James McClave and Emily Berger, a couple with a fortune linked to AI investments and cryptocurrency trading, are becoming significant contributors to the primary dark-money group supporting President Joe Biden. The couple’s association, BEMC 4 Association, made the second-largest donation in 2022 to Future Forward USA Action, the non-profit arm of Future Forward, the main Super PAC supporting Biden.
McClave and Berger are executives at Jane Street, a Manhattan trading firm. McClave is also an early investor in Anthropic, an AI company. The couple’s donation of $7.2 million to Future Forward USA Action in 2022 was only surpassed by the George Soros-linked Open Society Policy Center, which donated $15.2 million that year.
Future Forward USA Action does not disclose its donors, but other non-profits that contribute to it do. CNN analyzed tax filing data released by the IRS to uncover some of these contributors. Other top contributors in 2022 included left-leaning non-profits such as the League of Conservation Voters and the Fund for a Better Future, which each gave $2.5 million, and the Hopewell Fund, which donated about $1.55 million.
The large sums of money flowing through Future Forward highlight how wealthy donors from both political sides are using dark-money groups to influence American politics while remaining anonymous. Despite criticisms from Democrats like Biden about the impact of dark money and calls for reforms, they are also major beneficiaries of the system.
Future Forward has announced plans to run the largest ever political advertising campaign by a Super PAC in 2024. This trend of undisclosed donor spending leaves voters uninformed about who is funding the candidates they are voting for, according to Anna Massoglia, the investigations manager at the campaign finance watchdog group OpenSecrets.
McClave and Berger have been quietly increasing their political spending, donating more than $1 million in total in recent years to a variety of Democratic Party groups and candidates in federal and state elections. McClave was an early investor in Anthropic, which runs the AI chatbot Claude, and was co-investors with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried before his financial collapse and conviction for fraud and conspiracy.
McClave has shown an interest in the federal government’s crypto policies, writing a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022 urging the regulator to allow a Bitcoin fund to be listed on a subsidiary of the New York Stock Exchange. Berger joined Jane Street after earning a PhD in mathematics from the University of California Berkeley.
Future Forward operates as two linked groups: a Super PAC, FF PAC, which is required to publicly disclose its donors, and a non-profit, Future Forward USA Action, which is not. Both groups are allowed to run ads supporting or opposing candidates, although the non-profit is not allowed to make that its “primary activity,” according to IRS rules.
Future Forward has said that it raised a combined $208 million in 2023 between its Super PAC and non-profit. The bulk of that appears to have been raised by the dark-money non-profit, as the PAC only reported raising about $25 million over the year, and more than $8 million of that was transferred from the non-profit, according to Federal Election Commission records.
McClave and Berger’s non-profit also donated another $7 million in 2022 to the Center for Voter Information, a group that works to encourage young people, women and minorities to vote. It also made smaller donations to two other left-leaning groups. McClave and Berger are also the officers of the similarly named BEMC Foundation, a private foundation that has given a total of about $2.5 million in recent years to Vox Media’s Future Perfect Project, which produces news stories on global issues.