President Donald Trump has never hidden the fact that his very long enemies list includes major names from the philanthropic sector. After Charlie Kirk was killed, he and his allies called out both the Ford Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations specifically, as IP reported last week.
According to a New York Times report yesterday, the Department of Justice is now formulating plans to open a criminal investigation into the Open Society Foundations. A department directive obtained by the Times laid out how the DOJ may proceed: “Possible charges [against Open Society Foundations] included racketeering, arson, wire fraud and material support for terrorism.” Also yesterday, Trump issued a presidential memorandum seeking to establish “a new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources and predicate actions behind them.”
As evidence to support the Department of Justice’s investigation of OSF, a DOJ lawyer pointed to a report by the Capital Research Center (CRC), according to the Times. CRC is a nonprofit watchdog organization that has been backed in part by major conservative funders including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, John William Pope Foundation, William E. Simon Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust and Sarah Scaife Foundation, as well as supporters who donate anonymously through the conservative DAF sponsor DonorsTrust.
An earlier Times article underscored CRC’s role, reporting that Scott Walter, who heads the organization, “has briefed senior White House officials in recent months on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fundraising techniques, while also providing research briefs, including one titled ‘Marching Toward Violence,’ that purported to draw a connection between anti-Israel protests on college campuses and terrorism.”
In a recent interview with IP, Walter had this to say about CRC’s discussions with the White House: “I briefed them on our research, which is always public. I know it would make a wonderful novel if I were secretly plotting with some White House official, but I’m not. I’m just giving people our reports and answering questions.”
Walter added, “No administration official has ever asked us, ‘Whom should we prosecute?’ Nor have we told any official to prosecute anyone. We have simply carried out our charitable mission, which is to investigate and expose special interests, especially nonprofit ones.”
Still, the report, “Soros’ Open Society Gave Terrorist and Pro-Terror Groups Over $80 Million,” which alleges links between OSF and what CRC characterizes as terrorist or extremist organizations, does suggest some paths the administration could take: “Our findings could potentially form the justification for various accountability actions, including federal investigations and prosecutions, U.S. State Department and Treasury Department sanctions, revoking of tax-exempt statuses of Open Society and its grantees by the Internal Revenue Service, congressional investigations and civil suits.”
Yesterday, in an email to supporters, CRC took a bit of a victory lap: “Following the awful assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump vowed to go after the networks who fund the hateful, destructive Left,” the message reads. “Your friends at Capital Research Center have answered the call. Thanks to you, we’re perfectly placed to help leaders in the Trump Administration and Congress pursue the powerful leftists who support and promote violence.”
Open Society Foundations issued a statement in response to the administration’s reported investigation that reads, in part, “The Open Society Foundations unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law. These accusations are politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech.”
The Trump administration targets “leftist terrorist networks”
The administration and allies like CRC appear to be ignoring the fact that officials believe that Kirk’s killer acted alone. Instead, they are building and stoking the specter of an organized and violent cabal, what White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called “leftist terror networks.” Trump further fueled that narrative in his recent presidential memorandum.
Instead of toning down the rhetoric and working to heal divisions after Kirk’s death, the administration is using the tragedy to go after those who don’t support its agenda (yesterday, Trump also threatened LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman). So far his enemies list includes late night television hosts, political figures, media companies, law firms, universities, nonprofits — and progressive philanthropy.
Is the Trump administration’s goal “a chilling effect?”
It is still unclear how far the administration plans to go to target philanthropy, or exactly what strategies it will pursue beyond its apparent moves against OSF. Last week, IP’s Michael Kavate explored this question with several legal scholars. One, Notre Dame Law Professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, emphasized legal protections that make it difficult to strip an organization of its nonprofit status. “I still think the risk is pretty low with respect to tax exempt status because of the legal barriers,” he said.
Still, as Georgetown Law Professor David A. Super told Kavate, the administration’s threats will have a chilling effect — and that is the goal.
“The pattern we’ve seen in the other areas suggests that they can get a great deal of results from a relatively modest amount of intimidation, and that model is attractive to them,” Super said. Targeting big names like Ford and Open Society, he believes, will serve to silence other organizations and encourage them to keep their heads down.
It is too early to say if the administration’s intimidation plan is working. A host of philanthropy leaders signed an open letter, issued shortly after OSF and Ford were singled out by the president and vice president, pushing back against “attempts to exploit political violence to mischaracterize our good work or restrict our fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech and the freedom to give.” The letter now has over 180 signatures, but that is significantly fewer than the number that signed an April letter defending philanthropy’s right to give. Still, many philanthropies and nonprofits added their names in support of First Amendment rights, as my colleague Dawn Wolfe reported.
Since yesterday’s Times report, some major funders and funding leaders, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Freedom Together Foundation’s Deepak Bhargava and MacArthur Foundation’s John Palfrey, have issued statements or posted on LinkedIn in support of OSF.
The ACLU’s Anthony Romero also defended OSF: “The accusations levied against the Open Society Foundations are the latest example of just how far the Trump administration will go to silence its critics… We are living in a modern-day McCarthy moment, as President Trump turns the full weight of the Department of Justice against organizations speaking out against his administration’s increasingly un-American agenda.”
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Echoes of Orbán
The Trump administration’s actions evoke the policies of another authoritarian leader and archenemy of Soros’ philanthropic project, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Trump and others in the MAGA movement have made it clear that they admire Orbán — the Conservative Political Action Conference even held its annual conference in Hungary earlier this year. Orbán has worked to reshape the judiciary, silence media outlets, attack migrants and threaten universities and civic organizations — efforts that Trump appears to be emulating.
And of course, Orbán has long positioned George Soros as a convenient enemy, using antisemitic tropes to accuse the philanthropist, who was born in Hungary, of plotting to destabilize the government, and repeatedly invoking his name to bolster his policies at home and abroad.
If Hungary is the Trump administration’s playbook, as some believe, the former U.S ambassador to that country has a warning. In an opinion piece published earlier this year, David Pressman wrote, “After years watching Hungary suffocate under the weight of its democratic collapse, I came to understand that the real danger of a strongman isn’t his tactics; it’s how others, especially those with power, justify their acquiescence.”
