Dark Money
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Obama’s senior adviser: Holden met in the White House with Jarrett, the domestic policy director, Cecilia Muñoz, and the White House counsel, W. Neil Eggleston, on April 16, 2015. Subsequently, Obama defended the Kochs’ involvement on criminal justice reform issues, though he disparaged them not long afterward for opposing government support for renewable energy. Charles Koch described himself as “flabbergasted” by the president’s criticism.
“It was hell”: Goodwin, “Mark Holden Wants You to Love the Koch Brothers.”
“hemorrhaging benzene”: Loder and Evans, “Koch Brothers Flout Law Getting Richer with Secret Iran Sales.”
Nonetheless, the $25 million: Some liberal groups, like AFSCME, criticized the United Negro College Fund for taking money from the Kochs, whom it accused of breaking public employees’ unions that had provided employment to many minorities.
As a 2015 report: Jay Schalin, Renewal in the University: How Academic Centers Restore the Spirit of Inquiry, John William Pope Center for Higher Education, Jan. 2015.
By 2014, the various Koch foundations: The number 283 comes from ibid., 17.
“We learned that Keynes”: Jerry Funt, interview with author.
Russell Sobel: Sobel became a teacher at the Citadel after abruptly leaving West Virginia University in 2012. Sobel was also a visiting fellow at the South Carolina Policy Council, part of the State Policy Network, and was affiliated with the Mercatus Center, the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Tax Foundation, and programs partly funded by grants from the Kochs at Troy University in Alabama and Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.
But when critics raised: See Hardin, “Campaign to Stop Fresh College Thinking.”
Young Entrepreneurs Academy: The Huffington Post published a news-making story on the Kochs’ incursions into high schools. See Christina Wilkie and Joy Resmovits, “Koch High: How the Koch Brothers Are Buying Their Way into the Minds of High School Students,” July 21, 2014.
Displayed prominently: Beneath his byline, Charles appended a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr.: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
No mention was made: In his essay on the Well-Being Initiative, Charles Koch offered some of his own theories on the topic. As he saw it, the world had been divided for 240 years between those who believed government could make one happy and those who sought fulfillment through self-reliance. The split began with the French Revolution, continuing through the Russian Revolution, and on through tyrannical states like North Korea, he said. He contrasted these “collectivists” with the United States, whose founders, he said, “chose a very different path.”
But two American historians who read his essay found it full of factual flaws. Rather than opposing the French Revolution, Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson greatly admired it. Moreover, as the Princeton professor Sean Wilentz noted in an interview with the author, the U.S. Constitution was inspired by the European Enlightenment and calls for the government to “promote the general welfare.” Further, the Georgetown University professor Michael Kazin noted that far from being laissez-faire, the federal government had been intervening in support of public welfare since before the Civil War, often in aid of businesses. “The Koch version of history is a complete fairy tale,” he said in an interview with the author.
By then, Brooks had moved: See Chris Young, “Kochs Put a Happy Face on Free Enterprise,” Center for Public Integrity, June 25, 2014, which was the first report describing their embrace of “well-being” as a public relations gambit.
“Well, somebody has got to win”: Roy and McCoy, “Charles Koch.”
But after tallying up: Louis Jacobson, “Charles Koch, in Op-Ed, Says His Political Engagement Began Only in the Last Decade,” PolitiFact.com, April 3, 2014.
The Kochs’ development: The Democratic National Committee had undergone a somewhat similar transformation a decade earlier when about a hundred investors, including George Soros, combined forces to fund the creation of a nonparty political data and analytical firm called Catalist. In contrast to i360, Catalist was a co-op, formed by constituent groups in the progressive political sphere, such as labor unions and environmental groups. It was owned by a trust, and if it were sold, its charter required its investors to donate any profits to charity.
“I think it’s very dangerous”: See Jon Ward, “The Koch Brothers and the Republican Party Go to War—with Each Other,” Yahoo News, June 11, 2015.
“They’re building a party”: Lisa Graves, interview with author.
Americans for Prosperity had expanded: See Mike Allen and Kenneth P. Vogel, “Inside the Koch Data Mine,” Politico, Dec. 8, 2014.
“They aggressively corrected”: David Axelrod, interview with author.
“retooled and revamped”: See Nicholas Confessore, “Outside Groups with Deep Pockets Lift G.O.P.,” New York Times, Nov. 5, 2014.
“We have reached”: Mark McKinnon, “The 100 Rich People Who Run America,” Daily Beast, Jan. 5, 2015.
A few of the biggest: Tom Steyer’s organization was called Next Generation.
The 100 biggest known donors: According to Politico, 501(c) groups disclosed $219 million in campaign spending to the Federal Election Commission, 69 percent of which was by conservative groups. But this disclosed spending was a fraction of all of the 501(c) political spending during the 2014 midterm elections. One single Koch-backed 501(c) group, Americans for Prosperity, alone spent $125 million. See Kenneth Vogel, “Big Money Breaks Out,” Politico, Dec. 29, 2014.
As America grew more: See Eduardo Porter, “Companies Open Up on Giving in Politics,” New York Times, June 10, 2015, who writes that “unbridled spending” could create the “nightmare situation” where “those at the pinnacle of American society purchase the power needed to preserve the yawning inequities of the status quo.”
Among the new power brokers: Koch Industries spent over $13 million lobbying Congress in 2014, as well as making over $3 million in political action committee contributions, according to OpenSecrets.org. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000186&year=20, https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00236489&cycle=2014.
Soon after he was sworn in: See Lee Fang, “Mitch McConnell’s Policy Chief Previously Lobbied for Koch Industries,” Intercept, May 18, 2015.
Three of the newly elected: The other two freshman Republican senators expressing thanks at the Kochs’ 2014 June summit were Colorado’s Cory Gardner and Arkansas’s Tom Cotton.
John Kasich, the iconoclastic governor: Neil King Jr., “An Ohio Prescription for GOP: Lower Taxes, More Aid for Poor,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 14, 2013; and Alex Isenstadt, “Operation Replace Jeb,” Politico, June 19, 2015.
“What I give isn’t ‘dark’ ”: Charles Koch interview with Anthony Mason, CBS Sunday Morning, Oct. 12, 2015. Yet as Paul Abowd revealed in his investigative report on DonorsTrust, “Donors Use Charity to Push Free-Market Policies in States,” Center for Public Integrity, Feb. 14, 2013, “The Knowledge and Progress Fund, a Wichita, Kansas–based foundation run by Charles Koch…gave almost $8 million dollars to DonorsTrust between 2005 and 2011. Where the funds ended up is a mystery.” In addition, he reported, the Charles G. Koch Foundation also filtered small grants through DonorsTrust.
“over $760 million”: This figure is according to Robert Maguire, an investigator at the Center for Responsive Politics. This included $64 million to groups in the Koch network, such as the American Future Fund, 60 Plus, and Americans for Prosperity in 2010, $407 million to the network in 2012, and pledges of $290 million to the network in 2014, according to Peter Stone’s report, “The Koch Brothers Big Donor Retreat,” Daily Beast, June 13, 2014.
“It’s extraordinary”: Rob Stein, interview with author.
“There are few policy victories”: Brian Doherty, interview with author.
“actors playing out”: Ibid.
Even though Americans: Just 6 percent o
f Americans wanted Social Security cut, according to Lee Drutman, and a slight majority wanted the program’s benefits increased; see Drutman, “What Donald Trump Gets About the Electorate,” Vox, Aug. 18, 2015.
“false prophets”: John Boehner’s interview with John Dickerson on Face the Nation, CBS News, Sept. 27, 2015.
“Giving back”: Peter Buffett, “The Charitable-Industrial Complex,” New York Times, July 26, 2013.
Anyone paying attention: Confessore, “Outside Groups with Deep Pockets Lift G.O.P.” New York Times, Nov. 5, 2014.
“What they want”: Phil Dubose, interview with author.
To get there: The information on the Kochs’ pledges of $75 million is based on an interview with one source who is politically allied with them on several projects.
This time, the Koch network: James Davis, a spokesman for Freedom Partners, emphasized that the $889 million budget covered not just electoral spending but the whole universe of ideological spending by the Koch network, including think tanks, advocacy groups, voter data, and opposition research.
“Eight hundred and eighty-nine million dollars”: Fred Wertheimer’s interview with the author. Wertheimer’s nonprofit organization Democracy 21 had been supported by grants from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Wertheimer had nonetheless criticized Soros’s use of big money on elections.
As was clear: According to OpenSecrets.org’s tally of lobbying records, Koch Industries spent $13.7 million on lobbying in 2014, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000186&year=2014.
“We are doing all of this”: Fredreka Schouten, “Charles Koch: We’re Not in Politics to Boost Our Bottom Line,” USA Today, April 24, 2015.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three best-selling and critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction books. She co-authored Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988, with Doyle McManus, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, with Jill Abramson, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was named one of The New York Times’s Top 10 Books of the Year and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. For her reporting at The New Yorker, Mayer has been awarded the John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence presented by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Mayer lives in Washington, D.C.