The Arabella Network’s Secret Client: Reclusive Billionaire Gwen Sontheim

Around 2013, three private foundations were incorporated anonymously in Delaware, registered in Minnesota, and funded by a web of anonymous trust funds in South Dakota. Their cryptic names—the Kaena, Mattaponi, and Guilder Foundations—gave no clues about the mystery donor(s), and each of the foundations used the same law office address with a board composed of the same wealth management advisors. They were structured to be completely anonymous, which is not the norm for private foundations. Whoever was behind them had taken extraordinary measures to conceal their identity.

As the years passed, each foundation received roughly $100 million in contributions from a web of anonymous trust funds and shell corporations, but no information about the donor surfaced. Each year, each group disbursed a few million dollars in grants through the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, America’s largest donor-advised fund, making the destinations a total mystery. Anonymity wasn’t enough, the donor(s) wanted to conceal where the money was going as well.

By 2022, the most recent available year of disclosures, the trio of foundations controlled over $350 million in combined assets, enough for a Bloomberg reporter to finally inquire about the source of the funds. The reporter wrote:

On its filings, the three foundations list the same tax lawyer, Sonny Miller. When asked to speak with the people behind the foundations, Sarah Francomano, a spokesperson working with Miller’s firm, laughs. It was unlikely that would happen, she says, because, after all, they want to be anonymous.

Until now, that’s all the world has ever knew about the mysterious trio of foundations.

Meanwhile at Arabella

Across the country, around the same time that Bloomberg’s reporter was asking the first questions of Sonny Miller’s wealth management office, the Arabella Advisors network was busily creating a new organization. Not satisfied with its already massive web of pet nonprofit groups, the Arabella Advisors network launched the Telescope Fund, a new 501(c)(3) group, with a very unusual legal structure. The organization was separate and had its own distinct board, but the New Venture Fund retained near complete control of the group, could veto new donors, and was seemingly responsible for all its operations. Arabella apparently needed the group created fast, requesting expedited processing of its application on the grounds that, in just a few short years, the Telescope Fund would be raising upward of $200 million per year. The request for expeditated tax status was approved, and in its first year of operations the Telescope Fund raised just over $30 million.

The Telescope Fund’s priority in 2022 was making large grants to left-wing get-out-the-vote (GOTV), community organizing, and voter registration groups, particularly those in swing states. Grantees included Blueprint North Carolina ($1.15 million), New Florida Majority Education Fund ($1.27 million), New Georgia Project ($850,000), One Arizona ($1.7 million), and many others. All of them were 501(c)(3) groups primarily focused on getting voters that favor Democrats to the polls on election day. As Capital Research Center has previously exposed, large-scale funding of left-wing GOTV groups is often highly coordinated with leading Democratic powerbrokers, and these weren’t the sort of groups that a donor without extensive political connections would even think to fund.

The donor would have to be well connected, but who could it be?

After the money had been washed through the Arabella Advisors pass-through network, it would be next to impossible to trace the funding to a source with a name and a face. Further complicating the matter was that almost all of Telescope Fund’s seed funding had been delivered by one $30 million grant from the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund. Ordinarily, this would have made the mystery donor totally anonymous, but they didn’t completely cover their tracks.

Putting Telescope Under the Microscope

Beginning in 2018, the Guilder and Kaena Foundations began making large annual payments for philanthropic consulting fees to Arabella Advisors. The Mattaponi Foundation, now renamed the Green Fern Foundation, also made a single $56,000 payment to Arabella in 2021. In all, the three foundations paid Arabella Advisors $1,932,358 from 2018 to 2022. On their own, the payments prove little. Arabella Advisors provides philanthropic consulting services to many clients for many reasons, though most of their work is in the left-leaning political universe. Clearly, the three foundations and their apparent common donor were using Arabella’s services for something, but since each foundation was making grants exclusively through the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund it was not easy to say what that something was. Most likely, some or all of the funds being sent to Fidelity were being directed to the New Venture Fund or one of the Arabella network’s other 501(c)(3) organizations.

In 2022, though, an unusual pattern can be spotted by those who know what to look for. The Guilder, Kaena, and Green Fern Foundations made grants of $10,150,000, $13,750,000, and $6,100,000 respectively to the Fidelity Charitable Gift; a combined total of exactly $30 million. During 2022, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund made just one grant of exactly $30 million: the grant that created the Telescope Fund. Given the close ties between the three foundations and the consulting fees being paid to Arabella, it seems extremely likely that the Telescope Fund’s initial $30 million grant came from the mystery donor behind the three foundations.

Even though the donor behind the three foundations took every possible clandestine precaution, there are still clues that greatly narrow the pool of suspected donors. First, the person is obviously fabulously wealthy, probably a billionaire based on the amounts involved, and is connected to the wealth management firm of Sonny Miller. Second, to create an independent GOTV fund within the Arabella Advisors network, the person must be very involved in left-wing politics. Third, the person must be extremely private and obsessed with secrecy. Nobody would go to such lengths if they weren’t. Only a handful of people match that description, and one last clue narrows that handful down to just one.

In 2013, the year that the three foundations were created, each board of directors briefly contained a mysterious third board member by the name of Bob Theiler. By 2014, Theiler had disappeared from all three boards leaving just Sonny Miller and John Otterlei behind. There is little information about Theiler available. He doesn’t seem to work for Miller and Otterlei’s firm, but tax forms show that he has worked for a very specific group of private foundations. Theiler appears (at various times) on the boards of the Martha Elizabeth MacMillan Family Foundation, Donna J Macmillan & Cargill Macmillan Jr. Charitable Trust, Wilmac Foundation, Chair 4 Foundation, Oak Foundation, and Cedar Foundation. Each of these foundations is tied to an heir of the behemoth Cargill food corporation, an enormous company founded by William Wallace Cargill in 1865 that is worth over $50 billion today. The Cargill family is massive and highly secretive, particularly with charitable giving, and has numerous heirs and heiresses worth over $1 billion. Only one of those heiresses, though, is overtly involved with left-wing politics and has ties to the Arabella Advisors network: Gwendolyn Sontheim.

Sontheim, like the rest of the Cargill family, is extremely private. She loves equestrian sports and lives in California. Her only notable appearance in the news cycle is reports of a private meeting with an EPA administrator where she voiced opposition to the Pebble Mine project in Bristol Bay, Alaska. As it turns out, the Arabella network has also worked hard to oppose Pebble Mine, launching a massive campaign in 2018 against the mine through a fiscally sponsored project called “Salmon State.” Recall that 2018 was also the year that the trio of foundations began to pay Arabella consulting fees. Sontheim is also a Democratic Party megadonor, giving millions over the years to political action committees (PACs) associated with the Democratic National Committee, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries.

White House Frequent Flier

During the Biden Administration, Gwen Sontheim has logged 10 visits to the White House, four times as an invitee at lavish parties and six times as a participant in small closed-door meetings with senior officials and their staff. In each of these meetings, Sontheim was accompanied by a high-ranking member of the Democratic campaigning and fundraising apparatus.

First, on May 13, 2022, Sontheim met with Charolette Butash, then serving as policy advisor to Biden’s deputy chief of staff. She was accompanied by Dan Kanninen, battleground director for the Biden and now Harris campaign, and Emily Fye a one-time DNC staff member. Kanninen is a very powerful person to have on your arm in a White House meeting, and records show he has accompanied Sontheim to the White House almost every time she has visited since.

In September 2022, Sontheim secured a meeting with Democratic kingmaker John Podesta and was again accompanied by Kanninen. Capital Research Center has reported extensively on Podesta using his lofty position in the left-leaning nonprofit activism world to guide funding from billionaire donors towards “nonpartisan” GOTV organizations like those funded by the Telescope Fund. This meeting occurred just three months before December 2022, when the Telescope Fund submitted its request for this IRS to grant it expedited tax-exempt status. Sontheim’s next White House visit, attending a large party on December 16, was just five days before Telescope Fund’s application was submitted.

Sontheim visited the White House again in May 2023, again accompanied by Kinnanen, but also by several anti–Pebble Mine advocates and, most importantly, John Stocks. His name is not well known, but Stocks is arguably one of the most powerful people in left-leaning politics. Stocks was once the executive director of the National Education Association (NEA), but since 2020 he has worked as the chairman of the Democracy Alliance, an influential and highly secretive donor-advising group created in 2004 to advise frustrated billionaire donors on how best to use their money to secure Democratic victories

Just a few months later, in September 2023, Sontheim visited the White House again, accompanied by both Stocks and Kinnanen along with real estate mogul Daniel Tishman, Zumiez co-founder Tom Campion, Democracy Alliance co-founder and hedge fund manager Joe Zimlich, and several other powerful donor advisors including Kathleen Welch of Corridor Partners. Sontheim recently attended a similar meeting of known Democracy Alliance members, including John Stocks, Joe Zimlich, and Patricia Stryker in May 2024.

The White House visitor logs make it clear that Sontheim is not just a well-connected political megadonor, but also probably a secret member of the Democracy Alliance for many years now. She would have more than enough clout to get the Arabella Advisors network to bend over backwards to create the Telescope Fund and maybe get some of her wealthy friends from White House meetings to fund it with her.

The Secret Donor?

All the pieces fit: The Telescope Fund’s anonymous $30 million endowment almost certainly came from Gwen Sontheim.

If the Telescope Fund really is Sontheim’s personal get-out-the-vote fund, as the disclosures seems to indicate, then Sontheim may secretly be among the largest donors to the hopelessly corrupted “charitable” GOTV industry, which serves as the electioneering backbone of the Democratic Party. It’s also possible, given Sontheim’s obvious connections to the Democracy Alliance, that the Telescope Fund was created as a private funding vehicle for members of the Democracy Alliance and is now raking in and distributing donations from its clientele and allocating donations wherever the shadowy organization deems most strategically valuable.

It’s impossible to say anything for sure, though the circumstantial evidence is very strong, but two things are certain; Gwen Sontheim and the Telescope Fund deserve more scrutiny.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-arabella-networks-secret-client-reclusive-billionaire-gwen-sontheim/