March 19, 2010, - 7:15 pm
The Freedom Alliance’s Weak, Empty “Response”; More to Come on This Fraud
As you know, yesterday I posted an extensive expose on the fraud that is the Freedom Alliance and the associated Freedom Concerts pimped by Sean Hannity on hard-working Americans who pay their money, thinking they are helping severely wounded troops and funding college scholarships for the children of wounded soldiers. As I predicted, Freedom Alliance finally “responded” with a non-response that was more lies and obfuscation. You only need to look at their tax forms, which I posted in my expose, to know what’s going on without the filter of their lens.
The Sham Continues & the Shallow Wagons Circle
The liars and frauds at Freedom Alliance want to keep the gravy train going for them and their cronies. So, instead of actually refuting a single fact, they make claims without any hard evidence . . . because they don’t have any. None of the circle-the-wagons, fraudulent “conservatives” defending this group have dared post the tax forms because they tell the unvarnished truth. One of the “prominent bloggers” who posted the phony response is Erick Erickson, a nut from Kentucky, who supports the equally nutty, pro-Iran, anti-American, anti-Gitmo Rand Paul, and who defended Emily Zanotti, the lunatic who has been stalking me for four years, who praised Muslim death, rape, and torture threats against me and my family, and who recently lost a scurrilous, unhinged attempt to threaten my free speech rights by trying to challenge my law license (which she did with the participation of a number of the bloggers now defending Freedom Alliance). And I love how because the wasteful, lying charity claims in its response that Vannity paid for all his travel (he, in fact, paid for none of it and it was in fancy private planes, which I’ll tell you about in the coming days), that’s now “fact.” Yup, repeating CYA press releases by perpetrators is now deemed an “exhaustive investigation.”
Here is my initial response to Freedom Alliance’s extremely weak PR attempt at covering its hide (I will be posting more, next week, as I’ve discovered even more sleaze on the group’s part):
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 over $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 count the money they claim they raised for their scholarship fund in my percentages or the figures would have been even more outrageous against Freedom Alliance), the vast majority of spending goes to those kinds of expenses.
Also, the “scholarship fund” is really a war chest for something else, since it isn’t being used to fund scholarships for kids of soldiers now. If it has $15 million dollars, as they claim, then the interest alone should fund a free ride for all of the soldiers’ children currently in college. What are they waiting for? Likely, to convert the fund to something else, not what the donors intended. Do you really think people who held bake sales and bought tickets to the concerts thought they were funding a Merrill Lynch account for a nebulous promise that some kids of fallen troops might go to college from it in 20 years? No. They thought they were funding kids to go to college on a full ride now. But it was all a lie.
As I noted, Hannity said on his nationally-syndicated radio show that a $30,000 donation from Boca Java will fund a full year for one of these kids in college. Sadly, it never did. I don’t think anyone listening to his show thought that he meant 20 years from now. That’s not what Boca Java thought, according to a company spokeswoman.
We’ve been at war since 2001, when we went into Afghanistan, and we’re winding down in Iraq. Unless Freedom Alliance wants you to believe that the soldiers who died there had no kids born before 1992–and clearly that’s not the case because Freedom Alliance has been giving a couple hundred kids a pittance for college since at least its tax filing in 2005, they are ripping these kids off in order to build a massive war chest and self-perpetuate. Again, 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.
Moreover, because they hoarded millions of dollars, their returns show the fund shrunk by several million dollars with bad investments and market losses. That money could have put these kids through college for the entire time. What’s their excuse for the soldiers with no limbs and with severe burns? Are they waiting for two decades from now when technology is better? $165 for a soldier who is blind and his face blew up? No excuse for that. Their “response” is simply a non-response and an attempt to cover up the fraud.
Unfortunately for Freedom Alliance, I’ve discovered some interesting things that involve some other parties and more scamming here. It’ll make you sick. As a kid of a former wartime U.S. Army man, it makes me sick. They are using our severely wounded soldiers and the children of our war dead to help themselves and their cronies. And all the disinformation in the world won’t fool everyone. It’s an IQ test. If you believe the propaganda over their own tax forms, you failed. And you are essentially admitting they lied on their own taxes.
I will be posting more on this and on more fraud at Freedom Alliance, in the coming days. Stay tuned.
Tags: con, Fraud, Freedom Alliance, Freedom Concerts, scholarships, Sean Hannity, sham, soldiers, students
hello Debbie ,
Thanks for the update and very well done research.
JessH on March 20, 2010 at 5:59 am