Foundation Self Dealing Is Latest Conservative Grift

The conservative organizations surrounding the Republican party have been known for grifting for decades. Examples are Glenn Beck’s gold-buggery, the media outfits that sell their email lists to con artists and hucksters, and many more too numerous to mention. But this campaign has uncovered another conservative grift – the personal foundation that is set up primarily for self-dealing. The Trump Foundation has just admitted self-dealing to the IRS. But Trump is really playing that game for peanuts, taking a few tacky paintings and memorabilia for himself and occasionally paying his personal liabilities with Foundation money.

Steve Bannon, on the other hand, decided he would just take the cash. The non-profit Government Accountability Institute (GAI) set up by Bannon paid Bannon nearly $400,000 over four years while Bannon was also working as the head of Breitbart News. The GAI claimed Bannon worked 30 hours a week for the charity. In addition, GAI also paid two Breitbart News staffers around $1.3 million over the same four year period for 40 hours of work per week, in addition to their salary at Breitbart. When queried about this arrangement which presumably meant the staffers were working a minimum of 80 hours per week, the response was that they worked hard. GAI was the sponsor of the book Clinton Cash, a hit piece on Hillary and the Clinton Foundation, that both the NY Times and the Washington Post agreed to work with in order to explore story lines arising from the book. That probably accounts for the raft of Times’ stories about the Clinton Foundation that left vague impressions of wrongdoing while actually producing no evidence to support and even evidence to refute that conclusion. Of course, the only Foundation that has admitted wrongdoing is the Trump Foundation and, based on the revelations about GAI, perhaps the Times and the Post should have been looking at that foundation as well.

Today we learn that Trump’s appointment for Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, used the OneWest Foundation to essentially astroturf support for the merger of OneWest and CIT. Mnuchin was the chairman of OneWest, the successor to the scandal-plagued IndyMac, when he set up the OneWest Foundation, which he also chaired, in 2009. Shortly afterward, OneWest proposed a merger with another financial giant, CIT. OneWest Foundation donated funds to other charities. Many of those charities wrote letters to the Federal Reserve in support of the merger and some also even spoke in support in public panels convened by the Fed to explore the merger. At least two of the charities have said they were approached by the OneWest Foundation to write a letter of support. The Fed eventually agree to the merger and cited the support of charities as a factor in their decision. Again, this is pretty much another clear example of self dealing. As one expert on non-profit law says, “It is not an appropriate use of charitable assets to benefit an affiliated business.”

This foundation scam seems to be the latest area of grift for the conservative movement.  It’s really hard to swallow how much ink was spent on innuendo against the Clinton Foundation which looks squeaky clean when compared to these foundations associated with the conservative movement and Trump himself. But, then again, the media is never concerned with white collar crime on the right.