Trump grants $12m to rees-mogg and Young
Trump's state department plans $12m in sole-source grants for groups run by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Toby Young and Matthew Elliott, documents show.
Donald Trump’s state department plans to send $12m to three organisations run by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Toby Young and Matthew Elliott, a congressional notification shows. British voters are the ones who will live with what that money buys.
The Guardian reported on 17 July that the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor intends to award the grants without competitive tender: $7m to 878, the outfit founded by Rees-Mogg and his former aide Radomir Tylecote; $5m to Free Speech Union International, the offshoot of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union; and $3m to the Jobs Foundation, run by Matthew Elliott, former chief executive of Vote Leave.
The money would land the same week Liz Truss stages CPAC’s first UK spin-off in London, with Rees-Mogg, Young and Tylecote all booked to speak, and on the day Andy Burnham was declared Labour leader and prime minister.
Rees-Mogg, Young and the Trump money trail
878 was incorporated at Companies House only in March, its website went live in early July, and it has no track record beyond that. Its stated targets are “mass migration”, “censorship” and defending “Judeo-Christian culture” against what it calls threats to Western civilisation. It is asking for $7m of American taxpayers’ money to campaign against migrants in Britain.
The Tufton Street connection
Elliott’s name does the joining-up. He is president of the Jobs Foundation, one of the three grantees, and also a trustee of the Injustice Foundation, which has paid more than £382,000 to Young’s Free Speech Union over three years. The same small circle of Vote Leave and TaxPayers’ Alliance alumni sits on both sides of the transaction. Free Speech Union says it “takes no government money” while seeking $5m of it, and it went to the High Court to block publication of its own donor list after a website breach, the kind of scrutiny it demands of everyone else.
What’s actually confirmed
No money has changed hands. Young says his organisation has “not submitted a formal application and has not been awarded a grant.” ProPublica reports the $7m earmarked for 878 was abandoned after pushback in Congress; the Guardian’s document still lists it as under active consideration, so the two accounts are disputed and neither is settled. Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has already warned Washington off a related European scheme, telling the state department plainly that he does not want American money in German elections.
A foreign government is preparing to fund a small, unelected network of Brexit veterans to fight migration and deregulation on British soil, the week a new prime minister takes office promising to be “very upfront” with Trump about disagreements. The upfront conversation starts here.
