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Robert McGuire of the Center for Responsive Politics joins us to detail the Koch brothers expose from the January 5 Washington Post…Click here for free audiobook download that generates $15 to PBC Podcst from Audible!
McGuire is a political nonprofit investigator at CRP, their website is here. CRP partnered with the Post for a deep investigation of the $400 million in “dark money” spent in 2012 by a labyrinth of entities linked to the Koch brothers. He explains that the organizations have odd, random names, and those names are changed frequently to impede transparency. The big money donors are not identified, and the money is laundered through different groups, some of which are nonprofit 501(c)4 organizations. McGuire walks us through a dizzying chain of groups as we try to follow the dark money.
This article, complete with a handy chart, details the results of the investigation. We talk about last year’s controversy over IRS review of nonprofit applications from political groups, and McGuire explains that many of the GOP-linked nonprofits are just PO boxes, not real organizations–as compared with the League of Conservation Voters, which spent a portion of its money on political advocacy, but is an established public benefit organization with many other activities. We hear Charles Koch’s rationale for the extreme secrecy, and McGuire notes that we won’t find out who funded dark money groups in this year’s elections until sometime in 2015.