Billionaire Ronald Lauder has donated $1 million to the Republican State Leadership Committee, an organization working to elect at least two state-level candidates who are disputing the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Lauder’s $1 million donation, made on Sept. 12, is listed on the group’s third-quarter report recently filed to the IRS. He provided a chunk of the $17 million the group raised from July through September.
Lauder is the heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and has a net worth of $4.5 billion, according to Forbes.
A spokesman for Lauder declined to comment. A representative for the Republican State Leadership Committee did not return a request for comment.
Lauder is the latest of over two dozen wealthy business leaders and companies themselves that have contributed to candidates who have cast doubts on the results of the 2020 election — or outside organizations boosting them. Lauder’s donation to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which has gone unreported, is one of the top individual contributions to the group during the third quarter, according to the filing.
An even larger donation came from the Concord Fund, a group previously known as the Judicial Crisis Network that has ties to former President Donald Trump’s former judicial advisor Leonard Leo. The Concord Fund, which previously spent millions of dollars on ads backing Trump’s judicial nominees, gave $1.5 million to the Republican State Leadership Committee in September.
The Republican State Leadership Committee is considered a tax exempt politically active group under section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code. These organizations can raise and spend an unlimited amount of money, but they must disclose their finances to the IRS.
State-level midterm elections across the country are projected to raise over $7 billion as the parties jockey for control of legislatures, governor’s offices and secretary of state posts, according to OpenSecrets. The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, a 527 group backing Democrats running for secretary of state, saw a $500,000 contribution earlier this year from a super PAC financed largely by billionaire George Soros.
The Republican State Leadership Committee is supporting dozens of candidates running to become secretaries of state, lieutenant governors, state legislators and judges on state courts. Multiple Republican candidates running for secretary of state and lieutenant governor in the general election have echoed Trump in claiming that the 2020 election was stolen or rigged.
If those secretary of state candidates win, they would have a critical role in both administering the election and counting ballots in 2024 — when Trump could again lead the GOP presidential ticket.
The Republican State Leadership Committee has ties to state legislative leaders who either questioned the election results, backed efforts to stop the counting of Electoral College votes or downplayed the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. capitol.
In this year’s…
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