Sanders Foreign Policy Adviser Departs To Join Koch-Funded Think Tank

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I., Vt.) senior foreign policy adviser, Matt Duss, is leaving his office to join a think tank bankrolled by Charles Koch, a longtime nemesis-cum-ally of the progressive left.

Duss, who since 2017 has served as a top adviser to Sanders, is headed to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s American Statecraft Program, which received a $4.5 million grant last year from the Charles Koch Foundation.

Sanders and Duss have—at least until recently—been vocal critics of Charles Koch and his late brother, David, accusing the billionaires of using their political and philanthropic donations to “buy elections,” install an “oligarchy,” and push a “right-wing Koch brothers ideology.” But Duss, a longtime Israel critic who has defended me economic boycotts of the Jewish state, appears to have found common ground with Koch’s vision for American retrenchment.

“The Koch Brothers are preparing to try to buy the Democratic Party and buy the 2020 election,” Sanders tweeted in June 2019. “We cannot let them. The only way we will stop them is to build a grassroots progressive campaign that rejects their right-wing ideology.” Sanders also said in 2016, during his presidential run, “There is nobody in the United States Congress who has taken on the Koch Brothers more than Bernie Sanders.” He added later that year: “Our great nation can no longer be hijacked by right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers.”

Duss has at times struck the same notes, casting his soon-to-be-patron in an unflattering light. In response to a May 2018 article about purported Koch brothers influence at the Federal Communications Commission, Duss wrote, “Today in oligarchy.”

Although Duss has spent years promoting the Koch brothers as the nation’s top Republican boogeymen, his foreign policy views have become more closely aligned in recent years with those of Charles Koch, who has attempted to unite the a left hostile to American military power with the isolationist right.

Koch teamed up with liberal billionaire George Soros in 2019 to launch the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank staffed with Israel critics and Iran apologists. Quincy Institute experts routinely push for increased diplomacy with concessions to Tehran’s hardline regime, Communist China, and