AIPAC PAC has donated nearly $85,000 to Rep. Seth Moulton since 2021. News reports indicate he’ll return $35,000.
Rep. Seth Moulton, who is challenging Sen. Ed Markey (Mass.) for the Democratic nomination, announced in mid-October that he will not accept money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and will return the donations he has received from the committee’s PAC.
“I am returning AIPAC’s donations and refusing to accept any donations or support from them,” he said in a statement.
The Moulton campaign did not respond to a request for comment about just how much money Moulton has accepted from the pro-Israel organization, but a spokesman for the campaign told The Hill that the campaign would return $35,000. That’s the same number cited by the Harvard Crimson. But Moulton, a Marine veteran with three Harvard degrees, has received over $84,000 from AIPAC since the organization launched a political action committee, according to Federal Election Commission records.
A spokesman for AIPAC, Marshall Wittman, declined to confirm how much money the group has given Moulton and how much of that money Moulton has returned. Moulton’s finance director, the Harvard Business School professor Jeff Bussgang, did not respond to a request for comment.
The pro-Israel group supported Moulton, a graduate of the prestigious Phillips Exeter academy boarding school, in his 2024 race and had begun supporting him in his 2026 Senate primary against Markey. $15,000 of that came directly from AIPAC—$5,000 this year and $10,000 in the 2024 campaign cycle. The rest, over $69,000, came from individual donors who made donations through AIPAC, a practice known as earmarking. Moulton accepted nearly $40,000 in earmarked donations in the 2024 cycle and over $29,000 this year.
While Moulton cited his objections to “Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government,” Netanyahu was sworn in for his most recent term as prime minister in December of 2022. Moulton accepted donations from AIPAC for the entirety of his re-election campaign in 2024 while Israel was waging a brutal retaliatory war against Hamas in Gaza.
In fact, Moulton continued to accept donations from AIPAC while calling for a ceasefire in the war and accusing Netanyahu of violating “basic human decency” and embracing a “brutalist” approach to defeating Hamas, charges he leveled in March 2024. “These actions run counter to Israel’s strategic interests, not to mention basic human decency,” Moulton said at the time.
AIPAC was singing from a different songsheet, drawing attention to Israel’s efforts to facilitate humanitarian aid into Gaza. “Israel is facilitating massive amounts of humanitarian assistance to Gaza — including food, water, medicine, fuel, and shelter supplies — despite Hamas continuing indiscriminate rocket fire on Israeli civilians while holding over 130 Israelis hostage,” the organization said in March 2024.
Affiliation with AIPAC isn’t the only issue on which Moulton has parted ways from other moderate Democrats, including those in his own state. Rep. Jake Auschincloss (D., Mass.), another former Marine and a fellow Harvard graduate, warned in late October against the Democratic Party’s embrace of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner. “I want Democrats to be on guard that we don’t offer a Diet Coke populism to MAGA’s Coca-Cola, including thinking that bigotry is populist,” Auschincloss said in the wake of revelations that Platner had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest. “It’s not. There are scores of dynamic, gritty candidates who don’t have anti-Semitic tattoos.”
Moulton, meanwhile, has encouraged Platner to “keep fighting.”
“I think we need to have a debate in the Democratic Party about our future. And Graham very much represents a new generation of leadership. It’s up to the voters of Maine whether they want him or not. It’s not up to me,” he told a local NBC News station. “He got a tattoo that he probably shouldn’t have gotten. He went on camera and said, explained what happened and why he made that decision and what he’s done to fix it.”
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