Last year, a situation that has become all too common in the post-Citizens United era played out. A super PAC supporting Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a group with an anodyne name and no public profile, effectively denying the public’s ability to know who was sinking significant sums into benefiting a sitting senator.
But a recent filing in the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former head of cryptocurrency exchange FTX who was convicted in early November on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, provides a clue indicating that FTX may be one of the sources of the dark money funds that boosted Lee after flowing through groups affiliated with one of indicted Rep. George Santos’s (R-NY) controversial campaign treasurers.
Last month, prosecutors in the Bankman-Fried trial introduced as evidence a spreadsheet detailing gifts and contributions by Bankman-Fried and his colleagues that benefited politicians across the political spectrum. While many of the contributions had previously been disclosed in campaign finance records, the spreadsheet provided the first large-scale confirmation of Bankman-Fried’s claim that he was also a major dark money donor, adding support to a FEC complaint CREW filed against him last year.
According to CNBC, the trial evidence demonstrated how Bankman-Fried and his allies poured tens of millions into nonprofit groups during the 2022 election cycle that can spend money influencing elections without disclosing the source of their funds. The FTX crew made large contributions to prominent dark money groups like One Nation and Majority Forward, which are respectively aligned with the Republican and Democratic leadership in the Senate, as well as lesser known entities with names like the American Leadership Fund.
In the spreadsheet, contributions attributed to FTX are labeled as being associated with particular members of Congress. The American Leadership Fund, for instance, is tagged as being connected to Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) and reportedly received a $50,000 contribution from FTX on August 19, 2022. According to the trial evidence, FTX made contributions to nonprofits associated with four other members of Congress on the same day, including $100,000 to a section 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization—a type of tax-exempt organization commonly associated with dark money because they can spend money influencing elections without disclosing their donors—called Liberty Champions that supported a member with the last name Lee.
Except there are no public records available that indicate there is actually a nonprofit that goes by the name Liberty Champions. The IRS’s searchable databases for tax-exempt organizations do not contain an entry for the group, and a search of business records via the website OpenCorporates also comes up empty.
