‘Dark Money’ Activists Trying to Remove Trump from 2024 Ballot

Free Speech for People (FSP) is the group threatening to sue states to removing Trump from 2024 ballot.

Originally published at American Greatness (Sept. 7, 2023)

Everyone knows that the campaign to put President Trump behind bars as an “insurrectionist” is dirty politics at its worst. Look no further than the activists leading the charge: Free Speech for People (FSP), the group threatening to sue states into removing Trump from the 2024 election ballot.

In July, FSP and the get-out-the-vote group Mi Familia Vote blasted secretaries of state in North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and a host of blue states with a demand to bar Trump from appearing on their ballots next year.

That the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, was meant to bar ex-Confederates—not January 6 protesters—from serving in elected office is irrelevant to the far Left.

In a single blow, “progressives” could guarantee a Democratic landslide, keep Trump out of the White House, and strip the vote from the 25 million people who voted for Trump in these states in 2020. For un-American totalitarians, what could be better?

Thanks to a near-limitless well of “dark money,” FSP allies have launched lawsuits to remove Trump from the ballot in Michigan and New Hampshire and are exploring a suit in Arizona, making his path to victory all-but-impossible. More will surely follow.

FSP has raked in millions of dollars from the Tides, Park, and Rockefeller foundations to make war on conservatives, starting with the Supreme Court’s pro-free speech ruling in Citizens United (2010), which launched FSP. By any reasonable measure, those tax-exempt foundations are intervening in elections to pick our next president—something expressly prohibited by the IRS—yet they call it charity.

FSP’s key ally is Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a professional agitation group created by Republican-turned-Clinton crony David Brock with heavy funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Streisand Foundation. Before the current 14th Amendment craze, CREW peddled the Foreign Emoluments Clause theory against Trump; before that, it was his phony “ties” to Russia.

For its part, FSP started calls to impeach Trump the day he was sworn in in 2017, even though the group admitted it hadn’t yet discovered impeachable evidence (but surely would). It also pretends the Constitution’s Electoral College is a threat to the Constitution itself and needs to be abolished. (You’ll be shocked to learn that there’s no evidence the group held this view before 2016.)

FSP holds that anyone who questions the results of the 2020 election is an “election denier.” Yet FSP founder John Bonifaz had no problem questioning the legitimacy of the 2004 presidential election before Congress and demanding a recount in Ohio:

In the name of democracy, in the name of the right to vote, in the name of the constitution, let the recount process proceed to its completion before the Electoral College meets. . .no secretary of state has the right to certify the presidential electors until a final determination of the vote count is made.

Bonifaz also led a group that supposedly discovered “credible evidence” that voting machines may have been “manipulated or hacked” in 2016, swinging tens of thousands of votes to Trump—and reportedly asked Hillary Clinton’s campaign to demand a recount. In 2019, FSP sent a letter asking Pennsylvania investigate “deficiencies” in its voting machines, yet went mum on their security the next year.

In 2023 that’s an indictable offense. So when will Bonifaz and Co. be prosecuted for holding those opinions?

Americans need to wake up to the very real possibility that, if Trump is removed from the ballot in multiple states, the 2024 election results would look like a North Korean “election.” Democrats would surely champion this sort of 80–20% avalanche for Biden as a resounding victory for “democracy,” but who would believe it?

Nominating one of his competitors won’t solve America’s totalitarian problem. Whatever you think of Trump, this fight is proof that today’s Democratic Party has been radicalized by a multi-billion-dollar constellation of lobbying and litigation nonprofits, which have weaponized the justice system against their critics.

If the Left wins, it’s the death of liberty in America.

Hayden Ludwig is Managing Editor of Restoration News and Research Director for Restoration of America

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