Report: Liberal Think Tank May Have Violated IRS Regulations

The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross was reporting Friday morning that an official with a liberal think tank may have violated IRS regulations concerning nonprofits when he offered to coordinate with the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

Peter Schechter, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, also violated his employer’s policies when he sent a series of emails to the Clinton campaign. Those emails were leaked earlier this month by DCLeaks after being hacked from the email inbox of Capricia Marshall, a Clinton campaign fundraiser and ambassador-in-residence with the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

Ross reported:

In a March 17 email, Schechter offered his services as a campaign surrogate to Clinton campaign foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy, Laura Rosenberger.

He also proposed hosting a forum at the Atlantic Council which would focus on “U.S.-Latin American relations in a Trump era.” …

“Presuming an inevitable Trump nomination, I would try to get some well-known Latin American former presidents and ministers to participate in an event about ‘How Latin America sees Relations with US after Trump’s Success,'” Schechter wrote in the email to Sullivan and Rosenberger. 

“At very least, we would get massive coverage on Spanish language media; though I think it would fly on mainstream media also.”

Ross also reported that this kind of coordination with a political campaign by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit is likely a violation of IRS regulations:

“The Internal Revenue Code provides that a tax-exempt public charity may ‘not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements) andy political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office,'” Bruce Hopkins, a professor at the University of Kansas and a longtime consultant to non-profit organizations, told TheDC.

“Conducting a forum for the purpose of ‘hammering’ a political candidate seems to me to be a violation of this law.”