How one accountant links Whitaker's nonprofit to network of dark money groups



Luppe B. Luppen Contributor
,Yahoo News•November 30, 2018


Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP, Getty Images) More

The offices of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), the nonprofit once headed by acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, are located at a shared workspace on K Street in Washington, D.C., a couple blocks from the White House. FACT has used the address since 2014 on each of its publicly available tax returns.

Yet, in all those years, the organization never reported hiring any employees to work there, and its current executive director works at a law firm in Des Moines, Iowa.

Who funds FACT is unclear, because it relies on “dark money,” funding from anonymous donors who pursue political agendas.

What little information is available about FACT’s finances can be gleaned from its publicly released 990 tax filings, which show that the nonprofit paid Whitaker more than a million dollars over his three-year tenure there.

FACT’s funding is collected by another nonprofit, Donors Trust, and then sent on anonymously.

In recent weeks, FACT, which public records show has connections to a number of other conservative groups through the same family of activists, has drawn renewed attention to the role of dark money.

Yet one important link among these nonprofits has largely escaped notice — the accountant who prepared the nonprofit’s tax returns.

Thomas Raymond Conlon, the Maryland accountant responsible for the tax returns filed by Whitaker’s former nonprofit, is also linked to other prominent conservative organizations funded by dark money and whose only public face as an organization is often a UPS box or virtual office in the Washington, D.C., area.

Conlon, whose own accounting business has been penalized for failing to file tax returns, has created a paper trail with notable errors in his work for some of those groups, according to public records reviewed by Yahoo News.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-accountant-links-whitakers-nonprofit-network-dark-money-groups-224525365.html