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(108,903 posts) Thu Jan 2, 2014, 07:39 AM Jan 2014

Why Is the IRS Fighting Efforts to Unmask Karl Rove and U.S. Chamber Political Money Laundering?

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/why-irs-fighting-efforts-unmask-karl-rove-and-us-chamber-political-money

An IRS whistleblower lawsuit that attempts to finger an overseas non-profit affiliated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a dark money conduit that put tens of millions into Karl Rove’s hands during the 2010 elections may soon die in an obscure federal court—unless the judge allows evidence-gathering over the IRS’s objections.

Robert Jacobson, a Tuscon, Arizona physician who brought the lawsuit, believes that a nonprofit created by the State Department in conjunction with the U.S. Chamber to build a much-ridiculed exhibition at the 2010 Shanghai Expo in China had another purpose—diverting large slices of the $70-plus million in donations to Rove for campaigns to retake the House. The idea was that money from GOP-friendly corporations and even the Chinese government would evade oversight by flowing through barely regulated nonprofits.

“I took it to U.S. Tax Court to do discovery,” Jacobson said this week (discovery is the legal term for gathering evidence). “We were in the midst of doing informal discovery, which is the process the IRS has to avoid trials. The [tax agency’s] chief counsel hates whistleblowers… They have a routine to kill whistleblowers.”

Suffice it to say that federal courts have ruled, and the Supreme Court has affirmed, that the IRS doesn’t have to pursue whistleblowing investigations if it finds there is no penalty money to be collected. Jacobson filed his case against Shanghai Expo three years ago. Between 2008 and 2012, the IRS received 33,064 whistleblower complaints and made 630 awards, recouping $1.46 billion and paying $180.1 million in awards, it reported to Congress. Last year, the IRS concluded that since the Shanghai Expo nonprofit had disbanded there was no point in pursuing a further investigation.