President Joe Biden benefited from a record-breaking amount of donations from anonymous donors to outside groups backing him, meaning the public will never have a full accounting of who helped him win the White House.
The $145 million he received eclipsed the $113 million in dark funds GOP Sen. Mitt Romney took in for his failed 2012 presidential bid against former President Barack Obama and the $24 million former President Donald Trump received,as reported by Bloomberg News.
Democrats have long condemned such fundraising as it allows the candidate to dodge any potential scrutiny on account of the source of their backing.
Priorities USA Action Fund, a super PAC that Biden identified as his preferred group for outside spending, used $26 million originally donated to its nonprofit arm, Priorities USA, to back Biden, Bloomberg reported.
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Donors of those funds are not required to be identified.
The chairman of Priorities USA, Guy Cecil, told Bloomberg in a statement that it wasn’t “going to unilaterally disarm against Trump and the right-wing forces that enabled him.” A Biden spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
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Future Forward PAC spent $104 million to back Biden and received $46.9 million from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and $2.6 million from Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
But Future Forward PAC also got $61 million from its nonprofit, Future Forward USA Action, Bloomberg said.
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The $1.5 billion Biden raised, a record for a challenger to a sitting president, included only $318.6 million from donors who gave less than $200 each.
The rest came from contributors with deep pockets who gave as much as $825,000 – funds that were split between the Democratic National Committee and 47 state parties.
Contributors are able to write eight-figure checks to super PACs and joint-fundraising committees can bring in as much as $830,500, Larry Noble, a former Federal Elections Commission official, told reporters.
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Big donors can also keep their identities secret by giving to political nonprofits that turn the funds over to super PACs like Priorities USA.
However, under federal law, candidates and campaigns are prohibited from coordinating spending with such groups.
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Reform groups point out the possibility of wealthy donors gaining discrete influence over decision makers without public knowledge of their actions through “dark money” contributions.
“The whole point of dark money is to avoid public disclosure while getting private credit,” Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, which advocates for reducing the influence of money on politics, told Bloomberg. “It’s only dark money to the public.”
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