During the Republican primaries, millionaire Foster Friess became a household name for his more than $2 million in donations to the pro-Rick Santorum Red, White & Blue Super PAC. At that time, he told ThinkProgress that he would like to see more flexibility for big donors like himself to give directly to the candidates and full disclosure.

But like casino billionaire and Super PAC funder Sheldon Adelson, Friess has decided he would rather avoid the scrutiny of having his future political spending made public.

CNN reports that Friess “has decided his financial donations in the future will mostly be to [501(c)(4)] groups that do not have to disclose their donors.” He told the network:

I was kind of shocked to see the notoriety, the high profile I got. I didn’t know if I needed that. People looked at me as a villain.

The vast majority of Americans hate the massive influx of “independent” expenditures by Super PACs and secret-money 501(c)(4) groups enabled by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United ruling. With the Senate Republican’s successful filibuster of the DISCLOSE Act, donors like Adelson and Friess are free to do what they are doing — simply move their donations to undisclosed groups and spend at will, while the public has no way of knowing who is behind the attack ads they bankroll.

Still, if Adelson and Friess really don’t want to be looked upon as villains, they could spend their money on something else.

WASHINGTON — Foster Friess, the millionaire who funded outside groups supporting Rick Santorum’s presidential bid and is now helping to bankroll Romney’s Super PAC, thinks that he and other super wealthy donors should be able to give unlimited amounts of money directly to the candidate of their choice without any restrictions.

At the Faith & Freedom Conference last week, Friess bemoaned to ThinkProgress the complications in trying to donate: Citizens United, the famed Supreme Court decision, allowed anyone and any corporation to donate unlimited funds to a campaign, but they were forced to go through a third party that could not coordinate directly with the candidate.

Friess would like to change this. He believes that Super PACs are a superfluous step in the process of pouring millions of dollars into campaigns, and that people like himself and corporations overall should be able to write checks straight to the candidate:

FRIESS: I think all these little loopholes, and — you know, during the campaign I had to be so careful that I didn’t say certain things and keep the Super PAC and the campaign separate. So, I was paranoid to make sure that I followed the rules carefully. So, it’d be nice to get rid of that so that each person could give to the candidate of his choice as much money as he wanted and it was fully disclosed. So, I’m wholeheartedly behind Tim Pawlenty in that.

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Citizens United shook the very bedrock of campaign finance by allowing unlimited donations to campaigns. Its effects are already clear: Sheldon Adelson, another funder in the vein of Friess, will soon have spent $71 million on supporting Republicans. Friess is not the first to advocate for direct unlimited contributions, either: Mitt Romney himself has pushed for it.

Unlimited contributions are harmful in that they give the very rich and corporations bigger leverage in how elections turn out, despite the fact that corporations cannot vote. Poor and middle class Americans are unable to pour in the kind of huge contributions that a corporation can, and so their needs often go unnoticed. But Friess may be correct in that direct donations would create more transparency — in the past four years, the amount of undisclosed spending has risen by 47 percent.

WASHINGTON, DC — Uber-wealthy Republican donor Foster Friess isn’t content just giving his own money to support Mitt Romney; he’s now lobbying his rich friends to open their checkbooks as well.

Friess, an investment manager worth upwards of $500 million, gained notoriety earlier this year as the moneyman funding Rick Santorum’s super PAC. After Santorum dropped out, Friess (along with other wealthy donors like Sheldon Adelson) switched to supporting Romney’s presidential campaign.

ThinkProgress and TPM’s Benjy Sarlin ran into Friess at the Faith & Freedom Conference over the weekend and asked what his plans were going forward. After bemoaning the fact that big Republican donors hadn’t done more to coordinate resources and message before, Friess said he had now “reached out to a number of potential donors” about supporting Romney’s super PAC. He declined to name names, leaving it at the fact that they’re “big donors.”

SARLIN: Now that the general election is underway, do you keep in touch with the other big donors, Sheldon Adelson, Bob Perry, and the people who are now doing the general election? Do you guys have a friendly, encouraging society?

FRIESS: There should be more of that. I find when I’ve done certain projects like I put up a little video and I found four other people putting up the same message. Well we could’ve pooled our resources and done a much better, more professional than our somewhat-amateurish video. I wish that would happen more but it doesn’t and it should.

SARLIN: Have you reached out to any of the other big donors about trying to work together a little more?

FRIESS: I’ve reached out to a number of potential donors who aren’t involved so much before to help Gov. Romney with his Restore Our Future PAC and to try to encourage some of the same things for Gov. Romney as I did for Rick Santorum.

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Thanks in large part to extremely wealthy conservatives like Friess, Republican-aligned groups are far outpacing those supporting Democrats. In fact, a single casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson, just gave $10 million to Romney’s super PAC and has said he’s willing to spend a “limitless” amount of money to defeat President Obama in the fall.