WASHINGTON — Matthew G. Whitaker, the nation’s new acting attorney general, repeatedly chided presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in public statements during 2016 while he was speaking for a group that is barred by its tax-exempt status from supporting or opposing political candidates during a campaign.
Before coming to the Justice Department in 2017, Whitaker was president and executive or of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a charitable organization that styles itself as nonpartisan government watchdog promoting ethics and transparency. The tax-exempt group — known by its initials, FACT — is supposed to serve the public interest under Section 501c3 of the U.S. tax code, without directly or even indirectly supporting or opposing specific candidates for office.
Yet the group has engaged in one partisan pronouncement after another, mostly directed at Democrats. During the last presidential race, Whitaker argued in July 2016 newspaper opinion pieces that Clinton should be prosecuted for her handling of her private email server — a favourite talking point of Donald Trump. The opinion pieces identified Whitaker as FACT’s leader.
“I don’t think anybody in the history of our country that served in the administration has been this bold in their private fundraising and their sort of giving favours,” he said in a radio interview posted on YouTube by his group.
Daniel Borochoff, president of CharityWatch, a Chicago-based group that monitors the non-profit world, said that statement appears to violate the IRS ban on engagement for or against a particular political candidate. “It’s highly critical of a candidate, and he ought not to be doing that, because it’s a political partisan comment,” he said.
In 2015 and 2016, Whitaker earned a total of $654,000 from FACT — 30 per cent of its entire spending of $2.2 million over that two-year span. His 2016 salary was $402,000; the average CEO or executive director at 380 advocacy or education charities in that year made a salary of $173,099, according to Matthew J. Viola, a vice-president at Charity Navigator.
Whitaker’s foundation was initially formed and then primarily supported with funds from another organization called Donor’s Trust. That group is a non-profit built to give conservative and libertarian philanthropists “any level of privacy they want,” according to its marketing materials.
America Rising LLC formed in Delaware in 2002 and was first registered to do business in Virginia in 2016, but its registration was cancelled in May 2018 for failing to pay its annual registration fee, according to Katha Treanor, a spokeswoman for the State Corporation Commission. America Rising LLC did not respond to queries from The Associated Press.