Spotlight Delaware Reports On Corporate Law Contributions To Incumbents. Share with your friends:
Last year’s bitter legislative fight over a bill to shield companies from certain lawsuits has spilled into this summer’s primary election campaigns, with leading corporate law firms backing an advertising blitz to defend Delaware legislators against challenges from a rising progressive movement.
Those law firms, which have represented Tesla, Meta and other Silicon Valley giants, have mobilized through two interconnected political organizations that have published digital ads, sent out glossy mailers, and even purchased sponsored content with Spotlight Delaware.
Many of the ads appearing on YouTube or within a mailbox praise one of about a dozen incumbent Democrats, who last year supported reforms to Delaware’s influential corporate law within Senate Bill 21. The legislation has since become settled law. (Note: Musk and Zuckerberg have now settled in Texas.)
The mailers and online ads touch on familiar liberal themes, such as affordable housing, public education and an opposition to President Donald Trump’s policies. They do not appear to mention Delaware’s corporate law – even as last year’s fight over its reforms sparked the creation of one of the organizations now paying for many of the ads.
A separate set of political advertisements backed by the law firms directly oppose two Wilmington-area progressive challengers. Among those is Rob Bahnsen, a medical doctor, running to replace Rep. Krista Griffith (D-Fairfax), who was a sponsor of Senate Bill 21.
In an interview with Spotlight Delaware, he suggested that backers of the campaign are not operating out of concern for the kitchen table-issues they cite in their ads.
“Nobody gives away a million dollars for free,” Bahnsen said, referring to the law firms’ donation in June to one of the political advocacy organizations.
One of the two organizations behind the attorneys’ campaign is the Alliance to Protect Delaware’s Future, a nonprofit entity that is not required to disclose its donors.
Days after its initial ad buys, San Francisco-area attorney David Lazarus formally incorporated the group, according to state business filings.
Lazarus’s firm, Nielsen Merksamer, has also worked on a string of largely-California based political initiatives in recent years, including a high-profile referendum that allowed companies, such as Uber and Lyft, to classify drivers as independent contractors.
When calling the firm’s listed phone number, the caller ID states “Californians Against Higher Taxes.”
After its initial formation, the Alliance to Protect Delaware’s Future’s subsequent business filings identified five Delaware lawyers from prominent corporate firms as its officials. The attorneys do not list their Delaware addresses on the filings, but instead list the Albany, New York offices of the law firm, Harris Beach Murtha.
Among those attorneys is Burns, who serves as a director at Wilmington’s Richards Layton & Finger. In his emails to Spotlight Delaware, he said Harris Beach Murtha serves as compliance counsel for his Delaware group.
Burns did not answer several other questions, including those seeking details about donations to the Alliance to Protect Delaware’s Future and about its precise relationship with its partner group, the First State Future PAC.
The four other attorneys, besides Burns, who are listed as officials with the campaign, did not respond to calls seeking comment for this story.
Unlike the Alliance to Protect Delaware’s Future, few organizational details are publicly known about the First State Future PAC.
A Washington, D.C. consultant, Cassandra Tinsmon, created the entity this spring, according to IRS documents and Delaware campaign finance filings. No other names are listed on those public documents.
Still, like its partner organization, the PAC has the backing of Delaware’s corporate bar.
In June, the same five corporate law firms linked to the Alliance to Protect Delaware’s Future, collectively contributed $950,000 to the First State First PAC, according to a campaign finance report.
Those firms are Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnel; Potter Anderson; Richards Layton & Finger; Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati; and Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor.
None of this propaganda being spewed out by these corporate lawyers even mentions SB 21. They portray these incumbents as ‘fighting against Trump’, as if their progressive challengers would not fight even harder ‘against Trump’.
This article is a BFD. Share it with everyone you know. That’s what I’m trying to do.
Trump And Blanche–Partners In Corruption:
Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, has been a contentious pick to lead the Justice Department amid questions about his handling of the Epstein files, the targeting of Trump’s political foes and the broader politicization of justice.
Tillis and Cornyn this week voiced their opposition to Blanche over an agreement the Justice Department struck to end President Trump’s IRS lawsuit over his leaked tax returns.
The settlement included the creation of a nearly $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund, which Cornyn and Tillis have vocally opposed for weeks. That fund would compensate people who alleged they were unfairly targeted by the government, meaning money could have gone to defendants charged with wrongdoing in the Jan. 6 riots.
A second, related part was a sweeping immunity deal for Trump, his family and businesses from audits of past tax returns.
Blanche has said the fund is not moving forward, but Cornyn and Tillis wanted written guarantees from the Justice Department about the scope of the tax immunity deal — guarantees that they said the DOJ would not provide.
“For some reason, I don’t know whether it’s the staff of the DOJ or who it is, but they simply, they know what they need to do, but they simply refuse to do it,” Cornyn told reporters this week.
In response to Trump’s Thursday post, Cornyn responded with his own post: “POTUS is mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis.”
You guys are smart–You know that Trump’s push for the nomination is because of this unfathomably corrupt deal. No deal, no Blanche.
The Prairieland Case Is Fascism Writ Large:
Savanna Batten got her first call from the FBI the year she turned 18. It was 2011, and the Animal Liberation Front had set fire to a fur store in Idaho and raided mink farms in Iowa and Washington. The feds were cracking down, just as Batten had been chosen as president of Animal Connection of Texas. Her mother, Cynthia Lokey, says the group she and her daughter belonged to confined its own activities to peaceful protest. “We never did anything like that,” she said of the ALF actions, “but I’m not gonna knock other people for doing it, because those places are atrocious.”
Even then, Batten knew not to speak to the feds. Animal Connection’s lawyer told her, “If they come to your door, don’t talk to them.”
Fourteen years later, the FBI once again had Batten in its sights. On July 4, 2025, she’d participated in a demonstration outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Prairieland Detention Facility, southwest of Dallas. The plan had been to make noise and shoot off fireworks to let the detainees know they weren’t alone. But some of the activists were armed, and one of them shot a cop.
Law enforcement arrested Batten and nearly everyone else who attended the protest, charging 11 of them with attempted murder. “It was a planned ambush with the intent to kill ICE corrections officers,” the US attorney said three days after the shooting. “This was not a so-called peaceful protest.” The defendants, prosecutors initially theorized, had used the chaotic demonstration to lure officers into a deadly trap.
Then, in September, a gunman in Utah assassinated Charlie Kirk. The evidence suggests that the accused murderer acted alone. But in the furious reaction that followed, the Trump administration ramped up its assault on dissent, alleging that a network of left-wing activists and NGOs were engaged in a nationwide plot to foment political violence. Trump designated antifa—a decentralized anti-fascist movement he described as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise”—as a domestic terrorist organization. He ordered law enforcement to use every tool available to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle” antifa operations.
The Prairieland case became the Justice Department’s proving ground for its new war on antifa, and the defendants were soon indicted on federal terrorism and conspiracy charges punishable by decades in prison. Prosecutors spun up an elaborate tale of a Texas “Antifa Cell” engaged in a campaign of terror—one in which the fireworks demonstration became “conspiracy to use” explosives, and possession of radical literature became evidence of criminal intent. The government even portrayed Batten’s leftist book club as a recruiting and propaganda arm of the conspiracy. Batten, the indictment noted ominously, was “part of a group that created and distributed insurrectionary materials called ‘zines.’”
To be fair, ‘zines’ are killing machines.
As the trial began this past winter, FBI Director Kash Patel spoke as if it were already a done deal. “Nineteen people have been convicted for acts of violence related to antifa,” he said on a podcast. “You don’t got to believe me…Everybody can go read the public indictment.”
Patel’s pronouncement may have been premature, but he wasn’t wrong. It didn’t matter that little evidence of a premeditated attack on law enforcement ever emerged. It didn’t matter that every defendant, except the actual shooter, was exonerated of the original attempted murder charges. It didn’t even matter that prosecutors struggled to show the defendants belonged to an “antifa cell.” In the end, they convinced the jury that Batten and most of her co-defendants were guilty of rioting, conspiracy, using explosives, and supporting terrorists.
In a Fort Worth courtroom in June, a right-wing judge sentenced Batten to 50 years behind bars—a stark warning to others who might challenge the president’s agenda.
Some timid Democrats urge us not to use the word ‘fascism’. It’s FASCISM. Say it!
What do you want to talk about?
Did you see the Griffith PAC attack ad on Dr. Rob today? It claims that he isn’t fighting for “our” interests because he has raised money from out of state. Never mind where Rep. Griffith gets her money…. or who is indirectly supporting her. Who do you think they mean by “our?”