A left-wing “watchdog” group behind the Colorado Supreme Court’s unprecedented move to kick former President Donald Trump off the state’s 2024 primary election ballot has long pocketed wads of dark money despite assailing secretive donations in the political system, documents show.
Trump on Wednesday appealed the court’s 4-3 December ruling, which disqualified him from Colorado’s ballot for allegedly inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, though the decision was already paused due to the Centennial State’s Republican Party appealing it last week. That ruling was the product of a September lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a Washington, D.C.-based charity purportedly “compelling the government to be more open and transparent, and driving secret money and influence into the light,” all while receiving checks over the years from influential dark money hubs linked to George Soros and other Democratic megadonors, according to financial disclosures.
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“CREW is a left-wing, billionaire-funded dark money organization pushing a political agenda masquerading as an independent, nonpartisan nonprofit group,” Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer reportedly being floated by Trump’s inner circle as a hypothetical pick for attorney general, told the Washington Examiner. “This is further evidence that efforts to remove Trump from the ballot are nothing more than partisan politics by Democrats and have no basis in the Constitution or law.”
The dark money transfers highlight how organizations trying to block Trump’s potential return to the presidency, including CREW, Free Speech for People, and Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, are deeply connected to Democratic-allied entities promoting President Joe Biden‘s agenda. On Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers appealed a recent ruling by Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, Sheena Bellows, which, like the Colorado decision, booted the former president off the Pine Tree State’s GOP primary ballot on the basis of Trump allegedly inciting the Jan. 6 riot in violation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Liberal lawyers Norman Eisen and Louis Mayberg in 2001 helped launch CREW, which counted its first executive director as Melanie Sloan, now senior adviser to the anti-Trump litigation group American Oversight and a former prosecutor who was a Democratic congressional staffer in the 1990s. Sloan’s stint in Congress included serving as nominations counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee under then-Sen. Biden in 1993, the year ex-Biden congressional aide Tara Reade alleged in 2020 she was sexually assaulted by Biden, which the president has denied.
CREW has fashioned itself as fighting for “transparency” in government, often filing ethics complaints and lawsuits against Republicans, as well as picking fights with “wealthy dark money donors,” according to the organization’s website. Last year, CREW joined other left-leaning watchdogs in taking aim at conservative Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito for not reporting certain trips and gifts from billionaires in previous years despite Republicans asserting there were no laws on the books requiring such disclosure.
Still, while CREW often rails against Republicans receiving dark money, a phrase conservatives argue is weaponized by liberals to criticize speech they disagree with, the watchdog can thank dark money groups for helping to keep on its lights. Between 2017 and 2021, CREW raked in $2.85 million from the Soros-backed Foundation to Promote Open Society, a grantmaker in the billionaire’s Open Society Foundations network, which includes entities operating internationally, and Open Society Policy Center, a lobbying shop that, as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group, isn’t required to disclose its donors to the IRS.
According to internal documents, CREW has received support from the Democracy Alliance, a powerful membership group of wealthy liberals, including Soros and climate activist Tom Steyer. In September, Politico reported that Democracy Alliance is furious with the No Labels third party organization for toying with running a presidential candidate in 2024. The Democracy Alliance, which the conservative Capital Research Center think tank notes was “the brainchild of Democratic consultant Rob Stein,” was registered in Washington, D.C., in 2005 as a taxable nonprofit, meaning it does not have to disclose members or donors.
“CREW’s claims to the moral high ground are hilarious,” Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, told the Washington Examiner.
CREW has also long taken large sums of money through donor-advised funds, which are charitable investment accounts managed by third parties, thus obscuring initial sources of donations on financial disclosures and allowing contributors to keep their names out of the public eye. Between 2017 and 2022, more than $440,000 flowed from the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund to CREW, tax forms show.
But the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund transfers are just a sliver compared to the sheer amount of money that has been routed to CREW through Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, the first commercial provider of donor-advised funds and, according to Capital Research Center, “the largest public charity in the United States.”
CREW took home more than $5.9 million from 2020 to 2022 alone through the Fidelity fund, according to tax forms reviewed by the Washington Examiner. At the same time, that hasn’t stopped CREW from scrutinizing conservative activist Leonard Leo, co-chairman of the Federalist Society legal group, for his ties to Donors Trust, a right-leaning donor-advised fund, which, for instance, has moved cash to Capital Research Center.
“Dark money isn’t just bad for our democracy on principle — it also actively contributes to voter suppression and gerrymandering, which disproportionately harm minority communities,” CREW wrote in a 2019 blog post on its website titled “To achieve racial equity, we need an ethical government.” “Leonard Leo’s dark money network includes the so-called Honest Elections Project, which received tens of millions of dollars from dark money vehicle Donors Trust.”
Moreover, CREW has often pulled donations from the likes of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a liberal grantmaker sitting on more than $10.9 million in assets that has been dubbed a “black hole” steering the wealth of tech moguls, Schwab Charitable Fund, National Philanthropic Trust, and Jewish Communal Fund, among other funds, according to tax forms.
To Mike Davis, CREW is clearly not a nonpartisan watchdog organization and its “bias has been clear for years.”
“They are a bunch of partisan hacks who deserve to be called out for their lies,” he said.
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CREW did not return a request for comment. It’s currently fundraising on ActBlue, the top Democratic software platform, off of how it “successfully barred Trump from the Colorado ballot,” records show.
The Colorado Supreme Court declined to comment.
