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(CNN) --

A husband and wife couple whose fortune is tied to investments in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency trading is quietly emerging as one of the biggest backers of the main "dark money" group that supports the president of the United States. , Joe Biden.

The second-largest donation in 2022 to the nonprofit subsidiary of Future Forward, the main super PAC supporting Biden, came from a group led by James McClave and Emily Berger.

The couple works at Jane Street, a Manhattan trading firm, and McClave was an early investor in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company.

Tax records reviewed by CNN, which had not been previously reported, show that BEMC 4 Association - a nonprofit whose only two executives are McClave and Berger - donated $7.2 million to Future Forward USA Action in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available.

That's more than any other group other than the George Soros-linked Open Society Policy Center, which gave $15.2 million that year.

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Although Future Forward USA Action does not make its donors public, other nonprofit organizations that donate to it report those contributions, and CNN analyzed tax return data released by the IRS to uncover some of them.

Aside from the Soros group and BEMC, the group's top contributors in 2022 included other left-wing nonprofits such as the League of Conservation Voters and the Fund for a Better Future, which gave $2.5 million each , and the Hopewell Fund, which gave about $1.55 million.

The millions flowing through Future Forward are an example of how wealthy donors on both sides of the aisle are using dark money groups to shape American politics without flying under the radar.

And while Democrats like Biden have criticized the impact of dark money and pushed for reforms, they are also big beneficiaries of the system.

This trend will continue this year: Future Forward announced plans to run the largest political advertising campaign ever by a super PAC in 2024.

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Spending by groups that don't disclose their donors "ends up leaving voters in the dark when they go to the polls," said Anna Massoglia, research manager at the campaign finance watchdog group OpenSecrets.

"That's very important so they can know who is feeding the candidates they vote for and what special interests are playing a role."

Tax records do not confirm whether the $7.2 million came from McClave and Berger personally, or from other donors to the group they control.

But the only donations BEMC reported receiving were in the form of interests in a financial holding company or company.

And it's not uncommon for big donors to create new nonprofits to distribute their own money, Massoglia said.

Although McClave and Berger are not well known publicly, they have quietly increased their political spending.

The couple has given more than $1 million in total in recent years to a wide variety of other Democratic Party groups and candidates in federal and state elections, records show, becoming top donors to progressives like Judge of Wisconsin Supreme Court Janet Protasiewicz and Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg.

McClave was an early investor in Anthropic, which runs AI chatbot Claude, participating in the company's Series A and Series B rounds in 2021 and 2022. He was a co-investor in the company with FTX founder Sam Bankman. Fried – who used to work at Jane Street and was also a major campaign donor – before Bankman-Fried's financial collapse and her conviction for fraud and conspiracy.

Jane Street has been a major player in cryptocurrency trading, and McClave has shown interest in the federal government's crypto policies.

In 2022, he wrote a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging the regulator to allow a Bitcoin fund to list on an affiliate of the New York Stock Exchange.

Berger joined Jane Street after earning a PhD in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.

The couple declined to comment through a spokesperson.

A spokesperson for Future Forward did not respond to a request for comment.

President Joe Biden arrives at a campaign rally in Manassas, Virginia, in January.

The pro-Biden group Future Forward announced it plans to run the largest political advertising campaign by a super PAC this year.

(Credit: Julia Nikhinson/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Like other prominent political organizations on both sides of the aisle, Future Forward operates as two linked groups: a super PAC, FF PAC, which is required to publicly disclose its donors, and a nonprofit, Future Forward USA Action, which is not.

Both groups can post ads supporting or opposing candidates, although the nonprofit cannot make it its "principal business," according to IRS rules.

After Future Forward ran ads endorsing Biden and Democrats during the 2020 and 2022 campaigns, the Biden campaign publicly noted that it had become his super PAC of choice.

Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser, told the New York Times last year that the group had "really earned its place as the preeminent super PAC supporting the Biden-Harris agenda and 2024 efforts."

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Future Forward said it has raised $208 million in 2023 between its super PAC and its nonprofit.

Most of that appears to have been raised by the dark money nonprofit, as the PAC only reported raising about $25 million during the year, and more than $8 million of that was transferred from the nonprofit organization, according to Federal Election Commission records.

It's unclear whether McClave and Berger or their nonprofit made additional donations to Future Forward last year: Their group won't have to report donations it made in 2023 until after the November election, and it won't have to report of its 2024 expenses until November 2025.

Biden himself has criticized the influence of dark money, and has supported legislation that would force organizations that spend money on elections to disclose big donors more promptly.

“There is too much, too much money flowing behind the scenes to influence our elections,” Biden declared in a White House speech in 2022, adding that “dark money erodes public trust.”

"Right now, advocacy groups can run ads on issues that attack or support a candidate up until Election Day without exposing who is paying for that ad," Biden said, describing the type of ads Future Forward USA Action could run supporting him. at the end of this year.

Biden's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to supporting Future Forward, McClave and Berger's nonprofit also donated another $7 million in 2022 to the Center for Voter Information, a group that works to encourage young people, women and minorities to vote and which is run by a former Democratic political operative.

He also made smaller donations to two other left-leaning groups.

McClave and Berger are also heads of the similarly named BEMC Foundation, a private foundation that has donated a total of about $2.5 million in recent years to Vox Media's Future Perfect project, which produces news on global issues. .

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