group’s budget will be devoted to paying whistleblowers” for sharing their stories, and that it would launch “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns” that would “highlight these cases”.

It was followed by another ad that ran in swing states during the Olympics and told viewers “you could be eligible for compensation” for sharing evidence of election fraud.

Despite the group’s high-profile, deep-pocketed backers and lucrative bounty offers, it never revealed any evidence of voter or election fraud. Instead, the group took a series of unrelated detours into tangential areas like third-party ballot access, and its effort to uncover fraud reaffirmed what numerous studies, court rulings and bipartisan investigations have concluded: voter fraud is extremely rare.

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The lack of evidence has not stopped Republicans in Congress and state legislatures from continuing to push restrictive voting laws aimed at addressing this phantom threat. Meanwhile, Musk is claiming that “fraud” justifies his efforts to slash government operations, but similarly has not revealed much evidence.

The Fair Election Fund has now gone radio silent. Sitemap data shows that the website has not been updated since October, and the X/Twitter account for the group has not posted since November. The group’s spokesperson, former representative Doug Collins, became Trump’s veterans affairs secretary, and is now also leading the office of government ethics.

Close ties to world’s richest man

The Fair Election Fund is a fictitious name for another 501(c)(4) non-profit, Documented can reveal, and operates within a network run by Musk’s top political advisers. The group received funding from the same dark-money vehicle Musk has used to channel his political spending, and also routed funds to another Musk-backed non-profit.

The group is housed within a non-profit now called Interstate Priorities, formerly known as the For Which It Stands Fund. Formed on 3 January 2023, the non-profit raised $8,226,000 from a single donation in 2023.

The group is led by Victoria “Tori” Sachs, a Republican operative who was also executive director of And to the Republic, a group also formed in January 2023 that supported Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid, including by funding DeSantis’s private jets and hosting quasi-campaign events.

The naming of the two Sachs-led groups – And to the Republic and the For Which It Stands Fund – and the timing of their creation in January 2023 suggests that the group that now houses the Fair Election Fund was originally intended to support DeSantis’s run, which Musk initially supported.

Sachs’s involvement continued through 2024, with her name appearing on records that accompanied the Fair Election Fund’s broadcast purchases.

Since 2022, Musk has been secretly channeling his political spending through a dark-money non-profit called Building America’s Future. That group is run by Generra Peck and Phil Cox, two Republican operatives who were involved in DeSantis’s failed presidential bid and now advise Musk. Building America’s Future reportedly backed the Fair Election Fund in 2024. It also provided half of And to the Republic’s overall fundraising in 2023.

The Fair Election Fund has other ties to the Musk advisers who lead Building America’s Future. Cox’s digital marketing firm IMGE LLC, which provides services to several groups in the Musk-backed, Building America Future-tied universe, manages the Fair Election Fund’s Facebook page, and an IMGE employee appears to be responsible for articles on the Fair Election Fund’s website.

The Fair Election Fund/Interstate Priorities also acted as a conduit to support other Musk-backed groups. The group’s 2023 tax return shows that it made a $1,550,000 grant to Citizens for Sanity, which Musk funded in 2022 through Building America’s Future, and which aired racist and transphobic ads that election cycle. That grant made up almost the entirety of Citizens for Sanity’s funding in 2023.

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In the 2024 election cycle, Musk publicly disclosed at least $277m in political contributions to Super Pacs that worked to elect President Trump and other Republicans. It is not known how much he may have given to other politically active groups that disguise their donors.

A detour into third-party ballot access

The Fair Election Fund’s goal of exposing election fraud seemingly turned up nothing of significance.

Out of its $5m fund, the group announced $75,000 in “bounty” payments, releasing $50,000 in July 2024 and $25,000 in September 2024. The Fair Election Fund promised that it would “highlight” the election fraud stories it gathered through these payments via “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns”, but it never did so, which suggests that none of the evidence generated was consequential or credible.

Instead, the group took a detour in July 2024: it launched a $175,000 ad “blitz” targeting North Carolina state board of election (NCSBE) members who delayed placing third-party presidential candidates Cornel West and Robert F Kennedy Jr on the ballot. At the time, Republicans and their allies believed that West and Kennedy would act as spoilers to help Trump, by siphoning left-leaning votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee.

Ironically, the NCSBE had delayed a decision on West’s and Kennedy’s ballot eligibility based on evidence that petitions were obtained through fraudulent means – concerns that would seem to align with the Fair Election Fund’s stated mission of exposing election fraud.

The Fair Election Fund ads declared that the Democratic members of the NCSBE were “blocking your voting rights”, and offered a reward for evidence of the members’ “shady backroom deal”. The group also projected images on the side of the NCSBE’s building, and drove mobile billboards around the agency’s headquarters.

The Fair Election Fund also ran digital ads in North Carolina featuring Black voters, some of which asserted that “African American voices are not being heard”, while others declared “Support Equality, Support Inclusion, Support [Cornel West’s] Justice for All Party”. The group pushed similar efforts in states such as Michigan.

Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who sought to keep West off of ballots in North Carolina and elsewhere, was a frequent target of the group. In October 2024, the group announced that it would be running a six-figure ad buy to “troll” Elias. The ads included mobile billboards around the Elias Law Group office as well as a full-page ad in the Washington Post, which declared: “We beat Marc Elias and his racist voter suppression lawsuits … He tried to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters who support Cornel West, but the Fair Election Fund stopped him.”

The Fair Election Fund then veered into a series of efforts to chase other trending rightwing conspiracy theories.

For example, over the summer, the Fair Election Fund seized on to a far-fetched conspiracy theory about the online fundraising platform ActBlue, claiming to have found “60,000 potential discrepancies” in ActBlue-facilitated contributions to the Biden-Harris campaign, based on an investigation conducted “from late July to early August”. The group claimed to have “spent $250,000 on these initial findings” – a jaw-dropping sum to spend on a brief review of campaign finance records.

The group then announced a $50,000 ad buy in several swing states soliciting evidence from people who claim to have been “defrauded by ActBlue”. No evidence from this “investigation” has been made public.

In fall 2024, as conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting gained momentum, the Fair Election Fund announced that it would be launching a “six-figure investigation into noncitizen voting in seven key swing states”. The results of this “six-figure investigation” were never made public.

We wanted to tell you about Fieldnotes, an exciting new organization launched by some of our former Documented colleagues.

Fieldnotes is a new watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry at a time when corporate interests and polluters are preparing an unprecedented attack on climate policy and U.S. regulatory agencies.

If you appreciate Documented’s investigations and reporting into the way money, influence and power undermine everything from public policy to our democracy itself, we think you’ll love Fieldnotes.

Fieldnotes’ investigations will reveal corporations, lobbyists, and dark money groups' efforts to delay or block climate action, public health safeguards, and environmental protections.

In fact, they’ve already started: Their team recently revealed an oil and gas industry game plan to dismantle the Biden administration’s climate policies and boost production under a second Trump administration: https://fieldnotes.co/reporting/axpc-oil-gas-industry-trump-2025

Just last week, they also just exposed an internal plastics and petrochemical industry plan to convince consumers that recycling PET plastic works using paid TikTok influencers, questionable math, and celebrities like Dennis Quaid: https://fieldnotes.co/investigations/napcor-positively-pet-plastic-misinformation

You can learn more about Fieldnotes at www.fieldnotes.co and subscribe to their free substack below.

Fieldnotes

Fieldnotes is a new watchdog organization that investigates the oil & gas industry.

This article is a partnership between The Guardian and Documented.

A dark money group with ties to Trump’s inner circle dropped more than $90m on ads described as vile, racist and transphobic in the second half of 2022 alone, new tax records obtained by Documented and the Guardian reveal. The staggering sum makes the newly created group, which is based out of the nerve center for the Maga movement, one of the top political spenders in the last election cycle, as it now appears to gear up to influence voters with violent, bigoted messaging in 2024.

The group, called Citizens for Sanity, formed in mid-2022, and quickly drew attention as it flooded the airwaves in battleground states and swing districts with deeply offensive and often misleading ads. Some ads targeted LGBTQ+ rights and attacked “Biden and his radical allies” for supporting “the woke left’s war on girls’ sports” and the “woke war on our children”. Others pictured Latino immigrants and characterized them as criminals “draining your paychecks, wrecking your schools, ruining your hospitals [and] threatening your family”, declaring that “Joe Biden and the Democrats have erased our southern border”.

Another ad featured scene after scene of violent crime involving Black people, blaming the disturbing imagery on the “radical leftwing love affair with criminals”. The racist ads seem to be part of a bigger strategy to try and suppress voting among communities of color.

Not long ago, this kind of extreme messaging would be relegated to far-right internet message boards like 4Chan. But Citizens for Sanity even ran these ads during the World Series, and tax records show that Citizens for Sanity spent a stunning $93m in the final months of 2022, with nearly all of those funds going towards payments to outside media firms for “advertising and promotion”.

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These new records show that wealthy special interests are spending incredible amounts of money on messaging campaigns that mainstream extremism and push patent disinformation to voters in critical swing states and districts.

The group’s 2022 ads attacked Democrats and promoted divisive “culture war” issues, but were carefully worded to avoid triggering campaign finance reporting that year. These tax records offer the first comprehensive look at the group’s total spending last election cycle.

Citizen for Sanity’s spending has continued into this election cycle, with more recent ads focusing intensely on “anti-white” racism. One ad from last year plays on racist fears of white Americans being disadvantaged by diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) metrics, falsely claiming that “leftwing politicians think skin color and gender identity should determine who gets the job”. Another ad declares that equity is “leftwing code for whites and Asians not welcome”. The group asserts that “Democrats used to care about the middle class, now they just care about your race and your gender.” Other ads have targeted Democrats in competitive races, such as the senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

If Citizens for Sanity’s surge in spending in the latter half of 2022 is any indication, the bulk of the group’s spending this cycle is yet to come.

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The newly obtained tax records also reveal that Citizens for Sanity is housed at the headquarters of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a “nerve center for the right wing” and a key component of Maga political infrastructure. CPI is staffed with former Trump officials – including his twice-indicted chief of staff Mark Meadows and the lawyer Cleta Mitchell – and has launched several other projects, including America First Legal, the legal group created by Meadows and Trump’s anti-immigrant speechwriter Stephen Miller.

In 2022, OpenSecrets reported that America First Legal also employed Citizens for Sanity’s three board members – Gene Hamilton, John Zadrozny and Ian Prior – all of whom are former Trump administration officials. Prior told OpenSecrets at the time that Citizens for Sanity has “no relationship with America First Legal Foundation”, but the group’s latest tax filings describe the two as “related organizations”.

Citizens for Sanity’s staggering $93m in spending eclipsed that of its parent groups, surpassing even the combined total spent by CPI ($23m), and America First Legal ($35). The funding totals hints at the sheer amount of money flowing through CPI’s growing Capitol Hill empire, as CPI and its allies work to promote an extreme political agenda and prepare for a second Trump term. It also is further evidence that attacks on equality and attacks on democracy are often coming from the same place.

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America First Legal, for its part, also poured nearly $30m into the 2022 elections (meaning just a fraction of the group’s spending went towards legal advocacy, as Roger Sollenberger at the Daily Beast first reported). The two groups appeared to run complementary ad campaigns in 2022, with America First Legal similarly running divisive ads. The tag-team effort may have reflected their distinct tax statuses: America First Legal is a 501(c)(3) charity barred from engaging in elections, but Citizens for Sanity is organized as a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization that has more freedom to influence politics.

Notably, even as these groups ran ads in 2022 promoting racist stereotypes about Black and Latino Americans, they were simultaneously targeting Black and Latino voters with separate messages. For example, last cycle Citizens for Sanity produced inflammatory Spanish-language ads warning of urban crime and migration from Pakistan, aired anti-trans ads in Latino-heavy congressional districts, and placed an ad in Philadelphia’s oldest African American newspaper attacking John Fetterman. At the same time, America First Legal promoted anti-trans TV, radio and billboard ads in both English and Spanish, and aired radio spots on Black and Spanish-language radio.

This demographic targeting and dual-messaging appeared to have two goals: deter Black and Latino voters from the ballot box using inflammatory and anti-trans ads, and at the same time, produce ads decrying “anti-white” racism to motivate conservative white voters to show up at the polls.

Justin Unga from Human Rights Campaign described this targeted campaign as an effort to fuel frustration among traditionally Democratic voters. “It’s a cynical ploy to dissuade people from participating in our democracy,” he said, and to “get them so fed up that they stay home and decide that there is no good choice.”

The Michigan chapter of Cleta Mitchell’s national network of election conspiracy theorists is working with a thinly-sourced “voter integrity” database to engage in potentially intimidating door-to-door canvassing and to flood election offices with voter challenges, a new investigation by Documented reveals.

The project represents a crucial component of election deniers’ efforts to undermine the 2024 election.

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The database, Check My Vote, has put Michigan’s publicly-available voter file online, and conducts a conspiracy-driven “analysis” to identify alleged registration discrepancies. Drawing from that analysis, activists associated with Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network are personally going door-to-door as part of their “Soles to the Rolls” project questioning voters about their registration and history, then filing dozens of voter challenges with local elections clerks across the state.

The New York Times drew from Documented’s research in a March 3, 2024 story describing the Check My Vote/Soles to the Rolls project as "an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election." Historian Rick Perlstein called the piece an example of “early warning journalism,” and Rachel Maddow highlighted the story and interviewed one of its co-authors. The piece struck a nerve: Steve Bannon hosted Cleta Mitchell and other election deniers on his War Room podcast to complain about the coverage.

Like Eagle AI, the Check My Vote/Soles to the Rolls project is part of a nationwide effort by election deniers and MAGA activists to generate mass challenges to voter eligibility, which can overwhelm election clerks and create unnecessary hurdles for eligible voters to cast a ballot. Moreover, these mass challenge efforts may also feed litigation and lead to the development of conspiracy theories that undermine confidence in elections.

Alongside other strategies such as the takeover of election offices, the passage of restrictive voting laws, and the creation of election crime departments, mass challenges are a crucial component of the MAGA movement's plans to disrupt and undermine the credibility of the 2024 elections.

Learn more about Check My Vote/Soles to the Rolls—and view documents, and other material— at Documented’s website.

This article is a partnership between Rolling Stone and Documented.

An organized and well-funded network of right-wing groups is spending countless millions attacking a bipartisan election reform that could threaten the MAGA political project.

Ranked-choice voting — which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, rather than just selecting one — has been used in state and federal elections in Alaska and Maine, and has been gaining momentum in dozens of other states and municipalities, often with bipartisan support. Voters in Nevada and Oregon will hold referendums on adopting the system in 2024, and several other state and local governments have also been considering ranked-choice voting measures.

But beginning in early 2022, and intensifying in 2023, a range of so-called “election integrity” groups, from Leonard Leo’s Honest Elections Project to Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, have made stopping ranked-choice voting a top legislative priority.

Five states have since banned any city or county government from adopting the system, and at least six other states are considering similar measures this year. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) approved a model bill banning ranked-choice voting last year, a Turning Point Action official successfully pressed the Republican National Committee to adopt a resolution opposing the practice, and the Heritage Foundation has organized grassroots activists to oppose ranked choice voting in several states.

The far-right fixation on ranked-choice voting “is a bit bizarre,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA’s Law School. “It’s not really an issue of ‘honest elections’ or ‘election integrity,’” he said. “It’s a debate about the best way to translate voters’ preferences into election winners.”

“I would guess,” Hasen said, “that the reason for the fear of ranked choice voting is that it could help elect more Republican moderates rather than more extreme Republicans.”

Ranked choice voting is one of the few — if not the only — democracy reforms that still has bipartisan support. For example, 21 cities in deep-red Utah use ranked choice voting, where it is broadly popular, and bills to implement it have attracted Republican co-sponsors in states like Wisconsin, Virginia, and Georgia. The organized attacks on ranked choice voting appear aimed at eroding support for the reform among Republican lawmakers and conservative activists.

Groups backed by right-wing activist Leonard Leo are playing an outsized role in the campaign against ranked choice voting. Leo, who served as former President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, helped construct the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority. In 2021, he was put in control of a $1.6 billion dark money fund to help push U.S. politics to the right.

While Leo’s relationship with Trump has frayed — he reportedly considered boosting another MAGA-aligned candidate, Ron DeSantis, in the GOP presidential primary — the success of his political project relies on electing far-right candidates under the same system that produced Trump.

RCV, the MAGA Killer

Ranked choice voting, also known as RCV or instant runoff voting, does not provide a clear benefit to Republican or Democratic candidates generally. But it could make it harder for MAGA candidates to get elected.

Trump and other MAGA candidates generally have not won elections with majority support, but have achieved a degree of electoral success by winning a plurality in divided and often low-turnout primaries with backing from a militant far-right base, before relying on gerrymandered districts, the spoiler effect of third parties, and/or suppressed Democratic turnout to squeak through in the general. By allowing voters to rank their preferred candidates, RCV can give non-MAGA candidates a better shot.

Trump’s 2024 campaign offers an illustration of this. Trump’s path to victory in the general election could rely on third party candidates — like Robert Kennedy Jr. or Cornel West — shaving points off of Biden’s support in key states. That inference is supported by the fact that Trump megadonors are backing RFK Jr. while also financing Trump. (Trump’s allies ran a version of this play in 2020 with their behind-the-scenes support for Kanye West’s doomed third-party campaign.)

Ranked choice voting would upend this spoiler strategy. A progressive voter could rank, say, Cornel West first, and Biden second; if West didn’t clear 50 percent in the first round, then the vote would go to Biden. Third party candidates wouldn’t play the spoiler — or, put another way, a voter could support the candidate they prefer, and also designate a backup choice, rather than being forced to only choose between the lesser of two evils.

(A key advocate for banning ranked-choice voting is acutely familiar with this spoiler effect. Arizona state Sen. Jake Hoffman (R), who led an anti-RCV session at the recent Turning Point Action summit and has long been affiliated with the right-wing group, was also secretly involved in an illegal 2018 effort to run Facebook ads boosting left-wing Green Party candidates in swing states.)

Down-ballot races also illustrate how ranked choice voting might threaten the MAGA political project. Far-right lawmakers generally make it to Congress by winning low-turnout primaries with just a plurality of the vote, then coasting to election in safely Republican districts. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), for example, won just 36 percent of the vote in his first primary, and hasn’t faced a serious primary challenger since. As a recent FairVote analysis described, this has left Gaetz and other far-right lawmakers accountable to a small minority of activist primary voters; their only fear is a primary challenge from the right, which incentivizes bomb throwing rather than governing.

MAGA Opposition to RCV Grows in 2022

The effort to ban RCV started in Tennessee. In early 2022, Tennessee’s governor signed a bill banning the use of RCV in the state, ending a long-running dispute with the city of Memphis, whose residents had repeatedly voted to adopt RCV. (A few months later, the bill’s lead sponsor, state Sen. Brian Kelsey (R), would plead guilty to two criminal federal campaign finance charges.) That was followed by Florida banning RCV as part of an omnibus election package, and then a wave of reports, op-eds, and media appearances from an array of right-wing groups trashing “rigged choice voting.” Even Project Veritas published a “Ranked Voting EXPOSED” video before imploding.

Publicly, right-wing groups critique RCV because it is favored by progressive donors, and they claim it is so confusing that it “disenfranchises” voters — an especially rich claim coming from groups that otherwise seek to make access to the ballot box more onerous.

“The Left has railed against simple election laws like voter ID for years. Now many liberal donors are pushing ranked-choice voting (RCV), even though it has repeatedly been shown that RCV makes it harder to vote, risks longer lines at the polls, and discourages participation,” said

Jason Snead, the executive director of the Leo-backed Honest Elections Project, in a statement to Rolling Stone and Documented. (RCV supporters dispute those claims, pointing to post-election polls from RCV jurisdictions suggesting voters overwhelmingly understand and like the system, and noting that voter participation increased in many RCV elections, especially among young people.)

The MAGA opposition to ranked choice voting intensified after the 2022 elections in Alaska. In that race, Alaska voters returned moderate Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski to office, despite Trump’s attempt to exact revenge for Murkowski supporting his impeachment after January 6. Murkowski prevailed over a far-right Trump-backed challenger by attracting the second-place rankings of the 10 percent of voters who listed the Democratic candidate as their first choice. Alaska voters also thwarted Sarah Palin’s attempted comeback by reelecting Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat, thanks in part to Republican voters ranking Peltola as their second choice. (Notably, Alaska’s ranked choice voting system actually helped Republicans win in down-ballot races.)

Palin blamed her loss on ranked choice voting, and is now supporting an effort to repeal Alaska’s system, teaming up with a right-wing megachurch minister who has openly practiced LGBTQ “conversion therapy,” claimed that COVID vaccines cause “spontaneous abortions” in 80 percent of pregnant people, and who set up a fake church to secretly bankroll the anti-ranked choice voting repeal effort (which is likely to appear on the November ballot).

The national efforts to oppose ranked choice voting are slightly less insane than the Alaska campaign, or at least better organized.

The wide-ranging, coordinated right-wing campaign against RCV was illustrated earlier this year in Wisconsin, where a bipartisan bill to implement RCV moved to a hearing in February, triggering opposing testimony from a range of right-wing groups, including Leo’s Honest Elections Project; the advocacy arm of the Foundation for Government Accountability, which has been backed by Leo as well as the billionaire cardboard box magnate Dick Uihlein; and the Uihlein-backed Election Transparency Initiative.

The Election Integrity Network — the network of state-based election conspiracy theorists led by former Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell — also distributed anti-RCV talking points and messaging guidance to MAGA activists in Wisconsin. Mitchell supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including joining the infamous call when the then-president urged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes; she narrowly escaped indictment, and has become a leader in the movement to undermine democracy.

Nationally, Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has also been hosting a regular coalition call focused specifically on ranked choice voting that includes state activists and national players. In 2022, Election Integrity Network activists played key roles in driving grassroots opposition to bipartisan pro-RCV measures in states like Virginia, Georgia, and Illinois, as well as Wisconsin.

The Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm has also urged its grassroots activists to pressure lawmakers on RCV measures in states like Texas, Utah, and Georgia, and its representatives have testified in support of RCV bans in states like Arizona. It has also been holding grassroots anti-RCV events in states like Oklahoma, Georgia, and Arizona, and sponsored a multi–part ranked choice voting “Special Report” that aired on the fringe Real America’s Voice network.

“Polarization is Sometimes Good”

Despite public claims about RCV supposedly “disenfranchising” voters, privately, right-wing leaders acknowledge that ranked choice voting threatens the MAGA political project.

For example, at an August 2023 event in Arizona, Gina Swoboda — who is the executive director of the Dick Uihlein-backed Voter Reference Foundation and the Trump-endorsed chair of the Arizona Republican Party — declared that “polarization is sometimes good,” and described how RCV would make it harder for MAGA to keep pushing the GOP to the right.

“The entire purpose of ranked choice voting,” Swoboda claimed, is “to eliminate the political parties altogether. It will force the candidates to run for the middle like they are in a general election, and then they will not take the positions that we need them to commit to.”

Snead, of the Honest Elections Project, has also echoed the idea that ranked choice voting would disadvantage extreme right candidates — and additionally claimed that it would somehow advantage “dark money groups,” which is a jaw-dropping declaration from an organization founded by Leonard Leo, whose dark money network has funded groups fighting to protect dark money, and who has personally defended the virtue of secret political spending.

Speaking on Real America’s Voice network in June of 2023, Snead said, “I think that their calculus is you change the dynamic of elections, push our politics to the center left, make it harder for conservatives to get elected without that party primary and then of course you displace the parties themselves, allowing these dark money groups to step in and have even more influence over our politics.”

Snead specified that he was referring to “outside and independent expenditure groups funded by folks like George Soros,” the liberal billionaire.

This was not a one-off line of attack. Soros conspiracy theories are common among RCV critics. In fact, the title of Snead’s new book is “The Case Against Ranked-Choice Voting: How George Soros and Other Billionaires Use a ‘Dark Money’ Empire to Transform America.” His co-author is Trent England, the head of a group called “Save Our States” that was founded to defend the undemocratic electoral college, but is increasingly targeting ranked choice voting.

Along with Snead, England is embedded within Leo’s network. Both are full-time employees of Leo’s 85 Fund, according to the group’s most recent tax filings. Snead’s Honest Elections Project is itself a project of 85 Fund, and England’s Save Our States now appears to have a similar status, with funding to the group flowing through 85 Fund. For example, the Bradley Foundation’s 2022 tax filing shows that a $200,000 grant to support Save Our States was routed through 85 Fund (under the fund’s earlier name, the Judicial Education Project). As Rolling Stone first reported, Leo’s network also recently set up a new pair of legal entities, with iterations of “Save Our States” and “Honest Elections Project” listed as trade names.

Snead and England are more than just co-authors and co-workers at Leonard Leo’s network. They’re also co-chairs of the “Stop RCV” coalition alongside a front group created by notorious corporate PR flak Richard Berman — described as “Dr. Evil” in a 60 Minutes profile — and several members of the State Policy Network.

One coalition member is the Maine Policy Institute. Last year, the institute’s “Maine Wire” podcast conducted a wide-ranging interview with Leo last year in which the financier noted that he was supporting the group. The coalition has developed model legislation banning RCV, and Snead has testified in support of RCV bans in states like Montana, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

This constellation of Leo-backed groups also have their fingerprints on an ALEC model bill banning ranked choice voting, which the “bill mill” adopted at its 2023 annual meeting and subsequently promoted as a top model policy. (ALEC’s CEO had previously said the group would be outsourcing its election reform work to Honest Elections Project.) ALEC has been described as a “pay to play” operation, and this is no exception; Honest Elections Project sponsored ALEC’s annual meeting at the “Vice Chairman” level, which cost at least $25,000 the prior year, and Save Our States was a “Trustee” level sponsor, which cost $5,000 in 2022. The “Stop RCV” coalition also kicked in, paying to slap its logo on the hotel keycards used by conference attendees and to host an exhibition booth.

Much of the technical support for the RCV attacks is coming from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), which played a key role in helping to craft and support RCV bans in multiple states. FGA has received millions from Leo’s network and from Uihlein, who is a key backer of election denial.

Representatives of FGA and its advocacy arm testified in support of RCV bans in states like South Dakota, Idaho, Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin and Montana, according to Documented’s review of state records. FGA additionally published a report, launched a “Ranked Choice Voting is a Disaster” microsite, and has published multiple op-eds opposing RCV.

Ranked Choice Voting “Makes our Democracy Better for All Voters”

England, of Save Our States, has emphasized that it isn’t just MAGA-world hating on RCV — some Democrats dislike it, as well. “The D.C. and Nevada Democratic parties oppose RCV, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom has opposed its expansion, and many jurisdictions across the country have tried and then rejected it,” England said in a statement to Rolling Stone and Documented.

The fact that some officials in both major parties oppose RCV isn’t surprising, said Chris Saxman, a Republican and former Virginia lawmaker.

“Party leaders want to be in control of the nominating processes,” Saxman said, and both Democratic and Republican party bosses would prefer that voters be “stuck with a binary choice in the general election.”

Despite efforts to make RCV toxic for conservatives, Saxman and other Republicans are eager to see ranked choice voting expand, arguing that it can actually strengthen parties.

The Virginia Republican Party, for example, used ranked choice voting to choose Glenn Youngkin as their gubernatorial nominee in 2021, rather than a more MAGA-fied candidate. He prevailed in the general election, depriving Democrats of trifecta control of state government.

Ranked choice voting “turned around a near-death experience for the Republican Party in Virginia,” Saxman said. For Republicans, “the successes of RCV in Virginia should be obvious.”

“Ranked choice voting is a completely neutral, process-based reform that favors neither party,” said Kevin Hancock, Strategic Litigation Director at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “RCV also just gives voters more choice — basic common sense that makes our democracy better for all voters.”

Newly-elected Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson compared abortion to the Holocaust in 2005 and claimed “the prevailing judicial philosophy” that provided for a constitutional right to abortion “is no different than Hitler’s.” 

CBS News first reported on the op-ed uncovered by Documented.

Johnson’s April 2005 opinion piece, published in Louisiana’s Shreveport Times, sought to tie abortion to a high profile legal battle over end of life care for Terri Schiavo. 

“Because the life of an unborn child (or a disabled Terri Shiavo, or the elderly and infirm) may be difficult or inconvenient or even costly to society now means it can be terminated,” Johnson wrote in The Times. 

“This disregard for life has been fostered by the courts. During business hours today, 4,500 innocent American children will be killed. It is a holocaust that has been repeated every day for 32 years, since 1973's Roe v. Wade. Nearly 45 million babies have been sacrificed in the name of "personal choice." That staggering number represents somewhere between one-half and one-third of my entire generation.” 

Johnson made a stunning extrapolation about the impact of Roe, claiming that it has limited people’s choices in marital partners, led to Social Security becoming insolvent, and contributed to a “culture of death” where “kids shoot other kids because they’ve learned life has no real value.” 

“The magnitude of this is hard to imagine,” Johnson continued in the editorial. “If you graduated from high school in the last three decades, your class should have been twice as large as it was. Your choices in marital partners have been limited by half. Social Security wouldn't be in a crisis with all those able workers. And we wouldn't have this ‘culture of death,’ where euthanasia has become all the rage, where kids shoot other kids because they've learned that life has no real value, and the Terri Schiavos of the world can be sentenced to starvation. It is a shocking paradox that we live in.” 

Johnson authored the editorial during his time as an attorney for the Christian-right legal organization Alliance Defense Fund, the former name of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Johnson worked for ADF as an attorney from 2002 to 2010. 

The editorial is one of several that Johnson authored in his local Shreveport, Louisiana newspaper during his time at ADF and highlighted by CNN and other news organizations in recent days. According to the reporting, Johnson wrote in support of the criminalization of gay sex and ADF wrote an amicus brief supporting criminalizing gay sex. 

Johnson also reprised the false claim connecting abortion to mass shootings in a 2015 interview with reporter Irin Carmon. 

This article was produced in partnership with The Guardian

The Koch network, a web of rightwing groups cultivated by billionaire businessman Charles Koch and his late brother David Koch, is spearheading the attack on federal agencies and government regulations that dominates the US supreme court agenda this term.

The network has been working behind the scenes to bring cases before the court that, if successful, could undermine many of the core functionings of the US government. At least two of the biggest cases to be considered by the justices this term have been spurred by groups bankrolled and coordinated within the Koch universe.

Footage of an internal panel discussion between senior operatives from Koch entities held in the summer of 2022 reveals that the network has been quietly planning the current assault on the “administrative state”. The groups are seeking to exploit the supreme court’s new six-to-three rightwing majority secured by Donald Trump to dismantle vital executive powers.

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Regulatory controls in their sights include environmental standards to combat pollution and the climate crisis, consumer protections against predatory lenders, and safeguards for workers’ rights. At stake is what the Strict Scrutiny podcast has called “the future of government as we know it”.

The footage, which is made public here for the first time, was obtained by the investigative watchdog Documented and shared with the Guardian. During the 37-minute panel discussion, legal strategists with several Koch-related groups expressed excitement that the new hard-right supreme court supermajority has created the potential for a concerted attack on the functions of federal agencies.

Jorge Lima, an economic policy strategist at the Koch network’s central coordinating group, Stand Together, said that the new composition of the court amounted to a huge “landscape opportunity, particularly on the administrative state. We’re doubling down on this strategy.”

Lima added: “Every dog has its day, and it’s a big day for the administrative state.”

Casey Mattox, a legal strategist at the main Koch advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, argued that the supreme court was now “primed for a real change in the law” on federal regulations which he said amounted to a “paradigm shift”. Mattox said: “That’s why we are partnering with organizations that can get the right cases to the supreme court.”

The effort appears to have born fruit. Two of the most significant cases before the court in the 2023-24 term, brought with the backing of Koch-linked organizations, attempt to rein back the government’s power to impose regulations on corporations.

The prominence of the cases underlines how the libertarian empire created by the Kochs is still a force to be reckoned with within US politics. Since David Koch’s death in 2019, and the Koch network’s decision to come out in opposition to Trump ahead of next year’s presidential election, the network has receded from public attention.

But the scope of Charles Koch’s reach remains formidable, as was demonstrated earlier this month when the 87-year-old told Forbes that he had given $4.3bn of his Koch Industries stock to Believe in People, a newly-created group named after his book of the same title. He has transferred a further $975m to another new entity, CCKc4, which carries the initials of his son Chase Koch.

The massive combined $5.3bn in donations, one of the largest acts of giving to non-profits in US history, will ensure that the Koch influence will continue to push the US to the right for years to come. Undermining government regulations is central to those ambitions.

Lisa Graves, the executive director of the progressive watchdog True North Research who is a long-time Koch watcher, said that Charles Koch has shown a “fundamental hostility to government regulation” since his early political writings in the 1960s. “This is the through-line of his career. His business operations have a substantial self-interest in assailing regulations that impede his profits.”

Koch Industries is a conglomerate of energy and chemicals companies that stand to benefit if controls on pollution, workers’ rights and other aspects of public governance are rolled back. The firm is the second largest privately-owned company in the US.

Among the big administrative state cases that the justices will be considering this term is Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, which seeks to overturn a 40-year precedent set by the supreme court itself. Known as Chevron, the ruling allows federal agencies the flexibility to reasonably interpret laws without interference from the courts as they regulate critical parts of public life, such as the environment and public safety.

Experts have warned that if Chevron is struck down, it could be a recipe for legal and administrative chaos. “We are talking about rules that protect us in so many ways – truckers who are too tired to drive on the highway, unsafe workplaces, and pollution of our water and the air we breathe,” Graves said.

The case was nominally brought by a New Jersey herring fishing company that objected to being charged by a federal agency that monitors its catch to prevent over-fishing. Behind the challenge is a conservative group called Cause of Action, which is intricately tied to the Koch network.

The chair of Cause of Action’s board, Brian Menckes, is general counsel of the Charles Koch Foundation. Cause of Action’s executive director, James Valvo, who is acting as one of the fishing company’s lawyers in the case, is the former head of policy of Americans for Prosperity.

A second lawyer representing the company, Eric Bolinder, holds dual roles as a counsel for Cause of Action and Americans for Prosperity.

In 2021 Cause of Action’s entire income of $375,000 came from Stand Together, the Koch network’s coordinating group, Bloomberg reported. The groups are also physically close: Cause of Action and Americans for Prosperity not only share the same address in Arlington, Virginia, they occupy the same office – suite 700.

Bolinder was one of the panel speakers at the 2022 Koch discussion on the administrative state. He framed the plan to use the supreme court to launch a legal attack on regulatory government as a states’ rights issue.

“As the federal government grabs more and more power, particularly to the regulatory state, the states become less and less important,” he said.

The Guardian contacted Stand Together and Cause of Action for comment. Cause of Action did not immediately reply.

Gretchen Reiter, Stand Together spokesman, said that the Loper Bright case was seeking “to restore one of the core tenets of our democracy: that Congress, not the administrative agency, makes the laws. Cause of Action Institute – which filed the lawsuit in 2020 – is representing family-run fishing companies that the federal government is forcing to pay a tax that Congress never authorized, and that violates our constitution’s separation of powers.”

Last week, the supreme court accepted a second case also challenging the Chevron precedent, which has now been consolidated with the fishermen’s petition. Relentless v Department of Commerce was also filed by a group with intimate connections to the Koch network, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA).

The organization, which claims to “protect constitutional freedoms from violations by the administrative state”, was founded in 2017 with seed money from the Charles Koch Foundation. Over five years, it has received more than $5m from the Koch network.

NCLA’s president, Mark Chenoweth, previously served as in-house counsel for Koch Industries.

NCLA submitted an amicus brief last week supporting another major challenge to regulatory agencies that will be heard by the supreme court this term. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) v Jarkesy threatens to gut the enforcement power of the SEC by curtailing its ability to fast-track cases of securities fraud through its own in-house administrative law judges.

A ruling against the SEC could drastically reduce the ability of numerous government agencies to enforce environmental and other standards.

The footage of the Koch panel discussion obtained by Documented reveals that the NCLA has been secretly lobbying for the Jarkesy case to reach the supreme court. Mattox said that “NCLA brought a lot of value to that case”.

He went on: “You won’t see them actually directly litigating on that case, but they’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes, and that speaks to the way that our community adds value here, because when we partner with people we look for results, not necessarily for headlines and attention-grabbing.”

There is a further twist to the issue of Koch influence on the supreme court’s docket this term. Last month, ProPublica revealed as part of its expose of ethical breaches by some justices, that the right-leaning Clarence Thomas had attended at least two Koch donor events where funds were raised to forward the Koch network’s mission – which includes bringing cases before the court.

The attack on the administrative state is central to the work of Americans for Prosperity, which boasts of its years-long campaign to challenge what it calls the “out-of-control regulatory environment imposed by Washington”. It organizes bus tours around the country, directly relating “red tape” on energy infrastructure projects to the high cost of fuel at the pump.

This has taken place while oil and gas giants such as Exxon, BP and Shell have posted record profits, and the world has increasingly felt the impact of climate change. Americans for Prosperity calls itself “the nation’s premier grassroots organization”, but according to an independent audit report from 2021, 94% of the $112m in cash it received that year came from just two donors.

In June 2021, leaders from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — the right-wing legal group that set the groundwork for striking down Roe v. Wade — began meeting in secret with a group of wealthy Christian-right donors to discuss the future of the public education system. 

They were inspired by a speech by former Trump Attorney General William Barr as he received an award from ADF the previous month. 

In his speech, Barr outlined the case against public schools.

“I think we have to confront the reality that it may no longer be fair, practical, or even constitutional to provide publicly funded education solely through the vehicle of state-operated schools,” said Barr. 

After his speech, according to a recording, he spoke with leaders from ADF and Ziklag, a secretive funding project “for high-net-worth families” that channels millions of dollars to groups like ADF. 

A plan was hatched for multi-stage litigation with the explicit goal of draining a quarter of a trillion dollars annually from our public schools.  

“Our goal is not to just throw stones. Our goal is to take down the education system as we know it today,” said Peter Bohlinger, one of the leaders from Ziklag, in a recording obtained by Documented.

Documented has obtained other internal recordings, planning documents, and various other materials from this project. They provide a rare fly-on-the-wall look inside the development of a legal strategy from the legal arm of the Christian right. 

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In addition to writing laws for conservative state legislatures targeting abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, the ADF has also made in-roads into the Supreme Court. Justice Amy Coney Barrett taught in the ADF’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship program for five years, and both Barrett and Justice Samuel Alito took Blackstone alumni as law clerks last summer as the Court considered 303 Creative v. Elenis, a lawsuit filed by the ADF on behalf of a Christian web designer against Colorado’s public accommodations law. (The Supreme Court struck down the anti-discrimination statute on free speech grounds.)   

More Perfect Union is the first to publish these recordings in partnership with Documented. We also provided the Washington Post with the materials, which it covered in a front-page story by Emma Brown in September.

ADF’s hope was that the then-new 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court would provide them with a chance to radically change how we fund public schools. They anticipated that anger on the right about Critical Race Theory (which is not actually being taught in public schools) and other culture war issues would help their case. 

As ADF developed its strategy, protests were erupting at school board meetings across the country (sometimes involving physical violence), animated by issues around race, gender, and sex in school curriculum. Large numbers of school board members have faced death threats and intimidation, as Reuters has reported. 

On a call with the Ziklag donors in July 2021, then-ADF President Mike Farris compared public school lesson plans to Nazi Germany.

“What we see going on in the public schools has an uncanny parallel to the Third Reich,” Farris told the donors. “There's a clear, open effort to indoctrinate kids in this woke ideology.” 

As Farris explained to Ziklag, the plan was to bring lawsuits in different parts of the country, designed to create a split in the federal courts that the Supreme Court would have to step in to resolve. 

There have been significant efforts by the right to implement school voucher programs (that proponents refer to as “school choice”) since the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s following the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. 

The programs effectively siphon money from public schools and use taxpayer dollars to pay for private school tuition; even in states such as Texas, vouchers have proved to be highly controversial.   

Now, the ADF wants the Supreme Court to institute a nationally-mandated school voucher program. 

“The main aim of this is to say, if you're going to teach a worldview in the public schools, you've got to give a constitutional-mandated voucher or some other form of educational choice to every parent who doesn't want to participate in that mandated kind of program of indoctrination,” Farris said on the July 2021 call.

All of the details are in this new video from More Perfect Union, in partnership with Documented, which you can watch here.

Former Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell and her network of election conspiracy theorists are secretly backing a new project to help MAGA activists generate mass voter challenges, a new investigation by Documented reveals.

This endeavor hints at how right-wing vigilantes—supported by powerful institutions and millions in dark money—could pose a threat to free and fair elections in 2024.

“Eagle AI” looks to fill the void left by Mitchell and her network’s successful campaign to pressure state officials to cut ties with the bipartisan Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC.

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As NBC News first reported, based on material provided by Documented, Eagle AI draws from public data sources like voter files and newspaper obituaries to build a dashboard for activists to conduct their own “list maintenance” and generate potentially thousands of challenges to voter eligibility with a few clicks.

“While a handful of individuals in Georgia and Texas have taken in recent years to filing mass voter challenges,” NBC reported, “EagleAI could turn that steady stream into a nationwide flood.”

The resulting flood of conspiracy-driven voter challenges, drawn from questionable data, could inundate overworked and under-resourced election offices and lead to eligible voters being purged from the rolls. In many states, challenged voters will have to jump through additional hoops to have their vote counted.

Eagle AI is being deployed through Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network” (EIN), which was launched by the $45 million Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). Activists affiliated with EIN in states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida are already testing the Eagle AI system, and setting up meetings with election officials to normalize the program and encourage them to accept voter challenges generated by the platform. Platforms will also be rolled out soon in Arizona, Nevada and Texas.

Eagle AI’s funding sources are murky, but a planning document co-authored by Mitchell reveals plans to receive private donations from sources including Donors Trust, known as the “dark money ATM of the right.” A legal firm associated with Mitchell—and housed within CPI—also set up Eagle AI's tax-exempt arm, "Valid Vote," which told the IRS that it plans to raise $2.1 million in advance of the 2024 election.

Mitchell’s participation in the Georgia-based project comes as Fulton County prosecutors bring criminal charges against Trump and 18 co-conspirators for their efforts to block Biden’s win in that state. Mitchell was not indicted, but she did support Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including joining the infamous call when the president urged Georgia’s top election official to “find” 11,780 votes. 

Dive deeper into Eagle AI—and view videos, documents, and other material—at Documented’s website.  

Three of the most prominent rightwing groups which spread election denial lies and advocate for restrictions on voting rights in the US have joined forces in a secret attempt to woo top election officials in Republican-controlled states.

Led by the Washington-based conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, the groups have created an incubator of policies that would restrict access to the ballot box and amplify false claims that fraud is rampant in American elections. The unstated yet implicit goal is to dampen Democratic turnout and help Republican candidates to victory.

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Details of the two-day “secretaries of state conference” held in Washington in February were obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian.

Officials from 13 Republican-controlled states, including 10 top election administrators, participated in the event. Attendees discussed controversial “election integrity” ideas of the sort weaponized by Donald Trump.

Among the participants were nine secretaries of state and Virginia’s election commissioner, all of whom preside over both statewide and federal elections in their states including next year’s presidential contest. A list of attendees namechecks the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Documented also obtained the conference agenda which lists a number of Trump associates among the speakers. They include Ken Cuccinelli who, as acting deputy secretary for homeland security, played a key role in setting elections policy for the Trump administration.

Cuccinelli now runs the Election Transparency Initiative which is fighting Democratic efforts in Congress to shore up voting rights, and has been active in pushing state-level vote restriction measures.

The keynote speech was given by Ken Blackwell, former secretary of state in Ohio. He was an early adopter of Trump’s lie about rigged elections, championing the idea in the 2016 presidential race which Trump won.

Blackwell now chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute, a rightwing thinktank led by former Trump officials. The center has been touting election-related model legislation.

Heritage was careful to organize the conference amid tight secrecy. Among the records obtained by Documented is an email from Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the foundation who leads their election work.

Responding to a query about the event from a Texas official, Von Spakovsky said: “There is no livestream. This is not a public event. It is a private, confidential meeting of the secretaries. I would rather you not send out a press release about it.”

Von Spakovsky has long been at the forefront of efforts to undermine US elections by claiming falsely that fraud is endemic. He helped spearhead the attack on voting by mail during the pandemic, holding private briefings with Republican state election officials – a drive that became a core part of Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Heritage and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, have spent tens of millions of dollars promoting their own model bills that impose strict restrictions on voting. They have targeted the investment on key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan that could hold the balance of power in the 2024 presidential race.

Heritage began hosting annual gatherings of Republican secretaries of state at the start of the Trump presidency in 2017. February’s in-person conference was the first to be sponsored by three rightwing powerhouses of election denial and voter suppression – Heritage, together with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), and the Honest Elections Project (HEP).

Pilf is a conservative legal group that sues election officials to force them to purge voter rolls, a process that has affected eligible US voters. The group is led by J Christian Adams, a former justice department lawyer who tried to use the Voting Rights Act to claim voting discrimination against white people.

Trump’s former lawyer Cleta Mitchell also sits on the Pilf board.

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HEP is a conservative dark-money group closely tied to the Republican operative Leonard Leo who was instrumental in engineering the current conservative supermajority on the US supreme court. Reporting by ProPublica and the New York Times last year revealed that Leo has received control of a staggering $1.6bn to advance rightwing causes.

Concern about the potential of top election officials to subvert democracy intensified during the 2022 midterm elections when a number of individuals committed to Trump’s stolen election lie also ran for office. They formed the “America First Secretary of State Coalition” which became a conduit of far-right conspiracy theories linked to QAnon.

Most of those candidates failed in their bid to take over the reins of election administration in their states. But the Heritage conference suggests that the desire to deploy Republican secretaries of state as channels of voter suppression and election misinformation remains very much alive.

Though chief election officials are tasked with ensuring that ballots are fair and impartial, the Heritage conference was attended only by Republican secretaries of state.

The Guardian asked Heritage to explain why its conference was held in secret and with only Republican attendees. The group did not answer those questions.

Von Spakovsky said that the event was an “educational summit intended to provide information on current issues in elections and ensure that our election process protects the right to vote for American citizens by making it easy to vote and hard to cheat”.

He disputed the argument that security measures at the ballot box such as voter ID suppressed turnout. “The claim that secure elections somehow promote greater restrictions is outrageous and has been clearly disproven,” he said.

Von Spakovsky also pointed to Heritage’s election fraud database, which he said sampled “proven instances of election fraud from across the country”. The database records 1,422 “proven instances of voter fraud” stretching back to 1982 – a 41-year period during which billions of votes have been cast in the US.

Several of the participants at the conference have election denial and voter suppression track records. They include Florida’s secretary of state, Cord Byrd, who, soon after being appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis last spring, refused to say whether Joe Biden had won the 2020 presidential election.

Byrd runs Florida’s “election integrity unit” that was set up by DeSantis last year to investigate election crimes, even though there is scant evidence of substantial voter fraud. More than a dozen citizens accused of illegally voting have been arrested at gunpoint under DeSantis’s crackdown on supposed voter fraud.

Another attendee – Jay Ashcroft, secretary of state of Missouri – has been a leading proponent of that state’s new restrictive voting law. His office has been named in numerous lawsuits in the last year for imposing extreme constraints on voter registration, including a recent lawsuit accusing Ashcroft of illegally blocking a ballot measure.

Tennessee’s secretary of state, Tre Hargett, another listed participant, has been accused by Democratic leaders in Tennessee of purging thousands of voters from the official rolls.

Panel discussions laid out in the agenda were held on several of the core talking points of the current Republican party. The opening discussion, moderated by Von Spakovsky, was on “Auditing Expertise”.

The main speaker was Paul Bettencourt, a state senator in Texas who has sponsored several bills making it harder to vote including a measure that would deploy armed “election marshals” to oversee polling stations.

Before the conference-goers attended a cocktail reception and dinner held at an upscale restaurant in downtown Washington, day one ended with a session entitled: “Realistic Eric Fixes and Reforms”. Eric – the Electronic Registration Information Center – is a non-profit group run collectively by 28 states which is used to finesse the accuracy of state voter rolls.

In recent months it has become the target of rightwing conspiracy theories fueled by Trump who claimed falsely that it was rigged to benefit Democrats.

Ashcroft, the Missouri secretary of state, was one of the speakers in that session. Earlier this month he announced that he was pulling Missouri out of Eric, making it one of the first Republican-controlled states to quit the organization along with Alabama, Florida and West Virginia.

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The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative think tank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.

Previously unreported 2021 tax filings from Heritage Action for America, which operates as the foundation’s activist wing, shows that it spent $5.1m on contracting outside lobbying services. The outlay comes on top of $560,000 the group invested in its own in-house federal lobbying efforts that year, as well as registered lobbying by Heritage Action staffers in at least 24 states.

The 990 tax filing was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian. It points to the pivotal role that Heritage Action is increasingly playing in shaping the rules that govern US democracy.

The efforts help explain the unprecedented tidal wave of restrictive voting laws that spread across Republican-controlled states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The Brennan Center reported that more voter suppression laws were passed in 2021 than in any year since it began monitoring voting legislation more than a decade ago.

The expenditures also signal a dramatic increase in Heritage Action’s advocacy activities. In 2020, Heritage Action had reported no spending at all on outside lobbying.

Heritage Action, whose board includes the Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, is set up as a 501(c)4 under the US tax code which exempts it from paying federal taxes. It operates as a “dark money” group, avoiding disclosing the sources of its total annual revenue of over $18m.

In the past two years the organization through its public messaging has echoed Donald Trump’s lie that US elections are marked by rampant fraud. A private plan prepared by Heritage Action last year set out a two-year, $24m “election integrity” strategy.

The plan, obtained by Documented, proposed a two-pronged approach that would work to block moves by Democrats in Congress to bolster voting rights while at the same time pressing Republican-controlled states to impose restrictions on access to the ballot box. It said: “Where Democrats hold power, we must defend against bad policy. Where conservatives and our allies are in power, we must advance changes that protect the lawful votes of Americans.”

The Heritage Action plan, which was first reported by the New York Times, is being published by the Guardian for the first time.

Part of Heritage Action’s two-year strategy is to promote what it calls “model election laws”, focusing initially on eight battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. In a private meeting with donors in Tucson, Arizona, in 2021, the group’s executive director, Jessica Anderson, boasted about the role Heritage Action had played in pressing Republican-controlled legislatures to impose strict restrictions on voting, including limits on mail-in voting and early voting days.

In a video of that meeting obtained by Documented, Anderson told the donors that the group acted “quickly and quietly”, bragging that “honestly nobody noticed” their behind-the-scenes influence. Heritage Action staff have registered to lobby in at least two dozen states.

The laser-like focus on key swing states like Georgia appears to have had an impact. The New York Times found that one-third of the 68 voting bills filed in Georgia in 2021 contained policy measures and language that aligned closely with proposals from Heritage Action.

The group has publicly claimed that it had a hand in advancing 11 voting bills in at least eight states in 2021, though in some cases legislation was passed in only one chamber or went on to be vetoed by the state’s governor.

Heritage Foundation, under the auspices of its elections supremo Hans von Spakovsky, curates an “election fraud database”. It claims to expose the errors, omissions and mistakes made by election officials, but it presents incomplete and misleading information and underscores how exceptionally rare fraud is within the US system.

Its records stretch back 40 years, a period in which billions of votes have been cast. Yet the database records only 1,402 “proven instances of voter fraud” – a “molecular fraction” of votes cast nationwide, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The newly-disclosed tax filings also show that Heritage Action ramped up its spending on advertising as it sought to influence lawmakers and the public around its controversial voting agenda. In 2021, the organization reported paying $6.1m to outside contractors for “marketing and advertising” – a sharp rise from $1.8m the previous year.

Among the top contractors employed by Heritage Action was CRC Advisors, the consulting firm tied to Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society who is best known for his decades-long campaign to pack federal courts with right-wing judges. CRC Advisors was paid over $797,000 for “marketing and advertising” in 2021.

Some of that ad spending was targeted in Georgia. After that state’s 2021 restrictive voting law caused a backlash from businesses and led Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado, Heritage Action spent nearly $1m on TV ads defending the law aired on CNBC and local TV stations.

The group also spent nearly $500,000 on Georgia TV and digital ads during the MLB All-Star Game, and spent at least $700,000 more on ads supporting the Georgia bill’s passage.

On the federal level, Heritage Action also ran ads in West Virginia, Arizona, Montana and New Hampshire urging the Democratic senators in those states to oppose reforming the filibuster to pass democracy reform legislation with a simple majority. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Anderson said of potential filibuster changes at the April 2021 donor summit.

Heritage Action was formed in 2010 out of the right-wing policy empire embodied in the Heritage Foundation, which dates back to 1973. The foundation was created by Paul Weyrich, a richly networked conservative who wanted to inculcate small government, anti-regulation ideology at both federal and state level.

From the start, restricting access to voting was a core part of Weyrich’s mission. In 1980 he infamously articulated his thinking by saying: “I don’t want everybody to vote … Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

“You may recognize me as the guy with the hat standing next to Rudy Giuliani on January 6,” John Eastman told the New Mexico crowd in October 2022. “The last one to speak before President Trump.”

Eastman, the reviled former law professor who authored the blueprint for Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election, was not in Albuquerque to express contrition for his role in an attempted coup. He was there to lay the groundwork for rejecting votes in 2022, according to audio obtained by Documented and shared with POLITICO.

If Republicans lose in New Mexico, Eastman is laying the groundwork for legal challenges and to give MAGA-aligned county officials a pretext to reject the results.

“We will not let what happened in 2020 ever happen again”

Eastman was addressing a summit organized by the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), the $19.7 million Trump-aligned institution which is working to create “permanent election integrity infrastructure” in key states to recruit conspiracy-minded activists to become poll workers and challengers.

CPI’s Election Integrity Network project is led by Cleta Mitchell, the veteran lawyer who also supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. It was Mitchell who asked Eastman to engineer the 2020 Trump campaign’s far-fetched legal argument used to challenge electoral certification in Congress. Until recently, both Mitchell and Eastman were on the board of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a right-wing election litigation group that also co-sponsored the New Mexico event. Other co-sponsors included Heritage Action and Citizens United.

CPI's “election integrity” efforts grew directly out of Trump's failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, according to Marshall Yates, an Election Integrity Network official who spoke at the New Mexico summit.

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“We're all here because of what happened in 2020,” Yates told attendees, noting that he was previously Chief of Staff to Rep. Mo Brooks, a central player in Trump’s effort to block Biden’s victory in Congress.

“The election objection did not go as we wanted in 2020, on January 6, but we built up and this movement is here today partly because we didn't get to have the debate we needed in Congress,” Yates said. “We were shut out—for whatever reason that was, whatever happened, whoever planned it—but we didn't get to have that happen. But luckily it sparked a grassroots movement across the country for election integrity.”

“And without all of us rising up and saying, putting our foot down and saying, no, we will not let what happened in 2020 ever happen again, we wouldn't be in this room,” Yates said, before introducing Eastman.

2020 Coup Plotter Plans to Be Personally Involved in 2022 Election Challenges

Eastman didn’t just give a pep rally at the New Mexico summit. He gave activists specific direction on how to challenge voters at polls—in some cases, providing erroneous legal advice. He urged election conspiracy theorists to become poll workers and election judges who will adjudicate poll challenges, “because then you're the ones making the decisions, not just raising questions about the decisions.”

And Eastman stated that he would be personally involved in efforts to challenge election results, even urging activists to call him when their voter challenges are rejected.

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If election judges are “not unanimously approving the challenge” to a voter’s eligibility, Eastman said, “Call me. Call me, and document it, write it down, as much detail as you can,” he said. “Create those notes because that becomes the evidence in these legal challenges if we need them.”

A poll challenger’s notes, he emphasized, “become the basis for an affidavit in a court challenge after the fact.”

“I'm going to leave on the table out there, a stack of my cards so that if you need a phone number to call and you're not getting any headway otherwise, call me and we'll see what we need to do,” Eastman told the New Mexico crowd.

Manufacturing a Pretext to Refuse Certification

In addition to generating evidence to challenge election results in the courts, there are very real concerns that Eastman’s theories will provide a pretext for local officials to reject the will of voters.

Otero County, New Mexico attracted national attention earlier this year when local officials initially refused to certify the June primary results, citing unfounded conspiracies pushed by far-right activists in the state. Local officials in other counties might try a similar gambit in November, state democracy advocates say.

According to the audio, Eastman is preparing to argue that voter challenges were rejected that shouldn’t have been rejected, and that ballots were counted that shouldn’t have been counted.

If Republicans lose in New Mexico, those arguments could give MAGA-aligned county officials—like those in Otero County—a cover story to not certify the results.

Eastman, for his part, has a history of generating excuses for officials to reject the will of voters. In 2020, Eastman invented a rationale for Pennsylvania lawmakers to discount mail-in ballots and retabulate the state’s popular vote, which he argued would “provide some cover” for the legislature to hand the state’s electors to Trump.

The summit audio suggests that Eastman is setting the stage for an analogous effort on a local scale.

Pushing Unfounded Voter Challenges

One problem is that some of Eastman’s suggested voter challenges are off-base. 

Among other suggested challenges, Eastman said that a voter registering at the polls must show an ID with an address in the county, and that it would be grounds for a challenge if a voter “come[s] in and their ID says they live down in Las Cruces and they're trying to vote in Albuquerque.”

However, according to the New Mexico Secretary of State, a person may register and vote if they show a photo ID and a document that shows an address in the county. In other words, Eastman is wrong—a voter with a photo ID showing a Las Cruces address could vote in Albuquerque, provided they showed a utility bill or other document showing an Albuquerque address. 

Activists who follow Eastman’s advice and lodge baseless challenges could cause disruptions at polling places, leading to longer lines and intimidating some voters. And when such challenges are justifiably rejected, the fact of that rejection might be used as justification for MAGA-aligned county commissioners to refuse to certify the results.

Far From a Pariah, Eastman Remains Involved in Elections

A federal judge recently concluded that it was “more likely than not” that Eastman and Trump had participated in a “campaign to overturn a democratic election” in 2020 using a plan that “not only lacked factual basis but also legal justification.” The judge concluded that Eastman had advanced “a coup in search of a legal theory.”

“If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution,” the judge wrote. “If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.”

In normal times, Eastman would be sidelined from the political sphere.

Instead, Eastman is embraced by powerful figures in the conservative movement and remains deeply involved with our democratic processes. Eastman tried to overturn the 2020 election, and is now setting the stage to challenge the results in 2022.

Read more at POLITICO, Forbes, and Vanity Fair.

“We will not tolerate Biden’s tyrannical rule. The lines are clear, this is Joe Biden’s unlawful agenda versus the American people,” said RAGA Chairman South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson.

This agenda is not a secret, you can see it in court filings and on Fox News. They have drawn a clear line in the sand. On democracy issues, Republican attorneys general have filed lawsuits that would restrict access to the ballot. It is almost inevitable that in the 2022 midterms, or during the next Presidential election, we will see these same attorneys general again act in ways that undermine our democracy.

So why are so many corporate donors happy to have their names associated with this radical agenda?

After the events of January 6th, Documented revealed that RAGA’s 501(c)(4) sister organization, the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF), had sent out robocalls calling on its supporters to “march to the Capitol building.” “We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections,” said the voice on the call.

The integrity of the election, of course, wasn’t at risk, at least not in the way they alleged. Biden had won, but this was all part of the so-called “Big Lie,” a disinformation campaign being spread by groups and individuals around Trump. The AP later reported that RLDF had held a two-day “war games” exercise in September 2020, “for a series of conversations planning for what could come if we lose the White House."

Documented has written about the RAGA agenda before, and we will likely do so again. Today we wanted to look at the donors who are funding this work. The latest filing for RAGA, which covers the second half of 2021 was just filed yesterday, and it reveals a number of new corporate donors.

Why do corporations fund RAGA?

Here is a quick take on why corporations give to RAGA. In short: access.

As we have previously reported, corporate donors to RAGA receive private access to Republican state attorneys general and their staff, with the bigger bucks paying for even more access. It is the definition of pay to play and it has been going on for years. Aside from sponsoring dangerous rallies, this is the real problem with groups like RAGA/RLDF.

Corporations that pony up $50,000 get invited to numerous meetings and dinners, and even get to lead an issue briefing for attorneys general once a year. Those that give $125,000 get all of that, plus an additional monthly political briefing and they get to attend a special high dollar donor annual retreat. At these private briefings, the corporate lawyers have a captured, and (since they are donating to help the RAGA election funds) likely a receptive audience to hear their arguments about what actions attorneys general should, or should not take.

According to a scheduling email obtained by Documented via a public records request, RAGA held a private briefing on July 16, 2021 with lobbyists from UPS. We know from the email that RAGA Chairman, the South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, was to be on that call. The briefing note sent by RAGA to AG Wilson instructed him to urge UPS to renew its funding. Three days later, on July 19, UPS gave RAGA $15,000.

It can’t be right that our state’s highest law enforcement officers are asking corporate lobbyists for donations. The lobbyists have an agenda, which is why they want the meeting in the first place.

The UPS meeting wasn’t a unique event. Another RAGA member briefing with AG Wilson took place in June 2021, this time with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform was the highest donor to RAGA in the second half of 2021, giving over $550,000, more than twice as much as any other donor.

Some corporate donors might have been momentarily nervous about giving after January 6th. Following the release of the robocall by Documented, RAGA’s Chief Executive and a slew of other staff quit, some corporate donors pledged to review or end their funding, and the national chair stepped down. But the damage doesn’t seem to have been lasting. Their total revenue for the second half of 2021 was down a little, but not by much compared to 2019, the previous non-election year ($6.1m in 2021 vs $6.6m in 2019).

At least one corporation has gone back on its promise to not fund RAGA. A spokesperson for CenterPoint Energy told Documented on January 19, 2021 that: “CenterPoint Energy will not make any contributions to the Republican Attorneys General Association in 2021.”

According to the latest filing, it gave $20,000 in November 2021, and then another $20,000 in December.

RAGA’s donors in the second half of 2021

Match Group is the Dallas-based company behind dozens of online dating apps, including Match.com, OkCupid and Tinder. It gave $136,600, with the bulk coming in September 2021.

Why might they want to influence attorneys general? The company, along with others like Netflix and Spotify, has been lobbying to challenge the monopoly power of Google and Apple in charging large fees to app developers.

At a Senate antitrust subcommittee hearing in April 2021, Jared Sine, chief legal officer of Match Group, said the app store fees it pays to Google and Apple are the companies single largest expense. "That's $500 million that could be going back into the pockets of everyday consumers or deployed to hire employees or invested in new innovations," Sine said at the hearing, according to CNN.

In July, a bi-partisan group of attorneys general, filed a lawsuit against Google for alleged antitrust violations relating to fees charged in its app store. Just last week, another bi-partisan group of attorneys general filed a brief in a separate case, on appeal in the 9th Circuit challenging Apple’s strict control of apps delivered through its app store. "Apple's conduct has harmed and is harming mobile app-developers and millions of citizens," the states said, according to Reuters.

LHC Group ($125,220) is a national home healthcare service company. A New Republic expose of the company in early 2021 is really worth reading: “Employees of LHC Group describe a business model that prioritized profits and compromised patient care.” (Overworked, Underpaid, and Cutting Corners: The Crisis in Home Health Care, New Republic)

The company has made positive public statements about the CMS Covid vaccine mandate for healthcare workers. If they are sincere in those statements, there should be questions asked about why they have been funding RAGA. Republican attorneys general from Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming were behind the legal challenge to the vaccine mandate that made its way to the Supreme Court in January 2022.

Nomi Health ($125,000) was another major donor. The group has been running Covid testing sites across the country. Other major healthcare industry donors included Centene ($125,000), Cigna ($67,500), Blue Cross Blue Shield Of South Carolina ($62,500), Johnson And Johnson ($50,285), and Eli Lilly ($50,000).

Numerous media groups were amongst the top donors. IAC, the massive holding group that owns the Daily Beast, gave $125,220. Comcast Corporation, which owns NBCUniversal (NBC News, MSNBC), was the third highest donor at $216,075. Both Fox Corporation and News Corp gave $50,000 each.

Recently, 19 states, led by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, have been active in a case at the Supreme Court challenging the (now non-existent) Clean Power Plan. The case - West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency - is due to be argued later this year, and concerns whether the EPA has the authority to limit carbon dioxide emissions.

The National Mining Association has filed a brief in the West Virginia case. It gave RAGA $50,000 in October 2021. Other energy industry donors included Exxon Mobil, which gave $50,000, Duke Energy at $15,000, the trade associations American Petroleum Institute at $50,000, and the American Fuel And Petrochemical Manufacturers at $40,000.

New RAGA group and more pay to play

RAGA recently created a new 501(c)(3) group, called the Center for Law and Policy. The organization is busy organizing a variety of events in 2022, including an upcoming Energy Summit in Houston, Texas on February 10-11, and an earlier Healthcare Symposium held on January 25th. Copying the RAGA pay to play model, the events are just for paying “sponsors,” with the higher dollar donors receiving access to special dinners, and the chance to lead discussions. The highest sponsors at the Energy Summit, giving at the $50,000 level, get to hold an “issue briefing”, whatever that means.

According to an invitation to the event, obtained by Documented: “The Energy Summit will be a collaborative and educational discussion on a wide range of issues related to energy policy and will bring together leading attorneys general, industry experts, and thought leaders.” The invitation listed 11 attorneys general who would be attending, with the promise of more to be confirmed.

For more on RAGA, check out the resources on the Documented website. We will be posting a full list of all the RAGA donors - the actual filings are not very user-friendly - including a full breakdown of all RAGA donors since the group was created.

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Last month, the Washington Post obtained a recording of top Exxon lobbyist Erik Oswald telling a gathering of industry peers that he doesn’t believe climate change poses "catastrophic, inevitable risk.”

But Exxon’s own internal documents from the 1970s and 1980s acknowledge that climate change poses catastrophic risks, and climate scientists say catastrophic risks are inevitable if humans don’t rapidly transition away from fossil fuels, a joint investigation from HEATED and Documented has found.

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Our findings show that one of the world’s top fossil fuel companies is still publicly downplaying the certainty of environmental and economic catastrophe if its core product isn’t rapidly wound down. They also add fuel to the ongoing House Oversight Committee investigation of Exxon and other oil majors over their role in spreading climate disinformation to the public. 

“This is very disappointing,” Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who is leading the investigation, said in an e-mailed statement. “Exxon owes a clear, public explanation for this.”

The audio recording of Erik Oswald’s comments represents Exxon’s second lobbyist debacle of the year. The first came in June, when secretly recorded footage showed now-former Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy admitting the oil giant “aggressively” fought climate science and funded “shadow groups” to confuse the public. 

Exxon responded by disavowing McCoy’s statements and firing him. After that, Oswald became the company’s go-to spokesperson about the incident. The Vice President of Advocacy and the head of the company’s “Low Carbon Solutions” wing and a top lobbyist who has worked for Exxon for 30 years, Oswald called the McCoy tapes “gutting” and “a mischaracterization.” Now he finds himself the subject of tapes of his own.

In the recording, which was originally obtained by Documented and reported on by the Post the day before Thanksgiving, Oswald explained to a group of gathered oil industry executives and state-level oil regulators that Exxon’s policy strategy hinges on prioritizing shareholder profits, not preventing climate catastrophe—a catastrophe which, Oswald said, was not certain to happen at all.

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  “The way we think about this is, not as the crusaders for the climate fix,” Oswald said. “The way I look at it as a scientist is, all I need to think about is, is there risk? Yes, there’s risk. Is it a catastrophic inevitable risk? Not to my mind.”

But Exxon has privately acknowledged catastrophic climate risk for decades. In a memo from 1981, Roger Cohen, a top Exxon scientist, cautioned that climate change could "produce effects which will, indeed, be catastrophic, at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth's population." 

Cohen’s memo was meant to rebut those within Exxon that, like Oswald decades later, refused to acknowledge the reality that climate catastrophe could occur. 

In a memo the next year, Cohen expounded on the existing scientific consensus that CO2 emissions would result in dangerous climate disruptions. “In summary, the results of our research are in accord with the scientific consensus on the effect of increased atmospheric CO2 on climate.” In closing, Cohen added “our ethical responsibility is to permit the publication of our research in the scientific literature; indeed to do otherwise would be a breach of Exxon’s public position and ethical credo on honesty and integrity.”

A month after Cohen’s memo,  M.B. Glaser, Exxon’s manager of environmental affairs, wrote in a memo that "There are some potentially catastrophic events that should be considered."

“For example, if the Antarctic ice sheet which is anchored on land should melt, then this could cause a rise in sea level on the order of 5 meters. Such a rise would cause flooding on much of the U.S. East Coast, including the State of Florida and Washington, D.C.”

Glaser, however, warned that the report “should be restricted…and not distributed externally.”

Exxon and its lobbying partners have also understood for decades that the risk of catastrophic impacts is high, if not completely certain. In a report created by the American Petroleum Institute for an industry working group which included Exxon, API scientists found “Uncertainty in Estimates” for carbon cycle modeling to be “minor.” “Physical facts agree on the probability of large effects 50 years away” the report reads. 

In a statement to the Post, Exxon disputed that it had ever mischaracterized the science. “ExxonMobil has long acknowledged that climate change is real and poses serious risks,” spokesman Casey Norton said in an email. Norton also said Oswald’s statements “lack appropriate context and are not representative of the company’s positions on important issues, including climate change and carbon capture.”

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But climate scientists and disinformation experts tell HEATED and Documented that Exxon is still downplaying the severity of climate change—just as the company has done for many, many years. 

Exxon has a history of making public statements that downplay the scientific certainty of climate change. In 1977, Exxon CEO Lee Raymond said “Many people, politicians and the public alike, believe that global warming is a rock-solid certainty…But it’s not.” Just last month, during a Congressional hearing on climate misinformation, current CEO Darren Woods would only say “greenhouse gasses can contribute to climate change.” 

But global warming is a rock-solid certainty, and greenhouse gases are the indisputable cause. Exxon has known this for decades. A 1995 report by Lenny Bernstein of the Mobil Corporation, which would merge with Exxon three years later, says it best: “[The] scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” Bernstein wrote.

But now, Exxon is finding trickier ways to downplay the science. In interviews with HEATED and Documented, scientists noted that Oswald’s claim that climate change doesn’t pose “catastrophic, inevitable risk” is tough to scientifically assess. 

“There is no scientific definition of the term ‘catastrophe,’” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “Saying climate change is not a catastrophic, inevitable risk is an opinion, not a scientific fact.” 

Jane Zelikova, a soil carbon scientist at the University of Wyoming, agreed that “catastrophe” is a value judgment, and depends on your personal perspective and place in society. “‘Catastrophic and inevitable risk’ is in the eye of the beholder and some people have the privilege to not experience most of the impacts, while others will bear the brunt,” she said.

But do climate scientists believe the risk is catastrophic? “Yes, because I am not a sociopath and consider millions of preventable deaths to be a catastrophe,” said Kate Marvel, a research scientist at GISS and Columbia University. 

Zelikova, too, said catastrophe would be an appropriate word for climate effects that have already occurred. “Extreme weather events are already more frequent and severe and they already bring catastrophic consequences and tons of personal, societal, and economic risk,” she said. 

Zelikova also noted a recent paper showing climate change will lead to decreases in maize and soy crop productivity in many agricultural regions across the world. “Are these changes catastrophic? Probably for the farmers and likely consumers will feel the effects as prices for these major commodities increase,” she said. “Are they inevitable? Probably, since the effects of heat and drought can only be overcome with irrigation and most of these areas do not have access to irrigation during the summer months.”

Oswald and Exxon, however, may not consider these impacts catastrophic because they don’t affect the oil giant’s bottom line, said Jessica Green, a University of Toronto political scientist whose research focuses on how oil companies are responding to climate change.

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“It's pretty obvious that the science is clear on ‘catastrophic, inevitable risk,” she said. “The issue for fossil fuel companies is that they are going to lose a lot of money, and so are slow walking climate policy any way they can.”

Indeed, Oswald’s comments are “straight out of the inactivist playbook,” said Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist and author of The New Climate War, a book about “how fossil fuel companies have waged a thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility for climate change.” That playbook, he said, allows industry representatives to appear like concerned climate activists, while not actually advocating for anything that would meaningfully address climate change. 

And climate scientists all over the world have made it abundantly clear: the only way to meaningfully address climate change, and reduce catastrophic inevitable risk, is to eliminate greenhouse gas pollution—the majority of which comes from fossil fuels. 

The Exxon recording and revelations from it come amid multiple lawsuits against Exxon and other oil majors over their role worsening the climate crisis. The House Oversight Committee has also subpoenaed Exxon, API, and other oil majors over their role spreading climate disinformation and policy delay.

The goal of the Oversight Committee’s hearing and subsequent subpoenas is to “examine the fossil fuel industry’s long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.” The committee believes Exxon “took public stances in support of climate actions while privately continuing to block reforms.” 

The glaring dichotomy between Exxon’s current public position on climate change and Oswald’s flippant denial of climate threats underscores the legitimacy of the Committee's concern, said Rep. Khanna.

 “In the hearing, [Exxon CEO Darren Woods] said ‘our position . . . has been consistent with the general consensus in the scientific community,’” he recalled. But the new recording of Oswald “shows that Exxon continues to downplay the threat posed by climate change and contradicts the science,” Khanna said.

So far, the oil industry’s response to the Congressional investigation has been a familiar one. During the hearing, Exxon denied funding anti-science propaganda to mislead the public. The companies involved have also delayed turning over evidence to the Committee, and the documents that have been released seem to be purposefully confusing and inadequate. 

All the while, Republicans on the Oversight Committee have vociferously defended their funders. Last week, they sent a letter to the Democratic majority, asking them to stop the investigation altogether. Calling the investigation “an abuse of Congress’ oversight authority,” the Republicans’ letter read, “This Committee needs to act now and use its authority to address the most pressing issues facing the country.” It appears they do not consider climate change catastrophic either.

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There has been significant reporting in recent weeks about Manchin’s financial ties to the coal industry. See Joe Manchin's Dirty Energy by Daniel Boguslaw writing for The Intercept.

The quick version is that Manchin is the founder and part-owner of a West Virginia coal brokerage company called Enersystems. He received a salary of $174,000 from the Senate in 2020, but last year he got so much more than that - $491,949 - from Enersystems, according to his financial disclosures.

Manchin has said that his ownership of Enersystems is held in a blind trust. Despite that, his coal industry profits are pretty obvious. Sludge tallied up those disclosures, and Manchin has earned more than $5.2m from Enersystems since he joined the Senate in 2010.

Manchin also has significant investments in another company, Farmington Resources, which owns some coal reserves and provides support services to the mining industry, according to The Intercept.

On an investor call last week, Joe Craft, the CEO of Alliance Resource Partners spoke about Manchin’s help for the coal industry during the Build Back Better negotiations. “I think the positive news for the people in the coal business, it looks like, Senator Manchin's been successful in keeping out some of the draconian measures that were in the earlier bills,” Craft said.

That’s the context, here is what’s new..

Documented has now learned that Manchin was listed as a keynote speaker at a September 2021 secret invite-only meeting with the CEOs of numerous coal companies, including Joe Craft of Alliance Resource Partners.

We reached out for comment from Manchin’s office, asking them to confirm his appearance and disclose what was discussed at the event. As of publication we have not received a response despite multiple requests for comment.

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The 2021 Coal and Investment Leadership Forum

Documented has obtained materials from an annual elite-level coal industry event, called the Coal and Investment Leadership Forum, which took place from September 19-21, 2021. The annual event is billed as “a private, invitation-only conference focusing on the challenges and opportunities facing coal and energy around the globe today.”

The forum takes place annually in Bristol, Virginia, at an exclusive golf resort owned by Jim McGlothlin of United Coal Company. The Olde Farm also holds an annual golf tournament, "featuring three days of Ryder Cup-style competition with a Civil War theme." "It has become our most cherished tradition," McGlothlin told Links Magazine.

This year Manchin, along with fellow West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R), were described in an invitation obtained by Documented as being the event “headline” speakers.

Manchin is about as close to a rock star as you might find right now to coal CEOs, facing the inevitable end to their industry as we transition (oh too slowly) to clean energy.

Here is a video made by the Olde Farm for attendees previewing the event, obtained by Documented:

You can see the read the invitation and participant list here (click to see the full documents):

The CEOs of 21 coal industry companies were listed as participants. According to the materials, the full list of event hosts were: Michael Beyer of Vista Energy Resources, Jimmy Brock of CNX Coal Resources, Joe Craft III of Alliance Resource Partners, Nathaniel Drummond, Richard Mullen, and Mike Tracy of Drummond, John Eaves and Paul Lang of Arch Coal, Jim McGlothlin of The United Company, Mike Quillen of Alpha Natural Resources, David Stetson of Alpha Metallugial Resources, and Ernie Thrasher of Xcoal Energy Resources.

Also scheduled to speak was the notorious climate change denier Chris Horner. In 2016, bankruptcy filings for Alpha Natural Resources, one of the coal companies hosting this year’s forum, revealed Horner was secretly being paid by the company. Horner is best known for his repetitive targeting of climate scientists with lawsuits, a practice that has been described as “harassment.”

As a 2015 Grist article described it: “One of Horner’s preferred tactics is to inundate climate researchers with records requests so they get too bogged down with his bullshit to do actual work.” Horner has written a book called “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.”

Horner is listed on the agenda as leading a “legal discussion,” whatever that means.

According to the invitation, attendees had to cough up $7,000 just to get in, not including the cost of staying at the resort. An investment banker, Douglas Pierson of Credit Suisse, was on the list, along with Matthew Giugliano, Senior Vice President at UBS Private Wealth Management.

Andrew Frame, the Managing Director of Evercore, an investment banking advisory firm was also named. Evercore, which had $2.2 billion in revenue in 2020, advises on mergers and acquisitions like the $14 billion purchase of Whole Foods Market by Amazon in 2017. It currently works for Murray Energy, advising the coal company as it navigates chapter 11 bankruptcy.

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Manchin attacks on climate in the Build Back Better plan

According to Coral Davenport of the New York Times, Manchin "effectively succeeded in stripping the bill of its most powerful climate change provision, a program that would have rapidly shut down coal and gas-fired power plants and replaced them with wind and solar power."

The text of the Build Back Better plan, revealed late last week by the White House, included $555 billion in tax credits and other grants aimed at cutting carbon emissions. According to the Washington Post, the tax credits will make it "easier to buy electric vehicles, install solar panels, retrofit buildings and manufacture wind turbines and other clean-energy equipment in the United States.

But entirely missing from the text was the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP.). The opposition from Senator Manchin is credited with having killed CEPP.

So what is CEPP you ask?

The Biden administration set an ambitious goal of decarbonizing 100 percent of the country's electricity generation by the year 2035. This target is part of a longer term goal of becoming a net-zero economy by 2050. The Clean Electricity Performance Program, which was a part of the larger proposed $3.5 Trillion package, is (or I guess now “was”) a key element of the Administration's plan for how to reach these goals. A version of CEPP passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in mid-September.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), CEPP would shift utilities away from the burning of coal and gas: "by making a $150 billion public investment over the coming decade in power companies that meet annual targets for expanding clean electricity. To ensure proper incentives and a level playing field, the CEPP also collects a payment from power companies that fail to meet those targets."

This might all sound a little technical, and the acronyms probably don't help. But the scientific consensus is that we urgently need to switch from burning fossil fuels to clean alternatives. CEPP would help turbo-charge that transition by pushing utilities to switch fast.

The clean energy target is not just good policy, it’s also politically popular. According to Data for Progress, 62 percent of voters "support the government moving the country to a 100 percent clean energy electricity grid by 2035." That's 62 percent of all voters combined. For Democrats that number is a whopping 85 percent.

Unfortunately, it might be both good policy and good politics, but tackling climate change is definitely unpopular with coal CEOs, climate deniers, and anyone else making bucket loads of cash from the coal industry. And that, according to his own financial disclosures, includes Senator Joe Manchin.

On Fox News, Tucker Carson recently called for “civil disobedience” over school mask mandates.

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Wading into this is Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a group known for its close ties to Donald Trump, as well as for its role spreading disinformation about both the November election result and COVID. Turning Point Action, the TPUSA 501c4 sister organization was one of the groups that promoted the March to Save America in Washington, DC on January 6th. The group’s board members include Mike Lindell (the My Pillow guy).

Now TPUSA, a right-wing student group run by Charlie Kirk has launched a new project called “School Board Watchlist,” mirroring another “watchlist” project it runs that targets university professors. In 2018, a senior staffer from the Charles Koch Institute described the earlier Professor Watchlist project as “McCarthyism 2.0.” When you are too right wing for even the Koch network...

The website for the new Watchlist project features a full screen video playing in the background of protestors being arrested, and in large font a declaration that this is “the battle to save America.” It’s not subtle, and is clearly designed to inspire action.

The site includes a database of what appears to be every school board member in the country, and includes information on policies, board meetings, and more. A large and prominent “donate” button is on every page. According to the website, the project will expose “the teaching of Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, sexual/gender ideology, and more.”

Broward County mask mandate

The site highlights a list of what it describes as “the most radical” school districts. According to the website, these include Broward County, FL, which (totally coincidentally) is in the news this week over its legal fight with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over mask mandates. The school district is trying to protect the health of its students, staff and community during a surge in Covid infections.

According to Politico:

“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ fight over school mask mandates took a dramatic turn on Tuesday after the state Board of Education ruled two defiant school districts broke state law and threatened to remove local elected officials for disobeying the GOP governor.

School leaders in Alachua County and Broward County, who are resisting DeSantis’ order banning mask mandates, now could face a range of possible punishments for defying the DeSantis administration, which has taken a hard line against enacting additional Covid-19 precautions despite a record-breaking surge in cases and hospitalizations brought on by the Delta variant.”

TPUSA has been cozying up to Gov. DeSantis in recent months, providing him with plenty of support on social media and featuring him at a July 2021 event with thousands of its activists. DeSantis is seen by many as a possible Trump 2.0, so this relationship makes some logical sense.

But that isn’t all, School Board Watchlist is also upset with Broward County schools over the teaching of sex education and about gender identity.

From the TPUSA website:

Broward County is talking to your kids about sex education! 

That’s right. The School Board Watchlist reports that Broward is giving teachers the “tools and resources necessary to address lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) topics in a school setting.”

It’s not just Broward County. As you have probably seen, protests against school mask mandates have been breaking out across the country. Often this is happening in areas with high infection rates. Earlier this year, school boards were predominantly being targeted because of the teaching of racism and U.S. history in schools, misleadingly described as being about Critical Race Theory (which is not taught in K-12 education), as well as over the teaching of sex education, LGBTQ rights and other issues.

All of these topics are fertile ground for the “culture war”, and culture war is what TPUSA is all about.

One thing TPUSA isn’t talking about is the investigation of Matt Gaetz for allegedly having sex with a minor. As of this morning, the TPUSA YouTube channel still features his appearances at TPUSA events, and the Facebook page still has this kind of content:

According to an email sent to TPUSA donors, and provided to Documented, the new project will "take the front-line fight for freedom directly into the radical Leftist stronghold by exposing schools' dangerous anti-American policies, and board members, anti-freedom mandates, and shocking curricula!”

The school board project is the latest effort by TPUSA to bring the culture war to K-12 education. In March, Documented broke the story of another of these projects, called TPUSA Academy, which is developing an "America-first education" curriculum for K-12 children.

Kirk said in June that protests must be “harnessed”

Recently, fights have broken out at some school board meetings. Anti-mask protestors shut down a Louisiana meeting on Thursday chanting “freedom, freedom, freedom.” Doctors were threatened by protestors at a meeting in Tennessee, and a man was removed from a Birmingham school board earlier this week after he gave a Nazi salute.

In June, Kirk talked on his radio show about how much he admired these protests. While comparing them to the tea party movement, he spoke about how they needed to be “harnessed.”

On his daily radio show, cable news, and social media, Kirk has spent the past year repeatedly spreading disinformation about the risks of COVID, the safety of vaccines, and whether there should be mask mandates in schools. He has called for infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci to be imprisoned. Fauci has been receiving death threats, with at least one person being arrested and charged.

Kirk has been spewing hatred towards school board members for months with increasingly inflammatory language. On his radio show in June he called them “parasites.” Here is the clip:

“Similar to a virus that was in our country before we realized it, these school boards were infected by parasites who wish to teach your children a series of ideologies that are so harmful to who we are as Americans.”

“I can tell you that when these tyrants and these autocrats and these sociopathic, unimpressive, hyper aggressive administrators who sit on these boards actually have to look at the white in your eyes and not just read some angry email, things will change.”

“This real energy and enthusiasm that I have not seen since the Tea Party movement and parts of the Trump movement, but this is different. This is just so organic and so focused. It's focused on very specific action. It's something that I think must be harnessed for the better,” Kirk said.

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Kirk: “I was MAGA before it was cool”

If this all sounds very “Trumpy”, that is almost certainly the point. Kirk appears to be modeling himself on the former President. Or he at least seems to recognize the value in aligning himself to Trump. “I was MAGA before it was cool,” Kirk wrote in his 2020 book called “The MAGA Doctrine.”

Kirk talks often about his relationship to the Trump family, and in particular his bromance with Donald Trump Jr. The two often refer to their friendship on social media, and there have been rumors of a joint book project.

The ties between the Trump family and TPUSA have been mutually beneficial. The TPUSA fundraising exploded during Trump’s four years in office, going from $4m revenue in 2016, to almost $40m by the time Trump left the White House.

Kirk has hosted regular TPUSA events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The next of these will be the 4th annual TPUSA winter gala in December, a high-dollar fundraiser with sponsorship rates running as high as $100,000. Kirk also held rallies to boost the Trump campaign in 2020 through a project he runs called Students for Trump, based out of Turning Point Action.

Kirk has a large social media following, and unlike Trump he hasn’t been banned from Twitter (yet) and has amassed 1.7m followers.

According to an October 2021 analysis by the Election Integrity Partnership, Kirk’s was one of the most impactful Twitter accounts pushing lies about voter fraud (measured by retweets) in the run up to the election.

According to that report, Kirk was #2 on their list, only behind Donald Trump. That put him ahead of Sean Hannity, Eric Trump, and Breitbart News, all three of which were also listed in the top ten, along with Benny Johnson, Chief Creative Officer of Turning Point USA.

Twitter locked Kirk’s account temporarily in mid October following a tweet that spread disinformation about mail-in ballot fraud in Pennsylvania. But he is back now and continues to spread false conspiracy theories and disinformation. In June he propagated a baseless theory that the Surfside apartment building collapse was actually an act of terrorism. Climate change was likely at least a contributing factor to that disaster. Kirk and TPUSA have called climate change a “hoax.” It will probably not surprise you to hear that Jane Mayer reported TPUSA has received secret funding from the fossil fuel industry. Now Kirk is spreading this kind of message:

With tensions running as high as they already are at school board meetings, this kind of message seems highly irresponsible, but not out of character.

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The officials were flown to the nation's capital by the corporate-backed Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), and put up at the 5-star luxury Conrad Hotel, just blocks from the White House. According to a review of IRS records, donors to RSLC this year have included:

• Reynolds American ($240k)

• Koch Industries ($200k)

• Marathon Oil Company ($200k)

• Charter Communications ($150k)

• Dominion Energy ($145k)

• General Motors ($125k)

• Facebook ($50k)

• Visa ($50k)

• Walmart ($50k)

• Google ($10k)

According to materials obtained by Documented, over the course of two days the secretaries of state were to be briefed on policy proposals, litigation strategy and messaging best practice. The agenda featured numerous sessions around so-called “election integrity” (the 2021 Republican codename for voter suppression), H.R. 1 (the For the People Act), and various aspects of our elections including the use of mail-in and absentee ballots, and the use of drop boxes. 

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The meeting was organized by a project of the RSLC called the Republican Secretaries of State Committee (RSSC), and featured a number of sessions run by the RSLC-connected 501(C)(4) dark money group, the State Government Leadership Foundation (SGLF).

There are lots of acronyms in this, which we truly apologize for — blame the RSLC!

Documented, in partnership with Popular Information, previously reported that numerous corporations, including Google, Citigroup, and Deloitte, participated in an April 6 meeting of the RSLC concerning “election integrity.” A presentation given at that meeting described RSLC as the "last line of defense for the Republican Party."

RSLC and RSSC have been heavily involved in the push for more restrictive voting laws this year. In February 2021, RSLC formed an “election integrity commission” including both Republican secretaries of state and state legislators as members. The commission has published a “best practices” document that purports to instruct states on how to make it “easier to vote and harder to cheat.” In reality, the document amounts to a roadmap for various voter suppression tactics including strict voter ID laws and purging of the voter rolls.     

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In July, state Democratic lawmakers from Texas fled the state to block Republicans from having the necessary quorum needed to pass new voter suppression legislation. In response, RSLC and the Associated Republicans of Texas launched a six-figure ad campaign attacking Democrats for the move. Prior to the ad campaign, RSLC paid for numerous ads on Facebook in June featuring U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn bashing H.R. 1 and calling for donors to “chip in now” to “save our elections.” 

According to the June meeting materials obtained by Documented, the RSLC meeting kicked off with a Monday night welcome reception followed by a “VIP dinner” reserved for meeting sponsors, secretaries and their spouses at Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse.

The bulk of the agenda, which occurred on Tuesday June 29, consisted of briefings and policy working groups. The policy sessions, described as “Red-State Briefings,” were “offered to members and sponsors who contribute $5,000+ to the RSSC.” 

Materials sent to the secretaries of state made clear that it was “mandatory” that they attend all the briefings. Essentially, if RSLC is flying you to D.C., putting you up in a 5-Star Hotel, and paying for all your meals, you MUST attend the briefings with the RSLC donors.

SPN think tank dominates meeting

One of the roundtables was a session called “Election Integrity with the Foundation for Government Accountability” (FGA). Foundation for Government Accountability staff also presented during a lunchtime session called “Messaging on Election Administration,” and again in other sessions called “The Impact of H.R. 1” and “Voting And Voter Identification Methods.” FGA is a RSLC donor through its 501(c)(4) arm FGA Action, which also goes by the name Opportunity Solutions Project. According to RSLC’s most recent report filed with the IRS, which covers contributions received in the first half of 2021, FGA Action contributed $42,500 to RSLC so far this year. 

The Florida group is a member of the corporate-backed State Policy Network (SPN), a network of strikingly similar right-wing free market think tanks that are now operating in every state. SPN’s CEO Tracie Sharp revealingly described SPN as “the Ikea model” in a recording leaked to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer in 2013. 

According to materials reviewed by Documented, SPN lists “Election Integrity” - there’s that GOP codeword again - as being one of its top priorities for 2021. Many of its member groups have been active in promoting the Republican voter suppression agenda this year, but none more so than FGA. SPN was also named, along with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), as a partner of Heritage Action in its 2021 election project, which has received significant press attention, according to an internal Heritage Action plan obtained by Documented and first shared by us with the New York Times. 

Over the past decade FGA has become best known lobbying state legislatures for highly controversial “welfare to work” programs. 

In 2021, as republicans in many states introduced voter suppression legislation, FGA worked to support and drive this effort. It has been as active as any group doing this work, although they have received scant media attention. According to records reviewed by Documented, FGA and its connected 501(c)(4) group Opportunity Solutions Project (OSP) have been pushing voter suppression legislation in Texas, Iowa, Georgia, Michigan, Louisiana, Kansas, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. Documented has been tracking this activity from FGA/OSP and other groups, which you can see here.

FGA and Opportunity Solutions Project did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The RSLC and the Heritage Foundation team up

Earlier this year, in partnership with Mother Jones, Documented published the recording of a Heritage Foundation/Heritage Action for America donor summit session about elections. At the event, Heritage staff boasted about their role coordinating state voter suppression measures in Republican-led state legislatures across the country. That story received the June 2021 Sidney reporting award from the Hillman Foundation.

On the same recording, Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson, and Heritage Foundation Fellow Hans von Spakovsky, spoke about how they have been secretly briefing Republican secretaries of state over recent years. 

“Hans is briefing governors, secretaries of state, state attorney generals, state elected officials,” Anderson said. “Just what three weeks ago, we had a huge call with secretaries of state, right?”

“We’ve now for several years been having a private briefing of the best conservative secretaries of state in the country that has so annoyed the left that they have been doing everything they can to try to find out what happens at that meeting,” von Spakovsky replied.

“So far unsuccessfully. No leaks,” said Anderson.

Well, we found out about it this time. Prior to the June RSLC event, the Heritage Foundation held one of these private briefings for Republican secretaries of state, timed to coincide with the RSLC meeting. “Our goal is to gather the chief state election officials together to strategize on advancing their shared goal of ensuring the integrity of the elections they administer in their home states,” read the invitation, a copy of which was first published by the Center for Media and Democracy. 

According to further event materials obtained by Documented, topics at these Heritage meetings include “redistricting, election security, and current election-related litigation and legislation.”

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FGA funding from the Bradley Foundation

You may have seen the recent report by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer revealing the Bradley Foundation as one of the major financial backers of groups pushing voter suppression and disinformation.

“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,” Mayer writes.

“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.”

We can now add one more group to that list with FGA. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has given more than $3.25m to FGA since 2013, according to the foundation’s reports and list of grants, including at least $500,000 so far in 2021.

That is it for today. If you made it this far, thanks for reading. We will be back in your email sometime soon.

For example, on March 31, Google's SVP for Global Affairs, Kent Walker tweeted that the company is "concerned about efforts to restrict voting at a local level" and "strongly support[s] the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act."

A week later, Google's State Policy Manager, Joe Dooley, was listed as a participant in a private RSLC policy working group led by the organization's "Election Integrity Committee." The April 6 presentation, obtained by Popular Information and Documented, details an array of proposals to suppress voting, including purging of voting lists, more stringent voter ID requirements, and targeting of voting centers. The RSLC also opposes any federal action to protect voting rights. The meeting was run by Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (R), who has embraced Trump's lies and conspiracies about election fraud. 

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The RSLC presentation deck makes clear that the purpose of restricting voting under the guise of "election integrity" is to elect more Republicans. One slide asserts that Republican control of state legislatures is the "last line of defense for the Republican Party." The RSLC argues that Republicans must act "now" because "2022 is just over the horizon — election integrity is likely to have a major impact." 

Another slide in the presentation is titled, "Why It Matters: The Democrats Smell Blood." It warns that "if Democrats win key state races in 2021 and 2022, they'll have the votes they need to pass their radical agenda." 

Caleb Jackson, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center who specializes in voting rights, described the RSLC's proposal as "attacks on access to the ballot box disguised as measures to fix something that’s not broken." Jackson said the agenda had "nothing to do with improving election security and… everything to do with stopping certain voters from voting."

Dooley's participation in the event was secured by a $20,000 donation from Google to the RSLC on February 11. Google also donated $35,000 to the RSLC in 2020. These donations were not from Google's PAC, which is a separate fund of employee contributions, but cash directly from Google's corporate treasury.

Google did not respond to a request for comment. 

"Election Integrity" commission chaired by "Stop the Steal" conspiracy theorists

The April 6 presentation was delivered by Merrill with assistance from the RSLC staff. Merrill has backed Trump's false claims about election fraud. In December, flanked by a person in Revolutionary War garb with a Trump flag, Merrill spoke at a "Stop the Steal" rally in Alabama. During that event, Merrill questioned the integrity of the presidential results in six states, including California:

What happened in Georgia, what happened in Michigan, what happened in Wisconsin, what happened in Pennsylvania, Nevada, California, Arizona -- all of these states that have been in question -- is not something that started in October. It's not something that was necessarily even introduced or revealed in November. It started when the coronavirus first came to visit. Because some of the people that are in leadership positions in those states saw it as an opportunity...

Merrill also publicly supported efforts by Republicans in Congress to reject the results of the Electoral College vote and overturn the election. In the leadup to January 6, Merrill advised Congressman Mo Brooks (R-AL), who told a crowd in DC it was time to start "taking down names and kicking ass" shortly before the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Merrill also propagated specific falsehoods, including the claim that there were a large number of fraudulent ballots cast in Michigan. 

Merrill is no longer the co-chair of the RSLC's Election Integrity Committee. On the same day he gave the presentation to corporate supporters of the RSLC, a right-wing blog released a recording of a woman who said she had an affair with Merrill. The next day, Merrill admitted the affair and announced he would not run for any elected office when his term expires in 2023. 

But the co-chair of the Election Integrity Commission, former Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson (R), who currently serves in the State Senate, shares Merrill's views on "election integrity." Johnson filed an affidavit in support of Republican poll watchers who sued the City of Detroit claiming "Detroit and Wayne County election officials purposely cheated the system with 'systematic fraud' to swing the election for Joe Biden." The claims in the lawsuit were meritless and the case was dismissed. In the legislature, Johnson, who chairs the Senate Elections Committee, has supported numerous bills to restrict voting. "The majority of the people in this state don’t believe that we have integrity in our elections," she said.

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The RSLC's plan to suppress votes

The RSLC, which is supported by large contributions from major corporations, has actively supported voter suppression legislation around the country. In Georgia, for example, the RSLC not only supported the legislation that eventually was signed into law but also an earlier draft that would have banned drop boxes and ended no-excuse mail-in voting:

The plan presented to the RSLC's corporate partners in April advocates for the purging of voter rolls "as far as federal law permits." The group advocates removing voters based on data from the USPS, state agencies, and commercial vendors. 

Marc Elias, an attorney specializing in voting rights and election law, noted that while the heading is about registration, "the entire section is about how to purge." The RSLC is encouraging states to consider notifying voters "notice before OR AFTER removal from the rolls, rather than before," Elias told Popular Information and Documented.  

Excessively aggressive purging of voter rolls results in voters who "discover they’re no longer listed only when they arrive at the polling place," according to the Brennan Center for Justice. This is because states "rely on faulty data to flag potentially ineligible voters." These voters "either don’t vote or are forced to cast provisional ballots." 

The presentation also advocates for stricter voter ID requirements, which makes voting more difficult for people who lack the required identification. After Election Day, the RSLC presentation suggests states provide bounties to citizens who come forward with evidence of fraud. 

The RSLC presentation provides no evidence of fraud to justify these changes. Rather, it claims the changes are necessary because of declining confidence in the integrity of the election by Republican voters. This decline, of course, is the result of false information promoted by Trump and his Republican allies — including members of the RSLC. 

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The RSLC's corporate partners

A Deloitte representative listed as a participant in the April 6 policy working group. Deloitte's corporate website says the company "is committed to protecting voter access." ​ Deloitte says it honors "the long struggle over the course of our nation's history by so many - particularly women and people of color - who have fought to ensure the right to vote for every American." Deloitte also signed a letter organized by Black corporate executives saying it opposes "any discriminatory legislation or measures that restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot." 

Deloitte's participation in the briefing was secured by a $15,000 donation to the RSLC in 2020. The company did not respond to a request for comment. 

Citi was also listed as participating in the April 6 meeting, according to the agenda. In a LinkedIn post last month, Citi's Head of Global Public Affairs, Edward Skyler, said the company believes "the right to vote is the foundation of American democracy" and "strongly" opposes "efforts to undermine the ability of Americans to avail themselves of this fundamental right."

Citi donated $75,000 to the RSLC in 2020. The company did not respond to a request for comment. 

TIAA was listed a participant but said that its representative "doesn’t recall attending." The company said it was "possible someone might have registered him to attend." TIAA's CEO, Roger Ferguson, said in an April interview on PBS that "voting is a fundamental right" because "millions have died or sacrificed their lives to ensure the right of Americans to vote." TIAA donated $150,000 to the RSLC in 2020. The company did not respond to questions about whether it agreed with the RSLC's policy proposals on voting or whether TIAA would continue to support the RSLC financially. 

Comcast was listed as participating in the April 6 event. In April, Comcast said efforts to restrict voting were inconsistent with its values:

Voting is fundamental to our democracy. We believe that all Americans should enjoy equitable access to secure elections and we have long supported and promoted voter education, registration and participation campaigns across the country to achieve that goal. Efforts to limit or impede access to this vital constitutional right for any citizen are not consistent with our values.

Comcast donated $135,000 to the RSLC in 2020. The company did not respond to a request for comment. 

Dominion Energy was listed by the RSLC as participating in the April 6 event. In February, Dominion Energy touted that it had donated $1 million to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, in part to finance work "protecting ballot access."

Novo Nordisk was listed as participating in the April 6 event but said that its representative did not attend. The company donated $150,000 to the RSLC last year.

Other major corporations who participated in the RSLC's working group include Walgreens, Enterprise, CVS Health, AstraZeneca, Rock Central, and Waffle House. According to notes from the meeting, Walgreens Vice President Casey Cesnovar asked a question about how RSLC intended to work with its corporate members when they rolled out its package of reforms. AstraZeneca donated $200,000 to the RSLC in 2020 and another $200,000 in 2010. Enterprise ($50,000) and Walgreens ($65,000) were also major donors. None of these companies responded to requests for comment. 

This is a special joint edition of the Documented newsletter with Judd Legum of Popular Information, a newsletter about politics “for people who give a damn.” You can sign up for Popular Information’s fantastic newsletter HERE.

The fight to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) as House Republican Conference Chair is providing a fascinating case study into the continuing split within the party over Donald Trump.

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Cheney is a right wing conservative climate denier who is (or was) beloved by major Republican donors. As well as that, she is the daughter of the former Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney. Her Republican credentials are, in other words, pretty solid.

Despite this, Cheney appears set to lose her leadership position this week because of a perceived lack of loyalty to Trump. Not a lack of loyalty to the Trump political agenda (she has that, see below), but for daring to speak out against Trump following the riot at the Capitol on January 6th. She is set to be replaced - it seems - by somebody who is less in line with the the Trump political agenda, but more vocal in their support for protecting and boosting Trump the man.

This is where I think it gets really interesting.

Despite her public split from the Trump camp, Cheney appears to remain very popular with some major Republican donors. But, there might be political risks for some of these donors to be publicly aligned with Cheney. When Documented found out about one fundraising event happening this week, it was removed from the group’s website less than an hour after we started asking questions.

The National Mining Association fundraiser

According to a fundraising invitation obtained by Documented, MinePAC/CoalPAC - the political action committees run by the National Mining Association (NMA) - are set to host a fundraiser for Cheney on Thursday this week, right as she faces a high profile eviction from her Republican leadership position.

According to Open Secrets, one donor to CoalPAC is the billionaire and major Trump campaign donor Joe Craft, who runs Alliance Coal. Craft’s wife Kelly Craft was appointed United States ambassador to the United Nations by Trump.

A spokesperson for the NMA refused to answer a question from Documented about the significance of the timing for this event. “Just like any other organization seeking to build understanding around public policies that are important to our industry, we contribute to a wide range of elected officials. We do not, however, comment publicly on any of those activities,” wrote the spokesperson.

Less than an hour after we contacted the NMA, the invitation was taken down from the trade association’s website. The spokesperson failed to respond to a follow-up question about why it was taken down.

Trump made big promises about saving the coal industry, which then continued to collapse during his four years in office - coal jobs reduced by 24% during his term in office. Still, it’s a complicated relationship and the coal industry might not want a public falling out.

Cheney is of course from Wyoming, coal country, and she has long been a big friend of the coal industry.

In late January, the Wyoming coal association put out a strong statement supporting her": “Representative Liz Cheney has been a consistent and committed advocate for the fossil fuel industry in Wyoming. Time and again, she has stood with the Wyoming Mining Association in support of our industry's interests and legislative priorities.”

Cheney and Trump aligned politically

According to Five Thirty Eight, Cheney voted for the Trump agenda 92.9% of the time during his four years. For context, Sen. Mitch McConnell was less than this at 91.4%.

Cheney was considered a rising star in the Republican party, and except for her criticism of Donald Trump, she still would be, likely continuing to drive a hard right regressive agenda through Congress for many years to come.

By contrast, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the widely rumored pick to replace Cheney as Conference Chair, is a vocal Trump supporter. Stefanik spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention, calling Trump the "only candidate who is capable of protecting the American Dream."

Trump has called Stefanik a “new Republican Star.”

Unlike Cheney, Stefanik voted against the certification of election results for President Biden, and was a vocal and high profile defender of the President during Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial.

But on policy, Stefanik is actually somewhat less in line with the Trump agenda than Cheney. According to the Five Thirty Eight tracker, she voted with the Trump agenda 77.7%.

Cheney has signed the infamous Grover Norquist Taxpayer Protection Pledge, opposing all new taxes. It wasn’t too long ago that this was a prerequisite for Republicans with ambitions for higher office. Stefanik has not signed it, and Norquist’s group has publicly criticized her (Americans for Tax Reform: “Elise Stefanik Leaves the Door Open to Higher Taxes”)

The League of Conservation Voters scores members of Congress on their pro-environment voting record. Liz Cheney has a lifetime score of 2%. Stefanik is at 38%. That is why the National Mining Association is so keep on Cheney. On policy, she could hardly be a better supporter for the coal industry.

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Major donors still like Cheney, but why?

According to a story by CNBC, some major Republican donors are publicly standing by Cheney, and threatening to withhold funds from the party if they oust her from leadership. CNBC:

Eric Levine, who is an owner of the law firm Eiseman Levine and a Republican fundraiser, told CNBC on Wednesday in an email that Cheney’s business supporters plan to continue to back her. Those donors, he said, are concerned about Trump’s influence over the Republican Party and how those forces will impact future elections. Levine gave over $2,800 to a Cheney joint fundraising committee in the first quarter, records show.

“With but a few exceptions, that group appears to be uniformly supportive of Cheney and very concerned about Trumpism,” Levine said. “Republicans can only win if we can make substantial inroads in the suburbs and with women.  Donald Trump is a proven loser in those precincts,” he added.

It should not be lost this week why major donors like Cheney. She is a right wing politician who has consistently advances the interests of wealthy Americans, and works to block legislation that would help working families and the environment. As John Nichols wrote recently for The Nation: “…Cheney is no friend of Democrats, no friend of fairness and decency in American politics, and no friend of the truth. She’s a rigidly right-wing Republican who got on the wrong side of a power struggle with her fellow rigidly right-wing Republicans.”