Conservative group heads in a new direction

Hacked records reveal emphasis on crucial swing states

Long a player on the national stage, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee has been quietly using its vast resources to construct state-bystate networks of activist groups to win support for its conservative agenda from coast to coast.

This previously undisclosed effort was revealed in hundreds of thousands of documents swiped by international hackers from the foundation’s server late last year.

Those internal documents, obtained by the Milwaukee Journal

Sentinel, part of the USA TODAY Network, show the conservative powerhouse is working to duplicate its success in Wisconsin under Republican Gov. Scott Walker, focusing on such swing states as North Carolina and Colorado.

“You have to take a longer view on some of the things we’re trying to accomplish,” said Bradley Foundation CEO Rick Graber in an interview. “You’re not going to see definitive results every three months. It can take decades.”

The records make clear the Bradley Foundation no longer simply favors groups promoting its signature issues: taxpayer-funded school choice and increased work requirements for welfare recipients. It now regularly funds non-profits that are, among other things, hostile to labor unions, skeptical of climate change or critical of the loosening of sexual mores in American culture.

More important, the foundation has found success by changing its fundamental approach to putting policies into reality.

The Bradley Foundation is paying less attention to Washington, D.C. Instead, it is methodically building a coalition of outside groups aimed at influencing officials in statehouses from Pennsylvania to Arizona.

“Many say Washington is ‘broken.’ Whatever this might mean, it does not mean conservative policy advancement,” said one internal Bradley memo from August 2014. Instead, it continued, “there has been a recent increase in state-level receptivity to meaningful conservative policy reform.”

The result: Bradley Foundation, worth nearly $900 million, is underwriting local think tanks, opposition research centers, candidate recruitment groups, conservative media, bill-drafting organizations and litigation centers around the nation — what some critics call “shadow governments.”

As it often does, the foundation tested its new strategy in the political petri dish of Wisconsin, fi-

nancing a network of conservative groups that defended and promoted Walker and his agenda, including his attacks on labor unions. From 2011 to 2015, these dozen-plus nonprofits, labeled the Wisconsin Network, received more than $13 million from the conservative foundation.

Michael Grebe, who stepped down as president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation last year after 15 years in charge, said he decided to change direction.

“We didn’t create any of these organizations, but clearly we had a prominent role in funding those operations, particularly as they got up and running,” said Grebe, who has been chairman of Walker’s campaign committee since 2010. “I think it’s been rather successful.”

Rob Stein, who tracks the state-by-state political networks for the liberal Democracy Alliance, agreed.

“The Bradley Foundation has figured this out,” Stein said. “The presidency is the least important lever of power for them to control.”

The internal records show the new dollars have already been spent in several states, including:

uStarting in 2016, the foundation put $575,000 into five groups in Colorado, a key swing state. One group uses the money to recruit and train conservative activists and candidates while two others have the stated goal “to defund teachers unions.”

uBradley Foundation officials are giving $1.5 million over three years to two organizations in North Carolina, another swing state, to “create a comprehensive communications infrastructure around four primary elements: radio, online content aggregation, mobile applications and an APstyle news service for local newspapers.” One group has acquired a Drudge Report-style website called Carolina Plott Hound.

uIn the states of Washington and Oregon, a group called the Freedom Foundation was awarded $1.5 million over three years to “educate union workers themselves about their rights — which, if and when exercised, would defund Big Labor.”

Already, the Freedom Foundation has won a two-year court battle in the state of Washington to get the names of 34,000 members of a major union and contacted many of them to try to get them to drop their membership. The Freedom Foundation even hired a Santa Claus to stand outside a Washington state agency to encourage workers there to opt out of the union. The records used by the Jour

nal Sentinel became available because a foreign group calling itself Anonymous Poland hacked the foundation’s server shortly before the 2016 general election and briefly posted the compressed file of 30 gigabytes of hacked data information online.

“You have to take a longer view on some of the things we’re trying to accomplish.” Rick Graber, Bradley Foundation CEO