[FoxNews] Americans for Public Trust cataloged 523 groups and over 12,000 records of foreign contributions to tax-exempt organizations
Americans for Public Trust, a government transparency advocacy group, is releasing a new database that tracks more than $5 billion in foreign spending, bankrolling politically active nonprofits in the U.S.
The tool, the first of its kind, aims to provide a searchable database that catalogs 523 groups and 12,090 records of foreign contributions to U.S.-based nonprofit organizations. The database also reinforces the cautionary warnings from some lawmakers that those contributions are having an outsized influence on American discourse.
At a hearing on the matter earlier this year, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., blasted the privileges that nonprofits enjoy that he believes are being abused.
"It is clear the status quo is unacceptable. Tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right. It exists to support legitimate charitable and educational work that strengthens our communities, not to serve as cover for foreign propaganda, election interference, or activities that undermine our national interest," Smith said in a press release.
Fox News Digital is not aware of evidence that the Department of Justice is investigating or considering charges against groups in the database with any criminal behavior.
But Caitlin Sutherland, executive director for Americans for Public Trust, thinks maybe that should change — that the law itself should change.
"That’s exactly the problem. It should be illegal for foreign influence to permeate our political system and right now it’s not. Our database is designed to give them the information they need to address these loopholes and close them once and for all," Sutherland said.
The tool allows users to search specific organizations and their contributions. It also provides a timeline of when the contributions were injected into the American scene — some as recent as the past election cycle, others stretching back to 2007.
When asked why some form of similar tool hasn’t existed until now, Sutherland said the idea of nonprofits has disguised the amount of money coming in.
"The term nonprofit, it conjures up an image of putting soup in a homeless person's bowl, vaccinating orphans. The term nonprofit does not necessarily mean helping the needy. In the United States, nonprofits have really, really morphed into these huge entities. That are engaging in lobbying and public policy," Sutherland said.
"The nonprofits of today are not what we have seen in decades past."
Sutherland also explained that because of a wide-ranging definition for what qualifies as a nonprofit, organizations have a wide latitude about what they want to do with that money.
"Foreign money can pay for get-out-the-vote drives. It can be spent on ballot harvesting. It can be spent on ballot issue campaigns, protests that are emerging across the country," Sutherland said.
Smith, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, believes the database may soon shed light on the relationships between the groups.
"This database confirms what the Ways and Means Committee has been exposing for months: foreign money is flowing into America’s tax-exempt sector through shell funds and intermediaries designed to hide where it actually came from to influence American policymaking and our public discourse. The size and scope of the problem that Americans for Public Trust has identified is concerning, further underscoring the need to pass our legislation and close these loopholes once and for all," Smith said.
Under current law, nonprofits aren’t required to disclose the source of their donations.
Supporters of the current policy framework argue that donors could receive harassment for their contributions if they were made public. That’s the position of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a state-level think tank that advocates for free markets, limited government and federalism.
"Donor disclosure and donor privacy are very important issues. Unfortunately, instead of a focus on government transparency and individual privacy, many advocates of donor disclosure are actually attempting to pass laws that would require the disclosure of personal information—like names and home addresses of Americans—in order to intimidate these donors from contributing to the causes they care about most," the group states on its website.
"The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and association, yet many donor disclosure bills are designed to intimidate people from associating with organizations and ideas that the government may not like."
Sutherland agrees, having long shared the value of donor privacy.
But she also believes voters shouldn’t have to scrape through what reporting does exist to get a sense of where foreign dollars are going. She explained that getting that documentation is especially difficult because of varying legal standards for international contributions.
"That means that we are beholden to the laws of other countries that may not necessarily have to report money out here in the United States; a list of groups that are receiving money, whereas foreign charities don't necessarily have to publish the same information," Sutherland said.
"There is no central European registry for foreign charities, so we've really put together a piecemeal collection of information relying on the foreign charities' annual reports as well as their grant databases. We think that it should be simple," she added.
#3
Not a big believer in Chinese or Muslim charitable giving to their own, and highly suspect of donations to American NGOs? This is influencer and election fraud money in large part, and the bigger recipients should be the most suspect for their actions in the next few months.
[JustThe News] The filing was in response to the watchdog's Freedom of Information Act request, which asked the court to allow it to question the FBI, through a limited deposition, about its handling of the records.
Get someone from the DOGE team in — it’ll be scanned, searchable, and cross-referenced in a couple of hours, the usual reports available shortly thereafter. And figure out who is slow walking the process — management needs to get involved.
Conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch announced Friday that the FBI told a federal court in a status update recently it would take them "158 years" to process all the records from a "hidden room" in the bureau's headquarters in Quantico.
The filing was in response to the watchdog's Freedom of Information Act request, which asked the court to allow it to question the FBI, through a limited deposition, about its handling of the records.
The bureau said last year that it found "burn bags" in a hidden room at the headquarters, which contained classified information related to Crossfire Hurricane and other FBI inquiries into President Donald Trump and his allies.
Judicial Watch is seeking information on who discovered the room and when, who had access to it, the room's security classification, how records ended up stored in file cabinets, safes, boxes, and burn bags, what the FBI has done to bring them under standard records management and whether the records were ever searched.
Judicial Watch is seeking information on who discovered the room and when, who had access to it, the room's security classification, how records ended up stored in file cabinets, safes, boxes, and burn bags, what the FBI has done to bring them under standard records management and whether the records were ever searched.
The FBI said the room also had filing cabinets and the room contained more than two million pages of records altogether. The files were separated into “legacy files,” which referred to older records mostly tied to two closed historical investigations and more recent files tied to active investigations.
The bureau said it is processing the records discovered in the room at a rate of 500 pages a month, which will take it approximately 158 years to complete.
“American citizens should be outraged that the FBI just told a federal court judge that its stonewalling means it will take 158 years to release the 2 million weaponization and lawfare records in its secret ‘burn bag’ room,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “The American people need to know today how the FBI was used as a political weapon against Donald Trump and other innocents.”
The FBI said it opposes Judicial Watch's request for discovery and a status conference for the case is expected to take place next week.
#3
Bullshit. AI even now is good enough to rip through that in an afternoon and tell you what should be redacted. Give 100 data monkeys a month to verify that it should or should not be and release that shit.
#4
it would take them "158 years" to process all the records
That is not how long the job actually would take. That is how long it would take the FBI to do it. Yet another example of the Lawyerly Denial where no lies are told, but the facts are presented in a deliberately misleading way.
We've seen that movie before, with other investigations of (D).
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/01/2026 12:31 Comments ||
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#6
Perhaps a Gee-Whiz 6000 AI computer could shave a few dozen years off of those numbers. Don't wait until fully completed, process the results as they roll off the printer.
[JoeHoft] Jeffrey Tucker shared this piece from Fauci’s diary that was released this past week. In this diary entry, Fauci discusses a call he received from Barack Obama.
Here is the entry (highlight from Jeffrey Tucker):
November 4, 2021, Obama and Fauci on the phone together. You just have to read this to believe it. Please do read every word. pic.twitter.com/sbTrG4wW06
#7
Several stolen elections, I suspect. It would be fascinating someday to discover the margin of cheating in every presidential election since Bill Clinton’s day.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
