Stacy Sheridan is TPUSA’s inside fundraising boss AND she owns the outside firm the charity pays to raise its money. She sits on both sides of the same check. More than $88 million in donations has run through her hands, and her private companies quietly kept ~$5+ million of it. She is the highest-scoring name in this series so far.
Who is Sheridan?
Stacy Sheridan spent two decades as a professional fundraiser at Pepperdine, the Reagan Foundation, and the Gary Sinise Foundation. Turning Point then hired her as its Senior Advancement Director on a salary north of $180,000. Her job was to raise the charity’s money. So she did, into companies she owns.
Three of them, GSM Strategy, then Lionrock Ventures, then Cloverstone Ventures. Each one billed the charity she already worked for. Each one traced back to her only through another state’s corporate records and her own home address, never as the owner of those companies on the tax return itself. As each drew scrutiny, it went dark and the next one appeared. She turned a nonprofit’s donor base into a private revenue stream, made herself almost invisible on paper, and made herself indispensable in person.
Today she sits at the right hand of TPUSA’s new CEO, Erika Kirk, closer to the money than she has ever been.
What she is doing: the four signatures of an inside job
This looks like an insider-controlled fundraiser, a specific and well-documented form of self-dealing. It has four signatures, and Sheridan hits all four.
1. Same hand on both sides: the employee who helps decide who gets hired to raise the money owns the firm that gets hired to raise it. She is the buyer and the seller of the same service, sitting on both sides of a table with no one across from her.
2. Custody and control: she does not just get paid, she holds the donations. The money lands in her company’s account first, and she is the one who counts it and reports the number to the IRS and to the people who gave it. The insider who profits is also the one keeping the books.
3. The relay: not one company. Three, in a chain. Each terminated or gone dark the moment it drew a reporter, each reborn in a more sheltered state than the last. The entities keep changing names but the owner never changes.
4. Concealment: the return never says she owns the firm it pays. You only learn that in another state’s records. In Minnesota, Cloverstone, whose sole officer is Sheridan, registered under oath as an independent outside professional fundraiser. Based on the record, it is not.