With orders, investigations and innuendo, Trump and GOP aim to cripple the left

Boston Globe

19-03-2025

A small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them, according to two people familiar with the group's work who requested anonymity to describe it.
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Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups, and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law.
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It is not unusual for partisans in Congress, or their outside allies, to push for investigations into political groups on the other side of the aisle.
But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution. Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens.
Trump's continued willingness to defy that norm — including in a grievance-filled speech at the Justice Department on Friday, during which he name-checked a litany of critics and called them 'horrible people,' 'thugs,' and 'scum' — has Democrats sounding the alarm.
'The breadth is breathtaking,' said Cole Leiter, executive director of Americans Against Government Censorship, a coalition of progressive groups and labor unions created last year to defend against an anticipated Republican assault. Taken together, Leiter said, the efforts amounted to an attempt 'to cut the legs out from their opposition.'
It may 'sound conspiratorial,' Leiter said, 'but the reality is it's a sober description of what they're trying to do.'
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Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, did not directly address the accusation that the administration's actions were aimed at crippling the left. 'The Democrats don't need President Trump to dismantle the Democratic Party,' he said in a statement. 'They are self-destructing with their radical policies.'
Undermining the left would amount to follow-through on Trump's campaign promises to seek 'retribution' against his perceived enemies.
The sentiment has been echoed and expanded upon by some of Trump's closest advisers.
Billionaire Elon Musk, the top Trump donor leading the administration's cost-cutting initiative, has appeared to encourage investigations of institutions that form the financial backbone of the left. They include ActBlue, the donation platform that helps fund virtually the entire Democratic Party and that congressional Republicans are already probing, and Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm that manages difficult-to-trace 'dark money' groups that collectively have spent billions of dollars helping Democrats and their causes.
'Something stinks about ActBlue,' Musk wrote March 7, in one of several social media posts about the platform. A day later, he claimed without evidence that ActBlue was funded by Democratic megadonors including Herb Sandler, who died in 2019.
Megan Hughes, an ActBlue spokesperson, denied that the group was funded by the people Musk named, living or dead. 'The only funders that ActBlue has are small-dollar donors that work sacrificially to fund worthy campaigns and causes,' she said in a statement.
At the recent White House briefing, according to a person familiar with it, Walter presented research about ActBlue and major Democratic donors, leaving behind materials including copies of a book he published last year about Arabella.
Congressional officials say the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to throw its weight behind investigations of ActBlue in the House. And Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has suggested that ActBlue might have criminal exposure. He has also demanded documents from and threatened to subpoena another key company providing digital infrastructure for the left, Bonterra, which runs a crucial Democratic voter database system and supplies much of the party's organizing software.
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For now, Republicans are making wild claims about illegal activity at ActBlue with little to no evidence. But congressional Republicans believe the Trump administration will be far more cooperative in providing financial records to fuel their investigations than the Biden administration was.
'This is not a partisan issue,' said Jonathan Wilcox, deputy chief of staff for Republican Representative Darrell Issa of Calif., 'and we're optimistic this Treasury Department will demonstrate a completely different commitment to public transparency and government oversight.'
Last week, several Republican lawmakers urged Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to investigate ActBlue or to help them do so. Issa sought information on claims that ActBlue had assisted groups accused of supporting terrorism. Representative James Comer of Kentucky, Nick Langworthy of New York, and Bryan Steil of Wisconsin requested reports about suspicious activity related to ActBlue.
The Treasury Department did not respond when asked if it was cooperating with the Republican congressmen.
But the terrorism accusation -- even without evidence -- is notable. A bill that passed the House, over objections from most Democrats and many in the nonprofit world, would have allowed the Treasury secretary to strip a charitable group of its tax-exempt status if it was deemed a 'terrorist-supporting' organization.
The FBI declined to say if it was acting on a request last week by Republican Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, for an investigation of whether ActBlue had allowed Democrats 'to skirt the integrity of federal campaign finance laws,' including by processing donations that originated in hostile foreign countries. But Kash Patel, the new FBI director and a Trump loyalist, has reportedly expressed willingness to work aggressively to comply with Republican congressional oversight, and a close Trump ally predicted Monday at an event with Donald Trump Jr. that the FBI would take action 'soon' on ActBlue.
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The group has denied Republican claims of wrongdoing. Hughes said ActBlue was 'meeting this moment with the same resilience and determination that have fueled our work for decades.'
But Democrats worry that ActBlue may offer a harbinger of what is in store for other important Democratic institutions.
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