REPORT: Trump Lawyer Jay Sekulow’s Firm Steered $60 Million In “Charity” Donations To Family Members

The Guardian reports:

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.

But Jay Sekulow, who is now an attorney to Donald Trump, had a private jet to finance. His law firm was expecting a $3m payday. And six-figure contracts for members of his family needed to be taken care of.

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.

Telemarketers for the nonprofit, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism (Case), 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”.

“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”.

That Sekulows are scammers is hardly breaking news. From a 2015 Daily Beast report:

In 2005, the Legal Times reported that Sekulow had “multiple homes, chauffeur-driven cars, and a private jet that he once used to ferry Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.” Six years later, in 2011, another investigation—this time by The Tennessean—revealed that Sekulow and his wife, Pam, owned three homes, in Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina, with a total value of more than $1.6 million.

At some charities, an executive’s lavish lifestyle might raise eyebrows, but at the ACLJ and CASE, the checks and balances are handled not by independent outsiders, but by Sekulow’s family. The ACLJ’s 11-person board of trustees has two Sekulows on it, Jay and his brother Gary, the “VP of finance,” who has received $749,607 from the group in the last three years.

While the ACLJ’s 2014 tax returns suggest Jay Sekulow does not receive a salary from the organization, the ACLJ did pay $3,323,414 for “legal” services to the Constitutional Litigation and Advocacy Group, a law firm that just happens to be co-owned by Jay Sekulow.

From my own 2015 post:

Jordan Sekulow is the son of infamous anti-gay activist Jay Sekulow, who yesterday joined Tony Perkins in testifying before the Senate on religious liberty. The elder Sekulow has argued before the US Supreme Court many times, most often on the issue of religious speech.

Both Sekulows work for the Pat Robertson-founded American Center For Law & Justice, which in 2010 published a document in Zimbabwe which calls for “sexual relations between partners of the same-sex, bestiality, and other perversions to remain a criminal activity.” Four years ago I reported that the Sekulow family is raking in tens of million from their “charity” work.

In 2013 Human Rights Watch named the ACLJ as one of the “four worst anti-gay villains in the world.”