Hannity Loots Dead Vet Charity to Fund His Most Wanton Caligulan Impulses

DEAR SIR/MADAME

REQUEST FOR URGENT CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
RE:TRANSFER OF US$31.5M US DOLLARS INTO YOUR ACCOUNT.

AFETR DUE CONSIDERATION WITH MY COLLEGUES AT MOST GREATEST LIVING US AMERICA OVERLURD SEAN HANNITY FREEDUM ALLINANZE I DECIDED TO FORWARD TO YOU THIS BUSINESS PROPOSAL.

WE WANT A RELIABLE PERSON WHO COULD ASSIST US TO TRANSFER THE SUM OF THIRTY-ONE MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND U.S. DOLLARS ONLY (US$31.5M) INTO HIS ACCOUNT. THIS RESULTS FROM PAYING OUT BAJILLIONS TO US AMERICA WAR ORPHAN “SCOLARSHIPS” AND SHIT…

LET HONESTY AND TRUST BE OUR WATCHWORD THROUGHOUT THIS TRANSACTION AND YOUR PROMPT REPLY WILL BE HIGHLY APPRECIATED.

BEST REGARDS,
TEN STAR GENERAL AND FIELD MARSHALL AND OH SO HONORABLE OLLIE NORTH

This is beyond disgusting. A closeted Republican whose uncontrollable lust finally thrusts him, so to speak, into picking up a Latino drag queen you can understand. But this shit is so . . . calculating. Chainsaw, you showed great restraint in reporting this story.

I was looking into this last night (including the 2008 990 form, filed late 2009), and, well, it’s complicated. American Spectator ran with the story yesterday, then retracted it after Freedom Alliance complained. In particular, the Gulfstream tale remains undocumented hearsay, which the organizers deny.

But to the 990: Freedom Alliance does raise $7-$10 million a year, with more spent on administrative and fundraising expenses to my taste, and less spent on handouts than one would like. But the charity/scholarship fund is only one of four programs the Alliance runs, the others being “educational” (read: propaganda) in nature.

In particular, Freedom Alliance says that yes, all money raised from the concerts goes to the charity/scholarship fund. The handouts look skimpy right now, because they’re saving money for eventual scholarship payouts — some of which may not happen for 10-15 years, given the age of vets’ kids.

Freedom Alliance also says it honors requests for donations to be applied solely to the charity/scholarship fund; otherwise money goes into a general account.

Debbie addresses this response in an update:

Also, the “scholarship fund” is really a war chest for something else. We’ve been at war since 2001, when we went into Afghanistan, and we’re winding down in Iraq. Unless the kids were born in 2001 or thereafter, many of these kids are in college now and Freedom Alliance is giving them a pittance toward their college tuition, while they continue to build this massive war chest. With a giant multi-million dollar fund, why aren’t they giving the kids a free, complete ride to college? And how many kids of deceased troops will there be in the future? Enough to exhaust a multi-million dollar fund? Doubtful.

That’s a bit weak, to my taste: She’s saying the Freedom Alliance can’t possibly spend the money it’s raised, but we really can’t know until we know how many kids are potentially covered, and their ages.

Anyway, it was late, the 990 was long, and I gave up on it: Couldn’t document her charge to my satisfaction, nor could I document the defense. The distributions are indeed meager, but as long as organizers say they aren’t commingling funds — and that funds raised are applied as intended — I don’t have the documentation to doubt them.

@Dodgerblue: I was running for a flight to deGaul. Didn’t have time to really wind up and wail. The big BEEP was the printing and postage bill. It really sounds like a propaganda mill that occasionally throws pennies and spits champagne at orphans and congratulates itself between orgies and dwarf tosses.

Why is this so not surprising?

@nojo: In all charities the rule is pretty clear. If it’s not going to benefits of the cohort being serviced, it’s being snorted off of the bellies of hookers or paying for costumes for the dwarfs. This is a propaganda operation that hosts airborne orgies and keeps out of work neonazis in noshowjob shekels.

@FlyingChainSaw: No doubt, but I think Debbie overstated her case — the documented facts are damning enough without the Gulfstream, and there’s enough leftover uncertainty to merit some news organization looking into it.

It’s clear, for example, that relatively little money is being distributed right now to charitable recipients. Freedom Alliance says it’s saving most of it in a dedicated fund for later scholarship distribution (and there’s some hefty interest income in the 990), and it says that the charity funds are accounted for separately from the program funds.

But how that actually works is not clear (to me) from the 990. And I would want to take a closer look at the concert website, which pitches the fundraising: Are donors led to expect that their money will be spent now? And how much of that $7-$10 million is raised from the concerts and related activities?

Oh, and is the executive director’s $170k salary typical for that position?

There’s plenty there to raise eyebrows. But Debbie overplayed her hand, giving an opening for Ollie to strongly deny impropriety. She could have been more careful about her presentation, to my taste.

@nojo: Debbie should shut up for a while and track down a bunch of old accountants who’ve worked with non-profits, profile 12 scholarship charities and then look at the 990s. The fund-based accounting you cite is the classic architecture for charities. For scholarship funds, the 170K director’s salary is pornographic. One scholarship fund I give to has no operational expenses besides the post they spend on a one-page newsletter that comes out four times per year. The alums run it on a volunteer basis – and I doubt that this model is all that unusual. It’s pretty sure this is a drink-the-blood-of-vets scam but you need to hold up against its cohort to see how really strange it is – basically designed to be a cash cow for neonazis working at the edge of the law to avoid doing anything indictable. Proving it would be nice before you shit on their faces. But it is hard not to just want to drop a nasty crap on these guys the moment you have an opportunity.

@FlyingChainSaw: That’s the nagging detail: the scholarship/charity fund is just one of four programs, the rest of which are “educational” — i.e., propaganda. And while the 990 diligently lists all income and expenditures, I couldn’t determine how the funds themselves are divvied up.

So: She charges that of $10 million raised, less than $400,000 was paid in benefits. Which is true — but it’s not clear from the 990 how much of that $10 million was raised specificially for the charity program. Maybe they raised only $2 million toward that purpose — but to know, you’d have to see their books.

I don’t doubt that the people running the show are lining their pockets, and you can ask some pretty pointed questions from the 990. You don’t even need to prove anything to get a decent story out of it — just run the numbers (as she does) and ask whether they make sense.

For a comparison, look how everybody went after Wyclef Jean when the numbers looked fishy. Same story here.

@nojo: Woah. Classic charity accounting is fund accounting. You should be able to make sense of each program discretely and see who benefits. Even in my example, you can track contributions to the scholarship for the student who returns the highest achievement scores in Homeric Greek, say, and see who gets the scholarship money each year. You probably have a single deposit account at a bank but the books cut up the money into discrete scholarships, in our example. It sounds like they are selling ‘help the dead vets’ kids’ and spending it on crony gigs, propaganda and orgies.

Really, that is her story. You SHOULD be able to see each fund discretely accounted for in separate funds. The book should be clear. They’ve muddied the charitable activity they present as the essential value proposition and that is reflected in their accounting. They can’t do discrete fund-based accounting as they’d have to admit, yeah, we took in $10 million from boiler room-generated contributions from callers asking, ‘why don’t you care about dead vets’ kids going to college? What are you, an asshole?’ Then they’d have to give it away. With fuzzy accounting they can pretend, when it comes time to book the cash flows, they can pretend that they took in all of that money for four discrete programs. They didn’t . Best thing Debbie-cakes could do now is get all of their solicitations and see what they were pitching. Also, if she can find guys that did the usual boiler-room calling operation and get a copy of the script that would help, too. I am sure, they didn’t ring people up and tell they, ‘Hey, wanna send me a 100 bucks so Sean Hannity can send out signed copies of Mien Kampf?’