EXCLUSIVE — Senate Democrats are being pressed by a conservative watchdog group to recuse themselves from voting to confirm a Biden nominee who has donated to their campaigns, according to a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Gigi Sohn was tapped by President Joe Biden in January to serve on the Federal Communications Commission, a top regulator. But since Sohn has donated to the campaigns for Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), and Michael Bennet (D-CO), including when her confirmation was pending, the American Accountability Foundation is calling on the lawmakers to offer their recusals in order to avoid a conflict of interest.
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“Ms. Sohn’s donations to your campaigns and your acceptance of her contributions during the pendency of her confirmation have irrevocably corrupted the decision-making process and made an objective vote on her confirmation impossible,” Tom Jones, president of AAF, wrote in a Wednesday letter to the Democratic senators.
“While Ms. Sohn’s donations were not illegal, they were unethical,” the letter continued. “The campaign contributions will undermine the people’s confidence in your and her decisions by creating the perception that campaign contributions are part of lawmaker’s decision-making process to support her, and that Ms. Sohn has a bias towards certain lawmakers, those who she has donated to, and is incapable of rendering impartial decisions at the Federal Communications Commission.”
Sohn has faced hurdles during the confirmation process. Biden originally nominated her in October 2021, but a decision stalled in the Senate Commerce Committee. The president renominated Sohn on Jan. 3, 2023.
During the 2022 election cycle, Sohn gave $550 to Warnock’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings. She also disclosed $100 each in campaign donations to Cortez Masto and Fetterman, as well as $200 to Bennett.
Sohn also notably steered over $2,900 between April and October 2020 to Biden for President, filings show.
“Senators need to be held to a higher standard when it comes to the corrupt influence of money in politics,” Jones told the Washington Examiner. “They knew who Gigi Sohn was when they took her money, and they knew they would have to vote on her nomination. They cannot unring the bell of corruption by returning these donations.”
Between 2013 and 2015, Sohn was a counselor for the FCC. She was a project specialist between 1991 and 2001 at the Ford Foundation, a major left-of-center group led by Darren Walker, ex-vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Another recent post Sohn held was at billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. From 2017 to 2018, she was part of the leadership in government fellow program, which awards grants to former senior-level government officials “who have played a significant role in advancing social change,” according to OSF.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) was awarded a fellowship role at OSF in the fall of 2016, but it was suspended after Tlaib told the organization she would be running for Congress, OSF says on its website.
Sohn has come under fire recently for once sharing a tweet that called former President Donald Trump a “raggedy white supremacist president.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization Sohn sits on the board of, has opposed bipartisan legislation aiming to protect victims of sex trafficking.
“Because of the corrosive effect that Ms. Sohn’s contributions will have both on the perception of the impartiality of your vote as well as on the faith in her impartiality as a Commissioner, I urge you to recuse yourself from voting on her nomination so that the American people can be assured that Senator’s votes are not for sale,” AAF also wrote in its letter.
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Spokespeople for Bennett, Cortez Masto, Fetterman, and Warnock did not reply to requests for comment.
The FCC did not respond.
