Is this suburban New York charity a terrorist front group?

Editor’s Note: This piece by Joseph Simonson features quotes from CSP Director and Senior Analyst for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, Kyle Shideler.

At first glance, the Westchester Peace Action Committee Foundation (WESPAC) seems unremarkable: a sleepy community organization with just one part-time staffer, a modest office in White Plains, N.Y., and little by way of public events.

But the group raked in $2.4 million in 2022—more than three times as much as it raised in 2020, according to public tax filings. The charity in 2022 spent nearly $1.5 million on “office expenses,” a category the IRS says should only cover “supplies, telephone, postage.”

“This is all very strange, it seems like they’re trying to obfuscate what they’re really spending their money on,” said former IRS tax law specialist and nonprofit consultant Patrick Sternal. “This doesn’t look like a particularly transparent organization, this filing raises all sorts of questions.”

…

“Historically, a lot of these fiscal sponsors have some historical relationship to foreign influence networks that never seem to have gone away,” said Kyle Shideler, the director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy.

…

“You have to think that if these sort of discrepancies were found in any business other than politics, the IRS would have been hauling off all their stuff in boxes long ago,” Shideler said.

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