posted on: Wednesday, March 15, 2006

It’s hard to forget Jack Abramoff’s perfidious misuse of his purported foundation as camouflage for buying access with members of Congress for his lobbying clients. One of Abramoff’s more deceitful practices was taking ostensibly donations from Indian tribes and using them for purposes that the tribes could never have imagined and in some cases might have clearly opposed.

One scheme involved using the tribes’ contributions, ostensibly to promote their casino gambling interests, to fund the anti-gambling lobbying of the likes of former Christian Coalition activist Ralph Reed. At the center of this practice was the ubiquitous right wing political activist Grover Norquist and his ostensibly nonprofit organizations, Americans for Tax Reform and Americans for Tax Reform Foundation. We’ve written in the past about ATR and other allied nonprofits laundering money for special interests, many of them linked to players like Abramoff, but despite press coverage, ATR had gingerly sidestepped some of the condemnation earned by Abramoff’s Capital Athletic Foundation, Michael Scanlon’s American International Center, and Amy Ridenour’s National Center for Public Policy Research, nonprofits all.

Yesterday, March 14th, the focus turned to Grover himself. The indefatigable Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a formal complaint asking the Internal Revenue Service to investigate ATR’s questionable tax exempt activities. According to a Reuters news report (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/14/AR2006031401143.html), CREW charged that ATR was laundering contributions from Indian tribes, including those that were Abramoff’s lobbying clients, and taking a cut from the deals which it used to support anti-gambling activities also linked to and supported by Abramoff. CREW’s claim is that this laundering of Indian tribes’ gambling funds for anti-gambling interests constituted taxable business income for ATR since it was unrelated to ATR’s official tax exempt mission and purposes.

The Norquist, Abramoff, and Reed nonprofit interactions are questionable regardless of one’s position for or against gambling. What is occurring in this ever-expanding web of Norquist-Abramoff linkages, and remember, as NCRP wrote in the past (in “Abramoff: Well-Connected to the Well-Heeled of the Right,” in the Fall 2004 issue of Responsive Philanthropy), their working connections go back to their youthful escapades as college Republican colleagues. The Abramoff-Norquist nonprofit spider web exemplifies the use and abuse of 501(c)(3) charities and foundations to circumvent lobbying and campaign finance regulations and oversight.

It is unclear to us whether IRS will pursue the CREW complaint about ATR with half the vigor of its investigation of Texans for Public Justice, whose IRS-worthy activities consisted of having questioned Tom DeLay’s campaign spending practices. Maybe there’s a potential difference because the CREW complaint comes from a small nonprofit and the TPJ complaint arose from a letter from DeLay’s colleague, Congressman Sam Johnson (R-TX) (http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/02/27delay.html). NCRP has written that it was surprising that the IRS managed to miss years of Abramoff’s obvious charitable shenanigans (http://www.ncrp.org/press_room/index.asp?Article_Id=79). Here’s a chance to put the IRS on the right track by doing a thorough investigation of Norquist’s wayward nonprofit practices.