Wisconsins campaign to investigate conservative tax-exempt groups has always seemedlike 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 conservativegroups. Kevin Kennedy runs the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB)that helped prosecutors with their secret John Doe investigation of conservative groupsafter 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 multipleoccasions, sharing articles on topics including greater donor disclosure and Wisconsinsrecall elections. The emails indicate the two were also personal friends who met fordinner and kept in professional touch. Are you available for the 25th? Ms. Lernerwrote 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 itsharassment of conservative groups and Wisconsin prosecutors gathered informationthat 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 aprofessional friend who I have known for more than 20 years but declined furthercomment.

In an email exchange in July 2011, Mr. Kennedy sent Ms. Lerner an article in the RacineJournal-Times on the declining relevance of public campaign financing amid more

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

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Wisconsins Friend at the IRSEmails show a common cause in restricting political speech.

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

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

private and special interest money. Note the last paragraph where the paper supportsmore transparency, Mr. Kennedy writes to Ms. Lerner. The Legislature has killed ourcorporate disclosure rules.

Mr. Kennedys GAB work also became ammunition for other investigators pursuinghigh-profile conservative nonprofits, including Texas-based True the Vote. In anOctober 2012 letter to True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht, MarylandDemocratic Rep. Elijah Cummings cited the Wisconsin GABs criticism of True theVotes methods reviewing petitions to recall Mr. Walker and said the results would nothave survived legal challenges.

In a memo to Interested Parties in 2012, Obama for America General Counsel BobBauer 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 theGABs response as evidence that Elected officials in many swing states are not waitingand taking their chances that True the Vote acts to disrupt the electoral process onNovember 6th or during the early voting period.

After filing for tax-exempt status for True the Vote, Ms. Englebrecht says she wassubjected to two IRS business audits, two personal audits, and was contacted severaltimes by the FBI and inspected by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms andExplosives and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The IRS-GAB nexus also ran the other direction, as the state agency sought to enlist theIRS 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 thetime and that he was also keeping his Doe team apprised of his communications withthe IRS.

Sources tell us that in 2012 and 2013 John Doe investigators asked the IRS to look into aconservative group that was among the primary targets of the Wisconsin Doeinvestigation. The IRS doesnt appear to have followed up, but the request showsWisconsin prosecutors saw their pursuit of independent groups as part of a commonagenda with national Democrats.

Did GAB pitch the IRS on the theory that conservative groups were criminally violatingtax law? In October 2014 the Madison-based leftist group Center for Media andDemocracy filed a complaint with the IRS accusing the Wisconsin Club for Growth ofviolating 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 courtand rejected as evidence of improper political activity.

***

These interconnections matter because they reveal that the use of tax and campaignlaws 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 politicalmessage to investigators.

Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, [Republicans] are being helped along thisyear, as I said, by special interest groups that are allowed to spend unlimited amounts ofmoney 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 nameslike Americans for Prosperity, or the Committee for Truth in Politics.

Conservative nonprofits like the Wisconsin Club for Growth and WisconsinManufacturers and Commerce were later subpoenaed and bound by secrecy orders astheir fundraising all but ceased. Liberals worked together to turn the IRS and the GABinto partisan political weapons.

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