Editor's note: Watch Anderson Cooper's interview with California's Attorney General. She tells him why she wants the charity board members fired.
California authorities are taking a controversial veterans' charity to court, accusing it of paying officers "excessive" salaries and making "imprudent" loans, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, to a leading conservative activist's company.
In a civil lawsuit announced Thursday, the state attorney general's office asked a judge to remove the president and the entire board of directors of Help Hospitalized Veterans. The complaint asks for the board and president to pay more than $4 million in penalties to compensate for "misrepresentations" in solicitations by the charity.
The charity "has helped some veterans," Attorney General Kamala Harris told CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360." But she said nearly two-thirds of its revenue went to overhead, and the officers named in the complaint "have basically been lining their pockets off the compassion that Americans have for our veterans and servicemen and women."