Here's the truth of the matter. GoFundMe gave the fundraiser an ultimatum: "Give the money to a non-profit, or we will refund all of the money back to the donors". This is because they didn't like funds being raised for the wall, so they wanted to sabotage it.

But by forcing him to give money to a non-profit, they completely altered the nature of the fundraising. Non-profit isn't free, non-profit still pays people working on it. Non-profit just means people get paid salaries, they cover their operating costs, and the rest goes to the stated cause. Where for-profit means people get paid salaries, and the rest goes into someones pockets as profit, like any regular business.

So it was GoFundMe that altered the nature of the fundraising and the stipulations around being able to accept the funds, yet now people are being charged with fraud. It's essentially a bait and switch frame job, to make it look like fraud was committed, when the only fraud committed was actually by GoFundMe trying to set someone up to create the appearance of having committed a crime.

Initially, it was just one man running the GoFundMe, and that was where the advertisements of not taking any money were made. Then GoFundMe changed the nature of the fundraising by requiring that the money be put into a non-profit, which Steve Bannon set up for him. Thus the guy can't have possibly committed fraud, because it was GoFundMe that altered the nature of donation acceptance and their ability to be paid out, based on artificially created stipulations requiring it to go into a non-profit before the money could be touched at all. And again, the stipulation was that if they didn't have a non-profit to put it into by a deadline GoFundMe set, then the money would be refunded to the donors.

So the guy couldn't possibly keep his promise of all the money going toward the wall after GoFundMe stipulated that he couldn't personally handle the money and had to use a non-profit. The moment they wouldn't release the money if he didn't put it in a non-profit, is the moment GoFundMe changed the nature of donation acceptance, which makes him saying 100% of the funds would go toward the stated cause, null and void. There is no non-profit on earth that uses 100% of the money toward the stated cause. And by law, non-profits are certainly allowed to pay salaries and other operating costs. So everything he did was above board.

What wasn't above board, was how GoFundMe used that to deliberately frame them for fraud.

See, even if the guy hadn't taken any money from Bannon, they would still be charging him with fraud, because remember, his initial claim was that 100% of the money would go toward the wall. By forcing him to put it into a non-profit or get nothing, GoFundMe effectively made it impossible to comply with that claim. But by adding stipulations on the payout of donations, GoFundMe's actions essentially get him off the hook for that claim because they made accepting the donations contingent upon having it in a non-profit.