Leaked Files Show How the Heritage Foundation Navigates the Reactionary Views of Wealthy Donors
Heritage claimed last week that this was a hack:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141196433
"Data breach: Heritage Foundation emails, donor info stolen"
http://gawker.com/leaked-files-show-how-the-heritage-foundation-navigates-1727706821
Late last month, a strange file appeared on an Amazon server belonging to the Heritage Foundation, an influential Washington, D.C.-based think tank that remains widely regarded as one of the country’s most serious and respectable conservative institutions. The file—which appears to have been unintentionally uploaded by a Heritage staffer, rather than obtained by an intruder—offers a remarkable window into how Heritage maintains this reputation. It contains hundreds of emails and thousands of pages of internal fundraising reports documenting how the foundation navigated the flood of conservative conspiracy-mongering that followed Obama’s election in 2008, and how its staffers discussed the increasingly bizarre ideologies of its donor class with puzzlement and occasional derision.
The file, which has since been deleted, is a Microsoft Outlook backup folder that appears to have been associated with an assistant director at Heritage named Steve DeBuhr, who belongs to the foundation’s “major gifts team” and handles donor relations in the Midwest. In that capacity, he received regularly updated “call reports” containing detailed dossiers on current and potential donors as well as DeBuhr’s and other development officers’ various interactions with those donors throughout the country. By all accounts, the file appears to be authentic: It surfaced on the same server (thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com) where Heritage hosts policy papers and membership forms.
Between 2008 and 2009, Heritage raised approximately $135,000,000 in tax-deductible donations from private charities and individuals, according to publicly available tax filings. One of those individuals was a Pennsylvania businessman named Robert W. Ellis, who between 1994 and 2008 gave 40 gifts totaling nearly $250,000 to the foundation. DeBuhr’s records indicate Ellis’s development officer, a Heritage employee named Jeffrey Trimbath, met Ellis in person at least seven times between July 2008 and June 2009. In notes taken after those meetings, Trimbath characterized what he took to be Ellis’s views toward Muslims and liberals.
Short version: Heritage plays rich, right-wing nutters for big money
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