Koch spy network1/31/2024 The Kochs have disputed the allegation that they tried to force Cato to do their political bidding. We’re not involved in electoral politics. “We didn’t disagree with that, but we didn’t want to operate at the direction of the Kochs. “The Kochs had their notions about what they wanted to focus on, and those tended to focus on intellectual ammunition for what their political ambitions were,” Levy said in an interview last fall. Robert Levy, Cato’s board chairman, told ProPublica that while he didn’t disagree with the Kochs’ aims, Cato’s leaders were uncomfortable with serving as advocates for their political agenda. (Cato previously was controlled by four private shareholders, including the Kochs, an unusual setup for a nonprofit.) The dispute was settled in 2012, with the departure of Crane and the installation of a traditional board. The following year, they pressed Cato to provide “intellectual ammunition” for their oldest politically active nonprofit, Americans for Prosperity, Cato officials later alleged. In particular, they said, the Kochs likely wanted to prevent any of the groups that they help fund from going against their wishes - as happened with the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank the Kochs had long supported before they got into a dispute with its president, Ed Crane.Īfter a top Cato official ridiculed Charles Koch in a 2010 New Yorker article, the brothers pushed to put allies on the think tank’s board. Interactive Feature: How Dark Money Flows Through the Koch Network (at )įour other leading nonprofit experts and three conservative operatives with knowledge of the Koch network said the most likely reason that the Kochs and their inner circle are using this arrangement was to exert control over the groups without saying publicly who was in charge. “My guess is that we’re looking at various forms of disguise - to disguise control, to disguise the flow of funds from one entity to another,” said Gregory Colvin, a tax lawyer and campaign-finance specialist in San Francisco who reviewed all the documents for ProPublica. Some of the nation’s top nonprofit experts said they could only speculate on the reasons for the network’s increasingly elaborate setup. It sounds complicated and arcane because it is. Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch were among the first to grasp the political potential of social welfare groups and trade associations - nonprofits that can spend money to influence elections but don’t have to name their donors. The Kochs and their allies have built up a complex network of such organizations, which spent more than $383 million in the run-up to the 2012 election alone.ĭocuments released in recent months show the Kochs have added wrinkles to their network that even experts well versed in tax law and campaign finance say they’ve never seen before - wrinkles that could make it harder to discern who controls each nonprofit in the web and how it disperses its money.Ī review of 2012 tax returns filed by Koch network groups shows that most have been set up as nonprofit trusts rather than not-for-profit corporations, an unusual step that reduces their public reporting requirements.
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