Washington, D.C. — House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has no problem manufacturing outrage about the legitimate work of nonprofits and civil society, fed by dark-money operatives at the Capital Research Center. But when it comes to the most corrupt Attorney General in modern American history, who just got fired, he’s nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins is aggressively working to reduce transparency requirements for America’s largest public corporations, which flies in the face of his wife’s work at Capital Research Center, where she is the board president. And a federal court delivered a win for civil society this week, blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to turn houses of worship into partisan campaign operations.
Comer Investigates Nonprofits While Real Corruption Gets a Pass
James Comer has built a career deploying congressional oversight as a weapon against progressive organizations, with the wildly partisan Capital Research Center reliably supplying the ammunition, up to and including offering personal briefings to the White House. But this week offered a stark reminder of what Comer refuses to investigate.
Trump just fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, his loyal soldier who weaponized the DOJ against Trump’s political enemies, including James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell, and multiple Democratic lawmakers. Bondi falsely claimed an Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk,” recklessly exposed trafficking survivors’ identities, gutted the DOJ’s public corruption unit, and hung a banner with Trump’s face on the building’s headquarters.
There isn’t a nonprofit in America whose conduct comes close to what Bondi did atop Trump’s Justice Department. But when it comes to overt corruption in Trump’s ranks, Comer doesn’t run oversight. He runs interference. Case in point: he’s trying to use Bondi’s firing as an excuse to back down on enforcing her subpoena to testify to Congress.
The Transparency Hypocrites
Capital Research Center has spent decades positioning itself as the guardian of nonprofit transparency, invoking disclosure requirements as a cudgel against progressive groups and demanding accountability from organizations whose views they oppose.
That posture deserves a closer look. CRC’s board president, Sarah Humphreys Atkins, is the wife of SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. And right now, her husband is aggressively working to reduce transparency requirements for America’s largest public corporations, launching a sweeping review of the core disclosure framework for public companies, and fast-tracking a rule to cut corporate reporting from quarterly to semiannual.
The same network that feeds investigations into progressive civil society is connected, by marriage, to an agenda letting Wall Street tell the public less about what it’s doing. Capital Research Center invokes transparency when it’s a weapon against political enemies. When it applies to their allies in corporate boardrooms, they have nothing to say.
A Court Win for Civil Society
In a win for civil society and the First Amendment, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas rejected the administration’s scheme to gut the Johnson Amendment, the 1954 law that has long protected houses of worship from being turned into partisan political machines. The Trump administration had crafted a settlement with the IRS and the National Religious Broadcasters that would have exempted churches from the law’s ban on political candidate endorsements. Judge J. Campbell Barker ruled he lacked jurisdiction to approve it.
The Johnson Amendment has protected the line between civil society and partisan politics for over 70 years, and this ruling keeps it intact. The administration has signaled it will keep fighting. So will we.
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