A defecation group funded primarily by billionaires has emerged from one of the biggest supporters of Republican lawmakers trying to overturn U.S. election results, according to an analysis by the Guardian.
The Club for Growth supported the campaigns of 42 right-wing Republican senators and members of Congress who voted last week to challenge U.S. election results, and reportedly issued $ 20 million to support their campaigns directly and indirectly. compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
About 30 of the Republican hardliners received more than $ 100,000 in indirect and direct support from the group.
The biggest beneficiaries of the Club for Growth include Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, the two Republican senators who led to the annulment of Joe Biden’s election victory, and the newly elected far-right gun rights activist Lauren Boebert, a QAnon conspiracy theorist. Boebert was criticized last week for tweeting about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s location during the attack on the Capitol, even after lawmakers were told not to do so by police.
According to public records, the biggest funders of the Club for Growth are billionaire Richard Uihlein, the Republican co-founder of the Uline shipping company in Wisconsin, and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, an options trading group in Philadelphia that also owns a sports betting company in Dublin.
While Uihlein and Yass maintained a lower profile than other billionaire donors such as Michael Bloomberg and the late Sheldon Adelson, their support for the Club for Growth helped transform the organization from one traditionally known as an anti-regulatory one. and anti-tax pro. Business pressure group against one that supports the most radical and anti-democratic Republican lawmakers in Congress.
“Here is the thing of the rich. They believe that their hyper-wealth gives them the ability not to be held accountable. And that is not the case. If you’ve earned billions of dollars, it’s going well. But that does not make you any less responsible for funding anti-democratic or authoritarian candidates and movements, ‘says Reed Galen, a former Republican strategist who founded the Lincoln project, the anti-Trump campaigner.
Galen said he believes groups like the Club for Growth now serve to meet Republicans’ personal agendas, and not what used to be considered ‘conservative principles’.
The Lincoln project said it would spend resources not only putting pressure on Hawley, who accused the group of committing a riot, but also on its donors.
The Club for Growth has so far not escaped the inquiry into its role in supporting the anti-democratic Republicans, as it does not primarily make direct contributions to candidates. Instead, he uses his funds to make ‘outside’ spending decisions, such as attacking a candidate’s opponents.
In 2018, Club for Growth spent nearly $ 3 million on the attack on Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri, a race that was eventually won by Hawley, the 41-year-old graduate Yale lawyer with presidential ambitions who unleashed Donald Trump’s unfounded lies. on election fraud has intensified. .
That year, it also spent $ 1.2 million attacking Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who challenged Cruz – and then lost nail-bitingly.
Other lawmakers backed by Club for Growth include Matt Rosendale, who this week called for the resignation of fellow Republican Liz Cheney after saying she would support the president’s accusation, and Lance Gooden, which Pelosi accused of being just as responsible for the riot last week. like Trump.
Dozens of Republicans supported by Club for Growth voted to contest the election results, even after the insurgent stormed the Capitol, resulting in five deaths, including the murder of a police officer.
The club for growth has changed markedly as the group’s leadership has changed ownership. Republican Senator Pat Toomey, who previously led the group, recently suggested he be open to considering Trump’s accusation and criticized colleagues for disputing the election results. The current chief, David McIntosh, is a former Republican member of Congress who accompanied Trump to Georgia last week, the night before Republican candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both strongly supported by the Club for Growth, lost the run-off election. to their democratic opponents.
Neither the Club for Growth nor McIntosh responded to requests for comment.
Public records show that Richard Uihlein, whose family founded Schlitz Beer, donated $ 27 million to the Club for Growth in 2020 and $ 6.7 million in 2018. Uihlein and his wife, Liz, have been named “the most powerful conservative couple you’ve ever heard of” by the New York Times. According to the New York Times, Richard Uihlein, he was known for endorsing candidates for a “burning anti-establishment” like Roy Moore, who supported Uihlein in a Senate contest, even after it was alleged that he sexually assaulted minors abused. Moore denied the allegations.
A spokesman for the Uihleins declined to comment.
Yass of Susquehanna International, who is listed in public documents that he donated $ 20.7 million to the Club for Growth in 2020 and $ 3.8 million in 2018, declined to comment. Yass is one of the six founders of Susquehanna, who in a 2018 Bloomberg News profile called a “major engine of the $ 5 tonne global exchange traded fund market”. The company was based on the six founders’ mutual love for poker and the idea that training for ‘probability-based’ decisions could be useful in trading markets. Susquehanna’s Dublin-based company, Nellie Analytics, pays for sports.
In a 2020 conference on sports betting, Yass said that sports betting is a $ 250 billion industry worldwide, but that it could become a trillion-dollar industry with the help of lawmakers.
A Yass magazine in Philadelphia magazine in 2009 described how Susquehanna’s secrecy dominates, and that people who know the company ‘stealth’ is a word often used to describe the modus operandi. The article suggests that Yass was largely silent about his business because he did not want to share what he was doing and how, and that those who knew him believed that he was ‘very nervous’ about his own safety.
Yass, described in some media reports as a libertarian, also donated to the Protect America Pac, an organization affiliated with Republican Senator Rand Paul. The Pac’s website falsely claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 election.