Harlan Crow’s deep dark money connections
By Adam Rappaport and Meghan Faulkner
Harlan Crow is more than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s secret patron—he’s also deeply intertwined with the shadowy world of Republican dark money.
In fact, Crow personally took part in the creation of the post-Citizens United dark money system and secretly helped bankroll some of the new groups.
Crow’s political spending started long before Citizens United opened the floodgates for anonymous money in American elections in 2010. Between 1977 and 2009, Crow and his companies gave more than $2.4 million to federal candidates, parties, PACs, and other political entities.
Since Citizens United, he’s spent $13.8 million on federal politics, bringing his lifetime total of spending reported to the FEC to more than $16 million. But that’s not all he did. While it is impossible to track Crow’s undisclosed political giving, public information demonstrates his longstanding ties to the biggest figures and groups in Republican dark money.
One of Crow’s first forays into large donations was by providing some of the initial financing of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an organization that spent millions running attack ads in 2004 against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and was later fined nearly $300,000 by the Federal Election Commission for failing to register as a political committee.
Later, in
2009, Crow and his company spent more than $5 million on a failed ballot initiative in Dallas trying
to block the city from building a city-owned convention center hotel which
would have competed with Crow’s hotel.
Immediately after Citizens United, Crow took part in one of the first key events leading to the creation of the dark money system. As recounted by Kenneth Vogel in his book Big Money and separately by the Wall Street Journal, just weeks after the Supreme Court’s decision in January 2010, four leading Republican political figures set out to obtain the “seed funding” they needed to launch several post-Citizens United groups.
The four Republicans: consultant and former Bush White House aide Karl Rove, former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie, fundraiser Fred Malek, and former senator Norm Coleman, “laid out their blueprint for a sort of shadow party” to about “20 Republican plutocrats” at the Dallas Petroleum Club in early February 2010.
They wanted
funding for a network of what became some of the biggest players in outside
political spending, including super PAC American Crossroads, which Rove
explained would work to defeat then-President Obama and
win Republican control of Congress, and dark money group the American Action
Network.
Crow was one of the deep-pocketed billionaires
who attended the fundraiser. Whether he gave that day or how much is not known.
But after hearing Rove’s pitch, another Texas megadonor, Harold Simmons, proclaimed “I like this. I’m in for five
[million].” Others followed suit.
Even as the Supreme Court was deliberating Citizens United, Crow reportedly provided the major funding for Liberty Central, another dark money group, this one with links to Justice Thomas. Liberty Central was a 501(c)(4) organization founded by Ginni Thomas in late 2009 that counted Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo as a board member.
Ms. Thomas served as president
through November 2010 and was paid a salary of more than $120,000.
According to Politico, of the $550,000 in anonymous start-up funds
the group received in 2009, $500,000 came from Crow, who also held an event for the
group at his Dallas home a few months after it launched.
Liberty Central engaged in partisan
politics during Ginni Thomas’s time in charge. The group acknowledged on
its 2010 tax return that it spent a small
amount of money on political activity, but as described in a 2012 IRS complaint filed by Common Cause,
Liberty Central appeared to do far more than that, endorsing and supporting
dozens of House and Senate candidates, conducting polling, and issuing
scorecards of congressional candidates.
Asked later about his support of the group,
Crow refused to even confirm his contribution,
saying: “I disclose what I’m required by law to disclose, and I don’t disclose
what I’m not required to disclose.”
“Crow has taken full advantage of the
diminishing transparency laws around our politics.”
In 2011, Crow also made a contribution to another notorious dark money group called Americans for Job Security (AJS), which was uncovered by a CREW lawsuit and has not been previously reported.
AJS spent more than $25 million in federal independent expenditures and electioneering communications in the 2010 and 2012 elections, making it one of the largest dark money groups at the time.
CREW
filed an FEC complaint against the group in 2012, alleging that it should have
registered as a political committee and disclosed its donors. After years of
litigation, AJS settled the case, resulting in the first and largest release of
dark money donors in the post-Citizens United era. The disclosure showed that Crow, through his
company Crow Holdings, gave AJS $50,000 in May 2011.
How much more Crow has given to dark money groups over the years is unknown. He has, however, also donated huge amounts to super PACs closely associated with dark money groups, including several Rove and others pitched to him just after Citizens United.
Between 2011
and 2018, Crow personally and through his companies gave $2.5 million to super
PAC American Crossroads, which is closely related to dark money groups
Crossroads GPS and One Nation. Crow also gave almost $1.5 million between 2016
and 2022 to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC sister of the
American Action Network.
Crow’s secret political contributions and
undisclosed gifts to Justice Thomas can be seen as two sides of the same coin,
offering opportunities to exercise influence, while keeping the public in the
dark about who is pulling the strings.
We do know that Crow has given extensively to politicians and political committees, thanks to reporting requirements, and that he has given significant gifts to Thomas, thanks to investigative reporting.
But that spending is just what Crow and Thomas have been forced to
disclose, and what came out against their will. In helping bankroll the
Republican network of dark money groups following Citizens United,
Crow has taken full advantage of the diminishing transparency laws around our
politics—which Justice Thomas has been instrumental in dismantling.
As a result, we will likely never know the true impact of Crow’s political
spending on our government and our elections.