Former Alabama judge Roy Moore, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, once said publicly that he did not take a “regular salary” from the small charity he founded to promote Christian values because he did not want to be a financial burden.
But privately, Moore had arranged to receive a salary of $180,000 a year for part-time work at the Foundation for Moral Law, internal charity documents show. He collected more than $1 million as president from 2007 to 2012, compensation that far surpassed what the group disclosed in its public tax filings most of those years.
.. The former longtime executive director of the charity now serves as Moore’s campaign manager. The charity retained the same fundraising firm used by three of Moore’s most recent campaigns for state office, public records show.
.. Seven charity and tax law specialists consulted by The Post said the nonprofit’s activities raised questions about compliance with IRS rules, including prohibitions on the use of a charity for the private benefit or enrichment of an individual.
.. Joining Moore at the nonprofit were two other state Supreme Court employees who also lost their jobs over the monument controversy. One of them, Richard Hobson — now Moore’s campaign manager in the Senate race — became the charity’s president. Moore’s daughter, Heather, became its receptionist.
.. “He’s known as ‘The Ten Commandments Judge,’” he said. “That story was an important part of every fundraising appeal we did.”
.. In 2007, Moore became the charity’s president, committing himself to 20 hours a week, according to tax filings. The board agreed to pay him; the question was how much. They considered a figure as high as $500,000 annually, according to an internal letter the charity provided to The Post.
.. Moore would be paid whatever speaking fees and donations to the charity he could generate through what was called “Project Jeremiah,” the group’s ministry to pastors and preachers.
.. But he was guaranteed $180,000 a year under the agreement, with the charity making up the difference if Project Jeremiah revenue fell short. If the charity did not have the cash in a given year, the debt to Moore would accumulate.
.. In some years, including 2007, he was described as an outside legal contractor, tax filings show, and in others he was paid as president. His reported compensation ranged from $55,392 to $105,500 — and not until 2012 did the figure match the $180,000 the board had agreed to pay him.
.. In effect, the board was giving him the opportunity to foreclose on its headquarters to collect what he was owed. It also authorized Bentley to increase the amount owed to Moore as needed.
.. “My salary does not come by way of a regular salary from the Foundation, but through a special project that I run so that I don’t inhibit the Foundation,” he told a jury in August, according to a transcript of the hearing in federal court in Ohio.
In December 2011, Bentley agreed to increase the amount of debt to Moore, anchored by the mortgage, to $498,000, records show.
.. Moore’s full $180,000 compensation should have been disclosed each year, whether it was paid to him or accumulated as debt,
.. Kayla Moore became the charity’s president when Moore returned to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2013, making $65,000 a year from 2013 to 2015.
.. In recent weeks, the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group in Washington, accused the charity of openly promoting Moore’s Senate campaign through a Facebook page titled “Foundation for Moral Law.” Charities are prohibited by law from supporting or opposing political candidates.
Donald Trump Poisons the World
This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”
That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath.
.. This essay explains why Trump gravitates toward leaders like Vladimir Putin, the Saudi princes and various global strongmen: They share his core worldview that life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance.
.. It explains why people in the Trump White House are so savage to one another. Far from being a band of brothers, their world is a vicious arena where staffers compete for advantage.
.. In this worldview, morality has nothing to do with anything. Altruism, trust, cooperation and virtue are unaffordable luxuries in the struggle of all against all. Everything is about self-interest.
.. People are wired to cooperate. Far from being a flimsy thing, the desire for cooperation is the primary human evolutionary advantage we have over the other animals.
.. You don’t have to teach a child about what fairness is; they already know. There’s no society on earth where people are admired for running away in battle or for lying to their friends.
.. Jonathan Haidt has studied the surges of elevation we feel when we see somebody performing a selfless action.
.. Good leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt and Reagan understand the selfish elements that drive human behavior, but they have another foot in the realm of the moral motivations. They seek to inspire faithfulness by showing good character. They try to motivate action by pointing toward great ideals.
.. By behaving with naked selfishness toward others, they poison the common realm and they force others to behave with naked selfishness toward them.
.. By treating the world simply as an arena for competitive advantage, Trump, McMaster and Cohn sever relationships, destroy reciprocity, erode trust and eviscerate the sense of sympathy, friendship and loyalty that all nations need when times get tough.
.. By looking at nothing but immediate material interest, Trump, McMaster and Cohn turn America into a nation that affronts everybody else’s moral emotions. They make our country seem disgusting in the eyes of the world.
.. I wish H. R. McMaster was a better student of Thucydides. He’d know that the Athenians adopted the same amoral tone he embraces: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The Athenians ended up making endless enemies and destroying their own empire.