© Robin Opsahl/Iowa CapitalDisgraceful former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley spoke to a crowd at Avacentre in Cedar Rapids Oct. 20, 2023
Tyler Clark, who became Haley's 2024 state director for the Granite State late last year, is listed on lobbying disclosures filed in New Hampshire as working in 2020 on behalf of Sixteen Thirty Fund, a nonprofit group managed by Arabella Advisors, the largest liberal dark money network in the United States. Sixteen Thirty Fund, which is being investigated by the Washington, D.C., attorney general's office over financial mismanagement allegations along with the broader Arabella network, doled out more than $410 million in 2020 to boost Democrats and help unseat former President Donald Trump, all thanks to billionaire donors such as George Soros.
The top Haley campaign staffer's ties to Sixteen Thirty Fund could become a major liability for the ex-U.N. ambassador, who, along with Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), will compete Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary. Clark, the former New Hampshire state director for Trust in the Mission, a super PAC allied with failed GOP White House hopeful Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), also lobbied as recently as last year for New Hampshire's chapters for the American Civil Liberties Union and American Federation of Teachers, two groups conservatives often criticize for purportedly operating as arms of the Democratic Party, according to lobbying disclosures.
Trump, who won the Iowa caucuses in a landslide victory, is polling at a 66.1% average in the Republican presidential primary, followed by Haley at 11.5% and DeSantis at 10.5%, according to RealClearPolitics.
Clark's prior clients through Preti Strategies, where he was a public and government affairs adviser until June 2023, are likely to bolster concerns among conservatives that Haley is too "establishment" and could cave to Democratic demands if she became president, as well as potentially hire personnel with close relationships to liberal activist hubs. The Sixteen Thirty Fund-linked disclosures and other filings listing the lobbyist's name were personally signed by Clark, who was required to "hereby swear or affirm that the foregoing information is true and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief."
"Clearly, when Nikki Haley looks for talent, she turns to the Swamp and the Democrat Party's guns-for-hire, not genuine conservatives," Hayden Ludwig, policy research director for Restoration of America, a conservative advocacy group, told the Washington Examiner. "The Arabella Advisors-run 'dark money' Sixteen Thirty Fund is as Beltway insider as they come, to say nothing of the diversity, equity, and inclusion-obsessed teachers union that wants the government to raise all our kids."
Clark did not respond to a request for an interview. Haley campaign spokeswoman AnnMarie Graham-Barnes declined to respond to questions about Clark's lobbying record for liberal groups.
"The Trump campaign should be careful to throw stones at glass houses," Graham-Barnes said. "Donald Trump donated to Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Rahm Emanuel, and the Clinton Foundation. Trump has done more to help the Democrat Party than anyone in this race."
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, elevated Clark to state director after the campaign and then-state director Mak Kehoe for New Hampshire, who has worked in various roles for the Republican National Committee, parted ways in early December 2023. Clark, a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, joined Preti Strategies in 2019 on the heels of a roughly five-year role as a government relations adviser for the firm Dennehy & Bouley, whose clients have ranged from the likes of Oracle, Xerox, Lockheed Martin, and other major corporations or trade groups, according to Dennehy & Bouley's website.
Clark, along with lobbyists Peter Bragdon, Andrew Hosmar, and Lucas Meyer, is listed on New Hampshire lobbying filings for Sixteen Thirty Fund filed in April 2020 and January 2021, respectively. The April 2020 filings also list $15,000 in total fees for the period received from the client, Sixteen Thirty Fund.
In 2020, Sixteen Thirty Fund raked in $390 million, with half of that staggering haul originating from four donors combined, one of whom transferred $86.2 million to Sixteen Thirty Fund. The Soros-led Open Society Foundations grantmaking network pumped roughly $17 million in 2020 into Sixteen Thirty Fund, according to OSF database records.
In turn, Sixteen Thirty Fund shelled out $129 million that year to America Votes, a liberal voter registration group that used the funds to help "progressives across the country pivot to provide new and safe opportunities for voting during a deadly pandemic" and support "national efforts to expand access to vote by mail and increase voter turnout in communities of color and among traditionally disenfranchised people," Sixteen Thirty Fund Executive Director Amy Kurtz said in 2021.
The $129 million cash transfer accounted for 25% of Sixteen Thirty Fund's grantmaking in 2020, according to the conservative Capital Research Center think tank. Sixteen Thirty Fund financed advertisements through opaque pop-up groups taking aim at Trump and other GOP candidates, notably spending $23.6 million in 2020 on promotion and advertising, according to tax filings and the New York Times.
"Many conservatives will be surprised to learn that any Republican has worked for the Left's top 'dark money' network," President Scott Walter of Capital Research Center, who is the author of a forthcoming book on Arabella Advisors from Encounter Books, told the Washington Examiner.
"It's yet more evidence of how powerful and dangerous Arabella is," Walter said.
But Sixteen Thirty Fund isn't the only prior left-wing client of Clark, who in early January came under scrutiny for deleting a social media post touting how Haley was endorsed by Daniel Wolf, a Republican New Hampshire state representative who joined Democrats this month in voting against a bill aiming to ban transgender bathrooms.
Wolf also recently voted against a bill seeking to outlaw "genital gender reassignment surgery" on minors.
Clark's clients have also in recent years included the Granite State's ACLU, which advocates on its website for "abortion rights in New Hampshire," supported cashless bail to the ire of Republicans, and called for "dismantling systemic racism," according to a Washington Examiner review. The New Hampshire ACLU supported Trump's impeachment and habitually railed against the president while he was in office.
Another Clark client in recent years was New Hampshire's chapter for the American Federation of Teachers, which Republicans in Congress have investigated over the union's communications with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on lockdowns and reopening guidance for schools during the pandemic.
Earlier this month, New Hampshire's AFT celebrated a federal ruling allowing its lawsuit from 2021 challenging the state's restriction on race-based curricula to proceed. The law aims to thwart critical race theory, which conservatives have long slammed as discriminatory due to the framework holding that the U.S. is systemically racist, while teaching that people should view social interactions in terms of race.
Meanwhile, Clark is also listed on April 2021 lobbying filings in New Hampshire for the Teamsters Local 633 labor union, as well as disclosures over the years for CXS Transportation, the New Hampshire Auto Dealers Association, and Leda Health, among other organizations.
To Ludwig, the policy research director for Restoration of America, the Haley campaign's failure to respond to questions about Clark's lobbying record for liberal groups shows him they either didn't do their homework on him or simply don't care.
"Either way, it doesn't give Republicans confidence about the kind of personnel that Haley would staff her administration with," Ludwig said. "Hiring people willing to work for the biggest Democratic dark money political machine in the country is exactly why Republican voters are turning away from failed establishment policies Nikki Haley wants to revive from the dead."
Reader Comments
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