00:00Today on Forbes, how dark money gets to the Supreme Court.
00:06You might feel like you're seeing a lot of Supreme Court decisions in the news lately.
00:10That's because the Court often announces a number of big decisions near the end of its
00:14term, usually in June.
00:17Chief Justice John Roberts made a courtroom announcement Friday that the Court's last
00:21rulings of this term will be issued Monday, including a major case that will decide whether
00:26former President Trump has immunity from prosecution.
00:31More now than ever before, so-called dark money has arrived at the Supreme Court.
00:37Donors are increasingly pushing money into something called donor-advised funds, which
00:41operate like piggy banks for non-profit giving.
00:44The funds then route that money to legally-minded non-profits, who help pay for lawyers, file
00:50briefs, and, the donors surely hope, impact rulings.
00:55Because individuals aren't giving directly to non-profits, instead moving their money
01:00through middlemen funds, the non-profits can hide the identities of the individual contributors,
01:06hence the name dark money.
01:09Tax filings from 2022, the most recent year available, show that donors sent more than
01:15$48 million through donor-advised funds to groups bringing major cases to the Supreme
01:20Court this term.
01:22That accounted for 44 percent of all money flowing to those groups, which in turn reported
01:27spending $26 million on litigation.
01:31Despite the lack of transparency, some names can slip out.
01:36Billionaire Hobby Lobby founder David Green, for instance, has confirmed donating to two
01:41major donor-advised fund providers, the National Christian Foundation and the Servant Foundation.
01:48Those two organizations sent $32 million in 2022 to Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal
01:54group behind the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and brought two cases seeking to restrict
01:59abortion this term.
02:01The amount that Green has given remains a mystery.
02:06Other lightning rods of the right, the Koch, Olin, DeVos, Searle, and Bradley families,
02:11have all been tied to DonorsTrust, another donor-advised fund provider that funnels money
02:17to conservative causes.
02:19One major beneficiary is the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a right-leaning group involved with
02:24cases on guns, social media platforms, and the federal bureaucracy.
02:30New Civil Liberties Alliance received 21 percent of its total $4.8 million budget from DonorsTrust
02:37in 2022.
02:39DonorsTrust CEO Lawson Bader says his group, quote, has no involvement directly or indirectly
02:45with any case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
02:49He stuck by his statement even after Forbes pointed out to him that groups like New Civil
02:53Liberties Alliance have received millions of dollars from people with a DonorsTrust
02:57account.
02:59Donor-advised funds are a growing trend in philanthropy, even for those not interested
03:03in pushing money into politics.
03:06One selling point is that donors can give to a fund in lump sums, take full tax deductions
03:11right away, then watch their money get doled out over an unlimited number of years.
03:17Billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Paul Singer have all embraced making
03:22gifts to donor-advised funds, and people of more modest means can also use the funds.
03:28Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Vanguard, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs all have associated
03:35charities that offer donor-advised funds to members of the general public.
03:39Annual donations to donor-advised funds more than doubled from 2018 to $85.5 billion in
03:462022, according to the National Philanthropic Trust.
03:51That suggests that more and more money will keep flowing into the groups in the future,
03:56leaving less transparency into who is helping fund the country's most important court cases.
04:02For full coverage, check out Alison Durkee's piece on Forbes.com.
04:08This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:10Thanks for tuning in.
Comments