Unelected Infections: Paul Brest and Mind The Gap
A former dean of Stanford Law School and president of the Hewlett Foundation now heads one of Silicon Valley’s leading and most secretive, pro-Democrat investing groups.
Paul Brest, alongside fellow Stanford colleagues Barbara Fried and Graham Gottlieb, is behind the little-known political investment group called Mind The Gap. Emerging during the midterm cycle of 2018, Mind The Gap has focused on becoming a nucleus for high-dollar Silicon Valley investors who are keen on quietly funneling massive political donations into the Democratic Party.
Mind The Gap
By the end of the 2018 midterms, Mind The Gap had attracted a “donor network of over 800 individuals from scratch.” In a memo sent from the organization, Mind The Gap claimed to have raised $20 million and provided “hard-money contributions to 20 undervalued and underfunded House races.”
Ten of the races resulted in Democrat wins — including the Laura Underwood campaign in Illinois and Xochitl Torres Small’s campaign in New Mexico. Selected candidates averaged about $500,000 each in contributions from Mind The Gap. Of the $20 million raised during the 2018 midterms, $11.5 million went to the 20 “undervalued” Democratic candidates. Additionally, voter registration/participation campaigns -including Voter Participation Center, Center for Voter Information, and Everybody Votes — received approximately $9 million.
Journalist Theodore Schleifer of Recode detailed on January 7, 2020 that Mind The Gap wrote a memo to prospective donors at the end of 2019. A portion of it reads:
At current funding levels, the VPC, CVI, and EV programs together will be the largest voter registration drive in US history. Fully funded, they are projected to add roughly 3,000,000 people to the voter rolls, chiefly from communities of color, and yield 750,000 additional net votes in the November 2020 election in competitive battleground states across the country.
Despite the mass migration of donors and impressive election success, Mind The Gap remains basically undetectable online. There is no website or social media accounts for the self-titled “pro bono donor advisors.” An underwhelming LinkedIn profile page does exist for the group.
As Schleifer wrote in his January 6, 2020 article, Mind The Gap’s donation strategy is called the “Moneyball of politics.”
“Moneyball,” of course, refers to Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball — which tells the story of how the 2002 Oakland Athletics finished first in the American League West division despite having one of the smallest payrolls in Major League Baseball. Lewis’s book puts Oakland’s general manager’s bang for the buck team-building strategy centerstage.
It is this philosophy that has attracted so many donors to Mind The Gap. Instead of funding races that Democrats are most likely to win, Brest and Mind The Gap targeted underdog Democrat races where each dollar invested presented the highest potential reward. In baseball terms, instead of signing MVP Jason Giambi to a mega-contract, GM Billy Beane and Oakland targeted the acquisition of on-the-cheap players who they viewed as high potential assets that could exceed expectations if the Athletics invested in them.
Mind The Gap’s theory points out that the races that are most likely to flip are often the ones that are the most overfunded. By donating to seats that are less likely to turn Blue — as opposed to high-profile races — investments are increasingly more likely to return significant impacts. By not focusing on the perceived winnability of congressional races, Mind The Gap’s plan maximizes the potential per dollar influence on election results.
This sort of data-driven analysis is like ecstasy for suits in Silicon Valley. Schleifer notes in his report that this new-age donation strategy garnered support from Silicon Valley mainstays like Ron Conway, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eric Schmidt. Mind The Gap reassures contributors that almost all donations to the organization are tax-deductible — written off as philanthropy.
Neither Brest nor Fried responded to emails asking about which candidates Mind The Gap supported in 2020 and whom it is planning to fund in 2022.
Mind The Gap Super PAC and Donors
Acquiring a comprehensive list of Mind The Gap donors is impossible at this point. The organization operates in the shadows. If Theodore Schleifer did not obtain and publish a copy of a memo sent to prospective donors by Mind The Gap, information about the group might have never surfaced. The tight lips policy is demonstrated by the closing section of its memo:
Despite most of the information surrounding Mind The Gap remaining in a public blind spot, some helpful information does exist online. There is a Mind The Gap super PAC. A list of the super PAC’s donors and expenses is at OpenSecrets.org.
Open Secrets’ spreadsheets reveal roughly 200 specific donations to the super PAC during the 2020 election cycle and a dozen contributions from the 2018 cycle.
The 2018 donor class shrinks even more when noticing that six of the twelve donations came from Fried, Paul and Iris Brest, and Gottlieb themselves. Regardless, the Silicon Valley-philanthropic direction of the super PAC is still easy to see via the $50,000 contribution from Ron Conway of SV Angel and the $100,000 contribution from a philanthropist and former Executive Director of Stanford’s Healthy Body Image Program, Anne Devereux-Mills.
Contributors to the super PAC’s 2020 funding cycle include:
Russell Siegelman — Stanford / Microsoft / Kleiner Perkins (venture capital) — $50,000
David Hitz — NetApp — $50,000
Ron Conway — SV Angel — $50,000
Ben Appen — Magnitude Capital— $50,000
Gina Maya — Human Rights Watch — $20,000
David Sze — Greylock Partners — $10,000
Graham Spencer — Google Ventures — $10,000
George Hume — Basic American Foods — $10,000
Amy Rao — Human Rights Watch / Integrated Archive Systems — $7,000
David Fischer — Facebook — $5,000
Among the other contributors to the Mind The Gap super PAC for the 2020 cycle are individuals from venture capital firms, real estate enterprises, law firms and Planned Parenthood. Unsurprisingly, the donors are overwhelmingly from California, with many listed from Palo Alto.
The use of a super PAC instead of a PAC is essential in understanding Mind The Gap’s true motives. Traditional PACs have limitations on allotted donation amounts and have checks imposed on their spending powers. Limits would not sit well with the power-hungry and data-driven elites in Silicon Valley.
Super PACs cannot donate directly to specific candidates. However, super PACs have no limitations on the spending avenues that are permitted. Given that the data from Open Secrets — the only donor roll call I could find for Mind The Gap — does not highlight the full $20 million raised in 2018 or 2020’s total, the existence of Mind The Gap’s super PAC should raise red flags. The super PAC merely provides elitist capital and political legitimacy for the group and prospective donors. In reality, an optical illusion forms. The public is provided as little information as Mind The Gap approves of while maintaining the appearance of transparency.
Brest and the Hewlett Foundation
Brest, the former dean of Stanford Law School, co-authored the book Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy. The book was published in July of 2018. It serves as a guide for making the most of every dollar invested and is the product of more than a decade of philanthropy experience.
Brest operated as president of the Hewlett Foundation from 1999–2012. The Hewlett Foundation is a San Francisco-based private grant foundation whose assets are valued at $11 billion. With hundreds of millions of dollars in grants processed annually, the Hewlett Foundation invests in multiple fields — including global development and population, cyber, US democracy, and effective philanthropy.
The foundation’s “About Us” page reads:
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is a nonpartisan, private charitable foundation that advances ideas and supports institutions to promote a better world…In addition, we make grants for special projects and address other timely problems, such as challenges related to cybersecurity and U.S. democracy… At any one time, more than 2,250 of our grants are active. In 2019, the foundation awarded $454,458,000 in grants and disbursed $354,786,000 in grant payments. As of December 31, 2019 the foundation’s assets were approximately $11.0 billion.
While Brest was president, the Hewlett Foundation made a habit of providing funding for some of the most notorious American foreign policy think tanks. On November 30, 2011, the Hudson Institute was granted $75,000. From June 2007 through November 2010, John Podesta and Neera Tanden’s Center for American Progress received at least $1.65 million.
Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone wrote in February of 2021 about the imperialist ambitions of Tanden’s Center for American Progress:
In the past, CAP has accepted support from arms manufacturers like BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. Today, CAP hosts two former Raytheon vice presidents as a senior fellows, and has provided a revolving door for senior fellow Rudy De Leon to circle between the think tank sector and arms industry.
China announced sanctions against Lockheed Martin in July of 2020 after the defense giant entered into a $620 million arms deal with Taiwan brokered by the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, CAP has reaped financial support from the government of Japan, which has also positioned itself as a forward operating base for US plans to counter China. The Tanden-led think tank listed the embassy of Japan in the US as a top donor in 2019, with contributions ranging from $100,000 to $500,000.
Michèle Flournoy’s Center for a New American Security was granted $160,000 on July 20, 2009. CNAS has received financial support from Northrop Grumman, Chevron, Comcast, Facebook, and Lockheed Martin. In 2015, Flournoy represented CNAS while co-authoring a report called “Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do.” Flournoy joined individuals from the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institute, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on the project.
Journalist Dan Cohen wrote of Flournoy at The Grayzone in November of 2020. Cohen wrote:
In 2005, Flournoy signed onto a letter from the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, asking Congress to “increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps (by) at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.”
In 2007, she leveraged her Pentagon experience and contacts to found what would become one of the premier Washington think tanks advocating endless war across the globe: the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
CNAS is funded by the U.S. government, arms manufacturers, oil giants, Silicon Valley tech giants, billionaire-funded foundations, and big banks.
Flournoy joined the Obama administration and was appointed as under secretary of defense for policy, the position considered the “brains” of the Pentagon.
The biggest winner of the imperialist bunch was the Brookings Institute — which received over $9 million from 2007–2011.
Despite Brest leaving the Hewlett Foundation in 2012, the Foundation’s commitment to funding questionable organizations did not leave with him. Larry Kramer, another former dean of Stanford Law School, took over the role after Brest stepped down. The committee which confirmed Kramer as the next president of the Foundation included, among others, the Hewlett Foundation’s vice president, Richard Levin (Yale University), and Byron Auguste (McKinsey & Company). Kramer’s version of the $11 billion organization has advanced Brest’s earlier operations.
From 2016–2019, the Foundation provided more than $2.5 million to the Brookings Institute — a think tank whose board of trustees includes connections to Greylock Partners, McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, TD Bank, and Nike.
From 2016–2018, the Brennan Center for Justice received over $1.5 million. Early in his career, Kramer clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. Kramer continued to provide funding to the Center for a New American Security, the Center for American Progress, and the Hudson Institute. Grants were also provided to Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and George Washington University to support its Washington Post-affiliated blog, The Monkey Cage.
In addition, the Hewlett Foundation has provided more than $3.8 million to Issue One since 2014. Issue One describes itself as “the leading crosspartisan political reform group in Washington’’ whose goal is “to fix our broken political system.” The organization’s “Don’t Mess With US” campaign boasts openly about its xenophobic purpose of condemning Iran, Russia, China, and other countries that don’t play ball with the imperial-minded United States. The campaign’s website promotes several bills that have made their way to the desks of members of Congress.
The Defending Elections against Trolls from Enemy Regimes Act, or The DETER Act, which “imposes crippling sanction against countries that interfere in our elections,” made its way into the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act with the help of Senator Marco Rubio. The Shell Company Abuse Act, like The DETER Act, emphasizes harsh punishments for foreign election influencers. Both bills were co-sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham, Richard Blumenthal, and Chuck Grassley.
On Tuesday, April 20, 2021, Issue One hosted a webinar focussed on election integrity, foreign interference, social media usage, and disinformation. I attended the event as a viewer and asked roughly a half-dozen questions. Among the questions were:
- In 2018, Issue One received $1,000,000 from the Hewlett Foundation. The former president of the Hewlett Foundation, Paul Brest, heads a secretive pro-Democrat Silicon Valley funding campaign called Mind The Gap. Brest has ties to Silicon Valley billionaires like Eric Schmidt, Ron Conway, and Reid Hoffman. Hoffman [in] particular was a lead funder of a domestic disinformation campaign called Project Birmingham. Given this, how can the public believe that Issue One opposes disinformation and election integrity?
- In what ways do you weigh your stance against disinformation and foreign agitators in US elections vs. how the United States meddles and disrupts elections and power structures in foreign countries? For example, President Biden’s support of Jovenel Moise in Haiti and [the] insane Trump-era backing of Juan Guaido in Venezuela instead of Nicolas Maduro.
No members of the panel responded to my questions. A written and audio transcript of the event is available.
A complete list of Hewlett Foundation grant recipients is available here.
