A GOP Megadonor Is Attacking This Progressive For 'Opposing President Biden'

A recent attack ad against progressive Squad member Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) depicts her as a radical threat to Democrats’ agenda. As the ad pans over photos of pro-abortion rights protests, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and former President Donald Trump, a narrator warns, “Our rights are under attack, our democracy at risk, and in this moment, Representative Summer Lee is opposing President Biden.” The spot concludes with a plug for Bhavini Patel, a Pittsburgh-area council member challenging Lee as a moderate alternative.

Ads like these, against progressive members of Congress like Lee, are standard fare in a Democratic primary. Except the donor behind these ads is Pennsylvania billionaire Jeffrey Yass, who is this cycle’s single largest donor to the Republican party and on the shortlist for Treasury Secretary in a second Trump White House.

Yass has lavished more than $1.8 million on the super PAC behind the ads, Moderate PAC, making him the PAC’s single largest donor by far. At the same time he is paying for ads invoking the specter of Jan. 6, in other words, he is closely tied to the man who instigated it.

“For me, it’s really the audacity,” Lee said in an interview. “They don’t support Biden. … Jeff Yass is supportive of an insurrectionist. For any candidate to use dollars coming from him to paint me as an extremist is really rich.”

Yass made his fortune as an international stock trader, and, ProPublica reported , by assiduously structuring his wealth to avoid high taxes. His trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, is a major investor in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.

Susquehanna was also the largest institutional investor in the shell company that took Trump’s social media company public, causing Trump’s