A Look At The 'Dark Money' Behind Kim Foxx's States Attorney Campaign
In the highly contentious Cook County State's Attorney race, each candidate has their funding bases. Incumbent Anita Alvarez has Chicago's "old-boy power support" behind her, according to the Better Government Association—City Council's most powerful alderman, Ed Burke; Illinois's last true political boss, Michael Madigan; various associates of former Mayor Richard M. Daley. (She's also accepted over $25,000 from at least 60 of her employees.) Donna More is largely self-funding her campaign, as well as tapping into the Republican donor network. And Kim Foxx is working her political patron Toni Preckwinkle's connections; many of the largest donations to her campaign fund are from unions. But Kim Foxx has also found two other sources of cash, in the form of twin $300,000 donations to a Super PAC supporting her called Illinois Safety & Justice. The sole donors to the PAC are neoliberal superdonor and conservative-boogeyman George Soros and a "dark-money" group called Civic Participation Action Fund. A Super PAC is a fundraising group, created by the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, that can raise as much money as they want for any candidate or cause—as long as they don't coordinate on any level with political campaigns, which have much smaller campaign limits.
oros is a notorious liberal donor—he dropped $20 million on the 2004 election, and recently donated $8 million to a leading pro-Hillary Super PAC, as well as put up $5 million to increase Latino voter turnout. But according to Illinois Sunshine, a database of State Election Board filings maintained by the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, this marks the first time Soros has entered into a political race in Illinois—ever. (Though he has been intervening in local District/State's Attorney's races with increasing regularity, donating over $400,000 in a Caddo Parish, Louisiana, nearly the same amount in Mississippi last year alone.) Soros's presence in this race "really speaks to fact that Super PACs have become very influential in Illinois races, especially this cycle," according to Sarah Brune, the executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. A request for comment to Soros's Open Society Foundations went unreturned by press time.
The sole other donor to Foxx's Super PAC is the Civic Participation Action Fund, which, like Soros, has never made a donation in an Illinois race before. CPAF is a 501(c)(4), a special kind of nonprofit organization that at once doesn't have to disclose its donors and can conduct political activity. They are frequently referred to by campaign finance reform advocates as "dark money," since it is usually unknown where the actual funding comes from. The 2010 Citizens United decision set off a spark of 501(c)(4) donations nationwide, and they are a key component of Governor Bruce Rauner's stated plot to take away the Democratic supermajorities in the Illinois General Assembly.
https://chicagoist.com/2016/03/10/kim_foxx_funding.php
https://www.illinoissunshine.org/committees/31968/
https://www.illinoissunshine.org/search/?term=George%20Soros&table_name=candidates&table_name=committees&table_name=officers&table_name=receipts&table_name=expenditures