Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

The Kochs’ influence reached greater heights with Trump’s nomination of Mike Pompeo,

Pompeo was the single largest recipient of Koch campaign funds in Congress. The Kochs had also been investors, and partners, in Pompeo’s business ventures prior to his entry into politics.

In the past, labor unions probably provided the closest parallel to this kind of private political organizing, but they of course represented the dues of millions of members. In comparison, the Koch network was sponsored by just four hundred or so of the richest people in the country.

But in a 2011 interview with the Weekly Standard, David Koch echoed specious claims, made by the conservative gadfly Dinesh D’Souza, that Obama was somehow African rather than American in his outlook.

Obama,

derived his “radical” views from his Afr...

the Kochs and their allied donors poured cash into a dark-money group called the Center to Protect Patient Rights,

false claim that Obama’s plan was “a government takeover” of health care, which Politi-Fact named “the Lie of the Year” in 2010.

In short, during the Obama years, the Kochs radicalized and organized an unruly movement of malcontents, over which by 2016 they had lost control.

“We invested a lot in training and arming a grassroots army that was not controllable.”

Their narrowly self-serving policy priorities were at odds with those of the vast majority of voters. Yet virtually every Republican presidential candidate other than Trump pledged fealty to the donors’ wish lists as they jockeyed for their support.

Diane Hendricks, a building supply company owner whose $3.6 billion fortune made her the wealthiest woman in Wisconsin,

Sheldon Adelson, founding chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation casino

Inaugurals had long been underwritten by rich donors, so perhaps reading too mu...

garnered blue-collar support by promising to stick it to the elites who “are getting away

repeal the estate tax, presenting a windfall to heirs of estates worth $10.9 million or more.

fewer than five thousand estates of this size in 2015.

abolish the g...

As the headline on Yahoo Finance proclaimed on the day after the election, “Trump’s Win Is a ‘Grand Slam’ for Wall Street Banks.”

Charles, the elder brother, was a man of unusual drive, accustomed to getting his way. What he wanted that weekend was to enlist his fellow conservatives in a daunting task: stopping the Obama administration from implementing Democratic policies that the American public had voted for but that he regarded as catastrophic.

In addition to the Kochs, this group included Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; Harry and Lynde Bradley, midwesterners enriched by defense contracts; John M. Olin, a chemical and munitions company titan; the Coors brewing family of Colorado; and the DeVos family of Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire.

The glue that bound them together, however, was antipathy toward government regulation and taxation, particularly as it impinged on their own accumulation of wealth.

Koch donor summits during Obama’s first term were Steven A. Cohen, Paul Singer, and Stephen Schwarzman.

Cohen’s spectacularly successful hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, was at the time the focus of an intense criminal investigation into insider trading.

Paul Singer, whose fortune Forbes estimated at $1.9 billion, ran the hugely lucrative hedge fund Elliott Management.

Dubbed a vulture fund by critics, it was controversial for buying distressed debt in economically failing countries at a discount and then taking aggressive legal action to force the strapped nations, which had expected their loans to be forgiven, to instead pay him back at a profit.

Singer described himself as a Goldwater free-enterprise conservative,

Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, was enmeshed in a prolonged legal fight over his decision as chairman of the compensation committee of the New York Stock Exchange to pay his friend Dick Grasso, the head of the exchange, $139.5 million.

Richard Strong, founder of the mutual fund Strong Capital Management, was banned from the financial industry for life in a settlement following an investigation by the former New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer into his improperly timing trades to benefit his friends and family. Strong paid a $60 million fine and publicly apologized.

“The awful truth is that America has two income tax systems, separate and unequal. One system is for the superrich, like Anschutz and his wife, Nancy, who are allowed to delay and avoid taxes on investment gains, among other tax tricks. The other system is for the less than fabulously wealthy.”

Richard DeVos, co-founder of Amway, the Michigan-based worldwide multilevel marketing empire, had pleaded guilty to a criminal scheme in which he had defrauded the Canadian government of $22 million in customs duties in 1982.

Corbin Robertson Jr., whose family had built a billion-dollar oil company, Quintana Resources Capital. Robertson had bet big on coal—so big he reportedly owned what Forbes called the “largest private hoard in the nation—21 billion tons of reserves.”

Sheldon Adelson, founding chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, the world’s largest gambling company, whose fortune Forbes estimated at $31.4 billion, was facing a bribery investigation by the Justice Department into whether his company had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in securing licenses to operate casinos in Macao.

William R. Grace Company, was at the center of a stock-backdating scandal that resulted in his being ousted from the board of Take-Two, the company behind the ultraviolent Grand Theft Auto

Richard Farmer, the chairman of the Cincinnati-based Cintas Corporation, the nation’s largest uniform supply company, included an employee’s gruesome death. Just before the new and presumably less business-friendly Obama administration took office, Cintas reached a record $2.76 million settlement with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in six safety citations including one involving a worker who had burned to death in an industrial dryer.

Stephen Bechtel Jr., whose personal fortune Forbes estimated at $2.8 billion. Bechtel was a director and retired chairman of the huge and internationally powerful engineering firm Bechtel Corporation,

Bechtel was the sixth-largest private company in the country, and it owed almost its entire existence to government patronage. It had built the Hoover Dam, among other spectacular public projects, and had storied access to the innermost national security circles. Between 2000 and 2009 alone, it had received $39.2 billion in U.S. government contracts. This included $680 million to rebuild Iraq following the U.S. invasion.

The highlight of the Koch summit in 2009 was an uninhibited debate about what conservatives should do next in the face of their electoral defeat.

Texas senator John Cornyn, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and a former justice on the Texas Supreme Court.

“very much a constitutionalist” who believed it was occasionally necessary in politics to compromise.

South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, a conservative provocateur who defined the outermost antiestablishment fringe of the Republican Party and who in the words of one admirer was “the leader of the Huns.”

Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a wider swath of voters, including moderates.

DeMint was the face of a new kind of extremism, and he spoke that evening in favor of purifying, rather than diluting, the Republican Party. He argued that he would rather have “thirty Republicans who believed in something than a majority who believed in nothing,”

DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.

He accused Cornyn of turning his back on conservative free-market principles and capitulating to the worst kind of big government spending, with his vote earlier that fall in favor of the Treasury Department’s massive bailout of failing banks.

Cornyn suddenly found himself on the defensive as the donors jeered and the moderator, Stephen Moore, a free-market gadfly and contributor to The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, egged them on.

Had people checked the record carefully, they would have found it quite revealing. At first, the Kochs’ political organization, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), had in fact taken what appeared to be a principled libertarian position against the bailouts. But the organization quickly and quietly reversed sides when the bottom began to fall out of the stock market, threatening the Kochs’ vast investment portfolio.

A source familiar with the Kochs’ thinking says that Americans for Prosperity’s flip-flop mirrored their own.

the Kochs’ personal interest in protecting their portfolio had trumped their free-market principles, they weren’t about to mention it in front of a roomful of fired-up libertarians whose cash they wanted to combat Obama.

Advisers to Obama later acknowledged that he had no inkling of what he was up against.