Corporate Donors Gave $44 Million to Election Deniers’ Campaigns

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.A new report suggests that despite the statements of outrage and promises to reevaluate PAC donations, corporate donors have continued to support members of Congress who objected to certifying the 2020 election. 
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an liberal-leaning watchdog group, said on Friday that a new analysis shows that the 147 members of what it dubs the Sedition Caucus—lawmakers who voted against certifying Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss following the January 6 insurrection—have since raked in at least $44 million in corporate PAC donations to their campaigns. CREW says the donations came from 1,283 different corporate and industry trade group PACs.
Immediately after January 6, some of the biggest companies and trade associations involved with lobbying in Washington said they would stop donations to election objectors, or even stop making donations altogether. Despite these pledges, CREW found that of the $44 million donated from corporate PACs to election deniers, at least $12 million came from sources that had pledged to suspend donations to members who sought to overturn the election.
CREW found that the five biggest sources of donations to the Sedition Caucus were PACs associated with Koch Industries ($625,000), American Crystal Sugar ($530,000), Home Depot ($350,000), Boeing ($488,000), and UPS ($479,500). Boeing, Home Depot, and Koch had all paused donations or promised to reevaluate their donations after January 6.
This is not entirely surprising. Despite the companies’ pledges in the wake of January 6 to stop donating—or, as a Koch Industries spokesperson put it at the time, reevaluate donations based on the “the civility of candidates”—contributions never really seemed to be paused. Within the first six months after the insurrection, members of the Sedition Caucus had already raised $3.8 million from corporate PACs.