Note: While this story remains very interesting, it is not clear to me that Sean Hannity has actual management responsibilities or control over the charity in question even though he’s its most visible supporter. That question needs to be answered more clearly for me to be as angry at Hannity as Debbie Schlussel is.
UPDATE: Hannity pushes back:
http://biggovernment.com/falliance/2010/03/19/freedom-alliance-responds-to-allegations-against-sean-hannity/
UPDATE 2: For Debbie Schlussel’s response to the Freedom Alliance, please see the end of this note.
In a remarkable piece of investigative reporting, blogger Debbie Schlussel tells us that Sean Hannity’s Freedom Concerts, which are supposedly raising money for injured veterans and the families of veterans killed in action, give an almost-criminally low percentage of its donations to these veterans or their families. Instead, it spends the vast majority of the donations on expenses and salaries, on consultants and on private jets for Hannity and his family.
I’ve never been an enormous fan of Hannity’s even though I appreciate anyone who effectively promotes a message of liberty. To me, he’s rather superficial and rarely seems to do innovative or ground-breaking work. He’s a conservative populist and I generally don’t like populists but I always thought he was doing yeoman’s work with the millions of dollars he raised for dead or injured veterans and their families.
Now, even that reason to like Hannity appears to be gone.
It’s a remarkable story and I urge you to read it:
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/6938/sean-hannitys-freedom-concert-scam-only-7-of-charitys-money-went-to-injured-troops-kids-of-fallen-troops-g5s-g6s-for-vannity/
For those of you who don’t know Schlussel, she’s no liberal. She’s run for office as a Republican and has received death threats for her hard-hitting attacks against radical Islam in the US.
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Debbie Schlussel’s response to Freedom Alliance’s post in their defense:
In fact, the Freedom Alliance “response” doesn’t answer any of the questions I raised and goes on to lie more. They don’t address why they gave a triple amputee only $200—and in fact there are many of these examples provided in their tax return addendum, but I only cited a few for brevity’s sake. They also lie and claim that they gave a lot more money to charity b/c they categorize it as “program expenses.” But I’m sorry—calling $3 million in consulting fees, printing, and postage “program expenses” doesn’t change the fact that it still went to their cronies, not to a fund and not the soldiers who only got on average less than $900 apiece. It also doesn’t change the fact that out of the money spent (I didn’t use the money they claim they raised for their scholarship fund) the vast majority goes to those kinds of expenses.
Also, the “scholarship fund” is really a war chest for something else. We’ve been at war since 2001, when we went into Afghanistan, and we’re winding down in Iraq. Unless the kids were born in 2001 or thereafter, many of these kids are in college now and Freedom Alliance is giving them a pittance toward their college tuition, while they continue to build this massive warchest. With a giant multi-million dollar fund, why aren’t they giving the kids a free, complete ride to college? And how many kids of deceased troops will there be in the future? Enough to exhaust a multi-million dollar fund? Doubtful.
5 comments
on 03/19/10 at 11:27
Don't conservatives like us ever ask ourselves why none of these bozos like Hannity or Limbaugh ever served? And why they're making more money than Wall Street bankers trying to manipulate us into helping the big corporations taker over the country?
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