Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
New financial filings show how a deep-pocketed dark-money group run by the wealthy pro-Trump Mercer family financed a campaign to preserve President Trump’s ban on immigration from a number of Muslim-majority nations.
The group, Making America Great, took in more than $5.6 million in 2017 from five anonymous donors. It used that money to pay Cambridge Analytica, the Mercers’ controversial data-targeting firm, nearly $1 million, according to financial records obtained by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and shared exclusively with PAY DIRT.
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MAG, which is chaired by Rebekah Mercer, also reported paying $200,000 to a company called FSL Now Inc. That company describes itself as a “crisis communications” firm, and is run by a political consultant named Jason Vines, a former communications executive at automotive giant Chrysler.
FSL Now was behind a website, ImmigrationPause.org, that also listed Vines as an employee on its Facebook page.
The Immigration Pause website encouraged visitors to sign petitions supporting Trump’s Muslim-ban executive order. It wasn’t a project of a political organization or nonprofit group, and as a result was not required to disclose information about its financiers. But these new financial records show that it was backed with significant financial support from the Mercers.
The website promoted videos and columns in support of the policy by Jim Hanson, then the executive vice president of the Center for Security Policy, a hard-right group headed by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official who has accused prominent public figures of both political parties of being secretly in league with Islamic extremists.
Gaffney and Hanson, in turn, both promoted the Immigration Pause website. And while the Mercers were funding the campaign, they were also paying CSP directly. Their new financials list $250,000 in grants to the group for the purpose of “social welfare.”
In a brief interview Wednesday, Vines said he set up the website on behalf of a client, but refused to say if the client was CSP or MAG—or give any other details about who was behind the effort.
“It wasn’t astroturf,” he insisted. “It was right out there, this is who we were.”
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