Foreign spending to influence elections goes well beyond “Russian covert operations”

In a pair of 2010 cases, Citizens United v. FEC and SpeechNow.org v. FEC, the Supreme Court held that legal restrictions on independent political expenditures by corporations, unions, and nonprofits violate the First Amendment and that organizations may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on elections as long as they do not coordinate their spending with candidates, parties, and campaigns.

Much of the independent money spent on elections is funneled into two sorts of organizations—super PACs, independent political action committees that can spend unlimited amounts on political messaging and campaign ads but must disclose their donors, and tax-exempt 501(c)4 “social welfare” organizations, which cannot spend the majority of their budgets on political activity but do not have to disclose their donors.

Moreover, 501(c)4 organizations can, in turn, donate funds to super PACS, thereby rendering anonymous or “dark” expenditures by corporations and other deep-pocket donors intended to sway voters. Since 2010, the watchdog organization Open Secrets has tracked more than $2.8 billion in “dark money”—political expenditures from undisclosed sources—that has flooded into our elections.

The same legal loopholes that allow all wealthy corporations and individuals to spend millions in “dark money” to shape the political process also permit U.S. corporations that are subsidiaries of foreign companies, or that have significant foreign ownership, to pour untraceable money into U.S. elections. According to one estimate, 40 percent of U.S. corporate equity is owned by foreign investors.

A recent Open Secrets study of political expenditures by foreign-influenced corporations—corporations with more than 5 percent aggregate foreign ownership or individual foreign ownership of more than one percent—in state elections in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New York, and Washington found that such companies were responsible for $163 million in contributions from 2018 to 2022. Meanwhile, foreign-connected company PACs spent nearly $20 million on federal elections in 2022 alone.

And just like domestic dark money funders, foreign-connected corporations often funnel their political spending through various “shell” and “front” organizations that make their spending exceedingly difficult to trace. For example, oil and gas giants BP and Shell are both wholly owned subsidiaries of foreign corporations. They are also both members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is a major font of dark money spending, shelling out millions each year on “electioneering communication” in support of candidates it favors.

The Chamber refuses to disclose its members or how much they each contribute to the funding of the organization’s vast lobbying and political influence operations. As a result, there is no way of knowing how much of the dark money the group disperses originates with foreign-connected companies.

The issue of dark money spending by foreign-influenced companies, like dark money spending in general, has been largely ignored by the corporate media. Two years ago, the Federal Election Commission fined Canadian billionaire steel magnate Barry Zekelman’s businesses nearly a million dollars for making $1.75 million in illegal campaign contributions to American First Action, a pro-Trump political action committee, in 2018.

The fine was so unusual—and so large—that it received coverage in the New York Times and Newsweek. But, sadly, the FEC’s actions received more coverage in Zekelman’s home country of Canada than it did in the country whose election laws he violated.