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ADL accuses anti-Zionist group of violating US federal campaign finance laws

The ADL also accused the JVP political action committee of amassing enormous in-kind contributions from its affiliate, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Monday filed a complaint with the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) accusing the political fundraising arm of Jewish Voice for Peace of misrepresenting its spending and receiving unlawful donations from corporate entities, citing “discrepancies” in the organization’s income and expense reports.

The complaint lodges a slew of charges against Jewish Voice for Peace’s political action committee (JVP PAC), including spending almost no money on candidates running for office — a political action committee’s main purpose.

From 2020-2023, JVP PAC reported spending $82,956, but just a small fraction of that sum — $1,775, just over 2 percent — was spent on candidates, according to the complaint.

The money went elsewhere, being paid out in one case for “legal services” provided by a company which “doesn’t appear to practice law” and other expenses.

The ADL described such spending as “unusual” and said that full disclosure of JVP PAC’s spending is necessary for assurance of its compliance with the Federal Election Campaign Act.

“Simply put, JVP PAC’s numbers do not add up, and despite repeated warnings from the FEC, the PAC has failed to correct the record,” ADL chief legal officer Steven Sheinberg said in a statement.

“Moreover, while JVP PAC holds itself out to the public as a mechanism for supporting candidates for federal elected office, a significant majority of the PAC’s spending did not go to candidates or have any apparent direct connection to a federal campaign. The public deserves to know where this money is going, and the FEC must hold JVP accountable for violations of the law.”

The ADL also accused JVP PAC of amassing enormous in-kind contributions from its affiliate, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which is registered with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as a social welfare organization.

While the group has reported compensating JVP for services it provided, there is evidence that the cash value of those services far exceed any amount JVP PAC has actually paid.

“The whole complaint demonstrates, in our view, pattern and practice of misbehavior that we should take very seriously,” Sheinberg, who filed the legal action, told The Algemeiner on Monday during an interview.

“Taken together, together with the fact that they don’t spend money on candidates, it is very damning.”

Sheinberg noted that JVP PAC has been warned by the FEC, established in 1974 to regulate the flow of money into politics, about its conduct, a claim which The Algemeiner verified.

Since 2020, the FEC has sent JVP PAC four requests for additional information (RFAI), citing incomplete disclosures, potential errors in its accounting, contributions which exceeded federal limits, and other issues.

“It’s a troubling set of facts that people should know about,” Sheinberg said.

JVP is a fringe anti-Zionist organization that has long celebrated terrorism against Israelis. Along with the terrorist-linked Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization, JVP has been implicated in numerous antisemitic incidents on college campuses.

Representing a small fragment of the Jewish community, which is overwhelmingly Zionist, the group has been accused of being tokenized by anti-Israel groups as a way of concealing the antisemitic intent of targeting Jews and Israelis in higher education and, more broadly, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.

At the conclusion of the academic year, the group played a role in helping SJP organize mass demonstrations in which students commandeered sections of their college campuses and refused to leave unless school officials acceded to their demands for a boycott of Israel and divestment from companies linked to it.

Before that, it cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.

JVP has powerful friends. In 2023, a landmark report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) senior fellow Ian Oxnevad revealed that it has, since 2017, received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion.

Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants from various foundations, indicating a growing alignment of philanthropic organizations with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel that is fueling antisemitism on college campuses.

“JVP is very open about its support for BDS,” Oxnevad wrote. “[It] has issued multiple statements in support of [Students for Justice in Palestine] on campus and against allegations of antisemitism from pro-Israel organizations. Cooperation between SJP and JVP is widespread across college campuses and has lasted for years since the BDS movement’s emergence.”

JVP did not respond to a request for comment for this story.