The Man Behind the Man: The Network Behind Andrew Kolvet

Andrew Kolvet Follow the Money Investigation - Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of the Andrew Kolvet follow the money deep dive. This one is a little long but there are a lot of connections that create a dark web and I wanted to lay them all out together. I hope you enjoy!

When I started pulling the thread on Andrew Kolvet I ended up down an unexpected rabbit hole. Through this investigation, I found someone whose story makes everything in Part 1 look like a warm-up. A man who has been moving through the most powerful rooms in evangelical America for over two decades. Who built a PR firm that embedded its employees inside client organizations. Who ran a U.S.-backed Gaza aid operation where nearly a thousand civilians were killed at distribution sites. Who now sits on the national board of the Anti-Defamation League, the same ADL that deleted its entire documentation of TPUSA’s extremist ties three months before electing him.

His name is Johnnie Moore. And until you understand him, you cannot understand what is happening inside Turning Point USA.

Want to learn how to do follow the money investigations?

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The Protege

Johnnie Moore started at Liberty University in 2001. He worked in the campus pastor’s office, was invited by Jerry Falwell Sr. in 2003 to become Campus Pastor, and rose to Senior Vice President for Communications and campus spokesperson. He spent 13 years at Liberty, serving through Falwell Sr.’s death and the transition to Jerry Falwell Jr. His 990 compensation at Liberty was $148,000 in 2014 and $110,000 in 2015.

What Moore learned at Liberty was not just communications. He learned how evangelical institutions work, including the donor networks, the media strategy, the political alliances. And he learned it from the man who built the modern Christian Right.

After Liberty, Moore did a stint as Chief of Staff to Mark Burnett, the TV producer behind The Apprentice and Survivor. The Mark Burnett who made Donald Trump a household name. Moore went from the man who shaped the narrative at the largest evangelical university in the world to working for the man who shaped the narrative of Donald Trump’s public image.

In 2015, Moore launched The Kairos Company, a PR and strategic communications firm based in Glendale, California. Among his clients: the Museum of the Bible, the National Religious Broadcasters, David Jeremiah’s Turning Point Ministries, and a conservative youth nonprofit called Turning Point USA.

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Moore and Israel

Before I get to how Kolvet went from Moore’s firm into TPUSA, you need to understand the single thread that runs through everything Johnnie Moore has touched for the last fifteen years. It is not PR or politics. It is Israel.

Moore’s alignment with Israel started at Jerry Falwell’s knee. Falwell Sr. was one of the founding architects of Christian Zionism in American politics, the belief that supporting the state of Israel is a biblical mandate. Moore absorbed that ideology during thirteen years at Liberty and turned it into a career.

In 2010, Moore was among a contingent of evangelical leaders who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Moore has said publicly that visiting Israel made his faith “come alive” and that Israel has “impacted me far, far more than almost anything else.” He went again and again. By his own account, Israel became the defining feature of his professional life.

In 2016, Moore co-chaired Trump’s evangelical advisory board. The following year, he and the other evangelical advisers pressed Trump to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump did it. That same year, Moore received the Medal of Valor from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

In 2018, he co-founded the Congress of Christian Leaders with Rev. Sammy Rodriguez. Trump appointed him to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, where he served from 2018 to 2021, spanning both the Trump and Biden administrations. Also in 2018, Christianity Today called Moore the “most high profile evangelical” to ever visit Saudi Arabia, after he met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

He chairs the board of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, whose stated mission includes promoting Jewish immigration to Israel as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. The Israel Allies Foundation named him one of the top 50 Christian friends of Israel in the world. In 2024, he completed a doctoral dissertation at Liberty University titled “Evangelicals as Zionists and Peacemakers in Arab and Israeli Peacemaking through Track II Diplomacy.” His PhD is literally in evangelical Zionism.

And in February 2026, Moore spoke at the first-ever Judeo Christian Zionist Congress in Nashville. At that event, he told JNS that criticism of Christian Zionism from conservatives like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens was “an attack on and not a reflection of the views of evangelicals.” He called evangelicals “the load-bearing wall of the Republican Party.”

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Andrew Kolvet’s Placement Inside TPUSA

Andrew Kolvet was a Vice President of Communications at The Kairos Company before he was at TPUSA. That is confirmed by his own professional biography. Before Kairos, Kolvet worked at UAMG/LightWorkers Media and MGM’s Mark Burnett Company—the same Mark Burnett that Moore had worked for as Chief of Staff. These two share overlapping careers going back to the Burnett production world.

Kairos represented TPUSA as a PR client, and Kolvet, a Kairos employee, transitioned from the PR firm directly into the organization he was supposed to be representing from the outside. By early 2019, Kolvet was fully embedded at Turning Point USA as its communications director.

So, a PR firm’s employee became the client’s permanent spokesperson. The person who was paid to manage TPUSA’s public image from the outside went inside and never came back. And the PR firm’s founder, Moore, maintained whatever client relationship existed between Kairos and TPUSA throughout.

Kolvet is now the Chief Communications Officer of a $100M+ organization. He controls the narrative for TPUSA, produces the Charlie Kirk Show, fields every media inquiry. He is the voice of the organization. And he came there directly from Johnnie Moore’s firm.

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Kirk, Israel, and What Changed

Charlie Kirk’s relationship with Israel is relevant to this investigation because of what happened when it started to shift, and who was positioned around him when it did.

In January 2023, Kirk traveled to Israel alongside his pastor, Rob McCoy. He came back calling it life-changing. In October 2023, he went to the Western Wall, visited Israeli settlements in the West Bank, raised an Israeli flag in Hebron.

Then something shifted. By July 2025, Kirk was hosting Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith at a TPUSA summit in Tampa, where speakers voiced opinions critical of Israel. Internal Republican polling showed disaffection with Israel among Republicans under fifty had jumped from 35 percent to 50 percent. Kirk’s audience was moving and Kirk was moving with them.

Andrew Cockburn reported in Harper’s Magazine that Kirk’s funding was under threat from major donors whose generosity was pegged to his support for Israel, and that three weeks after Tampa, Kirk traveled to the Hamptons for a meeting arranged by Bill Ackman.

According to a report in The Grayzone, based on an anonymous longtime friend of Kirk, Netanyahu personally offered to organize an influx of Zionist funding for TPUSA. Kirk reportedly rejected it. The same source said Kirk was “frightened” by the private pressure campaign from pro-Israel donors. I cannot independently verify this, but the sourcing is specific enough to note.

What is documented: two weeks before Kirk was assassinated on September 10, 2025, he accepted an invitation from Netanyahu, extended through Rob McCoy, to visit Israel in January 2026 for a conference on antisemitism. Kirk never made that trip.

And Johnnie Moore, the man whose PR firm represented TPUSA, the man whose former employee was running its communications appears to have made no public statement about Kirk’s death. I have searched extensively and found nothing. If he did and I missed it, I will correct the record.

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The Gaza Operation

This is the darkest part of the story to me because it paints the picture of who Johnnie Moore really is, looking past his words and focusing on his morals.

In June 2025, Moore was appointed Executive Chairman of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S. and Israeli-backed aid organization that replaced over 400 local distribution points with four militarized mega-sites. The concept was simple: concentrate the starving population into four locations under military supervision for “security.”

It’s worth noting that the GHF was funded with ~$30M of our tax dollars and ~$75M from unknown donors. When asked, Moore refused to disclose those unknown donors. Unverified reporting alluded to the “unknown” donors being Israeli covert money. Based on what happened at these sites, I can’t say I don’t believe that.

The man who held the role before Moore, Jake Wood, resigned hours before operations began, citing concerns that the GHF could not adhere to “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.” Moore stepped in the same day.

By mid-August 2025, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that 994 Palestinians had been killed in the vicinity of GHF distribution sites since operations began on May 27. Nearly a thousand people, shot dead while trying to get food. The IDF and foreign military contractors opened fire on crowds of desperate civilians who had walked to these sites because the old distribution network had been dismantled and replaced with Moore’s operation.

Over 170 humanitarian organizations condemned the GHF. Doctors Without Borders said the centers had “morphed into a laboratory of cruelty.” CODEPINK organized protests. The Center for Constitutional Rights sent a formal letter. UN experts called for the immediate dismantlement of the entire operation.

Moore’s public response? He said the casualty reports were “overblown.” He said some people had “veered off the secure corridor.” He acknowledged that the IDF was responsible for some deaths but called it “a relatively small number of people.”

Nine hundred and ninety-four people is not a small number.

The GHF suspended operations in October 2025 and closed entirely in November 2025. And then two things happened very quickly.

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The Anti Defamation League (ADL)

This is the part of the story that I have not seen told clearly. So I will try and do it justice with dates because I consider it a very important piece to this puzzle.

For years, the ADL maintained a Glossary of Extremism and Hate, over a thousand entries documenting extremist groups and ideologies. It included an entry on Turning Point USA that documented the organization’s connections to right-wing extremists and noted that Kirk had “created a vast platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists.” The ADL was clear it did not classify TPUSA itself as an extremist organization, but the entry documented ties that the organization had not addressed.

On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Within weeks, the TPUSA entry went viral.

Elon Musk posted on X that the ADL “hates Christians” and called it a “hate group.” He wrote that “using such false and defamatory labels about people and organizations encourages murder.” Donald Trump Jr. piled on. Conservative media amplified the outrage.

On September 30, 2025, just twenty days after Kirk’s death, the ADL deleted its entire Glossary of Extremism and Hate. Not just the TPUSA page. All of it. Over a thousand entries disappeared. Archived versions show the ADL had been quietly softening the TPUSA entry in the days before deleting everything.

On October 1, FBI Director Kash Patel severed the FBI’s partnership with the ADL, calling it “an extreme group functioning like a terrorist organization.” He cited the TPUSA entry as one of his reasons.

The ADL removed “Protect Civil Rights” from its own mission statement. Board members started resigning. Joe Berman accused the organization of being “cover for Trump authoritarianism.” Steven Ludwig called out Greenblatt’s “abandonment of civil rights mission.” Yael Eisenstat resigned from heading the Center for Technology and Society.

And then, on January 23, 2026, the ADL’s board elected three new members. One of them was Johnnie Moore.

ADL’s board members are elected by the existing board. And Moore did not come out of nowhere. He had been involved with the ADL for over a decade. He completed their Glass Leadership Institute, served on a regional board, sat on their National Commission and advisory boards. So, his election to the national board was not a sudden parachute drop.

But the timing is worth noting after laying it all out because, the ADL documented TPUSA’s ties to extremism, then Kirk was killed, the documentation went viral, Conservative pressure forced the ADL to erase it all, the FBI cut ties, civil rights leaders walked out, and then the ADL elected to its national board a man whose PR firm represented TPUSA and whose former employee runs TPUSA’s communications. And we aren’t supposed to think this is strange?

The same man who co-authored a report with Jordan Peterson through the Network Contagion Research Institute arguing that “Christ is King” had been weaponized as an antisemitic phrase, naming Candace Owens.

Moore produced a public document designed to discredit the woman who was pulling at every thread in the organization Kolvet controls. And then the ADL, freshly gutted of its civil rights mission and its extremism documentation, put him on the board.

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The Pepperdine Connection

In October 2025, while the failures of the Gaza Humanitarian Fund were still warm, Pepperdine announced Moore as Vice Chancellor and Managing Director of a new Master of Middle East Policy Studies program in partnership with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Full tuition scholarships for the inaugural class. An eight-floor campus across from the World Bank. Three blocks from the White House.

That partner matters. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy was established in 1985 with funding from AIPAC donors. Its founder, Barbi Weinberg, was married to Larry Weinberg, then president of AIPAC. Its first executive director, Martin Indyk, was AIPAC’s former deputy director of research. Mearsheimer and Walt described WINEP as “part of the core” of the Israel lobby. WINEP says it is independent. But the organizational lineage is documented.

Moore now runs Pepperdine’s entire DC operation. He reports directly to President Jim Gash.

This is the same Jim Gash who attended the TPUSA chapter’s candlelight vigil for Charlie Kirk on September 11, 2025, alongside Dean Pete Peterson. The president of the university that just hired Moore was publicly mourning the founder of the organization that Moore’s PR firm represented and that Moore’s former employee now runs communications for.

And it gets worse. Because Pepperdine has another connection to TPUSA that nobody has talked about until now.

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The Pepperdine Pipeline: Stacy Sheridan

From 2005 to 2012, a woman named Stacy Sheridan worked at Pepperdine University’s School of Law in advancement and alumni affairs. For the first five of those years, her boss was Dean Kenneth W. Starr. Yes, that Kenneth Starr. The Whitewater prosecutor, the man who investigated Bill Clinton, and the man who was essential in securing Epstein his sweetheart deal in 2008. Real stand-up guy. Ms. Sheridan spent years at Pepperdine under Starr’s leadership, managing donor cultivation and alumni fundraising for the law school.

After Pepperdine, Sheridan cycled through the Gary Sinise Foundation, Open Hearts Foundation, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. She built a rolodex of conservative donors that most fundraisers would kill for. Then in 2018, she landed at Turning Point USA as Senior Advancement Director, earning a salary north of $180,000.

I have done a deep dive on Sheridan, but for those who many not have seen it, while drawing a salary from TPUSA, she was simultaneously running at least three LLCs that received over $2.7 million in payments from Turning Point entities. These companies have no websites, no visible employees, no public marketing. Corporate records tie all three to Sheridan’s name and personal addresses.

Cloverstone Ventures is the big one. It received $827,821 as a top-five contractor in fiscal year 2022, plus $641,466 in fundraising fees the same year, plus $505,293 in fundraising fees the year before. Lionrock collected $627,582 in fundraising fees plus $351,897 as a named contractor. GSM Strategy pulled in at least $200,000.

Total: at least $3.15 million to Sheridan’s personal companies, on top of her $180,000+ annual salary. From a nonprofit funded by small-dollar donors.

Cloverstone Ventures LLC does not just appear on TPUSA’s Form 990. It also appears as a contractor on Turning Point Action’s FY2024 filing. Sheridan’s personal LLC is pulling money from multiple entities in the Turning Point ecosystem. Two separate organizations, same LLC, same one person behind it.

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When In Doubt, Trace the Address

I found something else in my rabbit hole that I have not seen reported anywhere.

JDA Worldwide, the company that acquired Moore’s Kairos Company in April 2022, is headquartered at 135 N. Pennsylvania Street, Suite 2500, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The Turning Point Endowment, a supporting organization of Turning Point USA, is located at 135 N. Pennsylvania Street, Suite 1610, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Same building. Different floors. Moore’s company is on the 25th floor. TPUSA’s endowment on the 16th.

I want to be fair. 135 N. Pennsylvania is a large multi-tenant high-rise in downtown Indianapolis. Many companies lease space there. But when the company that acquired the PR firm that represented TPUSA sits nine floors above TPUSA’s endowment fund, and the acquisition terms were never disclosed, that is a fact worth noting.

JDA is owned by Prolific, a growth firm run by Brad Benbow. Benbow also sits on the board of Answers in Genesis. JDA crafted the marketing strategy for the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.

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How Moore, Kolvet, and Sheridan Connect

Pay attention to this timeline.

2005–2012: Sheridan works at Pepperdine under Ken Starr (2005–2010) and his successor. Builds her fundraising career.

2010: Moore meets Netanyahu in Israel with a contingent of evangelical leaders.

2012: Charlie Kirk, 18 years old, co-founds Turning Point USA.

2015: Moore launches The Kairos Company. Takes on TPUSA as a PR client.

2016: Moore co-chairs Trump’s evangelical advisory board. Kolvet founds ATK Media Inc. in November.

2018: Sheridan joins TPUSA as Senior Advancement Director. Payments begin flowing to her LLCs. Moore co-founds Congress of Christian Leaders. Trump appoints Moore to USCIRF. Moore meets Saudi Crown Prince MBS.

2018–2019: Kolvet, a Kairos VP, transitions from Moore’s PR firm into TPUSA full-time.

2022: JDA Worldwide acquires Kairos. Moore becomes president of JDA. JDA and TPUSA’s Endowment share a building at 135 N. Pennsylvania Street, Indianapolis.

2023: AP reports $15.2 million in insider payments at TPUSA. Kolvet tells the AP that TPUSA leaders were “underpaid for their talents.”

March 2025: Moore and Jordan Peterson co-publish a report targeting Candace Owens by name as an antisemitic vector.

June 2025: Moore takes over the GHF. UN records 994 deaths near GHF sites by August 15.

September 2, 2025: Kirk announces a DOGE-style audit of TPUSA.

September 10, 2025: Kirk is assassinated. The audit never happens.

September 30, 2025: ADL deletes its entire Glossary of Extremism.

October 2025: Pepperdine hires Moore as Vice Chancellor. FBI cuts ties with ADL.

November 2025: GHF shuts down permanently.

January 23, 2026: ADL board elects Moore as a national board member.

February 2026: Moore speaks at the Judeo Christian Zionist Congress. Calls Owens and Carlson “attackers.”

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Follow the Money

Here is what I cannot prove yet but what the evidence is telling me.

TPUSA has 67 unnamed contractors who received over $100,000 each. The 990 only requires disclosure of the top five. Kolvet’s ATK Media Inc. does not appear anywhere on any Turning Point 990 filing. Not TPUSA, not TP Action, not the Endowment, not America’s Turning Point. I searched every single one. He is invisible.

Sheridan’s LLCs appear because some of the payments were large enough to crack the top five. Kolvet’s company apparently was not. But that does not mean ATK Media was not getting paid. It means whatever TPUSA paid ATK was small enough to stay below the disclosure line, or it was routed through a different entity, or it was categorized in a way that kept it off the contractor schedule entirely.

Now here is the question that nonprofit watchdogs should be asking: What did TPUSA pay Moore’s Kairos Company? I doubt it was truly under $100K.

Kairos does not appear by name on any TPUSA Form 990 I can find. TPUSA was a confirmed Kairos client. Where is the payment? If it is in the unnamed contractor pool, then all three people in this triangle—Moore, Kolvet, Sheridan—were receiving TPUSA money through companies that the public filings never identified.

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The Network

Let me draw you a picture of what this looks like when you put it all together.

Pepperdine University is the institutional hub. Sheridan built her career there (2005–2012). Moore now runs its DC campus in partnership with an AIPAC-originated think tank (2025–present). President Gash attended TPUSA events. Dean Peterson ran for office as a Republican and sits on conservative education boards.

Turning Point USA is the money hub. $81 million in annual spending. $15.2 million in documented insider payments. Sheridan’s LLCs pull $3.15M+ across TPUSA and TP Action. Kolvet’s ATK Media receives undisclosed payments. Kairos was a paid PR client that never appeared on a 990. The endowment fund sits in the same building as Moore’s company.

Israel is the ideological hub. Moore built his career on evangelical Zionism. Met Netanyahu in 2010. Pressed Trump on Jerusalem. Chairs the IFCJ. Ran the GHF. Sits on the ADL board. Speaks at Zionist congresses. Runs an academic program through WINEP. And co-authored a report targeting the woman who was investigating the money.

Johnnie Moore is the connector. His PR firm sent Kolvet to TPUSA. He now works at the university that produced Sheridan. He co-authored a report targeting Owens. He sits on the ADL board after the ADL erased its TPUSA documentation. He ran a Gaza aid operation where nearly 1,000 people died at distribution sites. And he reports to a university president who showed up at a TPUSA vigil.

Andrew Kolvet is the operator. Came from Moore’s firm. Defended Sheridan’s payments to the press. Controls the TPUSA narrative. Runs a private media company. Invisible on every 990. Handed Kirk’s private texts to a man now under FBI investigation.

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What I See

The pattern here is one I have seen before and it looks like placement, access, extraction, control.

Moore’s firm sent Kolvet into TPUSA. Kolvet rose to Chief Communications Officer, the position with the most access to institutional knowledge and the most control over the public narrative. Sheridan, who built her career at the same university that later hired Moore, ran LLCs that pulled $3.15 million from TPUSA entities while drawing a $180,000 salary. And when someone started investigating the money, Moore co-authored a report to discredit her.

I am not saying this was coordinated in a smoke-filled room. I am saying the structure is there. The pattern is there. And in my experience, when the money is this opaque and the silence is this loud, the structure is not an accident.

Kirk is dead. The audit he announced eight days before his assassination never happened. Owens has been labeled an antisemite by Moore’s own report. The ADL erased its documentation. The FBI partnership is gone. And Moore has an ADL board seat, a university campus, and an AIPAC-linked academic program.

Every person who was asking hard questions is gone or discredited. Every person who was managing the structure has more power than before.

That is not how things look when there is nothing to hide. That is how things look when there is everything to hide and the people hiding it are very good at what they do.

Johnnie Moore is not the whole machine. But he is the man who connects the pieces. And now you know his name.

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If you have information about Johnnie Moore, The Kairos Company, JDA Worldwide, Prolific, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, or any of the names in this piece, my inbox is open. Anonymity guaranteed.

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This article represents my opinion, analysis, and commentary based on publicly available records including IRS Form 990 filings, state corporate registrations, published news reports from the Associated Press and ProPublica, publicly available social media posts, and official government documents. Where I draw conclusions or identify patterns, those are my interpretations of the public record. I am not alleging criminal conduct by any individual named in this piece. I have not been able to independently verify every claim from secondary sources and have noted where information comes from reporting by other outlets.

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Sources: Associated Press TPUSA investigation (2023); ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer 990 filings; Pepperdine University press releases; Pepperdine Graphic; Julie Roys Report; Word&Way / Religion News Service; ADL press releases and archived Glossary entries (Wayback Machine, Snopes); UN OHCHR reports; Doctors Without Borders/MSF; CODEPINK; Center for Constitutional Rights; Network Contagion Research Institute report (March 2025); corporate records (OpenCorporates, CorporationWiki, California Secretary of State); JDA Worldwide/Kairos acquisition press release (April 2022); Harper’s Magazine (Andrew Cockburn, “Turning Point,” January 2026); The Grayzone (Kirk/Netanyahu report, September 2025, anonymous sourcing); Jerusalem Post; Christianity Today; JNS (February 2026); Jewish Insider; Jewish Telegraphic Agency; Forward; Snopes; Fox News Radio (“The Untold Story of Andrew Kolvet,” November 2025); Israel Allies Foundation; International Fellowship of Christians and Jews; Washington Institute for Near East Policy; USCIRF; Liberty University; Mearsheimer and Walt, “The Israel Lobby” (2006); Palestine Chronicle; Israel Hayom; New York Sun; Candace Owens social media; X platform direct observation; professional biographies (Muck Rack, LinkedIn, IMDb, Kairos Company website).