CRC News: The growing influence of InfluenceWatch

Washington Examiner— ‘Local independent’ outlet in Virginia pushing redistricting is owned by Democratic operatives

Political advocacy masquerading as unbiased, grassroots journalism is not a novel electioneering tactic, explained Michael Watson, the research director of Capital Research Center, a think tank tracking the mobilization strategies of special interest groups.

Websites serving as mouthpieces for political actors have infiltrated the local news space for several years now, successfully imitating neighborhood gazettes and regional dispatches.

Watson, however, told the Washington Examiner that the mass distribution of physical mailers posing as a traditional town newspaper, rather than relying merely on online articles, is a newer approach to reaching unsuspecting voters.

“If you don’t know what you’re looking at,” Watson said, “and you’re just a person and you see this mailer that pretends to be a newspaper, it can easily trick you into thinking that, ‘Oh, this is independent and not actually aligned with a consultant network that’s very close to the Democratic Party.’”

Watson said that such left-of-center projects created to platform Democratic arguments about certain state-specific policy issues can range from left-leaning political reporting to thinly veiled partisan propaganda.

“This goes not just for the American Independent network,” Watson said, “but for all these sorts of progressive pink slime news. There’s a sliding scale of outright talking points to ideological journalism.”

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Watson said that similarly disguised influence campaigns tend to target battleground states, jurisdictions where politics are highly competitive at the local level, and areas whose voters are considering issues of great interest to the left-wing donor class.

The progressive philanthropy industry, Watson added, is deeply invested in the pink slime news sector, and Democratic donors see these dissemination sites as a vehicle for shaping public perception around contentious agenda items.

“In this case, George Soros has given a substantial amount of money to the Virginia redistricting campaign,” Watson said. “It’s of critical importance to the progressive donor class, even though Virginia is a relatively comfortable Democratic state.”

The proliferation of pink slime sites mimicking legitimate localized news is owed in large part to deep-pocketed donors, who are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into these pseudo-news operations, realizing that readers still prefer local media over legacy outlets.

Studies have shown that consumers historically are more likely to trust local media than national news sources.

“They’ve learned by now that national outlets like the New York Times are going to be progressive and Democratic, Fox News is going to be conservative and Republican,” Watson said. “But local outlets still have that ability to persuade, and so [philanthropists] are responding by throwing money, whether at ideological journalism or talking point mills essentially skin-suited as supposedly local journalism.”

[. . .]

Regarding the legality of American Independent Media’s direct-mail redistricting campaign, Watson said that since it is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, the nonprofit entity is allowed under tax law to engage in unlimited lobbying on any number of ballot initiatives.

“501(c)(4)s are designed for public advocacy, and [supporting or opposing] a ballot measure is considered lobbying the electorate,” Watson said. “As a 501(c)(4), you can make, as far as I’m aware, as many statements on ballot measures as you want.”

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Washington Examiner—Teamsters still bankrolling Democrats, including Jay Jones, despite openly flirting with Trump and GOP

Some conservatives view the Teamsters’ outreach to the GOP with skepticism, arguing that the policies pushed by unions are inherently out of step with conservatism and that union organizers themselves are still generally liberal.

“As for whether the Teamsters is compatible with the GOP, the union officialdom isn’t,” Mike Watson, an organized labor expert and director of research at the Capital Research Center, told the Washington Examiner. “The members are more open to the GOP for social-issues reasons, but the staffer class and officers are largely committed Everything Leftists.”

“Everything Leftism” is a turn of phrase used to describe the tendency of some liberal staffers and activists to adopt causes seemingly unrelated to their primary area of focus; environmental groups issuing statements about the war in Gaza is one such example. In a similar vein, many leaders in the labor movement place emphasis on issues such as LGBT rights, abortion policy, and climate change, despite those topics being tangential to the goals of unions themselves.

Of the hundreds of thousands of dollars the Teamsters spent on “political activities and lobbying” between 2024 and 2025, and among myriad groups it supported, the only GOP organization it funded was the Republican Main Street Partnership, which received a $50,000 contribution in 2025.

“‘Good faith’ or ‘bad faith’ isn’t the right way to think about O’Brien’s outreach game,” Watson told the Washington Examiner. “I think he’s a shrewd special-interest operator, just like the National Association of Realtors or other play-both-sides lobby groups. He wants to make sure his interests as union boss and organizer aren’t ‘on the menu’ when his team isn’t in power — the Democrats will protect his boss-organizer interests anyway because it’s in their ideological and coalitional interests.

“So playing open to the GOP is tactically shrewd, and not something we’ve seen from a major union since the feds got the Mafia out of the Teamsters national leadership in the early 1990s,” Watson said.

Indeed, the Teamsters have been able to win real concessions from the Trump administration following their ingratiation campaign. The union, for example, saw Lori Chavez-DeRemer, their preferred candidate for head of the Department of Labor, be nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate during the early months of 2025.

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The National News Desk—ActBlue potentially misled Congress about vetting foreign donations: NYT report

In a bombshell new report, the New York Times revealed that ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones may have provided inaccurate information to the House Administration Committee in a letter from 2023. In it, Wallace-Jones claimed that the Democratic fundraising platform used multi-layered screenings to root out all foreign donations. But internal memos from the law firm Covington & Burling, which was outside legal counsel for ActBlue, reportedly warned that these claims were not fully accurate.

“They told them you know, it is very possible, that you could be legally liable for misleading Congress about what ActBlue was doing,” said Scott Walter, President of the Capital Research Center.

According to the New York Times, the internal legal memos stated that ActBlue didn’t consistently verify U.S. passport information for donors, using third-party apps. Allowing overseas transactions to be processed using prepaid cards. Walter told The National News Desk that it’s against the law for foreign citizens, or those who aren’t permanent residents, to donate directly to federal candidates or political action committees.

“If you are processing billions of dollars for political party, you have the serious responsibility of vetting money that comes in. Especially money that appears to be foreign donations,” Walter said.

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The Grio—US treasury department launches whistleblower program offering up to 30% rewards for fraud tips: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the initiative is designed to encourage individuals to report financial misconduct.

The whistleblower program is part of a broader push by the administration to combat financial crime, including the creation of a federal task force focused on eliminating fraud. That effort has been associated with Vice President JD Vance, who has backed initiatives to strengthen oversight of federal spending.

Supporters say the financial incentives could motivate insiders to come forward with information that would otherwise remain hidden. Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, noted that offering a percentage of recovered funds creates a strong incentive structure, particularly in complex fraud schemes where insiders may have critical knowledge.

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Daily Wire—No One Is Safe: Homecare Fraud Schemes Are Ripping Off Americans In Every State: A low-trust society is a breeding ground for abuse — and it’s everywhere.

Essay by Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Center:

The Gavin-Newsom-fraud-fest spectacular continued last week as reporting from the City Journal revealed the massive scope of potential fraud within the In-Home Supportive Services Program, a California state program funded by Medicaid that allows people with no meaningful medical training to bill taxpayers for performing basic household tasks, or “homecare” for the elderly or disabled. It’s important for people to realize, though, that California is far from the only state with a homecare fraud problem. It’s almost certainly happening in your state too, and at a scale that will boggle your mind. The problem is so widespread, in fact, that I find myself compelled to do the unthinkable: defend Gavin Newsom.

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Just the News—Singham uses extensive CCP-aligned network in China as he finances global Marxist influence efforts: Some Republicans in Congress call for Roy Singham to be forced to register as a foreign agent of China. Just the News investigations have detailed the Marxist businessman’s Shanghai political ecosystem.

The Doublethink Lab — a Taiwan-based group aimed at countering Chinese malign influence — assessed that the CCP “in the form of both the central government via the State Council and the Shanghai municipal government, has influenced the organization since its inception.” InfluenceWatch describes Doublethink Lab as advocating that “web platforms and media strategies identify and censor purported CCP propaganda distributed and released online.”

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The Federalist—Unraveling The Far-Left Group Seeking To Derail Future Republican SCOTUS Nominees

According to the Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch database, Demand Justice was born in early 2018 as a project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund to advocate on behalf of left-wing judicial nominees and oppose conservative ones. The Sixteen Thirty Fund — which regularly injects its money into U.S. elections — is a left-wing advocacy group that operates within the recently re-acquisitioned Arabella Advisors dark-money network. The group has come under fire in recent years for accepting millions of dollars from Swiss national Hansjorg Wyss via his Berger Action Fund.

[. . .]

According to InfluenceWatch, Demand Justice became its own nonprofit in mid-2021, but nonetheless “received $1,982,613 from its former fiscal sponsor, Sixteen Thirty Fund” that year. The group also reportedly “received more than $2.5 million from the Open Society Policy Center, a 501(c)(4) lobbying group founded by George Soros, for general support” from April-June 2018.

[. . .]

Demand Justice has since re-focused much of its efforts to opposing Trump’s judicial picks since his return to the White House, according to InfluenceWatch. The organization also spawned an initiative to track what it claims to be are attempts by Trump and his allies to take “a sledgehammer to the rule of law and the balance of powers in our government.”

“The tracker’s release was accompanied by a targeted print and digital advertising campaign in the Washington Post, highlighting polling data from 2026 Senate battleground states,” the InfluenceWatch report reads. “The polling indicated cross-partisan concern regarding judicial integrity and political influence over the courts. [Demand Justice] stated that it intends to use both the tracker and polling data to apply pressure on lawmakers, regardless of party affiliation, during upcoming Senate confirmation votes.”

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Tampa Bay Times—After Florida special election wins, this Democrat raked in cash

Jolly’s political committee earned its biggest donation to date after the Florida special elections: $500,000 from Donald Sussman, a hedge fund executive who funds Democratic campaigns, according to InfluenceWatch, which tracks political donors.

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The Federalist—Analysis: More Than 90 Percent Of Funds Backing Dems’ Gerrymandering Scheme Come From Outside Virginia

A Federalist analysis of the latest donation figures assembled by the Virginia Public Access Project shows that more than 90 percent of Virginians for Fair Elections’ large contributions come from Democrat-aligned out-of-state groups.

The organization’s largest contributor is none other than the D.C.-based House Majority Forward (HMF), a 501(c)(4) that boasts ties to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and House Democrat leadership. According to InfluenceWatch, HMF — which has given $29.3 million to Virginians for Fair Elections — “focuses on climate change, social justice, economics, and democracy, and produces ads in favor of Democratic candidates and opposed to Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives.”

The second largest donor ($11.02 million) to Virginians for Fair Elections is The Fairness Project. InfluenceWatch describes the D.C.-based 501(c)(4) as a “labor union-backed advocacy organization that finances and supports state ballot initiative campaigns to promote left-of-center policies such as government-mandated comprehensive paid family and medical leave, Medicaid expansion, and minimum wage increases.”

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Cardinal News (Virginia)—‘Dark money’ is fueling both sides of Virginia’s redistricting campaign: More than $79 million has been spent on Virginia’s “yes” and “no” redistricting referendum campaigns since February; roughly $76 million of that is from “dark money” groups that don’t have to disclose their donors.

House Majority Forward is a major financial supporter of U.S. congressional Democrats, according to InfluenceWatch. InfluenceWatch is a project of the Capital Research Center that examines nonprofit organizations involved in politics and policymaking. House Majority Forward ended 2024 with $16.1 million in net assets, according to the organization’s 990 tax form. Efforts to reach representatives of House Majority Forward for this story were unsuccessful.

Another $11 million was contributed to Virginians for Fair Elections by The Fairness Project over four contributions between February and March. The Fairness Project is a Washington-based, labor union-backed 501(c)(4) that finances and supports state ballot initiative campaigns to promote left-of-center policies, according to InfluenceWatch. The Fairness Project ended 2024 with $4.1 million in net assets, according to the organization’s 990 form. Efforts to reach The Fairness Project were also unsuccessful.

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Daily Caller—Soviet-Era Groups Work To Win American Hearts For Another Communist Regime

The 89-year-old National Lawyers Guild frequently took pro-Russia stances while denying that it was a Soviet front, a profile by Capital Research Center notes. However, the NLG helped create the IADL, an entity that the CIA and International Commission of Jurists exposed as a front group hiring Soviets.

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American Thinker—Paid to Rage: How Astroturf Protesters Hijack the First Amendment: The First Amendment was written for citizens, not contractors.

The fingerprints of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) are not subtle.  A September 2025 report by the Capital Research Center documented that since 2016, OSF has directed more than $80 million to organizations tied to terrorism or extremist violence.  More than $23 million went to seven U.S.-based groups the FBI classifies as engaged in domestic terrorism, including the Ruckus Society, which trained activists in property destruction during the 2020 riots.  Another $18 million flowed to the Movement for Black Lives, which co-authored a guide glorifying Hamas’s October 7 massacre and instructing activists in infrastructure blockades and false identification.  OSF denied the characterizations.

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Daily Caller—Army Of Radical Prosecutors All Have One Thing In Common

According to Influence Watch, SEE [Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs] was originally founded in 1987 as the “American-Soviet Film Initiative” to “promote educational and cultural exchanges among citizens of the U.S. and citizens of the then-Soviet Union through films and television programs.” [name and hyperlink added for clarity]

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California Globe—Arizona Lawmakers Reject Latest Push for Assisted Suicide: Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) proposal backed by group with ties to Soros-backed network failed to advance in the legislature

Compassion & Choices, which supports MAID legislation nationwide, has received funding from organizations associated with philanthropist George Soros, according to a 2016 report by Capital Research Center. The report states that Soros-affiliated entities, including the Open Society Institute and the Foundation to Promote Open Society, provided more than $7 million to the group beginning in 2008.

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Just the News—Taxpayer-funded science academy will keep controversial climate chapter in judicial training manual: The National Academies of Science, which received $200 million from federal agencies in 2024, refuses to remove a chapter about climate from a science manual provided to thousands of judges. Critics argue it is one-sided and biasing judges in climate lawsuits. A new study details the left-wing funding, and possible self-interest that the academies are promoting.

The $200 million that NASEM received in 2024 was 70% of its budget, and the rest includes millions from anti-fossil fuel groups. Among those funders is Sunflower Services (formerly Arabella Advisors), which has been described by critics as the “godfather of the left’s dark money. InfluenceWatch describes them as “a left-leaning philanthropic consulting company that provides strategy, advocacy, impact investing, and management services to high-dollar foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and individuals.”