The king of the anti-tax movement and some of his colleagues in the right wing were using their non-profit, tax-exempt organizations to benefit Abramoff according to a new Senate report. These hard-core conservatives really are a shifty bunch:
Five conservative nonprofit organizations, including one run by prominent Republican Grover Norquist, "perpetrated a fraud" on taxpayers by selling their clout to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Senate investigators said in a report issued today.Senator Max Baucus, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee which authored the report, said the IRS and FBI should investigate Norquist's group. The Republican chair of the Finance Committee, Charles Grassley from Iowa, "endorsed [the reports] findings of wrongdoing by the nonprofit groups."
The report includes previously unreleased e-mails between the now-disgraced lobbyist and officers of the nonprofit groups, showing that Abramoff routed money from his clients to the groups. In exchange the groups, among other things, produced ostensibly independent newspaper op-ed columns or press releases that favored the clients' positions.
Could Grover run his famed Wednesday morning meeting from prison, one wonders?
