Jay Sekulow and President Trump.
Trump and Sekulow — Birds of a feather cheat together
In recent articles about the impeachment of Donald Trump, I have mentioned that his lawyers have behaved in ways that merit an investigation by their respective bar associations for violations of the rules of professional responsibility. Judging by a recent report by the Associated Press, there is another reason to investigate one of Trump’s lead lawyers, Jay Sekulow.
On January 30th, the AP reported that Sekulow is being paid for his legal work through a rented $80-a-month mailbox a block away from the White House. “Over [a] 10-year-period [2008 to 2017] examined by AP …, tax returns show nearly $37 million in charitable funds were paid by the American Center for Law and Justice and other charities controlled by Sekulow to the [Constitutional Litigation and Advocacy Group], the phantom law firm listed on court filings as defending Trump.” In total, he and his wife, his sons, his brother, his sister-in-law, his nephew and corporations they own received more than $65 million in “charitable” funds.
According to the AP report, “The Pennsylvania Avenue box appears to be the sole physical location of the [CLA Group], a for-profit corporation co-owned by Sekulow. The firm has no website and is not listed in national legal directories. The District of Columbia Bar has no record of it, and no attorneys list it as their employer.”
Sound weird? Not if we examine the modus operandi of wealthy right wing political donors and Trump himself.
Sekulow happens to be registered as chief counsel at the ACLJ, a non-profit “Christian” legal advocacy group located in Washington. Half a dozen lawyers employed by the ACLJ are listed in Senate legal briefs as members of Trump’s defense team, among them Sekulow and one of his sons.
A tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization such as Sekulow’s is prohibited by law from engaging in partisan political activities and must follow other rules. However, in planet Trump the only rule is take what you can as long as it’s possible to get away with it. Recall that this past December a New York state judge ordered Trump to pay $2 million to eight 501(c)(3) charities. Trump also agreed to liquidate the Trump Foundation’s remaining assets of more than $1.7 million and disburse them to the same nonprofits.
Trump, who had claimed the suit was a political attack, made 19 detailed admissions, acknowledging, for example, that the foundation had given his presidential campaign access to over $2.8 million that the foundation had raised at a veterans fund-raiser in Iowa in January 2016. Trump also was forced to recognize that the fund-raiser was in fact a campaign event. To top it all off in his inimitable style, he admitted that the foundation had purchased a $10,000 portrait of himself that was hung at one of his Florida hotels, and that he had used foundation money to settle obligations of some of his for-profit companies, including a golf club in Westchester County, New York, and Mar-a-Lago. It is, of course, illegal for charitable foundations to advance the self-interests of their executives.
“Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” —Isaiah Berlin
But birds of a feather cheat together, and it appears Sekulow has no qualms about emulating his client.
According to the president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, Daniel Borochoff, Sekulow seems to be entangling his defense of Trump with his supposed charitable activities. The Institute therefore issued a “Donor Alert” about ACLJ on its Charity Watch website.
“Charities are not supposed to be taking sides in partisan political activities, such as providing legal services to benefit a politician in an impeachment trial,” Borochoff said. “Regulators should investigate whether or not charitable resources, such as office, labor, equipment, etc., are being wrongly utilized to benefit Sekulow’s for-profit law firm.”
Using charities and ostensibly “religious” institutions to advance right wing political activities is not new, however. “Dark Money, The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” is a meticulously researched study by Jane Mayer concerning the malevolent and illegal uses of non-traceable funds for political purposes, using “religious” and charitable institutions as cover. In the words of a commentator, this book “is a chilling look behind the scenes of American politics, outlining how a small handful of the country’s richest people have been influencing the country’s political landscape since the 1970s. Far from a conspiracy theory, these are the cold hard facts of the powerful and immensely wealthy individuals behind the rise of today’s radical right-wing conservative movement.”
Mayer shows how the Koch brothers and a small number of conspiring plutocrats have been planning and executing schemes to use their money, essentially to hijack American democracy. They have done it by funding endowed chairs at various universities, supporting academics willing to sell out, creating foundations to produce white papers, providing the intellectual architecture of right wing ventures, artificially creating or amplifying fake “grass roots” organizations that are mere puppets of these billionaires, and organizing propaganda campaigns in support of extreme laissez faire capitalism designed to maximize their profits at the expense of workers’ rights and environmental protections, all while brazenly violating the law. The whole Tea Party endeavor is one notable example.
Mayer details the activities of many of the billionaire players, including the following: Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking fortune and to much of the wealth of Gulf Oil, was the main financial backer behind the Heritage Foundation, which set the example for others to come; John M. Olin, whose family chemical corporation was a major beneficiary of federal weapons procurement, concentrated on establishing faculty positions for conservatives at prestigious universities; the Bradley brothers, Harry and Lynde, used proceeds from the merger of their family electronics firm with Rockwell International to underwrite a whole array of publishing and research ventures; later the DeVos clan of Michigan joined the Koch brothers with the resources of their billion-dollar direct marketing company, Amway.
The DeVos were devout members of the Dutch Reform Church, a radical Calvinist sect that equated virtue with financial success, and brought a religious and vitriolic fervor to the fight. One Federal Trade Commission Attorney, who had prosecuted Amway for unlawful avoidance of taxes, declared that “they are not a business, but some sort or semi-religious socio-political organization.”
What the Kochs and their allies have created, in Mayer’s view, is a private political bank capable of bestowing unlimited amounts of money on favored candidates, and doing it with virtually no disclosure of its source. They have established a Republican Party in which donors, not elected officials, are in charge. Their main purpose is to have their preferred right wing candidates win election, and they expect that these candidates will eradicate restraints on political spending. Obviously, they have been successful not only in the legislatures, but also in legal battlefields.
Among other things, they created the model of fabricating legal cases to present certain issues in a certain order to the Supreme Court. Betsy DeVos, the current secretary of education, was at the forefront of this scheme, and for that purpose she founded the Madison Center for Free Speech in 1997. She named Mitch McConnell honorary chairman of this innocuous-sounding organization because of his prodigious fund-raising ability, and raised funds from her own family and the likes of the Christian Coalition and the National Rifle Association. They named James Bopp Jr. as general counsel. He was also general counsel to the right wing National Right to Life Committee.
Designating itself as a non-profit charitable group, the Madison Center allowed the DeVos foundation and other supporters to receive tax deductions to finance long-shot lawsuits that might never be filed otherwise. That marked the first time that a charitable foundation was used to finance a law firm, but it wasn’t the last. Among Bopp’s greatest successes is the infamous Citizens United decision, which “unshackled big money,” in the words of political strategist David Axelrod. The DeVos family and its allies perfected this scheme, got what it wanted at the Supreme Court, and Sekulow seems to be following their example.
The basic idea is that billionaires can give unlimited amounts of money to charitable organizations designated as “social welfare” groups under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, and the source of the money need not be disclosed. The organizations are not supposed to engage in electoral politics, but there’s little to stop them from breaking the rules and nothing to prevent their funding the think tanks, academic programs, individual scholars, retreats, conferences, white papers, general research, student scholarships, and issue advocacy organizations, in what has been described as an ideological production line. The recipients of these funds are then tasked with assembling the parts in the line. Apparently, Sekulow has been caught engaging in “charity” financing of Trump’s defense with funds whose sources are kept secret. It may not be new, but it’s a profoundly anti-democratic form of money laundering.
Amaury Cruz is a writer, lawyer, and political activist from Miami Beach. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Juris Doctor.
