Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Source: Judicial Crisis Network Website
Just days before President Trump announced his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Monday evening, a dark money group called the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) was airing a television ad calling some of the most trusted Democrats “extremists.” As photos of Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley flashed across the screen (along with other well known Democrats) a voice warned that these “extremists will lie and attack the nominee.”
One thing this threesome actually stands out for is telling the hard truths to the American people. During his presidential bid in 2016, Sanders traveled around the country telling tens of thousands of people at his rallies that the “business model of Wall Street is fraud.” Warren exposed the $6 trillion in a backdoor bailout that the Federal Reserve had funneled secretly to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch during the financial crash. Merkley brought the nation’s attention recently to the child abuse taking place under the Trump administration by visiting one of the immigration detention centers holding children, being refused entry, and going on national television to call out the abuse of ripping children from their parents and sending them off to unknown locations all over the country.
JCN was also behind the TV ads demanding that President Obama not be allowed to select a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia after his death. The group spent $7 million to block Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, from getting a confirmation hearing. This allowed President Trump to select Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s seat less than two weeks after Trump took office.
So who is behind this dark money group labeling hardworking public servants “extremists”? According to the Center for Responsive Politics, “JCN’s tightest ties with any group or individual revolve around Ann and Neil Corkery.”
In November of last year the Center for Responsive Politics reported that “Newly obtained tax documents show that JCN’s money came almost entirely from yet another secretive nonprofit, the Wellspring Committee, which flooded JCN with nearly $23.5 million in 2016. Most of Wellspring’s funds, in turn, came from a single mysterious donor who gave the organization almost $28.5 million — nearly 90 percent of its $32.2 million in revenues.”
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