This is the first part of a Fox News Digital series about the Arabella Advisors-managed dark money network.
The firm overlooking America’s largest liberal dark money network is expanding its operations as it experiences skyrocketing cash flows, which include billions of dollars raised and poured into progressive causes and initiatives across the country in recent years.
Arabella Advisors, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm that manages four nonprofits that host dozens of shadowy left-wing groups, including one that works with the Biden administration on policy, recently acquired New York-based Kiwi Partners, which provides nonprofit accounting and consulting services.
“As we’ve stated repeatedly, Arabella Advisors is a business dedicated to making philanthropic work more efficient, effective, and equitable,” Arabella spokesperson Steve Sampson told Fox News Digital. “Our nonprofit clients hire us to provide HR, legal, payroll and other administrative services—and, like all service providers, we work for our clients, not the other way around. They make their own decisions on strategy, fundraising, and programmatic goals.”
“Over the past 24 years, Kiwi Partners has established itself as an industry leader in nonprofit accounting and HR services, and their expertise in these areas complements the services Arabella currently provides our nonprofit clients,” he added. “The acquisition deepens Arabella’s capacity to support the nonprofit sector, and we are excited for our partners who will benefit from the combined expertise of our teams.”
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Governing for Impact, a group housed at the Arabella Advisors-managed dark money network, has worked behind the scenes with the Biden administration to shape policy. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The expansion comes as the Arabella Advisors-managed nexus positions itself as the pinnacle dark money network. It further shows how Democrats have exploited anonymous donations while publicly railing against their influence in politics.
The network’s web of groups sits under four Arabella-managed nonprofits: the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund and Hopewell Fund. Each fund acts as a fiscal sponsor to other liberal nonprofits by providing their tax status to the nonprofits housed beneath them.
This setup allows the fiscally sponsored groups to avoid filing tax forms to the IRS, effectively obscuring their financial information. The four Arabella-managed nonprofits also do not disclose donor information on their tax forms, keeping the public in the dark to the full extent of who is using the network as a conduit to fund left-wing initiatives.
The four funds combined to collect $1.6 billion from secret donors in 2020 – an increase of $885 million over what they had raked in throughout 2019, their tax forms show. They combined to disburse nearly $900 million in 2020.
The network contains dozens of liberal groups ranging from Campaign for Our Shared Future, which formed this year to push back against opponents of Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools, to Governing for Impact, which quietly works behind the scenes with President Biden’s administration to shape policy.
Influential Democratic donors use the network to funnel cash to projects, including billionaire George Soros, who provided millions to Governing for Impact and its action fund, Fox News Digital previously reported.
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Billionaire George Soros provides millions to groups housed at the Arabella-manged dark money network. (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Governing for Impact boasted in internal memos of implementing more than 20 of its regulatory agenda items since Biden took office as it works to reverse Trump-era deregulations by targeting education, environmental, health care, housing and labor issues.
The group also has additional Soros ties beyond his contributions. Tom Perriello, the executive director of Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF), sits on Governing for Impact’s four-person board. Mary Beth Maxwell, a special advisor at OSF, appeared in the group’s slide deck as part of its “listening tour.”
“Open Society is proud to support Governing for Impact’s efforts to protect American workers, consumers, patients, students and the environment through policy reform,” Perriello previously told Fox News Digital.
“Their work gives voice to people often overlooked in a regulatory environment too often dominated by corporate interests,” he continued. “Our support for Governing for Impact’s work is publicly available on our website and we are transparent about our enthusiasm for their victories for American workers and families.”
Soros’ advocacy nonprofit, the Open Society Policy Center, was also an early funder of the judicial advocacy group Demand Justice, which the Sixteen Thirty Fund fiscally sponsored until last year when it branched off and became a standalone organization.
Demand Justice, led by former Hillary Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon, started within the Arabella-managed dark money network before becoming a standalone organization. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Demand Justice has been at the forefront of Republican judicial fights, including fighting the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
However, shortly before Demand Justice publicly launched in 2018, Brian Fallon, the group’s leader who acted as press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign, appeared at a secretive gathering of the Democracy Alliance donor club, which counts Soros as a member.
Fallon was in attendance to promote his group, and Soros’ donation went to Demand Justice around that time, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The Democracy Alliance has recommended that its members, who largely remain obscured, provide donations to initiatives housed at the Arabella-managed funds in its internal documents obtained by the Free Beacon.
Arabella Advisors has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting services from the Democracy Alliance. At least one Arabella employee, Scott Nielson, its managing director of advocacy, worked with Soros’ nonprofits and the Democracy Alliance before joining the consulting firm.
Meanwhile, Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, who has said he does not hold American citizenship, is also connected to the Democracy Alliance and is a significant financial backer of the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Between 2016 and early 2020, Wyss directed $135 million into the Sixteen Thirty Fund through his foundation’s advocacy arm, the New York Times reported.
Another group closely linked to the Sixteen Thirty Fund and Wyss is the Hub Project. In 2015, the Wyss Foundation, one of two nonprofits established by the financier, created the Hub Project at the Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund, another Arabella-managed nonprofit, according to a New York Times report.
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Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss has provided large sums to groups housed at the dark money network. (Getty Images)
The Wyss Foundation is one of the top donors to the Hub Project, which has a history of distributing funds from the Sixteen Thirty Fund to state-level groups.
Years before Wyss had been linked to the Hub Project, the New York Times reported that it controlled the Change Now PAC. The Change Now PAC has disbursed $175,000 to a Latino voter mobilization group working to push Democrats to the polls for the midterm elections.
Marneé Banks, a consultant for Wyss’ groups, previously told Fox News Digital that they “expressly prohibit their grantees from using grant funds for electoral activities, including to support or oppose political candidates or parties.” She did not respond to questions about his citizenship.
Another billionaire, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, disclosed giving $45 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund for a group called the Civic Action Fund last year, Politico reported.
Arabella Advisors is led by Eric Kessler, a former President Clinton appointee and member of the Clinton Global Initiative. Managing the network has proved lucrative for the firm, which has collected large sums from the four funds for administrative, operations and management services in 2020, according to their most recent tax forms.
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The documents show the New Venture Fund paid nearly $27 million to Arabella, while the Sixteen Thirty Fund disbursed $9 million to the firm. The Windward Fund doled out almost $3 million for its services, while the Hopewell Fund gave Arabella $6.6 million.
Arabella hauled in $45 million between the funds for their management services in 2020.
