An ethics watchdog group lodged a complaint claiming a notary working for the Foundation for Moral Law, a Christian nonprofit activist group founded by accused sexual predator and current Senate candidate Roy Moore, has been filing potentially falsified documents with forged signatures.
The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a D.C.-based transparency advocacy group, alleged in its 35-page complaint that Shallon Nadeau Hartke, a Maryland notary working on behalf of Moore’s foundation, which is run by his wife Kayla, has been filing documents which “contain irregularities with their execution and notarization.”
The ethics group wants the Maryland secretary of state’s office to investigate and potentially remove Hartke as a notary.
The watchdog pointed to three distinct areas which suggest possible forgeries or fraud carried out by Hartke, including that “seven separate FML documents signed on the same day each included the signature of FML’s Chief Financial Officer that was misspelled and notarized, another document was notarized without being signed, and several documents contained signatures that appear not to be authentic based on radically stylistic differences compared to other previously signed publicly available documents.”
The ethics group’s complaint contains excerpts and images of the filings and signatures notarized by Hartke from the foundation’s official documents that the watchdog deemed suspicious.
One example is the name of the nonprofit’s chief financial officer, Adelaide Morris, which instead appears as “Adalade Morris” in numerous filings.
“Unless Morris mistakenly misspelled her own name fourteen separate times within the same day, the only reasonable conclusion is that Adelaide Morris did not appear before Hartke and sign the documents,” according to the watchdog’s news release.
Other official documents submitted by Hartke, including ones allegedly signed by Kayla Moore and Jessie Deem, an executive assistant with the foundation, are certified as being verified as “true, correct, and complete,” though Moore and Deem’s names were typed in rather than signed.
And the ethics watchdog claims the names of Roy Moore and Rich Hobson, a former president and executive director of the foundation, appear to have been potentially forged numerous times in filings over the years, as “signatures attributed to Roy Moore and Rich Hobson appear to have taken on a radically different form in documents notarized by Hartke in 2011 and after.”
The complaint states that “the radically different changes in signatures made by Moore and Hobson, in conjunction with notarized signatures that were misspelled and attributed to Adelaide Morris and notarization of documents with no signatures, is evidence of a pattern of signatures forged within FML filings purportedly prepared and notarized by Hartke.”
Hartke and the Foundation for Moral Law did not respond to Washington Examiner inquiries seeking comment.
The Foundation for Moral Law itself came under scrutiny in 2017. An investigation by the Washington Post revealed through public and internal records that, although Moore publicly claimed that he didn’t take a “regular salary” from the Christian charity, he secretly arranged to collect $180,000 per year for his part-time work there, totaling more than $1 million, between 2007 and 2012. That investigation also revealed through mortgage records that, when the charity couldn’t afford the full amount, Moore obtained a promissory note for the charity’s most valuable possession, a historic building in Montgomery, Alabama, worth $540,000.
The Washington Post also claimed that the foundation “is alleged to have intentionally tried to hide its actions while Moore publicly denied these payments” and that “the charity was audited on suspicion of violating Internal Revenue Service regulations for nonprofit organizations.”
During Moore’s losing 2017 Senate run, a number of women came forward during the campaign to claim that Moore had sexually assaulted them, including two accusers who were underage at the time of the alleged incidents. Sen. Doug Jones, a Democrat, defeated Moore in the deep-red state because of a combination of the allegations and Moore’s long-standing record of extreme comments, but Moore declared he was running again in June of this year despite a lack of support from national Republicans and President Trump.
A poll taken in late June after Moore’s announcement by Cygnal, a polling firm based out of Montgomery, put Moore in a distant third place in the Republican primary with just 13% of the vote, trailing former Auburn head football coach Tommy Tuberville at 29% and Alabama Rep. Bradley Byrne at 21%. In that survey, 65% of Republican primary voters said they had an unfavorable opinion of Moore.
