White House Can't Hide Look Into Koch Tax Data Misuse

 Posted 10/03/2014 06:25 PM ET

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Scandal: A court tells the White House to ac knowledge the existence of a probe into whether one of its advisers used private tax records for political gain. Transparency is being forced on an administration that's anything but.
In 2010, an attorney for industrialists and libertarian political donors Charles and David Koch told the Weekly Standard of a senior Obama aide telling reporters on background that the Kochs "do not pay corporate income tax" through their company, Koch Industries.
How, the attorney justifiably wondered, did the White House get his clients' private information from the IRS?
The anonymous official has since been identified as former White House senior economics adviser Austin Goolsbee, and his remarks were aimed to besmirch the Koch brothers and their group Americans for Prosperity, the bête noir of Democrats and the White House for helping expose Obama administration failures and the dangers of its policies.
In a conference call with reporters, the Washington Post reported, Goolsbee used Koch Industries as an example to back up an administration claim that half of all business income went to companies that manage to avoid paying corporate income taxes.
Goolsbee could not have made his claim without access to the Kochs' private tax data, something a White House official is not supposed to have. The administration's early excuses were that he obtained the data from an unidentified government board and later that he must have read about it somewhere.
A group of six Republican senators, led by Charles Grassley of Iowa, shot off a letter to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, complaining that Goolsbee's statement "implies direct knowledge of Koch's legal and tax status, which would appear to be a violation of" federal tax laws.
The inspector general responded that it was launching an investigation into the matter but, as the Washington Free Beacon reports, the IG never released any report or investigation results to the American people or to the senators who made the inquiry. The matter suddenly disappeared from view.
As the Free Beacon notes, the inspector general has refused Freedom of Information Act requests from the Free Beacon, Koch Industries and the government watchdog group Cause of Action. The IG office used the false argument that it could not release information pertaining to an investigation of the illegal use of private tax information because that itself would involve the release of private tax information.
The government used a similar excuse in a National Organization for Marriage case that resulted in a $52,000 government settlement. NOM's private tax data were leaked to the Human Rights Campaign, at the time headed by Joe Solmonese, a left-wing activist and Huffington Post contributor. Solmonese later became a 2012 Obama campaign co-chairman.