The Republican Party's single biggest donor in the 2022 midterm election cycle also teamed up with a nationwide network aimed at overturning GOP election losses.
Right-wing megadonor Dick Uihlein funneled tens of millions of dollars to the nonprofit Restoration Action Inc., which hired former Donald Trump campaign official and election conspiracy theorist Gina Swoboda as its executive director, according to a newly uncovered IRS filing shared with The Daily Beast.
“Restoration Action is a hub for election denial, including funding some of the key players pushing election falsehoods in Arizona at the moment,” said Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of the watchdog group Documented, which obtained and shared the filing. “This is a reminder that there’s big money behind the push to undermine democracy. Through Restoration Action and other entities, an array of groups pushing election conspiracy theories are backed by literally tens of millions of dollars from just one billionaire couple.”
The filing shows the dark-money group raised more than $20.5 million in the 12 months after the Jan. 6 insurrection, twice its haul from 2020 and substantially more than its $64,000 in revenue in 2019, and it's funded almost exclusively by Uihlein and his wife Elizabeth.
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Restoration Action hired Swoboda, the vice chair of the Arizona Republican Party, to run its offshoot Voter Reference Foundation, which has released the personal information of millions of voters -- in possible violation of the law -- to allow its members to search for "errors" in voter rolls.
Restoration Action isn't required to list its donors, but it must disclose the groups it funds, which include a number of election deniers and other right-wing causes, including $3.2 million to the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List.
SBA launched an "election transparency initiative" a month after the insurrection with another Uihlein-backed group called the “American Principles Project," which got nearly $1 million from Restoration Action and aired election ads in Arizona accusing Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and President Joe Biden of pushing gender-affirming care on children.
Restoration Action also gave $600,000 Jan. 6 rally organizer Tea Party Patriots and $1.5 million to the conservative dark-money group Lawyers Democracy Fund, which successfully challenged mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania last month and legally supported the so-called “independent state legislature” theory before North Carolina's Supreme Court.
The group also funded the conspiratorial group Fight Voter Fraud and the Liberty Initiative Fund, which seeks more restrictive voter ID requirements in Michigan.
