Exposing the supporters of “The Mount Vernon statement”: The Tea Party Manifesto

The entire crust of the Tea Party movement has been a right wing sham. It might have made sense if not for its supporters, primarily Former Reagan administration Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III, who has become involved as a leader of sorts in the tea party movement. Meese who was forced to resign as attorney general in 1988 over his role in three scandals, the Wedtech scandal, the Hamilton Promise software scandal, and the Michael Reconisuito CIA Scandal, should have resigned himself to an early retirement, but instead he has aligned himself with an organization that has a strong potentials for another political scandal, “The Tea Party”. If not a further disgrace for the three men involved, Meese, Feulner, and Regnery.

Meese and his close associates, Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner Jr. which is financed by several far right leaning foundations such as: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, Inc., Castle Rock Foundation, JM Foundation, Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Many of these same foundations are involved in the “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC) which wrote the hand book for wars of choice in the Middle East, namely a pre emptive attack against IRAN, IRAQ, SERIA, and Saudi Arabia.

The PNAC attempted to advise President Clinton to strike IRAQ. He “intelligently” denied their request.

Heritage has received donations from the East Asian nations of South Korea and Taiwan; SourceWatch reports that in 1988 Korean intelligence discovered that Heritage received $2.2 million from the South Korean National Assembly during the 1980's. Although Heritage denies this claim, they do admit to receiving a $400,000 grant from the Korean conglomerate Samsung.
The Korea Foundation, a conduit of the Korean government, has also donated almost $1 million to Heritage in the past three years.

Another associate is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery, Regnery served in the Justice Department during the Reagan Administration under Meese he and Meese are involved together is some questionable financial dealings involving their management of donations to The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.

Meese and Regnery: The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund – is a right-wing Virginia non-profit organization overseen by Ed Meese, William Bradford Reynolds, and Al Regnery just what it does with the funds is a serious question? Most of the money collected has gone to collecting additional funds, salary for its leadership, and to prop up other right-wing organizations to which they have ties, like The American Spectator, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Federalist Society

Tens of thousands of Americans have contributed to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. But while those donations total millions every year, the fund spends only pennies on the dollar directly assisting officers facing criminal charges.

Over the past five years, the charity collected more than $13 million, primarily through direct-mail pitches. But most of that money — more than $9 million — went right back to the professional fundraisers hired by the nonprofit legal defense fund.

Last year, for example, the group spent 81 cents on fundraising for every dollar collected, according to federal tax forms. After other expenses, the defense fund last year devoted only about 8 cents on the dollar to charitable grants, its tax forms show.

That grant money — about $275,000 — was less than the group's co-founders paid themselves in salary and benefits for the year. David H. Martin, a Washington lawyer who serves as chairman, collected $156,000, while Alfred Regnery, publisher of The American Spectator Magazine, received $81,000 for the part-time job of secretary-treasurer. In addition, the charity paid $54,000 into retirement accounts for Martin and Regnery.

Administrative costs have soared, particularly for salaries and rent. For years, the legal defense fund was run out of Martin's law office. But the nonprofit now subleases space at Regnery's financially strapped American Spectator. The initial rent in 2003 was $9,000 a year, but the nonprofit agreed last year to increase its payments to $42,000 a year — about a third of the total rent for the American Spectator's space.

And even as the charity devoted only a small fraction of its budget to grants, not all of the money doled out went to help accused officers. Instead, the charity's executives have sent a sizable and growing amount of cash to a small number of universities and conservative policy groups not mentioned in their fundraising pitches.

The charity's biggest beneficiary last year, for example, was not a police officer, but the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a national campus-based think tank that promotes "limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy, and moral norms."

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund sent $75,000 to the institute last year, part of at least $360,000 the defense fund has pledged. Regnery, secretary-treasurer of the defense fund, is chairman of the institute's board of trustees. The charity has also given tens of thousands of dollars to the Federalist Society, described by The American Conservative magazine as a "training ground for young conservative lawyers"; to the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University in Virginia, a leading center of conservative and libertarian legal studies; and to a project at McDaniel College — Martin's alma mater.

Wake up and look at who is behind any movement.