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http://www.wsj.com/articles/wisconsins-friend-at-the-irs-1436482521

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Wisconsins Friend at the IRS

Emails show a common cause in restricting political speech.

Former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in
Washington in 2013. PHOTO: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

July 9, 2015 6:55 p.m. ET

Wisconsins campaign to investigate conservative tax-exempt groups has always seemed
like an echo of the IRSs scrutiny of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
It turns out that may be more than a coincidence.
Former IRS tax-exempt director Lois Lerner ran the agencys policy on conservative
groups. Kevin Kennedy runs the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB)
that helped prosecutors with their secret John Doe investigation of conservative groups
after the 2011 and 2012 recall elections of Governor Scott Walker and state senators.
Emails weve seen show that between 2011 and 2013 the two were in contact on multiple
occasions, sharing articles on topics including greater donor disclosure and Wisconsins
recall elections. The emails indicate the two were also personal friends who met for
dinner and kept in professional touch. Are you available for the 25th? Ms. Lerner
wrote in January 2012. If so, perhaps we could work two nights in a row.
This timing is significant because those were the years when the IRS increased its
harassment of conservative groups and Wisconsin prosecutors gathered information
that would lead to the John Doe probe that officially opened in September 2012. Ms.
Lerners lawyer declined comment. Mr. Kennedy said via email that Ms. Lerner is a
professional friend who I have known for more than 20 years but declined further
comment.
In an email exchange in July 2011, Mr. Kennedy sent Ms. Lerner an article in the Racine
Journal-Times on the declining relevance of public campaign financing amid more

private and special interest money. Note the last paragraph where the paper supports
more transparency, Mr. Kennedy writes to Ms. Lerner. The Legislature has killed our
corporate disclosure rules.
Mr. Kennedys GAB work also became ammunition for other investigators pursuing
high-profile conservative nonprofits, including Texas-based True the Vote. In an
October 2012 letter to True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht, Maryland
Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings cited the Wisconsin GABs criticism of True the
Votes methods reviewing petitions to recall Mr. Walker and said the results would not
have survived legal challenges.
In a memo to Interested Parties in 2012, Obama for America General Counsel Bob
Bauer praised Mr. Kennedys GAB for having taken swift action in the aftermath of
[True the Votes] involvement in the June recall elections. Mr. Bauer described the
GABs response as evidence that Elected officials in many swing states are not waiting
and taking their chances that True the Vote acts to disrupt the electoral process on
November 6th or during the early voting period.
After filing for tax-exempt status for True the Vote, Ms. Englebrecht says she was
subjected to two IRS business audits, two personal audits, and was contacted several
times by the FBI and inspected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The IRS-GAB nexus also ran the other direction, as the state agency sought to enlist the
IRS in its burgeoning theory of improper campaign coordination by conservative 501(c)
groups in Wisconsin. We know Mr. Kennedy was communicating with Ms. Lerner at the
time and that he was also keeping his Doe team apprised of his communications with
the IRS.
Sources tell us that in 2012 and 2013 John Doe investigators asked the IRS to look into a
conservative group that was among the primary targets of the Wisconsin Doe
investigation. The IRS doesnt appear to have followed up, but the request shows
Wisconsin prosecutors saw their pursuit of independent groups as part of a common
agenda with national Democrats.
Did GAB pitch the IRS on the theory that conservative groups were criminally violating
tax law? In October 2014 the Madison-based leftist group Center for Media and
Democracy filed a complaint with the IRS accusing the Wisconsin Club for Growth of
violating its tax-exempt status by engaging in political activity. To support its complaint,

the group referred to Doe-related documents that had already been reviewed in court
and rejected as evidence of improper political activity.
***
These interconnections matter because they reveal that the use of tax and campaign
laws to limit political speech was part of a larger and systematic Democratic campaign.
Speaking at the University of Wisconsin in 2010, President Obama sent his own political
message to investigators.
Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, [Republicans] are being helped along this
year, as I said, by special interest groups that are allowed to spend unlimited amounts of
money on attack ads. They dont even have to disclose whos behind the ads, he said.
Youve all seen the ads. Every one of these groups is run by Republican operatives.
Every single one of themeven though theyre posing as nonprofit groups with names
like Americans for Prosperity, or the Committee for Truth in Politics.
Conservative nonprofits like the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin
Manufacturers and Commerce were later subpoenaed and bound by secrecy orders as
their fundraising all but ceased. Liberals worked together to turn the IRS and the GAB
into partisan political weapons.

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