The Washington Post: How Trump’s campaign may have offloaded spending on polling to a nonprofit

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On Thursday, CNBC reported that it had acquired a number of polls from a group called America First Policies. America First Policies is a 501(c)(4), a group organized under a section of the tax code that allows “social welfare organizations” to take contributions from donors without paying taxes on the donations — or reporting the donors. That’s thanks to a 1958 Supreme Court decision that determined that the NAACP didn’t have to list its donors, given the risk of harassment they might face.

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“If you do a poll, pay money for it and give it to a candidate, that’s an in-kind contribution,” Lawrence Noble, senior director of the Campaign Legal Center, told The Post. “So what [groups] started doing was they figured out that if they made the polling public, then anyone can use it, and it’s not a contribution to a candidate. So the game is to make the polling public, but to do it in such an obscure way that the public doesn’t know it.”

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“If you do a poll, pay money for it and give it to a candidate, that’s an in-kind contribution,” Lawrence Noble, senior director of the Campaign Legal Center, told The Post. “So what [groups] started doing was they figured out that if they made the polling public, then anyone can use it, and it’s not a contribution to a candidate. So the game is to make the polling public, but to do it in such an obscure way that the public doesn’t know it.”

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“Giving non-public polls to the Trump campaign would be an illegal in-kind contribution,” Noble wrote in an email. Making the polls “public” through a hidden link? A much grayer area. Especially, Noble said, “if they made a special effort to tell the Trump campaign where it was.” This was one question about @truthtrain14: Who was told how to interpret the other numbers in those strings of characters? If someone at the nonprofit tipped off someone from the Trump campaign about where to click, the legal picture changes, in Noble’s estimation.

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“The main takeaway,” Noble wrote, “is that the FEC’s and IRS’s enforcement of the laws and regulations is totally inadequate to ensure that we have the required disclosure and protect our elections from corruption.”

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