FEMA’s Blessing of Pat Robertson’s Operation

In a Bloomberg report, Walden complained that featuring Operation Blessing, an organization founded by right-wing televangelist M. G. "Pat" Robertson, ”gives Pat Robertson millions of extra dollars'” because of the heightened exposure in the immediate aftermath. Walden stated that he believes the “list is a departure from how the administration has handled previous disasters. To my knowledge they have never done it before with such a narrowly focused list of religious groups, some of whom are not known for being relief groups.''
...In the New York Daily News, Juan Gonzalez provides some background for Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing by recounting how in 1999, the Virginia attorney general concluded that, while Robertson raised millions from viewers of his 700 Club to aid Rwandan refugees, the Operation Blessing “humanitarian” supply planes were used primarily to transport mining equipment for a Robertson-owned diamond mine.