POLITICO's Ken Vogel and Giovanni Russonello dig into the money trail of the Park51 Islamic community center, and the campaign against it:

The think tank, the Center for Security Policy, which also produced an ominous Web ad opposing the mosque for the ground zero coalition, had a $4 million budget in 2008 (the last year for which it has filed tax returns).



Its chief operating officer, Christine Brim, declined to discuss her group’s donors or its support for the coalition but, in a blog post, criticized POLITICO for asking about funding for both mosque supporters and opponents — which she said “implied a moral equivalency between ‘both sides.’”



In fact, neither side’s funding is quite so clear-cut or ominous as their critics allege.



In addition to the donations from Qatar and the Saudi prince, Rauf’s nonprofits — the Cordoba Initiative and the American Society for Muslim Advancement — also received a healthy dose of funding from mainstream American foundations that bankroll countless apolitical organizations.



The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Deak Family Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Swanee Hunt Family Foundation and the William & Mary Greve Foundation combined to give $650,000 from 2006 to 2008, according to foundation grant reports reviewed for POLITICO by the conservative Capital Research Center. ...

But there’s also big money behind the mosque opposition, as highlighted by the relationship between [David] Horowitz’s Los Angeles-based nonprofit, Jihad Watch — the website run by Spencer “dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology play in the modern world” — and Joyce Chernick, the wife of a wealthy California tech company founder.

Though it was not listed on the public tax reports filed by Horowitz’s Freedom Center, POLITICO has confirmed that the lion’s share of the $920,000 it provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from Chernick, whose husband, Aubrey Chernick, has a net worth of $750 million, as a result of his 2004 sale to IBM of a software company he created, and a security consulting firm he now owns.



A onetime trustee of the ...Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aubrey Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network ...

The David Horowitz Freedom Center had a budget of $4.5 million last year, according to its tax filings, of which $290,000 came from the conservative Bradley Foundation, which also gave $75,000 to the Center for Security Policy last year. Horowitz has received an average of $461,000 a year in salary and benefits over the past three years, while Spencer has pulled in an average of $140,000, according to the center’s IRS filings.