The group behind the “doxxing truck” that exposed the names of pro-Palestine Columbia University students turns out to receive generous donations from prominent Republican donors, a new report has discovered.
CNBC reviewed the 2022 tax return of Accuracy in Media, which ran the doxxing trucks in the fall, has been running doxxing trucks at Harvard, and has been operating trucks calling for the resignation of the Columbia president in recent weeks. They discovered that many major GOP donors, including libertarian billionaire Jeffrey Yass, gave money to the group.
In 2022, Yass gave $1,000,000 to Accuracy in Media. Other prominent donors included Cullen Davis ($10,000), an heir of an oil fortune; the family foundation of Richard Uihlein ($10,000), a shipping supply magnate; the Adolph Coors Foundation, of the brewing fortune ($15,000); and John Brown Cook Foundation ($200,000).
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As Valuetainment reported in November, a truck was seen driving around Columbia University displaying the names of students on twin jumbo televisions. At the time, Columbia president Minouche Shafik and Barnard College president Laura Rosenbury released a joint statement praising student activism and condemning such “harassment.”
“The deliberate harassment and targeting of members of our community by doxing, a dangerous form of intimidation, is unacceptable,” the memo read. “We are grateful for the persistence and perseverance of the students, and their families, in the face of this harassment. We are assembling available resources to support them and the staff and faculty who are by their side.”
Yass has been an active force in politics for some time, funding various libertarian and conservative causes. However, in recent months he has made headlines for his aggressive lobbying in defense of TikTok against various attempts to ban the platform. He owns a 7 percent stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, and is using his leverage among free market interest groups to protect it from the impending Congressional ban.
Yass is the co-founder of options trading empire Susquehanna International Group; he and his wife Janine are the biggest political donors of the current election cycle. They have spent $70 million on “dozens” of GOP candidates and committees, according to OpenSecrets.
However, AIM officially denies that Yass gave to the group, telling CNBC it is a case of mistaken identity. “Jeff Yass is not an AIM donor and never has been. I think our accounting firm made a major, major error,” a spokesperson claimed.
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics and business for VT and a regular guest on The Unusual Suspects. Follow Shane’s work here.
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