The Scary Story racket is a two-part grift

The Scary Story racket is a two-part grift June 28, 2017

The private jet is the detail that really jumps out at everybody. As it should — it’s such an extravagant example of the kind of crassly self-indulgent excess and exploitative corruption at the heart of this story:

Meanwhile, a company run by Gary’s wife, Kim Sekulow, has received $6.2m since 2000 in fees for media production services and for the lease of a private jet, which it owned jointly with Jay Sekulow’s company Regency Productions. The jet was made available for the use of Jay and Pam Sekulow, according to corporate filings.

That’s from Jon Swaine’s brutally thorough investigation for the Guardian: “Trump lawyer’s firm steered millions in donations to family members, files show.”

The Trump lawyer in question is Jay Sekulow, who is a familiar face to longtime observers of the religious right and the direct-mail fundraising industry that supports it. He was tapped by Pat Robertson in 1990 to launch the American Center for Law and Justice — an outfit Robertson hoped would become something like a conservative white Christian version of the ACLU.

Jay Sekulow (left) is a master of the Scary Story racket.
Jay Sekulow (left) is a master of the Scary Story racket.

Robertson was coming off of his 1988 campaign for the Republican nomination for president — he won primaries in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington — and was making the most of the national mailing lists he had compiled as a candidate. At the time, the Christian Coalition was the main new fundraising machine Robertson created to exploit that mailing list. ACLJ was another.

It’s your basic Scary Story racket — a time-honored way of getting very rich for anyone who is both: A) thoroughly unscrupulous; and B) rooted in a fearfully credulous subculture eager to hand over its money to anyone willing to protect them from imaginary monsters. All you need to get started in this business is a mailing list with a few thousand good leads, enough initial capital to pay for postage and letterhead, and the imagination to exaggerate, invent, and amplify an endless cycle of bogeymen that only you can stop from destroying America. Thanks to Pat Robertson, ACLJ had all of that, and Sekulow proved to be very, very good at it.

What has the ACLJ actually done over the past almost-30 years? Not much. They’ve managed to get their name in the paper a few times, but the organization’s actual legal accomplishments are pretty thin.

They would argue otherwise. After all, the black president’s jackbooted secret police never did show up to padlock churches and cart real, true Christian pastors away to prison, right? So clearly the ACLJ has protected its supported from the very menace they long warned them about.

In any case, actual accomplishments are never the main point of a Scary Story direct-mail fundraising organization. The main point is making sure that the mailing list of supporters stays scared enough to keep writing those checks. That’s where Sekulow and the ACLJ have really excelled. The Scary Story industry has made Jay Sekulow a very rich man.

Crackerjack religion reporter Bob Smietana covered a lot of this years ago when he was at The Tennessean: “Lawyer’s family, firm collect millions from charities.” (The formatting for that 2011 USA Today story is messed up because Smietana’s former employer, Gannett, laid off its online copy editors that same year. Ahem.) Smietana outlined how Sekulow’s interconnected network of nonprofit agencies — owned and overseen by close relatives — allowed him to enrich himself and his family. Swaine picks up where he left off, and the numbers and details are appalling.

Here’s Swaine reporting on the fundraising efforts of “Case” (Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism), one of the many nonprofit “charities” in Sekulow’s many-tentacled operation:

In addition to using tens of millions of dollars in donations to pay Sekulow, his wife, his sons, his brother, his sister-in-law, his niece and nephew and their firms, Case has also been used to provide a series of unusual loans and property deals to the Sekulow family.

… For years, the nonprofits have made a notable amount of payments to Sekulow and his family, which were first reported by Law.com. Since 2000, a law firm co-owned by Sekulow, the Constitutional Litigation and Advocacy Group, has been paid more than $25m by the nonprofits for legal services. During the same period, Sekulow’s company Regency Productions, which produces his talk radio show, was paid $11.3m for production services.

Sekulow also personally received other compensation totalling $3.3m. Pam Sekulow, his wife, has been paid more than $1.2m in compensation for serving astreasurer and secretary of Case.

Sekulow’s brother, Gary, the chief operating officer of the nonprofits, has been paid $9.2m in salary and benefits by them since 2000. Gary Sekulow has stated in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings that he works 40 hours per week – the equivalent of a full-time job – for each of the nonprofits. Filers are told to specify if any of the hours were spent on work for “related organizations”. He does not.

Gary there, you’ll remember from up at the top of this post, is the brother whose wife Kim runs the company with that private jet. You need one of those RICO Task Force bulletin boards to keep all this sorted out.

The truly disgusting stuff in Swaine’s report is where he details how Sekulow’s “charities” specifically target economically struggling people to collect these millions of dollars for his family businesses. And where he discusses the Scary Stories — what some might call lies — Sekulow promotes to trick them into giving him their money:

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 has posted the telemarketing scripts used by Case fundraisers, outlining strategies for squeezing whatever they could get from people on fixed incomes, or from the unemployed and the sick, or from those who would prefer to direct their charitable giving to their local church. It’s really, really gross.

The key thing to remember here is that this is only one way the Scary Story industry exploits their supporters. It’s not just about inducing some frightened old church lady into giving $20 a month that she doesn’t have. It’s also about raising her taxes and cutting funding for anything she relies on so that Sekulow himself won’t have to pay as much in taxes for that private jet, or for all three of his houses.

The direct-mail transactions are only half the game. And that half of the game isn’t half of the money. The really big money is on the other end — the consequence of the political climate created and supported by the army of terrified supporters shaped by a yearslong steady diet of Scary Stories.

They’ll vote for politicians who want to repeal the estate tax. They’ll vote for politicians who want to reduce the capital gains tax. They’ll vote for politicians who want to gut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, consumer protection, and organized labor. They’ll vote for politicians whose entire agenda is transferring wealth upwards, deregulating every form of rent-seeking, and appointing robber-baron friendly judges who can be relied on to ensure that anyone who opposes such an agenda won’t be allowed to vote.

That’s where the real money comes in. Sure, Jay Sekulow has reaped some $60 million for himself and his family just by cashing all those checks from terrified little old church ladies. But the real payoff — the big payoff — is still being arranged. That comes once people like him cement their control of all three branches of government, ensuring that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell can pass their wish-list of laws, President Trump can sign them, and Not-Gorsuch & Co. can retro-engineer some excuse for calling them constitutional.

 

 

 


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