Udall Foundation Reauthorization Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, for the first time in American history, a gentleman of Muslim faith has been nominated to serve on a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

What could and should have been a moment of pride has been stained by the nominee, Adeel Mangi, having been subjected to a series--a campaign--of baseless and gross attacks.

Senator Booker of New Jersey came to the floor yesterday and gave an eloquent and thorough rebuttal of those attacks, so I won't rehash that. But it is important that my colleagues understand where these attacks came from. It is not just that they were untrue; it is that the whole campaign is a fake.

These attacks are part of a coordinated campaign by the same dark money interests that helped Donald Trump pack our Federal courts and who now want to stop President Biden from confirming qualified nominees who weren't handpicked by those billionaire special interests.

You don't have to search long to see their fingerprints all over this smear campaign. We can start with the main culprit, the Judicial Crisis Network. Let me give you just an overview of what the Judicial Crisis Network is.

The billionaire operation to pack the courts had an operative who was the staff person, essentially, who directed it. His name was Leonard Leo.

Leonard Leo runs a whole array of front groups to obscure what is really going on, sort of like a pea and shell game, only with lots of shells.

This is a diagram that I use about one component of his front group armada. What this reflects is his own companies up here: CRC Advisors, CRC Strategies, and CRC Public Relations. They are the entities through which he extracts money for services, so-called, from this array of corporate entities.

To understand what it is, the real ones here--the real ones here--are called 85 Fund and Concord Fund. Those are twin entities. They share office space and funders and staff. They have around them this array of other entities, none of which are real, all of which are registered fictitious names--fictitious names under Virginia law--under which their real entities are allowed to operate.

In this case, there are six of them, and one of them is this Judicial Crisis Network. This thing is being run through a fake entity that bears the fictitious name of a completely different organization. Behind that are more anonymous funders and screeners of funding and, ultimately, behind all of that, a bunch of creepy billionaires.

The story of the Judicial Crisis Network is that it was the main group that the operative, Leonard Leo, used to help the billionaires pack the Supreme Court with their handpicked Justices. It spent, for instance, almost $40 million opposing Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court and, thereafter, supporting the Trump Justices' confirmations. It took in millions in dark money dollars and individual contributions as big as $15 million and $17 million. This is not a grassroots organization; this is a billionaire-funded, multimillion- dollar contribution outfit. And it continues to work today in the service of packing the courts.

It is an organization for the billionaires to work through from behind the scenes through their operative, Leonard Leo.

It launched against Mr. Mangi a $50,000 ad campaign called ``Stop Antisemite Adeel,'' in which a video plays saying the Senate should reject ``anti-Semite Adeel Mangi,'' and--just to make the point even more grotesque--showing a plane flying into the World Trade Center. Classy stuff.

It has tweeted and promoted the false attacks that Senator Booker described at length over the past 2 months. In recent days, as the attacks on Mr. Mangi ramped up, the organization tweeted out ``It looks like our ad campaign worked.'' This ad campaign had nothing to do with truth. It was all about using secret billionaire money to derail a circuit court nominee who had not been blessed by this outfit and the billionaires behind them.

Leonard Leo, as the billionaires' operative, had his fingerprints all over--smears by another dark-money group attacking Mangi. This one is run by a former Neil Gorsuch clerk who also oversaw the Kavanaugh nomination on the Republican side.

Because this is a dark-money group, we don't know all of its donors, but we do know at least two. And the first is--guess who?--the Judicial Crisis Network. It is the hand in the glove in the glove.

JCN--Judicial Crisis Network--helped get the second organization off the ground with more than a quarter of a million dollars in 2018 and 2019. When the new organization launched, its leader tweeted:

Excited to work hand-in-glove with [a person named Carrie Severino, who is a Judicial Crisis Network lead operative] my other long-time friends at JCN, and many others on the outside who understand the critical importance of the judicial fight.

And, specifically, he means the critical importance to billionaires to be able to control the judiciary and get things done that Congress would never pass through courts that will do their bidding.

The dark money ties don't stop just there with the Judicial Crisis Network front group and the front group for the Judicial Crisis Network. The front group organization's vice president comes straight out of the Koch brothers--K-o-c-h, not C-o-k-e--the Koch political dark money network. That guy helped run multiple Koch political organizations, including the dark money flagship of the Koch political machine called Americans for Prosperity.

While there, guess what. He helped oversee Americans for Prosperity's multimillion-dollar campaign to pressure Senators to confirm Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

Who is the other big donor? Donald Trump. Earlier this week, it was reported that Trump's PAC gave the organization $150,000 to keep up the dirty work. The leader of this group wrote an op-ed calling Mr. Mangi ``Hamas's favorite judicial nominee'' and included a picture of Mangi with the Hamas flag edited to appear over his face--classy stuff, again--and tweeted that Mangi should ``Go serve as a judge in Gaza, you antisemite''--just beautiful stuff.

Leonard Leo and Trump World are also propping up yet another dark- money group attacking Mangi and other Biden nominees, the Conservative Partnership Institute.

The New York Times recently called the Conservative Partnership Institute ``a breeding ground for the next generation of Trump loyalists.'' It has received millions of dollars from Donors Trust, which is widely known as the ``dark money ATM of the right.'' It builds no product; it offers no service. What it does is launders the identity of donors so that if you are a big donor and you want to send money into politics, you send it to Donors Trust first, and then the report sent to the 501(c)(4) says the source is Donors Trust and not whoever really gave it. That is what it lives to do, and hundreds of millions of dollars flow through it. It also received $1 million from Trump's PAC in 2021.

CPI is quite a cast of characters, folks like Mark Meadows, Steve Miller, Cleta Mitchell, and Jeffrey Clark. One of its projects has been to find bad-faith ways to sink qualified Biden nominees, and Mangi is just the latest of its targets. This same group was behind the false attacks on Ketanji Brown Jackson that smeared her as lenient on sex offenders.

These groups are spending millions in dark money from Leonard Leo, from Donald Trump, and from billionaires like the Kochs to keep the Federal courts stacked in their favor. They want to stop President Biden's nominees who weren't handpicked by them in some Federalist Society back room by billionaires and their fixers.

It is not just Mangi who is their target. They have tried to smear many other Biden nominees, and there is an unusual concentration in their targets of people of color. They seem to have a particular fixation with people of color.

They ran the despicable ads accusing Ketanji Brown Jackson of being ``more concerned about the well-being of pedophiles than the safety'' of children. Judicial Crisis Network spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Justice Jackson during her confirmation. Again, that is the fake group with a fictitious name that actually is Concord Fund but purports to be something different.

Judicial Crisis Network also spent more than $1 million on a smear campaign against Vanita Gupta and $300,000 on a campaign attacking Dale Ho, both extremely qualified candidates of color.

JCN's president has written numerous op-eds calling nominees of color, like Judge Nancy Abudu on the Eleventh Circuit, the first Black woman ever on the Eleventh Circuit, ``ideologues'' and ``extremists.''

These groups have waged similar smear campaigns in other committees than Judiciary, with qualified nominees of color like Saule Omarova for the Department of the Treasury and Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve getting the smear treatment.

Adeel Mangi is an eminently qualified nominee. He comes across with all the dignity and decorum of an Oxford don. He is as well-trained and intelligent as any candidate who has ever come before the Judicial Committee. He has been the subject of vicious, bad-faith attacks, and the attacks come from this billionaire-funded, rightwing apparatus.

It is a scheme. It is not just a smear; it is an op. It is a covert operation designed to prevent the Biden administration from confirming well-qualified, fairminded judges to our courts so that they can create a vacancy so that if they can get Donald Trump elected in November, they can then put another rightwing extremist who will do what the billionaires want onto the court.

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