Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,9

voter registrations in the names of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in previous election cycles. I and many of my colleagues on the committee expressed serious concerns about the group’s history of fraud allegations and its well-documented partisan agenda.

Ultimately, the public outcry stemming from an undercover video operation exposing ACORN’s deceptive practices helped scuttle the partnership with the census. But this was just the beginning of a growing strategy to use voter registration as a pretext for nonprofits to engage in political activities intended to impact election outcomes to favor Democrats.

Flash forward to 2016. I was chair of the House Oversight Committee, and once again I was being shown evidence of partisan activity by Democratic-aligned nonprofits that claimed to be nonpartisan. The woman who brought me this information, which I’ll cover in the next chapter, had serious concerns about the overwhelming influence of partisan Democrats she was seeing throughout the whole nonprofit sector.

Of course, the groups on her list weren’t the groups the IRS had been interested in auditing up to that point. These groups all leaned left. But as we all remember, the nonprofit groups garnering all the IRS attention beginning in 2013 were the ones on a BOLO (Be On the Lookout) list containing words like “tea party,” “patriot,” and “9/12 project” in their names. Democratic allies in the news media faithfully reported at the time that progressive groups were also flagged for review, but a subsequent audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) dispelled the notion that the targeting was bipartisan.

The fear exhibited by Democrats and their IRS allies during the 2013 targeting scandal seemed like an overreaction at the time. Why did they see conservative-leaning nonprofits as such a threat?

After digging into some of the publicly available nonprofit filings, I now wonder if the apparent overreaction by the IRS was a classic case of projection. With a career community organizer at the helm of the executive branch—one who had worked with ACORN himself in 1992—Obama’s IRS may have been fearful that Republicans would figure out how to do what Democrats were already doing. A review of nonprofit filings since 2013, which we’ll scrutinize in a moment, will show the type of partisan activity senior IRS officials may have been overlooking on the left in their zeal to pursue conservative advocacy groups. Data from progressive groups during the exact time period of the Tea Party scrutiny is difficult to analyze given that disclosure laws only require tax filings to be publicly available for three years.

Today ACORN’s work is continued by an army of progressive volunteers who use voter registration drives as a pretext for helping progressive candidates win.

While the left-leaning bias of America’s largest advocacy nonprofits will come as no surprise to conservatives, the extent to which some are engaged in partisan political activities is greatly underestimated.

No comparable infrastructure exists on the right, partly because of the dominance of Democrats in an industry dependent on big government spending. After learning more about how Democrats are using nonprofits, I decided to compare the public tax filings of the largest conservative groups with the numbers I was seeing on the left. I found that the scale of conservative nonprofits is dwarfed by the scale of progressive ones.

The patterns we see on the left are not repeated on the right. Besides, to duplicate the tactics we’re seeing from the left, conservatives would need to create more of their own nonprofits—something a politically weaponized Obama-era IRS worked hard to prevent. Even many of the conservative nonprofits that sought 501(c)(4) status after 2010 and won an apology from the Justice Department for the scandal have since been targeted for audits. Judicial Watch reports that in February 2014, then-chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan, testified about improper IRS targeting of existing conservative groups:

Additionally, we now know that the IRS targeted not only right-leaning applicants, but also right-leaning groups that were already operating as 501(c)(4)s. At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83 percent were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100 percent were right-leaning.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch was able to uncover emails and other documents confirming that the IRS not only used donor disclosures to identify targets, but chose those targets based on their politics. Judicial Watch uncovered snarky messages