In his new two-film documentary presentation, The Dark Money Game, director Alex Gibney argues that democracy dies not just in darkness, per the erstwhile Washington Post slogan, but in dark money. The Dark Money Game painstakingly details how the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling let the genie of unregulated campaign funds from undisclosed contributors out of the proverbial bottle, deeply corrupting the U.S. electoral system and judiciary.
As Gibney tells The Progressive: “When you effectively give a candidate money, and ask for something in return, that’s corruption. That’s bribery. It’s simple: That’s quid pro quo.”
Gibney’s stepfather is the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, a renowned antiwar clergyman, so perhaps it’s not surprising that, after graduating from Yale and studying cinema at the University of California, Los Angeles, he went on to make nonfiction films documenting unscrupulous elites and their abuses of power and human rights. His 2007 Taxi to the Dark Side about torture in Afghanistan won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
The Dark Money Game, Gibney’s latest endeavor, derives its title from the 2008 book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker magazine staff writer and investigative journalist. Mayer, who won a George Polk Award last February, appears in The Dark Money Game, which she also executive produced. Mayer contends that Citizens United unleashed “legalized bribery.”
The hard-hitting pair of films, each about two hours long, unfold like a fictional whodunit. The first film, Ohio Confidential, recounts the investigation into whether Neil Clark, a prominent Ohio lobbyist who was found shot dead in March 2021, was murdered or committed suicide. The investigators uncover what appears to be a vast conspiracy involving $60 million in campaign contributions from the nuclear power company FirstEnergy, which was seeking a $1 billion taxpayer-funded bailout from the state.
Enabled by Citizens United, FirstEnergy flooded Ohio state legislators with $60 million worth of campaign cash in order to influence the lawmakers to provide FirstEnergy with $1 billion of taxpayer money to bail the nuclear power company out.
The second film, titled Wealth of the Wicked, examines maneuvers to circumvent the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill, which restricted cash contributions in the political arena. Gibney, who also narrates the series, interviews former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, a liberal Democrat who had teamed up with Arizona Republican Senator John McCain to pass stricter campaign finance rules. The film also zooms in on attorney James Bopp, who The New York Times said in a May 2013 article is “credited as being the intellectual architect of the arguments that persuaded the Supreme Court in Citizens United.” Gibney calls Bopp an “extremely anti-abortion” zealot determined to bring about “what I’d call ‘an unholy alliance’ between big business and evangelical Christians.”
Gibney’s documentary traces how the movement to torpedo campaign finance laws went hand-in-hand with efforts to intrude into women’s privacy and bodily autonomy; campaign finance was deregulated as abortion rights were re-regulated. Former extremist Reverend Robert Schenck—who once held a human fetus at a demonstration outside of a Buffalo abortion clinic in 1992, but eventually recanted his zealotry—appears for some on-screen interviews.
I asked Gibney whether the possibility of getting dark money out of politics is further away than ever, now that the billionaires are in charge. He doesn’t think so.
“You can see the depth, fervor, and anger that is rippling throughout this society by the number of people showing up for the demonstrations held by [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and Bernie Sanders,” Gibney says. “You’re going to see such rage and popular animus—you saw it a little bit in Wisconsin recently, where despite the millions of dollars spent by one oligarch, Elon Musk, the voters rose up and overturned the party of money.”
The Dark Money Game is the latest production in Alex Gibney’s audacious oeuvre to hold the powers-that-be to account. It is streaming on HBO and HBO Max.