EXCLUSIVE — A “watchdog” group that unwittingly leaked its donors to the Washington Examiner and panicked while pressuring conservative Supreme Court justices to disclose more about their finances is under the spotlight in a new book about its Democratic dark money financier.
In Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America, President Scott Walter of the conservative Capital Research Center think tank takes aim at Fix the Court, a self-described “nonpartisan” group demanding transparency, for “hypocrisy” over the donor leak episode in May 2023, according to an advance copy. Fix the Court, a charity that has alleged ethics violations against Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, was spun off from New Venture Fund, a nonprofit group managed by Arabella Advisors, the largest Democratic dark money network in the United States.
“To appreciate Fix the Court, you must recall the scene at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and friends have returned to the grand hall in which the huge and terrifying wizard booms orders and threats at them, only to be exposed as a single unimpressive gent hiding behind a curtain and using illusions to project his spurious authority,” Walter, ex-special domestic policy assistant in the George W. Bush White House, writes in the book, which will be published on April 9 by Encounter Books.
Walter’s book, which is 248 pages and received praise from the likes of conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), focuses on how Arabella Advisors, a powerful consultancy dishing out over $1 billion to left-wing groups, “channels much of this money into particular causes via pop-up groups designed to look like grassroots outfits.” Arabella and its dark money offshoots, including New Venture Fund, are under investigation by the Washington, D.C., attorney general’s office over reported financial mismanagement allegations.
Fix the Court launched in 2014 and gained attention over reports that its executive director, Gabe Roth, purchased both BrettKavanaugh.com and BrettKavanaugh.net and used the websites to link to sexual assault resources. The organization was previously a project of New Venture Fund and has joined other left-wing activist hubs in calling for a Supreme Court code of ethics that would enforce “stricter anti-harassment, anti-discrimination and whistleblower-protection rules,” Fix the Court says on its website.
Last May, Roth accidentally sent the names of Fix the Court’s donors to the Washington Examiner for 2021 and 2022, though the identities for the former year were already public on financial disclosures for grantees, such as New Venture Fund and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. “The ‘dark money’ group unfairly attacking Justice Thomas just got caught with its pants down,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said at the time.
However, Roth had what one Republican strategist dubbed a “historic on the record meltdown.”
“As you can see if you’ve reviewed the forms, I’m not a good fundraiser,” Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court and a former vice president at the Democratic consulting firm SKDK, told the Washington Examiner in May 2023. “I’m not a good CPA. I’m a klutz. Schedule B is not something that is sent out, right? It’s not made public. Like, if you’re donating to a 501(c)(3), the IRS gets to see who donates to you, but the general public doesn’t.”
“I mean, basically, I’ve tried to donate money; I have failed,” Roth added. “I tried to raise money; I have failed. I have only two foundations that give me money, and if their names become public, they’re never going to talk to me again, and Fix the Court is over. My screwup this morning probably cost me my job.”
Writing about the controversy, which prompted Cruz to say Roth was just frustrated “that now we know the identities of some of the people who are trying to delegitimize the Supreme Court and are funding parts of the smear campaign against Justice Thomas,” Walter asserts in his book that Roth’s freakout is part of a broader trend of “Arabella scams.”
“So Fix the Court, treated as a nonpartisan actor possessed of wide support and unimpeachable authority by prestigious newspapers and senators — the grand Oz who wows Dorothy — is in fact one rather unimpressive fellow sitting in his Brooklyn apartment who either can’t keep the simplest books or doesn’t want to risk disclosing his donors by filing honest tax returns,” Walter said of Roth, who initially didn’t file the proper tax forms until the Washington Examiner brought the issue to his attention.
Walter’s discussion of the Democratic dark money-backed group is in the introduction of his book on Arabella Advisors, whose Sixteen Thirty Fund also previously sponsored Demand Justice, a left-wing judicial group.
Fix the Court’s panic over its donor leak was hardly the only example of the group not practicing the principle of transparency that it preaches.
In August 2023, Roth admitted that Fix the Court failed to disclose lobbying after the Washington Examiner reported on this discrepancy. Fix the Court also adjusted its financial disclosures.
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That month, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled “‘Fix the Court’ Should Fix Itself,” which cited reporting from the Washington Examiner on the watchdog.
“In other words, the outfit denounces Justices for disclosure mistakes, but when it gets called out for the same thing it claims to be acting ‘in good faith,'” the Wall Street Journal wrote in the editorial. “Maybe Fix the Court should first ‘heal itself,’ to quote Democratic Senators, before Congress or the IRS demands that it be restructured.”
