Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires is Trying to Buy Political Control in the US

by Jane Mayer

On the last weekend of January 2015, as was their custom, the Kochs again convened their donor summit at a resort in Rancho Mirage, outside Palm Springs, California. Marc Short, the president of Freedom Partners, acknowledged that "2014 was nice, but there’s a long way to go." To get there, according to one ally, that weekend Charles and David Koch each pledged to give $75 million. If so, their contributions would still represent a mere fraction of the network’s new fund-raising goal announced that weekend. This time, the Koch network aimed to spend $889 million in the 2016 election cycle. The sum was more than twice what the network had spent in 2012. It rivaled the record $1 billion that each of the two major political parties was expected to spend, securing their unique status as a rival center of gravity. The Kochs could afford it. Despite their predictions that Obama would prove catastrophic to the American economy, Charles’s and David’s personal fortunes had nearly tripled during his presidency, from $14 billion apiece in March 2009 to $41.6 billion each in March 2015, according to Forbes.