Pic Of The Moment: Remember When The Tea Party Was All About Ending Wasteful Spending?

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12. The Tea Party Leadership Fund is my particular pet peeve

It's headed by Dan Backer -- the lawyer who brought the McCutcheon case and who has also been one of the chief movers behind the phony IRS scandal. There's an article about its scammy ways at http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/11/15/tea-party-leadership-fund-scam/

In fact, last fall Backer had the chutzpah to petition the FEC for his TheTeaParty.net to be allowed to keep not only its donors but even its vendors secret on the grounds that his had been harassed by the IRS and feared public retaliation. (See http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/11/18/2959081/tea-party-fec-exemption/ -- also the chuckle-worthy actual filing at http://saos.nictusa.com/aodocs/1246367.pdf )

Backer also has a long history of scamming tea partiers and has set up any number of right-wing PACs that promise more than they deliver. The most notorious example is the One Nation PAC, which he set up in 2009 on behalf of Kelly Eustis, a twenty year old former College Republican. Eustis had previously been an employee of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC -- the organization behind the Tea Party Express -- before being fired for his apparently outrageous behavior. Most of the PAC's expenditures went to Eustis, his own consulting firm, and an associate from the Tea Party Express who had been fired along with him.

Backer was both the treasurer and the legal counsel of the PAC, and it seems likely that he was calling the shots. For example, in August 2010 Eustis copyrighted the name "One Nation PAC" and Backer immediately brought a copyright infringement suit against a coalition consisting of the NAACP, Sierra Club, AFL-CIO and La Raza that was planning a march on Washington under the name One Nation Working Together.

The thing about people like Backer is that they're not only crooked but crooked in so many different ways it can make your head spin trying to keep track of them. And as the McCutcheon case shows, some of their activities are far from innocuous.