Tag Archives: dark money

Cigarette Maker Funded Dark-Money Conservative Groups

by 7GrittonMaine146 Posted on May 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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When we use the term “dark money,” we’re usually referring to politically active nonprofit groups—like the kind at the center of the recent IRS scandal—that spend millions on political campaigns yet don’t disclose their funders. Think Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, and pro-Democrat Patriot Majority. Rarely, if ever, does the public learn who bankrolls these organizations.

This week, though, we got one such glimpse. As the Center for Public Integrity reported, Reynolds American Inc., the corporation behind Camel and Winston cigarettes, funded several high-profile dark money groups in 2012. Reynolds doled out $175,000 to Americans for Tax Reform, conservative activist Grover Norquist’s anti-tax group. The company also gave $50,000 to Americans for Prosperity, $45,000 to the US Chamber of Commerce, and $100,000 to the Partnership for Ohio’s Future, an Ohio Chamber-backed group that supported restricting the worker bargaining rights.

Here’s more from CPI‘s Dave Levinthal:

The tobacco company’s donations are just a fraction of the nearly $50 million that those two groups reported spending on political advocacy ads during the 2012 election cycle, almost exclusively on negative advertising. Federal records show that Americans for Prosperity alone sponsored more than $33 million in attack ads that directly targeted President Barack Obama.

But the money, which Reynolds American says it disclosed in a corporate governance document at the behest of an unnamed shareholder, provides rare insight into how some of the most powerful politically active 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits are bankrolled.

Reynolds American is the parent company of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, which makes Camel and Winston brand cigarettes.

“The shareholder specifically requested that we disclose information about 501(c)(4)s, and in the interests of greater transparency, we agreed,” Reynolds American spokeswoman Jane Seccombe said.

Large corporations—tobacco companies or otherwise—almost never release information about their giving to such groups, and it’s most unusual for the groups themselves to voluntarily disclose who donates to them.

After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to pump vastly more money into American campaigns, businesses faced two options. They could donate to super-PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money but must disclose their donors. Or they could fund politically active nonprofits, which can dabble in politics but don’t name their donors. In the wake of Citizens United, we heard countless warnings about a “flood” of corporate cash into politics through big-spending super-PACs. But that flood never quite materialized: For-profit corporations accounted for just over $1 of every $10 raised by super-PACs in the 2012 election cycle. Instead, it was a small band of millionaires and billionaires that gave super-PACs most of their dough.

What the relatively small Reynolds American Inc. donations suggest is that corporations chose the nonprofit route and so avoided scrutiny of their political giving in today’s big-money era. In this case, Reynolds’ donations were disclosed only because a pesky shareholder asked for them to be. That’s not the case for most corporations, whose giving remains a secret.

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Cigarette Maker Funded Dark-Money Conservative Groups

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Official at Heart of IRS Tea Party Scandal Spiked Audits of Big Dark-Money Donors

by Shicsshaw Posted on May 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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You’d have to search long and hard to find a member of Congress not outraged that politics and partisanship crept into the work of the IRS, leading to the wrongful targeting of tea partiers and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. “The American people have a right to expect that the IRS will exercise its authority in a neutral, non-biased way,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said on Tuesday. “Sadly, there appears to have been more than a hint of political bias” by the IRS staffers vetting nonprofit applications. Hatch’s Republican colleagues in the House and Senate could hardly contain their anger. “Do either of you feel any responsibility or remorse for treating the American people this way?” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the former IRS chiefs Douglas Shulman and Steven Miller on Tuesday.

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How Congress Helped Create the IRS-Tea Party Mess


Official at Heart of IRS Tea Party Scandal Spiked Audits of Big Dark-Money Donors


5 Things You Need to Know in the Inspector General’s IRS Tea Party Scandal Report

Yet lawmakers have no qualms with using politics to bend the IRS to its will. In 2011, under pressure from House and Senate Republicans, Miller, then the IRS’ deputy commissioner, spiked audits investigating whether five big donors to 501(c)(4) groups—the type of nonprofit that can get involved in campaigns and elections but can’t make politics its “primary activity”—avoided paying taxes on their donations. Miller’s decision erased any worry that wealthy donors might have had about giving millions to nonprofits during the 2012 campaign season.

For some tax lawyers, it was a surprising move that raised red flags. “They were stopped mid-audit, which is an extraordinary move,” says Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer who ran the IRS division that oversees politically active nonprofits for 10 years. “I’ve been practicing tax law for close to 40 years, and I’ve never seen that. To have Miller reach out and stop those audits, that’s something that really deserves an inquiry.”

The identities of the donors and nonprofits being scrutinized were never revealed. Owens says he suspects most, if not all, of the five had contributed to Republican groups because GOP lawmakers were the ones raising a ruckus on Capitol Hill. Greg Colvin, a San Francisco-based attorney who represented one of the donors, declined to give any details about his client and the donation under review.

The tax matter at issue was whether these donors had sidestepped the gift tax. Created in 1924, the gift tax acts as a safeguard of sorts, backstopping both the estate tax and the income tax. Before its creation, people could donate all their money before they died to avoid the estate tax or give away their assets to relatives in lower income tax brackets. The gift tax does not apply to donations to traditional charities (the Red Cross), trade groups (the US Chamber of Commerce), or political nonprofits formed under the 527 section of the tax code (Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and America Coming Together). In the 1980s, the IRS said that the gift tax did cover contributions to 501(c)(4)s, yet for decades the agency never bothered donors about the gift tax on their donations to such nonprofits.

That changed in early 2011, when the IRS told five big donors to 501(c)(4) groups that they were being investigated for possibly dodging the gift tax. One of these letters read, “Donations to 501(c)(4) organizations are taxable gifts and your contribution in 2008 should have been reported on your 2008 Federal Gift Tax Return.” That was a potentially a big deal. The way the gift tax works, a donor who in 2008 gave more than $2 million to one or more nonprofits could owe hundreds of thousands of dollars to the taxman—a doozy of an unexpected tax bill. If the IRS vigorously applied the gift tax to these sort of donations, donors would be less likely to give (or would give less) to nonprofits, tax experts say.

In May 2011, news of the IRS’ big-donor probe went public. Republicans reacted furiously. On June 3, 2011, Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House ways and means committee, sent a letter to then-IRS commissioner Doug Shulman demanding the names and titles of IRS staffers involved in the gift tax probe, and the criteria used to pick which donors to scrutinize. “Every aspect of this tax investigation, from the timing to the sudden reversal of nearly thirty years of IRS practice, strongly suggests that the IRS is targeting constitutionally-protected political speech,” Camp said. (The IRS denied that the probe was influenced by politics in any way.)

The following month, Miller halted the agency’s donor audits. In a public memo, he wrote, “This is a difficult area with significant legal, administrative, and policy implications with respect to which we have little enforcement history.” The IRS would study the gift tax, Miller added, and if it launched future audits of donors, it would do so only after alerting the public.

If nonprofit donors had once worried about getting slapped with a big tax bill, Miller’s memo eased those fears—just in time for the 2012 campaign season, in which politically active nonprofits raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars. Miller’s memo “gave donors a green light” to finance 501(c)(4)s, Colvin says. “Ever since then donors have been able to give to c-4 organizations who may or may not be active in politics.”

Miller, who lost his job in the latest IRS scandal, was not a political appointee, unlike Shulman, who was named to his post by President George W. Bush. (The staffers who launched the short-lived gift tax probes weren’t political appointees, either.) Yet Marcus Owens, the former IRS director, says Miller’s decision to stop the audits smacked of politics after receiving so much pressure from Congress. “The deputy commissioner’s office does not normally step in to stop audits,” he says. “It’s getting too close to politics at that point.”

Colvin says that Miller and the IRS did the right thing by stopping the donor audits, which had little precedent. “I thought that was a pretty good example of a situation that had the potential to be a scandal and it turned out to be much better managed than this latest thing,” Colvin says.

But all the tax experts tend to agree that the gift tax law, like the rules and guidelines for politically active nonprofits, badly needs fixing. The gift tax is so murky, Colvin says, that some of his clients proactively have paid millions in taxes to avoid the slim chance of an IRS audit. Yet other donors don’t sweat it and pay no gift taxes at all. Ellen Aprill, a Loyola Law School professor, says, “If you’re trying to reform 501(c)(4) groups, you should try to address the uncertainty about the gift tax too.”

As for Republicans in Congress, they seem to want it both ways: hammering IRS officials for letting partisanship influence their agency’s work, yet at the same time applying all the political pressure they can muster to get what they want.

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Official at Heart of IRS Tea Party Scandal Spiked Audits of Big Dark-Money Donors

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White House Learned of IRS Tea Party Probe Early—But Didn’t Tell Obama

by kasyusd Posted on May 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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President Obama’s chief of staff and the White House’s top lawyer got wind of an inspector general’s investigation into the IRS’ singling out of tea partiers and conservative groups several weeks before the report went public. But those officials, according to press secretary Jay Carney, did not tell Obama. The president says he learned about the IRS’ screw-up only after an agency director apologized on Friday, May 10, for employees having targeted conservative groups—an apology that went viral.

Carney told reporters Monday it was “appropriate” that Obama wasn’t told of the damning IG report beforehand. And the president, he said, wasn’t angry to not have been given early notice. “He believes it’s entirely appropriate that, you know, some matters are not appropriate to convey to him and this is one of them,” Carney said.

As we’ve reported, a Treasury Department inspector general, at the behest of angry members of Congress, spent nine months probing whether IRS staffers targeted tea party groups and other right-leaning conservative outfits who had applied for tax-exempt status under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax code. Although staffers did in fact zero in on conservative groups, the IG’s report concluded that political bias did not play a role. Instead, staffers used “inappropriate criteria”—catchwords such as “tea party,” “patriot,” or “9/12 Project” (the latter a creation of conservative talk show host Glenn Beck)—to look for groups that might’ve been too involved in politics. (Groups that file their taxes under 501(c)(4) can dabble in politics, but it can’t be their “primary activity.”) IRS employees got away with this due to “insufficient oversight” by the higher-ups in Washington, the report found.

Testifying before Congress last week, Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner who will soon resign as a result of the agency’s tea party debacle, echoed the IG’s findings. He said IRS employees made “foolish mistakes” and that the agency’s behavior was “obnoxious.” But those employees did not have a grudge against conservative groups. Their errors, Miller said, “were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection.”

“What did they know” and “when did they know it” are two big questions looming over the IRS scandal. Here’s what we know right now: Almost a month before IG’s report came out last Tuesday, a staffer in the office of White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler learned of the report. Ruemmler herself was briefed on April 24. Soon after, she informed Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff. Carney said the president was not told of the investigation because there was nothing to be done about it. Also the White House did not want to appear to be interfering with an inspector general’s report on such a sensitive issue. There is no evidence yet that Obama or his top aides knew about the investigation before this year.

Here is the IG’s report:

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White House Learned of IRS Tea Party Probe Early—But Didn’t Tell Obama

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Billionaires Now Own American Politics

by deqc16rl Posted on May 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Billionaires with an ax to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists set into motion the fabled Watergate scandal, leading to the first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you been so free to meddle. There is no limit to the amount of money you can give to elect your friends and allies to political office, to defeat those with whom you disagree, to shape or stunt or kill policy, and above all to influence the tone and content of political discussion in this country.

Today, politics is a rich man’s game. Look no further than the 2012 elections and that season’s biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first giving $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the US Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged their own campaigns mostly to help Republican candidates for Congress). All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cycle—nearly four times the previous record set by liberal financier George Soros. And that’s only the money we know about. When you add in so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million.

It was not one of Adelson’s better bets. Romney went down in flames; the Republicans failed to retake the Senate and conceded seats in the House; and the majority of candidates backed by Adelson-funded groups lost, too. But Adelson, who oozes chutzpah as only a gambling tycoon worth $26.5 billion could, is undeterred. Politics, he told the Wall Street Journal in his first post-election interview, is like poker: “I don’t cry when I lose. There’s always a new hand coming up.” He said he could double his 2012 giving in future elections. “I’ll spend that much and more,” he said. “Let’s cut any ambiguity.”

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Billionaires Now Own American Politics

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IRS Speaks Out: We Messed Up, But We Would’ve Scrutinized Tea Partiers Anyway

by Vonnie Criswell Posted on May 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Finally, the IRS is giving a full accounting of how and why its staffers singled out tea partiers and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. The quick version: We had the right idea but went about it all wrong.

On Friday morning, Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner set to resign due to the scandal, appeared before the House ways and means committee and testified that several IRS employees made “foolish mistakes” by using catchwords like “tea party” and “patriots” as they picked through hundreds of nonprofit applications from groups that might be involved in politics. Miller described his agency’s behavior as “obnoxious.” Yet he denied that the IRS vetters who handled all those applications for groups wanting 501(c)(4) nonprofit status—who were working out of a field office in Cincinnati—acted out of political bias. Instead, he said the agency’s errors “were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection.”

Prior to Miller’s testimony, the IRS itself took the unusual step of posting on its website 14 questions related to the tea party debacle and the agency’s official response to each one. It’s an interesting and useful document.

The IRS insists that its staffers, as Miller emphasized, were wrong to target groups with “tea party” or “patriots” in their name. However, the agency says that it would’ve zeroed in on tea partiers and other conservative groups anyway, as it looked for applicants that might be getting too involved in politics. They sought out politically-inclined groups because 501(c)(4) nonprofits are allowed to dabble in politics but cannot make it their “primary activity.” But as they looked for groups that might be too political, they used inappropriate shortcuts.

“IRS employees had seen cases of organizations with the name Tea Party in which political activity was an issue that needed to be reviewed for compliance with legal requirements,” the agency says. “Because of the increased inventory of applications, this inappropriate criterion was used as a shortcut to centralize similar cases.” In other words, as a booming number of tea party outfits across the country were filing for tax-exempt status, the folks in charge of reviewing such applications—and making sure applicants were not engaged in so much political action that they would not qualify for this tax status—found it convenient to flag groups with “tea party,” “patriot,” and “9/12 Project” in their name.

The agency also says on its website that it found “no indication of political bias”—echoing the Treasury Department inspector general who investigated the tea party mess. The IRS staffers in Cincinnati didn’t have a grudge for the tea party; they felt, it seems, that tea partiers were simply more prone to get involved in politics.

The agency also offered a few basics on how it handles nonprofit applications. All applications go through Cincinnati, where there are less than 200 people who directly handle those files. Because the agency saw an increase in 501(c)(4) applications from potentially politically active groups, staffers there pooled all those applications together and gave a few selected employees the job of scrutinizing those applications.

Some more interesting nuggets in the Q-and-A:

Not only has the IRS seen an uptick in the number of 501(c)(4) applications, it says the number of groups applying that could become involved in politics has risen as well.

The IRS admits it mistakenly caused “inappropriate delays” for groups applying for tax-exempt status, and made “over-expansive information requests” of the groups it singled out for extra scrutiny. The IRS blamed this on “ineffective processes.”

In 2010 and 2011, as we’ve reported, IRS staffers specifically looked for groups with “tea party” or “patriots” in their name. However, of the nearly 300 groups with applications flagged by IRS staffers, the vast majority did not have either of those words in their name.

The IRS Q-and-A links to a list of almost 170 nonprofit groups given special scrutiny by IRS staffers but later approved for 501(c)(4) status. The entities on that list run the political gamut and include local tea party groups, statewide progressive organizations such as Progress Texas and Progress Missouri Inc., former Sen. Russ Feingold’s Progressives United outfit, and issue-based organizations such as Californians Against Higher Health Costs and Homeless But Not Powerless.

Here is the full list from the IRS’ website:

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IRS Speaks Out: We Messed Up, But We Would’ve Scrutinized Tea Partiers Anyway

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5 Things You Need to Know in the Inspector General’s IRS Tea Party Scandal Report

by JoanSanderz Posted on May 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday evening, the Treasury Department released a long-awaited investigative report on why IRS staffers gave special scrutiny to the applications of thousands of right-leaning groups seeking tax-exempt nonprofit status. Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration conducted the probe from June 2012 to February 2013 in response to pressure from Congress, and the 54-page report sheds light on the whole debacle.

Here are five key takeaways from the report.

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5 Things You Need to Know in the Inspector General’s IRS Tea Party Scandal Report

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Ex-IRS Director: Tea Party Groups Deserved Scrutiny, But IRS Bungled the Job

by olikellopas Posted on May 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Among those in attendance last Friday when IRS official Lois Lerner admitted that agency staffers had systematically singled out tea partiers and other conservative groups for special scrutiny was a lawyer named Marcus Owens. Lerner’s admission was shocking, and nobody realized that more than Owens. That’s because he served as director of the Exempt Organizations Division from 1990 to 2000, prior to Lerner holding the job.

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5 Things You Need to Know in the Inspector General’s IRS Tea Party Scandal Report


Did the Acting IRS Commissioner Mislead Congress?


Word of the Month for May: BOLO


Ex-IRS Director: Tea Party Groups Deserved Scrutiny, But IRS Bungled the Job

Owens, who has worked on tax law issues in private and public practice for almost 40 years, including 25 years at the IRS, says he has been getting a lot of calls about the scandal. The way he sees it, he told me in an interview on Tuesday, is that the IRS was right to take a close look at conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. Particularly in 2010, hundreds of new conservative groups were springing up across the country. “I think that it would be unreasonable to expect the IRS to ignore that, and to simply approve these 501(c)(4) applications from politically active organizations as if they were Scout troops or Little Leagues,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they should be denied exemption or that the evaluation should be overboard or overly intrusive, but there should be special evaluation.”

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Ex-IRS Director: Tea Party Groups Deserved Scrutiny, But IRS Bungled the Job

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Attorney General Eric Holder Orders Investigation of IRS

by DenaeTina858 Posted on May 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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At a Tuesday press conference, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he had ordered the Justice Department and FBI to investigate whether the Internal Revenue Service violated the law by subjecting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt nonprofit status to special scrutiny. Other dark money organizations that have drawn criticism from advocates of campaign finance reform, including the pro-Obama Priorities USA and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, have received little attention from the IRS.

The controversy, which was first reported on Friday, is the latest in a long line of alleged IRS witch hunts against specific political and religious organizations.

The New York Times reports:

The activities of I.R.S. officials are already the subject of an investigation by the agency’s inspector general. The results of that inquiry, which are expected in the next several days, are likely to detail how officials at the agency selected political groups for extra scrutiny about their tax status.

…

The attorney general said there were “a variety of statutes within the I.R.S. code” that could be the basis of a criminal violation. He said officials conducting the investigation would also look at “other things in Title 18” of the United States Code. Title 18 is the overall criminal code for the federal government.

During a concurrent press conference, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that “if the reports about the activity of IRS personnel prove to be true,” President Barack Obama “would find them outrageous, and he would expect that appropriate action be taken, and that people be held responsible. He has no tolerance for targeting of specific groups.”

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Attorney General Eric Holder Orders Investigation of IRS

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Did the Acting IRS Commissioner Mislead Congress?

by ggkk2121333 Posted on May 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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When Lois Lerner, a top IRS official, revealed last Friday that agency staffers had singled out conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny over their potential political activities, she blamed low-level, “frontline” staffers in the agency’s Cincinnati office, a hub of activity that handles tens of thousands of applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS later said no high-level officials were aware of these controversial actions.

As it turns out, the current acting IRS commissioner knew that staffers were flagging applications from certain conservative groups a year before Congress and the public found out about it. And members of Congress are steaming mad that the IRS was aware of the questionable practices of some of its staffers and didn’t speak up about it. Several Republicans claim that Congress was misled by the IRS and its top brass about these actions.

The IRS said that current acting commissioner Steven Miller learned on May 3, 2012, that staffers had been picking out conservative groups for greater scrutiny than is typical. (Miller was deputy commissioner at the time.)

Yet Republican lawmakers say Miller neglected to tell Congress about the systematic singling out of conservative groups in subsequent interactions. Miller wrote two letters to Congress after his May 2012 briefing about how the IRS reviews applications for tax-exempt status, but did not mention the scrutiny of tea party groups. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House ways and means oversight subcommittee on the subject of “organizational and compliance issues related to public charities.” During questioning, Miller was asked about tea party groups being harassed, but not about tea partiers specifically. He did not mention having been briefed on the IRS’ actions.

“It is almost inconceivable to imagine that top officials at the IRS knew conservative groups were being targeted but chose to willfully mislead the Committee’s investigation into this practice,” Rep. Dave Camp, chair of the ways and means committee, said in a statement.

An IRS spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Miller wrote in an op-ed for USA Today on Tuesday that the IRS’ singling out of conservative groups showed “a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made.” He added that sifting through applications for tax-exempt status was “factually complex, and it’s challenging to separate out political issues from those involving education or social welfare.” He did not say why he didn’t tell Congress about the tea party scrutiny when he learned of it in May 2012.

Other lawmakers say they corresponded with the IRS on the tea party issue and can’t understand why the agency didn’t share all of what it knew. “I wrote to the IRS three times last year after hearing concerns that conservative groups were being targeted,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), said in a statement Monday. “Yet it didn’t occur to anyone at the IRS to let us know that this targeting was in fact happening? Knowing what we know now, the IRS was at best being far from forthcoming, or at worst, being deliberately dishonest with Congress. These are the facts and the questions we need answered.”

They could be answered soon. On Friday, the House ways and means committee will hold a hearing on the IRS’ tea party controversy. Other House and Senate committees have pledged to investigate the matter, too.

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Did the Acting IRS Commissioner Mislead Congress?

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Electric Car Guru Elon Musk Ditches Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us Group

by Lou Bovee Posted on May 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and the private space travel company SpaceX, has parted ways with FWD.us, the tech-centric political group that Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg launched last month. So, too, has investor and entrepreneur David Sacks, who created the social network Yammer and financed the satiric 2005 movie Thank You for Smoking. The tech news website AllThingsD first reported the departures of Musk and Sacks, and their names have been removed from the list of nearly two-dozen “major contributors” to FWD.us.

Zuckerberg and Facebook “Causes” creator Joe Green founded FWD.us to lobby on behalf of Silicon Valley firms in Washington. They quickly earned the endorsements of a host of other tech superstars. The group—which, as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, does not have to disclose its donors—has reportedly raised more than $25 million so far. The group chose the ongoing fight over comprehensive immigration reform as its first foray into Congressional politics, seeking to expand the number of visas available to engineers and other high-skilled workers that tech companies would like to recruit. By all accounts, FWD.us’ message has gotten a warm reception on Capitol Hill.

But the group caused a political firestorm recently when it ran TV advertisements praising Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) for supporting more oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Another ad depicted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) criticizing Obamacare and President Obama’s refusal (so far) to green-light the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. FWD.us ran the ads to give Begich and Graham some political cover on immigration reform, the theory being that by touting the senators’ conservative bona fides, they could give them the space to take a moderate position on an immigration reform bill. The Begich and Graham ads ran for a week and are no longer on the air. Liberal and environmental groups reacted furiously to FWD.us’ conservative and anti-environmental message, protesting at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. And last week, nine progressive groups, including MoveOn.org, Progressives United, the Sierra Club, and Daily Kos, pledged to pull down their existing paid Facebook ads or cancel future ad buys for at least two weeks.

It’s not surprising that Musk would break with FWD.us. Tesla Motors builds high-end electric cars; its entire business model is built around a clean-tech economy. Musk also sits on the board of SolarCity, a company that delivers, installs, and maintains solar panels powering homes, businesses, and government offices.

Musk sent this statement to AllThingsD: “I agreed to support Fwd.us because there is a genuine need to reform immigration. However, this should not be done at the expense of other important causes. I have spent a lot of time fighting far larger lobbying organizations in DC and believe that the right way to win on a cause is to argue the merits of that cause. This statement may surprise some people, but my experience is that most (not all) politicians and their staffs want to do the right thing and eventually do.”

FWD.us spokeswoman Kate Hansen emailed this statement to Mother Jones: “We recognize that not everyone will always agree with or be pleased by our strategy—and we’re grateful for the continued support of our dedicated founders and major contributors. FWD.us remains totally committed to supporting a bipartisan policy agenda that will boost the knowledge economy, including comprehensive immigration reform.”

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Electric Car Guru Elon Musk Ditches Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us Group

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