Tea Party Crackpots Shouldn't Be Investigated?

I'm not a tax accountable and I'm not an election attorney. But I do run a PAC and we have an accountant and an attorney on retainer to keep us from running afoul of the FEC's and IRS' myriad arcane rules and regulations. A few years ago, a notorious GOP shill complained that we were coordinating our campaign efforts with Nancy Pelosi. We sent in so much paperwork showing that we were working at cross-purposes to Pelosi by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars against Blue Dog Democrats she was helping to defend that the "case" was immediately thrown out. This was while Bush was president but the FEC staffer told me that the complaint came from someone does that all the time.

There was also an instance of an FEC staffer who is a conservative and who was constantly harassing Blue America. We knew she wasn't acting on Bush's orders and that she was just a nasty zealot. But she was just a pest and because of her we had to retain our attorney.

I don't want to get into this whole Republican attempt to smear Obama with this IRS mess. They're on a roll, appealing to their base. But I'm not so certain that these Tea Party groups looking for tax exempt status shouldn't be thoroughly investigated. I'm in the middle of reading investigative journalist Lee Fang's stupendous new book, The Machine: A Field Guide To The Resurgent Right. These two pages make the case very clearly who these people absolutely should be investigated.

Colin Hanna, the silver-haired chairman of the Republican front group Let Freedom Ring, approached the podium and announced that his group had covertly provided training and resources to the Tea Party Patriots throughout the election. Young men working for Hanna handed out pamphlets to the reporters in the room detailing their efforts, which included providing the Tea Party Patriots with a small army of election lawyers, training for over 1,748 Tea Party Patriot “poll watchers,” and state-of-the-art technology from the Republican consulting firm Edge Targeting. Hanna’s group paid for the Tea Party Patriots’ automated phone calls, which reached over 1.6 million households focusing on twenty-three swing congressional districts. Hanna said his Let Freedom Ring group, which had aired a series of million-dollar ads supporting establishment Republican John McCain in 2008, was itself part of the Tea Party revolution.

Let Freedom Ring was not the only group propping up the Tea Party Patriots. Staffers from FreedomWorks, the front group led by Dick Armey, had managed the Tea Party Patriots’ listserv. Corporate front groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Heartland Institute provided many of the talking points and speakers used by the Tea Party Patriots Free training seminars and online tutorials for grassroots organizing were provided to the Tea Party and its affiliates.

Patriots by the Leadership Institute, which is funded by the billionaire Koch family as well as by other corporate interests, including Amway. Even the Tea Party Patriots’ website was sponsored by a who’s who of Republican front groups, including Regular Folks United, FreedomWorks, and Americans for Tax Reform. A mysterious donor granted Tea Party Patriots an additional $1 million for increased electionseason outreach.

Shortly before the election, a memo from the Tea Party Patriots leaked. The Tea Party Patriots had attended a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a secretive group of conservative donors, and presented a wish list with dollar amounts attached. The Tea Party Patriots asked the donors to underwrite their campaign efforts. To fund the Tea Party Patriots’ “traditional” get-out-the-vote walk and phone lists, they asked for $150,000, as well as $250,000 for “GPSenabled smart-phone walk lists and technology,” $125,000 for help setting up house parties, and finally $250,000 for “collateral material.” It didn’t end there. For efforts after the election, the memo demanded $110,000 for help protesting possible legislation during the lame-duck session of Congress, $175,000 for a summit to entertain newly elected Tea Party politicians, $300,000 for “Younger Generation Outreach,” at least $500,000 for a renewed advertising budget, $200,000 for help organizing tax-day Tea Parties in 2011, and a litany of other high-priced requests.

Aside from their somewhat casual attire, Mark Meckler, Jenny Beth Martin, and the Tea Party Patriots leadership were indistinguishable from any ordinary Republican consultants with high-priced demands and orthodox supplysider beliefs. With donors from the Reagan-era Council for National Policy and allies like Koch Industries and Let Freedom Ring, the Tea Party Patriots were like any other Republican group. However, to the media and to millions of Americans, they were still rag tag protesters fighting against the grain of the establishment.