On September 17, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a podium inside the National Archives and praised a small Florida charity for a big achievement. The Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness — FLAG — announced it had reached 2 million children with civics education since 2016.

"I hope you understand how important this is," Hegseth told the room. "What we pour into the next generation will determine whether we keep our republic or not."

It's a good line. The problem is what's underneath it.

ProPublica went through FLAG's finances, its donor operation, and nine years of its tax returns. What reporter Kali Bomeli found is a charity that has raised $7.7 million over a decade, pays its founder and his mother more than half its yearly revenue, and shows almost no sign of spending money on the thing it says it exists to do.

The money goes to the family

FLAG was founded in 2016 by Nick Adams — an Australian-born conservative commentator, self-described "alpha male" influencer, and one of President Trump's favorite authors. Adams was born Nicholas Adamopoulos. He moved to the U.S. in 2012.

Here's what the tax filings show:

• In 2024, Adams and his mother, Angelika Adamopoulos, took a combined $587,279 in pay and benefits. That's 53% of everything the charity brought in that year.
• Adams took no salary for FLAG's first three years. Then $20,400 in 2019. By 2023 he was making $411,209 — about 30% of the whole organization's revenue.
• His mother was paid $201,861 as FLAG's secretary.
• From 2016 through 2024, no other employee was ever paid more than $5,000.

You can look at the filings yourself — they're public, in ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.

Two other details stand out. On that same 2024 filing, the IRS asked FLAG whether any officer had a family relationship with another officer or director. FLAG answered no — while paying the founder's mother $201,861.

And every single year from 2017 to 2024, the IRS asked FLAG two basic questions: was executive pay reviewed by independent people, and did you compare it to similar organizations? FLAG answered no to both, every time. Those questions exist to stop exactly this kind of arrangement.

Philip Hackney, a nonprofit law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a former IRS official, told ProPublica that skipping independent review isn't just sloppy. "Technically, that can be an excess benefit transaction on its own," he said — the IRS category for paying insiders more than their work is worth.

Lloyd Mayer, a nonprofit law professor at Notre Dame, put the pay itself plainly: "The amount being paid, both in absolute dollar terms and as a percentage of the organization's revenues and expenses, is very high."

Where's the civics education?

Now the other half. If a charity's whole purpose is putting civics materials in classrooms, you'd expect to see money going to schools, teachers, printers, shippers — somebody.

In nine years of federal filings, there is no line item for a payment to a school, a teacher, or an educational distributor. Not one. The only two education-looking entries in the whole stack are from a single 2017 filing: $26,925 for "Student's Constitutions, Printing" and $5,670 for "Book Donations, Shipping & Supplies."

That's roughly $32,000 in documented educational spending out of $7.7 million raised.

In the last six years under Adams, the only documented FLAG activity that even fits the definition of "educational" is a 2020 video of Adams himself speaking at what's described as a teachers' conference.

FLAG tells Florida regulators that 66% of its revenue goes to "program service expenses." But salaries for Adams and his mother, plus social media and travel, come to $755,541 of the $878,208 it counted as program services. That's 86%.

Meanwhile, FLAG's online store sells Adams' personal books — Alpha Kings, From Mar-a-Lago to Mars, Trump and Churchill — some as signed copies for as much as $40, sitting right next to the charity's educational materials. Facebook ads for his books have linked straight to his own personal website, not FLAG's store.

Mayer's take on that: "He's free to market his books, but if he has a charity do it, that means it's not really a charity anymore, in that respect. It's not about public benefit — the private benefit to him overrides the public benefit."

The million-dollar prize nobody can find

Here's the part that should make you angry.

Most of FLAG's money doesn't come from big donors. It comes from a direct-mail sweepstakes operation, run under names like "Payout Decision" and "Winner Search Swps," that dangles a chance at $1,000,000 in front of people who open their mail.

Nine years of tax filings contain no transaction anywhere close to a $1,000,000 payout. At FLAG's financial peak in 2023, the entire organization held about $512,000 in total assets — roughly half the prize it was advertising.

Sweepstakes are regulated by states, and Florida — where FLAG is registered — requires registration. ProPublica could not find a sweepstakes registration for FLAG in any state, and FLAG doesn't disclose a sweepstakes program on its federal filings at all.

Mayer didn't hedge on this one:

"If the promise is that someone will win $1,000,000 and no one ever does, that's fraud. That's lying to induce people to support you."

An internal mailing-list database shows FLAG's own notes from July 2020: it was "not mailing much" through normal fundraising and was "focusing on the sweeps side."

In April 2024, somebody filed a Better Business Bureau complaint saying FLAG kept pushing back its drawing deadlines — a drawing first set to run January 2022 through December 2024 had been slid to December 2023 through January 2025. The complainant said more than a dozen other charities were doing the same thing.

Their words:

"I just want them to pay me back my hard earned money, since I am a retired senior citizen who happened to love this country."

That's who this operation is aimed at. Not billionaires. Retired people who love their country and open their mail.

This is not one bad apple

If FLAG were a one-off, you could call it a bad actor. It isn't. Patriotic-sounding fundraising has been one of the MAGA movement's most reliable businesses, and the receipts are in federal court files.

We Build the Wall. The crowdfunding campaign raised more than $25 million from hundreds of thousands of donors to build a border wall. Founder Brian Kolfage, according to federal prosecutors, "repeatedly and falsely assured the public" that he would "not take a penny in salary or compensation" and that "100% of the funds raised…will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose." He secretly took more than $350,000 for himself, routed through shell entities with fake invoices and sham contracts. In April 2023, Kolfage was sentenced to 51 months in prison and Andrew Badolato to 36 months. Judge Analisa Torres said the fraud "went well beyond defrauding individual donors. They hurt us all."

Steve Bannon. Trump pardoned Bannon on the federal We Build the Wall charges in the final hours of his first term. Pardons don't cover state crimes, so Manhattan prosecuted him anyway — and in February 2025 Bannon pleaded guilty to scheme to defraud. He was spared jail, has to stay out of trouble for three years, and can no longer raise money or serve as an officer for charities in New York. Prosecutors said Bannon wrote in an email at the time: "Isn't this a scam? You can't build the wall for this much money." He went on, they said, to write that "poor Americans shouldn't be using hard-earned money to chase something not doable." He suspected it. He did it anyway. Walking out of court, he said he "felt like a million bucks."

The Trump Foundation. In November 2019, a New York court ordered Trump to pay $2 million for misusing charitable money to help his own campaign. He admitted using foundation funds to settle his companies' legal bills and to buy a $10,000 portrait of himself. His campaign — not the charity — decided the timing, amounts, and recipients of $2.8 million in grants meant for veterans' groups. The foundation was dissolved, and Trump agreed to restrictions on ever serving a charity again.

Different names, different years, same shape every time: wrap the ask in the flag, aim it at people who trust you, and route the money to yourself.

And it worked as a career move

Here's the kicker. None of this slowed Nick Adams down.

Trump has called Adams one of his favorite authors. When Trump couldn't attend FLAG's 2023 gala, he sent a video telling the room that "tens of thousands of teachers are being trained and hundreds of thousands of parents and grandparents are now standing up for our kids" — a claim FLAG's own tax filings don't back up. "It takes Nick from Australia to come and teach us about American greatness," Trump added.

In March, after his nomination as ambassador to Malaysia stalled, Adams was appointed special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism and values — a State Department post created for him. Around the same time, he handed the FLAG CEO job to Cooper Rodenburg, a recent college graduate.

Adams didn't answer ProPublica's questions. The Pentagon declined to answer but restated Hegseth's support for FLAG. The White House declined to comment.

This isn't Adams' first run-in with other people's money, either. In 2006, at age 22, he was a councillor in Ashfield, Australia, and was formally condemned by fellow councillors for running up thousands of dollars in personal phone and taxi charges and billing them to the council. He repaid the money after an investigation.

FLAG celebrates its 10th anniversary this week with a gala. Tickets go for $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000.

The point

No movement in America talks more about waste, fraud, and abuse than this one. Rooting out grift is the whole pitch.

But look at who its own influencer economy takes money from. A retired senior citizen mailed FLAG their hard-earned money hoping to win a million dollars for a country they love. Nick Adams' family took $587,279 out of that charity in a single year. Nobody can find any evidence the million dollars was ever paid to anyone, in any year, ever.

The Defense Secretary praised the operation from a podium inside the National Archives. The President created a State Department job for its founder. Nobody with the power to check the math bothered to check the math.

When somebody wraps themselves in the flag and asks for your money, ask to see the tax return. It's public. It's free. And it's usually the whole story.

Source

This MAGA Influencer Runs a Charity to Teach Kids Civics. Much of the Money Goes to Him Instead. — Kali Bomeli, ProPublica, July 28, 2026. Photo: Philip Cheung / The Washington Post / Getty Images.