Courtesy of Pam Martens
Riverside County Sheriff Officers Guard the Entrance to a Rancho Mirage, California Luxury Resort Where the Koch Brothers Held their January 2011 Political Strategy Meeting with other Wealthy Donors. Photo Courtesy of Michael Cline, ClineFoto.com
In 2010 we broke the news that a secretive nonprofit called Donors Capital Fund (with the fingerprints of billionaire Charles Koch all over it) had forked over $17,778,600 to fund a widely distributed race-baiting film in the weeks before the 2008 election – an election in which the first black man, Barack Obama, was the Democratic candidate for President. Donors Capital Fund accepts donations from multiple donors and keeps their identities secret, so exactly who funded the actual payment for the film is still unknown.
Recently, we decided to see what Donors Capital Fund has been up to lately. We went to the publicly filed tax returns available online at the Foundation Center and Guidestar. The most recent available tax return is for 2016. Curiously, the schedule of the tax return that shows to whom disbursements were made was missing on both the tax return at the Foundation Center as well as at Guidestar. We have never seen that happen before. We became suspicious.
We called Donors Capital Fund and requested both the schedule showing recipients of donations as well as Schedule B, which shows the dollar amount from each donor. (Schedule B redacts the names and addresses of those donors, as allowed under current law.) When that material arrived, we quickly figured out why this dark money nonprofit was reluctant to provide this material to public outlets. One individual had provided 96 percent of all funding for Donors Capital Fund in 2016, a staggering $68,250,000 out of $70,783,659 in total contributions.
Can we tell you unequivocally who this $68 million mystery person is? Absolutely not. But we can tell you this: his pattern of giving is closely aligned with the pattern of giving by Charles Koch and Koch Foundations over the years. For example, out of the $68 million received by Donors Capital Fund, $5.5 million went to the George Mason University (GMU) Foundation School of Law.
On May 1, 2018 Inside Higher Ed reported that the Charles Koch Foundation has given GMU $50 million cumulatively through 2016 and that “some of its past donor agreements with Charles Koch Foundation have afforded the organization a say in faculty appointments, in violation of the norms of academic freedom.”
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