(C) ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
An Unusual $1.6 Billion Donation Bolsters Conservatives [1]
['Kenneth P. Vogel', 'Shane Goldmacher']
Date: 2022-08-22
Rather than merely giving cash, Mr. Seid donated 100 percent of the shares of Tripp Lite to Mr. Leo’s nonprofit group before the company was sold to an Irish conglomerate for $1.65 billion, according to tax records provided to The New York Times, corporate filings and a person with knowledge of the matter.
The nonprofit, called the Marble Freedom Trust, then received all of the proceeds from the sale, in a transaction that appears to have been structured to allow the nonprofit group and Mr. Seid to avoid paying taxes on the proceeds.
For perspective, the $1.6 billion that the Marble trust reaped from the sale is slightly more than the total of $1.5 billion spent in 2020 by 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with Democrats, according to an analysis by The Times. That spending, which Democrats embraced to aid the campaigns of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his allies in Congress, dwarfed the roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the Republican Party.
The Marble Freedom Trust could help conservatives level the playing field — if not surpass the left — in such nonprofit spending, which is commonly referred to as dark money because the groups involved can raise and spend unlimited sums on politics while revealing little about where they got the money or how they spent it.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/republican-dark-money.html
Published and (C) by ProPublica
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/propublica/
