Hate Group's Donor Records and Pro-Trump Activities Exposed

One of the biggest scams and tax dodges are right wing "charities" and "religious ministries" that use the tax laws to shelter their incomes from taxation and donor bases from scrutiny.   Section 501(c)(3) charities are barred under the tax code and IRS regulations from engaging in political activities if they want to maintain their tax-exempt status the theory being that members of the public should not be forced to indirectly underwite the activities of political operations. Yet among right wing Christian organizations this prohibition is blatantly violated almost daily in some cases as political activities are undertaken and candidate endorsements are made either explicitly or by implication.  Adding insult to injury is the reality that many of the leaders of these false charities pay themselves very plush salaries and cushy benefits - all underwiten by the taxpaying public.  The IRS needs to investigate and yank the tax-exempt status of these groups and their nefarious and outright political activities need to be exposed.  Sadly, it is often difficult to gain information on such groups and organizations that woud render themtaxable and educate the public about the true nature of their activities.  One such organization is Liberty Counsel, a certified hate group, that under the radar has been spreading malicious untruths and activiely supporting Republican candidates, including Donald Trump.  Thankfully, as The Intercept reports, hackers have copied Liberty Counsel's donor base, political emails and other data and are making the information available to media outlets - and one can hope, IRS and Treasury Department officials.  Here are highlights of the ugly truth about this vicious organization and its self-enriching leadership:

Liberty Counsel, an evangelical Christian nonprofit that provided a brief cited by the Supreme Court in its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, has been hacked, revealing a 25-gigabyte internal database that contains nearly seven years’ worth of donor records. The hacker, who identifies with the Anonymous movement, released the data on the hacktivist site Enlace Hacktivista, and the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets is providing it to journalists who request access.

“Noticing a worrying trend of far-right and anti-abortion activists aligning themselves with the evangelical Christian movement, hiding their funding sources behind laws that allow church ministries to keep their donations secret,” the hacker wrote in a press release, “we decided to bring about some much-needed radical transparency.”

In addition to fighting abortion, Liberty Counsel — a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group — has focused its legal efforts on challenging LGBTQ+ rights and vaccine mandates in the name of religious freedom. Because it is registered with the IRS as an “association of churches,” Liberty Counsel is not required to file a public tax return, meaning that its finances are largely shielded from the scrutiny applied to other tax-exempt organizations.

The records show that 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations controlled by Liberty Counsel encouraged supporters to vote for former President Donald Trump despite IRS rules that prohibit such entities from directly or indirectly endorsing candidates for political office. They also reveal how Liberty Counsel has skillfully employed misinformation and partisan polarization over election integrity and the Covid-19 pandemic to build its email list and raise millions of dollars in small contributions — and done so at a breakneck pace since November 2020.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Peggy Nienaber, vice president of Liberty Counsel’s Faith & Liberty ministry, was caught on a hot mic at an evangelical victory party bragging that her ministry prayed with sitting Supreme Court justices. Nienaber’s claim, first reported by Rolling Stone, suggested a troubling conflict of interest, considering that the court cited a Liberty Counsel brief in its decision to end 50 years of constitutional protection for abortion.

The organization’s amicus brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, filed on behalf of a group of religious organizations, was a work of dubious scholarship that argued that abortion is a racist tool of eugenics.

Liberty Counsel has also defended so-called sidewalk counselors, who troll outside abortion clinics creating a hostile environment for those seeking care, and challenged the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, enacted in the wake of the 1993 murder of Florida abortion provider Dr. David Gunn.

Liberty Counsel’s virulently anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and efforts to legalize discrimination in the name of religious freedom led the Southern Poverty Law Center to designate it as a hate group. “The organizations on our hate group list vilify others because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity — this includes Liberty Counsel and their vilification of LGBTQ+ people,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim deputy director of research for the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

Staver has advocated criminalizing homosexuality with harsh punishments as well as “curing” LGBTQ+ people, “a practice that has been condemned by every major medical and mental health organization in the country,” . . . .

More recently, Liberty Counsel has been involved in other right-wing causes. The day after the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Staver sent an email to supporters stating that “our research and legal staff have been deeply engaged in stopping the steal of our 2020 elections.” The email, later published as a blog post, stressed that Trump could remain in power if God intervened . . . .

Liberty Counsel, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, serves as an umbrella to a number of smaller groups, including Liberty Counsel Action, Faith & Liberty, and Christians in Defense of Israel, all of which share the same hacked database. Of these, only Liberty Counsel Action, a 501(c)(4), has an IRS status that allows it to endorse or oppose candidates for office.

While churches and other 501(c)(3) organizations are allowed to take stands on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and gun control, the IRS’s Internal Revenue Code prohibits these organizations from engaging in political campaign activity. “Because the IRS has not been very diligent in enforcing the law, many 501(c)(3) groups are pushing the envelope when it comes to politics,” Rob Boston, a senior adviser at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told The Intercept.

After reviewing the email newsletters and blog posts in the Liberty Counsel data, The Intercept found communications in which both Faith & Liberty and Christians in Defense of Israel encouraged their supporters to vote for Trump during the 2020 election.

The Anonymous hacker first discovered vulnerabilities in Liberty Counsel’s Site Stacker website — among them, an administrator user who worked for WMTEK used the password “Password1” — and then realized that the rest of WMTEK’s clients were also vulnerable. So the hacker made off with membership and donor records for more than 90 other Christian nonprofits.

In all, the data shows donations to the organizations totaling over $748 million from roughly 409,000 donors, the earliest dating to September 2015. It also includes private information like names, addresses, and phone numbers for about 1.3 million people.

While Liberty Counsel is best known for legal battles over abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, the hacked data shows more than $1.6 million in donations resulting from petition and fax campaigns built around dubious claims about the pandemic and election integrity. These campaigns — from Liberty Counsel and its 501(c)(4) affiliate, Liberty Counsel Action — drew more than 15,000 unique donors.

Some donors used their official government email accounts to make contributions, the hacked records show. Email addresses associated with the departments of Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Interior, Justice, State, Treasury, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs were among those included in the data.

Email addresses associated with state and local governments also made an appearance, including one belonging to Republican Terry Rice, a current Arkansas state senator, whose donation came via a petition decrying “the Democrat push to legalize election fraud.”

Liberty Counsel and organizations like it need to lose their tax exempt status immediately.  Better yet, they need to be shut down.