ProPublica, the nonprofit news website attacking Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, is funded by left-wing megadonors who pump money into court packing advocacy groups.
Picking up speed since the overturn of Roe v. Wade last year, the website has repeatedly alleged ethics violations against Thomas and Alito.
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“ProPublica isn’t a news organization; it’s a front group for liberal billionaires wanting to ensure that the court rubber stamps their political agenda,” Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino told the Washington Examiner.
ProPublica’s publications have targeted Thomas several times, detailing his trips with friend and billionaire real estate developer Harlan Crow, Crow paying the tuition for the schooling of the justice’s grandnephew, and purchasing Thomas’s mother’s home.
For Alito, the website published details on a 2008 fishing trip he took with conservative hedge fund manager Paul Singer. ProPublica pointed out that the trip was not included in Alito’s annual financial disclosure and that he did not recuse himself from a case involving Singer’s organization.
Alito preempted the report earlier this week with an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, where he defended himself and accused ProPublica of leveling “false charges.”
“ProPublica has been in the business of launching partisan attacks on conservative Supreme Court justices for months now, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone given their funding from left-wing groups,” Mike Davis, founder and president of the Article III Project, told the Washington Examiner, adding the “entire project is revenge for overturning Roe v. Wade.”
“ProPublica exclusively cites leftist ‘ethics experts’ who confirm their priors about constitutionalist justices to satisfy their dark-money Democrat donors,” he added.
The website was founded in 2007 by the Sandler Foundation, which has given nearly $40 million to the organization since 2010, according to tax filings.
That foundation, formed by Herbert and Marion Sandler, has also funneled money into left-wing organizations that actively call for investigations into Thomas and advocate court packing. The Sandlers have been blamed in part for the 2008 housing market crash, even making it onto Time magazine’s list of “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.”
“The same Sandler Foundation that ‘made ProPublica possible’ with an astounding $40 million also gave $500,000 to Demand Justice, a ‘dark money’ court packing group that spearheaded smear campaigns against Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett,” Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, told the Washington Examiner.
Demand Justice got $500,000 in a 2019 Sandler-earmarked grant to a group called New Venture Fund, which is part of a web of left-wing dark money nonprofit groups managed by consulting firm Arabella Advisors. The network spent nearly $1.2 billion in 2020 alone. Demand Justice has been pushing heavily for investigations into conservative justices, and its deputy chief counsel, Katie O’Connor, called for Thomas’s resignation in April.
The Sandler Foundation also gave $7.5 million to the Campaign Legal Center since 2015, a group whose senior director, Kedric Payne, testified before Congress as a Democratic witness arguing that the legislative branch should write ethics rules for the judicial branch. CLC wrote an April letter calling for a Department of Justice investigation into Thomas “for potential criminal and civil penalties.”
“The corrupt corporate media has been working with these liberal activists for decades, so of course Soros-type donors would be behind this,” a spokesperson for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner. “The fact is, Justices Thomas and Alito have complied totally with the Supreme Court’s ethics rules.”
Similarly, since 2010, the Sandler Foundation has given $6 million to the American Constitution Society, a progressive legal advocacy nonprofit whose president, Russ Feingold, called for Congress to investigate the Supreme Court for “violations of federal law and flagrant ethics lapses.”
ProPublica quoted both CLC and ACS in its reports.
“This is a textbook example of one of the Left’s favorite tactics: the pop-up pressure campaign,” Thayer explained, saying the aim is to create the appearance of “broad societal consensus” around an issue to which no one was paying attention.
“It’s easy to spot once you know the secret,” he said. “First, one or two donors pay a legion of different organizations to get involved in a certain policy debate. Then, all at once, these groups start making noise about an issue nobody cared about five minutes ago.”
The Sandler Foundation funds other far-left organizations, like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for American Progress, Human Rights Watch, and the Sierra Club.
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On top of the Sandler Foundation, left-wing megadonor George Soros, who is noted for funding the campaigns of local district attorneys who refuse to prosecute crimes, has backed ProPublica through his Foundation To Promote Open Society. That group has given ProPublica over $3 million and CLC $2.7 million.
“ProPublica is signaling loud and clear that they are nothing more than another dark money mouthpiece for their progressive backers,” Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s almost comical for this so-called journalistic enterprise to call themselves independent or non-partisan, especially when you consider who is bankrolling them.”
ProPublica responded to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner, saying, “ProPublica receives philanthropic support from donors of every stripe. More than 40,000 people actively fund our investigative, nonpartisan journalism. Our newsroom operates with fierce independence. No donor or board member is even aware of the subjects of our stories before they are published.
“ProPublica‘s reporting has spotlighted wrongdoing across the private and political arenas for more than 15 years, including unbiased reporting on Republican and Democratic officials harming the environment, gerrymandering, manipulating the tax code and engaging in a long list of corrupt behavior across the country,” the statement continued. “ProPublica exposes abuses of power no matter which party is in charge.”
