Look behind the bylines for The New York Times front page story about how some large corporations donated to tax-exempt groups and there’s another name – George Soros. The liberal investor is one of the richest people in the world and has given at least $550 million to help fund left-wing organizations.
The Times’ July 7 story [1] relied on information from the Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Responsive Politics and the Center for Political Accountability. All three organizations have received money from Soros’s Open Society Foundations – nearly $3.8 million in total. And yet, ironically, the Times referred to these heavily Soros-funded groups while they called out conservative groups for their political spending.
As Times staffers Mike McIntire and Nicholas Confessore rightly pointed out, the weakness of Super PACs is that they are legally required to disclose donation amounts. In order to avoid unnecessary bad publicity, some organizations instead have donated money to tax-exempt organizations, which are not required to reveal donors.
This is not the first of this type of article for Times investigative reporter McIntire. He has a history of targeting conservative donors [2]. McIntire even ran a remarkably similar piece on October 13, 2010 [3], entitled “Offering Donors Secrecy and Going On Attack” targeting such Republican friendly groups as the American Future Fund and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.
That piece said “efforts in Congress to force more disclosure for politically active nonprofit organizations have been repeatedly stymied by Republicans, who have described the push as an assault on free speech.”
Of course, the real irony of all of this is that the latest story’s research relied heavily on Soros-funded organizations. In both stories, he heavily referred to data from the Center for Public Integrity, a group which received $2,416,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations since 2000.
At one point in the July 7 story, McIntire said that “a search of voluntary disclosures, some collected by the Center for Political Accountability, which advocates for transparency in corporate political spending found more the $6 million in chamber donations by 10 companies last year.” Meanwhile, the Center for Political Accountability itself received $995,000 in Soros funds since 2004.
In the past 10 years, Soros [4] has given more than $550 million to liberal organization in the United States. That total represents about 27 percent of the $2 billion given out by the American branches of his Open Society Foundations from 2000 to 2009.