Move America Forward Responds to ProPublica's Hit Piece

Bumped. This was posted late yesterday, and was stomped by the Meatball. I want to make sure everyone sees MAF's response.

At Hot Air, Move America Forward responds to Ed Morrissey's request for comment.

I will direct you there for most of it, as this is his reportage. (He asked for comment, and got it.)

However, I want to include some of it hear, as I linked the earlier piece, and want everyone to know that MAF has responded.

Most of this seems pretty reasonable on its face, I have to say.

Allegation: Another Russo-associated group got money from the Conservative Campaign Committee.

Baker brings up how much money that Donationsafe got from the Conservative Campaign Committee in 2012, but that has nothing to do with MAF. Donationsafe helps provide IT support, and one of their guys often helps set stuff up on the MAF website when we come across something that I don’t know how to do. He helps us with it because we are a client and because we have a long relationship. It’s much better than paying gobs of money to have a dedicated web guy.

Donationsafe doesn't get hardly anything from MAF because most of our money comes in through care packages. Before we started using Donationsafe, MAF used to use a big company, Aristotle, which was more expensive in fees, and they didn’t have the easy to reach support staff. With Donationsafe I know the support staff guys are local; I can call them anytime day or night with a crisis, and I know they will drop everything and help me out.

Allegation: Donations to Move America Forward are actually billed to "The Campaign Store," another Russo-associated group.

The care packages are processed through The Campaign Store which Barker also demonizes like it's some kind of big conspiracy. The reality is that when MAF got started originally in 2004 there weren’t nearly as many options available for shopping cart systems online and none of them suited our unique needs, so we built our own with the help of a local team of web developers, and together that formed The Campaign Store...

So he's saying The Campaign Store is the operation they use to actually handle transactions.

...

The thing is, Move America Forward really only has two paid staff. We get the job done by using vendors like Donationsafe and TCS who provide IT services and a helping hand to get things done.

Allegation: MAF pays for the rental costs of a suite of offices, most of which are not charities (but instead are political operations).

Since MAF uses the majority of the office it would be unfair to make every organization pay equal parts, so the arrangement we have is MAF pays for the rent but TPE and RMA pay for many of the associated bills such as internet and phone service, service contracts and supplies/paper/toner etc. for the printers that we all share and that MAF uses often.

I assure you that overall it's an equitable division of cost.

More at Hot Air.

Well... assuming this is true, then that ProPublica piece seems, well, what a lot of what you thought it was.

posted by Ace at 12:25 PM

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