Trump’s executive order set the stage for Falwell’s political activities

Source: Politico | December 22, 2020 | Maggie Severns

By discouraging investigations of religious organizations, Trump appeared to clear the way for Liberty University to spend millions on his own causes.

Former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr.’s decision to spend millions of university dollars on Republican political causes followed an executive order by President Donald Trump directing the Internal Revenue Service to avoid whenever possible investigating religious organizations veering into politics.

Trump issued the order in 2017. The following year, under Falwell’s leadership, the university directed more than $3 million to conservative organizations. In 2019, it created a think tank that purchased Facebook ads featuring Trump’s image and the slogan “Pray For Our President,” produced a podcast that amplified Trump’s claims of a stolen election, and recently staged a strategy session for the 2021 elections that featured only Republican politicians.

These actions appear to push the boundaries of the university’s non-profit status, particularly given that the law explicitly bans non-profits from assisting political candidates under a provision called the Johnson Amendment, named after former President Lyndon Johnson, who sponsored it in the Senate.

But Trump’s administration furthered the IRS’s already hands-off approach to monitoring churches and other religious nonprofits to the point that enforcement now appears to be nearly nonexistent, giving Liberty and other groups new opportunity to test boundaries they couldn’t have in the past.

“For someone like Falwell, who was eager to use tax-exempt resources to engage in politics, it may have given the green light,” said Brendan Fisher, director at the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. “It’s a correlation — but it certainly seems like you can draw a line between the executive order, and Liberty ramping up its political activity in the years following it.”

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