Pay no attention to my dark money.
Sen. Marco Rubio is
playing by different rules than everybody else in the 2016 field. Nearly every candidate has his or her own Super PAC, but Rubio's also got a 501(c)(4) organization that is both spending exclusively in his favor and collecting unlimited money without disclosing any of its donors:
Of all the television advertisements aired in support of the Florida senator so far this year — $5.5 million worth — none have been paid for by Mr. Rubio’s own campaign. Even the “super PAC” supporting him has not yet spent a dime on ads.
Instead, the money has flowed through a political nonprofit group called the Conservative Solutions Project, formed by a former Rubio aide and now overseen in part by a Republican strategist who is close to Mr. Rubio’s campaign manager.
Rubio's dark money nonprofit has raised over $18 million in cash it will never have to attribute to any of its donors. It's a stretch beyond Super PACs, which can raise unlimited cash but ultimately disclose many of their donors. Rubio's been asked about dark money several times on the campaign trail and he's consistently said it's a part of donor free speech, "
but they have to be disclosed."
Here he was in New Hampshire:
“Full disclosure and sunlight into all these expenditures is critical to getting to the root of this problem,” Mr. Rubio told the voter. He added, “As long as you know who’s behind the money and how much they’re giving and where they’re spending it, I think that’s the sunlight that we need.”
That's exactly the type of sunlight his dark money group isn't offering, even though for all practical purposes it's exclusively backing Rubio. Yet these type of groups are granted tax exemptions because they're "
social welfare organizations" that are supposedly working for the common good of the people, not a single candidate.
So is it legal? Maybe not but the group is likely banking on the fact that the IRS is too strapped for resources to investigate.
“It doesn’t comport with tax law, but the problem is that the I.R.S. budget has been so constrained that they don’t have a lot of resources in this area,” said Marcus S. Owens, a Washington lawyer who specializes in campaign finance. “So if somebody is comfortable being aggressive, they’re just betting that the audit lottery won’t call their number any time soon, which is probably a safe bet.”