Aber Kawas won the Democratic primary for New York's 12th state Senate District on June 23 while running on a platform that targets "oligarchs and billionaires." But grant records show the three activist organizations that launched her political career collected at least $4.1 million from George Soros's Open Society Foundations and an affiliated nonprofit, a detail her campaign has declined to address.
The Washington Examiner reported that Kawas held paid positions at the Arab American Association of New York, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility project at CUNY School of Law. All three received Soros-linked funding before or during her tenures there.
Kawas's campaign did not respond to the Examiner's requests for comment about how Soros's wealth supported the groups that boosted her political standing. Neither did OSF, CLEAR, ACCESS, AAANY, nor CUNY School of Law.
The largest slice went to CLEAR, the legal-advocacy project housed at CUNY School of Law. The Foundation to Promote Open Society, an OSF-affiliated nonprofit, awarded CLEAR more than $3.2 million between 2017 and 2022, per the OSF grant database. Kawas began working at CLEAR as associate director of partnerships in 2024.
CLEAR was founded in 2009 by Ramzi Kassem, a CUNY law professor who attended law school on a fellowship funded by the Soros family. Kassem later served as a Biden-era White House immigration adviser and now works as chief counsel to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the same Mamdani who endorsed Kawas's candidacy.
ACCESS, which runs the National Network of Arab American Communities, received $875,000 from OSF, then called the Open Society Institute, between 1998 and 2009. The group also reported receiving between $100,000 and $499,999 from OSF between 2015 and 2016. Kawas worked there as an "advocacy specialist" as recently as 2018.
AAANY received an undisclosed amount from OSF in 2016. The Proteus Fund, described as an OSF "partner," also awarded the group a grant that year, categorized as an "Advocate Travel & Convening Fund." Kawas served as lead organizer at AAANY from 2015 to at least 2017.
None of this stopped Kawas from casting herself as a champion of the working class against the ultra-wealthy. In a post on X commemorating Eid al-Adha in May, she wrote:
"While the oligarchs and billionaires of New York City and State attempt to roll back the gains we are making, we hold on to these values in the long walk towards freedom."
In March, she launched a "Tax the Rich" campaign, declaring it was "long past time for millionaires and billionaires to pay what they owe." Her platform also includes promises for universal healthcare, stopping aid to Israel, and halting what she calls state and local officials' "collusion" with immigration authorities.
The gap between the rhetoric and the record is hard to miss. Kawas built her career inside organizations sustained by one of the world's wealthiest men. She then turned around and ran for office on a message that treats billionaire influence as a threat to ordinary New Yorkers. Whether she sees a contradiction there remains unknown, she hasn't answered the question.
It is not the first time a Democratic figure has been caught saying one thing in public while the paper trail tells a different story. Leaked texts from Senator John Fetterman recently revealed a similar disconnect between private reality and public persona.
Kawas's time at AAANY overlapped with the tenure of former executive director Linda Sarsour, who sparked controversy in 2017 over personal ties to Hamas and harsh rhetoric. When Sarsour drew criticism, Kawas defended her on Facebook.
"Linda is someone who has stood by my side for years, supported me, mentored me, given me opportunities I can never pay back. She is both friend and family to me."
In the same post, Kawas attributed the criticism of Sarsour to "white supremacists, the right wing & Zionist lobbies." She also made separate comments in 2017 claiming America exploited 9/11 to advance oppressive capitalism, white supremacy, and "Islamophobia." She later said those remarks were "cherry-picked."
The pattern here is familiar across the progressive wing of the Democratic Party: incendiary statements, followed by claims of distortion, followed by silence when reporters ask follow-up questions. Alan Dershowitz recently argued that the GOP manages its fringe more effectively than Democrats manage theirs, and candidates like Kawas make the case for him.
The web of connections around Kawas's candidacy is worth tracing. Ramzi Kassem, who founded CLEAR on the back of a Soros-funded fellowship, went on to advise the Biden White House on immigration. He now serves as chief counsel to Mayor Mamdani, who endorsed Kawas. Kawas, in turn, worked at the CLEAR project Kassem founded, a project that received more than $3.2 million from a Soros-affiliated foundation.
Soros, now 94, passed down his philanthropy empire to his son in 2023. But the infrastructure he built, a network of grants, fellowships, legal projects, and activist organizations, continues to produce political candidates who campaign against the very class of wealth that made their careers possible.
Voters deserve to know where their candidates come from and who paid the bills along the way. That standard should apply regardless of party. When a congressman profits from stock trades while voting on industry regulation, the public rightly asks questions. The same scrutiny belongs here.
Several questions hang over Kawas's candidacy. Did her tenures at AAANY, ACCESS, and CLEAR overlap precisely with the grant periods documented in OSF records? The timelines are close, but the fit is not perfectly clear from available records. The full amount of the 2016 AAANY grant remains undisclosed. And Kawas has never publicly acknowledged the Soros funding that supported the organizations where she built her résumé.
Her silence is a choice. Every entity contacted by the Examiner, Kawas's campaign, OSF, CLEAR, ACCESS, AAANY, and CUNY School of Law, declined to respond. That wall of non-response does not prove wrongdoing, but it does suggest that none of these parties want to explain the relationship between populist messaging and billionaire money.
The broader question is not unique to one state Senate race. Across the country, progressive candidates run on accountability rhetoric while benefiting from institutional networks funded by the wealthiest donors in American politics. The contradiction rarely gets examined because the donors and the candidates share the same ideological commitments, and the same interest in keeping the arrangement quiet.
Kawas wants New York's billionaires to "pay what they owe." She might start by telling voters what she owes to one billionaire in particular.
