House Resolution 7207 was introduced as a way of addressing the issues surrounding the government receiving donations for the border wall.
If the House can pass the bill before the Democrats take control before the beginning of the year, H.R. 2707 would establish the "Border Wall Trust Fund" and allow the government to receive funds for the earmarked project.
If passed, the Secretary of the Treasury would have 60 days to establish the account. A website would have to be established so people could donate directly to the cause online.
ORIGINAL POST
Over the last few days, the GoFundMe campaign to build the border wall along the southern border has raised more than $15.5 million out of the $1 billion goal. But now, Brian Kolfage, the Purple Heart triple amputee veteran who started the campaign may have to return the funds raised throughout the campaign.
According to Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, he's unsure about how the donation would work.
“I think it’s admirable, and I think that the country should respond,” Goodlatte told The New York Post. “Obviously, we can’t let citizens raise money and say, ‘The government will spend my money on this purpose.’”
Part of the problem is how donations made to the federal government are handled. “Gifts to the United States” are set aside for “general use” by the federal government or “budget needs.”
Translation: there's no guarantee that everyone's money will actually fund the border wall if it goes into the general fund.
And, to complicate matters even further, some agencies have to have money allocated by Congress. It remains unknown if the Department of Homeland Security is one the agencies that can accept earmarked donations.
One of GoFundMe's terms of services is simple: the funds must go towards intended purpose. If Kolfage turns the money over to the feds and they don't use it to build the wall then he may have to reimburse every donor.
Brian Kolfage did not immediately respond to Townhall's request for comment.
Founder of viral fundraiser for Trump's border wall has questionable news past
Brian Kolfage told NBC News he didn’t want to mention his previous projects because he “didn’t want it to be a distraction.”
By Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny
An internet fundraiser for Donald Trump’s border wall took in more than $7 million from over 131,000 donors by early Thursday evening.
The Florida man behind the GoFundMe page, a triple-amputee Iraq War veteran named Brian Kolfage, spent a large portion of the fundraising campaign’s description outlining his past, including a bolded section titled “How do you know this is not a scam?”
He implored users to look up his history, pointing donors to his verified Facebook page, and saying “I'm credible and a real person.”
The pitch has worked. One anonymous donor gave over $50,000 to the cause at 4 p.m. on Thursday. The GoFundMe trended on Twitter most of Thursday and received widespread media attention.
Kolfage told NBC News he’s plans to rely on connections in the White House to make sure the wall is funded, saying “we have a lot of people watching this,” which would “serve as a motivating factor not to screw this up.”
Retired U.S. Air Force Sr. Airman Brian KolfageRetired U.S. Air Force Sr. Airman Brian Kolfage speaks to reporters during a 2016 groundbreaking ceremony for a new home he and his family were receiving through the Gary Sinise Foundation's RISE program at Sandestin, Florida, on Jan. 14, 2016.Devon Ravine / Northwest Florida Daily News via AP file
“We have someone who is tied in with the White House that’s in their inner-circle,” Kolfage said. “We can work on a way where we can guarantee with a contract where [the funding] can only go to the wall.”
The fundraising page doesn’t mention Kolfage’s most recent business venture, a Facebook page titled Right Wing News and a ring of affiliate sites that frequently trafficked in conspiracy theories. In October, Right Wing News was pulled down by Facebook in a sweep of more than 559 pages that the company said were “using fake accounts… to drive traffic to their websites” or “were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”
Days after the pulldown, Kolfage created a group called Fight4FreeSpeech, which accepts donations, and is also not referenced in the GoFundMe.
Kolfage told NBC News he didn’t want to mention Right Wing News or Fight4FreeSpeech because he “didn’t want it to be a distraction.”
“I don’t wanna mix the two. That shouldn’t be the focus. My personal issues have nothing to do with building the wall,” he said.
Kolfage also ran Right Wing News’ shuttered affiliate sites including VeteranAF and FreedomDaily, which pushed false conspiracy theories, like ones claiming Hillary Clinton was secretly hiding deadly illnesses and fake voter fraud stories days before the 2016 election.
Those sites stopped operating in March, replaced with a string of text that said “This Website Has Gone Out of Business.”
The shuttering of Kolfage’s sites came a month after Michigan man Joel Vangheluwe sued FreedomDaily and other right wing sites for misidentifying him as the driver of the car that plowed into a group of peaceful protestors at a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The FreedomDaily article relied on the image board 4chan as its major source, according to a letter provided to the court by the contributor named in the suit. Kolfage was not listed as a defendant.
The sites often trafficked in false, inflammatory and racist content, including headlines like “Obnoxious Black People Lose Their Minds When Victoria Secret Models Say This 1 Word On Live Video” and “Trump Just Released Embarrassing Vids Of Obama’s Muslim Friends That He Never Wanted Seen.”
FreedomDaily and VeteranAF frequently ran identical stories by users with different bylines. Several stories on FreedomDaily written by “Liberty Belle” also appear on “VeteranAF” under the byline “Lady Liberty.”
Following Facebook’s takedown, Kolfage’s story drew considerable interest from right-wing media sites including Breitbart and WorldNetDaily. He has since appeared on Fox News to tout Fight4FreeSpeech, a group against “social media censorship.”
Meanwhile, Kolfage’s new crowdfunding effort is thriving. He said if there’s another major conservative cause in the next two months, it will have to be someone else’s problem.
“If there’s another big thing that comes up, somebody else is gonna have to take it. I have two kids and a wife. I wasn’t planning for this thing to be massive — maybe just in the conservative circle,” he said.
BECAUSE OF COURSE IT'S BRIAN KOLFAGE
When we first started Echoplex we tried to cover this story, it was a sordid tale of trolling, doxxing, and what happens when those things get away from the keyboard, causing harm to real people, sometimes innocent bystanders. The cast of characters was certainly complicated. There were an awful lot of hurt feelings surrounding the shit show, some even directed our way. We failed at covering the story. It was too messy and we just didn’t have the resources and time to put it all together in a way someone might understand. From the wayback machine, here’s Busta Troll’s take on what went down.
But we did figure one thing out for sure. Brian Kolfage, sorry, Senior Airman Brian Kolfage, is a litigious sort and a grifter. This gofundme for the wall is almost certainly going to enrich Kolfage. The grift machine is very profitable especially if your idea is just so star spangled fucking awesome.
Thomas Clay Jr probably says it best here:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1839429386183965&id=1487095678084006House Resolution 7207 was introduced as a way of a... (