David Fahrenthold Transcript — Sept. 16, 2025
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:00:00):
Well after we’ve heard from such a variety of folks, I thought it would be great to have one of you to come in and talk about the work and the importance of this work, and if you’re a fan of deeply reported journalism, examining business, especially the business of nonprofits, you are no doubt familiar with David Fahrenthold of the New York Times. David started his reporting career in 2000, spending his first 22 years at the Washington Post where he covered Night Cops, the Environment, new England Congress and the Federal Bureaucracy. That’s quite a range. His first foray into nonprofit reporting came in 2016 when he wrote a series of stories for the post about Donald Trump’s private foundation. As a result of those stories, a New York judge ordered Mr. Trump to shut down his foundation and pay a $2 million penalty. David was awarded something better, the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and join the New York Times in early 2022 to take on the nonprofit beat full time. So I thought it would be a natural progression to talk about the business of nonprofits and how you report on this kind of strange animal that they can be. So please welcome David Fahrenthold.
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:01:43):
Thank you.
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Thank y’all for having me. It’s really an honor to be here, especially at a place where I look out and see so many newspapers and publications that I’ve read and admired. So I’m honored to think that I can teach you guys something. I want to talk a little bit, as Kevin said about nonprofits. It’s something that I’ve found fascinating. It’s a beat that I’ve covered full time since 2022. I’m going to share a little bit about sort of the basics of what they are and what’s out there as far as reporting resources, and then I’ll shut up and let you guys ask questions after a while. But let me get into it just sort of on the basics. So why do I want to cover the nonprofit? Be why should you want to write about nonprofits? Because there’s lots and lots of money in many cases, some of the largest and most powerful institutions in your town, whatever your town is will be nonprofits, hospitals, universities, large charities.
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There’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of power. Those institutions have a huge amount of power in local state national affairs, and there’s lots of transparency. I’ve covered businesses for a while and I can tell you for sure that there is a lot more out there about nonprofits than there is about the average business, especially the average private business in some cases. If you’re writing about a powerful person or a powerful institution, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, their nonprofit will be the most transparent part of their entire life, especially people who’ve tried to sort of keep their life private or to curate what the public knows about them. The nonprofit’s going to be the most transparent piece of their life and the best part, there’s very little regulation and almost no enforcement. So the things that you might presume about a nonprofit, that it must be doing things right because it has nonprofit status because the IRS granted its status because your state gave it nonprofit status that there must be some sort of presumption that they’re doing something right because they’re allowed to operate as a nonprofit.
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Totally wrong. Nobody regulates these things really at all, and to the degree they are regulated, they’re often regulated through a partisan lens regulated by state attorneys general who want to hurt nonprofits associated with the other side and not really look at the ones associated with their side. All that to say is there’s a lot of room for us. There’s a lot of room for journalists because there’s a lot of wrongdoing that’s out there that you can find in documents that nobody else has found, especially regulators. Okay, so just start with the basics of nonprofits. We hear that word nonprofit and you think of a hospital, a charity, a food bank, something like that, and those are nonprofits, but the world of nonprofits is actually much bigger than that. There’s more than 30 types of tax exempt nonprofits. Some of them like food banks are what you would expect.
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Some of them are not like the PGA tour is a nonprofit, a very rich nonprofit, but a nonprofit nonetheless, and for some reason I have not figured out yet, there are two nonprofit casinos in Iowa. If anybody here is from Iowa, yeah, you can find out. I still don’t know why there are two nonprofit casinos in Iowa, but there are, it’s important to remember that not all nonprofits are charities. Charities are a subset of nonprofits. You may have heard the word term 5 0 1 C3. That’s the tax code section that designates its charity that is the most common kind of nonprofit and the ones that the public knows best. Those along with churches get some sort of special privileges for the fact that they’re supposed to be out there helping the public good. They can offer tax deductions to their donors. If you give them a hundred dollars, you can get a tax deduction unlike a lot of other nonprofits.
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And within those, there’s two subtypes, public charities and private foundations. That distinction will matter less to you unless you go really far down the rabbit hole. But just if you remember one thing out of this charities or 5 0 1 threes, that’s the best known kind of nonprofit, but it’s not the only kind. The rest are these ones you’ll probably hear about a lot. 5 0 1 C fours are dark money groups. Those are groups that are used as the name implies dark money, often used as a way to hide public political activity. They can, unlike a 5 0 1 C3, they can spend money on politics. They can endorse candidates. They don’t have to disclose their donors, so they’re used often as a way to hide political activity. There’s also five 20 sevens, which are also political trade associations, labor unions, sports leagues like the NCAA and PGA tours, credit unions, which for those of you who’ve covered them, are basically banks. Those are technically nonprofits and pay less taxes in banks, and again, two casinos in Iowa, I don’t know why.
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So who regulates nonprofits everywhere. The IRS regulates nonprofits, the IRS grants, nonprofit status to charities and other groups. If they come to the IRS and say, Hey, here’s our qualifications. Give us nonprofit status, give us the tax breaks that come with it. And the IRS nominally audits all nonprofits or can audit all nonprofits to see if they’re telling the truth in their statements and if they’re doing the right things. In 38 states, there is some kind of state level regulation of nonprofits. I include Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York because it’s mostly the attorney general. It’s not always the attorney general, but generally, if your state is a state that regulates nonprofits, it’s done by the attorney general, but nobody regulates them very well. As I said, you cannot assume a charity or any nonprofit is trustworthy just because you find it in the list of IRS registered charities or in your state’s list of registered charities or because it files nine 90 that you can find.
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None of that is a reason to presume that they’re doing the right thing because a lot of them are doing the wrong thing and regulators don’t look very hard when they look at all. Just to give you an example of how bad the regulation is, so I include this story that I wrote. There was a guy in Staten Island. He previously had been a Wall Street like Penny Stock scammer actually once dangled someone out of a skyscraper by his ankles later on decided he’d get into nonprofit fraud and this is what he did. He would send the IRS registration statements saying, hello, I am the American Cancer Association in Michigan. I have a PO Box in Staten Island. And then even the next week he would say, hello, I am the Red Cross of North Carolina. I have the same PO box in Staten Island. He did that 76 times, often claiming to be the American Cancer Society of 10 different places or 20 different places.
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The American Cancer Society caught onto this and started telling the IRS, this guy is not associated with us. Don’t grant him any more tax exemptions. And the IRS did. They proved 76 different fake charities at the same PO box in Staten Island. So all of those got to be in the IRS system. All of those could take tax deductible donations, and so basically that guy’s plan was to, he would get them approved by the IRS. Then those charities would automatically be included in things like Amazon gives or other sort of Facebook gives, like passive giving platforms that just list all the IRS approved charities and let people donate to them. And so he would just sit back and wait for people in Michigan to give to his American Cancer Society of Michigan and then keep the money it took forever for him to get found out.
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That was what we said in the story. This was a stupid fraud. This was one of the dumbest frauds you can possibly imagine, and it worked 76 times. I just tell you that. So remember, that level of stuff gets by them. So don’t presume anybody’s on the level because it got by the IRS. As an aside, you guys as reporters will appreciate this, we went to go find this guy in Staten Island and to go interview him. He wouldn’t answer the phone, and I brought along a photographer because I knew he had once dangled someone out of a window in case that if I was to be dangled out of a window, at least there would be pictures of it. And I went to the guy and he thankfully only had the two story house, so I wasn’t going to be that bad, but I went ready for am I going to ready for anything when he answered the door and when I rang the doorbell, what he wanted to do was confess.
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I knocked on the door. He was like, yeah, I did all this. I was in a bad time in my life. Anyway, later on then I called his lawyer for comment. His lawyer was like, he did what? He told you what? Anyway, just remember this story when you deal with nonprofits. So I want to give you a sense of how I start a nonprofit story and the sort of the way you can use the resources that are out there before you even make a phone call. How can you start to get grounded in a nonprofit story before you make a phone call? So you start here, the IRS Form nine 90, as I say, like the Deep Sea, you can study it for years and not fully contemplate its depth and beauty. It is a form that every nonprofit has to file every year with the IRS.
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I say every nonprofit. Every nonprofit above a certain income threshold, every nonprofit that gets more than $50,000 a year in revenue, they have to file it with the IRS. They have to make it public. So it often appears there’s a ProPublica site that I would recommend to all of you called nonprofit Explorer. I see nods like you’ve used that before. That’s the best free site to find these, but it is basically an x-ray of the nonprofit’s finances or at least what it wants to declare about its finances. So if you’re going to write about any nonprofit, you start by pulling these up, reading them closely, and then trying to take down and understand the information that’s in them from year to year. So that’s where I start. What I always do is to go through and catalog. I do this by hand. You can do it with AI or other ways, but I do it by hand.
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Recopying the data of things like how many people are employed, what’s their revenue, what’s their contributions, just sort of the biggest, most important numbers for this organization year after year. I do it because I want it to go through my own head and I want to see the trends that are there. And you ask yourself questions like, is this organization growing or shrinking? What’s changing with its expenses? Is it doing what it says it does? Does it say it’s helping the poor but really spends all its money buying baseball tickets for its owners or things like that? You can just get a real sense of an organization’s activities and you want to go through this to sort of understand how does this organization see the world? Are they desperate for money? Are they riding high? Do they have a lot of assets? Do they have very little and things?
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The nine 90 also includes who is on their board. You can find out is it all relatives of the guy who runs it or is it a big board full of unconnected people? So first to go through and catalog the finances. Then, as I said, I catalog the group’s, officers and board members. This is a good example because this is Elon Musk’s Foundation, which we wrote about last year. This is the entire board. Elon Musk, a guy who manages Elon Musk’s money, a person who works for the guy who manages Elon Musk’s money and they work. So this organization has billions of dollars. It’s one of the largest foundations in the country. It’s like $5 billion. Look how much, and these are all the employees. There’s no paid employees. It’s just these three people. They work a total of 2.1 hours of work a week. This one only works six minutes a week on it, and that’s up from zero. It was zero the year before. So you can start to get a sense from that of like, is this a professionally run organization? How much thought is going into what this organization does?
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In this case? Is it being run as an extension of Elon Musk’s business or is it being run independently? So the nine nineties will show you those things as well. And then nine nineties will also show you outgoing donations for a group, different groups. For some groups, this will be really important. For Elon Musk’s Foundation, it’s basically all they did was give money away. So this was a real indication of what they were doing. For other groups like the Red Cross or a university, most of what they spend their money on its operations. So there won’t be a lot of outgoing donations, but if it is a group that gives most of its money away every year they have to say who they gave their money to and in what amount. So you can track that over time, see how the donations change, see the scale, see the recipients.
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In some cases like this, they’ll say, what was the point of the donation in this case, just to give you a sense of the kind of thing you might learn from this. So the Musk Foundation had never given any money away to anybody in south Texas. Musk has a space launch facility for SpaceX in South Texas and it had never given any money to anybody in that area. You could tell that by looking at its past th nineties until one day a rocket exploded over south Texas and rained metal basically all over the greater Brownsville area, and then all of a sudden an hour later, the Musk Foundation begins giving heavily to people in Brownsville. So it was easy to track the way that he was using his foundation, which is again supposed to be serving the public good and not his own business to do PR for his business. So this is what step three looks like. When you’re done, I go through and catalog all the different, the recipients of the donations, the amounts and the years.
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The other resource that you can use in some cases for nonprofit reporting, there are seven states that require nonprofits to turn in more information than the nine 90. They require extra documentation. That can be statements of who their fundraisers were, more about the conflicts of interest within if they’re paying people who are also their board members. You get more details from these seven states, and I can send you guys this afterwards so you don’t have to write it down, but it’s those seven, California, Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New Mexico and New York. These are great. If you’re looking at a charity that’s big enough that would fundraise nationally, even if it’s not based in your state, it may have to register in these states if it is fundraising there. So you can often find things sooner and more detail on those databases. Sadly, if you’re in states like Texas, Wyoming, Utah, there’s a lot of states that either don’t require any documentation or require just basically the nine 90. So you will have only gotten what you already have.
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I always start by going through those financial documents, trying to build the time series of all the different things that I’ve learned about the changes of this group’s donations, revenue leadership, and then write down what are my questions, what are the questions I want to ask of the humans involved. Now that I’m moving from the document phase to the human phase, it’s important to me to sort of stop then and write down, okay, what are the things that I’m trying to answer Now the questions or mysteries I have from the documents thatt can answer. And then a couple of extra tools you can use to learn a little bit more. Nonprofits are required to 5 0 1 C3 is charities. When they register with the IRS, they have to send in an application to the IRS that often lists what’s their purpose, who do they think is going to give them money, what are they going to do in the world?
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And the IRS has to see it. That’s the most scrutiny you ever get from the IRS, although again, you don’t get much. You can get a copy of that and there’s two ways you can get it by foing it from the IRS and again, I’ll send out this document so you don’t have to write this down. It’s an extremely byzantine process where you fill out this form, you email it to an email address, you hear nothing back ever, and then sometime between three weeks and six months, they mail you copies on paper, it just shows up in the mail. You never hear from any human that they’ve received it. There’s no tracking number. Unlike other FOIA cases. There’s no tracking number. You just get a packet in the mail at some point in the future. But if you’re doing a series of stories on something or if you think this nonprofit’s going to be important beyond today, do this because when it comes in, you may learn more about despair is number three. That’s an important step, but you may find out something that they told the IRS, Hey, we’re going to take all our money and use it to help foster children and really they’re doing something totally different with it.
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Now this is a question you’re going to get a lot. Do nonprofits have to reveal who gives them money? Most of them do not. There’s a special category of charity called Private foundations, which do have to like the Musk Foundation. They have to reveal who gives them money and how much everybody else does not. But there are workarounds, there’s, I don’t want to read all this to you, but one of the most important things you can do, well, two things. One, you can search to see if other nonprofits have given money to them. It would be in their nine nineties that you do that by searching nonprofit explorer. And also this is a really fun part about nonprofit reporting. It’s one of the few times as a journalist when you can have the force of law behind what you’re asking for, you can call someone up and say, the law compels you to give this to me.
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And that is that all nonprofits have to, upon request, provide to the public their three most recent nine nineties and the form they filed to the IRS to get tax exemption. And so again, I will send you the right language, but it’s a very satisfying feeling to be able to email on someone and says, as you know, section 61 0 4, the tax code requires that you produce this information to me today or within a reasonable amount of time, and you can, they have to give it to you. Some of them are so shady that they won’t or so disorganized that they won’t. And it’s also in your reporting process. You may not want to reveal to the nonprofit that you’re on to them yet, but when you reach that point, this is a way where you can ask them and they’ll give it to you. And sometimes the documents they file with the IRS at the beginning will say, we are starting our food bank here and we already have X, Y, and Z people lined up to be our donors.
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So you can see a little bit into their donors. Then the last thing here before I take questions is please let me know how I can help. My email address is here, please email me because I feel like I learned so much more about this beat and the different many complexities in it by hearing from other reporters who say, I really want to know X. Can you help me? Just today I was emailing, there’s a great story I really recommend in the defector, the sports site about the Savannah Bananas. You guys know who the Savannah Bananas are about their nonprofit? They have a charity called Bananas Foster that fosters, it’s like a foster care. And so defector wrote a story about them. Mostly what it spends money on apparently is tickets to the Savannah Bananas games. But I emailed that guy and said, did you know about this IRS form you can get? So if you ever run across something, please don’t hesitate to email me because I would love to helping you solve a problem may help me figure out how to do this. So yeah, without the questions Yes, in the back.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:20:00):
Hang on just a minute. Let me get a microphone. Yeah, you’re good.
Scot Refsland | West Virginia Daily News (00:20:04):
Okay, gotcha. My name is Scott, West Virginia Daily News. My question is, we’ve been doing an investigation on a nonprofit and according to their public minutes, they’ve been exceeding the $50,000 limit for the ePost. I think that’s what it is on their nine 90. But what we found is on their nine 90, they’ve been submitting e os, so they’ve obscured their financials. How do we resolve this issue and get their financials?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:20:37):
That’s really interesting. So they’ve been filing the postcard nine 90, that is just for people under $50,000 in revenue, but they really have more than $50,000 in revenue. Yes. That’s really interesting. In that case, there wouldn’t be documents to find because it seems like they’re lying to the IRS, but I guess in that case, I would just ask them, if you were really under 50,000, produce the documents saying, so show us how. Show us why you, you’re doing this right, us, why you’re following the rules. There’s no public document. I could point you to because it sounds like they’re just lying, but I think that’s the first story I would write is tell us why you’re not violating the law here. It seems like you are usually in that case, those cases are a little easier because usually they’ll file when they file a nine 90 or in California, like a state form, they have to break out their expenses.
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We spend much on grants to individuals. We spent this much on travel office overhead, and they also have to list contract. We paid. These are what we paid in salary. So somebody who is doing that, who’s spending all their money on administrative costs, if they file a nine 90, it should be pretty laid out in that document. So the wildfire thing is hard because it’s so new wildfire. I mean, the nine s take a while to be filed and then become public, but in that case it would be, I think it should be shown in the nine 90. Don’t they feel bad? They do. And those are to the victims, and I think those stories, that kind of thing, this disaster happened, we’re going to start a fund for the victims. Those are some of the most abused charities, both because it’s often started by people who don’t have a background in charities and don’t really know what they’re doing and get more money than they expected to. But also because it’s like everybody, the donors felt good just giving the money, right? The donors aren’t going to go check on that at all because to them, once they give the money, they feel good and they move on. They’re not going back to see like, Hey, did you really use this to help people? So there’s so little scrutiny. Everybody feels so good about this. They don’t want to go back and look. But yes, those are great stories.
Savannah Hawley-Bates | KCUR (00:22:42):
Hi, I am Savannah Hawley-Bates. I’m at KCUR, the public radio station in Kansas City. Similar to Judy’s question, is there a way to track though when they disperse this money? So for example, we had a mass shooting at a Super Bowl parade last year whenever we last won the Super Bowl, and what we were trying to figure out is when these organizations that popped up did disperse the money, and I know United Way took a really long time to give the money out, but is there an easier way to track that, I guess, to see who is getting the money and when
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:23:23):
Sometimes, so you’ll be able to find it by year, which is sometimes helpful, sometimes not helpful. Sometimes for something like that, giving it away within a year isn’t that great. So sometimes in the nine nineties they’ll list it in order of donation instead of listing the recipients alphabetically, it’ll be listed in order, but sometimes not. In that case, what I’m trying to do something like that, I usually just end up calling the recipients. If they said, we’re going to give money to X, Y, and Z groups, you can call them and say, Hey, when did you get this check? Because typically you won’t get the date or even the month of the donation out of the nine 90.
Desiree Mathurin | The Charlotte Observer (00:24:00):
Hi, I’m Desiree. I work with the Charlotte Observer. Two questions. One, what are some red flags we should be looking for when we’re kind of diving into the nonprofits? And I guess three questions. What are some of the red flags? When should we be thinking about looking into a nonprofit and then sort of a emotional question. I know some nonprofits mean well, but they’re terrible. I was going to say something else, but they’re not doing well. How do you know when to report on them without laying on the fact that they’re trying but they’re not doing well? You get what I mean, that emotional aspect of I know that they really do want to help the community, but they suck at it. They’re just not doing well and ultimately need help or something. I don’t know.
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:24:52):
Tell me your first question again, I already forgot.
Desiree Mathurin | The Charlotte Observer (00:24:54):
Red flags. What should we looking for?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:24:56):
So when I look through nine nineties and I’m looking for red flags, the things I would look for would be payments to insiders. If they list, there’s a whole schedule of the nine 90 whole additional thing you’re supposed to fill out if you’re paying, basically if somebody who has the authority to spend money is spending the money on themselves or their relatives, they’re supposed to declare that. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. They’re also supposed to list contractors. These are the contractors who paid more than a hundred thousand dollars, and if you can find out, oh wait, that contractor looks like it’s this guy’s uncle. That’s a real obvious red flag. Also, I would say really high compensation for executives. That’s another thing they have to list. How much do they, not only how much they pay, but do they pay for first class travel?
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Do they pay for charter aircraft, that kind of thing. An organization that has a really high salary for its leader in comparison to the total budget. One of my colleagues did this great story about Glab, the anti-gay discrimination group where they pay, it’s not that big of a group, but they paid for the executive directors like renovations to her summer house. They paid for first class travel for her and her family for ski trips. Things where a lot of the money is going to insiders or leaders. The other thing would be if it looks like that they are not paying themselves off, but if it’s just a really poorly run charity. So if you see that they spend a huge amount of their money on travel and office space, overhead payments to contractors and very little on whatever they’re actually supposed to be doing, that could be malfeasance or it could just be incompetence, but that’s another sign.
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And another one I would say is just one that’s not financially doing well. A place that is where the assets are going way down the spending really outstrips the revenue. To answer your question about when the sort of moral call of when do you decide to write about something, to me there’s two factors. One is how new is the organization? Because that actually was what the Shan Bananas charity said was like, yeah, we did this wrong, but we’re new. We just started this. And that carries some weight. I feel like at the beginning, if you feel like people are good hearted, but they haven’t figured out either the complexities of running an organization like this, or if they’re filling out the nine 90 the wrong way, that could be a reason to go easy on them. The other thing is what have they taken? What did they promise?
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The people who gave them money. And so that could be either like you’re a vendor to the city and you’ve got a huge amount of money, or you raised a huge amount of money from donors and you told them you do something. The more that they’ve promised to people and the more money they’ve taken in under that pretense, to me that becomes easier to say, well, even if it’s just incompetence, good hearted incompetence, it’s still a story. People are relying on you. You’ve told people you can do this job. And now if you can’t, just the fact that you’re incompetent and not evil, that’s doesn’t mean it’s not a story. So that to me is the dividing line, is that have they given people a reason to rely on them and taken this huge amount of trust and then not done the job with it?
Lucia Maffei | Boston Business Journal (00:28:08):
Lucia, real quick. Hi, I’m Lucia. I work for the Boston Business Journal. Whenever I have a nonprofit story, I go to the site of the Attorney general of Massachusetts for the nine 90, which is a really good website. I dunno how many state website you can say about that, but it’s really good. It’s easy to navigate. But the thing is, I always find the nine 90 for the year before, and is there a way to get more updated financials about a nonprofit?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:28:41):
That is one of the frustrating things. Is it the previous year is nine 90, assuming that they’re operating on a calendar year, it’s due in May. And so if they follow that, the IRS might post it in June, but a lot of them can get an automatic extension to November. And so that means that you can’t see 2020 four’s numbers until November, 2025. That is very frustrating. The ways around that I would say are two ways. One is to look at states, like you said, Massachusetts and other places will have earlier deadlines and might get filing sooner. And the other thing would be to just use that thing I mentioned earlier where you can go to them and say, Hey, give me your nine 90. Sometimes they’ll do it. I recommend doing that anyway because I mentioned earlier how they don’t have to list their donors. Most s don’t have to list their donors. They have to tell the IRS, but not to us. And sometimes if you ask them, it all compels you to send me your last three nine nines. They’ll forget and send you the version with the donors included. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s worth doing, and that’s another way the secrecy of donors.
Tanya Babbar | Hearst Connecticut Media (00:29:43):
Very good. Thank you. Tanya. Hi, I’m Tanya Babar with CT Insider Press, Connecticut Media, whatever we are at this point. Well, I wanted to say first good hearted incompetence is a phrase I think I’m going to steal now. I feel like I’ve tried to summarize responses. People have given their quote and I never thought to just say they chalked it up to good hearted incompetence.
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:30:09):
Well-intentioned incompetence, right?
Tanya Babbar | Hearst Connecticut Media (00:30:11):
Yeah. But I guess one question I had when you’re speaking about Elon Musk’s Pride Foundation is that I am not an expert in this, but I feel like I’ve noticed in reporting especially recently, that it’s, and it’s not a new thing, there’s the Pandora papers. It’s easy to create shell businesses. So if you’re trying to do something shady, is there a reason why it would be favorable to do that through a nonprofit as opposed to just, I made my LLC called Banana Poop 1, 2, 3, and people don’t have to know I’m behind it. I can make it in Wyoming. Why would I, that’s my first question. Why would I do it through a nonprofit? And the second one is that I love stories with who donated to whose campaign, and I feel like that always takes a lot of work. You have to look up the name of the person, see if they’re connected to a contract, et cetera. You talk about starting stories with nonprofits by like, I’m going to look into this nonprofit and I’m going to start with the forms. Do you ever run into slash how do you navigate stories where you’re more interacting with what are the people behind this nonprofit doing and other parts of their life?
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If I open up a campaign finance report, I don’t think I’m going to immediately be able to say, oh yes, Joe Smith. I know he’s part of the, I don’t know if that makes any sense, but
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:31:45):
Well, to answer your first question about nonprofits, the reason you do it is that the tax deductions that’s, you get Elon Musk that particular year. His nonprofit had been really small, and then he got this huge Tesla payout and he was going to have a giant tax bill. And so he gave, there’s a loophole where if you give appreciated stock to your own foundation, you can get a huge tax break. He avoided billions of dollars in taxes by giving this money to his foundation. So that’s why people generally give to nonprofits in opposed to using an LLC or something is that they get tax deductions for doing it. The real scourge of this world, and you guys should write this down because it may come up, is something called the donor Advised Fund. Has anybody ever heard of a donor advised fund? The bane of my existence?
(00:32:26):
So basically their charities run by banks like Goldman Sachs has one, Morgan Stanley has one, and basically it’s a way to give your money away in a way that hides it. So the Elon Musk Foundation, we know Elon did this because foundation their donors and because Elon’s name is on it, but if he’d given his money through the Goldman Sachs donor Advised fund, we would never have known. So you may run into those, and that is a growing market for secrecy in the world of charities in a way that frustrates what I talked about earlier about how charities are so transparent. But yes, that’s the first thing I would say is that the reason people do these things, Musk is a great example of that, is that they want the tax breaks. Thank you to your other question about when you’re going in and looking for shady people, but unfortunately the shady donors don’t show up on the nine nineties, but you can usually look at the people they list as employees and board members and go back through and figure out who they are. Those are the people you start with.
Ashley Murray | States Newsroom (00:33:27):
Thank you. Ashley Murray, states newsroom. I was just wondering how you decide which stories to do. I’m sure you get a ton of tips now at this point in your career, and when do you decide to pull the trigger on that story?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:33:45):
I end up doing a lot of nine 90 research on stuff that I don’t do just because I feel like tips come in and you’re looking for either something that’s emblematic of something bigger or something where it’s just a great tale in and of itself. I guess for me, the two bars are either, is it a small thing that tells you something important about something bigger or is it something where it’s, it involves someone like Elon Musk or Donald Trump or somebody. The organization itself is important or its donors are important on their own. So a lot of stories don’t fall into that category as much as I like them or want to tell them. But yes, those are the two. Just to give an example of one that was more emblematic, I wrote this story last year about this group, this guy who said that, his guy in California who said, I lost my partner to police violence.
(00:34:37):
A policeman killed my partner, my best friend, my future husband in Oklahoma in 2007, and I started this group to stop police violence. It basically became a group that was dedicated to abolishing the police. They wanted to build their own parallel 9 1 1 system that you could call, I mean, some cities have this, but they were trying to do this nationwide where you could call with problems and not ever involve the police. And it turned out that the guy’s story was a lie. This partner, this story of his partner being killed in Oklahoma was completely made up and that he got all this money and then spent it all, not all of it, but he spent a lot of it on extremely expensive shopping sprees and Airbnbs and shoes, and the food deliveries to himself just wasted all the money and the amount of money involved was not that much.
(00:35:26):
And this guy was not that famous in the world. There’s lots of people who are trying to stop police brutality, and he was not that famous. But what made it interesting was that it was emblematic something, which is that all the people at his organization had all said, we are trying to create a world where we don’t need police. And in the meantime, we promised never to call the police. If we need the police, we will not call them because that perpetuates the world of police violence. And so now this guy stole their money and they lost their jobs and they weren’t able to do because he destroyed this organization. They weren’t able to do this work that was so important to them. And so now they were like, what do we do? We’ve all swarmed never to call the police, but this is a case where we want restitution. And they said, in an ideal world, we would have a way of having restorative justice where we’d sit down and he would admit what he did, but he won’t do that. He won’t admit that. So that was a fascinating story to see them grappling with the consequences of taking this very idealistic position. Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that even though it’s small, it’s kind of, it tells you something bigger
Noor Adatia | Dallas Business Journal (00:36:33):
Yeah, I’m Noor with the Dallas Business Journal. I just had a question about the expenses that some nonprofit leaders may make. I’m assuming that’s not explicitly said in the filing. So I was wondering in what ways is that, I’m assuming it’s personal or what are some of the red flags I guess we should look for when it comes to things like that?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:36:58):
The nine 90 has all these additions called schedules that you have to add on if you do things that fit those categories, and one of them, I believe is Schedule L is about leaders perks. So it lists their salary, their bonus payments to them, their benefits. They have to check boxes if they provided charter airfare, all these other stuff. And so not everybody does that, but they’re supposed to flag things there. And so you can go to the nonprofit explorer, the ProPublica site and look at that and see what they’ve said. They gave that person, and sometimes they’ll be like a little additional note, we bought a house for this person, or universities do this. We spent X amount of money to buy, put a down payment on a house for our new president. So they’re supposed to catalog those things to some degree. Sometimes you also see them hiring.
(00:37:45):
They’ll pay the person one salary and they’ll also hire them as a consultant and pay them extra. So that would be listed in the section on consultants. All those things are theoretically supposed to be cataloged, but what you often find is that they’re not or they’re not in the right way. I mentioned those state level filings. Sometimes those ask more questions about conflicts of interest and payments to insiders. So if it’s a big enough organization, then it would fundraising nationwide. It’s worth looking in those because sometimes you’ll see them flag organizations. I did a story last year about Mike Flynn, the guy who was the Trump’s National Security advisor. He took over this charity and then he was paying four members of his family or five members of his family, and some of them he declared as relatives and other ones he didn’t declare as relatives. So those are places where you can start to see what did they declare, and also if they paid this person as a contractor or this LLC as a contractor, can I go back and out? Who owns that LLC? And if they’re related to them, that’s where I would start.
Julia Eastham |Walla Walla Union-Bulletin (00:38:40):
Hi, my name is Julia Eastham. I’m with the Walla Walla Union Bulletin. Over the last few months, we’ve seen some rescinded government funding and grants to nonprofits. Did the nine nineties cover that or how is there a way to track what funds are being rescinded or granted to nonprofits
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:39:01):
That is hard to see in real time? So the nine nineties usually have a line item that says it breaks down their sources of funding, and one of them is government grants, but usually just a total. And so it’s hard to tell is that how much of that is federal, state, local, whatever. It’s all just in one number. So you’d see a year later that went down the easier way. We want to know it now. And the easier way is often to talk to the state, because usually in a lot of cases, the state is the intermediary for federal grants that are going to food banks or whatever else. Most of the money passes through a state agency, and the state agencies often are the ones who have the list of the USDA, for instance, may not even have a list of all the groups that are getting its money on the other end, but the state will have it. And also I’ve had good luck with, if you’re dealing with an industry that has a lot of grantees in a state like feeding programs, afterschool feeding programs or food banks, there’s often an association of state grantees in Washington or a national Association of grantees, and they often will have a better sense of who got what. Sometimes that’s easier to go to one of those associations or go to the state agency rather than try to find it from the feds. And the nine 90 will just be too late. So that’s where I would start.
Jasmine Robinson | Verite News (00:40:16):
Jasmine. Hey, how’s it going? My name is Jasmine. I’m a reporter for Verite News in New Orleans. And how do you go about looking into a charitable organization that has stopped filing their nine nineties and has thus lost their taxes and status? How do you look into those organizations? And also just more broadly, how do you look into non charitable nonprofits? What are the first steps into looking into those?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:40:43):
This still operating theoretically, but
Jasmine Robinson | Verite News (00:40:45):
Yes, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, I’m putting them on blast.
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:40:50):
Wow, okay. Well, I guess that I would say you could start by compiling whatever the nine nineties up to whatever point they stopped. And Louisiana, I don’t think has any sort of state registration, so there’d be nothing there. And are they responding to questions at all?
Jasmine Robinson | Verite News (00:41:11):
No.
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:41:12):
Well, it is a little suspicious that they’ve been,
Jasmine Robinson | Verite News (00:41:15):
Yeah, they’ve had some issues in the past. One of their, not to get into all their tea, but several years ago, former executive director got into some legal trouble for money laundering and fraud charges. So they have a history, rocky history there, but their current leadership and their one single employee is not responding to any of my inquiries. So I’m like, how else can I dig into what’s going on?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:41:42):
I would say they should be registered as a business entity in Louisiana, even if they’re not charity. So just to see what’s, if they’ve kept that up, have they kept renewing their corporate status? Because usually they become a corporation first and then a nonprofit. So sometimes they have kept that up and it tells you something about who their officers are. And then I would also look to see, so every nonprofit has something called an EIN Employee identification number. You can look for that if you know what that is for the organization, you could put that in a ProPublica’s full text search and just see are other people still giving to them even though they don’t exist. Do you know, have they’ve been revoked by the IRS or they just haven’t been filing nine nine because after three years of,
Jasmine Robinson | Verite News (00:42:22):
Well, yeah, they stopped filing for three years, so their status was revoked.
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:42:29):
It’s really interesting. In terms of other kinds of nonprofits, most other nonprofits that I listed, all the different kinds, most all of them have to file a nine 90. So if you go to ProPublica or if you go to the IRS website, you can find nine s for all of ’em. There are some groups called 5 27. They’re more political, different form. It’s not a nine 90, but it’s also on the IX website. It’s hard to find. So if you’re looking for that and you can’t find it, just email me and I’ll show you how to do it. But almost everybody that has any sort, like the PGA tour or the NCAA or whatever, they should have a nine 90 of one kind or another. The thing to remember though is different rules apply to them. And so something that a charity couldn’t do or give money to a political candidate, some other nonprofits can do. So if you’re ever in a situation where you found something and you don’t know if it’s wrong, definitely good to find. There’s lots of good professors out there who are study nonprofit law who will tell you, yeah, this is okay. It wouldn’t be okay for a 5 0 1 C3, but it’s okay for a labor union or whoever.
Olivia Evans | Courier Journal (00:43:33):
Hi, my name’s Olivia Evans. I’m at the Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and the second largest employer in Louisville is a nonprofit healthcare system. And then that healthcare system also has a bunch of other 5 0 1 c threes that it has both listed in Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and a couple in Tennessee. And it has so many nine ninety’s for both itself as the healthcare is the 2.4 billion healthcare system. But then for the multitude of its different foundations across state lines and whatnot, and it honestly just feels a little overwhelming with the amount of data that there is and then the ones that it’s like, oh, we have this nonprofit, but now this one no longer exists and whatnot. So when there is a surplus of the transparency and information, what are some things that you would go through and actually try to look forward to try and tell a story? Because so far, I’ve mainly focused around actually reporting on the healthcare system, but I know they have dozens, if not 50 or more different nonprofits across a multi-state area, and I don’t even know what I should or could look for.
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:44:35):
Yeah, those are hard because you’re right, you could spend your entire life if somebody working for them probably does spend their entire life cataloging nine nineties. In that case where there’s so much information, I usually try to find former employees, find somebody who used to work for them or somebody who used to be on their board, somebody who just gives you more of a sense of if there’s something weird or newsworthy, where is it? Which nonprofit is it in? Because otherwise, if you try to sift through all of it, you’ll go crazy and maybe not find a story. So that’s the case where I normally you start with the documents and then move to the people, but in that case, I might start with the people and just to get a sense of where’s the most sort of rich vein to dig in.
Carrie Rengers | Wichita Eagle (00:45:15):
Hi, I’m Carrie Rengers. I’m with the Wichita Eagle. It’s a daily newspaper, and I just have a super broad question kind of playing off the overwhelming though a little bit. I’m sure that everybody in here has metrics and all that stuff that they have to meet. And I feel like my specialty is cranking out stories for my paper and my editor, our story counts have been a little low lately, and he’s been told, well, you can’t miss those. So if you can help me by doing two a day, that would be awesome. And so I can’t even fathom however interested I might be unless I had a really good tip that somebody said, You got to check this. I could say to him, you got to give me two or three weeks or whatever. I just don’t see having the time to do this. So I’m wondering both how do you have the luxury of time and how long does this take you? And also any hints or advice you would offer for how we could work this in?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:46:17):
Yeah, I’m really sensitive to that. You don’t want to be in a situation where you waste a bunch of time on something that turns out not to be a story. It turns out not to be a good story. I think two ways to attack this would be, one, to try to use social media or other ways of letting people know that you’re out there and interested in this sort of stuff. Just being sort of, it’s probably as you can about writing tips. If you know a nonprofit or a business that’s worth interest, it’s worth writing about, send it to me. Or here’s a web form using Twitter or other mediums to do that. People often have something that they want to tell you about and they don’t know who to call Often I find it so hard, even though it shouldn’t be to know, okay, I have a story and I want to find the reporter who knows about or who cares about this stuff.
(00:47:03):
It can be really hard on our websites to figure out who that person is or even if you call the newsroom to know who that person is. So to sort of put yourself out there as somebody who’s looking for this kind of thing, and you’ll get more tips that way. The other thing is I find that I try to take these stories if I can and make them into as many little stories as I can, both because that satisfies the need to have copy, but also because I think it makes, rather than taking a and writing one really big story, if I can find one interesting detail about my thing, I’m going to write it. And then I’m going to let people know that I’m interested in this topic and readers interested, maybe get some sources. And then as soon as I learn something else, I’ll write another thing to break into as many pieces as I can just because I think it builds a sense of momentum for readers. Readers have a sense that this is something important being written about all the time, and every one of those gives you a new chance to find readers and sources and bring more stuff in. The hard part is the beginning though, like you said, finding the thing that’s most worthwhile. And sometimes that’ll spring out of other beat reporting, but I think it’s helpful to be as public as you can about, I’m looking for this sort of stuff. If you got it, send it to me.
Christian LeDuc | The Cincinnati Business Courier (00:48:09):
My name is, my name is C. I can hear you. My name is Christian LeDuc. I’m the restaurant retail manufacturing reporter for the Cincinnati Business Courier. One of our largest developers is a nonprofit, and they’re responsible for pretty much single-handedly the entire development or redevelopment of the downtown Urban Corps of Cincinnati. And they’re 5 0 1 C3, but they have an incredible amount of power, and most of, I don’t necessarily cover nonprofits, but a lot of what I write about, it’s called three CDC. They’re the landlord of these businesses. And the businesses will, off the record, tell me like, oh, well, they promised this one thing when we were going into this neighborhood, but our experience on the ground is something completely different, and I can’t do anything with that because they won’t come on the record to shit talk their landlord essentially. But three CDC has so much power in Cincinnati that it’s almost impossible to figure out what they’re doing. So do you have any experience in dealing with these organizations that are nonprofit developers that have immense power over people?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:49:22):
That’s fascinating. In that situation, one way around it is to think about other parts of government. It would touch other ways. It would produce foible documents like permit applications, health inspections, OCC inspections, other thing, other ways in which a city or a county or a state would have some dealings with them that you could FOIA and get a sense of when they got the zoning permission to build X, what did they say about what it was going to be? And now can I go back and figure out is it something different than what they said? I think in this case, you don’t want to think about, I’m going to write the story that’s going to tell the whole piece at once. It sounds really complicated, but can I find one evocative piece where they said X and did Y, or where they treated themselves where they didn’t follow through on their promises. I also would be super interested given how much money it sounds like they’re handling, how much they’re paying their executives. Nonprofits are supposed to be serving the public good, and so what’s the good that’s coming out of this? How are they serving the public and what are they doing with all the money they have anyway? It sounds like a great university sort of situation where there’s so much cash flowing into this nonprofit. They buy up all the buildings on certain streets, and then
Christian LeDuc | The Cincinnati Business Courier (00:50:34):
They hold them until they buy up certain, basically entire streets of retail and they’re moving north in my particular city,
(00:50:43):
And they just hold them until the economy or until they have the money or until they have the people to go in there and fill those spaces. And what’s resulted is there’s a lot of empty storefronts that are either not available for people to buy that are just single entities, or there’s a lot of turnover in the areas that they’ve developed, and they’ve not to get into their T, but they call it revitalization. Their people that are against it call it gentrification, and they used all these different terms, and so they’ve done a really good job of doing pr and now that they own pretty much a lot of the businesses in a lot of the buildings, nobody can really come after them. Not saying they’re doing anything bad, but it’s very hard to find out what they’re doing because of that
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:51:25):
That is fascinating. Just the idea that that’s a charity is interesting. Why does it, that’s a thing where if you’re a developer, you could make money doing that, right? Why does a charity need to do that? So the added sort of moral status they’ve given themselves by being a charity gives you a little more room to say, if this is supposed to be serving the public good, why is this street empty? To start with that? Why are they doing something that makes at least temporarily the neighborhood worse? That’s a great story. Anybody else?
Rayonna Burton-Jernigan | Capital B News (00:52:00):
Hi, my name is Rayonna. I work with Capital B News at Gary, Indiana. And really not saying we’ve been talking about the negatives of nonprofits, but where I work at, I would say for every one business there’s at least two nonprofits, just the way to help the city and stuff like that. So I would love to just from your perspective, knowing that there are a lot of cities like that, what story ideas would you think would be able to be generated for something like that?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:52:29):
That’s such a rich vein of stories because those places have so much power and they’ve promised, I feel like the thing I would do is look at results. At some point people try to, some places will try to coast by in their good intentions, look at what we want to do for this town or this block or these people. But if you don’t deserve it, if you don’t do it and it’s been a few years, you have to be held to that account. I think that’s one thing. I mean, also, as you said, not all the stories have to be negative. I think it is really fascinating what works, right? People that are trying something different and nonprofits have this tendency to sort of quantify their goodwill or their good intentions instead of quantifying what they did and how it works and to try to find places that are actually doing something different where there’s a tangible result. Those are good stories too. You have to get past, everybody wants to do good or at least says they want to do good, who’s actually doing something that can see the difference.
Judy Farah | Comstock’s business magazine (00:53:30):
Lighthearted journalism question. I am of the generation that went into journalism because of Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post, and now you’re at the New York Times. So I’m just curious what it was like with that transition. It’s almost like a New York Yankee going to the Mets or something like your rival. What was it like with that transition?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:53:53):
Well held off. I had not ever wanted to go to the Times. We’d always heard such terrible stories about what mean people they were in general. That’s been false. The one philosophical thing, well two things surprise me. One is really the rigidity about rules at the times. It’s been this way for a long time. It’s always going to be that way. I remember writing a story, one of the first stories I wrote for the Times I wrote, I included a contraction or Won’t or something, and the editor was like, well, there’s a place for contractions in the New York Times, but not in a story like this and a lighthearted story somewhere. But also the way that they think about reporters’ responsibilities was really different. The Post had had this sense that they wanted everybody to be sort of ready to jump into anything at any moment, whatever the big story of the day was, you were going to jump into it.
(00:54:45):
And so the more you stayed there and the more your stature grew, your experience grew, but the less specific your job got. You just were sort of a reporter at large and you were just ready to jump in if there was something big, which there often was. Whereas the Times is much more like you’re going to cover this beat and do it for 15 years or 10 years or something. You’re going to accumulate expertise and the way we’re going to show our appreciation for you is you stay in that beat. You don’t ever leave. And there’s downsides to that too. But the good part is that when I run into something in my beat where I’m like, oh, I am writing about a nonprofit that’s is involved in this other part of the world. I don’t have to learn all the rules of that other part of the world.
(00:55:23):
I can just go find a times reporter who knows about it. So as an example, one of the first stories I did was about these people at the, this agency of the un. They found themselves with $60 million in surplus that they weren’t really supposed to have. And they decided to spend 6 million writing a song about the ocean. They paid a guy $6 million to write a song about the ocean, which it was not even a very good song. And I wanted to know that sounds like a lot of money to pay for a song, but I don’t know. And so the Times had a guy who was the business of music reporter and he was like, oh, that’s way too much. Lemme tell you what songs cost and here’s the catalog of songwriting. So the ability to tap into that expertise, that’s been really fun.
Judy Farah | Comstock’s business magazine (00:56:03):
I just think it’s important to remind some of these younger reporters that Watergate was a series of stories.
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:56:09):
Yeah, it
Judy Farah | Comstock’s business magazine (00:56:09):
It wasn’t the one big thing. You were talking about those and some of the stories that were boring, they were about financials. So it’s just like series of stories that built up that eventually brought down a president.
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:56:19):
Yeah, those are the most fun stories to do when you feel like you’re building on something.
Elizabeth Schanz | Crain’s Cleveland Business (00:56:24):
Hi, my name’s Elizabeth Sch and I’m a reporter at Crane’s Cleveland Business and I report specifically on healthcare and nonprofits. So the nonprofit intersection. So you kind of have been talking a lot about story tools and tips and you kind of just touched on beat cultivation. What do you feel like have been the most helpful tips in terms of cultivating that be to the point you’re at now?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:56:46):
I’d say as just a way of getting new stories, finding new story ideas. I use Google alerts, just set Google alerts. I have one for nonprofit, arrested nonprofit charge, nonprofit corruption, a whole bunch of other things. And then to find substack newsletters, people that are niches that they’re interested in. A niche within your beat that you can read every day just because you want to be seeing everything, even if so, to be able to point that even if the first time you see some trend, you don’t write about it, but then you’re like, oh, I’ve seen that four different times in four different places. And then the other thing I do is I have a list of people who are sort of interested in the world of nonprofits, like professors, executives, lawyers, people that sort of would have a view into some big section of the world of nonprofits.
(00:57:37):
And every time I write a story, I email it to all of them. Here’s my latest story on nonprofits. Tell me what you think of it and let me know if you see something else. So you sort of jog their memory and so like, oh yeah, and that doesn’t often work, but it works enough. And those people are positioned enough that they might see something before I did. So to try to cultivate that sort of secondary set of people who are like, remember who you are, appreciate what you’re doing and think of you when something comes along. I think those are the most important things. Also just, and this is the obvious I think, but when you write a story about somebody or about something to make sure that you follow up with them, send ’em a note, send ’em an email, send ’em a letter, whatever, saying thank you so they remember it for next time, that also is a good reminder that you have to be fair to them if you’re going to see them again or write them tomorrow, you have to be comfortable writing something today that you can send to them tomorrow.
(00:58:28):
But yet, I think those are the best places to start. Although it’s so frustrating when you start a beat that you don’t know anybody. You feel like you’re never going to know everybody. But those to me have been tools to try to move ahead a little bit.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:58:40):
I’m going to take the liberty of asking the last question. Yeah, I think this will work. Many probably had seen that there was a lawsuit filed today against New York Times 15 billion from the president of the United States. And I know there’s probably not a lot you can talk about in the merits of it, or maybe you can, but more generally you face probably pushback not only from the subjects of your reporting, but also the government when you’re reporting lands in that arena. How do you handle that and what can you offer folks in terms of advice when that does occur?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (00:59:24):
Well, specifically on the subject of Trump, he has sued journalists his whole life. He’s been suing journalists forever, and I think he’s sued the times before and he just generally not one, I can’t think of it
a single time that one of his accusations has actually come to trial and he’s succeeded in getting images or a verdict against a newspaper. What’s changed is that some news outlets for reasons that they can defend have settled with him. A, B, C news and CBS particularly have settled with him and given him millions of dollars. So the fact that he’s sued us is not surprising. He sued us before and will probably sue us again and it shouldn’t change the way we write about it. In terms of more broadly, I think there’s the normal things you do to protect yourself, which is that you call sources back and run things by them to make sure that you’re getting the facts right, not checking their quotes, but making sure that you’re correctly describing what they think and what they said and what happened.
(01:00:22):
There’s all the efforts you make to reach out to people who don’t want to talk to you like the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, all the efforts you make to try to contact people that won’t respond. And I think that’s important. That’s one of the things that I really have tried to use social media for is I think when readers see in a story, a New Orleans jazz orchestra did not respond to requests for comment. People think from watching the movies that the question you asked them was, do you have any comment? You chased after them with a microphone and said they think that was the question. Do you have any comment? But no, what you probably did was say, here are my five findings, here are the 10 questions I have. So tell me if you think those findings are wrong. Answer these 10 questions.
(01:01:01):
In the past when I was writing more about Trump, when he wouldn’t respond, I would post that online on Twitter or wherever else. Here’s the questions I asked, just so people can get a sense of the huge effort you went to try to tell this side, to give these people a chance to tell this side of the story. People really respond to that and I think it increases the pressure on them to respond the next time. So try to think about ways you can not only ask for comment in the right way, but to let people know how hard you work to try to get their comment. And then also the biggest thing for me is people can criticize your reporting as long as you got the facts right, and as long as you feel like you were fair, you gave everybody a chance to comment. You heard everybody’s perspective, the complaints beyond that, you can feel good about the story you did. People are always going to complain. You’re always going to get people who are mad about the story, but you want to be sure that if you got the facts right and you were fair to them, that that was your responsibility. If they’re mad that this thing happened and people know about it, the Aspen Daily News, their motto is like, if you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.
(01:02:12):
I can’t stop the fact that you did it. If you’re mad that people know about it, that’s not my fault. But if you’re fair and you get the facts right, then you’ve done your job
Kevin Johnson/NPF (01:02:20):
Like an evil nonprofit. I lied about the last question I’m going to ask Marlon
Marlon Hyde/WABE (01:02:26):
Marlon Hyde, WABE news in Atlanta related to this last question or last question. Do you believe that you’re going to see an increase in these foundations, these 5 0 1 3 Cs or all of these nonprofits that are using money in ways that they’re not advertising? And the reason why I ask is because we are being run for the second time by somebody who was not for doing that exact same thing, and a lot of those political friends and allies sit up in the C-suite down the street. So do you believe that you’re going to see an increase or did you see an increase in 2017?
David Fahrenthold/New York Times (01:03:10):
I think certainly there’s, people have a sense that the IRS is not looking, but that was already true. I mean, the IRS was already, they cared so little about nonprofits that I think people already had a pretty strong sense that they could get away with things. I’m not sure how much worse it could be. The thing that I’m going to be interested to see is, so Texas, my home state, the attorney general in Texas, Ken Paxton has used, he’s the nonprofit regulator there and he doesn’t do very much, but what he does is very political. Now he goes after Catholic charities on the border because they’re serving immigrants. He goes after nonprofits that are doing things that are legal, I think, but he’s not alleging you stole money. He’s saying you served immigrants. You did a thing that I’m now going to cast that used to be seen as charity.
(01:03:57):
I’m going to cast it as being against the law using aggressively enforcing the law against your political opponents. I’ll be interested to see if Trump’s IRS or the DOJ does that if they start going after nonprofits in a way that that will make it seem like the law is being enforced more aggressively, but it’s going to be targeted just to people they don’t like and not in this, the IRS is almost asleep at the wheel now, but at least you could say that they are doing it impartially. I don’t think the little that they do is politically imbalanced and to see if it becomes that way will be interesting.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (01:04:29):
I think we have to cut it off there, unfortunately. But I want to thank David for sharing so much valuable information with us today. Thank you so much.
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