“This case raises important questions about the balance between a free press and effective national security,” Media Matters Action wrote in a blog post. “If the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated.”

The DOJ monitoring controversy is just the latest scandal to strike the Obama administration in the last week. On Friday, IRS officials admitted that they had “inappropriately” targeted conservative and tea party groups applying for tax-exempt status.

USA Today reported on Wednesday that liberal groups “were given a pass” when applying for tax-exempt status, despite the fact that many liberal nonprofit organizations, including Media Matters and President Obama’s former super PAC, Organizing for America, receive substantial amounts of money from shadowy liberal groups that support the Democratic Party.

Media Matters receives an undisclosed amount of money from the dark money group known as the Democracy Alliance.

The Democracy Alliance, a collection of billionaires and millionaires, funnels millions of dollars each year into liberal groups without disclosing their membership in the group. Several of its members, including Hedge Fund manager George Soros, provided the start-up capital needed to make Media Matters one of the nation’s best-funded political nonprofits.

The Democracy Alliance in 2012 purged several progressive organizations that “tend to … work outside the [Democratic] party’s structure.” Media Matters was not one of those groups.

The Cable has learned that a large chunk of that pro-Hagel money is coming from one Democratic donor, gambling legend Bill Benter, who is working with the Podesta Group, a Washington lobbying firm, to support pro-Hagel advertising. Podesta facilitated Benter’s funding of a week of ads in Politico’s Playbook must-read daily newsletter, written by Mike Allen, a spokesman for Benter confirmed to The Cable.

This isn’t Benter’s first effort to use his fortune to advance the career of someone with a history of anti-Israel rhetoric. Benter donated to the world of liberal foundations, specifically the two anti-Israel groups J Street and Media Matters, following his horse race gambling success. Benter told the Daily Caller he has “been a contributor to Media Matters for many years.”

Benter is suspected of donating to Media Matters in an attempt to install M.J. Rosenberg as the foreign policy voice at Media Matters.

M. J. Rosenberg was accused of being anti-Israel and anti-Semitic last year for using the term “Israel firster,” for saying AIPAC “has Obama’s back to [the] wall on Iran,” and for saying the Jewish “lobby” is pushing for war. Rosenberg left Media Matters in April 2012 after months of controversy.

J Street, the progressive organization focused on Israel, originally defended Rosenberg. J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami said, “it’s a legitimate question” when Jewish Americans and Americans sympathetic to Israel are accused of putting the interest of another country before the United States. Ben-Ami later retracted his defense.

Benter is also one of J Street’s most important backers. He solicited and facilitated an $811,697 donation from an individual in Hong Kong for the group. The controversial anti-Israel group has faced questions since its founding. The organization denied ties to the controversial billionaire George Soros on its website but it was later revealed that Soros and his family had donated $750,000 to J Street. Soros has faced criticism for blaming the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe on the policies of the Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’ administrations and for writing that Israel was “the main stumbling block” for the Egyptian revolution.

Clinton will speak before the Democracy Alliance today in an effort to haul in multi-million dollar Super PAC donations for Obama’s Super PAC, Priorities USA, according to the New York Times.

Bill Clinton will headline a lunch in New York to benefit Democratic groups. His audience will be members of the Democracy Alliance, a consortium of liberal donors, many of whom have been reluctant to make large contributions to Super PACs this year.

Far from being reluctant, the Alliance is prepared to raise $100 million for liberal groups and campaigns in 2012. Clinton is not the only Democratic VIP to make a presentation to the group. Following the 2010 Republican midterm sweep, Vice President Joe Biden beseeched the Alliance to begin pumping money into Obama’s reelection fund.

The group lifted its prohibition on campaign giving two months later and numerous members have since increased their contributions to the Obama campaign from 2008 levels, including several six-figure donations to Super PACs.

The Alliance operates on a venture capital model, selecting a handful of liberal organizations to receive its big-money donations. Members of the invitation-only group pledge to give $200,000 to the favored groups, which increasingly have close ties to the White House—the Center for American Progress and Media Matters each enjoy favored status. It does not disclose its recipients or members, who are forbidden from speaking to the press. The Alliance did not return numerous requests for comment.

A new book raises questions as to whether the FBI hid the existence of a weapon recovered at the scene of murdered U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Conservative commentator and author Katie Pavlich lays out evidence she says points to a FBI cover-up to protect a confidential informant in her recently released book, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-up,

In response to an inquiry from the Free Beacon, a Justice Department spokeswoman said in an email that she “was told to direct your questions to the FBI, and also to provide you with a link to this story: http://mediamatters.org/research/201204190011”

The link was to a story at the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America supposedly refuting many of Pavlich’s claims. Media Matters is a partisan organization whose founder, David Brock, is also running a pro-Obama super PAC.

In Operation Fast and Furious, federal agents allowed more than 2,000 weapons to be smuggled across the U.S.-Mexican border and into the hand of violent drug cartels, with the intent of tracking them to learn more about the cartels.

Two weapons connected to Fast and Furious were discovered at the murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, who was gunned down in the Southern Arizona desert in 2010 by five criminals armed with AK-47s.

However, Pavlich asserts there was a third gun. The book details three separate pieces of evidence that point to a third weapon being recovered and then covered up by the FBI and the Justice Department.

Border Patrol agents, who have since been issued gag orders, were overheard at Terry’s funeral discussing the third gun.

“The idea that the border patrol agents were issued gag orders and not allowed to talk about this is very telling,” Pavlich said in an interview with the Free Beacon.

An email sent less than 12 hours after Terry’s death also mentioned the weapon.

Finally, an audio recording of a discussion between Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf Trading Company, and ATF agent Hope MacAllister also references a third gun.

The investigation of Fast and Furious revealed that at least six FBI informants were involved in the operation, as well as an unknown number of DEA informants. Pavlich claims in her book that a confidential source told her the FBI hid the third gun from evidence because it was linked to a confidential informant or the brother of the informant.

“The reason they’re covering up the third gun is because it could lead to the confidential informant,” Pavlich said. “They’re protecting him at the cost of justice to Brian Terry and his family. I am not an expert on what confidential informants are allowed to get away with, but I guarantee they’re not allowed to kill federal agents.”

ADAM KREDO: Hi David. I’m Adam Kredo from the Washington Free Beacon. I was curious if you support and stand by the rhetoric used by your senior staffer M.J. Rosenberg, who’s accused American Jews and even AIPAC-supporting members of congress as being Israel Firsters. Do you agree with that? I was hoping David could as well—

ARI RABIN-HAVT: I’m going to take this. Here is what I think. You know, Israel is an issue that has a deep and heartfelt meaning to me. It’s an issue I have thought a lot about over the years. It’s one that has had an impact on my family, sorry–it’s had an impact on my family, had an impact on my ancestors. What disappoints me about this whole debate is, you know, the topic of Israel and the disputes in the Middle East and Iran are kind of the most serious thing our country is dealing with today. We’re asking big questions–we’re asking, should we go to war in Iran? And our debate is being driven down to a number of tweets from a staffer at an organization that people find offensive. I have this policy in general in my life that I don’t feed trolls, so I’m not going to do that here.  I’m just going to say I consider myself a Zionist. I consider myself in support of the state of Israel. If you talk to any staffer at Media Matters who deals with foreign-policy, I think they’ll tell you the same thing. So I’m not going to get into a debate, when we have, when we are debating the most serious issues of war and peace, I’m not going to engage in a debate with a conservative publication about tweets. When we take Iran to make it about Twitter, I think that is a huge problem.

KREDO: I’m just curious about the use of the term “Israel Firster” itself, if that’s okay?

RABIN-HAVT: Hey, I’m sorry, one question. One question.

Rosenberg has employed the phrase in articles published by the Huffington Post and other outlets. Media Matters reports statements made on Twitter by conservative commentators frequently.

We “don’t feed the trolls,” said Ari Rabin-Havt, MMFA’s executive vice president, when asked if Media Matters condones and stands by the use of the term “Israel firster,” a borderline anti-Semitic slur that is regularly employed by MMFA writer M.J. Rosenberg.

“I’m not going to get in a debate about tweets,” Rabin-Havt said, intervening to field a question that was directed at Brock.

Rosenberg, however, has not just used the epithet on Twitter. He regularly employs the phrase in articles published by the Huffington Post and other outlets.

And now the controversy is spilling into the Jewish nonprofit world.

Several of the nation’s most preeminent Jewish charities are facing criticism for donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to MMFA.

Five Jewish charities in some of the nation’s largest cities have donated nearly $600,000 to Media Matters since 2006, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller. The bulk of the donations came between 2008 and 2010.

A number of the charities in question are tied to the centrist Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella organization that includes some of the country’s largest Jewish nonprofits, including those in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

News of the donations surprised some Jewish and pro-Israel observers who have condemned Media Matters as a fringe outlier that promotes views contrary to those of the mainstream Jewish community.

Jewish donors “have no idea how this organization has turned into a bigoted group,” Alan Dershowitz, a prominent lawyer and Harvard professor who recently launched his own “personal war” against Rosenberg, told the Washington Free Beacon.

Since his hire in 2009, Rosenberg’s articles have focused on the power of the so-called “Israel lobby,” which he believes has placed a pro-Israel chokehold on the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Rosenberg has also appropriated the “Israel firster” phrase, a term that has its roots in the white supremacist movement.

Many Jews—particularly wealthy philanthropists—are unaware that Media Matters is condoning this type of content, Dershowitz told the Washington Free Beacon.

“Many Jews just couldn’t care less—and then there are … the M.J. Rosenbergs who work to destroy Israel,” Dershowitz said. “I would urge donors to reconsider their gifts.”

Asked if he was surprised to learn that Jews are fiscally backing Media Matters, Dershowitz responded, “Some Jews supported Mussolini and Stalin, so why should we be surprised?”

Of the five Jewish charities that have donated to Media Matters, the most prolific is the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, which has given the group $362,500 since 2007.

CJP president Barry Shrage did not respond to multiple requests seeking comment. However, a statement on the organization’s website states that it is not directly responsible for the donations that were made to Media Matters through its funding arm.

“CJP is now—and has always been—one of Israel’s strongest supporters,” the statement said. “The grant in question was from a Donor Advised Fund, and not from CJP’s communal funding allocations.”

Donor-advised grants are primarily controlled by the funder.

“While owned and ultimately controlled by CJP, [donor advised funds] do not involve communal funds, but rather reflect the interests of those individual donors,” the statement said.

The CJP said that it does “reserve the right to reject a grant to organizations whose missions are in conflict with our own and we have done so on several occasions.”

Dershowitz, who has ties to the CJP, said that while he disagrees with their decisions to fund Media Matters, Jewish donors should be granted the freedom to give to any organization they choose.

Joe Berkofsky, communications director for JFNA, the umbrella group that oversees several of these charities, including the CJP, recommended that the WFB “contact the individual Federations, which in fact are the actual custodians of the funds.”

The other charities that have given to MMFA include: The Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego, the Jewish Communal Fund in New York City, the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, and the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.

Each of these organizations either declined comment or did not return calls for comment.

A source close to JFNA described the entire funding controversy as “bullshit.”

“People request funds to be allocated from their endowment funds and donor advised funds that are housed at federations,” the source said. “They are not direct allocations by the federations. Federations serve as their philanthropic bank for donations to charities. Unless it’s Jews for Jesus or al-Qaeda, the requests are accepted.”

Jewish philanthropists and other experts said that although these charities have been directed by their funders to donate to Media Matters, they have a responsibility to exert oversight and prevent donors from making grants to organizations that subvert Jewish values.

“Media Matters is currently in the business of paying for and spreading anti-Israel and anti-Semitic invective, and these donations—which do not comport with Jewish communal values—are funding that organization and its work,” said Josh Block, a Middle East analyst and former top official at a pro-Israel group.

Block added that “these Jewish organizations have a special obligation to stand up and declare that funding groups using rhetoric that the ADL, AJC, and Simon Wiesenthal Center have all identified as anti-Semitic and anti-Israel is simply not appropriate—unless of course they agree with Media Matters and neo-Nazis that it is a good idea to call elected officials and other pro-Israel Americans ‘Israel firsters.’”

“I’m not surprised that federations are funding these far left liberal agendas,” said Richard Allen, founder of JCC Watch, an organization that tracks New-York based Jewish nonprofits. “I think there’s a group within these federations that is diverting Jewish community money for nefarious political purposes, and it needs to stop.”

Jewish philanthropists associated with the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington—which did not donate to Media Matters but has taken heat for its funding of a local theater company that staged a series of plays condemned as anti-Israel—said that the funding dispute reveals a systemic problem.

“Sadly, Federations around the country are largely in the hands of secular liberals who have little sense of what’s actually Jewish, much less what’s pro-Israel,” said Michael Steinberg, a Maryland resident who stopped contributing to the Washington Federation for these reasons.

Louis Offen, another Washington-based philanthropist, added:  “I’ve got liberal tendencies, but they don’t go in the direction of support for [those who use the term] ‘Israel firsters’ and M.J. Rosenberg.”

CARLSON: Well, for two reasons. First, for ideological reasons. Media matters is a left-wing organization, wants to see a left-wing monopoly on media. He could, its donors give a lot of money in order to hit Fox. We’ve got a week-long series going on. We have internal memos that we’re going to be releasing later in the week that put a little finer point on this, but the bottom line is Media Matters has decided it can make the most money by attacking Fox and has.

DOOCY: Keep in mind, folks, this is a tax-exempt organization. And let’s talk a little bit about what they’re doing. In your report today, you say that Media Matters, it does appear, coordinates with the White House. That’s — that’s big.

CARLSON: Yes. It is big and it’s proved. In June of 2010, David Brock, the founder and head of Media Matters went to the White House and met with Valerie Jarrett, perhaps the president’s closest advisor. Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director. Since then, the Media Matters organization has had a weekly conference call with the White House. There’s also a weekly meeting of progressive groups that is in some sense orchestrated by the White House. Almost always a White House representative at that meeting and if you follow statements by Media Matters, they mirror statements by the White House about Fox, for instance, and vice versa. There’s no question there’s close coordinations.

DOOCY: Okay. Also, there seems to be close coordination with the mainstream media and what you say is Media Matters, which I think is going to spend $20 million this year trying to influence media, apparently whatever Media Matters gives a couple of mainstream media outlets, they print it! Greg Sargent you say at the Washington Post, Ben Smith when he was at Politico and MSNBC, Media Matters is right in their primetime.

CARLSON: That’s a verbatim quote from a Media Matters staffer. “We pretty much write their primetime. We call Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC, he takes our call.” We knew there was coordination between Media Matters and a lot of news organizations. We were shocked by the degree of that coordination. You got to say, whatever else you say about the group, Media Matters has been awfully effective in getting its message out. There are a lot of liberal reporters out there, a lot of willing hands, eager to do the bidding of Media Matters, it turns out.

DOOCY: Meanwhile, the guy at the top, David Brock who makes a lot of money doing this, you describe him as viciously mean, unstable. You talk about mental illness. This guy, he’s paranoid. He’s got a couple of bodyguards with him all the time, because he’s positive that he is the target of an assassination attempt.

CARLSON: Yes. That there are right-wing, unseen right-wing assassins lurking in the shadows trying to knock him off. We open the story with a scene where he’s smoking a cigarette on the roof of his building in downtown Washington, a very safe place, and his two bodyguards rush up and whisk him downstairs for fear of snipers. His personal assistant carried a handgun to various events including in Washington, D.C., where that’s completely illegal. He carried a concealed Glock with no permit, because David Brock needed the protection in the view of David Brock so yes, we have many people who work for David Brock telling us that the atmosphere there is paranoid. And I don’t think that’s too strong of a word.

Both Media Matters for America and Think Progress, activist groups with links to far-left funding sources, recently accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) of waging a behind-the-scenes battle aimed at forcing the Obama administration to attack Iran’s nuclear sites. These groups and their representatives used language some critics consider anti-Semitic, relying on terms with origins in the white-supremacist movement like “Israel Firsters” to describe those concerned by a nuclear Iran.

On occasion, they’ve gone even further. “The people I call ‘Israel Firsters’ are, in fact, Netanyahu Firsters,” wrote Media Matters’ M.J. Rosenberg. Rosenberg has also written numerous times that AIPAC “has Obama’s back to [the] wall on Iran,” and that the so-called “lobby” is pushing for war.

In August, Think Progress ran an article headlined, “AIPAC’s Iran Strategy On Sanctions Mirrors Run-Up To Iraq War Tactics.” In the piece, reporter Eli Clifton writes that AIPAC’s support for economic sanctions against Iran “brings to mind eery [sic] parallels between the escalation of sanctions against Iran and the slow lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

Foreign policy observers called the rhetoric bizarre and dangerous.

“Their imagined conspiracies in which Jews all meet secretly, share secret handshakes, would be laughable if these progressives’ obsessions didn’t handicap long-term American national security,” said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon adviser on Iran and Iraq who is now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

“When you look at groups like CAP [the Center for American Progress], one of the narratives they have is that the Americans and the Israelis have always been saying Iran is a year or so off [from acquiring a nuclear weapon], but this is anachronistic, because it ignores that some Western strategies might have slowed Iran’s pursuit,” Rubin explained. “One of the issues which drives me nuts is an embrace of a policy of procrastination. People should not take solace in the fact that the Iranians have not yet succeeded. What they fail to realize … is that you can learn just as much from a failure as from a success.”

At least one Democratic foreign policy insider chastised these liberal writers for creating the impression that conservative Jews are leading the charge against Iran.

“If you examine the writings of the folks who are putting this stuff out, you’ll see them making the wildest type of excuses in order to insulate Iran,” said a former Democratic Hill staffer who follows nonproliferation issues closely. “And not only do they do all this crazy denial stuff, but there’s this notion they push that Iran isn’t seeking nuclear weapons capability and they actively ignore IAEA documented reporting on work directly related to nuclear warheads—and then they blame the concern about it on the Jews.”

The former Democratic aide speculated that this biased reporting is meant to prevent the U.S. from taking action against Iran.

“Are they trying to condition an environment where the left will become upset with the Obama administration for any further pressure or action to stop Iran?” the Democrat asked. “These guys aren’t progressives, they are propagandists—spreading propaganda that sounds eerily like what the Iranians say themselves.”

Even Jewish liberals like Peter Beinart have joined the chorus of leftwing voices arguing that Iran will become the next Iraq or, as they see it, a war based on flawed intelligence.

“The Iran debate has followed the same pattern” as Iraq, Beinart wrote in a January column for the Daily Beast. “The extraordinary thing about today’s Iran debate is that being wrong about Iraq has barely undermined the hawks’ influence at all.”

The Obama administration itself seems to be proud of its rocky relationship with the Jewish state. More and more, its officials have been publicly highlighting the daylight that exists between the U.S. and Israel.

“I’ll be forthright, we have differences” with Israel, Dan Shapiro, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said during a panel discussion at the Herzliya Conference, an annual national security confab held in Israel. “It’s not as if we always agree on everything.”

But “those are signs of a healthy and strong partnership,” Shapiro maintained. “It underscores the point of the strength of the relationship.”

Liberal writers routinely question the veracity of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) November report on Iran. The report builds the case that the regime is aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons.

On January 10, for example, Robert Kelley, a former IAEA inspector who worked in Iraq, and is now associated senior research fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, called the group’s report “sketchy,” and claimed that “the way the data have been presented produces a sickly sense of deja vu.”

Kelley also argued that, much like with Iraq, the IAEA is withholding information and potentially relying upon forged documents.

But a top nuclear expert dismissed this claim, concluding that there is no reason to believe the documents are inauthentic.

“We’re always worried about forged documents, but one of things I’ve been impressed by is how the IAEA has developed this narrative and is well aware of the possibility of forgeries,” said David Albright, founder of the non-partisan Institute for Science and International Security.  “They continue to report on this and reject the idea that the data are forged.”