#8
House Republicans Demand To Know How A Left-Leaning Group Allegedly Channeled Private Funds To Election Agencies
A group of House Republicans sent a letter Monday to the left-leaning group Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), calling on them to explain where the hundreds of millions of dollars they were given during the COVID-19 pandemic went, saying the group spent less than one percent on personal protective equipment (PPE).
The Daily Caller first obtained the letter which was spearheaded by Republican New York Rep. Claudia Tenney who was joined by 13 other House Republicans. The letter mentions that CTCL gave $350 million to nearly 2,500 election officials in 48 states and the District of Columbia in 2020. The lawmakers call on the CTCL to immediately publish their full financial 990s for public review, saying it is the groups legal obligation as a registered 501(c)(3).
“Many state and local entities have reported spending your grant money on expenses as varied and unrelated to COVID-19 as advertising, designing absentee ballots, registering teen voters, automatic voter registration, and even pay raises and new vehicle purchases. An elections supervisor in Lowndes County, Georgia, stated that CTCL was ‘very lenient regarding what we could spend the money on. They put virtually no restrictions on it as long as it relates to the election.’ Furthermore, it appears that 92% of CTCL grants were given to overwhelmingly Democrat-leaning precincts,” the letter states.
https://dailycaller.com/2021/06/21/house-republicans-letter-center-for-tech-civic-life-funds-election-mark-zuckerberg/
#9
ProPublica Donors Absent From Bombshell Report on Billionaire Tax Dodgers
Nonprofit pub has thousands of private tax docs on nation's wealthiest
Joseph Simonson • June 21, 2021 5:20 pm
ProPublica made waves after it obtained thousands of private tax documents for the country's wealthiest citizens and published a scathing investigation centered on the tax rates of Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Bloomberg, among others. Absent from the report: any of the publication's largest donors, including Laurene Powell Jobs, David Filo, and Pierre Omidyar.
The nonprofit news organization's June 8 story boasted about a "trove of never-before-seen records [that] reveal how the wealthiest avoid income tax." ProPublica documented the staggering wealth of business and finance titans, while emphasizing that they paid taxes to the federal government at a lower rate than many middle-class Americans. Conspicuously missing from the report, however, were details on whether the billionaires who fund ProPublica engage in similar tax avoidance schemes. ProPublica declined to say whether it had obtained tax returns for any of its donors or whether it planned on publishing them.
The organization initially stayed mum when asked by the Washington Free Beacon how they chose which tax returns to divulge out of the "thousands" they obtained. In a follow-up email, ProPublica president Richard Tofel said he is "not commenting on what we have until and unless we publish it."
"I note that your list of questions seems to involve individuals who have contributed to ProPublica, directly or through entities they have created," Tofel said. "I would note that our first story contained information about George Soros, who is similarly situated, but about whom you didn't ask."
Although ProPublica did make a passing reference to Soros—alleging that he "paid no federal income tax three years in a row" and printing a statement from his spokesman—the Hungarian-born billionaire is not a major funder of ProPublica.
In 2019, the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations gave $353,000 to the organization, the 20th-largest donor. In contrast, the Yellow Chair Foundation, helmed by billionaire and Yahoo cofounder Filo, donated $1.8 million. Jobs’s Emerson Collective gave $4.6 million in 2018, the third-largest gift ProPublica received between 2017 and 2019. Democracy Fund, founded by eBay cofounder Omidyar, gave $3 million in 2017. Over three years, ProPublica accepted donations totaling in the tens of millions from individual billionaires, the family charities of billionaires, or multibillion-dollar corporations.
"It’s clear, though, from aggregate IRS data, tax research, and what little trickles into the public arena about estate planning of the wealthy that they can readily escape turning over almost half of the value of their estates," ProPublica wrote in its story. "Many of the richest create foundations for philanthropic giving, which provide large charitable tax deductions during their lifetimes and bypass the estate tax when they die."
https://freebeacon.com/media/propublica-donors-absent-from-bombshell-report-on-billionaire-tax-dodgers/