Pro-Israel donors threw nearly $220,000 behind a Portland, Oregon, congressional candidate in a single day this week — the latest indication that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is working to block her opponent who has called for a ceasefire in Gaza and for conditions to be placed on U.S. aid to Israel.
The fundraiser adds to a $580,000 haul Maxine Dexter reported raising in just the month of April, after her entire campaign previously had raised only $340,000 since December. Beyond her own money, Dexter is on track to be boosted by upward of $3 million in dark-money spending, which similarly has ties to pro-Israel donors.
The last-minute deluge from Republican and AIPAC donors — the newest filing posted on Friday, 11 days before the Democratic primary and long after mail ballots have gone out — has upended the open primary race, as Dexter’s previous poor fundraising and low name identification in the district had her out of contention, with Susheela Jayapal, the former Multnomah County commissioner, the frontrunner.
Pro-Israel advocates identified Jayapal — the sister of Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — as a target early in the race, and had floated Dexter as the alternative to consolidate around. But openly backing Dexter with money from pro-Israel and GOP donors would come at an extreme political cost in Portland. Squad member Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., fended off a primary challenge recently in part by hammering her opponent for taking Republican cash. Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., is pillorying his opponent George Latimer for the same.
Latimer and Lee’s opponent, however, openly took the money. While Dexter is similarly benefiting from Republican and AIPAC donors, the largesse has been obscured by loopholes in campaign finance law that are only bursting open in the campaign’s final weeks.
Dexter has claimed she has no idea where the influx of money backing her and attacking Jayapal is coming from, but that pretense is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Jone Dalezman, who is listed in federal records as having given a maximum contribution of $3,300 to Dexter on May 7, told The Intercept she did not attend a fundraiser and had no recollection of giving directly to her. “I wasn’t there and I did not give money to her,” she said. But, she added, if AIPAC asks her to give to a candidate, she does. “I give all my contributions through AIPAC. Whenever I am asked to give to their endorsed candidates I give.”
A week ago, The Intercept reported that AIPAC had put together a secret operation to funnel money to the Portland race by diverting AIPAC donor funds through a super PAC called 314 Action Fund, which ostensibly works to elect candidates with science backgrounds, according to two sources. The timing of the operation, which launched after the March 31 filing deadline, meant the super PAC would not need to disclose its donors until May 20, the day before the primary election.
Subsequently, a staffer at 314 Action confirmed that the PAC was being used as a pass-through to stop Jayapal, and would also soon be expanding to other races, including that of Rep. Cori Bush, a Squad member and top AIPAC target who represents St. Louis. “314 has turned its back on science in order to be used as a weapon against progressives by Zionists,” said the staffer, who requested anonymity to avoid reprisal. The Bush money, the staffer said, would not come through 314 but through a newly created PAC, both because The Intercept had exposed 314’s role as a front for the money and because Bush’s opponent, Wesley Bell, doesn’t have a plausible science background to justify an endorsement.
AIPAC did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did 314 Action, but a few minutes before this article was published, the PAC posted a tweet accusing The Intercept of “making up stories out of thin air.” 314 denied that it would be spending against Bush but said nothing about another PAC doing so.
Dexter, during a recent debate, denied knowing the source of the dark money backing her campaign. But when pressed by her opponent Eddy Morales, she emphatically — and in contradiction to her claim of ignorance — said that the money certainly did not come from Big Pharma. Her campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
“AIPAC hasn’t endorsed any candidates in this race,” campaign manager Nathan Clark told The Oregonian in a statement. “Maxine’s position has been clear for months — we need a cease-fire that brings the hostages home and rush humanitarian aid into Gaza.”
The May 7 fundraiser netted Dexter’s campaign roughly $220,000 from just under 80 donors. Nearly 90 percent of the people who gave to Dexter through the fundraiser have also been direct donors to AIPAC or its super PAC, according to The Intercept’s analysis of campaign finance reports.
The fundraising closed a lead Jayapal had built over the field, having raised more than any other candidate as of March 31. She has raised a total of $772,00 dollars, now placing her second to Dexter.
Dexter is a doctor and Oregon state representative who entered the race at the urging of the local pro-Israel community, which worried that Susheela Jayapal would advance the same politics as her sister when it comes to Israel–Palestine. Jayapal has since embraced policy positions critical of Israel and said she would reject money from AIPAC.
AIPAC’s resistance to disclosing its involvement in the anti-Jayapal campaign reflects a concern that its support for Israel’s ongoing war — now being waged in the face of even President Joe Biden’s criticism — is too toxic for a Democratic primary in Oregon.
314 Action began spending on the race in April, and another super PAC jumped in with attack ads against Jayapal last week. While the super PACs won’t have to report their donors until the day before the primary election, candidates themselves are required to file more timely reports as election day nears.
On Thursday, Dexter’s campaign reported to the Federal Election Commission that it collected more than $218,000 on May 7.
Dalezman, the donor who said she has no recollection of a fundraiser, gave more than $50,000 to AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, last year. She previously gave $25,000 to Americans for Tomorrow’s Future, a pro-Israel super PAC that targeted Bowman and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar. Dalezman has also given to Democratic Majority for Israel, an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC, as well as former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, among a slew of politicians from both parties.
Bundling donations to approved candidates is a common practice in politics and one that was described by AIPAC donor David Ochs, who didn’t know he was being recorded for an undercover documentary: “What happens is [a donor] meets with the congressman in the back room, tells them exactly what his goals are … basically they hand him an envelope with 20 credit cards, and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit cards for a thousand dollars each.’”
Another one of Dexter’s recent donors is Daniel Kraft — the son of Robert Kraft, a major funder of the United Democracy Project — who maxed out a $3,300 contribution to Dexter on May 7. David Cohen, who works for Palantir, Peter Thiel’s cybersecurity company, gave to Dexter and also AIPAC this year, as did several dozen others.
Kraft and Cohen did not respond to requests for comment.
Several of the donors also earmarked AIPAC contributions to be directed to Joanna Weiss, the candidate AIPAC inscrutably backed against Dave Min, who has not been critical of Israel, in California. (Min won.)
Prior to April, the open Democratic primary was considered Jayapal’s to lose. In 2022, AIPAC showed that its super PAC had the capacity to knock 20 to 30 percentage points off the lead of a progressive Democratic candidate, when several million dollars in spending took Summer Lee from a commanding lead in her Pittsburgh congressional race to a neck-and-neck tie. (Lee nonetheless won the election.) DMFI accomplished the same against Nina Turner in a 2021 Ohio special election, managing to narrowly defeat her after she led by 20-30 points before the spending.
The ads against Jayapal funded by “Voters for Responsive Government” are brutal, and pin Portland’s homelessness crisis on her as a former member of the Multnomah County Commission. They even accuse her of “starving and abusing cats and dogs.” There is no reference in any of the ads to Israel or Gaza, where Israel is currently starving 2 million people.
Update: May 11, 2024
This article was updated to mention a tweet 314 Action posted about The Intercept’s reporting.
