Making Money With a Website

“It's hateful. It's ludicrous. And it's plain wrong.”

The object of his ire is a 9,963 word story in The New Yorker magazine, published last week which accuses David, his brother Charles, and Koch Industries of…well, just about everything: Secretly funding the Tea Party movement, secretly manipulating the Smithsonian, along with, not-so-secretly polluting the planet, stealing oil from Native American land, denying the existence of climate change, and promoting carcinogens—all in the self-interest of making further billions.

Another profile in July, this one in New York Magazine, described Koch as “the Tea Party’s wallet."

The news alert that a businessman with a personal net worth estimated at nearly $18 billion might wield political influence seems to have shocked, shocked, the media. Cue Rachel Maddow, who went on a televised tear, and the rest is Twitter.

Perhaps this wasn’t the Pentagon Papers, but it seemed that there had been an unraveling of sorts—after all, the title of last week’s New Yorker piece was “Covert Operations.”

“If what I and my brother believe in, and advocate for, is secret, it's the worst covert operation in history,” Koch says, in reference to the New Yorker headline, adding that a lengthy letter to the magazine, rebutting nearly every allegation in the story is in the works. (Koch Industries has already issued a "Response to Recent Media Attacks.")

David Koch speaks in Washington, DC. (Carrie Devorah, WENN / Newscom)

The origins of “the Billionaire who Secretly Funds the Tea Party” narrative seems to be his connection to Americans for Prosperity, an organization he founded six years ago, whose message is indeed aligned with the Tea Party movement’s message of less tax and more-efficient government. But, he says, no one from the Tea Party movement has ever approached him for money, and when I ask him straight up if he’s funding the Tea Party, all he says is, “Oh, please.”

In doing the profile, the New Yorker had repeatedly tried to reach out to Koch for comment but to no avail.

According to the New Yorker piece, even the president himself seems to think there are nefarious connections to uncover.

In her New Yorker piece, Jane Mayer cites President Obama pointing to Americans for Prosperity as one of those particularly sinister groups with “harmless-sounding names” that may be up to no good. “They don't have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are,” Obama said at a Democratic fundraiser in Texas last month. “You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation” or “a big oil company,” he said, ignoring that, on the AFP website, staff and principals are named, and that the organization files, as required by law, federal 990 IRS disclosure forms.

“If what I, and my brother believe in, and advocate for is secret, it's the worst covert operation in history.”

A few weeks later, during a conference call with reporters, a senior White House economics adviser mentioned Koch’s company during a discussion of the structure of corporations and tax liabilities. The unveiled reference to a specific company's tax returns—and especially to the tax status of a privately held company—was rather stunning to several on the call.

"Documents were scattered all over the room, and Love shared dozens of these documents with the reporters—property records, financial statements showing money being transferred from Love's account to other people's accounts, payment receipts, signatures she said were forged. The reporters huddled around Love's laptop and viewed a private website that served as a database for all of these documents, which she'd been collecting as evidence. Love would show them a document on paper or online and then say something like: 'Isn't it weird that [So and So's] signature is on that?' She did a lot of Googling, too, mostly of names and property addresses listed in the documents. This went on for about three hours."

—Following Courtney Love down the rabbithole.

eric seiger

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