FOIAengine: DNC’s Five Requests Also Target Nominee’s Venture Capital Partners
Caroline Graham is the Democratic National Committee’s research director, a $144,000-a-year job that puts her on the front line of gathering dirt on the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).
She isn’t losing any time getting to work.
Even before the Republican convention made Vance’s nomination official, Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Graham provided a roadmap for what the Democrats are looking for, and where they think Vance may have vulnerability.
Graham is a nine-year veteran of the DNC’s opposition-research efforts. Before that, she worked for Global Strategy Group, one of the top Democratic polling and campaign consultants. Graham’s FOIA requests to the Securities and Exchange Commission targeted Vance and his partners at various venture-capital firms before his election to the Senate.
FOIA requests can be signals of what’s to come: early warning of bad publicity, future litigation, or uncertainties to be hedged and gamed out. In this case, the DNC appears to be making an instinctive choice about the agency most likely to have information in its files about Vance and his early-career days as a fledgling venture capitalist.
Opposition research – “oppo” in the vernacular of politicians – is a basic building block in every political campaign. Oppo is the ammunition behind every negative campaign ad; every gut punch in a debate. The higher the stakes, the deeper the research.
Spending in the 2020 presidential and congressional races totaled $14.4 billion, more than double the total cost of the record-breaking 2016 presidential election cycle. The 2024 election is expected to exceed that; one estimate puts just the cost of advertising and direct mail at $17.1 billion. That huge influx of money means more negative campaign advertisements across all media, which juices the need for more opposition research.
Graham’s five FOIA requests about Vance were received by the SEC on July 18, and they appear in PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows.
Only one of the DNC requests cited Vance by name. That one, which also named his two partners at venture-capital firm Narya Capital, sought “copies of all complaints, violations and investigations that mention any of the following individuals, as well as records of any actions or reports related to such investigations: James Vance, and/or J.D. Vance, and/or Colin Greenspon, and/or Falon Donohue from January 1, 2019 to the present.”
Narya Capital is the off-the-beaten-path Cincinnati firm that Vance launched, with Greenspon and Donohue, in January 2020. Their $120 million fund had the backing of some notable billionaire investors – Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Eric Schmidt. The fund’s vision was steeped in Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy ethos: The partners’ stated mission was to invest beyond the usual tech hubs of Silicon Valley, New York, and Massachusetts, instead going after overlooked start-ups in the heartland.
Narya was the last of several brief venture-capital stops for Vance; by July 2021, he was running for the Senate. Greenspon, who earlier worked alongside Vance at Thiel’s Mithril Capital and Steve Case’s Revolution LLC, is still with Narya, as is Donohue. Revolution LLC has a seed fund, Rise of the Rest, which similarly looks for heartland start-ups and which was also mentioned in one of the DNC FOIA requests. Memo to Tolkien fans regarding Narya and Mithril: Thiel-influenced companies often have such names.
Narya’s website lists 12 investments, some of which appear to meet the partners’ original criteria, and a few that might raise eyebrows. One Denver-based Narya start-up, True Anomaly, has received at least $47.4 million from the U.S. Space Force, and at least $30 million more from private investors, to develop an “orbital-pursuit” spacecraft, called “Jackal,” to chase and surveil enemy spacecraft. A recent test launch was unsuccessful.
Another Narya company, Hallow, calls itself “the Number One prayer app in the world.” (“Pray the joyful, sorrowful, glorious, and luminous mysteries of the Rosary with actor and producer Mark Wahlberg.”)
Narya also funded a Kentucky “indoor farming” start-up called AppHarvest that, with Martha Stewart among its board members, quickly shot up to a $3.7 billion valuation only to file for bankruptcy two years later, amid lawsuits. Vance still has a LinkedIn page that maps to Narya.
The DNC’s other FOIA requests, some mentioning present and former SEC commissioners, asked for the following:
- “Copies of all complaints, violations and investigations that mention ‘Revolution LLC,’ ‘Rise of the Rest Seed Fund,’ ‘Rise of the Rest Seed Fund II,’ or any employee or officer of Revolution or Rise of the Rest, as well as records of any actions or reports related to such investigations from January 1, 2018 to the present.”
- “Copies of all complaints, violations and investigations that mention ‘Narya Capital Fund,’ ‘Narya Capital Management,’ ‘Narya GP,’ or any employee or officer of Narya, as well as records of any actions or reports related to such investigations from January 1, 2019 to the present.”
- “All correspondence, including e-mail attachments, between the following listed employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission and anyone using the domain @naryavc.com: Gary Gensler, and/or Hester Peirce, and/or Caroline Crenshaw, and/or Mark Uyeda, and/or Jaime Lizarraga, and/or Allison Lee, and/or Robert J. Jackson Jr., and/or Jay Clayton, and/or Elad Roisman from January 1, 2019 to the present.”
- “All correspondence, including e-mail attachments, between the following listed employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission that mention ‘Narya’ in the To, From, CC, BCC, Subject or Body sections of the message: Gary Gensler, and/or Hester Peirce, and/or Caroline Crenshaw, and/or Mark Uyeda, and/or Jaime Lizarraga, and/or Allison Lee, and/or Robert J. Jackson Jr., and/or Jay Clayton, and/or Elad Roisman from January 1, 2019 to the present.”
Those were the first federal FOIA requests we’ve seen from the DNC since last year, when the party’s opposition research was focused on the various contenders for the GOP nomination. Then, Vance wasn’t even on the DNC’s FOIA radar. (See our story from August 30, 2023, “The DNC Goes Fishing – What Will It Catch?”).
The SEC can be lethargic in its response to FOIA requests. We’ll be watching to see whether the DNC’s request turns up anything of consequence, before November.
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. Following the federal government’s shutdown of FOIAonline.gov last year, FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across dozens of federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities, and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
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John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.