They didn’t appear on a ballot for voters to elect or reject, but many staffers of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations have the ear of high-level White House officials, and with it, influence over federal policies.
Since President Joe Biden took office, representatives from the Open Society Foundations have met privately 40 times in the executive mansion, in meetings with one to three guests, White House visitor logs show.
Access to Highest Levels
George Soros, founder of Open Society, announced in June that he was handing leadership of his $25 billion dynasty over to his son, Alexander Soros, 37. The younger Soros had already been in a leadership position in the organization. Since the start of the Biden administration, Alexander Soros, chairman of the board of the Open Society Foundations, has visited the White House 18 times. Of those visits, four were meetings in the West Wing with deputy national security adviser Jon Finer.
Alexander Soros and Finer were joined in a Feb. 9 meeting by Vieira Abramovay, director of the Latin America Program and regional director of Latin America and the Caribbean at the Open Society Foundations, and by Yasin Yaqubie, special adviser to the deputy chair of the Open Society Foundations.
The meeting was held days before Biden visited Ukraine.
It isn’t clear what was discussed in the meeting of Finer, Soros, Yaqubie, and Abramovay. Neither The White House nor the Open Society Foundations responded to questions from The Epoch Times.
That same day, Feb. 9, Soros met with Jordan Finkelstein, special assistant to the president and chief of staff of the senior adviser to the president. The day before, Soros met in the West Wing with Mariana Adame, adviser to the counselor of the president. And on Feb. 10, Soros was back in the West Wing to meet again with Finkelstein.
Meetings Large and Small
Yaqubie has had 14 White House meetings during the Biden administration, visitor records show, including one on Oct. 6, 2022, with Kimberly Lang, who was the national security adviser executive assistant at the time, and three meetings with Nina Srivastava, associate director for domestic personnel at the Presidential Personnel Office.Jonathan Becker has visited the White House twice. Becker is executive vice president of Bard College and vice chancellor of the Open Society University Network, where he sits on the management committee with Alexander Soros.
“The Open Society University Network envisions a new model of global higher education—a long-lasting network with deep partnerships among diverse institutions committed to addressing global challenges collaboratively,” its website reads. Among its goals is to “incorporate civic engagement” into higher education and to “expand access to higher education at a time of growing inequities.”
Patrick Gaspard has visited the White House 10 times so far during the Biden administration. Gaspard served as U.S. ambassador to South Africa from 2013 to 2016. He was president of the Open Society Foundations from 2017 to 2020. Currently, Gaspard is president of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank largely funded by the Open Society Foundations and the Foundation to Promote Open Society, which are both Soros organizations.
Thomas Perriello, executive director of Open Society–United States, has been to the White House 19 times during the Biden administration. Of those, 10 were one-on-one meetings with White House officials, including Kimberly Lang and Rachel Chiu, chief of staff at the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach at The White House, and Yohannes Abraham when he was deputy assistant to the president and chief of staff and executive secretary of the National Security Council.
Since then, Biden has named Abraham his representative to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Created in 1967, ASEAN is headquartered in Jakarta and includes the nations of Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Burma (also known as Myanmar), Brunei, and Laos.
Perriello also met one-on-one with then-White House policy adviser Richard Figueroa, who worked for the Center for American Progress before being hired at the White House, according to Figueroa’s LinkedIn page.
In addition to private meetings, many of these visitors have been invited to the White House for larger political and social events. For example, Nicole Wilett, chief of staff at Open Society Foundations, has visited the White House for three larger events.
Perriello attended a White House event with 231 people hosted by Biden on Jan. 6 to mark the second anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. Perriello also attended with 196 people on Jan. 6, 2022, in the East Wing.
Perriello was also among the 448 guests who attended an event on the South Lawn of the White House on April 8, 2022, to mark the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.
Open Society Foundations
The left-leaning Open Society Foundations gives thousands of grants to groups and individuals working on issues it supports, including abortion access, implementing reparation payments to racial minorities, and ending stigma against drug users.Climate Justice
“The climate crisis demands unprecedented shifts of global investment by both governments and the private sector,” the Open Society Foundations website reads.Equity
Open Society supports more financial assistance from the richest countries to poorer countries to mitigate economic crises. It wants private businesses to be responsible for the well-being of their workers, communities, and the environment and to strengthen the rights of marginalized workers and the world’s refugees.It’s also against policies that punish drug use.
Expression
Open Society funds journalism, media groups, and documentaries. It supports the creation of global standards and rules for the behavior of existing corporate digital platforms, including “measures to protect user privacy and to counter hate speech and disinformation,” the Open Society website reads.Justice
Open Society supports human rights movements, reform of judicial systems, and the promotion of democratic participation at all levels.It funds groups that speak for communities that “face embedded racism and discrimination simply because of who they are or where they came from.”
“This includes supporting movements combating institutional and structural racism, and advancing demands for reparations for unresolved historical and ongoing violence and injustice,” the website reads. “We also work toward the fair treatment of refugees and migrants, as well as efforts to fight stigma against drug users that leads to criminalization and impoverishment.”
It also advocates for LGBT communities it claims are “under fire from conservative forces” and supports groups that pursue an “intersectional feminist agenda, including advancing reproductive justice and countering transnational attacks on sexual and reproductive health rights.”
