Who the heck is Giants owner Charles Johnson?
Part 7 in the series
This is the sixth installment in our series on who exactly owns the Giants. So far, we have covered real estate mogul Scott Seligman, private equity guy Phil Halperin, real estate mogul Jed Walentas, medical technology investor David Schnell, radio station owner/former Yahoo board member Arthur Kern (Art to his friends), and lady of mystery Nancy Olsen. Time to look at the big board!
Boy, you can barely see who’s left.
Today, we talk about Charles B. Johnson, who-
YOU: Hey! Hey! This is offseason content! You can’t just use offseason content all willy-nilly. We live in a society!
Okay, look, the thing is-
YOU: The Giants have played three games of a four-game series with the Dodgers that will decide first place in the NL West in late July and you’re profiling one of the owners? What is wrong with you?
Well, I’m not exactly sure where to start with th-
YOU: And everyone knows enough about Charles Johnson anyway! He has some financial firm and he made a lot of money and he gives that money to all the Republicans who hate democracy. THIS ISN’T HARD.
Yeah? Well, did you know that Charles Johnson was born in Montclair, New Jersey on January 6, 1933? Or that he went to Yale and then served as a lieutenant in the army stationed in Germany? Or that he took over Franklin Resources, the financial services firm his dad founded, took it public, acquired investment firms and securities corporations, and, as of his retirement, ended up with more than 320,000 times the cash under management that it had when he started?
Yeah, see? There are things you didn’t know!
Anyway, no one cares about those. Let’s talk about politics.
Charles Johnson is a Republican megadonor. In 2012, he gave to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and hosted a $50,000 per plate fundraising dinner for Mitt Romney. He also gave $50,000 to Romney’s PAC, and $200,000 to Karl Rove’s. On June 30 of this year, he gave the max contributions to New York Republican Nicole Malliotakis and to California Republican/bootlicker Devin Nunes. He’s been giving to Republicans for a long time, and he’s been giving a lot, and he’s not going to stop.
That got him into hot water, as you might remember. He gave money to Cindy Hyde-Smith in 2018, and then requested his money back because she was caught on tape saying, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”
This tape was released more than a week before his original donation, for the record.
Also in that year, he asked for another donation back, this one to a PAC called Black Americans for the President’s Agenda, which released a radio ad where this happened:
"What will happen to our husbands, our fathers or our sons when white girls lie on them?," one woman says in the audio.
“White Democrats will be lynching black folk again," says another.
After the January 6 riot at the Capitol where right-wingers tried to overturn the presidential election, Johnson claimed he asked for his money back from Lauren Boebert, a QAnon Congresswoman who tried to get Nancy Pelosi killed by tweeting out her location that day. Except he never actually requested or received a refund. And now it turns out he gave money to her again.
Now, this time it was through a joint fundraising committee, but it’s one that is very clear about which candidates it funds. Those candidates include Boebert, Malliotakis, and right-wing media stars Madison Cawthorn and Dan Crenshaw, among others. The committee gives to COVID truthers and election deniers, writers of bathroom bills and people accused of sexual harassment.
If the question is “Who the heck is Charles Johnson,” then there’s your answer. He’s someone who has repeatedly given to candidates who run racist ads or vote to overturn democracy, and, best-case scenario, just doesn’t notice when he does it again. The non-best case scenario, of course, is that he does notice and either doesn’t care or likes it.
Charles Johnson has been making the same lame excuses for too long. The “I didn’t know” excuses, the “Obviously I never would have donated if I had more information” excuses. They’re all bullshit. He doesn’t care. He’s never cared, and he probably thinks these candidates and these people stand for values that more people should share. There was never any remorse over anything other than being caught giving money to people who it was socially unacceptable to give money to. He supports them. He always has.
Johnson is the type of aging billionaire who talks to all his old billionaire friends about what they just watched on Fox News, then watches more Fox News, and tells everyone what he just saw on Fox News. He doesn’t bother doing his own research. He’s 88 years old, and he has his worldview, and he’s going to just shovel money at it because he can and someone says he should. If there is any more to it than that, the more isn’t any better.
We can talk about Johnson’s massive donation to Yale, or the way he shuns the media spotlight, or his earnest Giants fandom. Maybe those things do a better job defining the person inside. But the way that person has affected the world is through political donations. It is entirely fair to say that this is who he is. He gives money to assholes. When called out on it, he does it again as soon as he thinks no one is looking. That says a lot about a person, and none of it is good.