Think “Zuckbucks” are bad? The leftists who crafted “Bidenbucks” say, “Hold my beer.”
Earlier this month, Wisconsin became the 28th state to tell Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the private-money-in-elections mob to go Zuck themselves — and for good reason. The Badger State knows as well as any what millions of dollars of leftist-led activist cash in the administration of elections can do to election integrity and voter confidence.
Zuckbucks — the nickname for the $400 million-plus that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, dumped into the 2020 elections — predominately flowed to Democrat-centric cities in battleground states such as Wisconsin. Contracts devised by the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life, which has deep ties to the Democrat Party, and signed by city mayors required that election officials work with Democrat activists under the auspices of making voting “safe” during Covid.
Emails show activists, including a longtime Democrat operative, embedded in local election offices, offering to “correct” ballots and engaging in other suspicious conduct.
But as bad as Zuckbucks are, election integrity watchdogs say such private funds in elections pale in comparison to what President Joe Biden has wrought through the power of his pen. As wealthy as Zuckerberg is, his grant initiative was chump change compared to the resources of a politically weaponized federal government.
Cabal at the Core
On Aug. 9, 2021, just five months after Biden signed the executive order that would command the federal government to serve as a get-out-the-vote arm of the Democrat Party, Adam Lioz emailed “Team USDA.” Lioz, who at the time served as senior counsel for left-wing policy activist group Demos, wanted to circle back with Department of Agriculture staff and thank them for “a productive conversation,” according to records obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.
“As we noted, we’ll have our ‘best practices’ slides ready in the next 1-2 weeks and in the meantime, y’all had asked for data on voter registration at the state level, which I’ve pasted below,” Lioz, who these days serves as senior policy counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote in the email with the subject line, “Demos Meeting on Voting Rights EO.”
“We’re eager to schedule follow up conversations to dig into specific programs and help with integration in any way we can. Just let us know when you are available for that,” he added.
Not surprisingly, Biden’s USDA did just that. New York-based Demos reportedly helped draft Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which directs each federal agency head to develop a plan to “promote voter registration and voter participation.” As the Foundation for Government Accountability notes, Biden’s fiat “follows the same strategy” contained in a Demos policy paper.
If you’re filling your leftist bingo card, Demos is closely tied to the far-left Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wing of the Democrat Party, according to activist tracker InfluenceWatch.
“The organization emphasizes three areas of commitment: voting rights expansion, a hybrid environmentalist-left agenda it calls ‘pathways to ensure a diverse, expanded middle class in a new, sustainable economy,’ and advocacy for communitarianism and a liberal interpretation of racial equality,” InfluenceWatch reports.
Biden tapped former Demos executive K. Sabeel Rahman to serve as Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs senior counselor and Chiraag Bains, the group’s former director of legal strategies, as the president’s deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council for Racial Justice and Equity at the White House. They were responsible for reviewing the actions taken to fulfill Bidenbucks, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability. The GOTV effort is being carried out by Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations.
“This is a coordinated effort from left-leaning third parties and the Biden administration to use executive power and taxpayer resources for the purpose of federalizing elections and taking power away from the states,” said Chase Martin, legal affairs director at FGA.
‘Leftist Voter-Turnout Operation’
There are definitely some similarities between Zuckbucks and Bidenbucks. Much like private corporate funds in elections and their contract demands of involving activist groups, Biden’s order mandates federal agencies work with the White House’s “approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations.” These are NINOs, nonpartisan in name only.
Despite repeated requests for information on the implementation of the executive order, including the criteria for the third-party groups, the Biden administration has either slow-walked or altogether stonewalled the release of documents.
“Federal executive agencies, which have no business engaging in voter registration or mobilization efforts, as the EO directs, will surely exceed the scope of their authority under federal law,” House Republicans wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Moreover, in carrying out this EO, employees of these agencies will likely violate other laws such as the Hatch Act, designed to keep federal agencies, led by political appointees, from engaging in political activities to benefit one political party over another.”
The October 2022 letter goes on to note that any expenditure by the DOJ for this “could violate the Antideficiency Act, which prohibited executive agencies from spending funds Congress has not authorized or accepting volunteer services from ‘approved’ third-party organizations as EO 14019 directs.”
It’s clear the administration doesn’t care about any such constitutional entanglements, as Biden’s lawless record over the past three years suggests. Congressional Republicans have checked Democrats’ sweeping assaults on election integrity such as the ill-named “For the People Act,” so Biden is doing their work for them through executive order.
“Biden has turned the entire federal government into a leftist voter-turnout operation,” Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog group Judicial Watch, wrote on his X account.
Now federal agencies are working overtime to realize the left’s plan.
Zuckbucks on Steroids
The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service is working with state agencies that administer school breakfast and lunch programs to “provide local program operators with promotional materials, including voter registration and non-partisan, non-campaign election information, to disseminate among voting-age program participants and their families.” That includes promoting voter registration in school cafeterias to high school students turning 18 by Election Day and working with leftist groups in Democrat-rich cities.
As The Federalist has reported, Milwaukee Public Schools has joined forces with the California-based VoteRiders and the League of Women Voters to do so. A faculty member at each school is tapped to serve as “Voter Champion” to assist those 18 or approaching 18 who don’t have a photo ID. On the taxpayer’s dime, the school employee connects the student with a representative from the leftist VoteRiders. MPS and the Biden administration have refused to turn over records to The Federalist and the Foundation for Government Accountability.
Meanwhile, the Democrat-led Michigan Department of State recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Small Business Administration “to promote civic engagement and voter registration in Michigan.” The first-of-its-kind collaboration is expected to run through Jan. 1, 2036.
And the Department of Education recently announced a “clarification” to its rules allowing the taxpayer-funded work-study program to be used to hire college students to register their peers to vote — one of the more reliable Democrat voting blocs. My Federalist colleague Shawn Fleetwood has reported on several other ways the federal government is using Bidenbucks “to rig the 2024 election.”
In her book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway wrote about how a cabal of Democrat activists and business titans used Covid “as a pretext to maximize absentee and early voting.”
“Here, one billionaire in particular took a leading role: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg,” Hemingway wrote.
The left doesn’t have Covid to lean on this time around. So it’s using the full force of the federal government in its attempt to keep and consolidate its power.
“The president is acting unconstitutionally, the agencies are acting unlawfully, and they’re doing so with taxpayer money with next to zero transparency for the taxpayer,” David Craig, senior legal fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told me. “That’s something that has to be fixed.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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