Did Grover Norquist Commit Tax Fraud?

By Lee Russ

Saturday, October 22, 2005 at 08:30 AM

The Washington Post has been running many articles on the events underlying (and adjacent to) Jack Abramoff's indictment.  Part of that story involves running large sums of money "through" Grover Norquist's "Americans for Tax Reform" groups, which then returned the money (minus good ol' Grover's cut) to some third group, thus concealing that the money actually went from Abramoff to the third group.

The question in the title of this post is addressed by Stuart Levine, an attorney in
Baltimore, Maryland, on his blog:

http://taxbiz.blogspot.com/2005/10/did-grover-norquist-commit-tax-fraud.html

It's interesting reading, even though his conclusion is that we need to know the answer to several other questions before we can tell if Norquist broke any tax laws.

An Update to his blog entry includes the notation that the Faith and Family Alliance, an entity which its leader, Robin Vanderwall admitted operated as a "shell" for Norquist, failed to report some financial transactions.  Not that it probably matters much to Vanderwall at this point, since he's already "serving a seven year sentence in the Virginia prison system for soliciting sex with minors via the Internet."