Tag Archives: money in politics

Mitch McConnell’s 2014 Battle Could Be the Most Expensive Senate Race Ever

by Dermian Fizalian Posted on August 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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In 2014, ground zero for our cash-drenched, post-Citizens United politics will undoubtedly be Kentucky. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell faces a tea party challenger, Matt Bevin, in the GOP primary and, barring a stunning upset, the Clinton-backed Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in the general election. As I reported in July, Grimes says she’ll need between $26 million and $30 million to defeat McConnell. Only four Senate candidates raised more in 2012.

Now, the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza has run the numbers and made a odds-on prediction: The Kentucky race will be the first $100 million Senate election—and so the most expensive—in American history.

Cillizza builds a strong case. McConnell, who raised $21 million for his 2008 reelection campaign, already has nearly $10 million in the bank. To get past Bevin, his pesky primary challenger and a wealthy businessman with millions at his disposal, McConnell could end up spending $5 million to win the primary. Cillizza says McConnell could go on to raise and spend upwards of $35 million overall. And if Grimes, the Democrat, meets her $30 million target, then we’re talking about a $65 million to $70 million race.

And that’s before the outside money starts pouring in. Here’s Cillizza:

Consider the two national parties. The National Republican Senatorial Committee will spend almost everything it has to bring McConnell back, given his prominence within the party and the amount he has done for the committee over the years. And, while the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has plenty of its own incumbents to defend, beating McConnell might make up for lots of other losses in other places, and the committee knows it. It’s easy to see both the NRSC and the DSCC spending in the neighborhood of $10 million each—and that might well be conservative—on Kentucky. Add that $20 million, and the cost of the race is already at $90 million.

The final piece of the spending puzzle is the super-PAC world. A pro-McConnell super PAC—Kentuckians for Strong Leadership—brought in more than $1 million in its first four months of existence. There will be much, much more where that came from. And it’s a certainty that Democrats will set up a super-PAC of their own to support Grimes/beat up McConnell. Aside from those quasi-official super PACs for the two candidates, there will be lots of other interested parties who want to make their voices heard—read: spend money in the most high-profile Senate race in the country. Will all of these groups combine to spend $10 million? Um, yes.

Cillizza’s prognosticating is a little fuzzy on super-PACs, so here’s more to consider. Senate Majority PAC, the super-PAC devoted to electing Senate Democrats, has already hammered McConnell on the airwaves, and it will no doubt continue to attack as long as the race remains competitive. There’s also the American Crossroads super-PAC and its secretly-funded sister nonprofit, Crossroads GPS. The president of the two Crossroads groups is Steven Law, McConnell’s former chief of staff. You can bet that the Crossroads juggernaut will make itself heard in the Bluegrass State. With all those major outside players eyeing Kentucky, super-PAC and dark-money spending could easily blow past Cillizza’s $10-million estimate.

In 2012, the nation’s marquee Senate race was in Massachusetts, pitting incumbent Scott Brown against Elizabeth Warren. That race cost more than $80 million, falling short of the $100 million threshold only because Brown and Warren agreed to a “people’s pledge” keeping most super-PAC and nonprofit spending out of their race. In 2014, the spotlight is on Kentucky, and with no truce in sight, crossing that $100 million milestone is looking like a foregone conclusion.

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Mitch McConnell’s 2014 Battle Could Be the Most Expensive Senate Race Ever

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Iowa State Senator Allegedly Wanted Cash for Ron Paul Presidential Endorsement

by da3xs1z Posted on August 8, 2013

Mother Jones

A few days before the 2012 Iowa presidential caucuses, Kent Sorenson, an influential Republican state senator in Iowa, caused a stir by cutting ties with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and endorsing libertarian Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). “The decision I am making today is one of the most difficult I have made in my life,” Sorenson said. “But given what’s at stake for our country, I have decided I must take this action.”

Making Sorenson’s decision a lot easier was, allegedly, the offer of a whole lot of cash.

According to an October 2011 email obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), an ally of Sorenson’s allegedly told Ron Paul’s campaign that they could have Sorenson’s full support in exchange for an $8,000-a-month salary for Sorenson, $5,000-a-month salary for an acolyte of Sorenson’s, and $100,000 in contributions to a political action committee run by Sorenson. (It remains unclear how much, if any, money actually changed hands. Iowa campaign finance filings contain no record of a $100,000 donation to Sorenson’s Iowa Conservatives Fund PAC.)

In exchange, the email says, Sorenson would ditch Bachmann’s campaign, endorse Paul, join Paul on the campaign trail in Iowa, and provide Paul’s campaign with a member list of the “main Iowa home-school group” for “targeted home-school mail.” The bombshell email was allegedly written by Aaron Dorr, who runs Iowa Gun Owners, and is addressed to John Tate, Paul’s 2012 campaign manager. An aide to Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, Dennis Fusaro, gave the email to CRP, which you can read below:

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width: 630,
height: 700,
sidebar: false,
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container: “#DV-viewer-749399-kent-sorenson-john-tate-ron-paul-memo”
);

Here’s more from CRP:

The lengthy memo sent on Oct. 29, 2011, was addressed to John Tate, who was then the Ron Paul 2012 campaign manager, Dorr not only lays out Sorenson’s alleged requests for money and what he will do in return, but says that because of a major Iowa Senate leadership meeting coming up on Nov. 10, Sorenson couldn’t quit the Bachmann campaign until Nov. 11. In a second email chain Fusaro provided, Benton emails Dorr on Nov. 14, writing that, “with those meetings in the rear-view mirror, I though (sic) now might be a good time to revisit Kent and your brother joining our team.”

On Nov. 21, Dorr replied to Benton and Tate that he was going to step out of the negotiations because Dimitri Kesari, a Ron Paul staffer, had gone to Sorenson’s house for dinner.

“As I’m no longer needed to facilitate a conversation at this point, I’ll bow out and let you, John, Dimitri, and Kent work this out,” Dorr wrote.

Kasari, Tate, Dorr and Benton did not return calls and emails for comment. Today, The Iowa Republican, a conservative blog in Iowa, published an audio recording of what is alleged to be a conversation between Fusaro and Sorenson in which the senator tells Fusaro that Kasari gave his wife a $30,000 check from an account belonging to a jewelry store Kasari’s wife owns. In the recording Sorenson said he did not cash the check.

In response, Sorenson told TheIowaRepublican.com, which also reported on the alleged Sorenson-Paul arrangement, that Fusaro had fabricated the email and that he’d never received any money. The other players implicated in this alleged pay-to-play deal did not comment to CRP. If true, this scheme is yet another headache for Sorenson. He is currently under investigation by a state ethics committee for allegedly pledging his support to Bachmann’s campaign in return for renumeration, and he has denied any wrongdoing in that matter, too.

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Iowa State Senator Allegedly Wanted Cash for Ron Paul Presidential Endorsement

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Retiring GOP Congressman: Fundraising Is “The Main Business” of Congress

by Natalia681 Posted on August 8, 2013

Mother Jones

On Tuesday, Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), who was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 2002 and then switched to the GOP in 2004, announced he wouldn’t run again. In an interview with the Norman News Star, Alexander said he’d done all he could do in Congress, and he looked forward to life beyond the gilded halls of Capitol Hill.

The most interesting part of Alexander’s interview, though, was his description of how fundraising dominates the life of a member of Congress. Here’s what he said:

But the time has come for someone else to advance that cause now. I made that decision when one stops aggressively raising money, well then people start to ask questions. And that’s an unfortunate part of the business that we’re in. But it’s the main business, and it’s 24 hours a day raising money. It’s not fair. It’s not fair for the member, not fair for constituency to have to be approached every day or two or week ore two about campaign contributions. So it’s just a grueling business and I’m ready for another part of my life.

“Twenty-four hours a day” is hyperbole, of course, but it’s nonetheless a eye-opening statement. In making these comments he joins a list of outgoing lawmakers who, freed from the burdens of fundraising, have embraced their inner Bulworth and vented about the exhausting fundraising hamster wheel. In January, after announcing his forthcoming retirement, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said that Congress barely functions because members spend too much time buckraking. “The time is so consumed with raising money now, these campaigns, that you don’t have the time for the kind of personal relationships that so many of us built up over time,” he said. “So in that way, fun, I don’t know, there needs to be more time for senators to establish personal relationships than what we are able to do at this point in time.”

Why is Congress fundraising so much? Because the cost of elections keeps rising. In 1986, according to the Campaign Finance Institute, it cost $753,274 to win a House race and $6.4 million to win a Senate race (in 2012 dollars). Last year, those figures were, respectively, $1.6 million and $10.3 million. And the cost to win is only climbing.

It takes a whole lot of phone calls, breakfasts at the Capitol Hill Club, skeet shootings, beer bashes, ski trips, and Star Wars-themed fundraisers to raise that much money. For Rep. Alexander, it was all too much.

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Retiring GOP Congressman: Fundraising Is “The Main Business” of Congress

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Dead People Have Donated Nearly $600K to Campaigns Since 2009

by Zack Leverett Posted on August 6, 2013

Mother Jones

Yes, dead people contribute to political campaigns. No, they’re not zombies. USA Today reports:

The dead can’t vote, but they can give money to politicians.

Thirty-two people listed on federal campaign records as “deceased” have contributed more than $586,000 to congressional and presidential candidates and political parties since Jan. 1, 2009.

This isn’t a scandal or weird error. Federal campaign rules allow Americans to make political candidates or committees the beneficiaries of their estates. (Dead people can also leave their money to charities, for instance.) According to the USA Today analysis of FEC filings, 32 dead people contributed the nearly $600,000 to presidential and congressional candidates and committees. The Democratic National Committee received $245,176 of the zombie cash, $163,200 went to the Libertarian Party, $96,329 went to the Green Party, $31,203 went to the Obama Victory Fund, and $25,000 went to the National Committee for an Effective Congress.

Currently, there is a case pending before a federal appellate court in Washington, DC, that seeks to overturn limits on political contributions from dead donors. (Limits on contributions are supposed to help curb political corruption, whether the money comes from breathing person or a deceased individual’s estate.) The case involves a man who left more than $217,000 to the Libertarian National Committee in 2007. “A dead person can’t corrupt someone,” Alan Gura, attorney for the Libertarian Party, argued. The fight over zombie campaign cash continues.

h/t Political Wire

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Dead People Have Donated Nearly $600K to Campaigns Since 2009

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"Green Billionaire" Launches Big-Money Blitz Against Virginia GOPer

by publik23 Posted on August 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund manager turned climate activist and big-spending political player, already has one notch in his belt, helping elect Massachusetts’ Ed Markey to the US Senate earlier this year. Now he’s aiming for notch No. 2: pummeling Republican Ken Cuccinelli and electing Cuccinelli’s opponent, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s next governor.

Politico reports that Steyer’s super-PAC, NextGen Climate Action, will run its first wave of TV ads in Virginia this week. NextGen and its consultants are also laying the groundwork for a statewide get-out-the-vote effort this fall targeting Virginians who care about the climate. GOTV efforts are especially important in this year’s Virginia gubernatorial race because it is an off-year election and the year after a presidential race. Voters are following politics less closely, and turnout is expected to be low.

That Steyer would choose the Cuccinelli-McAuliffe race as his next target is no surprise. Cuccinelli, who is currently the state attorney general, is one of the loudest members of the GOP’s chorus of climate change deniers. He has frequently attacked the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to curb greenhouse gases, and he led a witch hunt into the research of prominent climate scientist Michael Mann, a professor at Penn State University.

If Steyer’s goal is to use his wealth and today’s lax campaign finance rules to force candidates to discuss climate change and to oust those candidates who don’t take it seriously, then attacking Cuccinelli is a no-brainer. “I would say there’s a very clear choice on this topic between these two candidates, and I think the citizens of Virginia deserve to understand both what the truth is and what the implications of that are,” Steyer told Politico.

Here’s more on Steyer’s big Virginia blitz:

While Steyer’s first overt move in Virginia comes in the form of paid television advertising, he told Politico repeatedly that he views get-out-the-vote efforts as a better overall investment, along with digital advertising and other, less-traditional independent expenditure methods.

“Our going-in assumption is that the bulk of what we’re doing is field—is enabling the citizens to literally speak to each other,” Steyer said. Referring to the Prop. 39 fight, he explained: “Our sense in California was that technology enabled a lot of viewers to just skip our ads.”

He added on a wry note: “The other thing that’s true, as I’m sure you know, is the traditional way for consultants to get paid is through a percentage of the TV buy…So it’s like you say, you know, ‘There’s a flood in Afghanistan.’ And they’ll say, ‘We need a bigger TV buy.'”

The billionaire freely acknowledged that he was a newcomer to Virginia, but in a whirlwind tour of Richmond last week, he introduced himself to a number of prominent figures in the state political and clean-energy communities.

Steyer met in Virginia’s capital city Thursday with a collection of climate activists and another group of about 20 energy executives. One of those executives—Mike Healy of Skyline Innovations, who invited Steyer to Richmond in the first place—delivered a letter signed by several colleagues asking that Steyer use his financial firepower in the governor’s race.

The consensus in that meeting, Steyer said, was that the advanced-energy sector could pack a much bigger punch in state politics if it were better organized politically and more deliberate about pushing the message that green policies can translate into jobs. (And, it goes without saying, if a deep-pocketed out-of-state figure would be willing to deliver a nuclear-level strike against a politician like Cuccinelli.)

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"Green Billionaire" Launches Big-Money Blitz Against Virginia GOPer

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Alison Lundergan Grimes: I Need $26-30 Million to Beat Mitch McConnell

by John Graham Posted on July 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky Democrat who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in next year’s election, is wasting no time beating the bushes for campaign cash. On Saturday, she “wowed” attendees at a Democratic Party private fundraising retreat on Martha’s Vineyard. She’ll need to wow a lot more donors, and fast: McConnell is a master fundraiser, and Grimes will need a whole lot of cash to defeat one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress.

But how much? Between $26 million and $30 million, according to a Democratic strategist who recently spoke with Grimes. Even with Election Day still 17 months away, Grimes has been busy courting DC politicos to raise funds, name-dropping the Clintons in her conversations. Grimes’ father, Jerry, a former director of the Kentucky Democratic Party, is friends with Bill Clinton, who reportedly urged Grimes to run against McConnell. (Grimes spokesman Jonathan Hurst did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Even by the standards of today’s big-money politics, Grimes’ $26-30 million target is a staggering sum of money. It’s almost three times more than the average winning Senate race in 2012. Only four Senate candidates—Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, David Dewhurst of Texas, and Linda McMahon of Connecticut—raised more than $26 million during the 2012 election season. And Grimes’ fundraising goal does not include outside groups—super-PACs, dark-money nonprofits, etc. Depending on how competitive the Kentucky race is, tens of millions more in outside money could pour in.

Grimes’ impressive showing at the Martha’s Vineyard event could help donors and party loyalists forget her campaign’s rocky start. Her kick-off event started half an hour late, with no banner or signs even mentioning the US Senate. Instead, an “Alison Lundergan Grimes: Secretary of State” banner hung behind her. A roll of toilet paper propped up one of the microphones she used make her announcement. At the time of her campaign launch, she had no website, no Facebook page, and nowhere for people to donate money.

McConnell, meanwhile, has been in campaign mode since literally the day after the 2012 elections, when he held his first 2014 fundraiser. In the second quarter of 2013, McConnell raised $2.2 million, more than any other Republican running for reelection. His campaign currently has $9.6 million in the bank.

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Alison Lundergan Grimes: I Need $26-30 Million to Beat Mitch McConnell

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GOP Super-Lawyer Jim Bopp Crashes Press Conference Call About Jim Bopp

by Cletus Posted on July 9, 2013

Mother Jones

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington today filed a whistleblower complaint with the IRS against campaign finance super lawyer James Bopp, the legal genius behind the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates for corporate money in campaigns. CREW alleges that he’s using a nonprofit organization he controls to divert money into his law firm without paying taxes on it.

Bopp’s Terre Haute, Indiana-based law practice works with clients including the Republican National Committee, the National Organization for Marriage, and a variety of anti-abortion groups. He is also the general counsel to the James Madison Center for Free Speech, a nonprofit legal organization that shares an office with Bopp’s law firm.The Madison Center has only one employee: Bopp himself, and all of the money it raises is used to pay Bopp’s firm. (Much of the complaint seems spurred by this Slate story that detailed the unusual arrangement and which is included as an exhibit to CREW’s complaint.)

CREW sees this arrangement as a clear violation of federal tax law, which bans nonprofits from providing a substantial benefit for private parties. The group finds it especially egregious and possibly criminal that Bopp has signed forms saying that the Madison Center doesn’t employ any independent contractors who make more than $50,000, when it’s paid his firm hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past few years. The fees paid to his firm are listed on the center’s tax returns simply as legal fees, rather than fees to a contractor. CREW also alleges that the board of the Madison Center, which includes Amway heiress and deep-pocketed GOP donor Betsy DeVos, has violated its fiduciary duty by allowing this arrangement. It estimates in its complaint that Bopp is liable for more than $6 million in unpaid excise taxes and other penalties. (CREW has also made complaints against Bopp with the US Attorney in Indiana and the state attorney general.)

Bopp finds most of this preposterous. “I’m the only one that does any work, so I’m the only one that gets paid,” he told me. “I’m not on the board. My firm is hired. The vast majority of things we do pro bono.” He says he’s not worried about the complaint, noting that despite CREW’s long list of complaints filed against various people and organizations, “I can’t find that they’ve ever won one. I’ve represented some of the people they’ve complained about and the IRS didn’t do a damn thing.”

When CREW convened a conference call with reporters today to discuss its complaint, Bopp phoned in to defend himself. “You didn’t ask me questions before you filed this ridiculous complaint,” he exclaimed when CREW’s executive director Melanie Sloan told him to convene a conference call of his own. “So I’m going to answer the questions.” Reporters seemed happy to have him there to respond, but CREW cut him off after he started to dominate the discussion.

While liberals might like to see Bopp slapped down by the IRS, the CREW complaint seems like rather small potatoes, despite the high-profile target. The Madison Center’s budget is relatively small, especially compared to what Bopp makes representing various political groups and the legal fees he recoups in court when he wins First Amendment cases. The center averages a little more than $200,000 in annual income, much of it coming from the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group. If Bopp really were trying to use the nonprofit to avoid taxes, he’s not funneling much of his money through it.

Sloan admits the potential infraction is fairly small, but argues that the size is insignificant. “I grant you it’s not a ton of money, but anybody working in this sphere needs to follow the law,” she says. “People don’t just get to ignore the laws that are inconvenient for them. We have a lot of legal support for our claims. Sometimes I think when you’re as significant a figure as Bopp is, you think the law doesn’t apply to you.”

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GOP Super-Lawyer Jim Bopp Crashes Press Conference Call About Jim Bopp

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“Super-PACs May Be Bad for America, But They’re Very Good for CBS”

by donkorleone842 Posted on July 8, 2013

Mother Jones

Ask the average American about super-PACs and I’d venture to guess he or she thinks of: those incessant negative political ads during the evening news, something about the Obama-Romney race, or the sheer amount of spending ($7 billion!) during the last election season. (That is, if they even know what a super-PAC is.) For the broadcasting business, though, super-PACs have come to stand for something altogether different: a big, fat payday.

The title of this post refers to something Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS Corporation, said at an entertainment law conference last year. Moonves was understandably over the moon about the rise of super-PACs: In 2012, he explained, the network’s profits were expected to soar by $180 million thanks to political ads.

And it’s not just CBS that’s riding high thanks to political ad spending. TV stations in battleground states are magnets for ad spending, and they’re driving a new wave of consolidation in the broadcast industry, leaving a handful of big media companies well-positioned to reap hundreds of millions during the 2014 midterm elections and, especially, the 2016 presidential race. Just in the past month, the Gannett company bought 20 TV stations for $1.5 billion, and the Tribune Company inked a $2.7 billion deal for 19 stations. Those deals included stations in battleground states.

Washington, DC’s WJLA, owned by the Allbritton media company, the New York Times notes, which serves both the DC and the northern Virginia markets, banked $33 million in ad spending on campaigns and issues last year. Columbus’ WBNS, owned by the Dispatch Broadcast Group, booked $20 million in campaign ad spending out of $50 million in total ad buys. Ad spending was also up at TV stations in Wisconsin and Colorado. Wherever there was a political fight, campaigns and consultants were gobbling up ads. According to the Times, WJLA could by bring in $300 million if the Allbritton media company decided to sell it (which, earlier this year, Allbritton said it planned to do).

So all this political ad spending is making the owners of these stations mighty happy. But someone’s getting the shaft, right? Yep: local viewers and businesses. From the Times:

Analysts say the surge in station consolidation this year has also been driven by low interest rates and by an enormous rise in retransmission fees for stations, which are the equivalent of per-subscriber fees for cable channels like ESPN and MTV. Some stations now earn 40 to 50 cents a month from each cable and satellite subscriber.

But those fees currently account for about 10 percent of station revenue, and even if they double in the next five years, as the research firm SNL Kagan predicts, advertising revenue will remain the most important part of the station business. Thus, political advertising is a lifeline, even if the sheer volume of ads sometimes makes viewers want to hurl the remotes at their sets.

“We get complaints from viewers,” Michael J. Fiorile, the chief executive of WBNS’s owner, the Dispatch Broadcast Group, acknowledged. “The bigger complaints are from regular advertisers who really get pushed off the air.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he added with a chuckle. “It’s a good problem for us to have.”

There are a number of worries with the escalation of the TV political ad wars and the broadcast industry’s consolidation. For starters, it’s far less likely that TV stations will fact-check super-PAC ads, let alone yank misleading ads off the air, which political analyst Kathleen Hall Jamieson is trying to do with her FlackCheck.org project. (By law, TV stations can’t censor candidates’ ads, but they can vet and reject those of outside groups.) After all, super-PACs and dark-money nonprofits are a cash cow for broadcasters. Why bite the hand that feeds? When the public interest group Free Press analyzed political ads and newscast stories in six TV markets in battleground states, it found “a near-complete station blackout on local reporting about the political ads they aired.”

The consolidation of the TV industry, meanwhile, can result in less local reporting and more shared content between various stations. And the decline in original, local reporting could worsen with more consolidation expected this year. “With the consolidation of ownership there’s generally a decline in the quality in local news,” Free Press’ Tim Karr told the Columbia Journalism Review in May. “It is directly related to the staffing of local newsrooms.”

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“Super-PACs May Be Bad for America, But They’re Very Good for CBS”

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Even Republicans Admit It: Politics Did Not Drive the IRS Tea Party “Scandal”

by AlvinaiTyler Posted on July 5, 2013

Mother Jones

With each passing week, the Internal Revenue Service’s supposed targeting of tea party groups looks less like a scandal and more like a case of IRS staffers doing their jobs, albeit in an overzealous, at times clumsy and narrow-minded way.

From the New York Times we now learn that IRS employees who vetted applications for tax-exempt status heavily scrutinized a Palestinian rights group, open source software developers, and an organization trying to help musicians make money online. This comes on top of the news, as Mother Jones previously reported, that the agency also singled out for extra vetting groups with “progressive, “occupy,” and “Israel” in their name.

That sound you hear is the last gasp of the tea party targeting “scandal,” which some Republicans have tried mightily to hype into a Watergate-esque controversy. Make no mistake: As the agency subjected tea partiers and other conservative groups to an intense amount of scrutiny, it made those same groups wait for months, if not years, to learn whether they’d earned tax-exempt status. This is a big deal. Waiting around that long crimps the flow of donations that a nonprofit needs to survive. Tea partiers are right to be mad about that. But what the drip-drip of revelations in the IRS mess has shown is that it’s not fair to say just tea partiers were singled out. Other nonprofits, partisan and nonpartisan, left- and right-leaning, politically inclined and not, got a grilling by the IRS, too. They also endured long wait times.

You’ll remember that the Treasury Department inspector general report that first looked at the “targeting” of groups with “tea party” and “patriots” in their name found no evidence of political bias. At the time, Republicans in Congress didn’t buy that. Clearly, they argued, this was the work of anti-conservative IRS staffers, or a meddlesome Obama White House looking to suppress its opponents in a closely fought election year. Then we learned that the manager of the IRS Screening Office in Cincinnati, where most of the alleged targeting took place, identified himself as a “conservative Republican.” Still, Republicans forged onward.

Now, with these latest revelations, even some GOPers are coming around to the reality of what happened. From the Times:

“We haven’t proved political motivation,” said Representative Charles Boustany Jr., a Louisiana Republican who, as the chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, is leading one inquiry.

Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, said that in retrospect, suggestions that Mr. Obama had orchestrated an IRS attack on his political enemies were unwarranted.

“Presidents have always been very careful about maintaining the appearance of keeping hands off the IRS,” he said. “I don’t have any reason to believe there wasn’t targeting of conservatives, but it might well have been a lot more than that as well.”

So there you have it. Republicans have gone from blaming the Obama administration and IRS staffers for targeting tea partiers to double-negative-laced non-concession concessions like Roy Blunt’s. (That said, Republicans aren’t calling off the hounds quite yet: A spokeswoman for Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), who chairs the House ways and means committee, says committee members will continue to “gather the facts” and “follow them wherever they lead us.”)

Questions remain about the process the IRS uses to vet nonprofit applications, and why it takes so long to respond to some nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status. The way the IRS went about scrutinizing organizations in recent years—with its “be on the lookout,” or BOLO, lists—is troublesome, which is why acting IRS commissioner Danny Werfel recently scrapped the BOLOs and pledged to reform how the IRS does its job. But as for allegations of politically motivated targeting, with all we know right now, that scandal appears to be dead.

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Even Republicans Admit It: Politics Did Not Drive the IRS Tea Party “Scandal”

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Dark Money Group Spent on House Race, Then Told IRS It Didn’t

by anjunonstennyao Posted on July 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

Shortly before Election Day last year, mailers went out to Texas voters featuring pictures of a Democratic congressional candidate and a rare species of spider, whose discovery had forced stoppage of an important highway construction project.

“The same left-wing extremists who support Pete Gallego want more burdensome regulations that put the interests of spiders above our need to create more jobs,” the flier declared, referring to discovery of the endangered Braken Bat Cave meshweaver. “The best way to stop left-wing extremists from killing jobs is to vote against their hand-picked candidate Pete Gallego.”

The group that put out the mailer, A Better America Now, reported to the Federal Election Commission it had spent about $65,000 for the mailer and TV advertising in the hard-fought race to represent Texas’ 23rd district.

But in a tax return recently filed with the IRS, the group claimed it did not spend any money at all on “direct or indirect political campaign activities.”

The tax return is signed under the penalty of perjury by the group’s president, Bob Portrie, and the accounting firm LBA Group. Neither responded to requests for comment.

We first reported on A Better America Now earlier this year, showing it had told the IRS in a 2011 application for nonprofit status that it did not plan to spend any money on elections. (That document was sent to ProPublica last year by the IRS, even though the application was still pending and thus not supposed to be released.)

“This type of inaccurate reporting by electioneering nonprofit groups has a long history,” says Public Citizen’s Craig Holman, when asked about the group’s most recent filing. “It is rooted in the fact that the IRS almost never holds these groups accountable for such false declarations.”

A Better America Now was a bit player in the elections. But it’s also an example of the kind of increasingly common outside groups that inject anonymous money into political campaigns.

Such social welfare nonprofits are not supposed to have political campaign activity as their primary purpose 2014 but the ambiguities around how the IRS measures such activity and how it screens the groups are at the center of the recent investigations of the IRS’s treatment of Tea Party groups.

ProPublica has documented how nonprofits that spent millions of dollars on ads in the 2010 elections failed to report or underreported that political spending to the IRS. The tax form that the groups are required to file with the IRS specifically asks for details on any campaign spending.

One of the curious things about A Better America Now is that, though the group spent money in a congressional and a state legislative race in southwest Texas, it is based a few miles off the beach near Jacksonville, Florida.

The president of A Better America Now, Portrie, is also the head of a consulting firm, the Fenwick Group. The two groups are listed at the same address. Fenwick’s website says it works with “organizations across the healthcare, financial services, insurance, retail and investment sectors.”

Portrie and Fenwick were also linked to ads run by another Florida-based social welfare nonprofit, America is Not Stupid, in last year’s US Senate race in Montana. Ads by America is Not Stupid featured a talking baby complaining about alleged cuts to Medicare by President Obama, and referring to the baby’s stinking diaper.

In 2010, the New York Times reported on links between the Fenwick Group and yet another politically active nonprofit, the Coalition to Protect Seniors. Ads by that group featured the same talking baby ad.

In last year’s race in Texas, which attracted a lot of outside spending on both sides, the Democrat, Gallego, prevailed over Republican incumbent Quico Canseco.

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Dark Money Group Spent on House Race, Then Told IRS It Didn’t

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