Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

Floor Speech

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Mr. ZINKE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of a select committee to investigate the weaponization of the Federal Government, something I have a lot of experience with firsthand.

I proudly served as the 52nd Secretary of the Interior. Despite the deep state's repeated attempts to stop me, I stand before you as a duly elected Member of the United States Congress and tell you that a deep state exists and is perhaps the strongest covert weapon the left has against the American people.

There is no doubt the Federal Government deep state coordinates with liberal activists and uses politicians and willing media to carry their water.

The deep state runs secret messaging campaigns with one goal in mind: to increase its power to censor and persuade the American people.

Dark money groups funded by liberal billionaires and foreign investors funnel money to shell organizations and repeatedly attempt to destroy the American West. In many cases, they want to wipe out the American cowboy completely, remove public access to our lands, and turn Montana into a national park. They want to control our land and our lifestyle.

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record two parts of a five-part series of investigative articles by the Capital Research Center titled: ``Arabella's Long War: Web of `Pop-Up' Groups'' and ``Arabella's Long War: `Keep it in the Ground.' '' [From the Capital Research Center, Nov. 12, 2021] Arabella's Long War: Web of ``Pop-Up'' Groups--How Leftist ``Dark Money'' Activists Brought Down Trump's Secretary of the Interior and Paved the way for Biden's Radical Environmentalists (By Hayden Ludmig) A Web of ``Pop-Up'' Groups

Enter Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm based in Washington, DC, that quietly runs arguably the most powerful activist and lobbying network in politics. Arabella manages four in-house nonprofits collectively called the ``sisters,'' each of which controls a small army of activists and a legion of ``pop-up'' groups. And each pop-up group is made to look like a slick, stand-alone website. These pop-ups target virtually every issue in politics--control of the courts, abortion access, gun control, and voter registration and mobilization, even the Trump-Russia collusion hoax--pushing left-wing policies in every corner. What makes Arabella so powerful is how these ``pop-ups'' deceive individuals into believing they represent genuine local grassroots interests, such as one pop-up in Alaska created to oppose creation of the Pebble Mine run from Arabella's plush offices in DC.

Arabella's network is extraordinarily well-funded. In 2019 alone, the four ``sisters'' reported total revenues exceeding $730 million and poured out $648 million. Between the network's creation in 2006 and its Form 990 filing for 2019 (the latest available), Arabella's empire has received more than $3 billion and spent nearly $2.5 billion. Most of that funding was directed to the network's flagship 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the New Venture Fund, whose largest known donors include the Gates, Ford, Hewlett, Packard, and Buffett Foundations.

Beginning in 2017, Arabella turned its guns on Trump's Department of the Interior using a pop-up pair: Western Values Project (WVP) and its ``sister,'' Western Values Project Action (WVPA).

According to their websites, WVP and WVPA were created in 2013 in Helena, Montana, to expose corrupt corporate lobbyists preying on public lands in the West. In reality, WVP is run by the 501(c)(3) New Venture Fund while WVPA is run by the 501(c)(4) Sixteen Thirty Fund, Arabella's in-house lobbying shop. Whatever staff the groups actually have would have been paid by one of Arabella's nonprofits or possibly by Arabella Advisors itself; we'll likely never know. But in its 2018 Form 990, New Venture Fund revealed that it is the ``paymaster'' for Sixteen Thirty Fund (which reported zero employees on its own 2018 Form 990) and ``pays the salary and immediately invoices Sixteen Thirty Fund, which reimburses the full amount.''

It's common for groups to use both kinds of nonprofit to maximize their ability to lobby through the 501(c)(4) and raise non-lobbying funds through the 501(c)(3), since donors may deduct donations to the 501(c)(3) from their taxes. But Arabella takes that tactic to another level, using pop-up fronts for its nonprofits that can take advantage of the New Venture and Sixteen Thirty Fund's respective tax advantages without disclosing their relationship to one another. Donations to WVP and WVPA in fact benefitted the Arabella-run nonprofits behind the projects, as an archived version of WVP's website from October 2019 reveals.

Until late 2019 the website for WVP and WVPA revealed a handful of staffers, including Chris Saeger, ex- communications director for the Montana Democratic Party and former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) staffer; Jayson O'Neill, a Democratic staffer for Montana's legislature and Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D); and Yetta Stein, a staffer for the left-wing political action committee End Citizens United and staffer for the 2018 reelection campaign Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT). The archived website also showed a small advisory board consisting of:

Kjersten Forseth, a former chief of state for Colorado State Senate Democrats, former director of the left-wing strategy group ProgressNow Colorado, political director for the Colorado AFL-CIO, and chief political strategist for Rocky Mountain Voter Outreach, a Denver-based get-out-the- vote and ballot initiative firm.

Kent Salazar, an environmental health manager for Albuquerque, New Mexico, former New Mexico State game commissioner for Gov. Bill Richardson (D), and a board member for the left-wing National Wildlife Federation.

Pat Smith, a lawyer representing Indian tribes in Montana, member of the 2010 Montana Redistricting Commission, and appointee of Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

WVP's advisory board also included Caroline Ciccone, who in 2019 was executive director of the New Venture Fund pop-up and anti-Trump ``oversight'' group Restore Public Trust. Ciccone is a former communications director for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Obama appointee to the U.S. Small Business Administration, and Democratic strategist. From 2014 to 2017 she led Americans United for Change (AUFC), a top left-wing strategy group whose national field director Scott Foval was recorded in late 2016 by undercover journalists from Project Veritas bragging that AUFC had paid mentally ill and homeless people to instigate violence at Trump campaign rallies. ``We know that Trump's people will [tend to] freak the f-- out,'' Foval said in the video. ``It is not hard to get some of these a------- to `pop off.' '' The scandal ultimately led back to Robert Creamer, co-founder of the powerful consulting firm Democracy Partners and a former general consultant to AUFC who directed parts of a vast network of advocacy groups all aligned in support of Hillary Clinton's presidential bid. This led to speculation that his firm helped Clinton's campaign violate collusion laws. Foval described Creamer's role in the scandal as the ``kingpin'' who is ``diabolical, and I love him for it.'' Within days of the video's release Creamer resigned, and Foval was fired.

Also present was Kyle Herrig, a New Venture Fund board member who sat on the advisory boards of at least five New Venture Fund projects, including American Oversight, a judicial activist and litigation group; Allied Progress, which attacked Trump cabinet officials; and the Ciccone-run Restore Public Trust.

In early 2020 it was announced that Western Values Project and these three Arabella ``pop-ups'' were being rolled into a new organization: Accountable.US, itself a former New Venture Fund project fully established as an independent nonprofit sometime later that year, headed by president Kyle Herrig and executive director Caroline Ciccone. (It appears that Western Values Project Action remains a project of Sixteen Thirty Fund, but that remains unclear as of writing.)

This reveals that Western Values Project, far from being a grassroots group, is enmeshed in a deeply networked, highly coordinated cabal of professional activists--and it always was. ____ [From the Capital Research Center, Nov. 12, 2021]

Arabella's Long War: ``Keep It in the Ground''--How Leftist ``Dark Money'' Activists Brought Down Trump's Secretary of the Interior and Paved the Way for Biden's Radical Environmentalists (By Hayden Ludwig)

Summary: For years ``dark money'' activists ran a coordinated campaign to sabotage and undermine the Trump administration from the offices of Arabella Advisors in Washington, DC. The campaign culminated in the most extreme environmentalist regime in American history under President Joseph Biden. This report goes inside that campaign to destroy Trump's Department of the Interior and promote the Left's war on affordable energy.

In 2019, the Capital Research Center's groundbreaking report on Arabella Advisors exposed the half-billion-dollar network for the first time, dragging Arabella into the limelight as the posterchild of the Left's ``dark money.'' Since then we've continued to uncover this now $730 million activist empire, tracing its shadowy campaigns on everything from abortion on demand to packing the Supreme Court to its war on the Trump administration.

This report on the Arabella network examines the professional Left's years-long campaign to undermine President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior, laying the groundwork for the Biden administration's crusade against oil and the most radical environmentalist policies in American history . ``Keep It in the Ground''

The U.S. Department of the Interior is primarily responsible for managing roughly 450 million acres of federal land and conservation of their natural resources, most critically the nation's vast reserves of oil and natural gas. It manages hundreds of dams and reservoirs, regulates drilling on public lands, runs the National Park Service, and maintains public monuments, including dozens attacked by radical Black Lives Matter activists in 2020.

The department also plays a role in foreign diplomacy and national security. Under President Trump that included international wildlife trafficking bans, encouraging trade of precious metals and rare earths, and promoting his Indo- Pacific security and economic strategy.

But the department's openness to expanding oil and gas production brought the sharpest attacks from the Left. Since the department is entirely under the president's purview, halting all drilling on public land is far easier than attempting to halt private oil and gas production nationwide--the radical Left's ultimate goal.

``The natural place to start phasing out supply is on our public lands and oceans where a ban on new leasing will keep up to 450 billion tons of carbon pollution in the ground,'' Center for Biological Diversity director Kieran Suckling said in 2015. Bill McKibben, founder of the ultra-leftist 350.org, has also stated that ``public lands are one of the easiest places for us to control the flow of carbon into the atmosphere.''

Unsurprisingly, that's been the policy of Democratic presidents and their activist allies for years. President Barack Obama canceled lease sales in the Artic and Atlantic offshore sites and banned the leasing of coal on federal lands. Phasing down ``extraction of fossil fuels from our public lands'' was in the Democratic Party's 2016 platform. That same year a 350.org activist asked Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton what she meant by ``extraction on public lands is a done deal?'' Clinton replied, ``That's where [President Obama] is moving: No future extraction. I agree with that.'' Her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, later assured another 350.org activist that ``I actually am now in that position.''

But even ``phasing down'' is too conservative for today's ``keep it in the ground'' Left. No less than 20 Democratic presidential hopefuls vowed to ban drilling on public lands outright during their party's 2020 primary. Ever the pawn of the radical Left, on January 27, 2021--exactly one week after his inauguration--President Biden indefinitely suspended development of new oil and gas wells on public lands, which the left-leaning San Francisco Chronicle cheered as ``a first step to halting the granting of federal drilling leases permanently.''

Why does this matter? Federal lands account for roughly 24 percent of America's oil, natural gas, and coal production. In 2019, total crude oil production reached an all-time high of 4.471 billion barrels, with a significant chunk of that growth coming from oil drilled on federal lands. Biden's ban blocks future development of these key resources, removing them from the supply stream and hampering the energy independence the United States struggled to achieve in recent years. This means higher gasoline and household electricity prices, an estimated $11.3 billion in lost federal royalties and rental fees, and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs across the economy.

With a single executive order, the Left could advance its crusade to ``keep it in the ground'' for years in the name of global warming. The stakes couldn't be higher--all that stood in its way was the Trump administration.

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Mr. ZINKE. We all knew politics was ugly, but we need to investigate and uncover corruption no matter where it lies. It is time to bring light to the shadows of the deep state and do our duty.

Mr. Speaker, I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting this critical piece of oversight investigations.

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