Revealed: The Billionaires Funding the Coup’s Brain Trust

Conservative mega-donors including the DeVoses and Bradleys are pumping big money into the Claremont Institute think tank that fueled Trump's election-fraud fantasies

BY ANDY KROLL
Rolling Stone, January 12, 2022

Excerpt…

The biggest right-wing megadonors in America made major contributions to Claremont in 2020 and 2021, according to foundation financial records obtained by Rolling Stone. The high-profile donors include several of the most influential families who fund conservative politics and policy: the DeVoses of West Michigan, the Bradleys of Milwaukee, and the Scaifes of Pittsburgh.

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The donations flowing into Claremont illustrate that although the group’s full-throated support for Trump and fixation on election crimes may be extreme, they’re not fringe views when they have the backing of influential conservative funders. “Were it not for the patronage of billionaire conservatives and their family foundations, the Claremont Institute would likely be relegated to screaming about its anti-government agenda on the street corner,” says Kyle Herrig, president of government watchdog group Accountable.US.

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But Claremont wouldn’t fully land in the spotlight until the end of Trump’s presidency. John Eastman, a law professor and Claremont scholar, spoke at the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the Capitol insurrection. Eastman repeated several election-related conspiracy theories, alleging that “machines contributed to that fraud” by “unloading the ballots from the secret folder,” a version of the rampant conspiracy theories spread by Trump campaign lawyers about the company Dominion Voting Systems.

As would later be revealed, Eastman also wrote two memos outlining a plan for how then-Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 result on January 6. “The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission — either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court,” Eastman wrote. “Let the other side challenge his actions in court…” (Worth noting: The Claremont Review would later publish its own critique of Eastman’s memos by a professor of government and ethics at Claremont McKenna college. After walking through a key piece of Eastman’s argument, the professor, Joseph Bessette, wrote: “One doesn’t have to be a scholar of the American Founding, a professor of constitutional law, or an expert in election law to know that this simply cannot be right.”)

Claremont continues to push the stolen-election myth and has apparently helped state lawmakers draft legislation to make election laws more favorable to the Republican Party. In October, Claremont President Ryan Williams told an undercover liberal activist that Eastman was “still very involved with a lot of the state legislators and advising them on election integrity stuff.”

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/devos-bradley-claremont-trump-election-fraud-insurrection-1274253/

May America’s rich rue the day they backed fascism.