Jack Smith has tangled with congressional Republicans before, and he's on another collision course with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) as he turns up the heat on Donald Trump, according to a report Tuesday.
The special counsel who has indicted the former president in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, and continues to investigate his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, previously drew the ire of Jordan and other GOP lawmakers while investigating how dirty money started flowing through conservative nonprofits into political races following the Supreme Court’s historic Citizens United decision, reported The Daily Beast.
“This seems egregious to me,” Smith wrote to his prosecutors on the Justice Department's elite public integrity section. “Could we ever charge a 371 conspiracy to violate laws of the USA for misuse of such nonprofits to get around existing campaign finance laws + limits? I know 501s are legal but if they are knowingly using them beyond what they are allowed to use them for (and we could prove that factually)?”
Smith had read a September 2010 report in the New York Times that showed how “social welfare” organizations such as Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies and Americans for Prosperity had been showering GOP candidates with cash, and he was alarmed by the way these tax-exempt groups appeared to be abusing the system.
Smith wanted to see whether the DOJ could charge those 501(c)(4) groups with conspiracy to defraud the United States government, but his team determined it would be nearly impossible to find the necessary "smoking gun" to prove they were violating election law, but might be able to charge them with tax offenses.
"‘This area has been the subject of much debate and press articles over the past, but I don’t see a viable way to make a prosecutable federal case here,” said Nancy L. Simmons, the team’s senior counsel.
But the famously relentless Smith kept pushing for a campaign finance investigation, and his team entered talks with IRS officials, including Lois Lerner, but they cautioned the DOJ investigators that U.S. laws generally prohibited them from releasing private tax information to law enforcement except in some narrow circumstances.
Smith's prosecutors proposed a coalition between the DOJ, IRS and Federal Elections Commission to crack down on political committees posing as nonprofits, and Lerner directed her staff to compile 990 tax forms -- which are already public -- from nonprofit groups engaged in political activity, although the agency would not turn over the protected "Schedule B" section from those forms.
However, investigators only looked over the index in those forms and never used them for any investigative purpose, but congressional Republicans seized on an IRS review that showed a small number of those forms were accidentally copied onto discs that were sent to FBI supervisory special agent Brian Fitzpatrick, who later was elected as a Republican congressman.
Republicans held contentious public hearings that conflated Smith's initial review of law enforcement options with an IRS mixup that held up Tea Party nonprofit applications, and Jordan demanded to know why DOJ met with the IRS to discuss the situation without notifying Congress – and called Smith to appear for an interview in 2014.
“All that cries out for a special prosecutor," Jordan said at the time. "If that doesn’t warrant a special prosecutor I don’t know what does.”
