Pro-retention groups refute claims of Soros funding

Leaders of three prominent groups working toward the retention of embattled Iowa Supreme Court justices are pushing back against allegations their groups are funded by an out-of-state organization tied to liberal activist George Soros.

At a judicial retention forum hosted by The Iowa Independent and Simpson College last week, Davenport attorney and author Nathan Tucker spoke at length on the supposed funding from Soros’ Open Society Institute to three Iowa groups tied to the Justice Not Politics pro-retention coalition. Citing disclosure forms, he said Interfaith Alliance received $50,000 between 2004 and 2005, the League of Women Voters Education Fund received $1.73 million between 2000 and 2009, and the Iowa-based American Judicature Society received $2 million between 2000 and 2008 — saying this money has gone directly to the retention campaign in Iowa.

These claims have been listed before in Tucker’s articles for the conservative blog The Iowa Republican. There, he calls the broader Justice Not Politics group the “One Iowa Coalition,” saying it is a front for Iowa’s largest LGBT advocacy organization. Tucker links to a research study done by Justice Hijacked, a project by the American Justice Project — an organization that “works to promote free enterprise and improve the fairness and predictability of the legal environment at the state level.”

The Justice Hijacked report, published in September, lists OSI funding that has gone toward 46 organizations working toward non-partisan judicial selection across the country. But the report fails to even mention the Iowa election or the local Iowa branches of the League of Women Voters or Interfaith Alliance. Instead, the study addresses eight other states and several other state-level organizations.

At the forum, however, Tucker maintained that money from OSI has gone directly toward those local branches. Former Iowa Supreme Court justice Robert Albee, who was participating in the panel discussion, challenged Tucker’s claims.

“I don’t think that’s the fact,” Albee said. “I think that’s made up.”

In an interview with The Iowa Independent the day after the forum, Tucker clarified his position and said he only saw the national disclosure forms. He said he thought those local chapters received funding from the national organizations, thereby receiving money from Soros himself.

“The study only specifies national organizations,” he said. “So, the relationship between those national organizations and their state chapters or affiliates, we don’t know. So, we don’t know what type of funds have been transferred.”

When he wrote his original story, Tucker said it was his assumption that if money was given to the national branch of an organizations, it would inevitably end up in the local chapters. Tucker now says that since the local chapters won’t open their books, he won’t have any hard evidence and will have to take them at their word.

“I don’t have any proof that Soros’ money was funneled to the League of Women Voters local chapter or the Iowa chapter of Interfaith Alliance,” he said. “I just know their mother ships, their national organizations receive money.”

After the forum, Connie Ryan Terrell, executive director of Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, confronted Tucker and explained to him that her organization does not receive any funding from its national branch, as it has separate 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 status.

“That simply is not true and he lied yesterday at the forum when he said he saw the paperwork, including independent expenditure (IE) paperwork,” she said later in an interview. “That is a lie because we have never filed IE paperwork as we don’t do that kind of work. To my knowledge, our national organization has not filed such paperwork and does not intend to do so.”

Myrna Loehrlein, president of the League of Women Voters of Iowa, is out of the state and was unavailable for comment. However, Carol Cooper, the group’s secretary, said: “We certainly did not have financial transactions with any group nor would we tolerate such activity.”

Seth Andersen, executive director of the American Judicature Society, said his organization does receive grant funding from OSI to support research and public education on merit-selection systems for choosing judges. But since the organization is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, they are prohibited to be political actors by tax law.

“We do receive that funding and it’s very helpful to us to analyze,” he said. “For example, we used a grant from the Open Society Institute to create this comprehensive website about judicial selection in the state, how it’s done, and it is a source of information that pretty much everyone in the field uses and it’s purely descriptive. It shows exactly how the judges are selected, and retained, and how they’re evaluated in every single level of court in every state. We do that kind of work, we don’t do political work.”

Andersen then pointed toward former Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats‘ Iowa for Freedom organization, and its funding from out-of-state organizations like the Mississippi-based American Family Association, the New Jersey-based National Organization for Marriage, and the Washington, D.C.,-based Campaign for Working Families. Those organizations, as has been reported by The Iowa Independent, have spent more than $500,000 so far on a campaign directly working against the retention of the three justices in Iowa. On the contrary, he said the three Iowa groups have been engaged in public education efforts that he says are not partisan.

Tucker has repeatedly claimed that Democratic influences in these organizations and in the current judicial selection system are troublesome to him. He said he wants people to ask why so many liberal Democrats, including Soros, predominately support the Missouri Plan for non-partisan judicial selection. Ideally, Tucker said he wants to see a federal system in place in Iowa. His latest post on The Iowa Republican details donations from registered Democrats to the pro-retention group Fair Courts for Us.