Former Alabama judge Roy Moore, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, once said publicly that he did not take a regular salary from the small charity he founded to promote Christian values because he did not want to be a financial burden.
But privately, Moore had arranged to receive a salary of $180,000 a year for part-time work at the Foundation for Moral Law, internal charity documents show. He collected more than $1 million as president from 2007 to 2012, compensation that far surpassed what the group disclosed in its public tax filings most of those years.
When the charity couldnt afford the full amount, Moore in 2012 was given a promissory note for back pay eventually worth $540,000 or an equal stake of the charitys most valuable asset, a historic building in Montgomery, Ala., mortgage records show. He holds that note even now, a charity official said.
A Washington Post review of public and internal charity documents found that errors and gaps in the groups federal tax filings obscured until now the compensation paid to Moore, whose defeat last month of President Trumps choice for Republican nominee in the Senate race will likely embolden far-right challengers to the partys mainstream incumbents. Moore is the front-runner in the race to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The charity helped Moore thrive - financially and otherwise - after his ouster from the states Supreme Court in 2003 for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the courthouse. The group has filed scores of legal briefs in cases involving conservative Christian issues, but it was in many ways built around Moore himself.
At a time when Moore was running for other public offices in Alabama, the charity kept him in the public eye and helped establish a nationwide network of donors while he took on controversial positions against same-sex marriage, Islam and the separation of church and state. Over the years, it has provided him with health-care benefits, travel expenses and a bodyguard, documents show.
The Foundation for Moral Laws website routinely promoted Moores speaking engagements and his book, So Help Me God: The Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny, and the Battle for Religious Freedom. In his last two years as president, as fundraising dwindled, Moores compensation amounted to about a third of the contributions to the group, tax filings show.
