How Trump campaign’s attack on Walz continues Harlan Crow’s swiftboating legacy

08 August 2024

The year was 2004. U.S. Senator John Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee running to unseat President George W. Bush. The Iraq War was a major campaign issue and Sen. Kerry campaigned against it by accurately attacking his Republican opponent.

“Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn’t make it so. Saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn’t make it so. And proclaiming mission accomplished certainly doesn’t make it so,” Kerry declared upon accepting the Democratic nomination.

Backed by GOP donors, veterans – some with grievances against Kerry – formed a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), falsely attacking Kerry’s Vietnam War record. It was a massively-funded multi-million dollar machine that helped President Bush win re-election by destroying Senator Kerry’s military record, and the term “swiftboating” – an organized political and personal smear campaign leveling false accusations – came into being as a result.

Its first ad was released on August 4 or 5, 2004 – almost 20 years to the day when the Trump campaign began its attack on Governor Walz.

On August 31, 2020 Politico ran an exclusive report: “Swift Boat mastermind to launch massive super PAC to boost Trump.”

“The new organization, Preserve America, is poised to begin a $30 million advertising blitz,” Politico detailed, adding that it “will be overseen by Chris LaCivita, a veteran Republican strategist who orchestrated the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth takedown of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race.”

Today, Chris LaCivita is the top advisor to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

On Thursday, amid the swiftboating of newly-minted Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, The New Yorker’s award-winning Jane Mayer wrote: “Remember when John Kerry was Swiftboated by Chris LaCivita who is doing it to Tim Walz now? Guess who funded it? Harlan Crow, the billionaire who has been lavishing freebies on Clarence Thomas.”

Back in 2004, that massively-funded multi-million dollar machine, or “millions of dollars in shadowy contributions,” as New York Magazine explains it, spent $22,565,360, according to Open Secrets. (That’s about $34 million in current U.S. dollars.)

One of Swift Boat’s top donors was conservative GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire whose financial relationship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been the subject of numerous bombshell investigative reports. Recently, Senate Democratic Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden detailed some 0f Crow’s alleged gifts to Justice Thomas. Legal experts have called for Justice Thomas’s resignation, and some legal experts have called for the U.S.. Dept. of Justice to open an investigationinto Thomas.

(Crow’s funding of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was made via his privately-held company, Crow Holdings. According to Open Secrets, Crow has made 1193 donations to candidates, PACs, and political parties since 1989.)

Last year, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington(CREW) reported, “One of Crow’s first forays into large donations was by providing some of the initial financing of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an organization that spent millions running attack ads in 2004 against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and was later fined nearly $300,000 by the Federal Election Commission for failing to register as a political committee.”

“Even as the Supreme Court was deliberating Citizens United,” CREW continued, “Crow reportedly provided the major funding for Liberty Central, another dark money group, this one with links to Justice Thomas.”

Citizens United was the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case that – in a 5-4 decision – declared, effectively, money is speech, opening the floodgates to dark money groups that have poured untold billions of dollars into U.S. politics.

“Liberty Central was a 501(c)(4) organization founded by [Justice Thomas’s spouse] Ginni Thomas in late 2009 that counted Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo as a board member,” CREW’s report states. “Ms. Thomas served as president through November 2010 and was paid a salary of more than $120,000. According to Politico, of the $550,000in anonymous start-up funds the group received in 2009, $500,000 came from Crow, who also held an event for the group at his Dallas home a few months after it launched.”

“In helping bankroll the Republican network of dark money groups following Citizens United, Crow has taken full advantage of the diminishing transparency laws around our politics—which Justice Thomas has been instrumental in dismantling,” CREW concluded.

In 2007, Newsweek published a deeply sourced, 7000-word report on what went on behind the scenes in the Kerry campaign and how it failed to adequately respond to the swiftboating. Essentially, the report suggests, the campaign reacted too slowly, tried too hard to play nice, and did not immediately attack with full force.