Tag Archives: money in politics

Dark-Money Group Defended Kelly Ayotte With Money From Her Colleagues’ PACs

by Julie Plunkett Posted on July 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Center for Public Integrity website.

Freshman Sen. Kelly Ayotte found herself under serious political fire. The New Hampshire Republican’s vote in April against enhancing firearm background checks prompted withering ads from a gun control group. Then another. And another.

But shortly thereafter, a conservative nonprofit—funded in part by some of Ayotte’s own Senate colleagues, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of campaign finance filings—sprang into action on Ayotte’s behalf.

On May 8, the leadership PAC of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) contributed $15,000 to the American Future Fund, records show. A day later, the PAC of Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), gave the same amount. In the following weeks, the leadership PACs of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) each contributed $30,000 to the American Future Fund, a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofit that’s not required by law to publicly reveal its donors. Meanwhile, the leadership PACs of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) donated $10,000 to the American Future Fund, while the PAC of Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) gave $5,000.

These six GOP leadership PACs combined to give a total of $105,000 to the American Future Fund in May, according to the Center’s analysis of Federal Election Commission filings. It is highly unusual for a group of leadership PACs to make sizeable contributions to politically active nonprofits, let alone during a matter of weeks, at a time when the beneficiary is airing ads in support of one of their own.

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Dark-Money Group Defended Kelly Ayotte With Money From Her Colleagues’ PACs

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6 Mind-Blowing Stats on How 1 Percent of the 1 Percent Now Dominate Our Elections

by siteforme Posted on June 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Here’s a statistic that should jolt you awake like black coffee with three shots of espresso dropped in: In the 2012 election cycle, 28 percent of all disclosed donations—that’s $1.68 billion—came from just 31,385 people. Think of them as the 1 percenters of the 1 percent, the elite of the elite, the wealthiest of the wealthy.

That’s the blockbuster finding in an eye-popping new report by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan transparency advocate. The report’s author, Lee Drutman, calls the 1 percent of the 1 percent “an elite class that increasingly serves as the gatekeepers of public office in the United States.” This rarefied club of donors, Drutman found, worked in high-ranking corporate positions (often in finance or law). They’re clustered in New York City and Washington, DC. Most are men. You might’ve heard of some of them: casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Texas waste tycoon Harold Simmons, Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Those are a few of the takeaways from Sunlight’s report. Here are six more statistics (including charts) giving you what you need to know about the wealthy donors who dominate the political money game—and the lawmakers who rely on them.

(1) The median donation from the 1 percent of the 1 percent was $26,584. As the chart below shows, that’s more than half the median family income in America.

Economic Policy Institute

(2) The 28.1 percent of total money from the 1 percent of the 1 percent is the most in modern history. It was 21.8 percent in 2006, and 20.5 percent in 2010.

Sunlight Foundation

(3) Megadonors are very partisan. Four out of five 1-percent-of-the-1-percent donors gave all of their money to one party or the other.

Sunlight Foundation

(4) Every single member of the House or Senate who won an election in 2012 received money from the 1 percent of the 1 percent.

Orham Cam/Shutterstock

(6) For the 2012 elections, winning House members raised on average $1.64 million, or about $2,250 per day, during the two-year cycle. The average winning senator raised even more: $10.3 million, or $14,125 per day.

Dawid Konopka/Shutterstock

(6) Of the 435 House members elected last year, 372—more than 85 percent—received more from the 1 percent of the 1 percent than they did from every single small donor combined.

Sunlight Foundation

So what are we to make of the rise of the 1 percent of the 1 percent? Drutman makes a point similar to what I reported in my recent profile of Democratic kingmaker Jeffrey Katzenberg: We’re living in an era when megadonors exert control over who runs for office, who gets elected, and what politicians say and do. “And in an era of unlimited campaign contributions,” Drutman writes, “the power of the 1 percent of the 1 percent only stands to grow with each passing year.”

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6 Mind-Blowing Stats on How 1 Percent of the 1 Percent Now Dominate Our Elections

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Soros-Backed Super-PAC to New York Pols: Pass Reform or We’re Taking You Down

by Margherit Posted on June 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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The deadline draws closer by the hour. In New York, the band of good-government reformers, labor unions, enviros, community organizers, religious leaders, and more have until Thursday night, when the current legislative session ends, to press state lawmakers to pass legislation combating political corruption and kickstarting a public financing program for statewide elections. Standing in their way: The odd coalition of breakaway Democrats and Republicans who control the state Senate and who are blocking the public financing bill, which passed the state Assembly earlier this year and is backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Friends of Democracy, the super-PAC run by political operatives Jonathan Soros and David Donnelly, is one of the most aggressive backers of public financing in New York State. Soros, the son of liberal financier and mega-donor George Soros, and Donnelly see New York as the front line in the post-Citizens United battle against big-money politics. In an interview on Tuesday, Donnelly had a cut-and-dry message for the independent Democrats, who broke away from the traditional Democratic caucus to form a new leadership coalition, and the Republican legislators who are denying a vote on public financing: Support reform, or we’ll fight to replace you.

Donnelly says public financing should be a no-brainer for independent Democrats and Republicans given the public support for the issue. According to a recent Siena College poll (PDF), 61 percent of New Yorkers say they support statewide public financing. Indeed, in five Siena polls dating back to August 2012, a majority of New Yorkers backed a public financing program. The way it’s proposed, a statewide public financing program would match each dollar of donations up to $175 with $6 in state money. The goal is to nudge political candidates into courting lots of less-wealthy donors instead of a few very wealthy ones.

“It’s pretty painfully clear that if this leadership structure, the Independent Democratic Conference and Republicans together, doesn’t produce on behalf of the citizens of the state a public financing law that addresses corruption, there needs to be a leadership structure that will do that,” Donnelly says. “That means electing people who will lead the Senate in a way that moves that legislation. It’s not so much of a threat as the reality of what we’re going to have to do.”

Donnelly declined to say which state senators Friends of Democracy would target. (Nor would he say how much Friends of Democracy has spent so far on New York’s public financing fight.) “I’m not about one senator or not about independent Democratic senators Diane Savino or Jeff Klein or any of these other Republican senators,” he says. “I’m agnostic about how we go about doing it. It’s a numbers game; we need to take out those numbers.”

Donnelly says he still holds out hope that the state Senate will pass a public financing bill before heading home for the summer. But if the state Senate fails, Friends of Democracy won’t walk away from the issue. In addition to targeting anti-reform senators, Donnelly explains, the super-PAC will continue pushing for a bill in the legislature, possibly during a special session or when lawmakers return later this year to work on a state budget. “If the senators can do it under the current leadership, great. Do it by Thursday, do it in a special session, during the budget session, great,” he says. “We’re not going away.”

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Soros-Backed Super-PAC to New York Pols: Pass Reform or We’re Taking You Down

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Want to Know How Your Rep. Voted on Wall Street Regs? Check the Campaign Cash.

by Polly Browder Posted on June 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow US banks to get out of new financial regulations by operating through their overseas arms. Financial reformers say this is dangerous because markets are global, and a bad bet made by a US bank operating in another country could easily affect banks in the US and cause the US economy to crash again. Bad for America, but good for banks that want to avoid tough new rules. Perhaps that’s why lawmakers who received more money from banks and the finance industry in recent years were more likely to vote in favor of the bill. House members who supported the bill received more than twice as much in contributions from the financial industry over the past two years as lawmakers who voted against it, according to a new analysis from the MapLight Foundation, an independent research group that tracks campaign finance.

Interest groups supporting the bill, including securities and investment companies, banks, and chambers of commerce, contributed an average of 102 percent more to House members who supported the bill than to those who voted no. Check it out:

Democratic House members who voted yes on the bill received 75 percent more money from from the financial services industry than Democrats who voted no.

In 2011 and 2012, groups that supported this bill gave five times more to House members than groups that opposed the bill did. The gap was even larger for donations to Democrats. Over those two years, House Democrats received less than $250,000 from interests that opposed this measure. During the same time period, groups in favor of allowing the banks to skirt regulation gave Dems 28 times as much—close to $7 million. Here’s what that looks like:

What’s remarkable is that some Democrats held firm. Although the bill passed the House last week by a vote of 301 to 124, most Democrats voted against it, which financial reformers say is a significant turn of events. “A majority of Democrats voted against a pro-Wall Street bill…even though it was co-sponsored by Democrats… that was heavily lobbied by Wall Street and everyone had predicted would win by a landslide,” Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, told Mother Jones after the vote last week. “I’m pretty psyched.”

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Want to Know How Your Rep. Voted on Wall Street Regs? Check the Campaign Cash.

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This Is What a Multimillionaire Calling In His Chits Looks Like

by BenjamingBolton Posted on June 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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Art Pope is the conservative mega-donor in North Carolina whose millions helped usher in Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature in 2010, and who dropped millions more in 2012 to elect Republican Gov. Pat McGrory. Perhaps to say thanks, McGrory promptly named Pope, a former board member of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity group, the state’s new budget director.

One of Pope’s pet causes has been killing North Carolina’s public funding program for judicial elections, an aim of his when he served in the state legislature. The NC Public Campaign Fund, as it’s known, provides judicial candidates with taxpayer money to fund their campaigns so long as they collect 350 or more small donations from registered voters and also abide by campaign spending limits. The program is popular: Since its launch in 2004, 80 percent of judicial candidates in contested race for state Supreme Court and North Carolina Court of Appeals have used it. In May, 14 of the 15 judges on Court of Appeals, judges who represent both parties, urged state lawmakers to preserve the program. “Our current system of nonpartisan judicial elections supplemented by public financing is an effective and valuable tool for protecting public confidence in the impartiality and independence of the judiciary,” the judges said.

North Carolina’s judicial public financing program gets its money from a $3 check box on state tax forms and a $50 annual fee paid by attorneys. The budget proposed by North Carolina Republicans would suck all the money out of the elections fund and eliminate its funding sources, a death blow to the program. But as Chris Kromm of Facing South writes, state Rep. Jonathan Jordan, a Republican, had a fix. He offered a budget amendment that would preserve the $50 attorney fee while still sucking out all the fund’s money and eliminating the taxpayer check-box. Although Jordan’s amendment would hurt the fund in the short term, the attorneys fees would replenish it over time. Other Republicans liked this idea.

That’s when Art Pope called in his chits:

Soon after Jordan’s amendment was filed the next day, the multimillionaire GOP donor and budget director for Republican Gov. Pat McCrory made a rare visit to the General Assembly and took Jordan aside. When the impromptu meeting with Pope ended, Jordan made an abrupt U-turn and dropped the amendment.

The amendment died—and with it chances of saving North Carolina’s pioneering judicial program.

Art Pope took a direct role in killing the landmark election reform measure even though his presence as budget director wasn’t needed, since Jordan’s amendment was revenue-neutral. His involvement highlights the unique power Pope holds as both a top campaign donor to state lawmakers and the highest ranking member of McCrory’s cabinet.

It also marks the culmination of a more than decade-long crusade by Pope to dismantle judicial public financing and other reforms that aim to curb the clout of big donors like himself in North Carolina politics.

Why, you might ask, would Jordan so easily abandon his amendment? Well, the money trail is a good place to start:

When Jordan first ran for office in 2010, he was one of two dozen Republicans that benefited from a flood of money Pope poured into elections, helping the GOP capture the state legislature.

That year, Jordan received $16,000 in campaign contributions from Pope and his close family, the maximum allowed by law. On top of that, three groups backed by Pope—Americans for Prosperity, Civitas Action, and Real Jobs NC—shoveled more than $91,500 into election spending on Jordan’s behalf, bringing Pope’s total investment in launching Jordan’s legislative career to more than $107,000.

But Pope’s connection to Rep. Jordan goes back even further. In the late 1990s, Jordan spent two years as research director at the John Locke Foundation, one of a network of conservative groups in North Carolina largely funded by Art Pope’s family foundation.

In an email to the News and Observer newspaper, Pope declined to comment on his talk with Rep. Jordan. “Of course the governor’s recommended budget proposed to stop giving taxpayer dollars to political campaigns,” Pope said. “That position has not changed, and I have stated this to the legislators, members of the public, and organizations such as Common Cause when they have asked about the issue.”

Episodes like these are what make North Carolina such a fascinating case study. On the one hand, you have Pope, an ideologue who gave handsomely to conservative causes for decades and now controls North Carolina’s budget. On the other, there is a progressive groundswell pushing back against Pope, McGrory, and the Republican majorities in the legislature. But in this case, the imminent death of North Carolina’s judicial funding program shows just how much clout a single donor can have.

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This Is What a Multimillionaire Calling In His Chits Looks Like

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Secret Money Is Now Swaying State Judicial Elections

by 07ld5ksl Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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The “banjo ad” supporting North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Paul Newby.

Sam Ervin IV must have been feeling pretty good about his chances of winning a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court last fall.

He had name recognition—his grandfather was the legendary senator who led the Watergate investigation—and a poll released less than a week before Election Day showed him leading his opponent, incumbent Justice Paul Newby by 6 points, 38-32.

But on the Friday before the election, “Justice for All NC”—an independent political committee whose funding came mostly from out of state—dropped a TV ad depicting a scowling Ervin and asking: “Sam Ervin. Can we trust him to be a fair judge?”

Ervin lost the race by 4 points, 52 percent to 48 percent.

“As far as I know,” says Ervin, “there had never been an attack ad in a North Carolina judicial race.”

North Carolina’s supreme court election was arguably decided by groups like Justice for All—secretive nonprofits, unaffiliated with a candidate, whose money came from out of state.

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Secret Money Is Now Swaying State Judicial Elections

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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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WATCH: Does the IRS Scandal Mean Dark Money Groups Will Go Unchecked? Fiore Cartoon

by Sandford Beech Posted on May 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: Does the IRS Scandal Mean Dark Money Groups Will Go Unchecked? Fiore Cartoon

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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.

More MoJo coverage of the IRS tea party scandal


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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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Is This Big Tea Party Group Really an Innocent Victim of the IRS?

by Anatoleia3 Posted on May 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin has been all over the airwaves since the IRS story broke, talking about how her group was among those whose applications for nonprofit status were unfairly targeted for extra scrutiny. She has called the IRS’ actions a “disturbing, illegal, and outrageous abuse of government power.” She told Fox News that Tea Party Patriots wants the agency repay it for expenses it incurred as a result of the “intrusive” questions it asked, including requests for “every single post on Facebook” and “every comment that any person who’s a fan of ours on Facebook had ever made.” On Friday, lawyers for her group sent a letter to the IRS alerting the agency to coming lawsuits over its “illegal” conduct.

But while the IRS has admitted to unfairly targeting some conservative groups, Tea Party Patriots, a national umbrella organization for the grassroots movement, may not have been one of them. As I reported last week, although IRS officials engaged in misconduct, they also may have had good reason in some cases to scrutinize groups whose financial and tax histories raised questions, including Tea Party Patriots. The group engaged in a type of creative accounting that the IRS said it specifically planned to crack down on, and TPP drew criticism from some of its own constituents for a lack of financial transparency. Moreover, the IRS received a formal complaint about TPP—when I filed one in 2011 after the group refused to provide me with a financial disclosure required by law.

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Is This Big Tea Party Group Really an Innocent Victim of the IRS?

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