Free Republic

In this overview, Mike examines Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s effort to follow the money behind tax-exempt organizations, political campaigns, extremist activity, and what he describes as the financial architecture of the deep state.From Arabella Advisors and the Sixteen Thirty Fund to the Tides Foundation, Open Society Foundations, CAIR, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mike explains how donations can move through interconnected charities and political organizations without revealing the original donors. These networks, he argues, allow billionaire-backed operations to influence elections, protests, political movements, and American culture while retaining their tax-exempt status.

Leftist nonprofits are using pass-through organizations to boost voter registration for demographics most likely to vote for Democrats, a new report alleges. The report, titled “The ‘Charities’ influencing elections: 2024 and beyond,” written by the Capital Research Center (CRC), found that multiple left-leaning 501(c)(3)s, which are prohibited from engaging in any political campaign for or against a candidate and whose donations are tax deductible, acted as conduits for 501(c)(4)s, which are permitted to engage in direct partisan politics. Those tax-exempt organizations spent $638 million during the 2024 election cycle, according to the report, to register voters most likely to vote...

Left or right, taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize political activism they oppose, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is drafting plans to ensure they don’t by revoking tax exemptions from bogus political “charities.” As The Post’s James Franey reports, Bessent and the IRS are taking a hard look at the conduct of up to a dozen or so high-profile lefty nonprofits — including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations — with an eye toward possibly revoking their tax-exempt status. That could mean a $165 million windfall in new tax payments from...

In Lawrence, Massachusetts, a whistleblower revealed a welfare scam that the Dominican community has been running for over a decade. Here is how it works: Dominican immigrants buy food with EBT cards or take it for free from food banks. They then load it into shipping barrels and send it to the Dominican Republic, where it is sold for profit in local bodegas. We tracked the entire pipeline, from corner stores in Massachusetts to shipping hubs in New York to bodegas in Santo Domingo that are stocked with food paid for by the American taxpayer. We are prepared to share...

Requiring the disclosure of fiscal sponsorships is key. On April 23, the US Treasury Department announced that the IRS plans to revise Form 990—the annual information return filed by tax-exempt organizations—to improve transparency and strengthen oversight, specifically targeting reporting on government contracts, government grants, and fiscal sponsorship arrangements. The stated goals are to detect misconduct and hold wrongdoers accountable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put the matter bluntly: “We are ending the days of hiding fraud, abuse, and extremist activity behind complicated nonprofit arrangements. When bad actors misuse charitable structures, directors and officers should understand that transparency can lead to scrutiny,...

Meet the ‘Mohammeds’ running the Church’s migration agenda. The Catholic News Herald, “Connecting Catholics in North Carolina”, bragged that the refugee case coordinator for the Catholic Charities Diocese of Charlotte, had been recently honored. His name? Ashir Haji-Mohamed. The latter part of the name meant that he had made a pilgrimage to the Islamic holy city of Mecca. Haji-Mohamed, a former Somali refugee, had previously been in the news for helping resettle Syrian Muslims, as well as Jordanians and Turks, in North Carolina. After the Biden retreat, Catholic Charities of Charlotte had also worked to bring Afghans to North Carolina....

A disgraced San Francisco human rights chief and her longtime beau have been arrested for allegedly grifting taxpayer funds for personal use through a city program intended to help the city’s black communities. Sheryl Davis, former heard of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, and her nonprofit boss partner James Spingola were taken into custody Monday on suspicion of multiple felony counts of misappropriating public funds and conflicts of interest. “Public integrity matters because our communities must be able to trust that government agencies treat everyone fairly and serve all members equally,” said District Attorney Brooke Jenkins at a press...

n 2025, my wife and I received 478 direct mail appeals from charitable organizations and other non-profits. That’s right — 478. That is an average of slightly over nine a week. How do I know the exact number? In 2024, I noticed that the number of letters from charities was increasing. There was always one or two in the mail, sometimes more. The only way to see what was really happening was to collect these mailings for a year and count them. So, after Christmas in 2024, I found an empty box I thought might hold a few hundred letters,...

Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the organizers of the storming of a Minnesota church to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Sunday, denied that she and her group tried to "rush" the church on CNN, despite previous comments suggesting otherwise. Armstrong appeared on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" Wednesday when she was asked about whether the Justice Department had contacted her since threatening a crackdown on the protesters. Armstrong said that she had not been contacted by the Justice Department, despite media attention, but that she wanted to "correct" the record on her protest.

MINNEAPOLIS — Last year, with the federal government making available huge new sums of money for programs to feed needy children during the pandemic, a nonprofit organization called Advance Youth Athletic Development set up what it described as an enormous child care operation in northeast Minneapolis that could prepare 5,000 dinners each weeknight. Based on the group’s claims, the State of Minnesota channeled $3.2 million of the federal food aid to the program. But on a subzero morning in January, the F.B.I. carried out a series of predawn raids around the region. It revealed a sprawling investigation into Advance Youth...

If you are angry (about the tension in St. Cloud) and want one entity to blame, it is Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, the primary federal refugee resettlement agency working in St. Cloud! That supposedly 'Christian' charitable organization is directly responsible for the high Somali numbers in St. Cloud, and they are jointly responsible for bringing over ten thousand Somalis from around the world to colonize Minnesota towns in the last ten years alone--Catholic Charities and World Relief MN (now Arrive Ministries)*** helped also. Of course they have brought many more than 10,000 in over two decades and not just...

The Bail Project, whose employee Holly Zoller drove the U-Haul in Louisville that gave supplies to antifa, received up to $1M in federal COVID relief funds. National File reported yesterday that Holly Zoller, a professional “Bail Disruptor” for the Bail Project, was caught driving a U-Haul truck that gave out supplies to Antifa rioters in Louisville, including what looked like shields. The rioters were protesting the result of the investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor, and the lack of murder charges that resulted. The Bail Project has ties to a number of famous faces. The board of advisors include...

The alleged "mastermind" behind Minnesota’s $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scandal tied to the Somali community is accused of wielding extraordinary power through threats and what the government described as "fake claims of racism." Aimee Bock, who founded the Feeding Our Future nonprofit in 2016, used her growing authority to silence dissent, discourage scrutiny from state regulators and cut off operators who refused to comply, prosecutors said. While other defendants splurged on luxury homes, cars and overseas property, prosecutors said, Bock instead controlled the levers of approval and reimbursement that allowed the scheme to flourish.

As we’ve reported, federal prosecutors have uncovered massive fraud in Minnesota’s federally funded food child nutrition programs, where scammers – many of them of Somalian descent – allegedly ripped off over a billion dollars from taxpayers. Some are predicting the end of Gov. Tim Walz’s political career, as this went down under his watch, and it’s been revealed that Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN-05) held her campaign victory party in 2018 at a restaurant owned by a man who was convicted in March on 21 counts related to the scandal, including wire fraud, federal programs bribery and money laundering. Not a...

A BLM activist has been charged over a huge fraud which is said to have included blowing a grant intended for young men at risk of violence on trips to Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., Shake Shack and a nail salon. She is accused of using much of the $1 million raised by her nonprofit Violence in Boston Inc for good causes. Her salary jumped from $25,000 in 2020 to $170,000 in 2021. Cannon-Grant - once named a Bostonian of the Year by the prestigious Boston Globe newspaper - was arrested at her spacious home last week. She appeared in a...

A Dallas Muslim community leader will be deported after an immigration judge ruled he provided “material support” to the Holy Land Foundation, the Richardson-based charity whose leaders were convicted in a major terrorism financing case. Marwan Marouf, 54, a Jordanian national who has lived in the United States for roughly 30 years, has served as the public relations and fundraising director for the Muslim-American Society’s DFW chapter. He has been held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since September. The Dallas Express previously reported that ICE arrested Marouf in September and charged him with lacking a valid entry...

Animal lovers beware: Some of the biggest charities in the biz are more than happy to bite the hand that feeds them. At least, that's the contention of one Washington, D.C.-based watchdog. If you’ve ever worried about where your charitable dollars go, you’re not alone. The holidays are the busiest giving season of the year, with Americans donating roughly $3.1 billion in 2023. About 30% of all annual giving happens in December, with the Tuesday after Thanksgiving now known nationwide as “Giving Tuesday.” Yet Americans’ growing distrust of institutions is starting to affect their willingness to give. A recent study...

Major corporate giving platforms use the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to vet charities, effectively blocking donations to many conservative and faith-based nonprofits wrongly labeled as “hate groups.” Benevity, a platform used by hundreds of corporations to manage workplace donations, says it has processed more than $18.5 billion in transactions. Company materials show that the platform relies on the SPLC list to help determine which organizations employees are allowed to select for donations.... The SPLC has labeled right-leaning groups such as Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) as “hate groups,” listing them alongside the Ku Klux Klan...

When violent riots erupted across Los Angeles in defiance of President Trump’s efforts to enforce federal immigration law, the uprising was not as spontaneous as open-borders politicians would have you believe. Far-left non-governmental organizations, including the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), helped provide transportation and services to those going to the protests in support of illegal immigration, many of which quickly devolved into brutal attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As it turns out, CHIRLA received nearly $34 million in California state grants from June 2022 to June 2023. From October 2021 to September 2024, under the Biden-Harris administration,...

It's absolutely amazing where the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) finds taxpayer money and how it gets there. The Daily Wire has been investigating a small USAID-linked organization that described itself to Congress as "a low-overhead charity sending its money to Africans." But the African Development Foundation was actually a grifter's paradise, siphoning taxpayer money in the name of charity and sending it to friends and cronies in Africa and the U.S. Mathieu Zahui, Foundation's chief financial officer, became something of a left-wing hero when Elon Musk and DOGE showed up for an audit. Bravely, Mr. Zahui stood up and...