VIRGINIA: Abigail Spanberger Swore Off Corporate Money. Her Top Donors Are All Big Business Insiders.
Democrats' nominee for governor has more in common with Wall Street than Main Street, campaign finance records show.
Being a Democrat means you never have to say sorry. Just ask Abigail Spanberger.
For close to a decade, the ex-CIA officer has positioned herself as an enemy of big business alongside socialists Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), pledging not to take money from corporate PACs.
"When I ran for Congress, I promised to refuse money from corporate PACs," she bragged in a TV ad while running for reelection in 2020. "I've kept that promise."
"I don't accept a dime of corporate money," she tweeted on the 2022 campaign trail.
And in her bid for governor this year, she was endorsed by a far-left group for her "long-held stance of not accepting corporate PAC donations"—a group, incidentally, founded and bankrolled by a Goldman Sachs millionaire.
The only problem with that promise: It relies on a legalese loophole Democrats hope you won't notice amidst the $16 million she's raked in so far.
The key word here is "corporate PAC money," not "corporate money." That's important for skeptical voters to understand, because Spanberger is backed to the hilt by well-heeled special interests… many of them from out of state.
Up until she retired from Congress, a PAC closely associated with Spanberger—so much so it's called SPAN PAC—accepted tens of thousands of dollars from the National Association of Realtors and a utility provider.
In 2020, she took in $10,000 from a PAC funded by Microsoft, Amazon, Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, General Motors, and Dominion Energy. Analysis by liberal NPR found that 48 of the 57 leadership PACs that contributed to Spanberger's campaign took corporate contributions.
The Monopoly Man Candidate
The list of Spanberger's top donors for her gubernatorial committee reads like a Who's Who of ultraliberal corporate donors.
Spanberger's top individual donor is California tech mogul Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, who gave her gubernatorial campaign a cool $350,000. As Restoration News has detailed, Hoffman is among the Left's most rabid NeverTrump mega-donors, funding smear campaigns attacking Republicans for "corruption, white nationalism, and mass deceit" and even meddling in the 2024 GOP primary to keep Trump out of the White House.
Hoffman spent $1 million paying the legal bills of Fusion GPS, the partisan firm behind the infamous fake Russian dossier meant to label President Trump a Russian crony. He's funded 6-figure disinformation campaigns to turn southern states blue—starting with flipping Virginia's General Assembly in 2019.
Oh, and Hoffman was caught visiting Jeffrey Epstein's pedophile island for immoral elites to attend a "breakfast party" with Bill Gates, later gifting Epstein an award for bravely challenging "society's injustices." (He doesn't like to talk about it these days.)
Then there's Michael Bills, Virginia's own George Soros. The Charlottesville finance millionaire is the largest individual political donor in the commonwealth, bar none—including the campaign of "porn mom" Susannah Gibson in 2023, better known as the X-rated sex streamer "HotWifeExperience." Thanks to Bills' funding, Gibson—who filmed herself having sex for money, sometimes violently—outspent her Republican opponent by $534,000. Yet voters wisely saw through it and voted her down.
Liz Simons and her husband, Mark Heising, have given Spanberger's campaign $200,000. Simons is the daughter of billionaire hedge fund manager James Simons and a Democrat mega-donor in her own right, pumping millions of dollars into Democrat campaigns from president down to District Attorney. Heising is a private investment manager whose foundation funds countless far-left activist groups.
Simons' brother is Nathaniel Simons, a Bay Area billionaire and hedge fund manager with shady ties to Russian oligarchs through his global warming group, Sea Change Foundation.
Other notable Spanberger corporate contributors include:
- $127,000 from James Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft;
- $105,000 from David C. Frederick, a white shoe law firm partner representing Morgan Stanley and other major banks;
- $100,000 from Gwendolyn Sontheim Meyer, a billionaire corporate heiress and donor to the Arabella dark money network;
- $250,000 from Glen E. Tullman, a former Big Health executive and investor;
- $180,000 from Robert Hardie, a private investment firm executive;
- $150,000 from Martha Samuelson, a financial services executive;
- $25,000 from Todd Stottlemyer, CEO of the private equity-backed healthcare software firm Acentra Health;
- $140,000 from Thomas J. McInerney, president and CEO of New York investment firm Altaba who previously helmed the insurance behemoth Aetna;
- And $127,000 from Shannon Hunt-Scott, a Silicon Valley political operative who chaired the California fundraising arm of Kamala Harris' presidential campaign and an abortion rights group.
Spanberger is as phony as she is extreme. Will voters see through the lies and vote for Winsome Sears?
(READ MORE: "Virginia's George Soros" is Backing Abigail Spanberger for Governor)
