As he runs for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick’s claims to his “home state” have been a source of contention on the campaign trail: the Republican hedge fund titan spent much of his youth in Pennsylvania, but has lived out most of his recent adult and professional days in Connecticut.
While the extent of McCormick’s ties to his “home state” are cloudy, his ties to another state—the “deep state”—seem far more clear.
Despite his claims to the MAGA movement, McCormick is steeped in the nexus of government, intelligence, and big business that Donald Trump and his acolytes ambiguously refer to as “the deep state.”
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Those connections range from colleagues to boards to corporate investments, with additional ties to notorious surveillance systems and an internal monitoring project at McCormick’s firm—the legendary hedge fund Bridgewater Associates—that was directly modeled after the Chinese Communist Party’s autocratic surveillance state.
And in the mind of Trump, who is McCormick’s most crucial political ally, some of those ties would be about as problematic as a MAGA Republican can get—such as, for instance, former FBI Director James Comey.
Comey, it turns out, accepted a senior role at Bridgewater the year after McCormick signed on as the fund’s president. As general counsel, Comey oversaw an internal security program whose invasive and sometimes demeaning methods of surveillance and interrogation earned him a reputation as Bridgewater’s “in-house inquisitor.”
Aside from Comey, the most prominent of McCormick’s “deep state” affiliations is his recent three-year run as a paid trustee of the secretive government-backed investment group In-Q-Tel—quite literally the Central Intelligence Agency’s very own venture capital firm.
McCormick’s role at In-Q-Tel appears on his candidate financial disclosures, where he listed the entity’s name as “IQT.” Tax filings from In-Q-Tel, which is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit, show that McCormick joined as a trustee in March 2018 and left in 2022 as he pursued his first Senate campaign. He collected an annual $35,000 salary, logging five hours of work a week, according to the tax records, and his election bid has since seen hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from executives tied to IQT and its investments.
For McCormick, his deep state connections embody the larger political contradictions he’s already been forced to reconcile as a corporate Republican seeking office in the quasi-populist era of Trump.
Dave McCormick speaks during a campaign rally at Beerded Goat Brewery in Harrisburg, Pa., on Thursday, April 25, 2024.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagesThat tortured balancing act failed two years ago. In the 2022 GOP primary in Pennsylvania, the lifelong moderate failed to land Trump’s endorsement—losing that honor, and subsequently the GOP primary, to Mehmet Oz.
While McCormick got the coveted Trump endorsement this year—though there weren’t any other viable Republicans running in the primary—the dissonance is starker than ever.
Today, the MAGA wing of the Republican Party finds itself fully enthralled with conspiracy theories about the intelligence community, which Trump and his allies have for years cast as public enemy No. 1. Trump is vowing retribution as a key 2024 campaign plank.
Given that McCormick’s challenge to Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) will be one of the most contentious races of the 2024 cycle, the hedge funder turned true MAGA believer may have to work harder than expected to scrub his deep establishment ties in order to appeal to his new base.
A former colleague of McCormick’s at Bridgewater told The Daily Beast that McCormick was “an honorable man,” a “stand-up guy,” and an “independent” and “brilliant leader.” But the colleague also put his finger on the Trump issue, calling it a “sad reality” that McCormick will have to cave to the whims of the former president.
“He knows that if he wins, he won’t get to do what he thinks is right,” the person said. “He has his own money and he won’t be so susceptible to outside pressures, financially. But he’s still going to have to kiss the ring, and that’s unfortunate.”
McCormick’s campaign did not respond to detailed questions for this article.
It’s not clear if Trump knew about McCormick’s work with the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA and Comey. But as it turns out, the deep state overlaps in myriad ways with McCormick’s 13-year tenure as a top executive at Bridgewater.
In 2010—the year after McCormick left George W. Bush’s Treasury Department to sign on as Bridgewater’s president—Bridgewater hired Comey, who would later come to embody the darkest of Trump’s paranoiac accusations about federal agents.
Bridgewater brought Comey on officially as head of security and general counsel. In practice, however, Comey’s role more closely resembled that of an “in-house inquisitor” over the first iteration of the firm’s oppressive internal employee monitoring program, which would later come to be called “The Politburo.”
Before he led the FBI, unleashed a bombshell on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign, and got fired by Trump, Comey reportedly raked in $7 million per year at Bridgewater. His task was to keep employees in line with the goals of what firm founder Ray Dalio called “radical transparency.” Those efforts included constant surveillance—including recorded meetings and videotaped, internal “trials” of employees—with Dalio telling Bridgewater staff that Comey was “like a godfather adjudicating it all.”
The taped meetings were “just the tip of the surveillance ecosystem” at Bridgewater, Vanity Fair reported in its profile of Comey’s time with the firm.
“A slew of ex FBI agents staffed the security team. Not only did cameras cover seemingly every inch of the property, but they seemed to be watched in real time. Staffers who left their desks even briefly would return to sticky notes left on their computer monitors admonishing them for failing to put up a screen saver,” Vanity Fair reported.
Comey would go through employee cellphone and computer records, and was apparently so intrusive that he embarrassed one executive into resigning.
But when Comey’s security posse only turned up “little evidence of actual offending behavior to snuff out, they created their own,” according to Vanity Fair.
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates LP, speaks during China Development Forum (CDF) 2023 in Beijing, China.
Lintao Zhang/Getty ImagesIn one instance, the report said, Comey left an executive’s binder clearly labeled and unattended in Bridgewater offices. He then watched as surveillance cameras captured a low-ranking employee discovering the binder and going through it. Comey put the employee on trial and fired him, with the approval of Dalio.
Comey, however, eventually found himself repelled by Dalio’s extremes, resigning after two years. (This month, Comey happens to be publishing a murder mystery novel that takes place inside a fictionalized version of Bridgewater.)
Dalio, however, only ramped things up, implementing more and more intrusive policies to fully enact his “radical transparency” dogma.
That program, it turns out, was literally modeled on the Chinese Communist Party’s social surveillance program, which Dalio openly admired. He even named the project after the CCP’s own “Politburo” and compared it favorably to “Big Brother” in a 60 Minutes interview.
China, of course, is another area where McCormick is against the prevailing GOP winds, as Bridgewater’s internal culture “reflects aspects of Chinese political ideology” and invested heavily in the region—after McCormick took over as co-CEO in 2017, the fund’s Chinese investments skyrocketed.
The “Politburo” staffed up with officials from the National Security Agency and the CIA. But Bridgewater workers found it “intimidating” and “humiliating,” and so intrusive that in 2017 one whistleblower filed a human rights complaint with the state of Connecticut, where the fund is headquartered, which was covered at the time in The New York Times.
As detailed in a recent book about Dalio, titled The Fund, the Politburo essentially pitted its employees against each other, assigning roles like “auditors” and “overseers” and recording practically every moment of activity—all in pursuit of Dalio’s core “radical transparency” philosophy.
While the system repelled many employees—including Comey and one-time CEO Jon Rubinstein, who both left after disagreements with Dalio—McCormick stayed aboard, got a promotion, and publicly defended Dalio’s “radical transparency.”
Rubinstein quit after a “firing squad” meeting that McCormick personally sat in on, according to the book, where Rubinstein made the case that Dalio’s increasingly authoritarian policies were creating a “climate of fear.” When McCormick, one of a handful of senior executives in the room, was personally asked if he agreed with Rubinstein’s take, he said he did not, according to the book.
McCormick has subsequently defended Dalio. In 2020, when McCormick was asked if he took issue with a fundamental contradiction at the core of the monitoring program—“radical transparency” within the company, but kept secret from outside scrutiny—he replied that he “doesn’t think it’s inconsistent at all.”
“Ray has always said this: Radical transparency is not total transparency. There are certain things that we’re not transparent about, and consciously so. Personnel and salary discussions, for example,” McCormick said.
Shortly after rising to co-CEO, McCormick joined the board at IQT.
The venture capital nonprofit, which former CIA Director George Tenet founded in 1999, has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds to hundreds of technology firms and startups, some of which are still secret.
Today, IQT oversees more than $1 billion in assets and even has its own special-purpose acquisition company. Though the group keeps a low profile, IQT maintains a close relationship with government intelligence and security divisions and runs “almost all investment decisions” by the CIA.
Many IQT investments seek to cultivate the private development of surveillance technology that could one day benefit the intelligence community, and some of them overlap with both Bridgewater and McCormick.
One of those companies is Palantir, a tech firm closely tied to right-wing financier Peter Thiel whose sprawling government work has made it a lightning rod for civil rights controversy—and whose fate was “rescued” by IQT’s investment.
Bridgewater itself helped fund Palantir, and incorporated Palantir technology to advance its own investments as well as to help monitor Bridgewater employees in the fund’s pursuit of Dalio’s “radical transparency.”
Palantir executives have contributed thousands of dollars to McCormick’s 2024 campaign.
Additionally, one of IQT’s current trustees, Howard Fox, who also served on the board with McCormick, has put serious money—more than $150,000—behind McCormick’s candidacy in both 2022 and this cycle.
The same is true of other McCormick supporters, like the CEO of Tenable, an IQT-backed tech firm which announced its public stock offering shortly after McCormick joined the board.
And while it’s true that McCormick brings his own money to the table, that hasn’t stopped Bridgewater donors from chipping in. In all, Bridgewater employees, mostly executives, have contributed about $100,000 to McCormick’s political aspirations, with current president Kyle Delaney throwing $50,000 to a 2022 super PAC backing his old colleague.
