REPORT: Trump’s Attorney Has a Christian Conservative Charity That Targets Poor Seniors – and Makes Him Millions

Since 2000 Jay Sekulow’s Nonprofit ‘Has Steered More Than $60m to Sekulow, His Family and Their Businesses’

Jay Sekulow is a prominent attorney who has argued and won religious liberty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He frequently appears on Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network, and hosts his own radio show on SiriusXM. And even though his latest book, Unholy Alliance: The Agenda Iran, Russia, and Jihadists Share for Conquering the World, paints Russia in a negative light, he recently was retained as the personal attorney for President Donald Trump.

It’s not surprising if Jay Sekulow were a wealthy man, given all that. But according to a report out Tuesday by The Guardian, Sekulow has another income stream that would seem unbefitting a presidential attorney.

“More than 15,000 Americans were losing their jobs each day in June 2009, as the US struggled to climb out of a painful recession following its worst financial crisis in decades,” The Guardian reports. “Documents obtained by the Guardian show Sekulow that month approved plans to push poor and jobless people to donate money to his Christian nonprofit, which since 2000 has steered more than $60m to Sekulow, his family and their businesses.”

That conservative Christian nonprofit, CASE, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, is one of two run by Sekulow. The other, the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), has been criticized by the Human Rights Campaign: “ACLJ has raised nearly $75 million in the past five years to fight for anti-LGBT causes, despite not meeting 10 out of 20 of the Better Business Bureau’s standards for charity accountability.”

CASE telemarketers “were instructed in contracts signed by Sekulow to urge people who pleaded poverty or said they were out of work to dig deep for a ‘sacrificial gift,'” The Guardian charges.

“I can certainly understand how that would make it difficult for you to share a gift like that right now,” they told retirees who said they were on fixed incomes and had “no extra money” – before asking if they could spare “even $20 within the next three weeks”.

Sekulow’s nonprofit, according to tax filings published by Propublica, shows 2015 assets of over $37 million. A 2014 filing shows total revenue, almost all of it from contributions, of $49,968,665.

CASE “raises tens of millions of dollars a year, much of it in small amounts from Christians who receive direct appeals for money over the telephone or in the mail. The telemarketing contracts obtained by the Guardian show how fundraisers were instructed by Sekulow to deliver bleak warnings about topics including abortion, Sharia law and Barack Obama.”

“It’s time to let the president know that his vision of America is obscured and represents a dangerous threat to the Judea-Christian [sic] values that have been the cornerstone of our republic,” one script from 2015 said.

A 2013 script warned listeners that Obama’s signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, promised to give Planned Parenthood federal funding to open abortion referral clinics “in your child’s or grandchild’s middle school or high school”.

The Guardian’s report is extensive, and details financial dealings between the charity and Sekulow’s family members. 

“Sekulow also personally received other compensation totalling $3.3m. Pam Sekulow, his wife, has been paid more than $1.2m in compensation for serving as treasurer and secretary” of the nonprofit.

According to The Guardian, Sekulow’s wife, brother, his brother’s wife, his two sons, and his brother’s son, or companies they run, have financially benefitted from the nonprofit.

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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license