Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
New financial filings show how a deep-pocketed dark-money group run by the wealthy pro-Trump Mercer family financed a campaign to preserve President Trump’s ban on immigration from a number of Muslim-majority nations.
The group, Making America Great, took in more than $5.6 million in 2017 from five anonymous donors. It used that money to pay Cambridge Analytica, the Mercers’ controversial data-targeting firm, nearly $1 million, according to financial records obtained by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and shared exclusively with PAY DIRT.