Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

A new “dark money” nonprofit is running a public relations campaign demanding that Amazon stop using the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) list of hate groups to determine which groups are barred from its charitable giving program.

Citizens for Corporate Accountability (CCA) has spent $31,789 on Facebook ads since it started an ad campaign this month and claims it has already sent more than 70,000 petitions to Amazon demanding it stop using SPLC to remove groups from its robust Amazon Smile program.

The campaign comes as right-wing groups try to capitalize on recent controversies at SPLC that led to the ousting of the group’s president and co-founder. The scandals have emboldened these groups to mount a coordinated effort to push tech companies and media outlets to reject SPLC’s hate group list that includes nonprofits deemed as anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant.



CCA is run by Brian Glicklich, a California public affairs and crisis management consultant best known for representing conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh when he was losing advertisers over controversial comments. Glicklich said he is pushing for Amazon to publish their own standards for its charitable giving program that has channeled more than $100 million to nonprofits.



“We all deserve better clarity than reliance on an oft criticized and opaque blacklist from an organization that uses it to advance a political agenda,” Glicklich told OpenSecrets.

Though Glicklich portrays his group as a “nonprofit coalition of voters who believe in the value of free speech and free enterprise,” he himself previously took a lucrative deal to defend a foreign regime notorious for quashing free speech and free markets whenever possible.



In August 2017, Glicklich registered as a foreign agent and inked a $240,000 retainer agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in a public relations campaign to enhance the country’s poor reputation in the U.S. The DRC government has committed what have been widely regarded as human rights abuses, including jailing journalists and protesters, killing civilians and turning a blind eye to child labor.



According to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings, Glicklich contracted with Israeli firm MER Security and Communications, which previously inked a $5.6 million deal with DRC to lobby the Trump administration to avoid additional sanctions.



As part of his efforts, Glicklich paid the Washington Times to insert pro-DRC opinion articles along with those meant to discredit DRC opposition leader Moïse Katumbi. He paid a fellow Woodland Hills, California resident to translate articles from French to English. The articles do not include disclaimers that they were paid for by a foreign agent nor do they include any information about the author — or even a publicly visible date of publication. One article is said to be authored by Bill Meierling, who shares the name as the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council’s chief marketing officer.



According to FARA filings, Glicklich met with the President of the DRC, who would have been controversial DRC leader Joseph Kabila at the time. Filings indicate that he ran a Facebook page called “Moise Katumbi Exposed,” which does not exist as of May 2019.



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Glicklich formally terminated his contract with the DRC in March 2018. He said the Congo was “just one of hundreds of clients I have handled over two decades.”

Glicklich noted the group does not have to disclose its donors under law and said the donors can reveal themselves anytime. It’s unclear how CCA is funded, but its messaging aligns with several conservative groups that share a disdain for SPLC and an incentive to push Amazon to change its policies.



Family Research Council and American Family Association, along with several other groups considered hate groups by SPLC, launched their own anti-SPLC website. The group took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal urging tech companies and media outlets to disown SPLC.



Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian nonprofit that has come under fire for its anti-LGBT stance, was one of several charities to express outrage over being removed from Amazon Smile.



Glicklich has previously expressed interest in the topic, having signed on to a 2017 letter along with far-right groups calling on members of the media to stop citing SPLC.



Right-wing groups have found some success in fighting SPLC. GuideStar stopped flagging nonprofits based on SPLC’s hate list following backlash from right-wing groups on the list. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended Alliance Defending Freedom last year against the “hate group” label.



Other groups, such as the Proud Boys and Center for Immigration Studies have filed lawsuits against SPLC over the hate group designation.



Disclaimer: OpenSecrets participates in the Amazon Smile program. Story was edited just after publication to include addition comment from Glicklich.



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