This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected].
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Donor Exposure
By Gabe Kaminsky
.....An advocacy nonprofit group behind a campaign demanding Supreme Court "transparency" reforms on financial disclosures is in panic mode over accidentally leaking its own funders to the Washington Examiner.
Fix the Court, a charity that spun off in 2021 after being a project of the New Venture Fund, a nonprofit group managed by the liberal dark money behemoth and for-profit company Arabella Advisors, is part of a seemingly coordinated campaign calling for Supreme Court justices to disclose more about their finances. Now, the organization is in disarray after unwittingly providing the Washington Examiner with unredacted copies of its own donors in 2021 and 2022.
"As you can see if you've reviewed the forms, I'm not a good fundraiser," Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court and a former vice president at the Democratic consulting firm SKDK, told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. "I'm not a good CPA. I'm a klutz. Schedule B is not something that is sent out, right? It's not made public. Like, if you're donating to a 501(c)(3), the IRS gets to see who donates to you, but the general public doesn't."
"I mean, basically, I've tried to donate money; I have failed," Roth added. "I tried to raise money; I have failed. I have only two foundations that give me money, and if their names become public, they're never going to talk to me again, and Fix the Court is over. My screwup this morning probably cost me my job."
The executive director added, "I really just don't know what to do here" and that he "just f***ed up in a minute" after the group had been operating for almost a decade...
Fix the Court's "panicked reaction" to releasing its donors is evidence that the group "is not serious about transparency," according to Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank. Roth further told the Washington Examiner that he "wanted to fix the mistake as soon as possible" since his "donors don't want their names out there."
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In 2021, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in AFP v. Bonta that requiring charitable organizations to disclose the identities of their large donors to a state attorney general’s office imposed “a widespread burden on donors’ associational rights.” On that basis, the Court found that donors’ First Amendment rights had been violated.
In similar fashion, AG James is keeping donor information that her office improperly requested from charitable organizations. Specifically, the OAG has requested and received IRS Form 990, Schedule B from charitable organizations; this document contains donor names and amounts donated. This information has been the subject of at least one security breach that AG James has acknowledged. The issue first came to light in an August 2022 Politico article that revealed donor identities from a leaked filing bearing the Attorney General’s official stamp.
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DOJ
By Sarah N. Lynch
.....Rachael Rollins, the top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts, improperly used her U.S. Justice Department position to meddle in a local district attorney election by leaking to newspapers dirt about a political rival - one of many ethics violations cited in two reports by government investigators on Wednesday.
The reports by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and the independent U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) were released a day after Rollins, appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden as the first Black woman to serve as U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, announced she would resign by Friday.
The scathing 161-page inspector general's report described a host of ethics lapses, from Rollins improperly attending a Democratic fundraising event with U.S. first lady Jill Biden in her capacity as a prosecutor to accusations that she "knowingly and willfully made a false statement" during her interview with Horowitz's office.
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The Courts
By Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter
.....A lawsuit filed in federal court on Wednesday said that a Florida county violated the First Amendment by removing or restricting certain kinds of books from its school libraries.
The free-speech organization PEN America and the country’s largest book publisher, Penguin Random House, filed the lawsuit, along with a group of authors and parents. The complaint said that the Escambia County School District and school board also violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution because books they targeted were disproportionately written by nonwhite and L.G.B.T.Q. authors and addressed themes of race, racism, gender and sexuality.
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Free Expression
By Brittany Bernstein
.....Members of a Loudoun County Facebook group, which included staffers from several local governmental offices, doxxed and threatened violence and retaliation against several concerned parents who spoke out at school-board meetings, according to documents obtained by the local ABC affiliate.
The group targeted at least three Loudoun County residents who have spoken during public comment periods at school-board meetings over the past two years to push for parental rights in education, academic rigor, special education improvements and school safety.
Scott Mineo is a Loudoun County parent who says he was fired after members of the group — who appear to be associated with County Supervisor Juli Briskman, school board member Atoosa Reaser, and County Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj — put pressure on his employer to let him go. Members of the group also reportedly referred Mineo to the FBI, IRS and DHS, he claimed, “all because they don’t like my opinion.”
“They’re probably going to sit back and celebrate the fact that I’m unemployed,” Mineo told 7News. “I’m having a hard time finding a job. And who knows what’s next with the IRS and the FBI? I don’t know. But they’ve done more than just put me out of a job. It’s impacting my family, my kids.”
The group, called the “Loudoun Love Warriors,” also shared threats against another Loudoun County resident, Mark Winn, who quoted a verse from the Bible in a speech before the school board.
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Candidates and Campaigns
By Bryan Metzger
.....In 2019, Cruz sued the Federal Election Commission after loaning his campaign $260,000, an amount just over the repayment limit, in the final days of his 2018 re-election campaign — intentionally setting up a challenge to the law.
That case eventually made its way all the way to the Supreme Court, and in May 2022, the court voted 6-3 in the Texas senator's favor in Ted Cruz vs. FEC, eliminating the repayment limit.
Cruz later paid himself back more than half a million dollars in loans that he could now recoup from his campaign account.
Furthermore, the FEC clarified in an advisory opinion in August 2022 that candidates could revive old loans to their campaigns that had long been forgiven and converted into contributions.
"The whole system is now set up so that somebody who has loaned their campaign money last election cycle, 10 years ago, however many years back, could seek to bring that loan back," said Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center.
Enter Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the wealthy former CEO of a plastics manufacturing company who loaned millions of dollars to his campaign when he first ran for Senate in 2010.
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Online Speech Platforms
By Robby Soave
.....When a repressive government orders a private company to restrict content, it is the government—not the company—that has decided to violate the human rights of its citizens. The companies should resist wherever they can, but resisting to the point at which the government shuts down their service is neither a moral requirement nor a course of action that obviously maximizes freedom. It's perfectly legitimate to think that a CCP-approved version of Google—while far from ideal—is better for the people of China than no Google at all. In either case, the villain is the CCP, not Google.
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By Joseph Cox
.....Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using an invasive, AI-powered monitoring tool to screen travelers, including U.S. citizens, refugees, and people seeking asylum, which can in some cases link their social media posts to their Social Security number and location data, according to an internal CBP document obtained by Motherboard.
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The Media
By Rich Lowry
.....Barack Obama has met the enemy, and it is us, or at least our diverse, clamorous media environment.
Asked what keeps him awake at night in an interview with CBS News this week, the former president said “the degree to which we now have a divided conversation, in part because we have a divided media, a splintered media.” He noted, “When I was coming up, you had three TV stations … and people were getting a similar sense of what is true and what isn’t, what was real and what was not.” Now, “we almost occupy different realities.”
There is something to this, of course...
Still, Obama is operating from a flawed assumption — that if only the media were more uniform and we had “a common set of facts,” our politics wouldn’t be so divided.
This gets it backwards. What we have in our politics is a disagreement about values and philosophical premises, from which factual disputes flow, rather than a consensus on first principles that is getting disrupted by disputes over niggling factual questions.
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The States
By Sapna Maheshwari
.....The governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, signed a bill on Wednesday to ban TikTok from operating inside the state, the most extreme prohibition of the app in the nation and one that will almost certainly be challenged in court. The ban will take effect on Jan. 1…
“Governor Gianforte has signed a bill that infringes on the First Amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok, a platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of people across the state,” Brooke Oberwetter, a spokeswoman for TikTok, said in a statement on Wednesday. Montanans, she added, can keep using the app “as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana.”
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By Chris Sommerfeldt
.....Lamor Whitehead, a scandal-scarred pastor with ties to Mayor Eric Adams, is suspected of having orchestrated an illegal “straw donor scheme” as part of his failed 2021 campaign to succeed Adams as Brooklyn’s borough president, a court filing reveals.
The new information about Whitehead — who faces criminal charges for allegedly extorting a businessman, swindling a retired parishioner, lying to the FBI and falsifying bank documents — was contained in a letter submitted in Manhattan Federal Court on Tuesday by prosecutors from U.S. Attorney Damian Williams’ office.
Whitehead has not been charged with any crimes stemming from the previously unknown “straw donor scheme.” The letter does not say whether the feds plan to pursue charges along those lines.
Federal prosecutors wrote in the filing that they have “ample” evidence of the scheme and revealed they secured a warrant from a judge on Oct. 6, 2022 to search Whitehead’s electronic devices for evidence of it.
The scheme, which marks the first indication of possible wrongdoing by Whitehead that’s political in nature, revolves around several donations to his 2021 campaign for Brooklyn borough president, the feds wrote.
The prosecutors say they suspect Whitehead of “falsely reporting” to the city’s Campaign Finance Board that the donations in question came from other individuals.
“In truth, Whitehead had funded the donations himself,” the filing states.
By claiming he had multiple donors instead of reporting the campaign money came from his own funds, Whitehead made the campaign eligible for public matching funds it wasn’t due, according to the feds. The prosecutors described Whitehead’s effort as an attempt “to defraud the New York City Campaign Finance Board and steal funds from the city.”
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