Washington, D.C. — James Comer’s partisan targeting operation is expanding on two fronts this week: the House Oversight Committee chairman has issued a subpoena to the Sixteen Thirty Fund over its ties to a progressive influencer program, and his Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee have scheduled a hearing designed to pile on the already-indicted Southern Poverty Law Center. Meanwhile, the Capital Research Center, the right’s go-to disinformation laundromat, has a new target: the 2030 census.
Comer Subpoenas the Sixteen Thirty Fund
James Comer has escalated his investigation into the Chorus influencer program by subpoenaing the Sixteen Thirty Fund for records about a network that pays progressive creators to promote pro-democracy content online. As we covered in March, Comer launched this probe while documented evidence of Russian state outlet RT secretly funneling $10 million to right-wing media figures sat untouched on his desk, a galling double standard.
The subpoena is the latest escalation in a broader Republican campaign to intimidate and drain resources from progressive nonprofits and civil society organizations. Chorus has been unequivocal that it does not pay creators for specific posts and that participants “maintain full creative control over their content.” Comer is running a pressure campaign against organizations that he personally opposes, and wielding the power of a congressional subpoena to do it.
House Judiciary Schedules SPLC Hearing
The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing for May 20 titled “The Southern Poverty Law Center: Manufacturing Hate.” The witnesses announced so far include Tyler O’Neil of The Daily Signal, the Heritage Foundation’s in-house publication, and Carol Swain, a frequent presence in conservative media. The hearing is designed to provide backup for the Trump administration’s baseless prosecution of the SPLC, an organization that spent decades dismantling the KKK and sharing intelligence directly with the FBI. The administration is now prosecuting that intelligence-sharing as a crime. This is the Capital Research Center pipeline in action: they manufacture suspicion, Republican committees convert it into hearings, and the administration supplies the enforcement.
Capital Research Center Goes After the 2030 Census
Speaking of the Capital Research Center, they published a new piece this week arguing that civil society groups helping people fill out the census and apply for census jobs are engaged in a nefarious left-wing plot. As we documented in detail, the facts don’t back that up. CRC’s core claim, that nonprofit spending to promote census participation in 2020 corrupted the results, relies on Hans von Spakovsky, a self-described “election integrity expert” who has repeatedly been caught misrepresenting basic facts. CRC claims the 2020 results were skewed to benefit blue states, while the Census Bureau data CRC cites actually shows overcounting in Ohio and Utah, and undercounting in Illinois. And under federal law, that survey data can’t be used to revise congressional apportionment anyway. What the Capital Research Center conveniently leaves out: it was the first Trump administration that stopped the census count early and obstructed the overall effort. If the 2020 census had problems, the receipts point in a different direction than CRC wants you to look.
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