When the Justice Department urged federal prosecutors last month to investigate the billionaire George Soros, it cited a report by a conservative watchdog group that accused the liberal megadonor of financing groups “tied to terrorism or extremist violence.”
But the report by Washington-based Capital Research Center does not show evidence that Mr. Soros’s network knowingly paid for its grantees to break the law, which legal experts said would be necessary to build a criminal case.
In fact, the report does not offer proof that groups that received money from the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations used those donations to commit acts of violence or terrorism.
Instead, it focuses largely on what the Soros network’s grantees said, not what they did. The report, which was published Sept. 17, largely catalogs statements in which Soros grantees offered support for Palestinians in the wake of violent attacks against Israel, suggested tactics for civil disobedience and urged people to turn out for a protest aimed at blocking an Israeli ship from arriving at a port in Oakland, Calif.
“I see the report as a political document, saying ‘Here’s why the Soros foundation is disreputable. It gives money to bad people,’” said Stephen Gillers, an emeritus professor of law at New York University. “From a legal point of view, that’s not enough by a long shot.”
Scott Walter, the president of Capital Research Center, agreed that his group had not found evidence that the Soros network had committed a crime.
“They have to have funded something bad and they have to have known they were funding something bad,” to prove a criminal case, Mr. Walter said in an interview. “We actually did not make either of those claims that a prosecutor would need to make.”
Mr. Walter said that his group was taken aback that the group’s work had been cited by the Justice Department, but said he supported the idea of investigating the Soros network, saying prosecutors might find something his organization had not.
“We were surprised when the Justice Department suggested federal prosecutors use our report. No administration official asked us to prepare it, nor did we suggest the administration use it,” Mr. Walter said in a statement, adding that “only lawbreaking, not mere speech, should receive prosecution.” A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.
A senior official in the department sent a letter with a link to the watchdog group’s report to more than a half-dozen U.S. attorney’s offices last month, and suggested possible charges against the Soros-funded groups that included racketeering, arson, wire fraud and material support for terrorism, as The New York Times previously reported.
That was the latest in a string of moves that suggested the Justice Department had become a tool of vengeance against those whom Mr. Trump views as his enemies. In recent weeks, the department has indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James and the former F.B.I. director James Comey, and has been investigating several others.
Since the killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the president and his top officials have called for investigations into liberal groups backed by Mr. Soros and other wealthy donors, accusing them of fomenting a violent conspiracy against the United States without providing evidence for their claim.
Mr. Trump renewed those calls at a White House event Wednesday focused on antifa, the loose movement of antifascist activists that he has sought to cast as an organized terrorist group. After one attendee claimed Mr. Soros’s network and other left-wing organizations had funded riots, Mr. Trump asked him to share information with Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director; Attorney General Pam Bondi; or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
“These are people that do not have good intention for the country. Treasonous, probably,” Mr. Trump said of the donors.
Mr. Soros, 95, originally founded his nonprofits to fund democratic initiatives in places like Communist and formerly Communist countries. His philanthropic network is today run largely by his son Alex, who has disputed Mr. Trump’s claims and has vowed to vigorously defend the work of the organization. The network includes seven U.S.-based nonprofits with a collective $23 billion, which give to liberal causes around the world.
Binaifer Nowrojee, the president of Open Society Foundations, said the network had not broken the law or encouraged anyone else to do so.
“Open Society has rigorous compliance processes and only funds peaceful and lawful work advancing human rights, democracy, and justice,” Ms. Nowrojee said in a statement. “Our grantees are obliged to follow the law.” In a statement, the network said that those legal requirements are laid out in a contract the grantees must sign before receiving funding.
Founded in the 1980s, the Capital Research Center is a conservative nonprofit that scrutinizes liberal groups for potential legal violations. Its own funders include some of the largest donors on the right, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation — established by heirs of the wealthy Mellon family — and the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
Its September report on the Soros network suggested that the funding organizations and some of their grantees could be stripped of their tax-exempt status for their alleged connections to lawbreaking. But the report did not explicitly call for a criminal investigation of the Soros network, nor suggest specific charges like arson or racketeering.
The report focused on a small fraction of the Soros network’s giving: about 50 grantees, who received about 1 percent of the network’s donations since 2016.
The group said it found that Soros grantees had criticized Israel, associated with people accused of terrorism against Israel, or made statements castigating Israel in the wake of the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. As an example, the report cited an Instagram post by an Asian American advocacy group called 18 Million Rising a few days after that attack, which said, “Today we are witnessing the Palestinian people rising up against 75+ years of Israeli settler colonial violence and occupation.” That group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The report identified seven U.S.-based nonprofits as the Soros network’s “most outrageous” grantees. It said those seven “directly assist domestic terrorism and criminality on U.S. soil.”
But the evidence it cited of that assistance consisted largely of public statements in which the groups expressed solidarity with a left-wing cause or support for a tactic in the abstract.
The closest connection it drew between one of the groups and a specific act was a 2021 Instagram post in which a Soros grantee called Grassroots Global Justice Alliance asked “our members and supporters in the Bay Area to turn out” for an effort being organized by another group to “block” an Israeli ship headed for the Port of Oakland.
Matt Davis, a spokesman for the Oakland port, said in an interview that the May 2021 protest was entirely peaceful: “It was just a bunch of people holding signs.” The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance did not respond to requests for comment.
Another of the seven grantees the report spotlighted was the Sunrise Movement, a group that uses civil disobedience to draw attention to climate change. The Capital Research Center sought to link it to the violence committed in 2022 and 2023 by protesters opposing a police training facility outside Atlanta. It said the Sunrise Movement had posted a statement on Instagram in 2023, saying it stood “in solidarity” with the protesters there, and to urge people to donate to a bail fund for those arrested.
The Sunrise Movement said in a statement that it practices only “peaceful, nonviolent activism.”
In another case, the report’s evidence of wrongdoing was a hyperlink.
Two Soros grantees helped produced an online tool kit to help those protesting Israel’s war in Gaza. In that tool kit, the report said, there was a list of resources that included a link to another general-purpose protest guide created by a third group. That second guide listed 198 possible protest actions, including “property destruction” and “nonviolent land seizure.” The group that produced the second guide, the Ruckus Society, said in a statement that it did not support terrorism and had never received funding from Mr. Soros’s organization.
The report did not cite evidence that Mr. Soros’s network was aware of the online tool kit produced by its grantees or the hyperlink. One of the two grantees that produced the original tool kit, Dream Defenders, did not respond to requests for comment. The other, Movement 4 Black Lives, said its tool kit did not encourage violence.
Legal experts noted that courts had found that calls for protest or civil disobedience are protected under the First Amendment. Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in California, said the fact that the Soros network’s grantees made such statements would likely not implicate them — or the Soros network — in a crime.
If a grantee came to the Soros network and said, “‘Now we’re going to do terrorism. We want you to fund it,’ then they’ve got a problem,” Ms. Levenson said. “But that’s not what happened here.”
In at least one case, the report also appeared to make a claim based on an error. The Capital Research Center said the Movement 4 Black Lives and other grantees had “endorsed Hamas by showcasing a glorifying image of a Hamas paraglider” from the 2023 attacks in its activism tool kit.
But the photo in the tool kit was actually taken during a protest in 2014. It shows not a paraglider, but a protester climbing a wall while holding a Palestinian flag. After The Times pointed out the error, Mr. Walter, the group’s president, said, “That doesn’t negate the claim that the grantees exalt violence.”
Devlin Barrett and Greg Kendall-Ball contributed reporting.