Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX via AP
Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is seen at the premiere of "The Post" held on December 14, 2017, in Washington.
This season of the American politics show has featured some dramatic twists and turns, some unprecedented weirdness, and some juxtapositions that don’t entirely make sense. But nothing may be odder than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his parents financing the campaign of a candidate vowing to break up Big Tech.
Maggie Goodlander, a well-connected Biden adviser who most recently was a deputy assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, is running for the House of Representatives in an open seat in New Hampshire’s Second District. Bezos and his parents are directly paying for campaign mailers for Goodlander, touting the candidate’s record of taking on the tech industry. The text of the pamphlet might not explicitly say Amazon, but it’s all but there in the phrase “Big Tech.”
Goodlander is married to Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security adviser. She’s running against Colin Van Ostern, a former state representative who narrowly lost the governor’s race in 2016. An EMILYs List poll released last week has Goodlander up by double digits.
In some sense, the way the Bezoses ended up footing the bill for anti–Big Tech mailers is indicative of an unbridled campaign finance system that allows geysers of cash to flow across American elections though increasingly convoluted channels. The billionaire might himself have gotten caught up in that intricate system by unwittingly funding an anti-monopoly crusader who wants to dismantle the company he built. But Bezos’s interest may have more to do with Goodlander’s national-security expertise, which is where his current business ambitions really lie.
The mailers are paid for by an independent expenditure called Principled Veterans Fund that supports service members running for office; Goodlander served as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve for 11 years. PV Fund has been the largest outside spender for much of the race so far, with $184,000.
Almost the entirety of PV’s contributions were transferred from a previous incarnation of the PAC sharing the same treasurer called the With Honor Fund II, which itself is a spin-off of the original With Honor Fund that shut down in 2023. The two largest donors to With Honor Fund II were Jeff Bezos’s parents, Miguel and Jacklyn Bezos, who each contributed roughly $1.5 million this year. Bezos’s parents rather 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 top donors to the original With Honor Fund, as was Bezos himself, who dropped $10 million into the PAC in 2018. Michael Bloomberg also gave $750,000 to the PV fund in 2022.
PV could not be reached for comment about the mailers. The fund ran into controversy when it cut an ad attacking a candidate’s comments about 9/11 from when she was still in college. They had to take down the ad and apologize, which may explain the subsequent rebranding of the PAC.
Much of the language in the Bezos-funded mailers 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 red-box language from Goodlander specifically asks independent expenditure campaigns to send mail to reach “primary voters who care about women’s issues and veteran’s issues,” and mentions Big Tech. But the date listed on the red box is July 19, a month after the PV mailers had already hit doorsteps in the district. PV appears to have just parroted lines from the candidate’s general background and listed policy stances, and the campaign put up the red box to indicate support for future independent-expenditure spending.
“Independent groups are spending money across the country to elect more veterans to Congress,” said a campaign spokesperson for Goodlander in a statement to the Prospect. “Just as Maggie was proud to serve our country in uniform, she was proud to be on the frontlines of the fight against corporate monopolies across America at the Justice Department—including Big Tech.”
This makes for quite a quixotic alliance between the billionaire Bezos family and Goodlander, who’s running on an avowedly populist platform to crack down on “price gouging and hold corporations accountable in Congress.” Those aren’t just talking points. Her record as a tough antitrust enforcer is by all accounts unimpeachable.
The front foldout of the mailer also cites Goodlander’s record while at DOJ of taking on “real estate monopolies that drive up housing prices, Big Agriculture that that puts family farms out of business, tech corporations that put our privacy and kids’ safety at risk, and health insurers that care more about profit than our health.” The mailer concludes, “Maggie Goodlander knows no one is above the law.”
The mailer features a photo of Goodlander standing next to President Biden, along with her husband Jake Sullivan. But while many insiders with similar elite pedigrees have worked to oppose anti-monopoly actions during the Biden administration, Goodlander firmly embraced the movement, and if she makes it to Congress, she would have one of the more powerful perches to work on opposing corporate power.
The issues discussed in the outside group advertisement reflect the points raised in Goodlander’s first major campaign ad, which discussed her deep family roots in the Granite State where she grew up, opened up about a difficult stillbirth pregnancy she suffered as a way to highlight the importance of access to health care, and tied it all to antitrust actions at DOJ.
Her opponent, Van Ostern, says he supports many of the same policies, though his framing is more about kitchen table issues, such as protecting Medicare and Social Security. The contest so far has mainly been about personal biography. Van Ostern has tried to contrast himself as a “real” New Hampshirite, compared with Goodlander.
Both candidates recently signed on to a letter to the DNC this weekend calling for a more “forward-looking approach to digital assets and blockchain technology.” Neither is receiving any outside help from crypto PACs yet. This is indicative of a dynamic seen around the country where candidates performatively parrot support for crypto to avoid being attacked by outside groups affiliated with the industry.
There’s been scrutiny in the race about the ethical gray areas that might arise from Sullivan helping his wife’s candidacy without violating the Hatch Act. Goodlander has responded to these charges directly on the trail, saying, “I’ve had my own career and I will continue to have my own career … I can’t be bought and neither can Jake.”
Both their connections in Washington have certainly helped though. Biden adviser Gene Sperling and numerous White House staffers are Goodlander contributors, and she has received $6,800 from the top executives of the consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners, where Sullivan worked in between stints at the Obama and Biden administrations, representing Uber and Microsoft.
All of this leaves the question of why the Bezos family would be backing a Big Tech opponent, knowingly or unknowingly.
There’s of course the possibility that they just don’t know that the mailers specifically attack Big Tech. Maybe they aren’t even aware of Goodlander’s record, which seems much more unlikely. There is a Ron Burgundy–like “read whatever’s on the teleprompter” quality to the whole thing, where outside PACs use the talking points in the candidate’s website, even if it means that Jeff Bezos is now funding someone who wants to break up the life’s work of Jeff Bezos.
There’s another possible explanation that the Bezos play here has nothing to do with Goodlander’s antitrust record but rather her extensive national-security background. Though he stepped down as CEO, Jeff Bezos is still deeply involved with Amazon, and runs his aerospace company Blue Origin. Both are major defense contractors with the U.S. government and on the hunt for more deals.
Principled Veterans supports candidates with a military or intelligence background who are much more likely to be assigned 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 for the Pentagon’s highly coveted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract for cloud computing.
As a veteran and former national-security adviser to Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Goodlander fits the bill for a role on the Armed Services Committee.
The Bezoses may also be backing Goodlander as a way to curry favor with Sullivan and make inroads with the national-security state.
They may not love Goodlander’s anti-monopoly credentials, but ultimately she would just be one of 435 members of Congress. What’s more valuable for Bezos’s business empire at the moment is ingratiating himself with the top brass of the military-industrial complex.
