A husband-and-wife duo whose fortune has ties to AI investments and cryptocurrency trading are quietly emerging as some of the largest backers of the main dark-money group boosting President Joe Biden.
The second-largest donation in 2022 to the non-profit arm of Future Forward, the primary Super PAC supporting Biden, came from a group run by James McClave and Emily Berger. The couple work at Jane Street, a Manhattan trading firm, and McClave was an early investor in the AI company Anthropic.
Tax records reviewed by CNN, which have not been previously reported, show that BEMC 4 Association — a non-profit whose only two executives are McClave and Berger — gave $7.2 million to Future Forward USA Action in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s more than any group other than the George Soros-linked Open Society Policy Center, which gave $15.2 million that year.
While Future Forward USA Action does not disclose its donors, other non-profits that give to it report those contributions – and CNN analyzed tax filing data released by the IRS to uncover some of them. Other than the Soros group and BEMC, the group’s top contributors in 2022 included other left-leaning non-profits such as the League of Conservation Voters and the Fund for a Better Future, which gave $2.5 million each, and the Hopewell Fund, which gave about $1.55 million.
The millions flowing through Future Forward is an example of how wealthy donors on both sides of the aisle are using dark-money groups to shape American politics while staying under the radar. And even as Democrats like Biden have criticized the impact of dark money and pushed for reforms, they’re also major beneficiaries of the system. That trend is set to continue this year: Future Forward has announced plans to run the largest ever political advertising campaign…
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