Are endowments like this permitted to give money to partisan organizations and openly activist political groups?
There’s nothing illegal about what she is doing. I want to make that clear. Everything she does is 100 percent legal, provided that the organizations you’re giving money to qualify for tax-exempt status, which means that only a specific percentage of their overall activity can be directed to overtly partisan or political lobbying efforts. What she does is legal; it’s simply not really charity. It’s political activism and it should be labeled for what it really is. Q: So you’d argue that she is violating the spirit of the endowment law, not the letter of the law? A: Precisely. What she’s involved in is trying to radicalize the state of Pennsylvania and change the entire tenor of national discourse. In the period that this most-recent book looks at (2004-2007), she’s also involved in trying to turn out Democratic voter constituency groups at the polls – increased voter registration, increased voter turnout – and all of this is happening when her husband John Kerry was considering running
