Koch

At a White House press briefing today, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about the Treasury Department's review of Austan Goolsbee's comments on Koch Industries' tax status. Gibbs says Goolsbee's comments were "not in any way based on any review of tax filings," and added: "I don't think he'd use that example or examples like that in the future. And I think the fact that he was wrong might also give you an indication that what is ultimately being alleged isn't the case."

Senator Chuck Grassley, ranking Republican of the Finance Committee, has requested a formal investigation of the Obama administration over a senior administration official's comments on the tax status of Koch Industries--a private company targeted by Democrats, including President Obama himself, for funding libertarian and conservative causes.

Lately, the White House and its allies have been drawing attention to the political activities of libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. In an August 9 speech, President Obama singled out Americans for Prosperity, a free-market political group founded by David Koch in 2004. In the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, Obama said: 

Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country.  And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are.  You don't know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.  You don't know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank.  You don't know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.

"Using a great deal" of research by the left-wing Center for American Progress, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer reported in the magazine's August 30 issue that the Kochs are "waging a war against Obama." Reason's Nick Gillespie argued that Mayer's report was nothing more than "sly innuendo and revelations as lame as they are breathless," but that hasn't stopped top Democrats from blasting the Kochs for funding the Democrats' political opposition.