Well, this is a big no-no.
Anyone who has worked in the nonprofit world knows there is a big difference between a charitable 501 (c) (3) nonprofit and a 501 (c) (4): one is tax-deductible, and the other is not. The first type, ostensibly, exists to serve an educational or charitable purpose, and the second may get involved in political issues and campaigns, although it may not campaign for any specific candidate.
I've actually run a (c) (4) and a (c) (3), and had run-ins with the IRS, which can get really picky about these distinctions if they want to, or really lax if they don't. (Guess who they focus their efforts on...)
SCOOP: Fidelity, a huge donor-advised fund, wired $37.5M to a dark money org that backed Kamala Harris in ‘24. But the donation is now turning heads among tax experts, who say Fidelity failed to disclose giving to a non-charity—raising q’s about tax law and voter turnout efforts…
— Gabe Kaminsky (@gekaminsky) February 10, 2026
In the run-up to the 2024 election, Democrats were throwing money at Kamala Harris as if they were the Federal Reserve dropping it out of helicopters to fight a financial crisis, and little issues such as the legality of the spending were not high up on the list of things they cared about.
Before the 2024 election, a group of Democratic political operatives came together in Washington, D.C., to form a nonprofit to support groups aligned with the left. Bright Future Fund wound up spending $182 million, including a chunk of money to the largest super PAC that made ads supporting candidate Kamala Harris.
Like many other nonprofits, Bright Future Fund submitted its annual tax return for 2024 to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) last November. Just two days later, it quietly went out of business. Bright Future Fund seemed likely to be remembered as nothing more than a small cog in the vast dark money machine that tried to elect Harris and failed.
But Bright Future Fund is now attracting attention among some tax experts and conservatives because of where almost all its money came from during 2024.
The nonprofit received $37.5 million from Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, one of the country’s largest donor-advised funds. Donor-advised funds are tailored to people who wish to donate anonymously and receive tax breaks for their philanthropic giving. In its own tax return, Fidelity said that it gives money only to nonprofits “where the funds distributed will be used exclusively for charitable purposes.”
And on a different page in the same filing, Fidelity said that it transferred donor money solely to 501(c)(3) organizations, referring to a section of the IRS code for charities. When the form asked Fidelity to disclose the number of groups that received money but were not registered as charities, it said: “NONE.”
The Bright Future Fund was essentially created by the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, which manages funds for donors who wish to remain anonymous. While Fidelity itself does not determine where that money goes, it does have a responsibility to manage that money properly and report that it does so to the government, which it apparently did not. Those funds were not supposed to go to groups that were not eligible for deductibility. By routing the money through the Charitable Gift Fund, the donors, whose names were hidden, were able to get tax deductions for political giving.
That is illegal.
Though Fidelity said it only gave money directly to charities, Bright Future Fund was registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(4) organization. Such groups may engage in unlimited political lobbying and some campaign activity, with no obligation to identify the sources of their money. Bright Future Fund’s tax return did not mention Fidelity, reporting only that $37.5 million of the nonprofit’s $40.6 million in revenue was from “contributions and grants.” The nonprofit said it gave money to more than 50 groups in 2024, including other Democratic-aligned PACs and nonprofits aligned with its mission to “strengthen the economy, protect reproductive rights, and make America more fair and just.”
Because of Bright Future Fund’s tax status, the disclosures by Fidelity “were technically inaccurate,” Patrick Sternal, a tax lawyer and former adviser at the IRS’s office of chief counsel, told me. “It raises questions about whether Fidelity was trying to disguise or downplay their grant to a highly partisan group that worked to benefit the Harris campaign,” he added.
The Bright Future Fund was essentially a pop-up political group whose sole purpose was to influence the 2024 election. It appeared before the election and disappeared after it. In no way did it, or indeed did it intend, to serve the kind of public purpose that 501 (c) (3)s are supposed to serve (many of these groups also skirt the law or break it, but at least they pretend to follow the law).
A Fidelity spokesperson shared a statement with me that said the donor-advised fund, which distributed $18.3 billion to charities last year, “complies with its obligations under the Internal Revenue Code with respect to its grants” and that grants “cannot be used for lobbying, political activity, or for other impermissible purposes.” The spokesperson did not respond to questions about the discrepancy in its tax return about Bright Future Fund.
The organization was incorporated in late 2023 by a partner at Elias Law Group, the Democratic-aligned firm led by lawyer Marc Elias, who represented Harris and other Democratic presidential campaigns.
Corporate records filed in Washington, D.C., show that Bright Future Fund filed paperwork to dissolve in November 2025 but did not state the reason why. The organization’s president and board chair, Democratic operative Preston Elliott, treasurer Lucinda Guinn, board member Kelly Ward, and Elias Law Group did not respond to requests for comment.
Marc Elias, you may recall, is just the kind of lawyer for whom ethics and the law are not even speed bumps. He was the one who funneled money from the Clinton campaign to create the Steele Dossier and charged the expenditure as legal expenses. In other words, he is the kind of traitorous scum who would sell his own child to organ traffickers if he were offered the right price.
Bright Future Fund’s tax return for 2024 also shows tens of millions of dollars in grants to charities, including the Hopewell Fund, which has long been affiliated with a network of liberal groups accused by Republicans of abusing the tax code in partisan ways to support Democrats. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, reported in 2023 that a sister group of the Hopewell Fund might have violated IRS rules through voter registration efforts. The sister group, New Venture Fund, denied any wrongdoing and said it complied with the law.
Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor who founded a left-leaning voter advocacy and education group called Vote Common Good, believes that conservative-led attacks on voter turnout groups are an attempt to silence voters from exercising their rights. “We are trying to advocate to get more people involved in the political process,” Pagitt told me. “The people who want to stop voter registration are committed to wanting people to stay confused, so that a smaller number of people know what’s going on and vote.”
Democrats have a long history of using nonprofits as money laundering outfits for their political purposes. A large share of government budgets is allocated to nonprofits, and over the past year, we have seen what that means in practice. A huge proportion goes out the door as fraud, and some of that money circles back to promote Democrat politicians and political causes. It is a shell game, with pop-up groups, corrupt politicians skimming political donations off the top, shell groups used to influence political campaigns and organize activist groups, and provide legal defense for rioters.
https://t.co/JrUhcSr4TN
— Pepe Deluxe 🐸 (@deluxe_pepe) February 4, 2026
Speaking of allowing Satan to freely cause maximum chaos in America
I don't want to say what I really think because I'd get another FBI visit
Multiple anti-ICE activist groups in Minnesota have collectively received more than $3 million from a…
Fidelity will likely not face legal consequences for facilitating this violation of the law; they will likely just need to amend their tax returns, although it's possible that the feds may trace the money back to its donors and investigate whether they took deductions for political giving.
But making it hard to do so is the whole point of using these cutouts. Hide the flow of money behind many layers of paperwork.
You would be surprised what kind of groups that qualify as nonprofits eligible for charitable donations. During the George Floyd riots, for instance, Kamala Harris raised money for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which bails out criminals. It is a 501 (c) (3), and it continues to operate as such, to the detriment of all of us.
This is Halima Farah, a resident of Minneapolis who was shot and robbed outside her apartment by De’Seanna Williams in 2021.
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 29, 2024
Williams was then bailed out of prison by the Minnesota Freedom Fund, the same fund that Kamala Harris promoted during the George Floyd riots in 2020.… pic.twitter.com/TpMVOkKws8
I couldn't estimate what percentage of funds flowing to nonprofits are used for nefarious purposes or diverted to political spending, but it is a significant share of the total. About 10% of employment in the US is in nonprofits, and of that, a not insignificant amount is people whose main job is helping Democrats win office. If you look at how many campaign workers wind up at nonprofits, you would be shocked.
Remember Zuckerbucks, which helped rig the 2020 elections? That money was routed through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which are 501 (c) (3) nonprofits, and hence tax-deductible.
If you ever get the sense that the system is rigged, you are absolutely correct. And these days, the people who rig it get to do it tax-free and get a tax bonus to boot. It's a great deal for them, and a horrible one for you and me.
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