U.S. Rep. Mia Love returned $1,000 in donations this week to a white-supremacist organization who sympathizes with Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof.
Love, the first and only black Republican woman in Congress, said that the Council of Conservative Citizens’ donations were unsolicited.
“We do not want to associate with anyone that sees Mia — or any other American — as less than human,” Holly Richardson,
Love’s campaign spokeswoman, told The Salt Lake Tribune in a statement.
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the
Council of Conservative Citizens as a hate group, according to CNN. Although the group did denounce the Charleston shootings on its website, Council president Earl Holt posted that Roof had “legitimate grievances” with which he justified his killings. The Charleston church shooter also credited the Council with helping him ground his racist sentiments in a
manifesto published to his website, The Guardian reported.
“The CofCC is hardly responsible for the actions of this deranged individual merely because he gleaned accurate information from our website,” Holt said of Roof’s massacre.
Love’s rejection of the Council’s funding set the stage for other conservative politicians to also distance themselves.
Holt has donated about $65,000 to Republican campaigns in recent years, according to The Guardian, including $8,500 to Texas senator and potential presidential candidate Ted Cruz and his political action committee since 2012. Cruz first announced that he was going to return the donations but then announced that “he decided that the best use of that money would not be to return it but instead use it to help support the families of victims from the Charleston shooting,” a campaign spokesman said in a statement.
RandPAC, the Kentucky senator and potential presidential candidate’s political action committee, also admitted to receiving $1,750 from Holt.
“RandPAC is donating the funds to the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund to assist the victims’ families,” Doug Stafford, RandPAC’s chief strategist said, according to The Guardian.