Collin Anderson and Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon expose a clear case of media malfeasance.
A left-wing dark money network funded by the Democratic megadonor George Soros sent voters in Michigan unsolicited mailers resembling a newspaper that falsely identified Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed as a “veteran.”
The mailer, from the Michigan Independent—part of a national left-wing organization founded by the Democratic operative David Brock, the American Independent—is designed to look like a nonpartisan local newspaper. Partisan content aimed at propping up Democrats is peppered amid recipes for “Blueberry Streusel Coffee Cake” from “The Mitten Kitchen.” The partisan content includes a piece on El-Sayed’s primary win headlined, “El-Sayed — veteran, doctor, and former health official — is Democratic Senate pick.” El-Sayed has never served in the military, and while he attended medical school and has described himself as a “physician,” he has never been licensed to practice medicine, Politico reported.
The mailer is the latest example of Brock’s outfit attempting to influence elections through misleading mailers masquerading as news. In 2021, the “Virginia Edition” of the American Independent sent unsolicited mailers to voters falsely claiming that then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin called COVID relief “unnecessary,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. The following year, in 2022, the group’s state arms in Pennsylvania and Arizona ran paid Facebook ads pushing articles like “Arizona Republicans out of touch with constituents on abortion rights.”
In addition to the mailer, the Michigan Independent started running a Facebook ad on August 14 targeting El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, with a headline reading, “Rogers, Trump support bridge delay to bully Canada.”
Joe Conason, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based American Independent Foundation, which founded the Michigan Independent and received $500,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations in 2022, confirmed that the group sent the mailer calling El-Sayed a “veteran.” He said the error was a typo rather than an attempt to deceive voters.
