The Fix That Walks Its Target Through

By Ruth Justice · 2026-08-27

Declared advocacy, not analysis

This column is written under the declared perspective of Ruth Justice, whose values file states the perspective from which it is written. Pen-name columns extend beyond the publication's consensus values floor with explicit, declared perspective. The factual substrate is held to the same evidentiary discipline as the general newsfeed.

The brief that names the alter ego, then writes the loophole for it to walk through. Tal Fortgang, a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute, files exactly that case in Don’t Let Terrorists Run Nonprofits, a Wall Street Journal op-ed endorsing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s plan to require nonprofits to disclose whether their top officials have been convicted of material support for terrorists, fraud, money laundering, securities fraud, or tax evasion. Fortgang agrees the alter-ego problem is real — convicted terror-financiers rebranding under new names with no disclosure — and proposes his fix. The fix is the con.

Here is the trick, and the op-ed gives it to you in the same paragraph it proposes the cure. Treasury’s current proposal reaches individuals by their convictions. Fortgang would swap that for an organization-succession certification: each new nonprofit’s leaders must attest that none of them previously led an organization whose exemption was revoked for cause, whose assets were frozen for terror financing, or whose money judgment went unpaid — and that the new entity was not founded by, or to succeed, any such organization. The drafting is precise. The precision is the point.

Then the op-ed names the pipeline it has just exempted. The president of the Islamic Association for Palestine co-founded CAIR. IAP’s public-relations director became CAIR’s executive director. The Holy Land Foundation’s treasurer founded CAIR’s Texas chapter. Trial evidence documented HLF payments to CAIR for “consulting services.” Other IAP officers took instrumental roles at American Muslims for Palestine. CAIR’s exemption was never revoked. AMP’s was never revoked. CAIR is not, in Fortgang’s own regulatory vocabulary, a “new” nonprofit that arose after its predecessor was sanctioned — it is the entity already populated, before any rule was written, by the personnel chain the rule was drafted to interrupt. The dress is cut for the next fellow’s shoulders. The fellow already in the chair walks through in the suit he was measured for.

The federal courts have already considered the alter-ego claim against CAIR, on the government’s own evidence, and declined it. In November 2008 a federal jury in Dallas convicted five leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for funneling money to Hamas through zakat committees — the largest terror-financing conviction in American history, and rightly so. In 2009 Judge Jorge Solis, presiding over the HLF trial, threw out the prosecution’s “unindicted co-conspirator” allegation as it applied to CAIR and IAP. In 2011 the Seventh Circuit, in Boim v. Quranic Literacy Institute (647 F.3d 553 (7th Cir. 2011)), held the record insufficient to support liability against CAIR as a co-conspirator or alter ego of HLF. The Supreme Court declined to revisit. Treasury in 2006 designated KindHearts as HLF’s successor and froze its assets; it did not extend the designation to CAIR. Every step of the way the alter-ego theory has been litigated, contested, and rejected. The op-ed’s rebuttal is to omit the rejection.

The mechanism produces this case as a predictable output. When the regulatory trigger is the revoked exemption or the unpaid money judgment, the personnel of the stripped entity who arrived at the never-stripped entity before any trigger ever fired have nothing to disclose about their own arrival. The disclosure obligation catches the next reconstitution. The generation already constituted is, by design, the generation the rule cannot reach. The proposal dresses itself in transparency the way the entity it exempts dressed itself in consulting fees.

The class is recognizable. It is the alter-ego’s attorney — the fellow at the well-funded shop, paid by foundations with long institutional memories, who imports a defeated legal theory through a friendly op-ed page and asks the Treasury to do the drafting the courts would not let the Justice Department do. The Manhattan Institute has spent a generation selling deregulatory legal theory; this is what the theory looks like when turned on its head: an associational bar, run by the IRS, with the bar’s targets chosen by the politics of the moment. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page publishes it as a “transparency” argument. The public pays for the spectacle.

I won’t mention that a well-funded think tank publishes such prescriptions on the exact regulatory record where its preferred clients sit. Don’t change the subject, dear.

The column ends where the receipts end: by Fortgang’s own account, CAIR’s executive directorship was filled from IAP’s publicity desk — and the position is still held. The theory had its day; it lost. The suit is being tailored for the next fellow.

About Ruth Justice

Ruth Justice is a heteronym in Main Street Independent's editorial architecture — an analytical voice, not autobiography of any actual person. The position this column expresses is the publication's position on the territory Ruth Justice's lane covers, rendered through Ruth Justice's register.

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Published: 2026-08-27
Pen name: Ruth Justice