Merely a month into his Presidency, Joe Biden is about to face a political storm about how he actually came to power. A Bloomberg report disclosed last month that Biden benefitted from a record amount of “dark money” during the Presidential polls last year.
He garnered $145 million in his winning campaign from anonymous donors, thereby meaning that Americans will never fully know who all helped their President financially.
According to reports, now the “dark money” groups like Arabella Advisors, which helped Biden during his election campaign, are being targeted by a coalition of three conservative groups which have launched a $2 million media campaign against them. The coalition consists of three conservative groups, namely – Judicial Crisis Network, Heritage Action for America and Americans for Public Trust.
As per a report by BizPacReview, Americans for Public Trust will be spending an amount of $600,000 to target “dark money” groups, and the same amount will be used by Heritage Action for America on ads to target Xavier Becerra.
The groups will also specifically target, Xavier Becerra, Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services and Vanita Gupta, Biden’s pick for Associate Attorney General.
Jessica Anderson, Executive Director of Heritage Action for America, revealed, “President Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, has spent his entire career fighting for socialized health care, catering to the abortion industry, trampling on Americans’ religious freedom, and pushing the policies of liberal dark money groups.”
Also as per Carrie Severino, the President of Judicial Crisis Network President, “In Vanita Gupta, President Biden has nominated a liberal activist who supports defunding the police and brings to the job her experience leading a left-wing dark money group.”
Democrats have always decried “dark money” as uniquely corrupting. Yet, Biden’s Presidential campaign benefitted greatly from such funds and clearly outstripped the $28.4 million spent in “dark money” on Donald Trump. Democrats say that they want to ban “dark money” but we cannot help but point out the hypocrisy here.
The use of “dark money” is not uncommon in American Presidential campaigns. But Biden’s Presidential campaign goes a bit too far in this respect. No candidate has received as much “dark money” donations in American history as Joe Biden. In fact, anonymous donations worth $145 million spent on Biden tops the previous record of $113 million in “dark money” donated to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in the year 2012.
Let us give you an example. Biden had designated the super political action committee – Priorities USA Action Fund, as his preferred source for outside spending. This entity used funds worth $26 million originally donated to its non-profit arm- Priorities USA, to back Joe Biden. The catch here is that donors of the money don’t have to be disclosed and Americans will never come to know them.
Now, this is where the Conservative lawmakers can mount a lot of trouble for the Biden administration. Conservatives can move a legislation or start a narrative pushing for greater transparency and complete disclosure about anonymous donors. If the Republicans can rally around this issue, they can even compel complete disclosure and perhaps make it a tool for the impeachment of the sitting President.
The Republicans actually have a lot to argue here. There is a lot that can go wrong with anonymous decisions. It is a well-known fact that ultra-wealthy individuals and corporates tend to enjoy a deep nexus in decision making, which is usually proportionate to the amount of money that they donate to the winning candidate. But at least, this nexus involving Biden is publicly accessible.
On the other hand, Americans don’t even know who contributed $145 million to Biden’s campaign and how they might affect decision making at top levels.
In Biden’s case, the role of anonymous donors is around 10 per cent of the total funds raised in his campaign pitch, that is, $1.5 billion. Hence, Biden’s “dark money” controversy is a political time bomb waiting to explode at any moment.