Power Grab

by Jason Chaffetz

  Motivated by a pattern of rage-driven fund-raising hauls, political advocacy groups on the right and left had more incentive to drive that rage than to calm it. Efforts to shame anyone found working across the aisle resulted in greater polarization in Congress. Any attempt at bipartisanship or compromise spawned a fund-raising campaign or what was called a key vote—a vote that would appear on an end-of-year scorecard marketed to voters as a means to judge lawmaker performance. This was good news for partisans and purists, but in a form of government that depends on finding common ground to pass legislation, it intensified the gridlock in Congress.

  The success of rage donating also gave rise to another problem: scams and scavengers on both the left and the right. I remember clearly the frustration of my colleague Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, whose image was used repeatedly in fund-raising pitches during the height of his work on the Select Committee on Benghazi, which was investigating the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on an American diplomatic facility in Libya. Ads would appear telling viewers to “help Trey Gowdy” by donating money. But none of that money ever actually went to Representative Gowdy’s campaign or any campaign that we knew of. Every time he turned around there was a new ad on the internet. His campaign never got a dime of it. He felt terrible that there were people all across the country sending in money and we had no idea where it was actually going.

  Despite the downside of nonprofit political engagement, the practice is likely here to stay. Monetizing political anger may have become too lucrative for politicians to give up. Whether we like it or not, the practice of politicizing nonprofit entities is now a driving force in American politics. But it is one that potentially poses an existential threat to the Republican Party.

  An Uneven Playing Field

  While American voters may be aware of nonprofit engagement in elections, they may not realize just how much that engagement favors progressive candidates and causes.

  During my work on the House Oversight Committee, I had an opportunity to take a meeting with someone who had done a deep dive into the public filings of certain nonprofit charities.

  “There’s something really fishy about the way these charities are raising money,” the woman told me, pulling out graph after graph of fund-raising numbers for some of America’s biggest nonprofits. A veteran of many nonprofit audits herself, the woman had approached my office in 2016 with information she wanted the House Oversight Committee to look into. “If I were working for the IRS, I would be auditing every one of these,” she said, pointing to a list of large, high-profile charities. The one thing these charities all had in common? They were all associated with progressive politics.

  This wasn’t the first time I had been shown evidence of the Democrats’ success in using nonprofits as political weapons. The seeds of this practice—acorns as it were—were first planted in my mind back in 2009.

  I was a freshman member of the House Oversight Committee at that time, but we had jurisdiction of the upcoming census. Democrats had controlled the House, the Senate, and the presidency in the years leading up to the census, which meant they got to dictate the terms under which it would take place.

  In an effort to find 1.4 million temporary workers to conduct the census, the government partnered with hundreds of nonprofit organizations to help count a U.S. population in excess of 300 million people. Among these groups was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which was a collection of local charity organizations operating under a national umbrella.

  Ostensibly, ACORN was created to advocate for low-income families. But by the time the group engaged with the census, it already had a long history of fraudulent voter registration efforts dating back to 1998 in Arkansas, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. In 2007, Washington State filed felony charges on a number of ACORN employees for falsely submitting in excess of seventeen hundred fraudulent voter registrations there. The organization also had a history of wage violations. On top of that, ACORN had covered up a $1 million embezzlement scandal by the brother of one of its founders.

  In spite of all that history, the left-leaning ACORN had received $48 million in federal grants and contracts between 2005 and 2009, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit. That same audit found that “of 22 investigations and cases of election and voter registration fraud and wage violations involving ACORN or potentially related organizations from fiscal years 2005 through 2009, most were closed without prosecution. One of the eight cases and investigations identified by the Department of Justice resulted in guilty pleas by eight defendants to voter registration fraud and seven were closed without action due to insufficient, or a lack of, evidence.”

  None of that stopped the U.S. Census Bureau in early 2009 from partnering with ACORN to send workers door-to-door counting every person in the country. These would be from the same pool of workers accused of submitting false voter registrations in the names of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in previous election cycles. I and many of my colleagues on the committee expressed serious concerns about the group’s history of fraud allegations and its well-documented partisan agenda.

  Ultimately, the public outcry stemming from an undercover video operation exposing ACORN’s deceptive practices helped scuttle the partnership with the census. But this was just the beginning of a growing strategy to use voter registration as a pretext for nonprofits to engage in political activities intended to impact election outcomes to favor Democrats.

  Flash forward to 2016. I was chair of the House Oversight Committee, and once again I was being shown evidence of partisan activity by Democratic-aligned nonprofits that claimed to be nonpartisan. The woman who brought me this information, which I’ll cover in the next chapter, had serious concerns about the overwhelming influence of partisan Democrats she was seeing throughout the whole nonprofit sector.

  Of course, the groups on her list weren’t the groups the IRS had been interested in auditing up to that point. These groups all leaned left. But as we all remember, the nonprofit groups garnering all the IRS attention beginning in 2013 were the ones on a BOLO (Be On the Lookout) list containing words like “tea party,” “patriot,” and “9/12 project” in their names. Democratic allies in the news media faithfully reported at the time that progressive groups were also flagged for review, but a subsequent audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) dispelled the notion that the targeting was bipartisan.

  The fear exhibited by Democrats and their IRS allies during the 2013 targeting scandal seemed like an overreaction at the time. Why did they see conservative-leaning nonprofits as such a threat?

  After digging into some of the publicly available nonprofit filings, I now wonder if the apparent overreaction by the IRS was a classic case of projection. With a career community organizer at the helm of the executive branch—one who had worked with ACORN himself in 1992—Obama’s IRS may have been fearful that Republicans would figure out how to do what Democrats were already doing. A review of nonprofit filings since 2013, which we’ll scrutinize in a moment, will show the type of partisan activity senior IRS officials may have been overlooking on the left in their zeal to pursue conservative advocacy groups. Data from progressive groups during the exact time period of the Tea Party scrutiny is difficult to analyze given that disclosure laws only require tax filings to be publicly available for three years.

  Today ACORN’s work is continued by an army of progressive volunteers who use voter registration drives as a pretext for helping progressive candidates win.

  While the left-leaning bias of America’s largest advocacy nonprofits will come as no surprise to conservatives, the extent to which some are engaged in partisan political activities is greatly underestimated.

  No comparable infrastructure exists on the right, partly because of the dominance of Democrats in an industry dependent on big government spending. After learning more about how Democrats are using nonprofits, I decided to compare the public tax
filings of the largest conservative groups with the numbers I was seeing on the left. I found that the scale of conservative nonprofits is dwarfed by the scale of progressive ones.

  The patterns we see on the left are not repeated on the right. Besides, to duplicate the tactics we’re seeing from the left, conservatives would need to create more of their own nonprofits—something a politically weaponized Obama-era IRS worked hard to prevent. Even many of the conservative nonprofits that sought 501(c)(4) status after 2010 and won an apology from the Justice Department for the scandal have since been targeted for audits. Judicial Watch reports that in February 2014, then-chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan, testified about improper IRS targeting of existing conservative groups:

  Additionally, we now know that the IRS targeted not only right-leaning applicants, but also right-leaning groups that were already operating as 501(c)(4)s. At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83 percent were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100 percent were right-leaning.

  Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch was able to uncover emails and other documents confirming that the IRS not only used donor disclosures to identify targets, but chose those targets based on their politics. Judicial Watch uncovered snarky messages about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, special interest in Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS nonprofit, and acknowledgments that interest in the issue on Capitol Hill was related to the upcoming elections.

  Social Welfare as a Pretext for Partisan Politics

  The proliferation of social welfare and advocacy nonprofits capitalizing on rage donations has polarized our politics in new ways. These groups were ideally suited to operate in this role, because our largest and most successful charitable nonprofits have already been functioning as fronts for political fund-raising. Using their venerable histories of social welfare work, they are able to trade on their credibility as nonprofits to generate donations that are ostensibly intended for nonprofit work, but that may actually be converted to partisan political campaign activity.

  For some of America’s most successful nonprofits, their original purpose has become little more than a side hustle. Their real purpose is now to fund and promote progressive politics.

  Nowhere is this problem more apparent than at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), ostensibly operating to fight intolerance. The group is known for its hate map that in 2018 identified 1,020 organizations provocatively labeled by SPLC as hate groups. The term is designed to inflame passions and open wallets—the real purpose of the SPLC. But the group’s targets are frequently not purveyors of hate, but purveyors of ideas SPLC cannot tolerate.

  In 2010, SPLC labeled the Christian group Family Research Council as a hate group. The justification? The group “hates” the LGBT community because they object to policies supported by that community, such as hate crime laws, gay marriage, and gay scout leaders. SPLC claims Family Research Council has embraced “junk science” to raise concerns about LGBT parenting. Instead of taking issue with that “junk science” in the marketplace of ideas, SPLC simply labels these organizations with a debate-killing epithet.

  Soon after Family Research Council appeared on the hate list, the organization was the target of a politically motivated shooting in 2012. Telling a security guard at the organization’s Virginia headquarters that he disagreed with the group’s politics, a twenty-eight-year-old gay rights volunteer carrying a 9 mm handgun and fifteen Chick-fil-A sandwiches opened fire. The shooter later told investigators he planned to shoot as many people as possible and then smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their faces as a political statement.

  Conservative backlash to SPLC following the attack received muted media coverage of the “conservatives pounce” variety, suggesting there was no way to know for sure whether SPLC’s hate designation motivated the shooter. The shooter himself laid those concerns to rest in subsequent interviews with federal investigators. In video obtained from the FBI by Family Research Council, the shooter can be heard saying, “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that.”

  Even as SPLC points the finger at the tiniest organizations on the right, major violent movements like Antifa on the left get a pass. The group has lobbed bricks and glass bottles at police, thrown Molotov cocktails and smashed windows on the University of California, Berkeley campus, slashed tires of right-wing activists, and doxxed 1,595 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers by publishing their names and photographs. Despite Antifa’s pattern of violence, SPLC president Richard Cohen told Congress, “Antifa is not a group that vilifies people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and the like.” He told the Washington Free Beacon in 2017, “There might be forms of hate out there that you may consider hateful, but it’s not the type of hate we follow.” We all know what type of “hate” they follow.

  What’s not hateful to the SPLC? Apparently when the governor of Virginia, a Democrat, appears in a yearbook photo allegedly either wearing blackface or dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman, that incident merits no response from the fighters of hate at SPLC. When it comes to hate on the left, SPLC’s approach is to see no evil, hear no evil.

  In the fight against hate and intolerance on the right, SPLC deploys both. The results are nothing if not profitable. The organization sits on a $471 million endowment. In 2017, thanks in part to the anger resulting from the violent riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, SPLC raised $132 million.

  Public reporting indicates SPLC has moved $121 million to offshore accounts. The reports don’t indicate how the offshore dollars are invested, but in its 2015 business tax filings, Southern Poverty Law Center reported having bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and the British Virgin Islands. The Cayman Islands is a well-known tax haven. An investigation by the Washington Free Beacon uncovered tax forms showing transfers to Cayman Islands bank accounts and foreign partnerships totaling millions of dollars.

  With its vaunted history of winning lawsuits against the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation, the organization attracts idealists. But the firing of cofounder Morris Dees in early 2019 amid allegations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism exposed the internal contradictions of an organization infected with the very intolerance it is paid to fight.

  SPLC bills itself as “dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society.” In reality, former SPLC employee and writer Bob Moser said, it was hard for employees not to “feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.”

  The posh Alabama headquarters (snarkily referred to by employees as “the Poverty Palace”) is focused on fund-raising programs, not civil rights lawsuits. Karl Zinmeister of Philanthropy Roundtable reports that SPLC has never spent more than 31 percent of its donations on fighting hate and intolerance. In some years, he reports, that number has dropped to as little as 18 percent, far less than the fund-raising budget.

  Its two largest expenses are propaganda operations: creating its annual lists of “haters” and “extremists,” and running a big effort that pushes “tolerance education” through more than 400,000 public-school teachers. And the single biggest effort undertaken by the SPLC? Fundraising. On the organization’s 2015 IRS 990 form it declared $10 million of direct fundraising expenses, far more than it has ever spent on legal services.

  The bad publicity following the firing of Morris Dees resulted in the resignation of SPLC president Richard Cohen as the group faces perhaps the worst public relations disaster in its history. To help navigate the problem, the Daily Wire reports they’ve hired the former chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama, Tina Tchen. She will lead an internal investigation into alleged racial
and gender bias.

  You may have heard of Tchen. She played a role in getting hate crime charges against actor Jussie Smollett dropped. A grand jury had indicted the actor from the television series Empire with sixteen counts of disorderly conduct after police found evidence he had falsely reported a hate crime. The actor had alleged an attack in January 2019 in which he claimed he was assaulted by two men who put a noose around his neck, doused him in chemicals, and said, “This is MAGA country.” The allegations described precisely the type of crime that fills SPLC coffers with donations from angry progressives.

  In a text message to Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx, Tchen wrote, “I wanted to give you a call on behalf of Jussie Smollett and family who I know. They have concerns about the investigation.” Foxx emailed back saying, “Spoke to the Superintendent [Eddie] Johnson” and “convinced him to reach out to FBI to ask that they take over the investigation.” Presumably Tchen’s intervention helped Foxx connect with a member of Smollett’s family. In subsequent texts between that family member and Foxx, Foxx reassured the family member, writing, “Spoke to the superintendent earlier, he made the ask. Trying to figure out logistics. I’ll keep you posted.” To which Smollett’s undisclosed relative replied, “Omg this would be a huge victory.” Foxx responded that she would “make no guarantees, but I’m trying.”

  Just one month after his arrest, the charges against Smollett for faking a hate crime were mysteriously dropped. There would be no prosecution. The case was closed. The record was sealed. Smollett did not even have to take responsibility for a hate crime hoax that targeted Trump supporters and undermined the credibility of other hate crimes going forward.

  You know which nonprofit should be really upset about this? That’s right. The Southern Poverty Law Center. Instead, they decided Tina Tchen was the person they should rely on to get to the bottom of their own racism and bigotry. Obviously, they are very serious about that. The extent to which these nonprofit charities are tied together with progressive politics and politicians is laid bare.