This is actually an old story from 2017 that's back in the news due to his prominence as Trump's impeachment attorney.President Donald Trump's attorney and prominent Christian conservative lawyer Jay Sekulow is now being investigated by top lawyers in two states after a report surfaced this week claiming that millions of dollars were steered from his Christian nonprofit to himself, family members and related entities.
Christian Post
As so many of these people, Jay is not a Christian. He's a duper of Christians, who are among some of the most gullible and dupable people on earth.
Funny he now aids and abets Trump's aspirations to a monarchy.As President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial gets underway in the U.S. Senate, his ever-growing legal team is being led by the team of Jay Sekulow, a religious-right attorney who shares Trump’s dubious relationship to the truth as well as the president’s penchant for self-enrichment, together with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who is part of an influential group of Washington, D.C. attorneys on the Catholic right.
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In 2018, Sekulow was forced to admit that he had misled the public regarding a statement issued under the name of Donald Trump Jr. regarding the purpose of a 2016 Trump Tower meeting that Trump Jr. and other campaign officials had with Russian operatives in hope of obtaining “dirt” on his rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton. Sekulow claimed that the president had nothing to do with writing the statement, only to walk that back when contradicted by the president himself. [...] Last spring, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, told members of Congress that Sekulow had told him to lie to Congress about the fact that the Trump Organization continued to engage in negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscoweven as Trump campaign figures met with Russian operatives.
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More recently, revelations from the House Intelligence Committee and Lev Parnas [...] have placed Sekulow in the middle of team Trump’s machinations in Ukraine. It turns out that Sekulow told former Trump attorney John Dowd that the president was OK with Dowd representing Parnas and his business partner Igor Fruman, undercutting Trump’s claims not to know Parnas. Sekulow was also named in a text by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, as the person who could secure a visa for the corrupt Ukrainian former prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.
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Sekulow has a long track record of promoting false right-wing claims and campaigns, including right-wing conspiracy theories about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich and the claim that faithful Muslims cannot truthfully swear loyalty to the U.S. Constitution.
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In 1990, Pat Robertson, the erstwhile Republican presidential candidate and Christian Broadcasting Network founder, placed Sekulow at the helm of a new, Robertson-founded entity, the American Center for Law and Justice. The organization’s stated aim was to act as a counterweight to the American Civil Liberties Union.
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Over the years, multiple reporters have investigated the ways that the ACLJ and an affiliated nonprofit, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, have enriched the bank accounts and lifestyles of Sekulow and members of his family.
Sekulow’s lucrative family “nonprofit” business was first investigated by Legal Times’ Tony Mauro back in 2005.
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It is the Jay Sekulow who, through the ACLJ and a string of interconnected nonprofit and for-profit entities, has built a financial empire that generates millions of dollars a year and supports a lavish lifestyle — complete with multiple homes, chauffeur-driven cars, and a private jet that he once used to ferry Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.[...]
In 2017, the Guardian reported that CASE had steered more than $60 million to “Sekulow, his family and their businesses” since 2000. In addition to paying millions to “Sekulow, his wife, sons, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew and their firms,” the Guardian reported CASE “has also been used to provide a series of unusual loans and property deals to the Sekulow family.”
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The Washington Post also examined Sekulow’s finances in 2017, documenting that his family had been “paid millions from charities they control.”
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Sekulow has said that the state has a “compelling interest to ban the act of homosexuality,” and the ACLJ argued on behalf of state laws criminalizing gay sex that were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2003. In 2011, Sekulow claimed that the Obama administration’s decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court meant that Americans were “now living in a monarchy.” Right Wing Watch
The best people.But perhaps even greater an attraction for Trump than Sekulow’s links to the Christian nationalist crowd that comprises an important part of Trump’s base is Sekulow’s prowess as a prevaricator in front of cameras and microphones.
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Sekulow has also been a longtime opponent of the Johnson Amendment, the legal provision that prohibits overt electoral politicking by churches and other tax-exempt nonprofits. Part of the deal candidate Trump offered religious-right leaders in return for their political support was a pledge to make them more politically powerful by repealing the Johnson Amendment.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Part 2
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