Many Trump ‘enemies’ are being spoon-fed to him by one conservative think tank

When a lawyer in the deputy attorney general's office instructed more than half a dozen U.S. attorneys to prep criminal investigations of a George Soros-funded foundation last September, he attached as evidence a report by the Capital Research Center.

A conservative nonprofit, CRC is headed by Scott Walter, who had spent the previous six months briefing senior White House officials on Democratic donors and progressive groups to target.

That pattern repeats across nearly every front on which the Trump administration and its MAGA allies in Congress have gone after perceived enemies over the past year. When the White House needs an evidentiary basis to link a "network" of Soros-linked nonprofits to Charlie Kirk's assassination, it turns to the Capital Research Center.

When congressional Republicans need a citation for the argument that coal remains a safe source of power even as they roll back the rules meant to regulate it, they turn to the Capital Research Center.

And as the administration has sidelined the scientists, career regulators and industry groups who have traditionally shaped U.S. climate policy, the CRC’s research has been used to fill that vacuum — supplying the government's preferred conclusions without the independent scrutiny those traditional stakeholders would have applied.

Walter told Inside Political Money in July that his group had “developed a reputation as a valuable source of information” on a “whole world of influencers and money” surrounding the Democratic Party, which led “various people in the administration” to ask him for information.

The “various people” Walter spoke of largely centers on Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff who for months has been leading efforts to turn the machinery of government against Democratic-leaning organizations and NGOs, a push that kicked into high gear after last year’s killing of MAGA activist Kirk.

Days after the September 2025 assassination, Miller told Vice President JD Vance — who was guest-hosting Kirk’s eponymous podcast — he wanted the administration “to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” a “network” he blamed for Kirk’s death.

Yet Walter acknowledged that no evidence of potential criminal activity by those groups could be found in his research. "They have to have funded something bad and they have to have known they were funding something bad," he told The New York Times of the bar that needed to be met.

He added that his organization “did not make either of those claims that a prosecutor would need to make."

Miller’s push to criminalize vast swaths of the opposition to the Trump administration has thus far not been fruitful, but Walter’s Capital Research Center has nonetheless become a load-bearing evidentiary source for Republican-led government that is actively working to defund, investigate and prosecute environmental and progressive organizations.

Its research has been routed to federal prosecutors by the Justice Department, footnoted by House Republicans pressing the Environmental Protection Agency over climate grants, and entered into the record at four congressional hearings since January 2025 through the testimony of Walter himself.

It is also a group with a documented record of publishing material that did not hold up — on elections, on tobacco and, repeatedly, on climate science.

The CRC’s relationship with the White House began early on in Trump’s second term, with Walter reportedly briefing senior officials in March 2025 on "a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques” used by Democrats and aligned groups.

At the time, the New York Times reported the White House group he briefed was “said to be exploring what more can be done within the law” to kneecap the Democratic Party’s institutional infrastructure, including its fundraising mechanisms.

At that briefing, a person familiar with it told the paper that Walter had presented research on ActBlue and major Democratic donors and left behind copies of a book he had written about the Arabella Advisors network.

By that September, Walter told NBC News his group had briefed the White House on nonprofit voter registration efforts it considers partisan, and that he was hopeful the administration could take effective action against left-wing groups. "I'm more optimistic than I've ever been, but it is definitely an uphill battle to make progress," he said.

His colleagues were less circumspect about the purpose. Ryan Mauro, a Capital Research Center investigative researcher, said on The Glenn Beck Program on Sept. 17, 2025 that the group's Soros report "should equip the Trump administration with what they need in order to take action." Beck described it on air as "the key that the president will need to begin to take down George Soros and a lot of his NGOs."

Five days later, on Sept. 22, a lawyer in then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's office issued the directive. The lawyer, Aakash Singh, sent instructions to U.S. attorneys’ offices in California, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Detroit and Maryland, among others, to draft plans to investigate the Open Society Foundations, The New York Times reported. The directive listed potential charges ranging from racketeering and arson to wire fraud and material support for terrorism, and asked prosecutors to determine whether the allegations were enough to justify opening criminal cases.

But The Independent’s review of the center’s report found it did not show that the Soros network knowingly paid for grantees to break the law — the element legal experts said a criminal case would require — and did not establish that any group used Soros money to commit violence.

The closest link the report drew between a grantee and a specific act was a 2021 Instagram post in which Grassroots Global Justice Alliance urged supporters in the Bay Area to turn out for a protest against an Israeli ship at the Port of Oakland. Matt Davis, a spokesman for the port, told the Times of that May 2021 demonstration: "It was just a bunch of people holding signs."

The report also contained a factual error. It said grantees had "endorsed Hamas by showcasing a glorifying image of a Hamas paraglider" from the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in Israel. But the photograph was taken at a protest in 2014 and shows a person climbing a wall holding a Palestinian flag.

The same report devotes a section to Sunrise Movement, the youth climate group, which it says "is primarily focused on environmentalism but also helps build financial and popular support for anarchist terrorists," wishes for Israel's destruction, has "some pro-Hamas chapters," seeks the abolition of police and prisons and condemns tourism to Hawaii as "colonization."

That environmental strand runs through Walter's congressional appearances. He testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on June 25, 2025 at a hearing titled "China and the Left's Lawfare Against American Energy Dominance," where he told Chairman Ted Cruz: "It's no accident as the Marxists say that China has deep ties to the environmentalist movement."

Walter’s written submission argued that an environmental lawsuit over plastics traced to Andrew Forrest, the Australian mining magnate who endowed the Minderoo Foundation.

And at a House Ways and Means hearing on Feb. 10, 2026 titled "Foreign Influence in American Non-profits: Unmasking Threats from Beijing and Beyond," Walter described his own assignment plainly: "I criticize domestic environmentalist groups' ties to the Chinese Communist government."

The group's research has also entered the fight over the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. In a June 3, 2025 letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin attacking the fund's grants, House Science Committee Chairman Brian Babin and oversight subcommittee Chairman Rich McCormick footnoted the Capital Research Center's InfluenceWatch database for the claim that a $2 billion grantee had been founded a month after the EPA opened applications.

That grantee, Power Forward Communities, was one of eight nonprofits whose $20 billion in green bank awards Zeldin seized in February 2025, alleging misconduct, conflicts of interest and potential fraud. The money remained frozen a year later. "We've had to lay off a very sizable part of our team," chief executive Tim Mayopoulos told The Times in February.

The organization supplying that research is funded by the major institutions of conservative philanthropy. Donors Trust reported an $820,600 grant on its 2024 IRS Form 990; the Sarah Scaife Foundation reported $500,000 the same year; the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation reported $300,000 in 2022; the Charles Koch Foundation reported $10,844 in 2017.

Its published record on climate science is not neutral. A 2016 news release compared the scientific consensus on climate change to the "supposed scientific consensus" once "used to promote slavery, white supremacy, and eugenic practices such as the involuntary sterilization of poor Southerners." A senior fellow wrote in 2015 that "Global Warming theory" would end up "on the ashheap of history with supposed science like white supremacy, Piltdown Man, canals on Mars, Keynesianism, and N-rays."

The group has a longer history of research commissioned against public health campaigns. A 1990 Capital Research Center study attacking the American Heart Association, American Lung Association and American Cancer Society over anti-tobacco lobbying was used by the tobacco industry; a 1998 internal Philip Morris email described the group as a "long-time friend of PM," according to a 2009 article in the American Journal of Public Health. In 2003, its then-president defended smokeless tobacco in print as "an alternative free from the dangers of lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema."

Walter also appeared in "2000 Mules," the 2022 election conspiracy film whose creator, Dinesh D'Souza, later acknowledged the footage in it "were characterized on the basis of inaccurate information provided to me and my team."

And while the group's central rhetorical device is the phrase "dark money," Walter told Congress in December 2023 that he opposes forced donor disclosure: "As a defender of citizens' privacy, I do not wish to harm donors and groups I disagree with."

In 2023, The Washington Post reported that the Capital Research Center had acted as fiscal sponsor for Crowdsourcers, a group led by Virginia "Ginni" Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, an arrangement that collected nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations over three years and "effectively shielded from public view details about Crowdsourcers' activities and spending."