Scandal: A court tells the White House to acknowledge 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
