In a piece published Wednesday morning at the Washington Examiner, our friend Matthew Foldi exposed how the far-left dark money group Arabella Advisors has expanded its tentacles to capture the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the point that it works hand-in-glove with the USDA’s Secretary, Tom Vilsack.
Foldi’s opening line said it all: “If it walks like an illegal lobbyist and talks like an illegal lobbyist, it’s probably an illegal lobbyist.”
He explained that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from Americans for Public Trust (APT) “show that the head of Arabella Advisors...is directly communicating with” Vilsack and thus “raise troubling questions about the Democratic Party’s willingness to outsource policymaking to an unaccountable dark money juggernaut — questions that Democrats in Congress are unwilling to answer.”
In one exchange, Foldi showed Vilsack personally emailing Arabella Advisors founder Eric Kessler to say he awoke one day “thinking about the processing project you are helping to direct and lead” with much of the collusion coming as Arabella’s “run[ning] its own for-profit ‘Good Food’ initiative that is poised to benefit from Kessler’s wide-open access to USDA.”
But, given its role in political strategy and role in promoting various progressive causes, it’s an open question why the group hasn’t been deemed to have “violate[d] the Lobbying Disclosure Act.”
Foldi further explained:
Indeed, on Arabella’s Good Food website, the company touts the need for “a culture that demands good food, an infrastructure that supplies good food to meet that demand, and a policy environment that enables a good food system to take root. We’re helping to build all three.” Certainly Kessler, with his direct access to the secretary of agriculture, is helping to shape all three: the administration’s point of view on what “good food” is, the farming infrastructure to encourage the production of “good food” (which probably consists of a lot of green-friendly agriculture), and, most significantly, the policy environment which involves the quasi-lobbying in which Kessler is deeply involved.
Of course, none of this has made to the flagship morning and evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, or NBC. They’re too busy running segments like this one from CBS on transgenderism.
To read more of Foldi’s reporting (including see more examples), click here.
