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I see your point, but I think a better analogy would be if they paid a contractor to organize a "Let's Trash the Trails" event and then cited that event to potential donors as a reason why they should donate. At a certain point, the use of the money is so different from the organization's stated goals that a decent argument can be made that the donors were defrauded. For purposes of criminal prosecution, organizations should get a good amount of leeway on this issue, but depending on how the facts shake out, it looks like SPLC may have crossed the line.
That seems like money laundering to me. I mean, they are setting up phony bank accounts in order to conceal the source of money. If Donald Trump had pulled something like that in order to discretely pay a few sugar babies, he surely would have been prosecuted.
I would guess it's pretty unusual for not-for-profits to help fund and organize activities which they nominally oppose.
An even better example would be if investigators discovered several invoices to contractors for "trail obliteration" totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Trail obliteration is the process of disbanding and renaturalizing eroded, worn out trails to limit additional damage and provide a better user experience through reroutes. At minimum, this can be done by volunteers in an afternoon by disguising the entrance of the old trail with brush for the first 50 yards or so. At maximum, this can involve going in with heavy equipment to regrade the entire corridor, followed by covering the disturbed area with brush and new plantings. It's a necessary management practice where appropriate, but it's always a hard sell to donors, land managers, and even within the organization, because when you have to fight tooth and nail to get every mile of trail built no one wants to hear how much money you plan on spending to get rid of mileage. But identifying old, unsustainable trails and getting rid of them is a best practice, and this type of work is related to the core mission of any trail development organization, regardless of how contradictory or unpopular it may be. It is not, however, evidence that the organization hates trails and is trying to get rid of them.
Do you seriously believe that the reason the SPLC gave these groups money is because their directors are actually white supremacists who are trying to fleece their liberal donors? Because that's what would be required for their donations to constitute the kind of fraud that you're alleging. It seems more likely to me that, whatever their exact thought process, it was part of a scheme that they thought would benefit their mission. It may have been a dumb, misguided scheme that was unlikely to work and that would have pissed off their donors had they known about it, but wire fraud isn't about making misleading statements over the internet that some people don't like. It's a crime with specific elements that must be satisfied, and there's no evidence that they were satisfied in this case.
Whether or not it seems like money laundering to you is irrelevant. Let's look at the statute:
I've omitted a lot of irrelevant surplussage, but the upshot is that you can't launder legally earned money. It isn't a crime to play secret Santa. If there's no fraud, then there's no laundering.
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