“They wanted me to use fear to manipulate people.”
So says attorney and legal commentator Preston Moore, who posted a video Saturday saying he was offered, and rejected, $400 by the “Good Information Foundation” to make a video attacking Donald Trump.
Moore, who graduated from Harvard Law School and practices for the Georgia-based Beasley Allen law firm, posts daily at a TikTok account, trialbypreston. He focuses on legal news, political news, and personal stories from his own legal practice. He is not a Trump supporter.
With 89,000 followers, he has begun to build a significant presence. That, he told Breitbart News, seemed to be why he was approached by a 501(c)3 organization called the Good Information Foundation to make a video about Trump and January 6.
The foundation, whose website proclaims that “good information is the lifeblood of democracy,” and that it wants “to increase the flow of good, factual information online to counter and rebut the spread of misinformation and disinformation,” wanted Moore to create the video about January 6, and to post it on his social media platforms to reach the widest possible audience.
At first, Moore told Breitbart News, he was willing to do so. “To be honest, I would be willing to talk about specific facts, if you just want the literal facts,” he said. But after he asked for more information, he was given a set of talking points.
While the proposed content was originally billed as “nonpartisan,” the organization clearly wanted an anti-Trump attack ad: “The next paragraph made clear that it was not nonpartisan,” Moore recalled, noting that it said “now Trumpism has to go.”
As he noted in a now-viral video about his experience, he was also given a set of talking points that included several dubious claims about January 6, including that “The Trump campaign paid literally millions of dollars to make January 6th happen.”
That rang alarm bells, and when Moore replied to a representative from Vocal Media, the contractor that had apparently partnered with the Good Information Foundation, asking for evidence to back the claim, he stopped receiving replies.
In the video, which has been viewed more than one million times on TikTok alone as of Sunday, Moore notes with some irony that the “Good Information Foundation” was essentially looking for social media influencers who were willing to misinform.
“It became really clear that … they wanted me to use the most graphic images possible,” he told Breitbart News. “They wanted me to use fear to manipulate people into voting blue, or into voting not Trump. … And when they’re giving examples of the things they wanted me to say — don’t say ‘Trump and his allies,’ say ‘Trump Republicans’ — it became really clear that this was about putting out information … to impact midterms.”
Moore notes in the TikTok video that he does not support Trump politically.
What bothered him was not that the group was critical of Trump, but the dishonesty: “You’re being paid to put out fake news. That’s why it rubbed me the wrong way.”
According to the Internal Revenue Service website, the Good Information Foundation only received its 501(c)3 non-profit and tax-exempt status in April of this year. No other information appears to be available about the group’s funding and spending.
Under the federal tax code, 501(c)3 non-profit charities cannot participate directly in politics and retain tax-exempt status.
Breitbart News has reached out to the Good Information Foundation with inquiries; no response has yet been received.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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