Lee Heidhues 2.2.2022
Tim Redmond, publisher of 48 Hills, has done a dive into the most recent financial disclosures in the effort to Recall San Francisco’s progressive DA Chesa Boudin.
The Recall campaign hired mercenaries to qualify the measure for the ballot, spending $1,4000,000. Mercenaries, many of them from outside California, were housed, fed and well compensated for each signature.
Absent these mercenaries the DA Recall never would have qualified for the ballot.
This Recall is no mom and pop effort. It is a well orchestrated effort by the most extreme right wing cadres in this country to pull off an electoral coup d’etat.
The most shocking finding. Only $150,000 has been raised by small local contributions. The massive balance are contributions from super wealthy individuals and dark money Political Action Committees attempting to subvert democracy and bring down San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney.
Mercenary signature gatherer – June 2021
Excerpted from 48 Hills – Tim Redmond – 2.2.2022
The latest financial disclosure forms for this spring’s elections were filed with the city and the state yesterday, and some of the information is just stunning. Not surprising, I suppose, but stunning.
William Oberndorf, The big GOP donor and support of Mitch McConnell, has now put more than $600,000—including an unusual donation of roughly $300,000 in stock—into the campaign to recall Chesa Boudin.
If you take out all the contributions from the multi-millionaires, the campaign has only raised about $150,000. That wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of paid signature-gathering, which came in at more than $1 million.
The message: Twenty rich people have paid to put this recall on the ballot. (Let’s be serious—for $1 million you can get almost anything on the ballot in San Francisco.) They are pretty much funding the entire campaign.
That money to the recall campaign is all flowing through a separate organization called Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, created to defeat progressives for supervisor in 2020. It’s now by far the primary source of funding for the recall.
In fact, records on filed with the Secretary of State’s Office show that Neighbors—and an affiliated dark-money nonprofit by the same name that doesn’t disclose its donors—made up almost 80 percent of the $1.4 million going into San Franciscans for Public Safety, the main recall group.
And the vast majority of the Neighbors money comes from 20 donors, most of them very rich. Some of them don’t live in San Francisco.
Virtually all of them made their money in tech, venture capital, or real estate.
Top photo: DA Chesa Boudin being sworn into office by Mayor London Breed as his wife Dr. Valerie Block looks on 1.8.2020
Big, big millionaire money is almost entirely funding the Boudin recall
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