Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud | Hacker News Reader

Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud

bitsaboutmoney.com

53 pointsRedoubts29 comments

I generally enjoy Patrick McKenzie’s writing. After quickly skimming this post, I don’t see anything objectionable from a journalistic standpoint. However, I firmly believe the federal indictment of the SPLC is motivated purely by political motives. Out of all the possible financial crimes the federal government can investigate and prosecute, they target a well-known progressive organization that’s spent decades fighting for marginalized communities against white nationalists? This is a miscarriage of justice wrapped in a thin veneer of respectability.

This is completely irrelevant to the article. The SPLC committed wire fraud to subsidise the supply of and activities of the kinds of people they told their supporters they were against. Separately, they worked hard over a period of years to censor their political opponents in a partisan fashion. Those are illegal acts. If you want to defend their actions as such by all means do so. But if you’re just pointing out that the motivating factor behind this particular prosecution might not have been entirely apolitical so what?

No one expects the US court system or US attorneys general to act apolitically. The Obama administration extensively used the IRS to target Republicans as such. If you don’t want to be prosecuted for illegal conduct, you should not do illegal things. Alternatively, you could arrange to never lose elections so that your friends are always in power.

Private actors working hard to censor political adversaries is not necessarily illegal, for what it's worth. You could say it's problematic for other reasons, and if you mesh in with campaign financing you start to face (long shot) bank-shot legal arguments, but generally partisanship is a time-honored American tradition.

> "Private actors working hard to censor political adversaries is not necessarily illegal, for what it's worth."

"Private actors" is doing quite a bit of work here.

For individuals working in their personal capacity, you're mostly correct. The rules change for certain jobs.

BUT that's not the situation here. In this case, we have the SPLC - a registered 501(c)(3) - that appears to have worked to censor political adversaries. And the law specifically bars that, making it illegal.

> Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.

Ref: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

Unless Patrick is wrong. The end of his post asks for comment from the relevant organizations so they could easily address this one.

You're trying to axiomatically derive election law here. Every word in the statute matters. It is very probably perfectly lawful for SPLC to work to censor ideologies, even up to the point where those ideologies are coterminous with party definitions. The whole edifice of Citizens United is based on a sharp divide between advocacy and campaign finance; the argument you're putting forward is disfavored.

(That's not to say SPLC couldn't have fucked up and crossed the line, just that the general description given upthread of what they were doing did not in fact describe a violation of law).

Upthread summarizes Patrick accurately but maybe too succinctly, so to lay it out specifically:

In the post, Patrick demonstrates that the SPLC cofounded and led Change the Terms (CTT) then goes on to demonstrate CTT targeted a specific political candidate's fundraising. The first is fine, the second is illegal.

Check out the section titled "July 2021: The CTT coalition attempts non-partisan interdiction of Trump PAC fundraising" for specific quotes and even a picture of a mobile billboard they funded.

That is neither "ideologies" nor "party definitions"

I've read Patrick's post very carefully and am not disputing it, just the comment upthread, and then only as a nudge.

>Private actors working hard to censor political adversaries is not necessarily illegal, for what it's worth.

It should be, for what it's worth.

Pesky First Amendment. Freedom of association is a hell of a drug.

Yeah, because, the "right to free speech" fits so well with "working hard to censor political adversaries".

If that was a response to my comment I think you need to read it slightly more carefully.

You have a right to free speech. Other people have the right to say they disagree with you, or refuse to do business with you because of your speech.

For 501(c)(3)s, it is. In exchange for tax-exempt status, a group loses certain options.

But the DOJ wouldn't touch those charges though as they're civil (IRS under Treasury) and the criminal charges could be fatal to the org by themselves.

Though, regardless of the criminal outcome, if the facts in the indictment are proven, I'd wager the IRS' case is proven implicitly which could also be fatal.

No it isn't. A 501c3 can't participate directly in a campaign. That's it, that's the whole rule. Plenty of 501c3's are nakedly and openly partisan. Center For American Progress is a c3. Heritage is a c3. AEI is a c3. Claremont is a c3.

I didn't say "partisan"

Again, I encourage you to read Patrick's post, specifically the section titled "July 2021: The CTT coalition attempts non-partisan interdiction of Trump PAC fundraising" where it describes their direct involvement against a single, specific candidate's PAC.

You could make the claim "well, technically he wasn't a candidate at that time" but considering the PAC was a registered FEC entity raising money for campaign rallies, that argument is weak at best and absurd in reality.

Sorry, what I should’ve said was that it was illegal for them to try and do it since they’re supposed to be non-partisan as a condition of their tax status. Same way as the Brookings Institution maintains the tissue thing pretence that it’s not a Democratic organisation. It is some other kind of thing that just happens to always do what the Democrats want to do. There’s nothing illegal about trying to send her and ruin the lives of your political opponents as long as you stay with the law but it is illegal for SPLC to be part of a partisan political campaign.

Again, I'm not disputing anything in Patrick's post, and I totally buy SPLC could have stepped over the line in a number of ways, but being a 501c(3) just means you can't directly contribute to campaigns. You can do as much partisan advocacy as you want. There is absolutely no requirement that a 501c(3) be non-partisan; they just can't participate in campaigns.

>>However, I firmly believe the federal indictment of the SPLC is motivated purely by political motives.

You may be right, but you have to remember that the SPLC was motivated purely by political motives.

FAFO.

Governments should be more constrained than private individuals' enterprise.

"Political" motives are inappropriate for the federal government.

At least goverments are elected. Some private enterprise like SPLC could fuck people over and brand them with no accountability.

It's the opposite: elected or not, governments are strictly limited in their ability to do anything like what SPLC did, because they are bound by the Constitution. Private entities are not; they're free to associate, advocate, and advocate for associations or disassociations, generally however they'd like.

I guess this case is especially interesting and novel because of how the government has deputized banks as ersatz law enforcement, and banks have delegated decision making to SPLC as ersatz compliance officers.

I’m not sure what the law could and should be in this case, but I suspect it’s woefully underspeced to the chagrin of most parties.

Hence, bank/wire fraud.

People in this thread keep saying reasonable things and then stepping on a rake in their last sentence. No, not "hence bank fraud". The bank fraud charges have nothing to do with what's happening here in this thread. SPLC is alleged to have created pass-through bank accounts under fictitious business identities. Everybody agrees that the thing SPLC was trying to do with those accounts was reasonable (or at least, well publicized and understood). They crossed over the line in trying to (a) improve the optics of what they were doing and (b) retaining a single major banking relationship instead of shopping for whatever bank would let them transfer money to the Grand Kloobah of the Kloo Klux Klan or whatever.

If they had created entities and called them "investigative agencies" or "detective agency" to the banks it would have all been above board. But they didn't.

I was personally feeling like the law is too broad and being weaponized against them until the bits about SPLC and allies trying to cut banking access to a Political Action Committee were dropped (it shouldn't matter whose). That's quite beyond the pale for any pro-democratic institution.

There's a few interesting threads in the article that I found interesting. One is about the aggregation of power using social pressure. I've heard whispers of similar things, but it was interesting to see the specifics of how it was built. The other is the use of Donor Advised Funds (which I hadn't heard about before) to have some anonymity over the direction of donations.

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47973309

I’m really surprised I didn’t get auto-duped. Usually submission of the same url gets forwarded to the old post if it’s recent enough…

What are the likely long-term consequences of this? Destruction of the SPLC and imprisonment of several officers for wire fraud? Slap on the wrist? End of the widespread use of their censorship product?

What would the maximally charitable but in contact with reality [Republican|Democrat] expect or want out of this?

At least their destruction, and prison for everybody who knowingly violated FEC rules

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