Tag: Judicial Crisis Network

Shadowy group behind Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation spending big to undermine Biden’s Justice Department

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The right-wing dark money group that helped Donald Trump “capture” the Supreme Court is now working to undermine the Biden administration’s efforts to enforce voting rights.

The Judicial Crisis Network is running ads attacking Justice Department nominees Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke — a pair of widely respected litigators and civil rights activists — as part of a related new organization, the Honest Elections Project, with an improbable name, reported The Daily Beast.

Conservative legal activist Leonard Leo, the longtime executive vice president of the Federalist Society, is coordinating efforts by the various dark-money front groups to pack the Supreme Court and then to bring voting rights cases in front of those right-wing courts. Continue reading.

Conservative judicial group is top donor to GOP state elections arm

Judicial Crisis Network previously spent millions to support Trump’s Supreme Court nominees

The dark money group that spent millions on ads supporting Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court was the biggest contributor to Republicans’ state legislative campaign arm in the first half of 2019, in what may be an effort to affect judicial races.

The Judicial Crisis Network, a group dedicated to elevating conservative judges, spent a combined $22 million to promote the confirmations of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and contributed $1 million of the roughly $8.2 million the Republican State Leadership Committee raised through June 30 of this year, according to a report the RSLC filed last week. The RSLC then transferred about $1.2 million to its Judicial Fairness Initiative — nearly all of what the state judicial campaign group raised all year.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the equivalent to the RSLC, raised a similar amount from unions.

View the complete August 6 article by Jacob Fischler and Ilana Marcus on The Roll Call website here.

Mysterious dark money group got $22 million to get Trump SCOTUS pick Kavanaugh confirmed

A just-published report by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics’ award-winning OpenSecrets.org reveals the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative secretive dark money group received $22 million from anonymous donors in the year leading up to the Tump administration and conservatives’ push to place Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Supreme Court.

$17 million of that $22 million came from one anonymous donor.

“The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, pledged to spend as much as $10 million to ensure Kavanaugh’s confirmation — the same amount that it spent to help confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017,” Anna Massoglia and Andrew Perez at OpenSecrets reveal in their report Friday.

View the complete May 18 article by David Badash of the New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

Unnamed donors gave large sums to conservative nonprofit that funded Trump allies

Wellspring Committee, a politically active nonprofit organization that funds conservative groups and causes, gave $14.8 million last year to Judicial Crisis Network, which spent millions of dollars backing the Supreme Court nominations of Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch, according to tax documents. Credit: Andrew Harnik, AP

Four unidentified donors gave nearly $17 million last year to a conservative nonprofit group that distributed funds to organizations that backed President Trump’s inaugural committee and his Supreme Court nominees Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, according to tax documents.

Wellspring Committee, a politically active organization that funds conservative causes and groups, received $16.7 million in 2017 from four unnamed donors who gave between $250,000 and $8.9 million each, according to the group’s 2017 tax return, obtained by the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) in Washington.

During the same period of time, the Northern Virginia-based group gave $14.8 million to another politically active nonprofit organization: the conservative Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), which spent millions of dollars backing the nominations of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

View the complete November 27 article by Michelle Ye Hee Lee on The Washington Post website here.