Racial Bias, Illegal Campaign Activity and the Shadow of Donald Trump
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
22 December 17
On Tuesday, in a convention center in West Palm Beach, Florida, amid chants of
“USA!” and “The wall is going to be built!,” Donald Trump, Jr., kicked off a
three-day annual summit for Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit. Based
outside of Chicago, Turning Point’s aim is to foment a political revolution on
America’s college campuses, in part by funnelling money into student government
elections across the country to elect right-leaning candidates. But it is
secretive about its funding and its donors, raising the prospect that “dark
money” may now be shaping not just state and federal races but ones on campus.
Turning Point touts its close relationship with the President’s family. The
group’s Web site promoted Don, Jr.,’s appearance for weeks, featuring a photo
of him raising a clenched fist. Its promotional materials include a quote from
the younger Trump praising Turning Point: “What you guys have done” is “just
amazing.” Lara Trump, the wife of Don, Jr.,’s brother Eric, is also involved
with the group. In West Palm Beach on Wednesday, she hosted a luncheon
promoting Turning Point’s coming Young Women’s Leadership Summit. The group’s
twenty-four-year-old executive director and founder, Charlie Kirk, told me that
he counts Don, Jr., as “a personal friend.”
Turning Point casts itself as a grassroots response to what it perceives as
liberal intolerance on college campuses. Kirk has called college campuses
“islands of totalitarianism”; he and his supporters contend that conservatives
are the true victims of discrimination in America, and he has vowed to fight
back on behalf of what he has called his “Team Right.” Kirk is a frequent guest
on Fox News, and last summer he was invited to give a speech at the Republican
National Convention. That was where he met Donald Trump, Jr., and “hit it off”
with him, Kirk said. After the convention, Kirk divided his time between
Turning Point activities and working for the Trump campaign as a specialist in
youth outreach. “I helped coördinate some rather successful events with him,”
Kirk told me, referring to Don, Jr., “and I also carried his bags.” When
friends threw Kirk a surprise birthday party earlier this year, Don, Jr.,
attended, as did Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump White House adviser.
As Turning Point’s profile has risen, so has scrutiny of its funding and
tactics. Internal documents that I obtained, as well as interviews with former
employees, suggest that the group may have skirted campaign-finance laws that
bar charitable organizations from participating in political activity. Former
employees say that they were directed to work with prominent conservatives,
including the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in aid of
Republican Presidential candidates in 2016. Perhaps most troubling for an
organization that holds up conservatives as the real victims of discrimination
in America, Turning Point USA is also alleged to have fostered an atmosphere
that is hostile to minorities. Screenshots provided to me by a source show that
Crystal Clanton, who served until last summer as the group’s national field
director, sent a text message to another Turning Point employee saying, “I HATE
BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.”
Clanton, who resigned after serving as the group’s second-highest official for
five years, at first declined to comment. “I’m no longer with Turning Point and
wish not to be a part of the story,” Clanton told me over e-mail. Later, in a
second e-mail, she said, “I have no recollection of these messages and they do
not reflect what I believe or who I am and the same was true when I was a
teenager.”
John Ryan O’Rourke, the former Turning Point employee who received the text
messages from Clanton, requested that the messages “not be used in any article
or background information concerning Turning Point” and declined to comment on
them. Kirk said in an e-mail that “Turning Point assessed the situation and
took decisive action within 72 hours of being made aware of the issue.” Soon
after, Clanton left the organization.
While Kirk served as the public face of Turning Point, Clanton, its former
field director, acted as its hands-on boss, according to former employees. In a
2016 book that Kirk co-authored with Brent Hamachek, “Time for a Turning Point:
Setting a Course Toward Free Markets and Limited Government for Future
Generations,” he described Clanton as “the best hire we ever could have made.”
He called her “integral to the success of Turning Point while effectively
serving as its chief operating officer.” He added, “Turning Point needs more
Crystals; so does America.”
Former Turning Point employees say that the organization was a difficult
workplace and rife with tension, some of it racial. Gabrielle Fequiere, a
former Turning Point employee, told me that she was the only African-American
hired as a field director when she worked with the group, three years ago. “In
looking back, I think it was racist,” she said. “At the time, I was blaming
myself, and I thought I did something wrong.” Fequiere, who now works as a
model, recalled that the young black recruits that she brought into the
organization suddenly found themselves disinvited from the group’s annual
student summit, and that when she herself attended, she watched speakers there
who “spoke badly about black women having all these babies out of wedlock. It
was really offensive.” (Kirk, through a spokesman, denied that any such
incidents occurred, and said, “These accusations are absolutely baseless and
even absurd.”)
Fequiere said that Clanton fired her on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, on the
grounds that she was not performing her job well. “I was the only black
American employee they had, and they fired me on M.L.K. Day—it was so rude!”
Fequiere told me. She added, “I felt very uncomfortable working there because I
was black,” but she said she had seen white employees mistreated, as well. “My
Democratic friends had told me that some Republicans didn’t care about the poor
and minorities, and I thought it wasn’t true, but then I found the people they
were talking about!”
Speakers at Turning Point events on various college campuses have been accused
of going out of their way to thumb their noses at ethnic and cultural
sensitivities. The conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, for instance,
whose appearance Turning Point co-hosted with the College Republicans at the
University of Colorado, in Boulder, said that despite being gay, he hated
“faggots,” lesbians, and feminists, who, he said, “fucking hate men.”
In an effort to mock campus opposition to hate speech, members of the Turning
Point chapter at Kent State University staged a protest last fall in which they
appeared on campus wearing adult diapers and sucking on pacifiers while
proclaiming “Safe Spaces are for Children.” The protest stirred widespread
ridicule, and Kirk’s spokesman said that he disapproved of the display and
later issued guidelines against other chapters repeating it.
Kirk grew up in Wheeling, Illinois, and was an Eagle Scout; in a 2015 speech to
the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley, he said that his “No. 1 dream in
life” was to attend West Point, but the slot he considered his went to “a far
less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion”
whose test scores he claimed he knew. (Kirk said he was being sarcastic when he
made the comment.) An older acquaintance encouraged him to forgo college and
launch a conservative analogue to the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org.
Kirk acknowledged in an interview that it is something of an irony that he
heads an organization devoted to waging political warfare on campuses when he
never actually attended college himself. “I joke that I wasn’t smart enough to
go to a four-year school,” Kirk told me, although he noted that he continued
his studies at a community college.
MoveOn, however, has one part set up as a super PAC, and another as a 501(c)4
“social-welfare group,” both of which are legally allowed to engage in
political elections. It also has a policy of disclosing the names of anyone
contributing five thousand dollars or more. In contrast, Turning Point is a
501(c)3 charity. This means that, unlike MoveOn donors, Turning Point donors
can take tax deductions for their contributions and remain anonymous. In
exchange for these benefits, however, the Internal Revenue Service strictly
prohibits charities such as Turning Point from engaging either directly or
indirectly in political elections.
Several former Turning Point employees told me in interviews that they felt
they were asked to participate in activities that crossed lines drawn by
campaign-finance laws for groups like theirs. Payden Hall, who worked for
Turning Point during the 2016 Presidential campaign, told me that Clanton, who
was her boss, e-mailed her at her Turning Point address to make arrangements
for her to coördinate with Ginni Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas, to help Ted Cruz’s Presidential campaign. “That’s where the
ambiguity began,” Hall recalled. Soon after, she said, Ginni Thomas, who was
supporting Cruz’s candidacy and is on Turning Point’s advisory council, left a
voice message for Hall and her sister, who also worked for Turning Point,
saying that she was sending two hundred Cruz placards to them to distribute in
the coming Wisconsin Presidential primary.
Audio: Listen to Ginni Thomas’s voice mail.
“Crystal gave Ginni Thomas my private mailing address without my permission,”
Hall recalled. “They gave out employees’ personal information to the wife of a
Supreme Court Justice.” The next thing she knew, she said, hundreds of Cruz
placards arrived at her home. “We threw them out,” Hall said. She was a Cruz
supporter, but, she says, “We wanted to volunteer on our own terms, not to give
in to pressure from a boss. I felt that if it wasn’t crossing a legal line, it
was crossing a professional one.”
Trevor Potter, a former Republican commissioner on the Federal Elections
Commission who is the founder and president of the Campaign Legal Center, a
nonpartisan campaign-finance-law watchdog group, said that Turning Point is
barred from aiding political campaigns. “Under the law, a 501(c)3 can’t engage
in political action or give anything of value to a campaign, including
students, or the names of students,” he said. “If what Turning Point USA was
doing was helping Republicans on campus and feeding them to campaigns, that’s a
political operation, and it sounds as if it crosses the line.”
Reached by phone, Ginni Thomas declined to comment. Clanton’s lawyer, Robert
Grabermann, said that if she e-mailed Hall “at her TPUSA email address, it was
an honest oversight and sincere mistake on Ms. Clanton’s part. Ms. Clanton
categorically denies using TPUSA resources to aid any political campaign
activities. She fully understands the 501 (c)(3) guidelines, and has on many
occasions consulted with legal counsel to ensure that all personal campaign
involvement was compliant with 501 (c)(3) rules.”
Susan Walker, who worked for Turning Point USA in Florida, in 2016, told me
that the group did aid Republican political campaigns. Walker said that a list
she created while working for Turning Point, with the names of hundreds of
student supporters, was given without her knowledge to someone working for
Marco Rubio’s Presidential campaign. “That list had, like, seven hundred kids,
and I worked my ass off to get it,” she said. “I had added notes on every
student I talked to, and they were all on it still.” The Rubio operative, she
added, “shouldn’t have had that list. We were a charity, and he was on a
political campaign.”
E-mails and interviews from other former Turning Point employees in South
Carolina and Ohio showed crossover between Presidential-campaign work and work
for the charity, as well. In South Carolina, a chain of e-mails shows, Kirk
asked a Turning Point USA employee to round up students to support Cruz at the
behest of two officials with a pro-Cruz super PAC. In a January 25, 2016,
e-mail, Drew Ryun, a Turning Point advisory-council member who was helping run
one of the pro-Cruz super PACs, asked Kirk to get another Turning Point
employee to “send” the super PAC “as many kids as possible.” Ryun, a former
deputy director of the Republican National Committee, explained that he needed
“as many kids as you can generate for a WSJ piece on efforts in” South
Carolina. After Kirk agreed to help, the e-mail thread shows, Kirk coördinated
with Dan Tripp, Ryun’s associate at the pro-Cruz super PAC, who headed its
operations in South Carolina and is the founder and president of Ground Game
Strategies.
“Yes!” Kirk answered Tripp when asked for help from Turning Point. “What part
of SC?”
“Greenville, Spartenburg or Anderson Counties,” Tripp replied.
“Time of day and how long?” Kirk asked.
“I’m thinking 2 hours late Sunday afternoon. Canvassing, training and pizza,”
Tripp responded.
“You got it, will recon shortly,” Kirk e-mailed back. Kirk explained that a
Turning Point employee in South Carolina named Anna Scott Marsh would be the
point person, and added that “Anna will be helping. Let’s rock this!”
Soon after, e-mails show, Marsh, the Turning Point employee, promised to round
up the requested recruits. “Sending something out tonight, and will send you a
list hopefully tomorrow . . . I’m sure we can find some solid students here.”
Marsh declined to comment about her e-mails.
Asked about these practices, Kirk referred me to a statement from his lawyer,
Sally Wagenmaker: “Turning Point USA works diligently to comply entirely with
all relevant laws and regulations governing not-for-profit organizations.
Turning Point USA focuses on fiscal conservatism, free market economics, and
related student education and advocacy, all completely within applicable
Section 501(c)(3) legal constraints.”
Ryun confirmed that the exchanges occurred, but said that Kirk e-mailed him
“via his personal e-mail and on his personal time!” Tripp, too, confirmed the
e-mails, but said, “We welcomed many volunteers to our efforts and were
grateful for their support. It would be quite troubling if campaign finance
rules were interpreted to prevent conservative volunteers from exercising their
right to be involved in the political process.”
In a phone interview, Kirk declined to identify the donors who have supplied
his group’s eight-million-dollar-plus annual budget, noting that many prefer to
remain anonymous. But Kirk has spoken and fund-raised at various closed-door
energy-industry gatherings, including those of the 2017 board meeting of the
National Mining Association and the 2016 annual meeting of the Independent
Petroleum Association of America. In our interview, Kirk acknowledged that some
of his donors “are in the fossil-fuel space.”
Kirk’s ties to fossil-fuel magnates are controversial because Turning Point has
helped organize opposition on campuses to students calling for schools to
divest from fossil-fuel companies. Turning Point distributed a guide for
college students with a foreword by Kirk, titled “10 Ways Fossil Fuels Improve
Our Daily Lives.” In it, he argues, “Across the nation, college students are
clamoring for their campuses to divest from fossil fuel . . . students are
indoctrinated to believe the myth that fossil fuels are dirty and renewable
energy is a plausible alternative . . . ” Turning Point, which also runs an
online “Professor Watch List” that targets professors it believes are liberal,
blamed “leftist professors” in its booklet for having “perpetuated” these
“myths.” In the interview, Kirk told me that “We think targeting fossil fuels
is rather unfair, and it is not really in the best interests of the
universities to favor one type of political agenda over another.” It’s a
message that “went great,” he said, when he delivered it at energy-industry
meetings.
Last May, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an investigative report
on what it called Turning Point’s “stealth plan for political influence.” The
story recounted accusations on multiple campuses that the group had funnelled
money into student elections in violation of the spending caps and transparency
requirements set by those schools. It detailed how student candidates backed by
Turning Point had been forced to drop out of campus elections at the University
of Maryland and Ohio State “after they were caught violating spending rules and
attempting to hide the help they received from Turning Point.” It also quoted
Kirk saying in an appearance before a conservative political group in 2015 that
his group was “investing a lot of time and money and energy” in
student-government elections. (In the story, Kirk denied any wrongdoing and
said it was “completely ludicrous and ridiculous that there’s some sort of
secret plan.”)
A copy of a Turning Point brochure prepared for potential donors that I
obtained provides a glimpse into the group’s tactics. (A former Turning Point
employee said the brochure was closely held, and not posted online so that it
couldn’t leak.) Its “Campus Victory Project” is described as a detailed,
multi-phase plan to “commandeer the top office of Student Body President at
each of the most recognizable and influential American Universities.”
Phase 1 calls for victory in the “Power 5” conference schools, including the
Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten Conference, the Pacific 12 Conference,
the Big 12 Conference, and the Southeastern Conference. Phase 2 calls for
winning the top student-government slots in every Division 1 N.C.A.A. school,
of which it says there are more than three hundred. In the first three years of
the plan, the brochure says, the group aims to capture the “outright majority”
of student-government positions in eighty per cent of these schools.
Once in control of student governments, the brochure says, Turning Point
expects its allied campus leaders to follow a set political agenda. Among its
planks are the defunding of progressive organizations on campus, the
implementation of “free speech” policies eliminating barriers to hate speech,
and the blocking of all campus “boycott, divestment and sanctions” movements.
Turning Point’s agenda also calls for the student leaders it empowers to use
student resources to host speakers and forums promoting “American
Exceptionalism and Free Market ideals on campus.”
Today, Turning Point claims to have a presence on more than a thousand college
campuses nationwide, and to have “a stronger, more organized presence than all
the left-wing campus groups combined.” Kirk told me his group had started three
hundred new chapters in the past year. The Campus Victory Project brochure
names more than fifty four-year colleges and universities where it claims the
group helped effectuate student government victories in the 2016–17 year,
including the University of California, Los Angeles, Syracuse, Purdue, Michigan
State, Wake Forest, and the University of Southern California, and it names a
hundred and twenty-two more schools whose governments the group hopes to
“commandeer” in Phase 2. The brochure notes that completing the task will take
money: specifically, $2.2 million.
Kirk, in his interview, denied that any of these funds would directly pay for
students’ campaigns. “We do not directly fund any of these candidates,” he
said. Instead, he explained, “We will support them through levels of
leadership,” including training and what he called “leadership scholarships.”
The prospect of “dark money”—contributions from anonymous donors to national
ideological groups—flowing into campus elections has alarmed some students.
“Students were outraged that our elections were being influenced from outside,”
Danielle Di Scala, who last year was vice-president of the student government
at Ohio State University, said. “I’d never seen that before, but it’s starting
to be a trend. The problem,” she told me, “is it can price some student
candidates out of the market when others are getting money from groups with
unlimited funds.”
Andy MacCracken, the executive director of the National Campus Leadership
Council, said he worries that campus elections are “particularly vulnerable” to
outside money, “because there aren’t really any standard rules.” MacCracken
says it’s been “shocking to see how much of an operation there is from Turning
Point,” adding that “there’s really nothing comparable that I’m aware of from
left-wing groups.” The push, he suggested, reflects a recognition on the part
of conservatives about the future value of student leaders. “I can totally
imagine they’re thinking that if we can win this on campuses, they will be the
thought leaders down the road. This is a way to win it efficiently at the
start. The challenge, though,” he says, “is that so much of this is in the
dark.”
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