AIPAC Is Helping Fund Anti-Bernie
Sanders Super PAC Ads in Nevada
By Ryan Grim, Akela Lacy
February 15, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
The
American Israel Public Affairs Committee
is helping to fund a Super PAC launching
attack ads against Sen. Bernie Sanders
in Nevada on Saturday, according to two
sources with knowledge of the
arrangement. The ads are being run by a
group called Democratic Majority for
Israel, founded by longtime AIPAC
strategist
Mark
Mellman.
The
Nevada attack ads, which will air in
media markets in Reno and Las Vegas,
follow a similar spending blitz by DMFI
ahead of the Iowa caucuses. Like the ads
that aired in Iowa, the Nevada
ads
will attack Sanders on the idea that
he’s not electable, Mediaite
reported.
DMFI
spent $800,000 on the Iowa ads, while
the spending on the Nevada ads remains
private. AIPAC is helping bankroll the
anti-Sanders project by allowing
donations to DMFI to count as
contributions to AIPAC, the sources
said. As is typical with most big-money
giving programs, the more a donor gives
to AIPAC, the higher tier they can claim
— $100,000 level, $1 million level, and
so on — and the more benefits accrue to
them. A $100,000 donor gets more access
to members of Congress at private
functions, for instance, than someone
who merely pays AIPAC’s conference fee.
A $1 million donor gets still more,
which means that it is important to
donors to have their contributions
tallied. There is also status within
social networks attached to one’s tier
of giving. The arrangement allows donors
to give directly to DMFI, which is
required to file disclosures naming its
donors, without AIPAC’s fingerprints.
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Rachel
Rosen, a spokesperson for DMFI, said she
was unaware of any AIPAC encouragement
to donate to the organization. “As far
as we know, what you are suggesting is
completely untrue,” she said. “But
because we are a separate organization,
we can’t know exactly what other
organizations are doing. Therefore, we
are the wrong address for the the
specific questions you ask — they need
to [be] directed to AIPAC.”
AIPAC denied the arrangement. “AIPAC
is not and has not been involved in the
ad campaigns of any political action
committee,” spokesperson Marshall
Wittmann wrote in an email. “The
accusation that AIPAC is providing
benefits to members for donating to fund
these political ads or this political
action committee is completely false and
has no basis in fact.”
In the past, AIPAC
enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Congress. But as
it’s cozied up to the GOP in recent years and taken
a harder right-wing stance on Israel policy,
reflecting a rightward drift in Israel, more
Democrats are cutting ties with the group and
tacking further left. AIPAC’s faltering relationship
with Democrats was the initial spur for Mellman’s
new organization,
founded by donors and operatives linked to AIPAC.
On Wednesday, Rep.
Betty McCollum
slammed AIPAC as
trafficking in “hate speech”
for a recent social
media ad
campaign that warned that “radicals in Congress”
presented a threat “maybe more sinister” than the
Islamic State,
along with photos
of Reps.
Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and
McCollum.
Representatives of AIPAC spent Wednesday and
Thursday on Capitol Hill apologizing in private
meetings with House Democrats for those ads,
claiming that they were made by AIPAC’s Democratic
digital firm (though how that shifts responsibility
from AIPAC is unclear). Omar, Tlaib, and McCollum
were not invited to — nor even aware of — those
meetings, despite being the subjects of the ads,
Tlaib and Omar told The Intercept.
Sanders has long
been one of the most outspoken critics of
unconditional U.S. support for Israel and has become
an even sharper critic of the alliance during his
2020 campaign. He said in October that he would
condition military aid to Israel on changing its
settlement policy, and redirect some military aid to
humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip. DMFI sent a
fundraising
email
in January attacking Sanders for that comment. While
Sanders would certainly be more sympathetic to
Palestinians than any president in U.S. history, he
tends to qualify support for Palestinian rights by
first prioritizing Israel’s security.
DMFI’s
anti-Sanders ads that aired in Iowa in the week
leading up to the caucuses had
nothing to do
with Israel or the Middle East. Instead, they
focused on his label as a democratic socialist and
his recent heart attack. Following that ad buy,
Sanders raised
$1.3 million
in one day.
The DMFI ads have
been controversial and represent one of the first
Super PAC interventions by a Democratic group
against a Democratic presidential candidate in the
post-Citizens United era. (Hillary Clinton in 2016
had the benefit of the group Correct the Record,
which was legally a
Super PAC and attacked Sanders.
The group coordinated with the Clinton campaign,
rather than operating independently, yet that
coordination went
unpunished.)
But the revelation that AIPAC has been encouraging
donors to fund DMFI suggests how seriously the lobby
is taking Sanders’s candidacy and that it is willing
to intervene in the Democratic primary. On Thursday
night, news leaked that a Super PAC connected to the
Democratic group EMILY’s List had been contemplating
an attack ad against Sanders. In a statement, the
group said the ad had not been approved and that it
would support whichever candidate won the Democratic
nomination.
Big-money groups
are doing all they can to ensure that Sanders
doesn’t become the nominee, however, and after
the Iowa caucuses, DMFI boasted that its ads had
left a mark on Sanders. “Now that almost all of
the Iowa results are in, the incredibly close
race shows that DMFI PAC’s ad blunted Senator
Sanders’ momentum,” the group wrote to its email
list after some of the results were in. “The
network entrance poll proves it. Among those who
decided which candidate to support before DMFI
PAC’s ad aired, Sanders was in first place by a
6 point margin. However, among those who made a
decision while the ad was airing, Sanders came
in 5th, 10 points behind the leader.”
Conservative
writer Jonathan Tobin,
in a recent piece
for Ha’aretz,
discussed AIPAC’s posture toward Sanders in a
recent column headlined, “AIPAC Must Stop Bernie
Sanders — at All Costs.”
In the
lead up to the Iowa caucus, the Democratic
Majority for Israel, a year-old political
action group and super PAC, invested heavily
in negative ads aimed at
derailing
the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Mark
Mellman, the veteran Democratic strategist
who leads the group, told me that its
efforts – which are funded by the party’s
leading pro-Israel donors – helped steer
late deciding voters away from the Vermont
Democratic Socialists.
It’s in
that context that the AIPAC Facebook ads
that so offended Democrats must be seen. For
centrist pro-Israel Democrats, the problem
with Sanders is not just that he is the most
critical toward Israel of all the Democrats.
It’s that the left-wing activist base that
is fueling his candidacy is also largely
hostile toward the Jewish state. Sanders is
backed by Representatives Ilhan Omar
(D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich), who
are supporters of the
BDS movement
and are accused of using anti-Semitic
language and tropes in their criticisms of
Israel’s supporters.
DMFI denies
that it has any link to AIPAC, but Mellman’s
firm, the Mellman Group, has close ties with
AIPAC and consulted for the lobby group’s
dark-money cutout, Citizens for a Nuclear Free
Iran, as part of Mellman’s work to defeat former
President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal in 2015.
CFNI paid the Mellman Group
$241,439
that year.
Mellman’s firm
has also consulted for AIPAC’s educational
group, the American Israel Education Fund, which
organizes
congressional
trips
to Israel. The Mellman Group was AIEF’s
second-largest contractor in 2015, receiving
$1.3 million
for “program research.” AIEF’s biggest
contractor that year was a travel business owned
by Sheldon Adelson, a far-right Israel advocate
and mega-donor to the GOP.
At least 11 of
DMFI’s 14 board members have links to AIPAC as
well, having either worked at, spoken to,
volunteered for, or donated to the group, The
Nation
reported
in December.
AIPAC’s annual
conference is in March. A coalition of
progressive groups, including the left-leaning
Jewish advocacy group IfNotNow, the Working
Families Party, MoveOn, and Indivisible,
launched a campaign this month to pressure
presidential candidates not to attend. So far,
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has
committed
to skip this year’s conference. During a town
hall in New Hampshire this month, Sanders
told
a student that he didn’t think he was going but
had “no objection.” He, Warren, and several
other candidates
skipped
it last year.
Update: Feb. 14, 2020, 5:20 p.m. ET
This article has been updated to
include a statement from AIPAC that was received
after publication.
This article was published by "The
Intercept"-
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