‘Cynical cash grab’: FBI chief nominee Kash Patel’s profitable links in the non-profit world

The personal foundation of Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s controversial pick for FBI director, has directed donor money to a business controlled by its own vice-president, Andrew Ollis, a direct marketing entrepreneur whose business affairs are now deeply entangled with Patel’s.

Two websites associated with that non-profit direct visitors to an online clothing store, Based Apparel, an online Maga merchandising operation owned by Ollis and Patel.

The revelations underline the wide variety of efforts Patel has made to profit from his association with Trump since he worked in his first administration, and played a leading role in Trump’s efforts to deny the result of the 2020 election.

They also show how Patel and Ollis have turned their top-tier Maga-linked network into income.

Patel has positioned himself as a ferocious supporter of Trump and called for the president-elect’s political enemies to be investigated and potentially prosecuted. He even drew up an enemies list of 60 “government gangsters” that he published in one of his books. Many civil liberties advocates fear that Patel will use the FBI to do Trump’s bidding or go after his political foes, especially as the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, announced his resignation on Wednesday.

Erica Knight is a spokesperson for the Kash Foundation and its board, whose membership includes Patel, Ollis, and the lawyer Jesse Binnall.

In a telephone conversation, she said that the board had “a conflict of interest policy that was created by outside attorneys”, adding that “in terms of the conflict of interest policy, they require all board members to disclose and recuse themselves from any decisions that are going to involve conflicts of interest”.

She said that relationships between the foundation and Ollis’s and Patel’s businesses were “fully compliant” with the policy.

Knight also said that “they created this foundation with the understanding that Kash was going to be scrutinized” and “while everyone is looking, I can promise you that there is going to be nothing found in the foundation”.

Accountable.US is a transparency non-profit based in Washington DC which has independently analyzed the relationships between the Kash Foundation and Ollis’s businesses.

In an online statement accompanying the non-profit’s findings, Accountable.US’s executive director, Tony Carrk, said: “Not known for his subtlety, Kash Patel has sought to make money off the Trump brand in several ways including selling a children’s book on election denialism,” adding: “This enrichment also appears to extend to his friends and partners. Sadly, this appears to be the same old Trump economic model that only looks out for the lucky few at everyone else’s expense.”

The organization characterized the payments to Ollis from the foundation as a “cynical cash grab”.

Patel first launched the Kash Patel Legal Offense Fund in 2021. The IRS later granted the Kash Foundation 501(c)(3) non-profit status in July 2022, according to agency records, but the organization weathered controversy before any of its filings were publicly available, partly because of confusion as to the relationship between the two entities.

ABC News reported in March 2023 on Patel’s “vague assertions and inconsistent claims” about the charity’s activities, citing blurred lines between the 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation and its predecessor, the private Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust, and the use of the charity’s website to plug Patel’s book and videos including some in which he endorsed political candidates.

IRS rules state that 501(c)(3) charities “must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests”, and that they are prohibited from “directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office”.

ABC also reported that Patel had not publicly identified anyone that the organization had helped with grants.

Subsequent filings and public statements have done little to allay these concerns. The Kash Foundation has not specified or identified any of the beneficiaries of its charitable activities, and new information has prompted deepening questions about how Patel and those around him may be deriving private benefits from the organization.

The Kash Foundation’s website says that the organization’s mission includes offering “veterans, active duty military, and law enforcement financial assistance” and “education of the public in areas the mainstream media refuses to cover” and to “provide scholarships for Americans seeking tuition assistance for public, private, college or other areas of education” and “legal defense funds to support whistleblowers, defamed American citizens, and other governmental accountability efforts”.

Kash Patel on the campaign trail for Trump in October. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Its IRS filings say that the $213,000 in grants included “$70,000 in academic scholarships to young men and women, thousands of dollars of grants for financial and legal assistance for whistleblowers, needy families and education”, but neither the foundation and the foundation’s website nor public statements by the organization’s representatives offer any information about 2023’s grant winners.

Currently, the website advertises open-ended “grant applications” with a web form for applicants that asks them to “summarize the nominee’s personal hardship including any relevant financial circumstances”. There are no apparent indications of the normal range or upper limit of ad hoc grants issued from these applications.

Details of a separate grant on the site do not suggest that the Kash Foundation is generous relative to its fundraising.

On an application form for the Josh Cremeans scholarship, a grant for college freshmen named after a Maga movement social media personality who died in 2023, indicate that the program offers “no more than ten (10) $1,000 Scholarship Grants”.

What the foundation’s filings do show is that in 2023, its charitable giving was far outstripped by promotional spending, and a large proportion of that has gone to a company controlled by Ollis.

The foundation’s most recent 990 tax form shows that in 2023, its payouts to its two biggest contractors – more than $425,000 – were twice what it gave out for charitable purposes, and more than 57% of all its spending.

The charity’s biggest contractor – One and Oh LLC – alone received more than scholarship recipients, having been paid over $275,000 for “advertising merchandise”, according to the filing, which alone represents more than 37% of all of the non-profit’s spending that year.

One and Oh LLC appears to be controlled by Ollis, who also serves as the Kash Foundation’s secretary.

Ollis’s name is not included in any public filings associated with One and Oh LLC. The company was registered in Virginia in April 2021 via Legalzoom, a registration agent, which many states allow to function as an administrative and legal stand-in for beneficial owners. Although Ollis’s name is not on the filings, they locate the company’s head office at an address in the exurbs of Leesburg, Virginia.

Loudoun county property records indicate that that address is a 5,500 – sq ft house belonging to Ollis and his wife, Alyssa.

State-level filings offer more insights into the relationship between One and Oh LLC, Ollis, and the Kash Foundation.

One and Oh has registered as a professional fundraiser for the Kash Foundation in Minnesota. That state’s laws require such registration for “any person who, for compensation or profit, performs for a charitable organization any service in connection with which contributions are, or will be, solicited”.

South Carolina state records, first highlighted by Accountable.US, indicate that an open-ended August 2022 contract between One and Oh and the Kash Foundation paid Ollis’s company a $3,000 a month retainer, as well as $2,000 for every $10,000 the company raised on behalf of the non-profit.

Knight, the Kash Foundation spokesperson, said of the payments to Ollis that they included “direct costs and investments”, offering the example that “if the website needed updating, you know, some of that stuff is an actual hard cost”.

The Kash Foundation’s IRS filing does not specify what the “advertising merchandise” it paid One and Oh for is. However, both the foundation’s website and an affiliated website, fightwithkash.com, prominently feature “Shop” links, both of which lead to a dedicated Kash Foundation landing page on the web store for Based Apparel.

That company was incorporated in Delaware in 2022; state filings for the parent company and its branches in Wisconsin and Virginia only name registered agents. However, the Virginia branch is registered at the same Leesburg address for the property owned by Ollis and associated with One and Oh.

Ollis has publicly characterized Based Apparel as a joint venture between him and Patel.

For example, In a 19 August appearance on the rightwing livestreaming show Live on Grove Street, a recording of which is posted to “alt tech” site Rumble, Ollis said that after the Kash Foundation was set up, “Kash immediately wanted to do merch, he wanted to take our branding and put it on merch, and he wanted to be able to send it to his friends and stuff like that.”

“And then Truth Social went online and boom: the merch took off,” he added.

According to Ollis: “Before we were doing Based Apparel, we were doing the foundation merch” and selling “an incredible amount of merch every month.”

The Kash Foundation’s IRS filing says that the non-profit netted more than $84,000 on gross sales of more than $240,000 worth of “inventory”.

Ollis’s involvement in both the Kash Foundation’s and Patel’s affairs goes beyond this merchandising pipeline.

Domain registration records for the Fight With Kash website show that when it was initially registered in September 2021, the registrants were the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust and Believe Media.

The latter company was originally formed in Delaware in 2016, a state where companies can operate without a high degree of transparency, and where it is possible to register and operate businesses without revealing beneficial ownership.

Believe Media branches are registered in other states where “foreign entities” are required to provide more information about company ownership and location. The Indiana branch locates the company’s head office at the same Leesburg, Virginia, property where One and Oh is headquartered.

Believe Media’s website indicates that Ollis is Believe Media’s CEO.

Ollis’s history indicates he shares something of what Rolling Stone magazine recently described as Patel’s “pitchman approach to politics”.

Virginia company records indicate that he founded Believe Media in 2017.

Between March 2016 and June 2019, nine web domains were registered with Ollis’s Gmail address. Only one of the domains, coderedpolitics.com, still showcases any content, though the Guardian’s visit to the site triggered a browser warning about an expired security certificate.

However, snapshots of that page and two others at the Internet Archive show that they were set up as rightwing news outlets.

In two recent podcast appearances, Ollis gave more details about his relationship with Patel and the nature of their ventures.

In the August Live on Grove Street appearance, Ollis said that a year after he started Believe Media, he was sued by a former employer and hired Jesse Binnall to defend him.

Binnall “regularly trafficked in outlandish claims of election fraud” in the months after the 2020 election, notably at a December 2020 hearing of the Senate homeland security committee, where he aired false claims that 1,500 dead people had voted in Nevada, and 42,000 people had voted twice. Similar claims underpinned a lawsuit filed in Nevada earlier that month in which Binnall acted as the plaintiffs’ counsel.

According to Ollis, following his own lawsuit he briefly lost touch with Binnall before seeing him “testifying about election integrity in Nevada and how he had all this evidence showing that there was absolutely malfeasance in Nevada” during the Senate committee hearing, which led to him reconnecting with him.

Ollis said that “part of Jesse’s team was this woman named Amanda Milius”. Milius, a prominent Maga internet personality, is the daughter of the noted Hollywood director John Milius, and is a film-maker herself. She worked in the state department during the first Trump administration.

She is also the director of the 2020 documentary The Plot Against the President, which portrays the investigation of former congressman Devin Nunes and his then staffer Patel as heroically resisting congressional investigations into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russian intelligence operations during the 2016 campaign.

According to Ollis, “Amanda put us in touch with Kash”, after which “Kash, Jesse and I started the legal offense fund”.

Binnall remains as secretary of the Kash Foundation.

Then, “at CPAC in 2021”, according to Ollis, “somebody gave Kash like a big nice hotel room so we had a meeting in there and we had our first board meeting”, which he described as a “sacred moment”.

Guesting on an October livestream from Brainstorm Army, also archived on Rumble, Ollis explained more about Believe Media’s business model.

He told the hosts that while the core purpose of the company was to “build conservative brands … the way that we actually make money is by building out email lists and then running ads on them to monetize”.

Ollis explained: “It’s really, really difficult for conservatives to generate ad revenue online,” but “fortunately for us, like, we have this kind of intra-ecosystem, like, in conservative world.”

He continued: “Email is still a primary way that campaigns raise money. So like right now, our biggest advertiser is the Trump campaign.”

FEC records show that since its founding, Believe Media has taken more than $3.25m from Republican campaigns. In the most recent cycle, the company took in about $914,000 from all campaigns, with over $600,000 coming from Trump-related Pacs alone.