This Mysterious New GOP Dark Money Group Raises All Kinds of Red Flags

[Celerity]

The group, organized in part by a Dr. Oz campaign strategist, may have already violated federal law, a key watchdog claims.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mysterious-gop-dark-money-group-ardleigh-impact-corp-raises-all-kinds-of-red-flags



In late October, a mysterious nonprofit registered with the state of Delaware. Within months, it was funneling millions of dollars to conservative causes. Last week, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the new group, Ardleigh Impact Corporation, bears the marks of a shell entity specifically created to pump big donors’ money into politics while masking their identities. The alleged setup, known as a “straw donor” scheme, would violate federal law, the complaint states.

It’s no surprise that the entity drew the CLC’s attention. As the complaint notes, Ardleigh does not operate a website or any social media pages, does not appear in various corporate databases, and has no “discernible public footprint.” In fact, at the time of the complaint—before news sites picked up the story—the only publicly available evidence of the nonprofit’s existence were the donations documented in FEC reports and its articles of incorporation, which it had unsurprisingly registered with the notoriously opaque state of Delaware.

However, those incorporation documents, obtained by The Daily Beast, reveal key details not found in the complaint. Ardleigh’s officers, however, refused to provide The Daily Beast with any information about the group’s activities. First, the incorporation records identify the group’s organizers as experienced political operatives, including, apparently, the professional strategist who ran Dr. Mehmet Oz’s failed Senate campaign in 2022. They also show that Ardleigh Impact Corp. is not organized as a private company, but a 501(c)(4) nonprofit—a “dark money” group. However, additional business filings show that Ardleigh Impact Corp. has an apparent twin entity—a private limited liability corporation called “Ardleigh Impact LLC,” also registered in Delaware.

The new information increases the likelihood that Ardleigh Impact Corp. is, as the complaint alleges, specifically designed to function at least in part as a vehicle for anonymously funding political activity. However, the fact that Ardleigh Impact Corp. is a dark money nonprofit—and therefore permitted to participate in limited election activity—would also seem to rule out claims that it is a “shell company,” potentially deflating one of the complaint’s arguments while simultaneously introducing new questions about transparency. Tax regulations do not require nonprofits like Ardleigh Impact Corp. to disclose their donors, making it highly unlikely that the public will ever learn who funds the entity. By extension, that means the public will also likely never know the ultimate source of the millions of dollars that Ardleigh has already poured into those GOP groups—hence the “dark” in “dark money.”

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