The top five donors to Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid are Jewish, according to a Washington Post analysis.
The story posted Oct. 24 named the top donors, who are contributing $1 of every $17 of the more than $1 billion amassed for the Democratic nominee’s presidential run.
They are Donald Sussman, a hedge fund manager; J.B. Pritzker, a venture capitalist, and his wife, M.K.; Haim Saban, the Israeli-American entertainment mogul, and his wife, Cheryl; George Soros, another hedge funder and a major backer of liberal causes, and Daniel Abraham, a backer of liberal pro-Israel causes and the founder of SlimFast.
The article reported on tensions within the Clinton campaign over “big money” in politics, as revealed in stolen emails posted recently by WikiLeaks. Clinton and other Democrats oppose recent court rulings allowing unlimited donations to political action committees, but many of her supporters also see giving and accepting large figures as inevitable, given the existing rules. (Direct donations to campaigns are still limited to $2,700 maximum; the vast majority of the money in the Washington Post article is given to super PACs, political action committees permitted to receive unlimited funds.)
Sussman told the Post that his top issue is rolling back the rulings allowing for unlimited giving.
“It’s very odd to be giving millions when your objective is to actually get the money out of politics,” he said. “I am a very strong supporter of publicly financed campaigns, and I think the only way to accomplish that is to get someone like Secretary Clinton, who is committed to cleaning up the unfortunate disaster created by the activist court in Citizens United.”
Citizens United refers to the 2010 decision allowing corporations to give unlimited money in support of a campaign.
Meanwhile, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who is Jewish, donated $35 million to political groups supporting Hillary Clinton and other progressive causes, adding him to the top ranks of Clinton’s financial backers.
Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, made two donations in the past six weeks — the most recent contribution amounting to $15 million and an earlier one totaling $20 million — according to Politico.
The Jewish billionaire, whom Bloomberg classifies as the 73rd-richest person in the world at a net worth of $12.8 billion, is a relative political outsider. Prior to this year he only made one recorded political contribution, to a candidate running for Congress, Politico reported.
Moskovitz’s donations make him one of the top three individual contributors in the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The donations will go to several political action groups, including the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA Action, and groups dedicated to various causes, including the environment and get-out-the-vote efforts.
In 2005, Moskovitz founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg and two other Harvard University students. He left the social networking site in 2008 to found Asana, where he is CEO. — jta