MAY 1, 2017 09:20 PM EDT
Trump’s biggest donor wages war against the IRS: Billionaire Robert Mercer’s fighting nearly $7 billion in back taxes
The IRS says Mercer’s Renaissance Technologies owes billions in taxes, so he wants the agency’s commissioner fired
Money in politics is as old as politics itself. While some Democratic partisans like to imagine this doesn’t happen on the left, the philanthropy and campaign donations of large liberal donors like Google, George Soros or General Electric just happen to coincide with their business interests. And a look at the electoral and business ambitions of President Donald Trump’s largest political donors, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, reveals an incredible amount of intersection.
Like big-time conservative donor Cary Katz (who only started giving to the hard right after his business was upended as part of a little-known provision of Obamacare), Robert Mercer’s family foundation donated almost exclusively to conventional charity groups and medical researchers, according to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, until coming under intense IRS scrutiny.
Rebekah Mercer began redirecting the family’s philanthropy after her father’s primary company, Renaissance Technologies, became the subject of an IRS inquiry into its practice of temporarily storing investment income in bank accounts as a method of avoiding higher tax rates. In 2010 the agency ruled that firms utilizing “basket options” were engaged in illegal tax avoidance and warned Renaissance Technologies, the world’s most profitable hedge fund, to discontinue the practice.
Renaissance declined to do so, and in the intervening years the agency has been collecting evidence apparently in preparation for a future court case. According to a 2014 Senate report reviewing some of the allegations, the company could owe at least $6.8 billion in back taxes.
Since the 2010 IRS ruling, the Mercers have dramatically stepped up their giving to conservative groups, particularly to those engaging in full-on attacks against the IRS and the agency’s commissioner, John Koskinen.
The agency has long been on the receiving ends of journalistic attacks from Breitbart News, the conservative website that was formerly headed by top Trump adviser Steve Bannon. The Mercers are widely believed to have been responsible for elevating Bannon into his prime position within Trump’s world.