A Breitbart article by Amy Furr takes note of a Republican group called the Republican Accountability Project, which is calling on a list of GOP members of Congress to resign over supposedly inciting violence in the U.S. Capitol riot in January.
Furr points out that at least some of the targeted members, like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and Rep. Madison Cawthorn, actually called for rioting to cease and denounced violence in no uncertain terms.
GOP group launches billboard campaign urging Cruz, Hawley to resign https://t.co/e4ib6wypSd pic.twitter.com/hD9sYeQv3F
— The Hill (@thehill) January 30, 2021
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
It seems equally important, however, to point out that the group in question — the Republican Accountability Project — is directly linked through its executive director, Sarah Longwell, to the Never-Trump publication The Bulwark, and to an advocacy group formed in 2018 by Longwell and Bulwark’s Bill Kristol called Defending Democracy Together (DDT).
Longwell, who is also DDT’s executive director, is the publisher of The Bulwark. She was the first female board member of the Log Cabin Republicans and served as the board chairwoman until 2020, when she resigned over the group’s decision to endorse Donald Trump for reelection.
Defending Democracy Together is a 501(c)(4) that serves as the parent organization for the Republican Accountability Project, Republicans for the Rule of Law, and Republican Voters Against Trump. According to the Influence Watch site, moreover, “The Defending Democracy Together Institute is the 501(c)(3) counterpart of Defending Democracy Together. It also has a 527 super PAC, Defending Democracy Together Action Fund.”
DDT runs projects that include Operation Grant, created to help Joe Biden win in 2020 “by winning over Republican and former Trump voters in Ohio”; and Russia Tweets, which makes available “nearly 3 million” Russian troll tweets “posted by thousands of different accounts.” (The Russia Tweets thread leads down a rat-hole we have visited before, the Alliance Securing Democracy and the strange Hamilton 68 Project, in which Kristol and other Never-Trumpers have involved themselves. Those initiatives have been largely funded by left-wing businessman and activist Pierre Omidyar. Related initiatives of Omidyar’s were reportedly linked in the 2020 election cycle to allegations about Russia spreading disinformation on the Democratic Iowa caucuses, with their clownish vote-counting problems, and the bizarre smear that Tulsi Gabbard was the puppet of a Putin disinformation campaign. This site backs up its claims with evidence, even if some might complain about its tone. In another weird twist, The Daily Caller News Foundation unearthed connections among the following: Hamilton 68; the New Knowledge false-flag trolling operation run against Roy Moore in Alabama; Fusion GPS; and the former Dianne Feinstein staffer who was keeping Fusion GPS under contract in 2017, while funded by George Soros.)
To keep the DDT enterprise going, the group has accepted at least $1.6 million in funding from Democracy Fund Voice, a 501(c)(4) run by, guess who, left-wing businessman and activist Pierre Omidyar. Other funding has come from Hopewell Fund, “part of a $600 million network of left-wing funding nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors in Washington, D.C.” Arabella Advisors manages several funds backed by Soros nonprofit entities.
Meanwhile, the president of DDT, Charles Sykes, is on the advisory board of the left-wing Democracy Fund, the parent organization of Democracy Fund Voice, and sits on the board of a Democracy Fund Voice entity, Stand Up Republic – also a left-wing organization. Sykes is the editor-at-large of The Bulwark.
We could actually go on. The connections of the core group that revolves around The Bulwark and DDT include other left-wing funding sources – which does not mean those sources have provided funding, but is part of a pattern in which this Never-Trump group does very little nowadays that is identifiably “Republican,” as the Republican on the street understands it. According to the tracking site Open Secrets, which looks at who’s spending campaign cash where, Defending Democracy Together qualified by early October 2020 as the year’s top “dark money” spender. The bulk of the money was spent through Republican Voters Against Trump and Republican Voters Against Trump Fund.
So that’s who is putting up billboards demanding that some of the GOP’s most effective and popular politicians resign their seats in Congress. The Republican Accountability Project is reportedly partnering with the usual-suspect associates who are behind the Lincoln Project (now mired in scandal), in an initiative to back the Republicans who voted in the last couple of weeks to impeach and try former President Trump. (In the “things you can’t make up” department, the subject of the Lincoln Project scandal, John Weaver, registered under FARA in 2019 as the agent of Russian nuclear energy company TENEX, the one connected to Uranium One and a bribery rap sheet as long as your arm. Seriously.)
Republican Accountability Project. On sheer technical points, it seems fair to put caveats on both “Republican” and “Accountability” in that group name.
