A leading Democratic Super PAC is hoping to dig up dirt on a public university after it accepted grant money from a group backed by libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch, documents reveal.
American Bridge, a pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC backed by some of the nation’s wealthiest Democrats, filed an open records request with Mississippi State University last week seeking correspondence between university officials and employees of the Charles Koch Institute.
The group filed the request a day after MSU announced that it would accept roughly $365,000 in grants from CKI to fund a new Institute for Market Studies.
According to a copy of the request obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, American Bridge is seeking all correspondence since Jan.1, 2014, between the CKI and 10 MSU employees, including its president and provost.
It is also looking for communications with MSU economics professor Claudia Williamson, who is helping to form the Institute and is expected to play a key role in its operations.
American Bridge routinely attack the Kochs, who have donated more than $167 million to dozens of colleges, high schools, and other educational institutions, according to Mother Jones.
After failing to win key races for Democrats in the 2014 midterms using a strategy that painted the Kochs as evil oligarchs, American Bridge decided to double down on that strategy heading into 2016. The group did not respond to a request for comment on its open records request.
The Kochs featured prominently in promotional materials handed out at a recent conference of the Democracy Alliance donor club in San Francisco. A coalition of the left’s deep-pocketed moneymen, the group’s conference included presentations by David Brock, a high-profile Clinton supporter and American Bridge’s founder.
The Super PAC’s dark money arm recently attacked a Koch-backed group for lobbying to reduce federal subsidies for Koch Industries and its subsidiaries.
Critics of the MSU project said the Kochs are looking to line their own pockets. "I haven't been shown another example where someone's political and economic interests were so aligned with the centers they're funding," a Greenpeace spokesman told the Associated Press.
CKI brushed off that criticism. "Those accusations are false," John Hardin, its director of university relations, told the AP. "They're unfair. We believe that academic freedom is an absolute core value."
David Shaw, MSU’s vice president for research, also rejected that criticism in a statement.
"We strongly support academic freedom, and accept funds to support independent research activities from a wide variety of foundations with widely divergent backgrounds and focus of their efforts," Shaw said.
The Kochs are not the only politically active billionaires to invest in research centers at major universities.
Billionaire Democratic donor and Democracy Alliance partner Tom Steyer and his wife Kat Taylor recently helped Stanford University form the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy and the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance.
Steyer’s TomKat Charitable Trust has also donated more than $2 million to Harvard University, including $600,000 in contributions to the TomKat Innovation Fund at the university’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.