A far-right activist group that is doxxing college students who engage in pro-Palestinian protests revealed that it is funded by top Republican political donors and nonprofits backed by wealthy business leaders, a tax return reviewed by shows.
The group, Accuracy in Media, publicly disclosed on its federal tax return a list of donors who combined to contribute nearly $1.9 million to the tax-exempt nonprofit between May 2022 and April of last year.
The contributors listed on the tax return include billionaire Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, who Accuracy in Media said gave it $1 million.
The family foundation of shipping supply magnate Richard Uihlein is also identified on the tax return, which says the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation gave $10,000. The Milstein Family Foundation, which is run by real estate executive and Republican donor Adam Milstein, gave another $10,000, the group reported to the IRS.
According to its tax return, Accuracy in Media said it received $15,000 from the Coors brewing family’s charitable foundation. The Adolph Coors Foundation is chaired by former Molson Coors executive Peter H. Coors, according to the foundation’s latest tax records.
Yass, Uihlein, Milstein and Coors have all donated regularly to Republican campaigns over the past decade.
But Yass stands apart from the others. The co-founder of options trading powerhouse Susquehanna International Group and his wife Janine are the biggest political donors of the 2024 election. So far, Yass and his wife have contributed $70 million to dozens of Republican candidates and committees, according to the nonpartisan campaign finance database OpenSecrets.
Accuracy in Media blamed its accountant when informed the group that its 2022 federal tax return had been filed with a list of major donors and contribution amounts included. This data is typically meant only for the IRS.
Accuracy in Media did not dispute the authenticity of the nonprofit tax return. Nor did it challenge the accuracy of 25 out of the 26 donations listed.
But AIM President Adam Guillette told that Yass had been misidentified, and that he did not give to the organization.
Yass’ name and his business address appear on two separate pages of AIM’s 2022 tax return. The amount it says that Yass gave, $1 million, is the largest contribution listed on the filing for that year.
“Jeff Yass is not an AIM donor and never has been. I think our accounting firm made a major, major error,”.
The accounting firm, JBS & Co., said the information on the tax return was provided by the client, Accuracy in Media. It also said that the return contained an “incorrect donor.” But it did not say who the donor was, or who said that it was incorrect.
“We filed a Form 990, authorized by our client, and identifying an incorrect donor. We apologize on behalf of our client and to those incorrectly identified as donors to organizations that are not donors too. We have no further comment,” Phil Headley, a certified public accountant at JBS, wrote in an email.
A spokesman for Yass did not return a request from to clarify whether he made the donation or not. Milstein, Uihlein and representatives from the Adolph Coors Foundation did not return requests for comment.
CNBC was able to independently confirm the accuracy of the contributions AIM listed from the Uihlein and Coors foundations by cross-checking the amounts against the foundations’ publicly available records of donations they made. The Yass entry, however, was reported as coming from an individual, and not a foundation.
Nonprofit groups are not required to release their donors’ names publicly, but they are required to report to the IRS the names of donors who gave $5,000 or more. Typically, tax-exempt groups redact these major donors’ names on the public versions of their tax returns. But in this case, AIM did not.
Instead, the organization submitted its 2022 tax return to the IRS earlier this year with the names of major donors still attached. The forms were later posted online on Candid’s nonprofit database and ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
While it’s rare for a tax-exempt group to reveal the names and contribution levels of its donors, this is not the first time a nonprofit appears to have inadvertently posted a tax return that contained this information.