Louie Gohmert Swears He Did Not Give $5,500 To A Homophobic Holocaust Denier No Matter What the FEC Says

This is a curious case of mistaken identity, but maybe not when you consider that Rudy Giuliani ended up giving an important post-election speech from the parking lot of a landscaping company and not the palatial Four Seasons Hotel, which everyone assumed at the time must have been his original order. It’s entirely possible that whomever the instruction “book us at the Four Seasons” was given to, s/he had never heard of the Four Season’s Hotel and just went to the first business with that name that came up in a Google search.

This latest saga of Louie Gohmert’s has exactly the same flavor. Gohmert reported a donation of $5,500 to the FEC, made to Steven Anderson Ministries. Anderson is a anti-gay, anti-Semitic, holocaust denier who thinks that women should be denied the right to vote. What oh what would convince Gohmert to fund such a creature?

Gohmert’s office is saying that he didn’t. They’re saying “they just screwed up the name, purpose, and address of the recipient of their largesse. Oops.”

“Disclosures to the FEC show that the Louie Gohmert for Congress Committee sent $5,500, to an entity in Tempe called “Anderson Ministries.” There is in fact no organization of this name registered in the Grand Canyon State—but the address in the campaign filing matches that of Anderson’s church.” Daily Beast:

Standing at the vanguard of the small but growing New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement, Faithful Word Church calls for punishing homosexuality with the death penalty in the doctrinal statement published on its webpage. But that demand seems mild compared to the seething rhetoric Anderson has unleashed against the LGBTQ community: in a 2014 video posted to his now-deplatformed YouTube account, he declared “if you executed the homos, like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running around.” In 2016, he applauded the the mass shooting at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, asserting “there’s 50 less pedophiles in this world.”

Gohmert’s rhetoric toward the LGBTQ community has been far less violent, though only slightly more tolerant. In 2010, he asserted that homosexuality is a form of adultery, argued for barring gay people from the military on the grounds that they “cannot control their hormones.” Four years later, he lauded a Mississippi statute that enshrined the right to discriminate against gay people on religious grounds. A year after that, he suggested as a thought experiment stranding gay and lesbian couples on deserted islands, and comparing their situation after a century to similarly marooned straight couples to “see which one nature favors.”

Anderson also has demonstrated a particular animosity toward Jewish people, as evidenced in titles of the sermons listed on his IMDB page, which include “The Jews Are Our Enemies,” “The Jews Killed Jesus,” “Unbelieving Jews Are Under God’s Wrath,” “Jews Worship a Female God Named ‘Shekinah,’ and “Jewish Synagogue = Synagogue of Satan.” He has also, as the Anti-Defamation League noted in a 2015 report, propagated false claims that millions of Jews were not gassed and cremated in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

That is some “church.” It goes without saying that this vitriol is not a lot of peoples’ cup of tea, especially coming from the pulpit, and you won’t be surprised that Anderson has been banned from entering or spreading his particular toxic flavor of the gospel in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean and he was deported from Botswana in 2016. So again, we inquire, why would Gohmert support such a creature?

Gohmert’s treasurer, William Long, told The Daily Beast that the gift to “Anderson Ministries” was “probably” intended for Faithful Word Baptist Church. However, he insisted that he was unfamiliar with the organization, and did not believe the congressman shared its views.

Still, he said that the eight-term Republican personally handles all donations from the campaign to churches and nonprofits.

“I’m sure that Louie sent it or carried it to him,” Long said. “Things like charitable contributions, yes, he pretty well makes the decisions.”

But Gohmert’s chief-of-staff, Connie Hair, subsequently called The Daily Beast and claimed the situation was a massive misunderstanding. The check the congressman signed was not to the Tempe-based Anderson, but to the Sunshine State-based [Musician Steve] Amerson, she asserted. Hair said the $5,500 was not a donation, despite what the filing said, but payment for Amerson’s appearance at a December fundraiser.

The address and information in the filing was the result of a botched Internet search by Long, according to Hair—who maintained it was Amerson who got the money.

“That’s who it was written to, and Louie gave it to him, and when Bill Long got the check and the charge, he searched ‘Anderson Ministries’ instead of ‘Amerson,’” she said. “”Bill Long is amending our filing.”

Welllll. Is every mental muscle you’ve got sprained and strained from making this big of a stretch? Again, I’m no defender of Louie Gohmert, but bear in mind the lesson of the Four Season’s debacle. Do you recall Hanlon’s Razor, which said, “never attribute to malice that which can be explained by plain stupidity?” There are a lot of people out there in the working world who are totally asleep.

Now where this falls apart in the real world, is that when any performer or company provides services for an event, it’s handled in regular bookkeeping fashion, which means there’s a purchase order number submitted on an invoice, and when the performer is paid, the check they’re paid with has the P.O. number on it, too. And also, generally speaking, there’s a short net time for these things, sometimes two weeks. If Amerson didn’t get paid, did he go forth and inquire why?

It would be interesting to see if the check was cashed, because that’s a distinct possibility. Even if Gohmert did intend the check for some minstrel, it’s entirely foreseeable that the Anderson Ministry in Arizona didn’t question their good fortune for a moment, but just ran it down to the bank — even if the check was clearly marked, “Entertainment, night of such and such, in payment of invoice number whatever.”

And finally, Louie Gohmert didn’t earn his handle, “dumbest man in Congress” overnight. And who would work for the dumbest man in Congress other than a bunch of dummies, who evidently pay the bills at the last minute with frantic Google searches rather than keeping a proper set of books, like the rest of the world? This actually makes sense — not in any sanely run congressional office, but in the alternate world of Louie Gohmert? Yes.