NEW: We found out who secretly bankrolls the National Prayer Breakfast, keeping the purportedly nonpartisan, ecumenical event in the black every year:
Franklin Graham.
tyt.com/stories/2ilAKs…
Every year, a source told me, Graham funnels $100,000 to the Fellowship Foundation, the legal entity of The Family, which stages the breakfast...
...through his two nonprofits, Samaritan's Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Past tax filings reveal traces.
Both the BGEA and Samaritan's Purse are openly anti-LGBTQ.
Last month, an LGBTQ group warned congressional Democrats about participating in prayer breakfasts, which an EU parliamentary report found to be part of a right-wing networking strategy.
The Family's Democratic defend the breakfast as a time for reconciliation...
...but internal docs we obtained show that reconciliation rarely happens with advocates who favor LGBTQ or abortion rights... because they're not invited.
tyt.com/stories/7K5fbf…
Instead, Democrats have told us they didn't know their names were used to invite anti-LGBTQ leaders to the 2016 and 2018 breakfasts...
...and a source close to The Family says virtually no one in Congress who lends their names to the event has a clue who's being invited.
Graham himself has used Democratic participation in the breakfast to make a case that Christian politicians are better for America.
Here he is talking to Fox specifically about the prayer breakfast.
Trump's first year in office, the BGEA cited @RepJuanVargas' participation to make the case that the breakfast is above politics...
...and then went on to praise Trump's breakfast speech for defending religious liberty (aka, allowing anti-LGBTQ discrimination).
While Democrats help boost Graham's claim that the breakfast is above politics, Graham uses the event as a political weapon against Democrats who participate in it.
Obama was too critical.
Biden not religious enough.
You can check out all the stories in our current series on The Family -- based on internal docs we obtained -- here:
tyt.com/stories/franch…
Glad to see Twitter having a sense of humor about all this...
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