south Carolina shooting Archives

Dylann Roof’s White Supremacist Group Donated Thousands to Republican Candidates

The leader of a white supremacist group that apparently influenced Dylann Roof, the suspect in the killing of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns, including those of 2016 presidential contenders such as Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul, the New York Times reports.

Mr. Cruz, a Texas senator, said Sunday night that he would be returning about $8,500 in donations that he had received from the Texas donor, Earl Holt III, who lists himself as president of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

“We just learned this evening that Mr. Holt had contributed to the campaign,” a spokesman for the Cruz campaign said in an email to The New York Times. “We will be immediately refunding all those donations.”

Mr. Paul’s campaign said it planned to send $2,250 received from Mr. Holt to a victims’ fund set up in the wake of the shooting.

Earl Holt III, president of the Council of Conservative Citizens, in a 2013 image taken from the council’s website.
“RandPAC is donating the funds to the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund to assist the victims families,” said Sergio Gor, a spokesman for the campaign. Mr. Holt made four separate donations to the Paul campaign last year, records show. The campaign could not confirm the total received but said that all the money it identified from the white supremacist leader would be donated to the fund.

The Guardian first reported on Mr. Holt’s donations to the Republican contenders.

GoFundMe Shuts Down Donation Page for Police Who Shot Unarmed Man in Back

And once again, it has already started. Even with the video showing that the officer lied in his report on what happened in South Carolina, even with that video evidence showing a man being gunned down like an animal as, even with that video available for all to see, the supporters of the police who pulled the trigger are making themselves known with a GoFundMe page to raise money for the officer who shot the man in his back. But according to this report, that page was shut down by GoFundMe.

A fundraising page dedicated to South Carolina police officer Michael Slager was shut down by GoFundMe on Wednesday.

Slager was charged with the murder of 50-year-old Walter Scott after video surfaced of him shooting at the unarmed man eight times. GoFundMe’s public relations manager, Kelsea Little, told The Huffington Post that the page’s removal was “due to a violation of our terms and conditions.”

However, Little said GoFundMe was unable to discuss the details of the campaign with anyone other than the organizer because of “privacy concerns.”

One source of outside financial support for the Slager family will be North Charleston. In a press conference Wednesday, Mayor Keith Summey confirmed that the town would continue to pay for the medical insurance of the officer’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, until the birth of the child.