Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler concluded that the “incendiary claim that George Soros funded Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg” is “simply false,” but only by conflating the operative question with a series of unrelated ones.

Republicans have bashed the impending indictment of former president Donald Trump as the politically motivated act of a “Soros-funded” prosecutor, which Kessler deems as a “slippery” descriptor.

Some facts around this issue are undisputed. As Kessler acknowledges, Soros, the single biggest individual political donor in the United States, made a $1 million contribution to the political action committee Color of Change on May 14, 2021, just six days after Color of Change pledged a million dollars to Bragg’s campaign.

“While that appears like careful coordination, both Soros and Color of Change say the two events are unrelated. Color of Change says it makes decisions on whom to endorse without input from its donors,” writes Kessler. It’s the first sleight of hand he uses to reach his ultimate verdict.

The question of whether Color of Change endorsed Bragg because Soros wanted it to is immaterial to the broader question of whether the megadonor supported Bragg’s campaign financially. Soros need not have met with Bragg and pressured Color of Change in order to have funded his candidacy.

In fact, Soros need not have even known Bragg’s name. In our campaign finance system, donors often send money to committees that support a certain kind of candidate and make independent expenditures on their behalf. Whether he knew of Bragg’s existence or not — and the timeline of events, Soros’s professed support for progressive prosecutors, as well as the prominent office Bragg was seeking renders Soros’s claim not to “know him” dubious (surely he knew of him)  — there’s little doubt that his donation went toward electing Bragg.

“In any case,” Kessler continued, “Color of Change never met the $1 million goal. Notwithstanding its news release, state election records show that it spent less than half that amount — $420,000 — on independent expenditures for Bragg. That amounted to about 9 percent of the group’s total spending in that election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records.”

Again, this point is irrelevant to the question Kessler set out to answer, but it’s worth noting that his claim about the proportion of Color of Change’s spending on Bragg is itself misleading. For his denominator, Kessler appears to be using the $4,555,301.71 Color of Change spent on all of its political activity and operating expenses from January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2022. That includes money spend on staff salaries, contractors, and independent expenditures on behalf of candidates.

In this context, the Color of Change contribution to Bragg’s campaign and Soros’s contribution looks much more significant. For the entire two-year period, the PAC spent just $111,364.40 on independent expenditures for federal candidates, meaning it spent nearly four times that on Bragg alone.

Next, Kessler weighs in on whether Color of Change’s donation had any effect on the race, eventually asserting that “It could have been helpful — or it may have been wasted. In any case, there is no evidence Soros has influence over Bragg.” Later, Kessler characterizes this as “a dangerous game that plays into stereotypes of rich Jewish financiers secretly controlling events.”

Yet again, though, this point does little to support the thesis of his fact check. Quite the opposite, Kessler’s commentary on the effect of Soros’s donation is a concession that money did flow from Soros toward assisting Bragg’s campaign, even if only through a third party.

Kessler’s musings on this subject also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Soros and Bragg’s critics. While the anti-Semitic fringes of the far-right might portray Soros as a puppetmaster — and political beneficiaries as puppets — the more mainstream conservative critique of Soros is that he supports candidates with a deleterious progressive agenda. Soros would object to the normative evaluation of that agenda, but he’s readily acknowledged the aims of his activism, especially in the offices of district attorneys. For the most part, Republicans invoke Soros not because his name is synonymous with Jewish money, but because it’s synonymous with a political brand that’s out-of-step with a majority of voters.

If Kessler wanted to fact check far-fetched claims about Soros influencing Bragg to pursue a case against Trump, he could have. But by accusing Republicans of deception for simply noting Soros’s support for Bragg — and through it their shared worldview — he’s discrediting himself.

The country’s most prolific political donor wrote a million dollar check to a PAC days after it promised to spend the same sum on a prosecutor of exactly the predilections Soros has a professed affinity for. Somebody’s being slippery here, but it’s not those who have noticed as much.

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