He then went further: “Should essentially an agent of any foreign government, whether it’s Israel or any other, be able to spend … $30 million in a race like this to influence the outcome of that race?”

Another CNN contributor, Van Jones, immediately shot back at Axelrod’s characterization. “I don’t think that they’re an agent of a foreign power. I think they’re American Jews,” Jones said, noting that their political interest is protecting Israel.

The back-and-forth was just the beginning of a postmortem fixated on AIPAC, an organization funded not by the Israeli government but by Americans concerned with the safety and security of the world’s one and only Jewish state. You wouldn’t know that from the way the organization is routinely discussed, however. AIPAC has become the great foreign-money boogeyman of American politics, despite the inconvenient fact that the money in question is American.

If Americans are actually concerned about foreign money influencing American politics and policy, there is plenty to investigate. And unlike AIPAC, much of it is actually foreign.

Americans for Public Trust has just launched a new database, FollowForeignMoney.org, attempting to track the enormous sums flowing from foreign sources into American nonprofit groups and advocacy organizations. At launch, APT says it has identified more than $5 billion in spending across more than 500 groups, documented in more than 12,000 records.

The scale is remarkable, but so is the loophole that makes much of it possible. Federal law prohibits foreign entities from contributing to candidates, political committees, and super PACs, or participating in a campaign’s decision-making process. But elections are hardly the only way to influence American politics, and there are far fewer restrictions on foreign money once it moves outside the narrow confines of electoral activity.

Foreign dollars can finance nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, voter registration, issue advertising, and various policy and lobbying efforts, all of which can help shape the political environment in which Americans eventually cast their ballots. As APT explains, the line between regulated electoral activity, where foreign money is prohibited, and unregulated issue activity, where it is typically permitted, is “nearly indistinguishable to the average American.”

For some perspective, AIPAC, which again is funded by American donors, spent $29 million in 2022, $46 million in 2024, and $67 million in 2026, much of it in Democratic primaries. Those are substantial sums, and Americans are perfectly entitled to debate whether they like AIPAC’s political priorities, its tactics, or the candidates it supports.

But there is something deeply unserious about treating money donated by Americans to an American organization advocating an issue they care about as a sinister form of foreign influence, while billions of dollars originating overseas can flow into American organizations seeking to shape our laws, institutions, and political culture with comparatively little scrutiny.

In a conversation with the Washington Examiner, Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, explained what her organization found when it began following the money.

“Foreign money is flowing through the nonprofit sector to implement an extremist climate agenda and bankroll radical left-wing causes and policies,” Sutherland said, including organizations supporting political causes such as radical ballot measures. “And it’s all propped up by foreign money.”

The database allows users to trace that money through the complicated network of foundations, nonprofit groups, and advocacy organizations through which it often travels. An organization spending millions of dollars trying to change public opinion, influence legislation, register voters, or pass a ballot measure is participating in American political life, whether its name ever appears on a candidate’s campaign-finance report.

Congress was beginning to take notice of the problem even before APT released its database. At a hearing this year, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) focused on how nonprofit organizations can exploit gaps in American law to bring foreign money into domestic political and policy fights.

Smith later put the problem plainly: “Tax-exempt status … exists to support legitimate charitable and educational work that strengthens our communities, not to serve as cover for foreign propaganda, election interference, or activities that undermine our national interest.”

There is a legitimate debate to be had about how far Congress should go in restricting foreign donations to American nonprofits, particularly because any new law would have to avoid inadvertently ensnaring legitimate charitable, educational, or religious organizations that receive support from abroad. But it is difficult to have that debate honestly when our political and media class applies the label “foreign influence” so selectively.

AIPAC’s donors are Americans exercising the same right every other American has to pool their money around an issue they consider important and support or oppose candidates accordingly. The fact that the issue is Israel does not transform those Americans into agents of Israel any more than Cuban Americans advocating policy toward Cuba or Ukrainian Americans lobbying for aid to Ukraine become agents of foreign governments.

That is what made Axelrod’s calculation so revealing. He was not simply complaining about the amount AIPAC spent, or making the familiar argument that there is too much money sloshing around American politics. He described an organization funded by Americans as “essentially an agent” of a foreign government because those Americans are politically engaged on behalf of the Jewish state.

My husband, Seth Mandel, identified the more disturbing implication in Commentary after watching the exchange. “Why would Axelrod, who has worked so hard to position himself as a moderate in temperament and a card-carrying member of the mainstream, go on CNN and slap American Jews across the face?” he asked.

“And that’s when I realized it. Axelrod is positioning himself in the party’s mainstream. Accusing AIPAC of being a foreign agent isn’t relegated to the fever swamps anymore. And Axelrod, a very smart observer of Democratic Party politics, saw El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens as confirmation that this is what the party is now. And that might be the most dispiriting part of it all.”

That observation makes the timing of APT’s database particularly useful because it offers a remarkably simple test of what this debate is actually about. If Axelrod and others are genuinely alarmed by foreign money influencing American politics, they have just been handed a database documenting more than $5 billion of it, spread across thousands of records and hundreds of organizations. There is enough there to keep journalists, lawmakers, and cable-news panels occupied for quite some time examining whether American law adequately protects our political system from money originating overseas.

Yet that wasn’t the money Axelrod was talking about on CNN. The $30 million that concerned him was raised and spent by Americans, and calling it foreign required treating the political interests of those Americans as somehow foreign themselves.

AIPAC’s supporters are not just Jews; they include evangelical Christians and millions of other Americans who believe, for religious, moral, or strategic reasons, that the United States should maintain a strong relationship with Israel. Americans organize politically around all sorts of foreign-policy questions, and we generally understand that doing so is an expression of their American political rights rather than evidence that they are acting on behalf of another government. 

Something peculiar happens, however, when the country in question is Israel and a substantial number of the Americans doing the organizing are Jews.

ABDUL EL SAYED IS AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

For American Jews, there is nothing especially novel about the accusation lurking underneath Axelrod’s language. The charge of divided loyalty is one of the oldest accusations made against Jews, but like most prejudices that survive long enough, it adapts itself to the vocabulary of the moment. You no longer have to say outright that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country. You can instead talk about AIPAC as “essentially an agent” of a foreign government, describe American political donations as foreign influence, and insist that what troubles you is merely the role of money in politics.

Which is why APT’s database is so clarifying. There are billions of dollars in actual foreign money flowing into American institutions and organizations seeking to influence American laws, policies, and political culture. Anyone sincerely worried about the ability of foreigners to shape American politics now has an enormous amount of material worth investigating. If the political conversation remains fixated instead on money donated by American citizens because those citizens happen to support Israel, then the problem was never simply about whether the money was foreign.

It was that their support for Israel was being treated as evidence that they were.