Karl Rove Calls Out Liberal Dark Money Groups While Failing to Talk About His Own

Republican political consultant Karl Rove appeared on Fox News Primetime to chastise dark money groups on the left while failing to disclose he has been heavily connected with Republican dark money groups.

So-called “dark money” groups use the anonymity of nonprofit 501(c)(4)s to legally hide who their donors are and then use the money to donate to super PACs.

Host Lawrence B. Jones III played a clip of Democratic Congressman Mondaire Jones arguing for an expanded Supreme Court, using the Citizens United  case to highlight his point. Jones said the Citizens United decision “opened the floodgates to a torrent of dark corporate money in elections.”

Rove attempted to point out Democrats’ hypocrisy on the subject saying it was in fact Democrats that use these groups to influence politics more than Republicans. Illustrating his point with his whiteboard, Rove discussed the liberal group Arabella Advisors, which donates money to left-wing causes.

What Rove failed to mention is that he was the mastermind behind the well-known dark money organization Crossroads GPS. At its peak, the group spent $75 million dollars in political expenditures during the 2012 election. Rove is now working with a new group called One Nation.

One Nation spent over $125 million dollars in the 2020 election and was the biggest dark money group, spending over double what the second-largest group spent. Overall, however, Democrats benefitted from more total dark money donations than Republicans, the first presidential election in which that happened since the Citizens United case.

Fox News Contributor Tammy Bruce remarked on dark money groups saying, “When we talk about election integrity, why politicians do what they do, who they are working for, the American people have seen that perhaps they are not really working for us anymore.”

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