Fundraiser bags millions from conservatives, but owes taxes, child support

Todd Zirkle is executive director of Freedom’s Defense Fund, a political action committee that has received more than $7.4 million in contributions since 2010, most of which went to fundraising firms to which he has close ties. The companies are Base Connect in Washington, D.C., and a handful of other businesses that largely share office space and clients.

FDF conducts little actual political activity. The only ad on its website from this cycle attacks a Michigan candidate as a “foreclosure king.”

Zirkle owes thousands of dollars in child support to his wife. The home where she and the couple’s daughter live is now in foreclosure.

Even as he inundated conservative donors, many of them elderly, with mailings warning of the dire consequences of the federal deficit, court documents show that Zirkle has failed to pay state and federal taxes for years.

In an application to the government for unemployment insurance, Zirkle swore he had no income. He recently stopped paying for his daughter’s medical insurance, Lori Saxon, his ex-wife, told the Washington Examiner.

“He said just go on Medicaid, just sign up for Obamacare,” she told the Examiner.

Court papers from child support hearings last year show he had five years of outstanding tax debts to the IRS totaling $17,000 — going back to 2009 — plus $1,875 in unpaid state taxes.

He worked as a contractor for the U.S. General Services Administration with a salary of $90,000 from 2007 until 2010.

After the GSA requested that his employer fire him for a bad attitude, Zirkle began collecting unemployment insurance. “Todd … created a tremendous amount of animosity. … Todd’s attitude has been demeaning and sarcastic,” a GSA official wrote.

Previously, Zirkle worked from 1998 to 2001 as a tax assessor for the District of Columbia, until he was fired.

Zirkle also had a role in the Help Foundation, a nonprofit funded by the District government and intended to help needy children.

It was headed by Mahdi M. Shabazz, who appears on Maryland’s sex offender registry and has multiple convictions and numerous arrests in the District of Columbia, including sex crimes and assault on a police officer.

MM Shabazz LLC, a limited liability company, was also set up using Shabazz’s name and Zirkle’s address, and it bought a house worth an estimated $600,000. The LLC also fell behind on taxes.

“He’s totally ghetto. The Help Foundation is a nonsense thing he made up. I don’t think he’s ever worked a day in his life and he’s never missed a meal. He’s lived off other people, he’s had these weird relationships with men,” Zirkle told the Examiner on Friday.

He said he needed a black man as the face of his home renovation business because D.C. bureaucrats were corrupt and racist against whites. Doing so ended their obstruction, Zirkle said.

He claimed he was fired from his government jobs because of retaliation by lazy, sometimes cocaine-addicted bureaucrats who fought to protect the status quo and punish hard workers.

Base Connect CEO Kimberly Bellissimo lent Zirkle money to pay for a lawyer in his divorce proceedings, court documents show.

In the documents, FDF described Zirkle as its “volunteer executive director,” said “Zirkle has been a close personal friend of Michael Centanni, FDF’s chairman, for many years,” and claimed that Zirkle had never profited from the fund.

Last month, Centanni, who was also Base Connect’s chief operating officer, was charged with possessing child porn; Homeland Security investigators said he had a hidden camera focused on his shower and videos of a 5-year-old in a bedroom in his house.

Centanni took his four children, including a 5-year-old, to the Base Connect office with him every day and home-schooled them during business hours, Zirkle said.

“He’s fully schooled all their kids at Base Connect. They’ve got easels and stuff there,” he said.

“I went down to the D.C. Jail to see him today. … I do get the impression from what he said that a lot more has been made of this than is really there,” Zirkle said. “I don’t know whether it’s porn or politics.”

Saxon told the court that Zirkle left multiple nude photographs of himself on their daughter’s camera. He appears wearing only a baseball cap. She was 7 at the time.

He said the photos were taken in the gym of a GSA building and were intended to document how he looked before he began a workout regimen.

Base Connect and its affiliates have drained tens of millions of dollars from conservative donors in recent years with no effect on electoral politics.

They run ads attacking President Obama and other liberal Democrats — while seeking donations — in an endless cycle of fundraising that has little to do with actual races.

For example, the Conservative Majority Fund, which shares its treasurer with FDF, raised more than $4 million during the 2014 campaign cycle. A typical ad pleads for funds while falsely claiming that Obama will no longer be president if only a sufficient number of petition signatures can be gathered.

Zirkle insisted that he was not hiding any income from political donations.

“If Freedom’s Defense Fund was paying me any money, I wouldn’t be in the fix I’m in,” he said. “I know $7 million sounds like a lot if it was in your checking account, but in the process of direct mail, it’s a small startup fund.” The group has operated for more than a decade.

He could not explain why his volunteer political efforts were on behalf of an entity with limited effect on any races, except that Centanni and Bellissimo were his old friends.

FDF PAC raised $2.7 million this cycle but ran only $75,000 of ads in two races — one of which was against a Republican seeking to displace the member of Congress for whom Centanni’s wife works. It also distributed $100,000 to a handful of other candidates.

He insisted that while he didn’t keep any of the other donations, Base Connect wasn’t taking advantage of him, either.

“Base Connect makes a lot of money, I understand they’re doing much better than I am, but I don’t think I’m feeling cheated. There isn’t much to the organization,” he said of FDF.

Correction:

This story has been corrected to say the Conservative Majority Fund – not the Conservative Action Fund – shares its treasurer with FDF. The Washington Examiner regrets the error.