Public Citizen, founded by Ralph Nader, claims that it “champions the public interest in the halls of power.” The Soros-funded group though draws the line at actually standing up to leftists in the halls of power.
Earlier this week, I wrote “The IRS and Stacey Abrams: A Love Story” about her seeming ability to flout ethics and the tax code and get away with it. This was partially triggered by a Politico story that reported where a whole lot of the millions that Stacey wasted on her worthless lawsuit was going.
The voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams spent more than $25 million over two years on legal fees, mostly on a single case, with the largest amount going to the self-described boutique law firm of the candidate’s campaign chairwoman… The firm received $9.4 million from Abrams’ group, Fair Fight Action
The article also contained this quote.
“It is a very clear conflict of interest because with that kind of close link to the litigation and her friend that provides an opportunity where the friend gets particularly enriched from this litigation,” said Craig Holman, an expert on campaign finance and ethics at Public Citizen, a non-partisan consumer advocacy organization, offering his opinion after POLITICO briefed Holman on the contents of Fair Fight Action’s 990 forms. “The outcome of that litigation can directly affect her campaign itself.”
Such quotes are fairly typical. A journalist contacts experts in a particular field and consults with them and then gets a quote. Except, as Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica noted on Twitter, Public Citizen retracted the quote.
The story quotes a Public Citizen staff member suggesting that a contractual arrangement between Fair Fight and outside counsel poses a conflict of interest.
However, we have now reviewed the full story presented in the Politico article. Based on the information in the story, our organizational conclusion is that there is no conflict of interest or any problem at all.
The entire press release is written in that strange “we” format. It never mentions Holman’s name at all.
But it’s not exactly a mystery. It’s right there in the Politico article.
Fair Fight Action’s new executive director Cianti Stewart-Reid declined to disclose the group’s donors. But POLITICO was able to identify donations from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, both large and well-funded liberal organizations, based on interviews and a review of other 990 forms.
Open Society’s co-director for U.S. grants, Laleh Ispahani, said she was impressed with how “cutting-edge” Fair Fight Action was. “I was always informed about the work and I think most of their donors probably would say the same thing,” Ispahani said.
Public Citizen is also Soros-funded. One group in the Soros network is not supposed to criticize another. This whole thing screams of Public Citizen trying to mollify one of the biggest sources of money in the lefty donorsphere. PC couldn’t get Holman to disavow his own statement so they issued a panicked organizational disavowal without the quote being pulled from the article. Is that what happened? Could be.
Will that save them from the Wrath of Soros? Probably not.
The entire incident is a reminder that Soros cash, Ford, Rockefeller, etc is inherently corrupting and has turned the Left into a mafia that can’t stop its own corruption. Politico was trying to help Dems and lefties stop throwing away more money on Stacey. But instead, the same big lefty donors will work to protect her and keep the cash coming, ultimately hurting their own movement.
Soros needs to lose hks American Citizenship and be retuned to Europe one way
Returned in installments.
Everything the devil does will always come back and bite his servants one way or another. It’s going to get worse, never, better.