by Ben Whedon
The Center for Renewing America (CRA) hit Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, his wife, and three voting rights groups with legal complaints over an alleged effort by which they improperly channeled roughly $500 million in a bid to influence the 2020 presidential election.
CRA alleges, according to Fox Business, that the Zuckerbergs sent the money to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), and National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI), which in turn moved the money to Democrat leaning areas aiming to move competitive states into President Joe Biden’s column. Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe was reportedly Zuckerberg’s point man on the effort.
A House Republican investigation into CTCL’s use of the funds found that the vast majority of the so-called “Zuckerbucks” were spent on get out to vote and voter registration efforts. Republican lawmakers have since moved to ban the use of private funds in elections, in part as a response to the controversy.
The conservative think thank told the outlet “[i]t is beyond disgraceful to imagine federal taxpayers subsidizing the partisan preferences of billionaires who easily could have given to a Democrat super PAC in 2020.”
“But, of course, then they would not have been able to take a tax deduction, so they disguised the political nature of their donations and shuffled them through ‘charitable’ intermediaries, making ordinary Americans foot the bill,” the statement further read.
CRA has asked the IRS to terminate the tax exempt status of CTCL, CEIR, and NVAHI as well as to deny any income tax deductions the Zuckerbergs made for their contributions to them.
A spokesperson for Zuckerberg denied the complaint’s allegations and cited a unanimous decision from the Federal Election Commission that determined donations to the CTCL and CEIR were apolitical, Fox Business noted.
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Ben Whedon is the night editor for the Just the News. He came to the company from Breitbart News and is a graduate of Washington and Lee University.
Photo “Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan” by Lukasz Porwol. CC BY 2.0.
