# Citizens United **Citizens United** is a conservative [[501(c)(4)]] advocacy group founded in **November 1988** by political consultant **Floyd Brown** and run since 2000 by **[[David Bossie]]**. It is headquartered on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. **Disambiguation.** This page is the *organization*. The 2010 Supreme Court decision is [[Citizens United v. FEC]]. Most political writing that says "Citizens United" means the ruling, not the group that brought it. ## What it does The group is mainly a **political film studio** with an advocacy arm attached. It has made about 25 documentaries, including: - *Celsius 41.11* (2004), a rebuttal to *Fahrenheit 9/11* - *Hillary: The Movie* (2008) - *Fire From the Heartland* (2010) - *Occupy Unmasked* (2012) Around the films it runs ads, direct mail and web campaigns, and its funders have included Koch-network sources and the affiliated Presidential Coalition, LLC. ## How a movie became a constitutional case The landmark case started as a distribution problem. In 2008 the group wanted to run *Hillary: The Movie* on cable video-on-demand and advertise it during the primaries, inside the [[Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act]]'s blackout window for "electioneering communications" paid for by corporations. It sued to be allowed to. The Court ordered reargument on broader questions, and on **Jan. 21, 2010** ruled 5–4 (Kennedy writing) that the government may not ban independent political expenditures by corporations and unions. Combined with *SpeechNow.org v. FEC* two months later, the decision produced the super PAC and the modern [[Dark Money]] system. A small film operation's name is now attached to one of the most consequential rulings of the [[John Roberts]] Court. ## The Bossie channel into Trump world The group matters beyond the case because of its president. Bossie came up as a congressional investigator of the Clintons in the 1990s. In **September 2016** he took leave to become Trump's **deputy campaign manager**. He has been Maryland's **Republican National Committeeman** since May 2016. After the 2020 election Trump tapped him to lead the ballot-count challenges in close states, though a positive COVID test on Nov. 9 took him out of that effort. He also worked on Benjamin Netanyahu's 2020 re-election campaign. Through Bossie, the organization that won unlimited independent spending also supplied one of the operators of the campaign that most benefited from it. ## See also - [[Citizens United v. FEC]] · [[David Bossie]] · [[Dark Money]] · [[Money as Speech]] · [[Corporate Personhood]] - [[Corporate Free Speech]] · [[501(c)(4)]] · [[Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act]] · [[Koch Network]] - [[Paid Political Influencers]] · [[Crypto-Political Ecosystem]] · [[AIPAC]]