Jeff Bezos-funded antitrust crusader

This season of the American political show has been full of dramatic twists, never-before-seen oddities and juxtapositions that don’t quite make sense. But nothing could be stranger than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his parents bankrolling the campaign of a candidate who vows to break up Big Tech.

Maggie Goodlander, a well-connected Biden adviser who most recently served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, is running for the open House seat in New Hampshire’s 2nd District. Bezos and his parents are directly paying for Goodlander’s campaign pamphlets, touting the candidate’s record on battling the tech industry. The pamphlet may not explicitly mention Amazon, but the phrase “Big Tech” says almost everything.

Goodlander is married to White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan. She is running against Colin Van Ostern, a former state representative who narrowly lost the 2016 gubernatorial election. An EMILYs List poll released last week showed Goodlander leading by double digits.

In some ways, the way the Bezoses ended up footing the bill for the anti-Big Tech email is indicative of the unbridled campaign finance system that allows geysers of cash to flow through American elections through increasingly convoluted channels. The billionaire may have gotten caught up in that convoluted system himself, unwittingly funding an antitrust crusader who wants to dismantle the company he built. But Bezos’ interest may have more to do with Goodlander’s knowledge of national security, and that’s where his current business ambitions lie.

The postage costs are covered by the independent Principled Veterans Fund, which supports service members running for office; Goodlander was an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve for 11 years. The PV Fund was the largest outside donor for most of the race, with $184,000.

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Almost all of the PV contributions were carried over from a previous version of the PAC that shared the same treasurer, called With Honor Fund II, itself a spinoff of the original With Honor Fund that closed in 2023. The two largest donors to With Honor Fund II were Jeff Bezos’ parents, Miguel and Jacklyn, who gave about $1.5 million this year. Bezos’ parents famously gave their son a $240,000 loan to start the e-commerce giant in exchange for a 6 percent equity stake.

Both parents were also major donors to the original With Honor Fund, as was Bezos himself, who gave $10 million to the PAC in 2018. Michael Bloomberg also gave $750,000 to the PV Fund in 2022.

PV could not be reached for comment on the mailing. The foundation was embroiled in controversy when it pulled an ad attacking the candidate’s comments about 9/11 while she was still in college. It had to be removed and apologized for, which may explain the PAC’s subsequent rebranding.

Much of the language in Bezos’s finance flyers mirrors the “red box” on the campaign website, a convenient way for campaigns to indirectly coordinate with independent expenditures without violating campaign finance laws.

The language in the red box from Goodlander specifically asks independent spending campaigns to send mailers to reach “primary voters who care about women’s and veterans’ issues” and mentions Big Tech. However, the date listed in the red box is July 19, a month after PV’s fliers had already arrived at doorsteps in the district. It appears that PV was simply parroting issues from the candidate’s general background and listing policy positions, and the campaign included the red box to indicate support for future independent spending.

“Independent groups are spending money across the country to elect more veterans to Congress,” a Goodlander campaign spokesman said in a statement to Perspective“Just as Maggie was proud to serve our country in uniform, she was equally proud to be on the front lines of fighting corporate monopolies across America at the Department of Justice — including Big Tech.”

This creates a rather quixotic alliance between the Bezos billionaire family and Goodlander, who is running on an overtly populist platform to crack down on “exorbitant prices and hold corporations accountable in Congress.” These aren’t just talking points. Her record as a tough enforcer of antitrust law is, by all accounts, unquestionable.

The front of the flyer also recounts Goodlander’s history at the Justice Department, where he fought “the real estate monopolies that drive up home prices, the Big Agriculture that bankrupts family farms, the tech corporations that put our privacy and children’s safety at risk, and the health insurers that care more about profit than our health.” The flyer ends with the words, “Maggie knows that no one is above the law.”

The email includes a photo of Goodlander standing next to President Biden with her husband, Jake Sullivan. But while many insiders with similar elite pedigrees have opposed antitrust efforts during the Biden administration, Goodlander has emphatically supported the movement, and if elected to Congress, she would have one of the more powerful positions to work against corporate power.

The issues raised in the outside group’s ad mirror those raised in Goodlander’s first major campaign ad, which touched on her deep family roots in the Granite State where she grew up, opened up about a difficult pregnancy that resulted in a stillbirth to emphasize the importance of access to health care and tied it all to the Justice Department’s antitrust actions.

Her opponent, Van Ostern, claims to support many of the same policies, though his framing is more about kitchen-table issues like protecting Medicare and Social Security. So far, the contest has been mostly about personal biography, with Van Ostern trying to contrast himself as a “real” New Hampshireman versus a Goodlander.

Both candidates recently signed a letter to the DNC this weekend calling for a “more forward-thinking approach to digital assets and blockchain technology.” Neither is yet to receive any outside support from a crypto PAC. It’s a sign of a dynamic seen across the country in which candidates performatively parrot support for cryptocurrencies to avoid attacks from outside groups with industry ties.

The race has drawn scrutiny over the ethical gray areas that could arise when Sullivan helps his wife’s candidacy without violating the Hatch Act. Goodlander responded to those allegations directly on the trail, saying, “I’ve had my own career and I’m going to continue to have it… I can’t be bought, and neither can Jake.”

Both of their Washington contacts certainly helped. Biden adviser Gene Sperling and numerous White House staffers are donors to Goodlander, and she received $6,800 from top executives at consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners, where Sullivan worked between stints in the Obama and Biden administrations, representing Uber and Microsoft.

All of which leaves the question of why the Bezos family would consciously or unconsciously support a Big Tech adversary.

It’s possible, of course, that they simply don’t know that the emails specifically target Big Tech. Maybe they’re not even aware of Goodlander’s track record, which seems much less likely. The whole thing has a Ron Burgundy-style “read the prompter” feel to it, where outside PACs exploit talking points on a candidate’s website, even if it means Jeff Bezos is now funding someone who wants to dismantle Jeff Bezos’ life’s work.

There’s another possible explanation, in that Bezos’s game has nothing to do with Goodlander’s antitrust past, but rather her extensive national security experience. Although he stepped down as CEO, Jeff Bezos remains deeply involved in Amazon and runs his other aerospace company, Blue Origin. Both are major defense contractors for the U.S. government and are on the hunt for more deals.

Principled Veterans supports candidates with military or intelligence experience, who have a much better chance of being appointed to the House Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Defense Department and military intelligence. When Bezos first gave $10 million to the original With Honor PAC in 2018, Amazon was bidding on a coveted Pentagon contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure for cloud computing.

As a veteran and former national security adviser to Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Goodlander is an ideal fit for the role on the Armed Services Committee.

The Bezoses may also back Goodlander to curry favor with Sullivan and build ties with the national security state.

They may not love Goodlander’s antitrust credentials, but ultimately she would be just one of 435 members of Congress. More valuable to Bezos’ business empire right now is currying favor with the highest-ranking members of the military-industrial complex.