Soros Spent More on Lobbying in 2017 Than Any Previous Year – by Steve Straub
In President Trump’s first year in office George Soros has spent more on lobbying than during any previous year:
The Open Society Policy Center, a D.C.-based 501 (c)(4) nonprofit that focuses on domestic and international advocacy efforts and is a separate entity from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, poured $16.2 million into lobbying throughout the entirety of 2017.
Soros’s group reported spending $4.6 million during the first half of 2017 on its lobbying efforts. During the third quarter, Soros added $1.25 million to the total. Most of the lobbying expenditures—$10.3 million—were spent during the fourth quarter, which spans from October 1 to December 31.
Soros ramped up his efforts as the year progressed by pushing funds toward issues that have been seen as a direct attack on the deep-pocketed financier, such as Hungary’s Bill on Foreign Funded Organizations (LexNGO), a crackdown on foreign-funded organizations in that country.
Hungary’s parliament approved the law that targets foreign-funded NGOs in June of last year, saying they could “threaten the country’s political and economic interests and interfere with the functioning of its institutions.”
While the legislation does not mention Soros, who was born in Hungary and has given money to a number of NGOs in the country, by name, Hungarian politicians have said that they wanted to “sweep out” organizations tied to the financier, Bloomberg reported.
Soros also pushed funds to lobby on the Restricted First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018, and the Preventing Preemptive War in North Korea Act of 2017, among others, according to the disclosure forms. The Open Society Policy Center lobbied the Senate, House of Representatives, State Department, National Security Council, and the Department of Defense last year.
“We make different grants each year depending on what is happening in Congress and there was a lot going in 2017: Protecting immigrants and refugees, preserving fairness in the tax code, advocating for criminal justice reform, pressing for disaster relief for Puerto Rico, and promoting a progressive U.S. foreign policy,” said Jonathan Kaplan, a spokesman for the Open Society Policy Center.
Between 2002 and 2012, the policy center reported spending a total of $19,120,000 lobbying Congress and agencies, an average of $1.9 million on lobbying per year. The most Soros had spent on lobbying prior to last year was $12.4 million in 2014.
The group’s disclosure forms also show that Soros has recruited the help of a number of outside lobbying shops in the past including Orion Strategies, the Mitchell Firm, and Glover Park Group, all D.C.-based firms, on top of its three in-house lobbyists.
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