Who is This Dark Money Green Energy Group?

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The next time you hear Democrats whining about conservative “dark money” groups destabilizing democracy or whatever, keep this item in your back pocket. Some excellent investigative snooping by the Washington Free Beacon has exposed one of the darkest of the dark money groups you’ve never heard of and they move around massive amounts of money every election cycle. The group is named The Civic Involvement Fund (CIF). Don’t bother Googling them because they have no footprint on the web. They don’t show up on tax records because they have no paid employees. During odd-numbered years they do nothing except collect checks worth tens of millions of dollars from a handful of anonymous donors. Then, when the next election cycle kicks off, they flush all of that cash into the coffers of Democrats running against Republicans and conservatives, including the Biden administration. This is a perfect example of the muddy, murky bottom of the Washington swamp. 

It has no website, no employees, and its books are in the care of a powerful green consulting firm with close ties to the White House. It has also flooded Democratic groups with more than $35 million in untraceable cash since 2020, all while evading public detection—until now.

The Civic Involvement Fund has operated from the shadows from an apartment unit in Brooklyn since launching in 2019. That’s thanks in part to a novel spending strategy that sets the group apart from most other spokes in the Democratic Party’s ever-growing dark money network. During off-election years, the 501(c)(4) group does nothing but rake in huge sums of cash from one or two anonymous donors. Those funds collect dust until election years, when the Civic Involvement Fund dumps its entire bankroll into groups dedicated to defeating Republicans at the ballot box.

Having done such an excellent job of remaining in the shadows, how did the Free Beacon find out about The Civic Involvement Fund and the three unpaid executives that appear to control it? The group did leave a small paper trail that couldn’t be avoided. Three of its representatives have made dozens of visits to the Biden White House since he took office. That means they had to sign in on the White House visitor logs and list the organization they represent. Those logs are available for public inspection through the FOIA process, so they showed up when researchers scoured through them and began trying to figure out just who or what the CIF actually was.

The CIF has three unpaid board members. Two of them are Kathleen Welch and William Roberts, principals of Corridor Partners, a for-profit consulting firm that pushes green energy. The third, Shelley Hearne, is Kathleen Welch’s wife. Welch has only a small footprint on the web, with almost all references to her stemming from her position with Corridor Partners, though she is also the head of the board of directors for a climate activism group called NRDC. William “Bill” Roberts has a similarly slim online presence, though he does some additional philanthropy work with the National Center for Family Philanthropy.

Aside from pushing windmills and trying to shut down fossil fuels, these people don’t seem to be terribly prominent. So how have they been convincing people to give them tens of millions of dollars every year just so they can shower it upon Democratic political campaigns? And who is giving them all of that money? Nobody seems to know. It’s a mystery. But that kind of money can buy someone a lot of influence, including the political muscle required to receive frequent invitations to visit the White House. It’s not hard to imagine that these are some of the little birds that have been whispering in Joe Biden’s ear and contributing to his crazy climate policies. I wonder if they’ve been lobbying for the massively higher fuel and emission standards that will soon make gas-powered automobiles and trucks unaffordable. Perhaps someone should shine a light on these individuals and let the autoworkers’ unions know about them.

I’m grateful for this sort of investigative journalism that gives us a peek under the covers in terms of how things truly work in the swamp. This is the dark underbelly of American politics. We can rest assured that there are many more people like these three scurrying around the Beltway. They have their hands on the true levers of power far more solidly than any working-class people or run-of-the-mill voters ever will. Pay no attention to the wizard on the House floor. It’s the person behind the curtain that you have to keep your eyes on. Or the three people in this case.