Rebekah Mercer

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Rebekah Mercer (born December 6, 1973 in Yorktown , Westchester County , New York ) is an American lobbyist and the director of the Mercer Family Foundation. She was one of the most influential supporters of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election in the United States .

Early life

Rebekah Mercer was born as the second of three daughters of the computer scientist and later hedge fund manager and multi-billionaire Robert Mercer and his wife Diana (née Dean). She grew up in a rural area (Yorktown Heights) on the edge of Yorktown near a Research Center of IBM in, where her father was working as a computer scientist. She studied biology and mathematics at Cornell University and Stanford University , where she received her bachelor's degrees in 1996 . A few years later she earned a Masters in Operations Research .

After completing her bachelor's degree, she joined the investment company Renaissance Technologies , to which her father switched in 1993 and where he was involved in the development of novel algorithms for high-frequency trading . In 2003 she married the French-born manager Sylvain Mirochnikoff, a managing director at Morgan Stanley ; she has four children with him. The family moved into a $ 28 million complex of six merged apartments in a high-rise building ( Trump Place ) on Manhattan's Upper West Side . Mercer gave up her job on Wall Street and devoted herself to her children, whom she also teaches at home. She is a supporter and supporter of homeschooling activist Arthur B. Robinson and has touted his homeschooling curriculum. Robinson describes the public schools as " socialist ", "evil" and "a form of child abuse ". In 2008, Rebekah Mercer took over the management of the Mercer Family Foundation , which at the time mainly supported medical research and charities.

Turning to politics

In 2010, when a ruling by the Supreme Court almost completely lifted the previously applicable, quite strict restrictions on the use of funds to influence politics in the USA ( Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ), and her father, the just as co- CEO had taken over the management of Renaissance Technologies , began to invest millions in this direction, Rebekah also found interest in politics . With him, she supported an advertising campaign against the re-election of Peter DeFazio , one of the Democratic representatives of Oregon in the House of Representatives , with 600,000 dollars. Whose Republican rival candidate in the same constituency was Arthur Robinson. DeFazio may have benefited from announcing that a New York hedge fund manager and his daughter wanted to get involved in Oregon politics.

In 2011, Rebekah Mercer and her father took part in seminars offered by entrepreneurs Charles and David Koch ( Koch Industries ) for right-wing millionaires to use their decades of experience to demonstrate ways in which they can effectively use funds to influence elections. The Mercers also joined the secret but influential Conservative Council for National Policy . In the same year they met Andrew Breitbart , the founder and director of the then insignificant website Breitbart News Network . She was impressed by his vision of building a media company capable of waging an “information war” against the mainstream press.

Breitbart introduced the Mercers to film producer Stephen Bannon , who had been pursuing similar goals with political documentaries for years . His most recent work, Fire From the Heartland: the Awakening of the Conservative Woman (2010), was a propaganda- staged “documentation” about women in the tea party movement . During this time, the Mercer Family Foundation gave 1.2 million to the conservative Young America's Foundation , almost half of which passed on to Bannon to fund his film projects.

Bannon suggested the Mercers join Breitbart News for $ 10 million ; in this transaction he was appointed to the board of directors . When Breitbart suddenly died of a heart attack in 2012 , Bannon took over the management. In the following years, financed mainly by the Mercers, he built the website - with the help of many full-time authors - into an extremely effective tool for influencing politics. Breitbart News supports extreme outsiders in the Republican Party against the establishment there and offers a forum for racist and sexist positions that were previously hidden from the media . Rebekah Mercer did not become an official, but took a large part in the editorial work , read all articles against and suggested topics.

Like her father, Rebekah Mercer shuns the public and almost never expresses her political views. But their goal is apparently to eliminate the political establishment in Washington . In 2012, her Mercer Family Foundation donated $ 2 million to Citizens United , the organization that championed lifting restrictions on investing in political influence before the Supreme Court. Rebekah Mercer also includes the Board of the Moving Picture Institute at which the " Hollywood - liberalism " own conservative will oppose productions, and (until 2014) the founded by Bannon 2012 Government Accountability Institute , which although as a supposedly impartial occurs Research Institute, but after a statement by Bannons to Bloomberg Businessweek, the mission is to dig up “dirt” on politicians and thus “feed” the mainstream media. More than half of the GAI is funded by the Mercer Foundation, with $ 4.7 million from 2013 to 2015. (No information was available for 2016 in November 2017.)

The Mercer Family Foundation is also one of the largest donors of the organized climate denial movement . Funding went to major think tanks and front-line organizations in this scene such as the Heartland Institute , the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (Arthur Robinson), the CO2 Coalition and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change . The Heartland Institute alone received around $ 5.9 million from the Mercer Foundation between 2008 and 2016. In recent years, the Foundation has increased its grants in this area, while ExxonMobil , long one of the main sponsors, has largely withdrawn.

After Barack Obama's re-election in the 2012 presidential election , which was particularly surprising for the wealthy supporters of Republican opponent Mitt Romney , Rebekah Mercer was extremely angry in the VIP area of ​​the party event planned as a victory celebration. She explained that the pollsters , data jugglers ( "data crunchers") and spin-doctors to whom they had trusted, were all cheaters. Her appearance at the debriefing to which the Republican Party had invited the major donors was even more drastic. One of those present later referred to him as her “coming out” (which in English does not only refer to sexual orientation ).

From then on she wanted to know exactly what her donations were being used for. She required the Kochs, who had been particularly focused on preventing Obama's re-election and whose funds the Mercers had already paid at least two million dollars, an account of why that had not worked. After ignoring this, she decided to take matters into her own hands. While her father continued to donate millions to the Kochs' fund, she financed Bannon's Government Accountability Institute through her Family Foundation to a similar extent. Large sums of money also went to conservative and libertarian think tanks. In 2013 alone, the foundation awarded a total of $ 13.5 million. That same year, Rebekah Mercer became president of the newly formed data analytics and microtargeting company Cambridge Analytica , of which her father was the primary investor.

2016 presidential election

In the primary elections for the 2016 presidential election, the Mercers first stood up for the Republican Ted Cruz , an outsider in his party. They donated $ 11 million to a Cruz-supporting Super-PAC, a special form of Political Action Committee that is exempt from the otherwise strict limits on the amount of money used. Rebekah, however, soon began to give scathing judgments on Cruz's achievements in discussions and urged his campaign leader to use the services of Mercer-funded data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica . After Cruz was eliminated from the race, the Mercers chose Trump as their candidate, while many leading Republicans distanced themselves from him. They turned the Super PAC on him and gave it another two million. In one of their very rare public statements, they told the Times that everything had to be done to ensure Trump won the election because if Hillary Clinton won , they would repeal the First Amendment and the Second Amendment , two important amendments to the US Constitution .

When Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort had to resign after a few weeks in the main election campaign , Rebekah Mercer pushed through a reorganization of the team and installed three “of her” people at the top: Bannon, Kellyanne Conway , the previous head of the Super-PAC, and David Bossie , the head of Citizens United. On the other hand, their earlier investments in the election campaign had a considerable negative impact on Clinton: The accusation of corruption that was constantly raised against Clinton could be based on the 2015 book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer and an editorial in the Times based on it and the articles based on it of the same name, which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in the 2016 election year . Behind it is the Government Accountability Institute, whose founders were Bannon and Schweizer. Bannon, who had made politically motivated films long before joining Breitbart News, was the producer of the film. The publication of Clinton's e-mails from her previous work as Secretary of State in the closing stages of the election campaign apparently also goes back to an initiative by Rebekah Mercer: After her foundation made another donation of $ 550,000 to Citizens United, this organization brought the Freedom of Information Act , which ultimately brought about this publication and the negative press that it generated.

After the presidential election

After the election, Rebekah Mercer was appointed to Trump's transition team, which lasted until his inauguration . On December 3, 2016, she hosted a victory celebration with several hundred guests, including Donald Trump , in the Owl's Nest , her parents' estate in Head of the Harbor on Long Island . He thanked the Mercers for their help in the election campaign and specifically named Bannon, Conway and Bossie. In the transition team, Mercer successfully campaigned for Michael Flynn's appointment as National Security Advisor . Your proposal to make Arthur B. Robinson National Science Advisor, however, was not approved. Robinson is an active denier of climate change , plays down the consequences of nuclear war and propagates creationism .

When early January 2018 preliminary publications from the book Fire and Fury appeared, in which sensational negative statements by Bannon about the conditions in the vicinity of the president were reflected, Rebekah Mercer turned to the public and said: Your relationship with Bannon had cooled; she and her family have not communicated with him for "many months" and have no longer financially supported his political agenda. Bannon's recent actions and statements are not supported. However, Breitbart News support will continue.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Jane Mayer: The reclusive hedge-fund tycoon behind the Trump presidency . The New Yorker, March 27, 2017.
  2. ↑ Joshua Green: Palin filmmaker spreads his bets to Bachmann . The Atlantic, July 26, 2011.
  3. ^ A b Jon Swaine: Offshore cash helped fund Steve Bannon's attacks on Hillary Clinton . In: The Guardian , November 7, 2017.
  4. ↑ Alexander C. Kaufman: The Mercers, Trump's Billionaire Megadonors, Ramp Up Climate Change Denial Funding . In: Huffington Post , January 25, 2018. Retrieved January 26, 2018.
  5. ↑ Inside Philanthropy: Robert and Diana Mercer .
  6. ↑ NonProfitFacts.com: Mercer Family Foundation in New York, New York (NY)
  7. ↑ Craig Timberg, Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin: "Facebook: 'Malicious actors' used its tools to discover identities and collect data on a massive global scale" from April 4, 2018
  8. ↑ see also en: Arthur B. Robinson and en: Science Advisor to the President
  9. ^ Süddeutsche Zeitung : Bannon loses most important donor after explosive book quotes . 5th January 2018.
  10. ^ Rosalind S. Helderman: Mercer issues rare public rebuke of former ally Bannon . The Washington Post , January 5, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Mercer, Rebekah
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lobbyist and director of the Mercer Family Foundation
DATE OF BIRTH December 1973
PLACE OF BIRTH Yorktown , Westchester County , New York