A major left-wing dark money network raised more than $1 billion in 2022 and funneled millions into liberal causes across the country, recently published tax documents reveal.
Arabella Advisors, a for-profit venture run by Clinton administration veteran Eric Kessler, manages five left-wing nonprofits: the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the New Venture Fund, the Windward Fund, the Hopewell Fund and the North Fund. Arabella’s network raked in $1.3 billion in revenue during 2022, and provided financial support to things like climate lawsuits, pro-abortion initiatives and election-related organizations. (RELATED: Dem Donors Plow Millions Into Dark Money Group Aligned With Pro-Biden PAC: REPORT)
Arabella’s network was deeply involved in the 2022 midterm elections.
Nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors dumped more than $62 million into get-out-the-vote initiatives, voter registration drives and other voter mobilization efforts in 2022. While groups pushing these efforts often brand themselves as nonpartisan, some critics see them as carrying water for Democrats.
“Voter registration nonprofits are nothing more than a cost effective way to achieve partisan electioneering results for Democrats while keeping the donors totally anonymous and giving them a tax write-off for their troubles,” Parker Thayer, an Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Voter Registration Project, a group that got $8.5 million from New Venture Fund, is “a voter mobilization group which targets African-American, Latino, Native American, low-income, and other voter groups likely to lean left-of-center,” according to Influence Watch.
Arabella’s network spent millions on voter mobilization across Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, key states in the 2022 midterms.
Nonprofits affiliated with Arabella took a particular interest in shaping policy and influencing elections in Michigan in 2022, pouring $30.1 million into progressive groups in the state.
Groups supporting two ballot referenda, one to enshrine a right to abortion in the state’s constitution and another to loosen voting laws, received the bulk of funding from Arabella’s network, pulling in $18.4 million from Arabella-managed nonprofits.
The Sixteen Thirty Fund also gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups aimed at electing Democrats in Michigan.
Michigan Republicans ended up losing both referenda as well as control of the state legislature in 2022.
“Arabella’s network has showered money on progressive groups in Michigan, which has helped usher in a new era in Michigan politics, featuring single-party control at the state level,” Michigan Republican Rep. Tim Walberg told the DCNF.
“This network has helped put a thumb on the scale and led Michigan down a dangerous path,” he continued.
Arabella’s network also sought to push environmental policy to the left in 2022, supporting left-of-center green advocacy groups.
New Venture Fund in 2022 transferred $2.5 million to Sher Edling, for instance, a law firm that collaborates with Democrat-run cities and states to bring lawsuits against major players in the energy industry, Fox News Digital reported.
“You have this whole self-dealing scheme where progressive donors are hiding behind nonprofits and taking advantage of that from a tax perspective, then funding Democrat law firms, and also, Democrat politicians and elected officials are participating as well,” Tom Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research, told Fox.
“This is further evidence that the green movement is no longer about protecting the environment. It’s about being a political, financial and organizational arm of the Democratic Party.”
Sher Edling has worked with the Democratic governments of New York City, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Baltimore, Minnesota and New Jersey, among others, to push climate-related lawsuits since its founding in 2016. The firm claims to “help [its] clients hold polluters accountable for deceiving consumers about climate change.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s daughter, Somah Haaland, works for another environmental group bankrolled by the Arabella network.
Haaland’s daughter works as a communications coordinator for the Pueblo Action Alliance, a group that promotes “indigenous solutions as means to dismantle and eradicate white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, hetero-patriarchy and extractive colonialism.” Pueblo Action Alliance is a fiscally sponsored project of the Southwest Organizing Project, which received more than $1.5 million from nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors between 2020 and 2022.
Fiscal sponsorship is an arrangement where an established nonprofit processes tax-deductible donations, and sometimes provides administrative services, for another group that isn’t registered as a nonprofit with the IRS, according to the American Bar Association.
Environmental policy wasn’t the only area where Arabella’s network tried to influence laws.
Campaign for Accountability received $450,000 from New Venture Fund in 2022. The group in September signed on to a letter demanding that Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito recuse themselves from cases tied to Paul Singer and Charles Koch over alleged conflicts of interest.
Campaign for Accountability received $2.3 million from the New Venture Fund between 2016 and 2021.
A note on @ProPublica‘s morning bombshell: another individual appears to have joined Clarence Thomas on his unreported luxury vacations. Here, Leonard Leo is seated second from the left, across from Thomas. Let’s take a closer look: pic.twitter.com/7n75SlcrV8
— Campaign for Accountability (@Accountable_Org) April 6, 2023
Some of the groups funded by Arabella’s network have attracted significant controversy.
New Venture Fund and Windward Fund gave more than $1.5 million to Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ) in 2022.
AFGJ serves as the fiscal sponsor for Samidoun, a group the Israeli government designated as a terrorist organization over its alleged ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group both the United States and Israel recognize as a terrorist organization.
New Venture Fund and Windward Fund have since pledged to cease supporting the AFGJ, joining a growing group of nonprofits and payment processors who refuse to work with the charity over its alleged ties to Palestinian terrorists.
Some of the nonprofits managed by Arabella bragged about how they influenced policy and elections in 2022.
The New Venture Fund, touting the nearly $800 million it brought in during 2022, said that it “is proud to be taking on big issues like climate change and conservation, early education, civic participation, global health, criminal justice, and creating a more equitable world.”
The plurality of New Venture Fund’s expenditures in 2022, about $483 million, went toward its “Civil Rights, Social Action, [and] Advocacy” program. The group also spent hundreds of millions on environmental and foreign affairs programs, according to the report.
Amy Kurtz, president of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, wrote a blog post highlighting how her nonprofit helped support efforts to embed the right to an abortion in Ohio’s constitution and funded groups across the country focused on getting Democrats elected. Sixteen Thirty spent almost $150 million in 2022.
The Sixteen Thirty Fund, the New Venture Fund, the Windward Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the North Fund and Arabella Advisors did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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