Don’t Cross POTUS: Did Obama Reveal Tax Info for Top Conservatives, Use IRS As Tool Against His Enemies? (video)

Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on September 21, 2010

Déjà vu of the Day: Is this current administration the Nixon administration, part deux?

Is Pres. Barack Obama using the IRS as a tool against his political enemies?

Some say it certainly looks like it, but the White House denies it.

From John McCormack at Weekly Standard, Koch Industries Lawyer to White House: How Did You Get Our Tax Information?:

Lately, the White House and its allies have been drawing attention to the political activities of libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. In an August 9 speech, President Obama singled out Americans for Prosperity, a free-market political group founded by David Koch in 2004. In the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, Obama said:

Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country. And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank. You don’t know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.

[...]

While the attention is unwanted for the Kochs, if somewhat expected, a lawyer for Koch Industries now tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the administration may have crossed a line by revealing tax information about Koch Industries. According to Mark Holden, senior vice president and general counsel of Koch Industries, a senior Obama administration official told reporters at an August 27 on-the-record background briefing on corporate taxes:

So in this country we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax. Some of which are really giant firms, you know Koch Industries is a multibillion dollar businesses. So that creates a narrower base because we’ve literally got something like 50 percent of the business income in the U.S. is going to businesses that don’t pay any corporate income tax. They point out [in the report] you could review the boundary between corporate and non-corporate taxation as a way to broaden the base.

Holden tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that this quotation from a senior administration official “came to our attention from different avenues. We are very concerned about why this would be said about us, particularly in this setting. We are concerned where this information would have been obtained from. We also are concerned in light of recent events that we have been singled out by the government and others as a campaign against us because of our political views.”

THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked White House press office officials in an email on Friday to verify the quotation’s accuracy, but 72 hours later they have not replied. A White House press aide reached this morning on the phone said she would look into whether a transcript of the call exists. The aide has not yet responded.

From TaxProf Blog, Barack Milhous Obama — Did White House Reveal Confidential Tax Information About Political Enemy?:

This story is particularly troubling in light of President Obama’s “joke” in his Arizona State commencement address (at the 3:10 mark) last year about his planned retaliatory audit of the school for its refusal to award him an honorary degree:

The video above that the TaxProf provided today has inexplicably been removed from YouTube. Troubling coincidence, to say the least. I managed to locate this much longer version of Obama’s ASU address on YouTube. Obama’s IRS audit joke is located at the 11:00 mark, so skip ahead if you want. No telling how long this video will be available for Americans to view before it, too, is removed.

Obama at ASU: Commencement Speech with intro by Michael Crow | May 2009

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and political writer at PJTV.com, wrote this Wall Street Journal article last year, Tax Audits Are No Laughing Matter – A president shouldn’t even joke about abusing IRS:

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