John Podesta's leaked emails already told us Democrats had a plan to rig the charity system for elections.
Now investigators have spent a year tracing exactly where that plan went after Podesta read the memo.
What Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent found when he started pulling on that thread is something Democrats never wanted made public.
Podesta Emails Launched a Decade of Democrat Dark Money
In 2015, a Swiss billionaire's private foundation sent Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta a memo with a specific plan: use tax-deductible charities to register voters for Democrats.
The mechanics were simple enough that nobody at the IRS bothered to look.
Funnel donations through 501(c)(3) charities – which face strict IRS prohibitions on partisan politics – into affiliated 501(c)(4) organizations that can engage directly in election work.
The memo didn't target all Americans for voter registration.
It targeted non-white voters in swing states – with entire paragraphs about "beating Republicans" and "reshaping the electorate" visible as deleted edits in the document.
That memo became the Everybody Votes Campaign – and by 2024, the Capital Research Center's new report documents it had metastasized into a $638 million operation spanning 83 organizations.
How 83 Tax-Exempt Nonprofits Laundered 638 Million Into Get Out the Vote
Three organizations in the CRC report make the scheme impossible to misread.
America Votes Education Fund reported giving $20,748,002 in grants to its affiliated 501(c)(4), America Votes, while spending just $532 on office expenses and $274 on fundraising.
It paid zero employees.
Three of its board members simultaneously hold the top positions – president, chief operating officer, and treasurer – at the affiliated political arm.
Guarantee Our Votes Project spent 0.2% of its nearly $14 million in 2024 expenditures on legal and office costs.
The rest – $13.85 million – went straight to America Works USA, an organization whose entire website is one page describing its mission as advancing left-wing policy.
Democracy Matters Foundation routed 96% of its 2024 spending – $31.38 million – directly to its affiliated 501(c)(4).
Voter Registration Fraud Charges and Stacey Abrams Ethics Violations
Criminal charges have already been filed.
One Everybody Votes Campaign grantee, Field+Media Corps, received $4.6 million for "voter registration support" in 2024.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday charged seven of the firm's employees with forgery and tampering with public records after thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms turned up across multiple battleground districts.
Another grantee – the New Georgia Project, founded by Stacey Abrams – agreed to pay a record $300,000 penalty after the Georgia State Ethics Commission found campaign finance violations tied to its work during Abrams's 2018 gubernatorial campaign.
The organization later dissolved.
The Voter Participation Center – one of the network's largest players – ran Facebook voter registration ads that excluded users with interests in John Wayne, Duck Dynasty, and the Daytona 500 while targeting users on the left side of the ledger.
Senator Tom Cotton flagged this to the IRS in 2024.
IRS Investigation Into Partisan Nonprofits Now Underway
The scheme is legal – everything is filed on IRS Form 990s.
But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Just the News last month his department is reviewing exactly how money moves between paired 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) organizations and whether those transfers cross legal lines.
"It is going to go right up to the directors, and they can be held criminally liable," Bessent said, warning that board members who look the other way while grant money flows cannot simply walk away.
The IRS, now under Bessent's direct oversight, has already prepared a list of large 501(c)(3) organizations operating affiliated (c)(4) entities for review.
While inflation-adjusted spending through traditional political action committees fell roughly 20% between 2020 and 2024, this nonprofit election machine grew 30% in the same period – about 10% even after adjusting for inflation.
Democrats abandoned conventional campaign finance and shifted the entire operation into the charitable sector, where donor names stay hidden and every contribution comes subsidized by American taxpayers.
The Heritage Foundation, for comparison, gives away less than 1% of its expenditures in grants.
These organizations gave away nearly everything – because the grant was the product.
The machine Podesta commissioned in 2015 ran two full election cycles without a single IRS enforcement action – and it took a new Treasury Secretary to finally call that a problem.
Sources:
- Ashe Short, "Tax-deductible 'charities' served as pipelines to Democrat voter registration: report," Just the News, August 27, 2026.
- Parker Thayer, Robert Stilson, and Fred Lucas, "The 'Charities' Influencing Elections: 2024 and Beyond," Capital Research Center, August 2026.
- "EXCLUSIVE: $638M Left-Wing 'Vote Machine' Runs Through Tax-Exempt Charities," Breitbart, August 24, 2026.
- "Scott Bessent warns nonprofits that break the law will face criminal charges and asset seizures," Conservative Institute, June 30, 2026.
- Tom Cotton, Letter to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, U.S. Senate, October 3, 2024.
