In the wake of the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, Donald Trump and his close associates found themselves mired in lawsuits that, among other things, sought to hold them accountable for inciting the violence that resulted in injuries to more than 140 police officers and likely contributed to the deaths of five. By 2023, the legal fees had ballooned into the millions, all while Trump also was mounting an expensive presidential campaign.
At the same time, a charity run by construction heir, private equity mogul, and Trump donor Bill Pulte—who now runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)—made a mysterious, previously unreported donation that raises serious questions about whether it was an effort to quietly funnel money to the legal defense of Trump, other January 6 defendants, or another purpose entirely.
In 2023, Pulte’s charity donated $65,000 to a nonprofit called One World Love LLC for “assistance to underserved people,” according to annual tax filings. But searches of the IRS’s nonprofit database, Virginia’s database of charities, and several third-party services that collect nonprofit filings nationally, like Guidestar and CitizenAudit, turn up no charities with a matching employer identification number (EIN) or the name “One World Love” anywhere in the country. Instead, financial filings show that One World Love LLC is a Wyoming corporate entity tied to the Binnall Law Group—which represented Trump in his efforts to prove election fraud and to avoid paying damages after the January 6 attack.
Mother Jones reached out directly to Jason Greaves, the Binnall firm partner who formed this entity, and to Pulte via the FHFA for comment for this story. Neither responded to our repeated requests.
“There’s a strong indication that something fishy might be happening, but because of secrecy jurisdiction rules, we don’t know.”
Filings don’t show what the LLC spent Pulte’s donation on, but they do show that Trump’s team was accruing large bills with the Binnall Law Group: Trump’s PACs paid the firm more than $4.5 million in legal fees between 2022 and 2024. Experts who spoke to Mother Jones outlined several potential reasons for the mystery donation, including the possibility that Pulte was trying to spend this money on private expenses—legal costs or others—while disguising it as charity to the poor. But experts also noted that the LLC was likely created with an eye toward keeping its true purpose hidden from the public because it was incorporated in a state that is a known hub for corporate secrecy.
“There’s a strong indication that something fishy might be happening, but because of secrecy jurisdiction rules, we don’t know,” says Poppy Alexander, an attorney who specializes in matters that involve cutting-edge financial frauds. “We shouldn’t have corporate entities where we can’t trace ownership, and this story illustrates that perfectly: I don’t know where the money is going, and none of us can.”
The tale of the donation began in 2019, when Pulte started doing what he deemed “Twitter philanthropy,” handing out money on social media and amassing millions of followers in the process. Eventually, several people started a formal charity in the same vein, with seed funding from Pulte himself. Tax filings and financial disclosures show that Pulte later became the charity’s president, almost single-handedly funding it with $200,000 from the Bill Pulte Foundation, a separate charity, and ultimately renamed the group Team Pulte, Inc.
Not only was Mother Jones unable to find the name “One World Love” or its EIN in nonprofit databases, but we also were unable to identify any for-profit US businesses with this EIN number.
By 2023, though, Pulte’s foundation had stopped funding Team Pulte, according to tax filings, leaving it with just a fraction of the funds it had brought in the prior year. As a result, the charity scaled down its giving. It donated about $50,000 in small amounts to 85 recipients. And then it made one unusually large donation: $65,000 to One World Love LLC, which the filing lists as a nonprofit. Team Pulte did not respond to repeated requests for comment on a detailed list of questions. The charity did, however, change its public X feed to private after we contacted them, and it appears to have taken its recently active website offline.
Team Pulte’s 2023 tax filing says that One World Love is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered at an apartment complex on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia. The nonprofit’s paperwork includes an EIN—a number that the IRS assigns to every US business as a tax identifier. Not only was Mother Jones unable to find the name or EIN in nonprofit databases, but we also were unable to identify any for-profit US businesses with this EIN number. We also reviewed lists of people and businesses associated with this Alexandria apartment building, but none of them appear to have anything to do with a business called “One World Love.”
When a Mother Jones reporter visited the building, an employee said he had never heard of One World Love, noting the building is solely residential.
The only relevant hits that existed in 2023, when Team Pulte recorded its donation, were two corporate, for-profit entities called One World Love LLC. The first, registered in Arizona, belongs to a therapist. In a phone call with Mother Jones, she said she had never heard of Pulte or received money from any people or organizations bearing that name.
Over the next two years, the annual reports filed in Wyoming by One World Love were either signed by Binnall partner Jason Greaves or listed him and another Binnall employee as the LLC’s main contacts.
The second is registered in Wyoming, where it was created in 2021. The main office listed has a similar address to Binnall’s law firm in Alexandria. (Binnall Law Group’s office is on King Street, Alexandria’s main thoroughfare; the LLC’s founding documents list its address incorrectly as Main Street, which doesn’t exist in Alexandria, but with the same street number as the Binnall firm, and the same suite number that the Binnall firm lists on LinkedIn and elsewhere.) Over the next two years, the annual reports filed in Wyoming by One World Love were either signed by Binnall partner Jason Greaves or listed him and another Binnall employee as the LLC’s main contacts. In December 2023, the end of the year when Pulte’s charity made its donation, Greaves signed the paperwork to dissolve One World Love.
The year that Team Pulte donated to One World Love was also when the pressures of Trump’s legal bills began to escalate. In the first half of 2023, Trump’s Save America PAC reported about $20 million in legal spending, despite having only $18 million on hand at the beginning of the year. Soon the PAC was forced to request a refund of $60 million it had poured into Trump’s reelection effort, according to the New York Times. Trump’s team then diverted yet more money from his presidential campaign and even created a separate legal defense fund to fundraise for bills.
During this time, Greaves and other Binnall attorneys were enmeshed in several lawsuits representing Trump himself, along with key supporters and allies. Court filings show he was one of the attorneys who represented Trump in his failed 2022 effort to sue Hillary Clinton for allegedly orchestrating a conspiracy to connect him to claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Greaves has also represented Trump allies including Michael Flynn, Devin Nunes, Kash Patel, Richard Grenell, and former North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson in defamation lawsuits against critics and media outlets.
The reason why Greaves created One World Love is a mystery—it could have been at the request of a client, or for a purpose tied to the firm. But regardless of the LLC’s purpose, the $65,000 donation to it from Team Pulte presents several possible issues, explains Joan Heminway, a professor at the University of Tennessee’s Winston College of Law who specializes in business law. Nonprofits are required to spend money on things that complement their public mission. The one that Team Pulte lists on its financial filings is simple: “provide financial assistance to low-income individuals in need of food and supplies through donations and crowdfunding.” If One World Love LLC spent the money received from the charity on work that aligns with this mission, they haven’t done anything wrong other than erroneously listing the company as a nonprofit, says Heminway.
Philip Hackney, a professor of the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in nonprofit law, agreed: “A 501(c)(3) can make payments to groups that are not charitable as long as the dollars are ultimately being used in a charitable way.”
“They have a lie on their form, and the question is: Why are they lying on their form?”
But if that were the case, there should be documentation. Neither Team Pulte nor the Binnall firm responded to questions about whether such documentation exists. “In these more unusual cases where a 501(c)(3) gives money to a for-profit entity, there would be some sort of an agreement as to how those funds are to be held, who controls them, who makes sure that they’re released to the right thing—because otherwise you’re just completely running around the nonprofit charitable status of the entity,” Heminway says.
The other option, Heminway says, is potential fraud. “They put that it was a nonprofit on there to hide the fact that they were giving money to a firm that doesn’t meet their purpose,” she says. “That could be a fraud on all of the donors and on the IRS. That could be not just reckless or negligent, but actually willful to hide something.”
Hackney named two similar possibilities: a filing error where Team Pulte incorrectly called One World Love a 501(c)(3)—or an intentional deception. “They have a lie on their form, and the question is: Why are they lying on their form?” he says. “It might be that they just don’t realize that they’re lying: They might not know they don’t actually have a (c)(3). Or they’re willingly doing this, but that can be hard to prove.”
It is common for law firms to create LLCs for their clients for various purposes, notes Eric Amarante, a professor at the University of Tennessee’s Winston College of Law who also specializes in nonprofit law. So the fact that the Binnall firm’s lawyers created One World Love LLC and are its point of contact does not confirm that money went to pay the firm. But the fact that the LLC was dissolved at the end of 2023—the year that Team Pulte made its big donation, while Pulte himself controlled the charity as its president, according to its tax filings—suggests an effort to quietly pull money out of the charity for a private purpose unrelated to the Team Pulte charity’s mission. (Neither the FHFA nor Team Pulte responded to questions asking about the extent to which Bill Pulte controlled donations in his role as the charity’s president.)
“If you are just brazen and you wanted that $65K—the charity could donate it to the LLC. The LLC shuts down, and when the LLC shuts down, they just divvy up the money to their owners,” Amarante says. “There’s no subterfuge at all, but that may have been what happened here.”
It is also possible that Pulte’s motives with this donation were personal: to build goodwill toward a future Trump administration role. For years before his reelection, Pulte was trying to win Trump’s attention—and to support his rise to power. From 2019 to 2021, he and his wife donated more than $650,000 to Trump’s reelection efforts. Pulte met with Trump a few times, and he often praised the president to his millions of Twitter followers. In July 2019, Pulte tweeted a promise to give $30,000 to a veteran in exchange for a Trump retweet and later posted an offer to donate cars to two veterans. Both times, Trump happily obliged with tweets thanking Pulte. “You’re welcome, Mr. President,” Pulte replied. “I look forward to catching up with you soon.”
The donation is the latest in a growing list of dubious financial transactions that conflict with Pulte’s self-anointment as Washington’s fraud sheriff.
“Pulte conducted a campaign to make himself a visible figure to MAGA, presumably with an eye toward getting a big job—and it was an overall successful effort,” says Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a political corruption watchdog. “That suggests that this was a form of individual lobbying for a job. The obvious first guess is that this donation is an effort to curry favor with powerful people who want to see legal work done for the types of clients that this law firm represents—people who kind of took the fall for Trump, both Flynn and the January 6ers.”
This donation is also the latest in a growing list of dubious financial transactions that conflict with Pulte’s self-anointment as Washington’s fraud sheriff. He’s dug up old mortgage documents and used them to accuse the president’s political foes—from New York Attorney General Letitia James to Fed governor and economist Lisa Cook—of financial crimes, referring them to the Justice Department for investigation. Throughout, his own actions have also come under scrutiny for errors or misrepresentations, including a federal watchdog investigation into whether Pulte has improperly accessed confidential mortgage information to go after Trump’s political foes.
One of those transactions is reminiscent of the scenario with One World Love LLC—where Pulte or his family used a complex financial transaction to quietly steer funds to Trump and obscure their origins. As we reported last year, Pulte and his wife, Diana, appear to have used an LLC they controlled in Delaware to funnel a $500,000 contribution to a pro-Trump PAC in 2021. That contribution came while Trump was struggling to win support following his 2020 defeat and his role in the January 6 insurrection.
The gift drew a complaint from a campaign finance group alleging that Bill Pulte violated campaign finance laws by obscuring the source of the funds sent to the PAC. A resulting Federal Election Commission investigation, concluded only last year, said that he had not broken the law, and it did not accuse Diana Pulte of wrongdoing. But the FEC found the Trump-controlled PAC had erred by failing to properly disclose the real source of the donation. The agency also said that Diana Pulte had incorrectly filled out a form to indicate the money came from an LLC rather than a member of the Pulte family.
Mother Jones also has uncovered other questionable financial transactions by Bill Pulte, including a missing SEC filing and his promotion of a memecoin created by an influencer facing financial fraud charges.
None of this appears to have slowed down Pulte’s efforts to help launch criminal probes into Trump’s enemies. Last month, the Trump administration served Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with a subpoena stemming from a first-in-history criminal inquiry by the Justice Department. Bill Pulte was the driving force behind that decision, according to reports and a court filing, fueling a dramatic escalation of Trump’s ongoing vilification of the Fed that shocked economists and financial markets. On the day that the document was served, Pulte flew down to Palm Beach, Florida, with the president, for a stay at Mar-a-Lago and a visit to Trump’s nearby golf course.
