Records show the paper trail behind a left-wing dark money group aligned with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
According to reporting by Axios, “Majority Forward is the nonprofit arm of Senate Majority PAC, a high-dollar super PAC affiliated with Senate Democrats. Tax records show that Majority Forward gave nearly $2.7 million in 2018 to another nonprofit called the Coalition for a Safe and Secure America (CSSA).”
The Coalition for a Safe and Secure America spent that money on direct mail and digital advertising campaigns in the 2018 election that attacked GOP candidates in competitive Senate races. Instead of attacking them from the left as many people expected, the ads hit these GOP candidates from the right.
Some of the dark money group’s attacks which accused candidates of caving on key conservative issues, as reported by Axios, included:
- Nevada’s Heller “allowed almost 200,000 foreign workers a backdoor entry into our country,” one ad declared.
- Missouri’s Hawley, the group charged, “sides with Washington liberals against gun owners.”
- “Tax-hike-Mike Braun,” is what the group dubbed the former Indiana state representative.
- Rosendale, then a GOP candidate for Senate in Montana, “supports drone monitoring,” the ads in that race claimed.
The attacks came out after the GOP primaries were over in an attempt to depress GOP voter turnout or encourage voters to choose third party candidates, giving the Democrat candidates an edge in the race.
The biggest problem with this information is the fact that we’re only finding out about it now, years later.
According to Axios, this is because “laws allowing nonprofits to engage in limited political activity permitted Majority Forward to finance these ads in a way that made it impossible to trace the money until years after the elections at issue.”
The Coalition for a Safe and Secure America is now facing an IRS complaint over their actions from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The group is claiming that CSSA illicitly concealed political activity in its annual tax filings.
The claim may be true, considering the fact that the dark money group has recently acknowledged that it omitted legally required disclosures from direct mail pieces in 2018.
Will they actually be held accountable for their actions? If they were a Republican group, the answer would be a definite yes, but the same cannot be said for Democrat groups. Unfortunately, being a Democrat means never being held responsible for your actions.