The following is an adapted excerpt from Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life (Sentinel, Nov. 14).
In the United States, global financial speculator George Soros has been the single-biggest financier of overtly political causes for decades. In 2022, he poured $178.8 million into federal campaigns, making him by far the biggest campaign contributor in that cycle. Then there are his hidden and comingled political contributions — a vast web of dark money — that are intentionally designed to influence elections and avoid public scrutiny.
According to OpenSecrets.org, a research organization that tracks money in politics (coincidentally funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations), Soros Fund Management was by far the largest single political contributor going into the 2022 midterm elections. The fund ranked first out of 31,955 contributor organizations with a known war chest of approximately $180 million. Not a single dollar went to a Republican candidate.
The political research group noted that organizations like Soros Fund Management cannot legally contribute directly to candidates or party committees. Instead, the fund funneled cash to political affiliates, the largest being an entity innocuously titled Democracy PAC II. The super PAC’s Federal Election Commission filing lists Michael Vachon as its treasurer. Vachon has served on boards of left-wing organizations tied to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, such as NYC Partners, Democracy Alliance, and Catalist. George Soros’ son, Alexander, runs the super PAC.
To be sure, Republican billionaires use the same methods of concealing how their dark money flows, but Soros’ dizzying political financing network is unparalleled. Other Democracy PAC II affiliates include ColorofChange.org, DNC Services Corp., Justice & Public Safety, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democracy PAC, and Forward Majority Action, to name just a few (each with multimillion-dollar budgets).
Notably, the first iteration of Democracy PAC funneled more than $80 million to Democratic groups and candidates in the 2020 election cycle. In a statement to Politico, Soros said the massive spend was necessary for “strengthening the infrastructure of American democracy: voting rights and civic participation, civil rights and liberties, and the rule of law.” Incidentally, the Soros-linked America Coming Together political action committee was slapped with what was, at the time, the third-largest fine in the Federal Election Commission’s history following the unsuccessful bid to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004 and install Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in the White House.
The group’s $137 million election effort spanned 90 offices in 17 states and employed more than 25,000 neighborhood canvassers and election staff. The FEC unanimously approved a $775,000 fine for using unregulated “soft money” to elect Democrats. The penalty was a pittance of accountability compared to the amount spent, though America Coming Together shuttered operations in 2005.
Soros had also given millions to the leftist MoveOn.org Voter Fund, which the FEC fined $150,000, to run television ads attacking President Bush. The progressive megadonor was an early supporter of Barack Obama. In 2004, he held a fundraiser in New York City for the community organizer from Chicago and his successful U.S. Senate bid in Illinois. Soros — the so-called “smart money” in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary — would go on to back Obama over Hillary Clinton.
Ironically, Soros would later say that Obama (whose 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, suggested was the most anti-American president in the nation’s history) was his “greatest disappointment.” Not because Obama’s leftward lurch didn’t go far enough, but because Obama, in Soros’ view, stabbed him in the back, politically, and left him to operate outside the inner White House circle.
In 2016, Soros threw his full weight behind Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump by pouring millions into her presidential election run. FEC filings in the summer of 2016 showed Soros had committed or personally donated more than $25 million — mostly for her benefit.
Upon Trump’s election, the Soros mission turned to getting rid of the 45th duly elected president of the United States. How that jibed with any honest notion of democracy is anyone’s guess.
Framing President Trump as a Russian agent guilty of colluding with Vladimir Putin to cheat Hillary Clinton out of the White House was always a Clinton campaign smear. The associated Steele dossier, named for the former British intelligence officer and Fusion GPS opposition research operative Christopher Steele, was laundered through the law firm Perkins Coie.
According to The Washington Post, Perkins Coie represented “the national Democratic Party, its governors, almost all of its members of Congress, and its campaign and fundraising apparatus.” The firm’s “Democratic superlawyer,” Marc Elias, was the Clinton campaign’s general counsel. Elias was not only involved in the Steele dossier fiasco, which the FBI used to obtain a surveillance warrant to spy on the Trump campaign — and led to subsequent FISA warrant renewals to spy on the Trump presidency — but Elias was simultaneously paid by George Soros to knock down election integrity laws in swing states.
Flash-forward to the 2019 impeachment of President Trump, and Soros surfaced again through his Open Society Foundations’ ties to Ukraine and the so-called whistleblower at the center of the controversy, identified by independent media reports as Eric Ciaramella. Breitbart journalist Aaron Klein found that Ciaramella was reportedly receiving email communications from a top director at Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Klein also noted that the Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity was fueling the impeachment narrative that President Trump acted improperly with respect to the purported temporary withholding of military aid to Ukraine in exchange for evidence of former Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged corruption.
Corporate media outlets with a collective loathing for President Trump used the Soros-backed group’s assertions to substantiate Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment effort. Trump was indeed impeached and acquitted by the Senate. Just as in previous elections, Soros reportedly told a group at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the 2020 election would determine the “fate of the world.” He said Trump was “a con man and a narcissist, who wants the world to revolve around him.” Previously at the World Economic Forum, Soros claimed Trump was “doing the work of ISIS.”
Soros spent $52 million in the 2020 presidential election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings. But there is no way to know how much money and influence originated from the billionaire activist, whether directly or indirectly via his Open Society Foundations.
One thing is certain: The 2020 presidential election, amid unprecedented Covid-era election changes and summer riots destabilizing dozens of American cities and the nation’s capital, was unlike any in American history. Soros-backed prosecutors are already swaying the 2024 presidential election via lawfare. Soros grant recipients are attempting to remove the leading opposition candidate from the ballot.
And George and Alex Soros are only just getting started.
