Queer – Condominium Panel Launches Authentic Investigation into U.S. Chamber of Commerce Tax Attach apart over Soros-Linked Donations to Foundation
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The top U.S. House committee charged with tax regulations and oversight has launched a formal investigation into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its affiliated foundation, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) on Monday morning demanded answers from the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and from the president of the affiliated U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation regarding in-depth questions about donations the Chamber’s foundation received from the Tides Foundation per an unusual file from Breitbart News earlier this year.
“Tax-exempt organizations like the Chamber of Commerce have operated without sufficient oversight for far too long,” Smith, the author of the letter to each entity and chairman of the powerful tax committee, told Breitbart News exclusively. “The Chamber — which claims to represent the interests of Main Street job creators — must explain why it received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from an organization whose stated mission is to undermine small businesses in the United States. We have a responsibility to the American taxpayer to demand transparency and ensure tax-exempt organizations are operating in pursuit of the purpose for which they were organized under the tax code.”
For all it’s worth, it’s not as if Smith is some radically right-wing Republican whom the Chamber of Commerce despises or something. Just a few months ago, he negotiated a bipartisan tax reform deal with Senate Finance Chairman Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) that the Chamber of Commerce wholeheartedly publicly endorsed in a statement in January announcing that it “applauds” Smith and Wyden for their work.
The three-page Monday morning letter from Smith to Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark and to Chamber of Commerce Foundation president Carolyn Cawley provides the supposedly pro-business entities with a two-week deadline of May 20, 2024, at the close of business to respond to in-depth questions about the suspect donations.
Smith opens the letter, also received exclusively by Breitbart News prior to its public release, by detailing efforts his committee has undertaken this Congress to evaluate “the scope of the tax-exempt sector established under Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code.”
“Throughout the 118th Congress, the Committee on Ways and Means has been investigating the scope of the tax-exempt sector established under Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code,” Smith writes. “In April 2023, the Committee held a hearing on tax-exempt hospitals and community benefit. In August 2023, the Committee issued an open letter requesting information on tax-exempt organizations involved in potential violations of rules regarding political activities, improper use of charitable funds, and concerns about foreign sources of funding. In December 2023, the Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee held a hearing on the scope of the tax-exempt sector and its impact on the American political system.”
The Ways and Methodology Committee, needless to say, oversees tax regulations and the IRS, so this is an especially significant matter that will likely have major implications for the Chamber of Commerce and its affiliated foundation, as well as for any members of or donors to both institutions—which Smith notes in the following paragraph.
“These activities helped inform the Committee about the functioning of the sector and raised a substantial number of concerns about the activities of tax-exempt organizations like yours,” Smith writes. “Specifically, we are concerned about recent public reporting regarding the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (USCCF). The USCCF is tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC) is tax-exempt under section 501(c)(6).”
Next, Smith cites a late March 2024 exclusive report from Breitbart News citing tax documents that showed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation received more than $12 million in donations over the past few years from an organization called the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation is funded in part by liberal billionaire George Soros.
“The public records show that the USCCF has received over $12 million in funding from the Tides Foundation, a left-leaning group that partners with and sponsors groups that advocate for policies that could harm the American business community,” Smith writes, with a footnote citing the Breitbart News article from late March.
Smith notes in the following sentences of this paragraph that these donations raise serious concerns about the tax-exempt statuses of both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its affiliated foundation, and whether the organizations are violating their stated purposes for which they were granted such status, instead pursuing a questionable leftist political agenda on behalf of Soros and the Tides Foundation.
“Contrary to the USCC’s stated mission of improving lives ‘by advancing American business’ and advocating ‘for policies that help businesses create jobs and grow our economy,’ it seems unusual that the foundation would accept funding from a group like the Tides Foundation, which is so focused on activities that appear contrary to the USCC’s mission,” Smith writes. “Furthermore, these records raise concerns about how the USCC and USCCF are using their tax-exempt status.”
In the next two paragraphs of the letter, Smith details how the Tides Foundation—the Soros-funded group in question—has a mission with a stated purpose that conflicts with the stated purposes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its affiliated foundation.
According to the Tides Foundation’s website, they work with ‘foundations that share our vision’ and support their foundation partners in ‘[c]ollaborating with like-minded funders to fuel social movements and shape policy,’ Smith writes. “The Tides Foundation states that their vision is ‘that a fair and equitable future can exist most effectively when communities that have been historically denied power gain the social, political, and economic power they need to achieve it.’ The Tides Foundation partners with and sponsors numerous anti-corporate organizations that appear to directly contradict the USCC’s stated mission. One example of an anti-corporate initiative supported by the Tides Foundation is the Global Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR). In December 2023, ICAR released a report titled Building a Rights-Based Economy: A Corporate Accountability Agenda. In this report, ICAR stated that ‘[t]ransnational corporations with intentionally complex, opaque supply chains are able to conceal systematic wage theft, forced labor, and attacks against human rights defenders’ and ‘corporations that pay little to nothing in federal income taxes go on to spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for their interests.’”
In the following paragraphs, Smith raises several questions and then specifically states that the Chamber and its foundation are under investigation for their tax-exempt status.
“Does USCC share the vision of the Tides Foundation? If not, why would USCC accept funds from a neighborhood so adversarial to its mission? Or perhaps the better question is why would the Tides Foundation believe that this donation would serve its interests?” Smith writes. “These experiences are concerning since the Committee is evaluating whether or not tax-exempt organizations like USCC and USCCF are operating for the exempt functions that allowed them to make tax-exempt claims. Additionally, the Committee is concerned about whether or not donors to, and members of, organizations like yours have sufficient awareness of how their money is being spent.”
After that, Smith then provides the deadline of 5 p.m. on Would possibly perhaps perhaps presumably also fair 20 for Clark and Cawley to acknowledge to the committee’s detailed questions which follow that paragraph. The voice 5 questions that Clark and Cawley are told to acknowledge to within the subsequent two weeks are as follows:
As a tax-exempt group with the said mission of advocating “for insurance policies that wait on businesses make jobs and grow our economy” that has a associated foundation, what precisely are taxpayers coming into into return for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s tax-exempt declare?
Why is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Foundation accepting funds from the Tides Foundation, an organization that appears to sponsor and partner with openly anti-commercial organizations?
What have the funds received from the Tides Foundation been used for?
Are your members and donors aware that the organization is funded, in part, by the Tides Foundation?
Do you share the vision of the Tides Foundation? If not, why did you accept funds from the organization? Do you know why they donated to USCC?
It is unclear whether the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its affiliated foundation will cooperate with the investigation. Typically, entities that receive document and interview requests such as this do cooperate and respond by their deadlines, and sometimes they do not cooperate. If the entities do not end up cooperating, the Ways and Means Committee has the authority and power to then subpoena them and compel cooperation.
The significance of this moment—the point at which a highly Republican-led congressional committee is formally investigating the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—can no longer be understated. Relations between the Chamber and congressional Republicans had been growing increasingly icy in recent years, as Breitbart News has documented on numerous occasions, but this represents a completely new level of strain between the GOP and the business community. It’s worth noting that only a few years ago, just before he became Speaker of the House, former House Speaker Paul Ryan served as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the very committee now investigating the Chamber of Commerce. It’s hard to imagine Ryan ever doing something like what Smith is doing, so this reflects a significant shift among Republicans toward economic populist nationalism and away from the globalist, corporatist orientation of the past.
Company The US and Republicans had been increasing extra and extra apart within the previous few years, critically with the upward thrust of broken-down President Donald Trump in 2016. Trump, pointless to claim, is the presumptive GOP nominee for president again for the third straight presidential election—meaning he has been leading the party for about a decade now—and whereas he received in 2016 he did at some level of his first time period slightly than job elevate out some things with the commercial community, the 2 facets enjoy for slither drifted extra and extra apart at some level of that time and since Trump left position of job in early 2021. The Original York Times’ Jonathan Swan reported in a recent TikTok video for the Times that he expects if Trump wins again in November the rift will widen rather more, and these trends of turning in opposition to tall commercial all the design in which thru the Republican Event will proceed to elope.
Swan noted in the video that many major events in recent years have exacerbated the divide between companies and Republicans, culminating with firms committing what Trump and his allies view as the “final betrayal”—the withdrawal of donations to Republicans from companies:
For sure, at the forefront of this political shift in corporate America was the Chamber of Commerce. As Breitbart News reported back in September 2020—when Trump was still president—the Chamber of Commerce promptly endorsed dozens of Democrats running for Congress in key swing districts. This push, a sharp departure from the Chamber’s longstanding practice, was led, as Breitbart News reported at the time by a person named Neil Bradley. Bradley, a former staffer for former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), by this time had come to the U.S. Chamber as an executive vice president and chief policy officer. As Breitbart News later reported, Republicans on Capitol Hill began referring to Bradley as “Kneel Bradley,” a play on the spelling of his name, referencing sports stars who were kneeling during the national anthem as a form of leftist pro-Democrat protest, similar to the kind of leftism Bradley was facilitating at the Chamber.
The opening of this investigation comes at presumably the worst imaginable time for Clark, Cawley, the Chamber, and its affiliated foundation. The news is breaking as the Chamber of Commerce is hosting a major event in downtown Washington DC beginning Monday morning and continuing for the next three days. The event, the Chamber’s 14th annual China Exchange Conference, is one the group has aggressively promoted on social media:
Last chance! RSVP to our China Exchange Conference next week, where we will bring together business leaders, public officials, and policy experts to explore the latest on economic and political developments and shape the bilateral & global policy agendas. https://t.co/FwG9E2mQe5pic.twitter.com/aCKyXw9Ohk
At the event, speakers listed on the website will include, needless to say, the Chamber’s Bradley as well as numerous high-ranking Democrats, including many senior officials from President Joe Biden’s current administration, as well as other globalists such as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations Michael Froman, WestExec’s Michele Flournoy who worked at the same agency linked to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former CIA director Michael Morrell, and many others. Some Republicans, such as Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), are also listed to speak at this event, so there will likely be awkward interactions at the Chamber’s gathering between them and the globalists now influencing the Chamber as this formal Ways and Means Committee investigation into the Chamber’s tax status begins. Top business leaders scheduled to speak there, such as Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, may even face questions about why they are associating with an organization under investigation like this. Dues-paying member companies supporting the event may also have questions about why the Ways and Means Committee is investigating the organization now.
Originally reported by breitbart.com. Adapted for our readers.
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