Schumer-aligned group pumps nearly $50M in secretive donations into midterms to save Senate majority

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A dark money nonprofit associated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has pumped nearly $50 million in secretive donations into the midterm elections as Democrats attempt to hang on to the Senate majority, filings reviewed by Fox News Digital show.

Majority Forward, a dark money nonprofit that hides its funders, on Oct. 12 funneled a $20 million contribution to the Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC (SMP) to elect and maintain Democrats in Congress's upper chamber, Federal Election Commission records reveal.

The donation is SMP's largest this election cycle and follows the roughly $27 million Majority Forward already passed to SMP, according to its records. Majority Forward is SMP's most significant funder for the midterm elections with $47 million now poured into the committee heading into the home stretch to Election Day.

"Liberals decry dark money, unless it's their own," Americans for Public Trust executive director Caitlin Sutherland told Fox News Digital. "The fact that this Schumer-backed group funneled $20 million to help Schumer keep his gavel, just weeks after his diatribe on the evils of money in politics, is the height of hypocrisy."

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Majority Forward, a group closely aligned with the Chuck Schumer-tied Senate Majority PAC, has pushed substantial amounts of dark money into the midterms to help save Democrats. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Majority Forward and SMP are closely affiliated entities. J.B Poersch, a Schumer ally, is Majority Forward's and SMP's president. The groups share a Washington, D.C., office and employees, and Majority Forward has added hundreds of thousands of dollars for salaries, insurance and IT security, filings show.

The Schumer-aligned groups soaked in dark money even as he publicly criticized the practice. As recently as Sept. 19, Schumer called dark money a "cancer" and added, "Americans deserve to know who's spending billions to sway our democracy."

Majority Forward launched in 2015 as a voter turnout operation and has since collected increasing sums from mystery donors. The nonprofit raked in $105 million between July 2020 and June 2021, its most recent tax forms show, which was a $13 million increase over its previous calendar year.

But as Majority Forward pulled in the personal record amounts, Schumer also pushed legislation against dark money after previously demanding that right-leaning judicial groups make their donors public, even as Democrats simultaneously benefited from such groups.

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has railed against dark money and pushed legislation against it. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool)

Schumer has championed the For the People Act, which contains provisions to make political nonprofits disclose donors who give more than $10,000. The bill also calls for nonprofits to file disclosure reports to the Federal Election Commission when they inject more than $10,000 into election-related activities — much like Majority Forward, which chooses to obscure its financial backers.

Additionally, Schumer, outspoken dark money critic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and other Democratic politicians previously called on the Judicial Crisis Network, a right-leaning organization, to release a list of donors who provided the group with more than $10,000.

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The dark money Majority Forward nonprofit is the largest donor to the Chuck Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC this election cycle. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The senators criticized the group for concealing "the identity of its donors" who "have contributed tens of millions of dollars used to fund political advertising campaigns in support of nominees like Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch."

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The politicians made the demand as they reaped the rewards from their own judicial dark money groups, including Demand Justice and the Alliance for Justice. Both groups have undertaken initiatives to influence President Joe Biden on judicial nominations, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Senate Majority PAC did not respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment.