White Supremacist Who Inspired Charleston Church Shooter Gave to GOP Presidential Candidates

Charleston, SC, mass murder suspect Dylann Roof appears to be pictured holding a Confederate flag in this screenshot from The Last Rhodesian website, registered in his name. The website was not working Monday.

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Republican presidential contenders Ted Cruz and Rand Paul scrambled Monday to distance themselves from a white supremacist group tied to Dylann Roof, the suspect in the massacre of nine African-Americans at a Charleston church last week, returning thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the group’s leader, Earl Holt III.

Another GOP 2016 presidential candidate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, has not announced what he will do with contributions from the group to him.

The Guardian and New York Times revealed this weekend that Holt, president of the Council of Conservative Citizens, has given $65,000 to Republican campaigns in recent years.

A manifesto that appeared on a website registered to Roof said that he had first learned of “brutal black-on-white murders” from the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website.

Matthew Beynon, a spokesman for Santorum, who received $1,500 from Holt, wrote in an email to The Guardian:

“Senator Santorum does not condone or respect racist or hateful comments of any kind. Period. The views the Senator campaigns on are his own and he is focused on uniting America, not dividing her.”

Cruz, a Texas senator, told The Times that he would return the $8,500 donation he received from Holt. A strategist for Paul, a senator from Kentucky, said the $1,750 the RandPAC received would go to the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund to assist the families of the nine victims in last Wednesday’s shooting, The Guardian reported Monday.

Holt has also given to members of Congress, The Times said, including Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake; Ohio Sen. Rob Portman; former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann; Iowa Rep. Steve King; and former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin.

Holt, 62, the president of the Missouri-based CofCC, has declared black people are “the laziest, stupidest and most criminally-inclined race in the history of the world” in online posts. The Guardian reported several other inflammatory references, including comments referring to black people as “Africanus Criminalis.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center regards CofCC as a hate group that advocates a return to segregation and opposes “all efforts to mix the races of mankind.”

In a statement Sunday, Holt said it’s no surprise that Roof got information about race relations from the CofCC website because it is “perhaps three websites in the world that accurately and honestly report black-on-white violent crime, and in particular, the seemingly endless incidents involving black-on-white murder.”

But, he said, the “CofCC is hardly responsible for the actions of this deranged individual merely because he gleaned accurate information from our website.”

The Guardian said Holt declined to comment for the story.