This year's election is on track to be the most expensive ever, with influential groups like AIPAC becoming consequential forces in shaping American political spending and discourse.
Twenty more pro-Israel candidates endorsed by AIPAC won their primary elections in Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky and Oregon.
For more than 60 years, AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, has focused on issue-based lobbying to, quote-unquote, build bipartisan support for the U.S.-Israel relationship.
But in 2022, the influential group embraced a new strategy, targeting members of Congress critical of unconditional military aid to Israel. Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, a new podcast from our newsroom.
I'm Jessica Washington, a politics reporter at The Intercept and your host this week.Every week we'll bring you stories from The Intercept's newsroom and discuss the most consequential issues of our time.
This week we're bringing you a story from senior politics reporter Akilah Lacy. Over the years, she has reported on the role AIPAC has played in individual races, injecting millions to oust any member of Congress insufficiently pro-Israel.
She joins me now to discuss her latest investigation, which looks at the sum of AIPAC's massive outflow of money this election cycle, and the impact those funds have had on shaping U.S.-Israel policy. Welcome to the show, Akayla.Thank you, Jessi.
To start, I want to ask, I mean, many people are probably familiar with AIPAC, but as someone who's an expert, I would argue, what is AIPAC and what do they do?
So to answer that question, I'll zoom out a little bit, which is why do we even care about what AIPAC is? Israel's war on Gaza is entering its 13th month, and AIPAC has played a huge outsized role in this year's elections.
But the role of the Israel lobby goes back half a century plus to Israel's founding, upon which it became the top recipient of U.S.military aid and economic aid going back to 1946.I think we've given them over $300 billion.
They are the top recipient of aid every year, year upon year. And we currently have an MOU to give them around $3.8 billion in aid every year, but that is dwarfed by the amounts that we've given since the war in Gaza started last year.
So the question is, you know, how is all of this possible?
For people who really want to know more about the longer history of the Israel lobby beyond the electoral spending, which is what we'll be focusing on today, I will recommend a synonymous book called The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, which talks through some of the talking points that have been, you know,
brought up to explain why we have this special relationship with Israel, for lack of a better word, that it's, you know, the only democracy in the Middle East, that it's a strategic ally geopolitically, economically, for many reasons.
The thesis of the book basically is that none of these things can explain our relationship with Israel unless you understand the power of the Israel lobby, the biggest group of which is AIPAC.
So, you know, the investigation that we just did looks at the $100 million that they spent this year on elections.This is just a lobbying group.It's just a very effective lobbying group.
It's like the trade industry or the agricultural industry or, you know, business interests.It's just that it is extremely effective at what it does, and it has almost no opponents.So that allows AIPAC to have this outsized power over not just U.S.
foreign policy, but domestic policy, and as we'll get into now, over electoral politics.
Yeah, I really want to pick your brain about all of this.But first, I think it's helpful to kind of put this in context.So you already told us the $100 million number, but I mean, how does APAC compare to other large PACs?
So other PACs spend, you know, millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars. What's different about APAC spending is the concentration that we saw this year.
So it's not unusual to see tens of millions of dollars or even more coming from a particular industry.But from one individual PAC, just two years since it started spending directly on elections, $100 million is an enormous figure.
other industries, I think you can compare them to sort of the Israel lobby spending, which includes groups like AIPAC, but also pro-Israel America PAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, but AIPAC is still the main group.
But the difference is that the crypto lobby, you know, spending X tens of millions of dollars On campaigns, that includes dozens of groups.We're not just talking about one group spending $100 million, which is the case with AIPAC.
So that's, I think, a really big difference.How do they get this money?That's a lot of money.
Who's giving it to them?Where is this coming from?
It's a great question, and campaign finance laws make it hard to figure that out.
There has been some great reporting done on this by colleagues at The Intercept, at lots of different publications, which is mostly coming from leaked donor rolls, leaked emails, information like that.
Some of the major players are well-known and are, you know, proud and vocal about their support.But broadly, AIPAC says they have 5 million members. Dozens of those happen to be billionaires, some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
A lot of them, you know, we're talking bipartisan, you know, major Democratic and Republican donors.But when you're talking about that amount of support, five million people. including, you know, more than a dozen billionaires.
That's how they raise their money.They're very effective.They have a wide base of support that happens to concentrate among some of the wealthier people in the country.
I want to switch gears a little bit to talking specifically about Israel's war on Gaza.So obviously it's been well over a year now since the war started, and more Americans are starting to feel as if Israel has gone too far, particularly Democrats.
A Pew Research poll found that recently.You know, at the same time, AIPAC has beefed up its electoral efforts over the last year.I mean, what was their strategy and was it effective?
AIPAC's lobbying strategy was highly effective. even before they launched these two new PACs, which I think says a lot about the group's potential and where it plans to go.
APAC, you know, solely through lobbying lawmakers, you know, funding congressional junkets to Israel, had been able to maintain the status quo that we've seen, you know, in bipartisan foreign policy towards Israel, you know, throughout our lifetimes, which is unconditional support, annual support, bipartisan sort of
refrains that Israel has the right to defend itself no matter what happens and sort of this tacit understanding that we aren't going to talk about documented human rights abuses in Palestine.The U.S.Congress is not the place for those conversations.
So they had all that in the bag.And then in recent
congressional elections, you know, progressive members of Congress started running on not only, you know, populist economic policies, not only on social justice issues, but on talking about this longstanding silence, talking about Palestine, talking about human rights abuses, questioning why is no one talking about this?
And why is Israel getting billions of dollars in aid from the U.S.every year when our, you know, our school systems, our housing infrastructure, X, Y, and Z are crumbling?We want health care. Right.
So you started seeing people like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar running on not only populist economic policies and social justice issues, but on being critical of Israel's human rights abuses and of U.S.military support for Israel.
And AIPAC and its allies, including a guy named Mark Mellman, who was a long-time consultant for AIPAC and started a new group called Democratic Majority for Israel during that cycle, wanted to basically test the waters and see, okay,
We've been very successful in sort of dictating foreign policy to date, but now we have these upstarts in Congress, basically, and we want to shore up Democratic support for Israel because we see that the dam is starting to break, hence the name Democratic Majority for Israel.
And so that cycle, they launched, they ran ads against Bernie Sanders in Nevada shortly after he expressed support for conditioning military aid during his presidential campaign that year.
DMFI had an agreement with AIPAC so that AIPAC donors could basically funnel their money to support these ads.And that was sort of like a pilot run for what we see AIPAC doing this cycle, which is
specifically targeting candidates who have been critical of U.S.
military aid and who have proposed either restricting that aid or who have proposed some other policy or made comments even that can be interpreted as being anti-Israel or questioning this relationship.
I mean, Bernie Sanders lost that election cycle.I don't think we can attribute it to these ads necessarily.But they notched that as, you know, OK, we can do this in other races.
And as, you know, we saw more and more members of Congress start to put this on the table, You know, the idea of conditioning military aid, Elizabeth Warren, I think, came out shortly after that.
And, you know, the squad continued to grow, electing other people who were adding to this growing chorus of voices.We had people like, you know, Murray Newman and Andy Levin coming out and talking about this, too.
And as quickly as those candidates came up, we saw AIPAC and DMFI
coming in to spend against them and effectively say, if you're going to start bringing this into Congress, we're going to use all of our ample resources to, you know, knock you out of the running.
COLLEEN O'BRIEN I have to say, like, thinking about this and a story we recently covered together, actually, I mean, I spoke to one activist who was saying, you know, progressive except for Palestine doesn't exist anymore.
And that's been kind of the major change.I'm curious, like, do you think AIPAC saw the writing on the wall about that and got scared.
I do.Like I said, there's there was not the break in the dam wasn't coming in foreign policy.
It was coming from people in Congress ringing the alarm about this, creating the possibility, creating the opening for other people to join them, which which they started doing in quick succession.
The rapid sort of expansion and contraction of the squad in many ways can be traced to this issue.Had Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman not not talked about Israel, I think they might still be in Congress.So this is, you know,
I certainly think that the impetus behind this was to weed out the critics that were sort of popping up like weeds in the Democratic Party and to also message to the party, this is what's going to happen to you if you go along with these people.
So Akayla, you've been looking into APAC's spending in multiple different congressional races, including their unsuccessful efforts to oust Summer Lee, their successful efforts to oust Jamal Bowman, as well as Cori Bush.
I mean, what did you find when you were looking into the total sum of the fundraising that APAC had done?
So APAC, when it launched, it launched two political action committees during the 2022 cycle, one of which is a normal federal PAC called APAC PAC, where people make contributions to the PAC and the PAC can give to a campaign, you know, to a campaign committee, directly to a candidate, etc., etc.
So that's one PAC.The other PAC is a super PAC called United Democracy Project, which can spend unlimited amounts on advertising, attack ads, mail, digital.
They this year started spending on get-out-the-vote efforts, which is not something that we had seen from AIPAC last cycle.So those are the two conduits basically through which AIPAC is now spending on elections.
What was easy to figure out was the total amount of money that they spent because they were very public about it.
What was harder to figure out was how the PAC was allocating money to candidates, how many races in total it had actually spent on, and whether or not there were other people running in those races and what the results of those races were.
So that was really what this investigation was looking into, which, you know, was really eye-opening in some cases where you can see that, you know, a significant portion of a candidate's total campaign haul was funneled through, you know, earmarked contributions through AIPAC PAC or something like that, which was the case with Wesley Bell, who was an AIPAC-backed candidate who ran against Cori Bush in Missouri and beat her in the Democratic primary earlier this year.
I mean, I think it's helpful to put it in some context.How much money was spent on Jamal Bowman's race and how much money was spent on Cori Bush's race by AIPAC or AIPAC affiliates?
So AIPAC's regular PAC and its super PAC in total spent about 18 million dollars on Jamal Bowman's race. And on Cori Bush's race, in total, they spent about $11 million.
That includes around $8 million that was spent directly from the Super PAC and about $3 million in contributions through AIPAC PAC to Wesley Bell's campaign.
That is a lot of money.I mean, in context, is that, I mean, it sounds like a lot of money to me, but in context, I mean, is that a lot of money for AIPAC to be spending on individual races?
Yeah, the indicator here is that these were two of the most expensive House Democratic primaries in history, solely because of the money that AIPAC put into these races.
Is this having a material effect in Congress?I mean, are people making decisions based off the spending?
You know, this is through reporting that I've done, that you've done.Members are definitely talking about being afraid of, you know, what AIPAC will do to them next cycle.This is particularly, you know, some of the remaining squad members.
I interviewed Rep.Delia Ramirez at the DNC, who said to me that she has had conversations with
multiple people in Congress, other members, who have said, I don't want them to Jamal me, you know, referring to what happened to Bowman in his race, indicating, you know, not only are they concerned about what AIPAC could do to them if
you know, they come out against Israel, but what will AIPAC do to them if they stay silent?You know, there's layers to this.There's multiple costs that people are concerned about.
You know, you did some reporting also on the chilling effect that this is having among candidates.I mean, I also have talked to Democratic consultants who said, you know, preparing for primaries this year, AIPAC is the number one thing
that prospective candidates have concerns about.It's, what are we going to do about this if they come into our race?And it's not just AIPAC, it's DMFI, it's these other groups too.But how do we navigate this?
Candidates who have said that they decided not to run because they don't want to come up against this and that they know that they couldn't take a principled stance in support of Israel at this time.So those are some of the
things that are harder to measure, but they're happening.I think the clear material impacts are there were two stalwart, you know, Black progressive voices in Congress that are not there anymore.
And those seats are taken by pro-corporate, pro-Israel candidates who have shown that they, you know, they don't care what their backers do.You know, in Cori Bush's race, we asked Wesley Bell to, you know, another Black candidate.
to respond to AIPAC running images that distorted her features and darkened her skin tone, and they, you know, didn't respond to us.
And it's like, people don't necessarily take into account, I don't think, taking AIPAC money doesn't just mean like, oh, you get a seat in Congress, it means that you tacitly agree to all of these other things, which is, you know, signing your name to basically a witch hunt.
for people who happen to disagree with AIPAC's policy preferences. Yeah.
And when you're mentioning those names, it's kind of occurring to me now and occurring to me now, you know, it's progressives don't really have a great immunity against AIPAC also.
I mean, thinking through Cori Bush, Jamal Bowman, Summer Lee, all people who have said that they won't take corporate PAC money.I mean, does that put them then at that kind of extra risk?
Absolutely.That's such a good point.The refrain that kept coming up from, you know, progressive groups who there were, you know,
core groups that did throw in all the resources that they had to support Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman in these races, and it's just simply not enough.
When you're talking about groups whose membership bases are small-dollar donors, working-class people, you can't compete with, you know, billionaires who are doing this, you know, as part of their charity, basically.
They're, you know, they're donating money to this group.This is not an even playing field in any sense of the word.
And I think that was lost in a lot of the analysis that we saw where people were getting lost in the weeds of, well, Jamal Bowman pulled the fire alarm and Cori Bush's husband is getting investigated.And all of those things can be true.
But I think the very clear rebuttal to that is then why spend $20 million?Yeah.
If it was so obvious that they were not going to make it, why invest those resources?
Right.So APAC canvasses these districts to see where it can have the biggest impact, and it stays out of races where it doesn't think it can win.This is what we saw with Summer Lee this time around.
It's my understanding that they did polling there that showed that she was strong enough that, you know, even, you know, this is what happened in her 2022 cycle.They spent about $4 million against her, and she still won.
So I think they saw, we're not going to be able to do this.They also had a really hard time recruiting people to run against her because she was so popular in her district.
Even though they sort of faux-recruited Bhavani Patel, you know, she didn't really do well.And they did not publicly work on that race because they didn't want to be pinned with a loss when Summerlee won.
I mean, what does it mean for our democracy to have this amount of money flowing into our elections, to have it particularly targeting progressives in Congress?I mean, why does this matter on a larger scale?
So the thing that comes up a lot of the time when I'm talking with people about APAC spending, not just APAC spending, but other campaign finance issues, is the damage that overturning Citizens United has done in terms of allowing PACs to spend unlimited amounts of money because there is no
limiting factor for groups like AIPAC that have bipartisan support from some of the wealthiest people in the country for one of the policy areas that is already strongly in their favor.
So the campaign finance regulation is one of the big areas, but that would require some act of God and Congress or, you know, another review by the U.S.Supreme Court, which is just not going to happen with the current balance.
I think there are avenues that people are pushing for, at least in Congress, to try to shift shift policy in terms of blocking weapons sales to Israel, which could, in theory, sort of cut some of the threat that AIPAC presents.
It's unlikely that this would happen, but in theory, like, if you're able to pass some sort of legislation like that through Congress, then the threat from AIPAC of being pro-Israel, you know, is weakened in some ways.
You don't have to worry because there are other people who are voting with you.And it's not out of the question because we saw AIPAC spend on more than 80 percent of the seats that were up for reelection this cycle.
But the idea of them being able to combat a vote in Congress like that is more difficult to conceive of. I think once it's already on the floor and you have a vote, then if it passes, then it passes.
And then you sort of shifted the playing field a little bit.I mean, that's unlikely, though, given the current balance of power in Congress.The other piece, I think, is supporting groups that are working against AIPAC.
There are lots of grassroots progressive groups that have spent on these races.Being active in groups that are working against these sort of influences is important, even if you're not going to make up the spending difference.
What I keep coming back to in interviews with people is that none of this would happen without the complicity of Democratic leaders in Congress.This is obviously a bipartisan issue.Republicans take, you know, just as much money from AIPAC.
But the fact that AIPAC is using its money to target Democratic members, whose leadership has historically been very, you know, aggressive against any sort of attacks like this, but is, you know,
uniquely silent on this issue because they also take AIPAC money.That's kind of the last dam.You know, none of this could happen without support from Democratic leaders.
You know, if Hakeem Jeffries came out tomorrow and said, we have to get AIPAC money out of Congress, then we would be having a totally different discussion about this stuff.
So I think it really comes down to, if we know we're not going to get campaign finance regulation, if we know we're not going to get legislation on this, then who else is there to make a difference?And it's party leadership.
Well, we're going to leave it there.But Akayla, thank you so much for joining me on the first episode of The Intercept's briefing.I encourage everyone to go check out Akayla's incredible investigation.
It's truly a work of art and a great work of journalism.So please go read it.And thank you so much for being on.Thank you for having me.This was great. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn.Sumi Agarwal is our executive producer.
Ben Musig is our editor-in-chief.Chelsea Coombs and Jordan Ewell are our social and video producers.Fei Liu is our product and design manager.Nara Shin is our copy editor.Legal Review by David Braylow and Sean Musgrave.Will Stanton mixed our show.
Slipstream provided our theme music.If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com slash join.Your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.
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