Billionaire Ronald Lauder has donated $1 million to the Republican State Leadership Committee, an organization that is working to elect at least two state candidates contesting the results of the presidential election this year. 2020.
Lauder’s $1 million donation, made September 12, is listed in the team’s third-quarter report recently filed with the IRS. He provided a portion of the $17 million the team raised between July and September.
According to Forbes, Lauder is the heir to Estee Lauder’s fortune and has a net worth of $4.5 billion.
A spokesperson for Lauder declined to comment. A representative for the Republican State Leadership Committee did not return a request for comment.
Lauder is latest of the more than two dozen wealthy business leaders and the companies themselves who contributed to the candidates, who cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election — or external organizations pushing for it. push them. Lauder’s donation to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which was not reported, was among the top individual contributions to the group in the third quarter, according to filings.
An even larger donation came from the Concord Foundation, a group formerly known as the Crisis Justice Network with ties to President Donald Trump’s former counsel Leonard Leo. The Concord Foundation, which has previously spent millions on ads supporting Trump’s judicial candidates, gave $1.5 million to the Republican State Leadership Committee in September.
The Republican State Leadership Committee is considered an exempt political group under section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code. These organizations can raise and spend unlimited amounts, but they must disclose their finances to the IRS.
According to OpenSecrets, the nationwide state midterm elections are expected to raise more than $7 billion as parties vie for control of the legislature, the governor’s office and foreign offices. chief, according to OpenSecrets. The Association of Democratic Secretaries of State, a group of 527 supporting Democrats running for secretary of state, received a $500,000 donation earlier this year from a super PAC largely funded by billionaire George Soros.
The Republican State Leadership Committee is supporting dozens of candidates running for state secretary, lieutenant governor, state legislator and judge on state courts. Many Republican candidates running for secretary of state and lieutenant colonel in the general election have echoed Trump’s claim that the 2020 election has been stolen or rigged.
If those secretary of state candidates win, they will have a key role to play in both running the election and counting votes in 2024 – when Trump can once again lead the GOP presidential ticket.
The Republican State Leadership Committee has ties to state legislative leaders who question the election results, support efforts to block the electoral college’s vote count or downplay the election. January 6 attack on the US capital.
In this year’s state legislative races, the Republican State Leadership Committee backed several candidates who cast doubt on the 2020 election results.
The Republican State Leadership Committee supported Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu through digital ads starting in August, according to Facebook’s ad archive. LeMahieu, who has passed a preliminary challenge and is voting in November, has pushed election conspiracies into the campaign trail.
“We may never know the full impact the illegal use of drone voting boxes, nursing home abuse or ‘Zuckerbucks’ has had on the 2020 election, but we do can make sure those violations never happen again in Wisconsin,” he told a local Wisconsin news outlet.
LeMahieu was one of three Republican leaders in the state Senate last year Authorised Senate Elections Committee to review an election audit they say “paint[s] a bleak picture of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and its careless administration of election laws in Wisconsin. “
Biden won Wisconsin by less than more than one percentage point by 2020.
Earlier this year, LeMahieu speak“By a rough tally, yes, Biden got more votes in the state of Wisconsin but we don’t know – there’s clearly a lot of concern about how those votes are done.”
The Republican State Leadership Committee also began running a digital ad in October in support of Pennsylvania Representative Lori Mizgorski, who running to become a state senator, the group’s Facebook ad archive shows. Mizgorski was one of the state GOP officials who called for an election check in Keystone State after President Joe Biden beat Trump there in the 2020 election by a margin large enough to avoid automatic counting.
Republican lawmakers allied with Trump launched an audit last year. While the GOP-led effort is not a recount and cannot change the outcome, it is intended to examine state voting procedures and in the process, may cast doubt on whether the 2020 election will be fair.
“It’s not about who wins or loses, it’s about restoring trust in the foundation of our government. We all want to know our votes were counted fairly in this election, and we do. We want to make sure that they are counted fairly in all future elections,” Mizgorski said in a statement. when She sided with state party leaders in supporting an election audit.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court earlier this year blocked a third-party company from testing voting machines provided by Dominion Voting Systems – a common target for election conspiracy theories – as part of an audit. maths.
Trump, who could run for president in 2024, still claims that the election was rigged against him even though officials from both sides of the aisle say there is no widespread voter fraud. Republicans running for state and federal office have repeated many of his false claims.
Although she supports an audit, Mizgorski has not explicitly denied the election results. Lawsuits from the Trump campaign, and state-mandated audits from each of Pennsylvania’s counties, have not uncovered evidence of issues that could affect election results.
Additionally, members of the Republican State Leadership Committee supported false claims about the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill.
Karen Fann, the president of the Arizona Senate who is listed on the Republican State Leadership Committee website as a legislative campaign committee member, has called for a review of the Dominion Voting System after the election. vote. Fann is not seeking re-election.
Mike Shirkey, the majority leader in the Michigan State Senate, is also listed as a member of the group’s legislative advocacy committee. He called the January 6 attack on the US Capitol a “hoax” and “pre-arranged”, according to a record obtained by Detroit News. The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attacks was also subpoenaed Shirkey.
He will not run for re-election this year due to term limits.
Bryan Cutler, speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, is on the group’s state legislative committee. He is part of a group of state legislators who have co-signed a Letters to the congressional delegation of Pennsylvania, urging them to “oppose and vote to uphold such objection, to the Electoral College votes received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
