Bird Thanked Iowa; The Money Came From Washington
The board seat, the bankroll and the national machine behind Iowa’s top lawyer.
"I have news for Joe Biden when I'm attorney general I'll see you in court right our current attorney general he's Biden's attorney general. When I'm attorney general, I'm gonna be Iowa's attorney general.”
Brenna Bird, Des Moines Register Political Soapbox, August 13, 2022
“Iowa’s Attorney General”
On May 19, 2026, the Bird for Iowa campaign posted a message to its official Facebook account. “Because of generous support across Iowa,” it read, “our campaign is in strong position to get our positive message out and WIN on Election Day!” Attached to the post was a campaign press release in which Brenna Bird was quoted directly: “Iowans have invested in this campaign because they’ve seen that we can cut through politics, deliver results, and stand by the rule of law.”
That same week, the campaign filed its pre-primary disclosure with the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board. The Iowa records show that on May 13, 2026, a single organization — the RAGA Action Fund, a federally registered Super PAC with a Washington, D.C. address — contributed $1,425,000 to the Bird for Iowa campaign account. The campaign’s total reported cash contributions for the period ending May 14, 2026, were $1,775,913.99. The RAGA Action Fund contribution alone represented 80.24 percent of that total.
All other donors — every individual check, PAC contribution and small-dollar gift — together raised roughly $350,913, or about twenty cents on the dollar.
The campaign’s press release described raising “over $1.7 million” and characterized the result as evidence that “Iowans have invested in this campaign.” It did not mention the RAGA Action Fund.
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With those numbers in mind, let’s look more closely at the pre‑primary filing itself — the document that makes these figures official.
The Ledger
The DR-2 is a routine campaign finance disclosure, filed with Iowa’s ethics board on May 19, 2026, and amended May 29, 2026. Under Iowa law, it covers a defined reporting window and lists every cash contribution above certain thresholds, every expenditure, and a statement of cash on hand.
Page one lists the period summary: $1,775,913.99 in Schedule A cash contributions. The contributor pages run for several pages — dozens of individual donors from communities around Iowa, state political action committees, industry interests. Among them, a single line entry:
05/13/2026 — RAGA Action Fund, 1747 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20006 — $1,425,000.00
No other single contribution in the filing comes close. The campaign’s public framing during this period emphasized Iowa support; the filing shows its financial position depended overwhelmingly on a single Washington-based Super PAC contribution.
The non-RAGA remainder — $350,913.99 — included a $50,000 check from Miriam Adelson of Las Vegas, a $25,000 payment from The Hurst Group LLC of Jackson, Mississippi, and $10,000 from KochPac in Wichita. The individual Iowa contributions — $25 here, $100 there — were real. They were also a fraction of the total.
In fact, the 19.8 percent that did not come from RAGA was itself top-heavy. Of that $350,913.99, twenty-eight donors who gave $5,000 or more accounted for 74.4 percent of the remainder. At the other end, sixty donors who gave under $500 supplied less than two percent of it. Whatever “generous support across Iowa” describes, the dollar figures point to a small number of large checks rather than a broad base of small ones.
The DR-2 doesn’t tell the whole story. Once the May 14 reporting window closed, new money started flowing in — and those later transfers pushed the known RAGA Action Fund total even higher.
Beyond the Pre‑Primary Report
Iowa campaign finance law requires disclosure of contributions within a defined reporting window. The May DR-2 covered through May 14, 2026. Contributions arriving after that date would appear in a later filing, not this one.
On May 26, 2026, twelve days after the DR-2 cutoff, the RAGA Action Fund contributed another $1,100,000 to Bird for Iowa. That transfer appears in a later state filing, at the same Washington, D.C. address as the May 13 contribution. It would not have appeared in the May DR-2 that Iowa voters saw at the time the campaign published its “generous support across Iowa” announcement.
There is a further wrinkle in the federal record. The RAGA Action Fund’s first-quarter 2026 federal report shows total receipts of just $2,935 for the quarter. The Super PAC’s two May 2026 contributions to Bird, totaling $2,525,000, were therefore drawn on balances the committee already held rather than on new first-quarter fundraising.
Those post‑May 14 contributions, added to an earlier December gift, reveal just how concentrated Bird’s support is.
Tracking the RAGA Action Fund Transfers
"And DAGA has put a target on Brenna Bird and Kris Kobach. Both of those seats we won by about one and a half points four years ago. We'll defend those."
Adam Piper, Executive Director of Republican Attorneys General Association
Three known RAGA Action Fund contributions to Bird for Iowa, confirmed in state records.
That is a $3.525 million running total from one Super PAC, in a race that does not end until November 2026.
Piper explicitly confirms that protecting Bird is a top-down national priority. He dismissed governors and senators as "show horses with a big bully pulpit," and boasted that, "when you look at [the] AG's office you have the ability to move the needle on 8,000 different issues every single day of the week."
Understanding these numbers requires understanding the entity behind them.
What is the RAGA Action Fund?
The RAGA Action Fund is not a mystery. It is a federally registered Super PAC — formally an independent-expenditure-only committee — registered with the Federal Election Commission under committee ID C00560904. Its contributions to Bird for Iowa appear on publicly available Iowa and federal records. This is the disclosed layer of the operation.
The organization is the Super PAC arm of the national network of Republican attorneys general. Its purpose is to elect Republican AGs. What the financial record makes visible is the scale at which that mission is being executed in Iowa’s 2026 race — and the structural relationship between the contributor and the candidate it is financing.
Money is only half the equation. Bird also has an inside role in the organization sending her the funds.
The Board Seat
Here the financial record meets the governance record. Bird is involved at the top level of leadership in RAGA.
According to an amended IRS Form 8871 filed by RAGA on July 29, 2025, Brenna Bird serves as an executive committee member of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) — the parent organization of the Super PAC that is her campaign’s dominant financial backer.
Federal tax filings for the 2023 and 2024 tax years, the most recent available, also list Bird as a director of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, or RLDF — the 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that functions as RAGA’s policy arm. Unlike a Super PAC, a 501(c)(4) is not required to disclose its donors, and RLDF’s funding sources are not visible on its public filings. Bird is also listed as a director of this organization as of the last available tax filings.
During the 2024 tax year, while Bird was listed as a director, RLDF transferred $1,200,000 to RAGA as a political campaign activity expenditure, disclosed on Schedule C of RLDF’s 2024 Form 990. The same filing shows $697,000 in shared expenses between RLDF and RAGA.
The records do not show whether Bird voted on those transfers or was present for the decision; what they show is that during the year RLDF made them. But they do show that she was listed as both a director of the RLDF and executive committee member of RAGA during the most recent reporting available.
Together, those roles show how Bird’s campaign and national networks overlap.
Tracing the Money and the Board
Step back from the individual transactions, and the structure is visible in the filings.
It runs across three agencies’ records — the IRS, the FEC, and the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board — and it moves in one direction. A donor-nondisclosing 501(c)(4) feeds a 527 political hub. The hub feeds a Super PAC. The Super PAC funds an Iowa campaign. And the candidate at the end of that chain is listed, in the organizational filings, as a governance member at two points along it.
The middle of the chain is the part most people never see. During 2025, the RAGA 527 transferred more than $12.6 million into its affiliated Super PAC layer — the RAGA Action Fund and RAGA Action Fund PAC, both at the same Washington address — before and during the period the Super PAC began making major contributions to Bird for Iowa. That is the operating pool the December 2025 and May 2026 Bird contributions were drawn from.
The Rule of Law Defense Fund kept feeding that pool through the current cycle. Beyond the $1.2 million political expenditure disclosed on its 2024 Form 990, RLDF provided $557,116 in cash and $273,251 in-kind to the RAGA 527 during the 2025–2026 reporting period — $830,367 in additional support, separate from the earlier transfer.
Bird’s connection to the network is not only financial. The RAGA 527’s own expenditure records list $568 in travel reimbursements paid to Brenna Bird across three transactions in January and February 2025 — the routine bookkeeping of an organization reimbursing a participating member’s travel. It is a small number. It is also documentary confirmation that her role in RAGA is an active one, contemporaneous with the campaign.
The records place Bird in governance roles at two nodes of the same attorney-general network. The money flow runs through interconnected entities: RLDF, the RAGA 527, the RAGA Action Fund, and Bird for Iowa. The filings show a national attorney-general infrastructure financing an Iowa reelection campaign — and they show the candidate inside the infrastructure.
Restoring Democracy’s Promise sent requests for comment to Bird for Iowa, RAGA, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, and the RAGA Action Fund on May 26, 2026. Neither Bird for Iowa nor RAGA, RLDF, or the RAGA Action Fund responded by the deadline or provided documentation disputing the figures and records described here.
One fundraising event, however, offers a window into how the campaign and national donors came together.
Inside the Mar‑a‑Lago Fundraiser
The campaign’s spending records and a public invitation point to the same event — and the contribution ledger shows what came in around it.
On November 12, 2025, Bird for Iowa held a fundraiser at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. The invitation, circulated on Instagram, requested “the honor of your presence … for an evening in support of Attorney General Brenna Bird,” with a reception and dinner. The suggested support levels were steep: $5,000 per couple for the reception, $10,000 for reception and dinner, and $25,000 per couple to be an “Event Host.” Checks were payable to Bird for Iowa; questions were routed to two consultants — one for Iowa donors and one for “National” donors — the same firms that appear as the campaign’s paid consultants in its own state disclosures.
The campaign’s own ledger corroborates the event: Bird for Iowa paid the Mar A Lago Club LLC $19,260 in April 2025 and $38,520 in August 2025 — $57,780 in venue costs, with the memo fields left blank.
Public social media confirms the event and identifies its host. In a post dated November 13, 2025, a verified X account wrote that its owner was “honored to have hosted an incredible event at Mar-a-Lago last night” in support of Bird, tagging her campaign account and posting photos from the club. The Public business, professional, biographical, and interview sources identify the host as Ranko Ristic, founder and CEO of Zastava Arms USA. According to the Halyard Mission Foundation’s public biography, Ristic formed Zastava Arms USA in 2020, and the company became the exclusive importer of firearms for Serbian company Zastava Oruzje.
Instagram user @iowawecandobetter, who posted the invitation, perfectly captured the absurdity of the event by tagging Bird and writing, "@brennabirdia - we're confused. Are you running for AG in Florida?"
A Bird for Iowa contribution record lists a $25,000 contribution from “Rada Ristic” of Park Ridge, Illinois in the same event window; RDP treats the campaign-finance spelling as a record rendering or name variant and uses Ranko Ristic as the public business name. Ristic’s X post also stated that General Michael Flynn was among those present. The post does not establish who paid to attend, what was discussed, or whether any contribution was tied to the event; it corroborates that the fundraiser occurred and was publicly presented as a Mar-a-Lago event in support of Bird.
And the contribution records show a cluster of high-dollar donations around the event window matching the invitation’s support tiers. In November and December 2025, the campaign reported four contributions of exactly $25,000, one of $20,000, five of exactly $10,000, and fifteen of exactly $5,000 — the invitation’s three price points, repeated. Eight tier-matching donors clustered around the event date — from Park Ridge, Illinois; Alpha, Minnesota; Brownsville and Austin, Texas; and several Iowa towns — gave $90,000 between them, more than the campaign’s venue cost. One donor at a North Bay Village, Florida address gave $25,000 at the Host tier on November 17. Across the window, contributions of $5,000 or more totaled roughly $280,000 — with more arriving from out of state than from Iowa.
The records do not identify who attended, and they do not label any contribution as event proceeds; the pattern is one of timing and tier-matching visible in the ledger. What they do show is the financing model: high-dollar checks at fixed national-event price points, not low-dollar grassroots giving. It fits the larger pattern — the rhetoric was local; the money was national and high-dollar.
To see how unprecedented this flow of money is, it’s worth tracing the donors behind RAGA — and how they differ from its Democratic counterpart.
The Upstream Funders
The Super PAC’s operating pool has its own sources, and one of them has a long history with RAGA.
Federal tax filings show that the Concord Fund — a Virginia-based 501(c)(4) that also operates under the name Judicial Crisis Network — contributed $7 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association’s 527 organization across three tax years, from 2021 through 2023. Those payments went to the RAGA 527, not directly to the RAGA Action Fund and not directly to Bird for Iowa.
That distinction matters. The records reviewed here do not show Concord writing a check to Bird’s campaign. They show something broader: upstream financing into the national attorney-general network whose Super PAC later became Bird’s dominant funder.
Between Concord’s donor-nondisclosing contributions and the Super PAC’s disclosed transfers to Bird sits RAGA itself — the 527 hub that received $7 million from Concord, took in additional support from the Rule of Law Defense Fund, and routed more than $12.6 million into its Super PAC layer during 2025. The checks to Bird for Iowa were disclosed. The layers above them are where the disclosure thins out.
As RDP reported in The Pincer Movement - An Architecture of Autocracy , the Concord Fund sits inside a larger architecture of organizations linked to conservative legal organizer Leonard Leo that move money between dark money nonprofits and the political and legal infrastructure they fund.
That reporting establishes the dark money upstream for what the Iowa filings show downstream: the same network that finances national legal-policy fights is, through the RAGA Action Fund, the dominant funder of Iowa’s attorney general race.
A fair question is whether this is simply how both parties operate. National attorney-general associations exist on both sides, and both spend heavily to elect their party’s top law-enforcement officers. The Democratic Attorneys General Association raised roughly $32 million in 2025 — more than its Republican counterpart at the committee level — drawing on disclosed contributions from unions, corporations, and plaintiffs’ law firms.
The distinction visible in the records reviewed is not one of scale. It is architectural: the Republican Attorneys General Association and the Rule of Law Defense Fund — a donor-nondisclosing policy arm — share an address, share staff, and, according to IRS filings, have moved millions of dollars between them through payroll reimbursements and shared expenses. No comparable arrangement — a co-located, donor-nondisclosing policy arm sharing staff and finances with the Democratic association — appears in the records reviewed.
All of this raises a deeper question: why pour so much money into a statewide legal office?
Why the Attorney General Matters
Iowa’s attorney general is not a ceremonial office. The position controls the state’s law-enforcement posture across a wide portfolio: consumer-fraud prosecutions, antitrust actions, Medicaid oversight, public-records litigation, and the legal defense of state agency decisions in federal court.
The attorney general also controls Iowa’s participation in multistate legal coalitions — the networks of state attorneys general who file joint amicus briefs, multistate lawsuits, and coordinated letters to federal agencies. Those coalitions have been among the most effective mechanisms for challenging or defending federal policy across administrations. Who leads Iowa’s legal office shapes whether the state’s legal power is deployed to challenge Washington or to align with it.
That is one reason the national party committees now contest these once-lower-profile races so aggressively. Adam Piper, RAGA’s executive director, has compared their stakes to the top of the ticket, telling one interviewer that who holds the attorney general’s office “matters as much to a state” as who serves as governor. The money flowing into Iowa’s 2026 race is the local expression of that national calculation.
Under Bird, Iowa has participated in immigration-enforcement cooperation, expanded citizenship-verification database access, joined multistate letters on DEI and federal education policy, and pursued enforcement actions touching higher education. Bird has also used her position to announce high profile anti-DEI and immigration investigations that were not followed up on, or quietly dropped months later.
The scale of the outside investment is also notable against the shape of the race. Public polling available through April 2026 has shown the contest between Bird and her Democratic challenger Nate Willems within the margin of error in each survey conducted.
Finally, the stakes of this race go beyond Bird versus her opponent — they speak to how democracy works when national money floods local offices.
The Democratic Accountability Question
Iowa’s Attorney General is elected every four years, creating a direct line of accountability between the state’s top law enforcement officer and its voters. Speaking to a national audience on Night 2 of the 2024 Republican National Convention, Attorney General Brenna Bird proudly attributed her initial election victory to this local mandate, telling the crowd,
"We won because Iowans were ready for an attorney general who would protect them, not the criminals." - Brenna Bird, July 16, 2024.
Yet as her 2026 reelection campaign accelerates, the financial reality documented in state and federal ledgers tells a vastly different story. The campaign's own filings show that the overwhelming majority of its pre-primary war chest did not come from everyday Iowans, but rather from a single Washington, D.C.-based Super PAC operated by the Republican Attorneys General Association
While the campaign’s public rhetoric continues to celebrate local momentum and “generous support across Iowa,” the reality of a $3.5 million national rescue package raises a fundamental democratic question. When a state campaign is fundamentally sustained by a national political machine rather than the voters it claims to represent, who is the “People’s Lawyer” truly accountable to?
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References
Primary records and official data
Bird for Iowa. (2026, May 19). DR‑2 pre‑primary disclosure, Schedule A (amended May 29, 2026; re‑amended June 5, 2026). Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board. iecdb.iowa.gov.
Bird for Iowa. (2025). Contribution and expenditure records, 2025 (including November–December 2025 contribution export and Mar‑a‑Lago venue payments). Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board. iecdb.iowa.gov.
Concord Fund. (2022–2024). Form 990, Return of organization exempt from income tax (TY 2021–2023). Internal Revenue Service.
Federal Election Commission. (2025–2026). RAGA Action Fund, committee ID C00560904: Campaign finance reports and data. Federal Election Commission. https://www.fec.gov
DMRegister. (2022, August 13). Iowa Attorney General candidate Brenna Bird at the Des Moines Register Political Soapbox, Youtube
Halyard Mission Foundation. (2021). Ranko Ristić biography. Halyard Mission Foundation.
Iowa Ethics & Campaign Disclosure Board. (2025–2026). Bird for Iowa (Committee #5206): DR‑2 filings, contribution exports, and expenditure schedules. iecdb.iowa.gov
RAGA Action Fund. (2025–2026). Form 8872, Political organization report of contributions and expenditures. Internal Revenue Service.
Republican Attorneys General Association. (2025, July 29). Form 8871, Political organization notice of section 527 status (amended). Internal Revenue Service.
Rule of Law Defense Fund. (2024–2025). Form 990, Return of organization exempt from income tax (TY 2023–2024). Internal Revenue Service.
Zastava Arms USA LLC. (n.d.). Federal firearms license listing, 55 Bradrock Dr., Suite B, Des Plaines, IL 60018; mailing address 1515 Laverne Ave, Park Ridge, IL 60068. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives / FFL directories.
Zastava Arms USA LLC. (n.d.). Business profile. Better Business Bureau.
Zastava Arms USA LLC. (n.d.). Zastava warranty policy. Zastava Arms USA.
Zastava Arms USA LLC. (n.d.). Zastava Arms USA LLC. Park Ridge Chamber of Commerce.
News, analysis, and secondary sources
Associated Press. (2026, March 21). Big money flows into state attorney general races as legal battles shape American politics. San Francisco Chronicle.
The Lobbying Show. (2025, December 13). 2026 midterms: Attorneys general preview with Adam Piper, RAGA [Audio podcast episode]. In The Lobbying Show. Podtail.
Center for Media and Democracy. (2024, October 15). Leonard Leo’s Concord Fund again tops funders of Republican AG group in third quarter. Exposed by CMD.
Democratic Attorneys General Association. (2026, June 3). ICYMI: The Kansas AG race is heating up.
InfluenceWatch. (2022, February 24). Rule of Law Defense Fund. Capital Research Center.
Kansas City Star / Topeka Capital‑Journal. (2024, December 16). Kris Kobach’s popularity plummets among Kansas voters. The Kansas City Star.
Multistate Associates. (2026, February 3). State AG races to watch in 2026 and why you should care. Multistate Associates.
ProPublica. (2026, February 3). Republican Attorneys General Association — 527 Explorer. ProPublica.
Rule of Law Defense Fund. (n.d.). About us. Rule of Law Defense Fund.
Washington Examiner. (2026, March 4). Donors turn their attention to “top cop” races in midterms. Washington Examiner.
Zastava Arms. (n.d.). Zastava Arms. Wikipedia.
Zastava Arms USA. (2019, February 8). PAPs, Toks and Mausers for the masses: Zastava launches U.S.‑based operation. Zastava Arms USA.
Zastava Arms USA. (2025, April 28). History. Zastava Arms USA.
Zastava Arms USA. (2025, July 21). Zastava in Des Plaines: How the U.S. facility upgrades AK production. Zastava Arms USA.
Zastava Arms USA. (n.d.). Zastava Arms USA. ZoomInfo.
Social‑media and campaign materials
Bird for Iowa. (2025, November 12). Mar‑a‑Lago Club fundraiser invitation for Attorney General Brenna Bird. Instagram reposts (e.g., @iowawecandobetter). Screenshots on file with Restoring Democracy’s Promise.
Bird for Iowa. (2026, May 19). “Because of generous support across Iowa” pre‑primary fundraising announcement and press release. Facebook. Screenshot on file with Restoring Democracy’s Promise.
Ristic, R. (2025, November 13). “Honored to have hosted an incredible event at Mar‑a‑Lago last night in support of Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird!” [Post]. X (formerly Twitter).
Zastava Arms USA. (n.d.). ZASTAVA ARMS USA (@zastavaarmsusa) profile. X (formerly Twitter). Screenshot on file with Restoring Democracy’s Promise.
RDP prior reporting (Substack)
Tucker, T. C. (2025, July 4). The pincer movement: An architecture of autocracy. Restoring Democracy’s Promise.
Tucker, T. C. (2025, May 30). AG Bird’s silence on 27A database revealed amidst sheriff pursuit. Restoring Democracy’s Promise.
Tucker, T. C. (2025 November 7). The DEI hoax: Iowa’s attorney general announced an investigation in six hours — and then nothing. Restoring Democracy’s Promise.
Tucker, T. C. (2025, November 24). The Performance of Protection: Why Iowa’s crypto crackdown doesn’t stop fraud — but supercharges surveillance. Restoring Democracy’s Promise.
Tucker, T. C. (2025, December 10). SAVE: The benefits database now monitoring every licensed Iowan — and every driver. Restoring Democracy’s Promise.
Never in my lifetime (72+years) have I seen a more consistently inaccurate interpreter of laws and legal principles than Brenna Bird. And, I’m still waiting to hear who financed her excursions to provide background photo legitimacy to support Trump, and his NY trial that resulted in 34 felony convictions.
You might be interested in this writer's work: Lin Su, a former big tech exec who'd finally gotten enough cognitive dissonance from her work to walk away. This recent piece, on election tech, was unsettling in a manner you'd probably recognize: https://freeparadox.substack.com/p/targeted-democracy?r=wo0if&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
You'd written about the midwestern version of it in the past month. The subject of iowa voter records being wired off to DC. And it's troubling, too, that smart Iowa voters I know repeat the mantra "well, I've got nothing to hide", or its counterpart, "they already know all about me anyway..."
Tim