Fact Check: Bloomberg ‘Bought’ Republicans — and Democrats

CLAIM: Democrat billionaire-turned-presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg funded Republican campaigns.

VERDICT: True, though Bloomberg has also funded — or “bought,” as he almost said — Democrats as well.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) attacked Bloomberg on the debate stage in Charleston, South Carolina on Tuesday night for having contributed to Republican campaigns in the past.

She declared:

Who funded [Senator] Lindsey Graham’s campaign for re-election last time? It was Mayor Bloomberg. And that’s not the only right-wing senator that Mayor Bloomberg has funded. in 2016, he dumped $12 million into the Pennsylvania Senate race to help re-elect an anti-choice, right-wing Republican senator. And I just want to say, the woman challenger was terrific. She lost by a single point. In 2012, he scooped in to try to defend another Republican senator against a woman challenger. That was me. It didn’t work, but he tried hard.

Warren is largely correct. Bloomberg donated large sums to a pro-Graham super PAC in 2014; gave nearly $12 million to help Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) win re-election in 2016; and hosted a fundraiser for Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) in 2010.

But as Bloomberg noted, he has also donated to Democrats — heavily.

“Let’s just go on the record. They talk about 40 Democrats [who won in 2018]. Twenty-one of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect. All of the new democrats that came in, put Nancy Pelosi in charge, and gave the Congress the ability to control this president, I bought — I got them.”

In the media filing center, journalists broke out into laughter at Bloomberg’s gaffe.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.