Exclusive – Tax Documents: U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation Turns to Soros-Funded Groups and Democrats to Keep Dwindling Operations Alive AP Photo/Ronald Zak

Tax documents for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and for a major foundation funded by leftist billionaire George Soros show the organization that purports to represent the U.S. business community has turned hard left in recent years.

The Tides Foundation’s public filings from 2018 to 2022 show the Soros-funded organization has given more than $12 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation over that five-year span. In 2018, the Tides Foundation gave the Chamber’s foundation $450,000. In 2019, Tides gave the Chamber group $1,450,000. It gave another $100,000 in 2020, followed by $10 million in 2021 and another $175,885 in 2022. That totals $12,175,885 in a five-year span.

View the Tides Foundation’s public filings here:

Tax form 990 by Breitbart News on Scribd

The Tides Foundation is funded by a variety of leftist donors including tens of millions of dollars given by Soros’s various groups and family members.

“God knows what they promised in return for a Tides Foundation contribution of that size,” a former Chamber consultant told Breitbart News. “But, George Soros doesn’t write checks like this without a return on his investment.”

During this timeframe, specifically from 2021 to 2022, revenue for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation dropped significantly per 2022 tax documents the organization just filed. Revenue for the organization in 2021, per the documents, was at $53,612,150 whereas in 2022 per the group’s IRS 990 form it was at $30,634,307. That’s a drop of $22,977,843—or about 42 percent—in revenue in just one year.

In 2022, the tax documents show that Suzanne Clark—the director and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation who also serves as the President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—made $6,326,094 from the U.S. Chamber foundation, or just under $125,000 a week.

“Is Susie Clark really worth $100k a week to represent the biz community?” a former Chamber employee told Breitbart News.

The 2022 tax filings from the U.S. Chamber foundation also show the organization’s biggest vendor was that year an organization called the Markham Group, LLC, a Little Rock, Arkansas-based event planning company. Markham Group was paid $5,193,837 in 2022 from the U.S. Chamber foundation per the IRS document, far and away much higher than any other vendor.

View the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation's tax filings here:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation – Full Filing- Nonprofit Explorer – ProPublica by Breitbart News on Scribd

It would seem unremarkable that a business group is paying big dollars to an event planning company except for the fact that Markham Group appears to be extremely plugged in with top Democrats—and not so much among Republicans. On its website, it features photos and videos of events it helped execute with top Democrats including Democrat President Joe Biden, first lady Dr. Jill Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Biden White House chief of staff Ron Klain, the Clinton Global Initiative, and more.

The founding partner of Markham Group is a man named Greg Hale, who has worked in and around the Clinton family political orbit for decades. In 2016, he was the Hillary Clinton campaign’s director of production, which earned him a glowing profile in the New York Times that ran just weeks before now former President Donald Trump smoked her in the election that year.

It’s not like the Chamber’s foundation employing the Markham Group is any kind of secret either. In a 2018 interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Hale discussed his work for the Chamber foundation producing events as he rattled off other major clients from the radical left he works with.

“Most of our work is about passionate things that we believe in,” Hale said in the interview with the local newspaper:

We’ve been working on March for Our Lives rallies all over the country a few weeks back, so Bloomberg and Everytown, those are good clients who do really good things… The Walton Family Foundation, they do good work that helps people. We do work for Hiring Our Heroes, which is the U.S. Chamber Foundation, and we produce rallies all over the country where we bring in veterans … and match them up with potential employers. That’s rewarding work.

The Hiring Our Heroes program is an effort by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation every year to connect U.S. service members, military spouses, and veterans with potential employers. The admirable push every year helps veterans and military families find economic opportunities, but that’s beside the point: The Chamber foundation could hire literally anyone to do this work—there are hundreds probably thousands of major event production companies in existence in America that are not run by partisan leftist Democrats such as Hale. But the group chose this company to do its work, again all while the funding source shifted and the Chamber foundation began receiving millions from leftist organizations.

What’s more, how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its affiliated foundation operate are particularly relevant given the fact that Biden in his most recent State of the Union address used the fact that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had endorsed the failed Senate immigration deal from Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and others as some sort of evidence it had Republican support.

“The Border Patrol union has endorsed this bill. The federal Chamber of Commerce has,” Biden said in his State of the Union address before getting into a shouting match with Republicans in the U.S. House chamber.

Trump, for his part, has ripped that Senate immigration deal, telling Breitbart News in a recent exclusive interview at Mar-a-Lago that it would have “exacerbated” the border crisis that Biden created.

But again, the fact that Biden is leaning on the Chamber of Commerce as a key part of his case for a second term in his State of the Union address begs the question seriously as to whether the Chamber has not fully turned to the Democrats. And the tax documents show that its affiliated foundation certainly has done so.

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