Members of a host of Tea Party groups gathered at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday to speak out against what some characterized as a near-dictatorial abuse of power designed to silence conservative voices.

Jordan Sekulow, policy director of conservative public interest law firm the American Center for Law and Justice, said he will be taking legal action against the IRS in the next few days on behalf of groups that were improperly targeted.

Seventeen ACLJ clients are ready to file suit against the IRS, he said.

Those clients “suffered damages, they lost membership and donations, they missed the election cycle, they missed key moments, they were not able to bring speakers in,” Sekulow said.

ACLJ has demanded that the IRS take action on 10 groups whose 501(c)(4) statuses have not yet been approved. Lawsuits will be filed whether or not the IRS complies with that request, he added.

“This is far from over, even if they do approve the remaining groups,” Sekulow said.

The impending lawsuits are the latest development in a scandal that has embroiled the administration since Friday, when IRS officials admitted they had applied heightened scrutiny to the tax-exempt-status applications of groups that used the words “tea party,” “patriot,” or “9-12,” the latter a reference to a movement headed by television personality Glenn Beck.

Conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status were sent lengthy questionnaires that asked for extensive and detailed information about every facet of the groups’ operations.

Some groups were even asked for lists of their donors. Others had to provide lists of all the books they recommended to their members. At least one group had to pledge not to protest activities by liberal political groups.

Adam Brandon, executive vice president of FreedomWorks, said at Thursday’s press conference that the IRS’s actions make the American political system feel “more like a third world junta than a constitutional republic.”

President Barack Obama announced Wednesday night in response to last week’s revelations that he had accepted the resignation of acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller, though it was later reported that Miller was already scheduled to step down.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department will investigate the IRS and pursue criminal charges if warranted.

Members of Congress hammered the IRS for these apparent abuses at Thursday’s press conference.

“There’s something profoundly un-American about targeting your political opponents,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.). “Someone needs to be held responsible. Someone needs to be imprisoned. Someone needs to be prosecuted.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) pledged “a complete and thorough investigation of this in Congress.”

“The truth will come out. It always does. It could come out sooner or later, but I guarantee that we will find out everything that happened,” McConnell said.

“This isn’t just an act of a Democratic administration attacking Republicans,” explained Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah). “It’s much, much more than that. This is an act of a political class in Washington, regardless of political affiliation, targeting the American people.”

Tea Party groups in attendance said the IRS’s actions would have a profound chilling effect on Americans’ involvement in the political process.

“The damage the IRS has caused may be immeasurable,” said Jenny Beth Martin, cofounder of the Tea Party Patriots.

Beyond the “concrete, monetary damages” inflicted on these groups, Martin said, “there are groups of individuals who collectively gave up petitioning their government, and others who never even attempted to apply for tax-exempt status because they saw what other citizens were enduring.”

“How do we measure the impact of a public who is rapidly losing faith in the IRS in its ability to impartially apply the law in a fair and equal manner to all citizens?” she asked.

A loss of faith in the IRS, others suggested, affects not just Americans’ abilities to petition their government, but questions of health care policy, given the extensive role the agency will play in implementing and enforcing the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

“I’m quite worried about the privacy of medical records,” said Paul, a former physician.

“I’m quite worried that your medical records will be evaluated by an IRS that seems to have the ability and seems to have the penchant to use political persuasion to search out political opponents,” Paul added.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.), a former IRS attorney, was even more explicit in her concerns.

“It’s very important to ask, and now it is reasonable to ask, could there potentially be political implications regarding health care—access to health care, denial of health care—will that happen based upon a person’s political beliefs or their religiously held beliefs?” Bachmann said.

“This question would’ve been considered unreasonable and out of bounds a week ago,” she noted. “Today, this question is highly relevant.”

Those concerns could be heightened by allegations that the IRS illegally stole 60 million medical records from a health care facility in California in 2011.

Walmart declined to sign on to a legally binding agreement to improve safety conditions at its factories but has pledged to do so voluntarily and to post the results of extensive inspections on its website.

Liberal groups such as the Center for American Progress criticized Walmart’s refusal to accede to a legally binding agreement.

Walmart has donated to the Center for American Progress (CAP) in the past. The Center for American Progress Action Fund’s blog, ThinkProgress, has written about the Bangladeshi factory collapse nine times and mentioned Walmart in three of those posts. None of the three posts that mentioned Walmart have noted its past financial support for CAP.

CAP did not respond to a request for comment on that failure to disclose the financial relationship.

“If we identify issues that cause us to believe that people’s lives are in danger, we will take swift action,” said Rajan Kamalanathan, Walmart’s vice president of ethical sourcing, in a news release.

Documents obtained by the New York Times indicated that a Walmart contractor was producing jeans at the Dhaka, Bangladesh, factory that collapsed last month, killing up to 1,100 workers and injuring as many as 2,500 more.

Walmart indicated that contractor Fame Jeans had lied to the company about its Bangladeshi production in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.

Fame Jeans “told us there was no previous production at Rana Plaza,” the factory in question, “but our suppliers have a binding obligation to disclose all factories producing Walmart merchandise,” Walmart spokesperson Megan Murphy said in an emailed statement.

Murphy said Walmart was ending its business relationship with Fame Jeans due to its policy on “unauthorized subcontracting.”

She stressed that Walmart had no operations in the Rana Plaza factory at the time of the disaster.

“Media reports have given the impression there was production for Walmart happening in Rana Plaza at the time of the tragic building collapse. That’s wrong,” Murphy said. She did not specify which media reports were inaccurate.

Contacted for comment, Times reporter Steven Greenhouse noted that nothing in Murphy’s statement contradicted his reporting.

“No one has challenged the facts of the story,” Greenhouse wrote. “No one has asked for a correction. No one has said there was anything wrong in the story.”

IRS agents “stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans, including at least 1,000,000 Californians,” according to a lawsuit filed in March by an unnamed company in California superior court.

“This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power by several Internal Revenue Service agents,” the plaintiffs claim.

The lawsuit could fuel public outrage at the IRS, which is already under fire for targeting Tea Party groups for increased legal scrutiny while allowing liberal groups to operate relatively unimpeded.

The IRS is also the chief enforcement agency for the Affordable Care Act, making concerns about their handling of health care records of particular note.

The lawsuit, which lists 15 unnamed IRS officials as defendants, claims that those officials illegally seized records during a March 11, 2011 raid on the “John Doe Company.”

The raid involved alleged wrongdoing by a former employee of the company, but the complaint says IRS agents seized millions of records that did not pertain to that investigation and failed to offer even “the illusion of legitimacy and legality.”

“No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search,” it states.

“These medical records contained intimate and private information of more than 10,000,000 Americans, information that by its nature includes information about treatment for any kind of medical concern, including psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual or drug treatment, and a wide range of medical matters covering the most intimate and private of concerns,” the complaint adds.

An IRS representative said it is the agency’s policy not to comment on pending litigation.

After IRS agents illegally seized the medical records in question, the suit continues, they remained in the office and used a company television to watch the NCAA tournament. The Connecticut Huskies, who would go on to win the tournament, topped the Syracuse Orange by a score of 76-71 on March 11, 2011.

The IRS is currently embroiled in scandal after top agency officials admitted that they targeted conservative political groups for increased scrutiny. Liberal groups conducting comparable activities were not similarly targeted.

Concerns over the IRS’ handling of medical records raise concerns about the agency’s impending health care authority under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, according to Scott Gottlieb, who has served in the Food and Drug Administration and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“The Obama Administration shouldn’t settle for this. Neither should we,” wrote Gottlieb, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Americans should demand that the Obama team work a little harder to get its signature legislation off the ground without pulling the IRS so deeply into our healthcare.”

Anthony Foxx’s critics say he has mismanaged the city’s public transit projects and would pursue similar projects at the federal level. The potential for federal funds comes after months of battles over a proposed Charlotte streetcar and other public transit projects in the city.

Costs for a major light rail line in Charlotte have ballooned. Rather than trimming other public transit projects in the face of declining tax revenue, Foxx has looked to raise other taxes, alienating even ardent public transit supporters.

Foxx “will spend a god-awful amount of other people’s money on stupid ideas” if he is confirmed as secretary of transportation, predicted John Hood, president of the North Carolina-based John Locke Foundation.

“If Obama is hiring Anthony Foxx because he has shown himself to be a brilliant local leader in the area of transit, the president’s making a mistake,” Hood said.

Foxx has clashed even with public transit proponents who note that the city does not have the revenue to fund his grandiose vision for transportation projects in Charlotte. His office did not respond to requests for comment.

One member of the area’s Metropolitan Transit Commission (MTC) joked that the commission would have to “pass around a hat” to collect the revenue needed for the projects.

As part of a 1997 transit and land use plan, Charlotte proposed a half-cent sales tax to fund bus and light rail lines throughout the city. The plan was approved by referendum and survived a repeal effort 10 years later.

But revenue from the tax has been $2.3 billion less than projected, leaving the city’s transit plans woefully underfunded. The MTC projects that the city will need an additional $3 billion fund those plans.

Foxx acknowledges the grim fiscal picture. “The transit sales tax is tapped out,” he said during his 2013 State of the City address. “Financially, the rest of our transit plan is dead.”

Foxx has aggressively pushed a plan for a $119 million streetcar project in Charlotte in addition to existing public transit plans despite that admission.

Critics say Foxx has stubbornly refused to acknowledge the infeasibility of the plan.

Foxx was “faced with a choice of, ‘Do we adjust our transit dreams to fiscal realities, or do we have fiscal dreams to match out transit dreams?’ He decided for the latter course. He decided, ‘Well, we just don’t have enough money. These are all great projects, we don’t have enough money, let’s go for more,’” said Hood

Foxx attempted to insert the streetcar plan into Charlotte’s $1 billion 2012 capital improvement plan. He looked to pay for the project through a property tax increase.

That sparked heated opposition, even among groups that supported the initial sales tax hike and public transit projects generally.

“Part of the argument was ‘let’s approve the half cent sales tax so we don’t have to use property taxes to fund transit,’” said Bob Morgan, president of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, which was supportive of the sales tax hike.

“Some would say that that’s an agreement with the voters that we can’t go back on, and so don’t come to me and say ‘let’s pass bonds that will be backed by property taxes to fund the streetcar,’” Morgan said.

The capital improvement plan was narrowly defeated by the city council. Charlotte’s city manager subsequently removed the streetcar from the plan in order to make it politically palatable.

Without additional tax revenue the city may seek federal support for the project, Morgan suggested. A previous streetcar project, which would be extended by the mayor’s latest effort, was funded in large measure by a $25 million federal grant from DOT’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA).

The FTA also cut Charlotte a check for $580 million to help fund the $1.16 billion extension of the city’s Blue Line light rail project.

Foxx “could be in a position to help the city” with its ongoing transit funding issues if he is confirmed as transportation secretary, the Charlotte Observer reported on Monday.

Federal funding for the streetcar could avoid a showdown over taxes with North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, who was a major architect of public transit projects as Charlotte’s mayor.

McCrory warned Foxx during the debate over the capital plan that a property tax hike could imperil the nearly $300 million the state had committed to the Blue Line extension.

McCrory and others were incredulous that the city would fund additional public transit projects even as the state, which is facing its own budget crunch, funds projects planned more than a decade ago.

“During these tough budget times, the governor has continually informed leaders in Charlotte that the streetcar makes it more difficult during each continuing budget cycle to get support in the legislature for continued matching funds of the light-rail line when the city is exhibiting that they have additional money for other projects outside the approved process through the MTC,” a McCrory spokesman told the Observer.

Hood and other opponents of the Blue Line extension, which is scheduled to begin construction next year, criticize its exorbitant cost.

“It’s very common for forecasts of ridership to be optimistic and costs to be lower than what actually happens. That’s what happened in this case,” said David Hartgen, emeritus professor of transportation studies and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Hartgen published a landmark study in 2008 that found that ridership and economic development projections surrounding the city’s light rail projects were wildly optimistic.

Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute specializing in urban growth and transportation, said such inflated projections are routine for public transit projects.

“At the time they made the decision to build the [light rail] project, the people who make the cost estimates deliberately underestimated the cost in order to skew the analysis towards building rail,” O’Toole said.

Inflated costs for the light rail projects have forced the city to chip away at other public transit options, he said.

“Almost inevitably, at some point, because of either cost overruns or revenue shortfalls or both, transit agencies that build rail hit a fiscal wall and in order to deal with that they end up cutting bus service and raising bus fares which depresses ridership,” O’Toole explained.

Charlotte has raised bus fares six times since 2004. The result is a de facto subsidy for transportation in higher-income areas subsidized by bus riders, who tend to be lower-income residents, O’Toole said.

“At least two times a week I don’t have enough [money for bus fares]. I just don’t even go out,” one unemployed Charlotte resident told a local news station after the latest fare hike.

Bus transit is more cost-effective than rail transit, noted Hood. However, “it’s not appealing to [light rail advocates] because it’s not sexy, it’s not gee-whiz, and it won’t get yuppies out of their BMWs.”

“If your interest was in advocacy for low income people and people who don’t have cars trying to get up the economic ladder, bus transit makes more sense,” Hood said.

Foxx’s continued advocacy for light rail and streetcar projects despite their financial problems and cost-overruns suggests to Hood that his nomination for transportation secretary is rooted less in a pragmatic recognition of his successes as mayor than in the political interests of the Democratic Party.

“I think he’s hiring Foxx because Foxx helped put on a pretty successful Democratic convention in 2012 in Charlotte and because he has been a loyal supporter and political ally of the Obama administration,” Hood said.

With Republicans controlling the governorship and the legislature for the first time since reconstruction, Hood added, Democrats are looking to expand their political bench in the only state the Obama campaign fought for but did not carry.

“They really want to win in the future. They want to strengthen the political base of Democrats in North Carolina. That’s why they’re giving Anthony Foxx such a high-profile job.”

Schweitzer and a New York hedge fund won four of eights seats on the board of Stillwater Mining Co. last week, one of multiple companies in which Schweitzer personally invested after using his official position to advance their financial interests.

Critics say the deals raise questions about a potential abuse of power.

“Schweitzer is apparently quite a wheeler-dealer, and his business dealings merit further scrutiny,” said Matthew Vadum, editor at the Capital Research Center.

Schweitzer is considering a run for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.).

“I think [Schweitzer’s critics] will use this if he does decide to run for higher office,” predicted Steve Stanek, a financial expert at the Heartland Institute.

“I’d say he has looked for ways to enrich himself,” Stanek said. “It would certainly not be the first time that someone in office has done that.”

Schweitzer has been mentioned as a potential dark horse presidential candidate.

Political observers say Schweitzer’s populist credentials could be an asset in a presidential run. Those credentials were on full display in 2009, when he exercised his sway as governor to preserve a lucrative contract for Stillwater.

As the federal government bailed out General Motors (GM) in July 2009, the automotive company announced that it would kill a contract with Stillwater for palladium and platinum in favor of cheaper foreign sources.

The GM contract was important to Stillwater’s financial success, since the “overwhelming majority” of platinum and palladium produced by the company was used in automotive catalytic converters, according to the Associated Press.

“GM officials made it clear they are not interested in reconsidering the terminated supply contract,” Stillwater said in a news release at the time.

Schweitzer was enraged.

“Damn right, I’m mad,” he said. “They reached into my pocket [via the bailout] so they can stay in business and then they take actions to put Montanans out of business.”

Schweitzer even said he would stop driving his Chevy pickup truck in protest.

He sent letters to then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and chief White House economist Larry Summers, who co-chaired the administration’s automotive task force, expressing his displeasure at GM’s decision.

GM renewed its Stillwater contract the following year.

Within two months of leaving the governor’s mansion, Schweitzer purchased 25,000 shares of Stillwater stock. He later joined the hostile takeover attempt of the New York hedge fund the Clinton Group. The hedge fund did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Stillwater executives see opportunism in Schweitzer’s attempt to take over the company.

“We’re going to have a higher share price, and these guys see that and on the cheap they want to take control of a company as well-positioned as we are,” CEO Frank McAllister told the Associated Press.

Montana political experts say Schweitzer’s investment in a company whose interests he advanced as governor reflects his leadership style.

“Schweitzer ruled Montana’s state bureaucracy and political class with an iron fist during his tenure as governor,” said Carl Graham, CEO of the Montana Policy Institute.

“His reputation among insiders for rewarding friends and punishing enemies rivaled that of the Copper Barons in Montana’s history books,” Graham said.

Just as the populist appeal of Schweitzer’s work on Stillwater’s behalf obscures perceptions of cronyism, his advocacy for the wildly popular Keystone XL Pipeline involved a deal that enriched a company in which Schweitzer subsequently invested.

Schweitzer said he spent 18 months of his governorship convincing TransCanada, the company building the pipeline, to build an “on-ramp” to the pipeline in Montana.

The goal was to enable Montana oil producers, many of which draw crude oil from the Bakken shale formation, which sits below Montana and North Dakota, to cheaply ship oil to refineries and export terminals.

The president of Oklahoma-based Continental Resources, which owns more North Dakota drilling acreage than any other oil company, met with TransCanada in 2008. Continental CEO Harold Hamm said “they weren’t interested” in hauling Bakken oil via the pipeline.

That all changed after Schweitzer went to bat on Continental’s behalf. He threatened to tie up the pipeline, which was slated to run through Montana, in red tape.

“I said, ‘Tell you what I’ll do to TransCanada. I’ll tie one leg up there, and they’ll start listening,’” Schweitzer told the Washington Post. “That’s exactly what I did.”

“Guess what, the next thing we know we’re having a meeting,” Hamm said. “TransCanada, producers, [Schweitzer] was present, as was the governor of North Dakota. And TransCanada felt that an on-ramp seemed pretty feasible. It’s amazing how some of those things come about.”

Schweitzer personally brokered the meeting that resulted in an agreement between TransCanada and Bakken producers, according to TransCanada CEO Russ Girling.

“The spark was the governor,” Girling told the Post. “He said: ‘I can see growth and a pipeline coming through my back yard. You, TransCanada, and producers have to get together.’ He pushed it, and we’re all glad he did.”

Hamm called Schweitzer his “new best friend.” The Bakken on-ramp was officially announced in September 2010.

At some point between December 2010 and December 2012, Schweitzer bought stock in Continental Resources, according to biennial financial disclosure forms filed with the Montana Commission on Political Practices.

Schweitzer did not return requests for clarification on when he bought the stock or how much he owns. Continental also did not respond to a comment request.

A proposal by councilman Bill Rosendahl would allow the city to yank investments by the city’s three pension funds in the Tribune Co., which owns the Times, if the company opts to sell the paper to someone who does not uphold “the highest terms of professional and objective journalism.”

Rumors that libertarian industrialists Charles and David Koch might buy the paper spurred him to propose the motion, Rosendahl told the Times. He did not respond to a request for comment.

“Frankly what I hear about the Koch brothers, if it’s true, it’s the end of journalism,’’ Rosendahl told the paper.

The Koch Brothers are reportedly considering purchasing the Tribune Co., which owns the Times, though they are also said to be uninterested in the company’s other media properties, which include 23 local television stations, a national cable network, and other newspapers.

“We cannot support the sale of the Times to entities who Times readers would view as a political transaction first and foremost, turning L.A.’s metropolitan daily into an ideological mouthpiece whose commitment to empirical journalism would be unproven at best,” Rosendahl wrote.

Legal experts say Rosendahl’s political motivations in directing the city’s pension funds could run afoul of the Kochs’ First Amendment rights.

A Koch spokesperson declined to comment on the issue.

“The government generally can’t discriminate against government contractors based on the content or viewpoint of the contractors’ speech,” University of California Los Angeles law professor Eugene Volokh said in an email to the Washington Free Beacon.

“I think that principle would apply here,” Volokh explained. “The city might choose its investment firms for various reasons, but it can’t choose them because the firms sell their assets to speakers whose speech the city dislikes.”

Rosendahl’s motion, which was cosponsored by two other councilmembers, including mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti, may also violate laws governing pension administration, experts say.

“The law is very clear: Pension funds must be invested so as to maximize their value and provide a secure financial foundation for retired public servants,” said Allen Dickerson, legal director at the Center for Competitive Politics.

“There is no indication that this motion was motivated by the economic interests of L.A.’s retirees,” Dickerson explained. “Rather, it reflects a troubling trend toward the politicization of investment decisions.

The city’s “legal duty,” he added, “is to invest funds with an eye solely to the economic welfare of current and future retirees and leave political points for another venue.”

Rosendahl’s motion directs the Los Angeles’s city administrative officer to produce a report on how the city’s pension fund investment decisions can support “professional and objective journalism.”

The California Constitution states all public pension officials must “minimize the risk of loss and … maximize the rate of return,” and vests authority in public pension administrators to invest funds “for the exclusive purposes of providing benefits to participants in the pension or retirement system.”

It allows legislative changes to pension fund investments but specifies that any change must “satisf[y] the standards of fiduciary care and loyalty required of a retirement board pursuant to this section.” Legislative changes must be geared exclusively toward maximizing returns in other words.

The office of the city administrative officer did not respond to a request for comment.

Two dark money environmentalist groups, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) and the NextGen campaign, claimed at least partial credit for securing the nomination for Markey.

LCV claimed it played a “decisive role” in his win. “With low turnout out in tonight’s special election, it is clear that our work was an important part of Markey’s victory,” the group said in a statement after polls closed on Tuesday.

The NextGen campaign, run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, said they “succeeded in … injecting climate change into the race,” and forced Rep. Stephen Lynch (D., Mass), Markey’s opponent, to change tactics “in direct reaction to our offensive.”

Markey blasted the involvement of such groups on Wednesday despite the large sums spent by dark money groups supporting Markey’s bid or attacking Lynch’s during the primary.

“It’s undisclosed, it’s unlimited, and it is unseemly to have that kind of outside influence not be known by the voters of the state of Massachusetts as they would be casting their ballots,” Markey said of dark money groups on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown.

Asked about the disconnect between Markey’s rhetoric and the large independent expenditures on his behalf, campaign spokesman Andrew Zucker said Markey “has fought to keep money out of politics, reform campaign finance laws and overturn the Court’s misguided Citizens United ruling.”

Republicans said Markey’s comments and his general antipathy to the post-Citizens United campaign finance landscape—he has compared the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision to Dred Scott—are hypocritical, given the involvement of dark money groups in the race.

“There is no greater height of hypocrisy,” Republican nominee Gabriel Gomez said in an interview.

Markey “has been down there [in Washington] for 37 years taking outside money to further his career and taking it from groups or industries that he regulates or has control over,” Gomez said.

“Ed Markey railing against ‘special interest’ money from Washington is like the Pillsbury Doughboy complaining about carbohydrates,” said Brad Dayspring, communications director at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

LCV and NextGen both focus on environmental and energy issues. Markey is the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee and also sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The role of dark money groups frequently came up in the contest for Massachusetts’s Democratic Senate nomination. Markey and Lynch both agreed to sign what they called the “People’s Pledge,” which was designed to reduce the roles of those groups in the race.

Markey falsely suggested the pledge prohibits involvement by such groups in the race on Wednesday. It only prohibits political advertisements and direct mail funded by dark money organizations.

The pledge’s focus on campaign advertisements and mailers is seen by some as a major loophole, since it does not prohibit independent expenditures on activities such as polling, canvassing, and other non-media campaign activities.

Markey benefitted from well over a million dollars of independent expenditures by Super PACs and other dark money groups during the primary despite the pledge and his insistence he “[doesn’t] want funding that comes in from these Super PACs,” according to data gathered by the Sunlight Foundation.

LCV spent more than $830,000 supporting Markey’s primary bid through a Super PAC and an affiliated 501(c)(4) advocacy group. NextGen independently spent more than $350,000 in opposition to Lynch.

Markey’s top three independent expenditure groups in the race—LCV, NextGen, and the Service Employees International Union—spent more than $1.5 million supporting Markey or opposing Lynch.

Those totals dwarf the $93,000 in independent expenditures supporting Gomez’s candidacy.

Markey claimed on Wednesday that Gomez’s refusal to sign the “People’s Pledge” undermined his claim to be “a new kind of Republican” despite benefitting from more than fifteen times as much independent cash as Gomez.

Gomez, a private equity executive and former Navy SEAL, rejected that characterization. “People have the right to express their views” through independent political expenditures, he said.

“Politicians takes pledges because nobody trusts them,” Gomez said of his decision to pass on the People’s Pledge. “The only pledge I’m going to take is to protect the Constitution.”

Fang, formerly a writer for ThinkProgress and the Republic Report and now a reporter with the left-wing magazine the Nation, has compiled years of dodgy reporting on the industrialist Koch brothers into a chapter called “The Koch-Fueled War on Obama.”

Fang does not disguise his political agenda. Outside spending by labor unions and other groups that share his policy preferences is not so much a problem, he said in an email exchange with the Washington Free Beacon.

“I think we’d have a better political system if it wasn’t so influenced by special interest groups across the board,” Fang said. But “if you think the interests of two billionaires seeking upper income tax cuts and industrial deregulation are akin to unionized janitors and nurses seeking better work and retirement conditions, I don’t know what to tell you.”

That comment mirrors remarks Fang has made previously and reflects the subject line of a fundraising email from Organizing for America, a now-shuttered advocacy group tied to President Barack Obama: “Our Donations are Different.” (Organizing for America was more or less reborn after the 2012 election as Organizing for Action.)

The distortions pile up. For example, contrary to Fang’s claim that “Obama and the Democrats…were too timid to explicitly denounce the Koch Brothers,” numerous high-profile White House officials targeted the brothers by name.

David Axelrod, then a top Obama adviser, accused the Kochs of manufacturing the Tea Party movement in Jane Mayer’s 2010 attack on Charles and David.

A month later, Austan Goolsbee, then the chairman of Obama’s council of economic advisors, revealed private tax information about Koch Industries in a background briefing with reporters.

The president himself attacked Americans for Prosperity, which Fang dubs a Koch “front group,” in an August 2010 speech warning of secretive, potentially foreign-funded groups influencing American elections.

That attack dovetailed with one Fang himself made up a couple months later. He alleged in a ThinkProgress post that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—another Koch co-conspirator, by Fang’s telling—was illegally spending foreign money on American political activities.

Fact-checking websites panned the piece. “Accusing anybody of violating the law is a serious matter requiring serious evidence to back it up,” wrote FactCheck.org. “So far Democrats [who attacked the Chamber based on Fang’s report] have produced none.”

It was revealed in 2011 that the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the 501(c)(4) that publishes ThinkProgress, accepted nearly $3 million in foreign money from the Bermuda-based Atlantic Philanthropies through 2010.

Fang says his distaste for conservative political philanthropy is grounded in what he alleges is corporate America’s antipathy to progressivism.

“Democratic presidents promising bold, progressive change have faced orchestrated attacks from the titans of industry since President Franklin Roosevelt,” he writes.

But Fang glosses over evidence of corporate support for Roosevelt’s programs—as well as for Barack Obama’s.

“The New Deal continued the innovatory corporatism of Hoover,” wrote historian Paul Johnson.

Roosevelt’s package of economic reforms was part of a corporatist strain in American politics that began with President Woodrow Wilson’s war economy and “culminated in the vast welfare state which Lyndon Johnson brought into being in the late 1960s,” Johnson wrote.

More recently, financial regulation legislation was crafted in conjunction with industry lobbyists who have frequently huddled with regulators in charge of implementing the bill.

The Obama administration struck a deal with the pharmaceutical industry, ensuring its support for the Affordable Care Act in exchange for billions of dollars in payoffs for the industry.

Tobacco companies Philip Morris and Altria were major lobbying forces for and beneficiaries of the president’s 2009 tobacco control legislation.

Yet Fang does not admit any similarity between what he says is rent-seeking by the Kochs and the litany of corporatist influences on the president’s policies.

That outlook has led Fang to vehemently criticize politically active philanthropists in publications funded by politically active philanthropists (including the Nation).

Fang notes in his introduction that much of his writing is drawn from his work at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a division of the Center for American Progress (CAP) that does not disclose its donors.

The well-endowed liberal think tank is funded in part by corporations such as Walmart hoping to advance financial interests by supporting policy work and political commentary.

Reports indicate CAP has also received contributions from liberal billionaires George Soros, Peter Lewis, Tom Steyer, and Herbert Sandler and his late wife, Marion.

However, Fang routinely dubs the conservative 501(c)(4) activist group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which is organized under the same provision of the tax code as the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a Koch Industries “front group” because of the brothers’ ties to the organization.

David Koch sits on the board of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which is a legally distinct organization from AFP, analogous to the relationship between CAP and its Action Fund, neither of which are referred to in Fang’s book as “front groups” for Walmart, Soros, Lewis, the Sandlers or any of their other wealthy, politically active donors.

The billions spent on electioneering activities by the nation’s labor unions are said to be less pernicious to American democracy than the significantly smaller sums spent by conservative political groups.

Additionally, Fang provides little evidence to support his claims regarding the Koch brothers’ motivations.

“Before Obama even assumed office, the pair made it their goal to neuter the young president and remove him from the White House,” he writes.

“Every company wants smart people,” noted Charles Koch in one anecdote relayed by Fang. “Well, Hitler was smart. Stalin was smart. Mao was smart,” Koch continued. “If somebody’s evil, the smarter they are, the more damage they’re going to do.”

This historical observation, Fang claims, is a veiled comparison of Obama to Hitler and Stalin, though Koch mentioned neither Obama nor any other element of contemporary politics.

“The odd remark, made at the peak of the election season, sounded more like a shot at candidate Obama than a critique about the perfect employee. The erudite senator from Illinois could do a lot of ‘damage’—like Hitler or Stalin—Charles seemed to think,” Fang writes.

Asked how he drew that conclusion from Koch’s remark, Fang said he had simply laid out “why Charles’ remark could be interpreted as a fear about a leader like Obama in the book.”

Fang also cites his own writings as “evidence” the Koch brothers have faced criticism for their activities.

“The Koch brothers were accused of rampant oil speculation, driving the price of gasoline up for consumers,” he writes.

But that accusation was made by Fang, who stands by his reporting despite the fact it was quickly debunked.

He also repeats accusations that Koch Industries stole oil from Indian tribal lands in the 1980s—claims that resulted in a settlement with the federal government—without mentioning “investigations by the Bureau of Land Management and the Osage Tribal Council in Oklahoma found no evidence” to support the allegations, according to a Tulsa World article obtained through Lexis Nexis.

Fang spends much of the chapter on what he alleges are activities by Koch Industries to undermine a consensus on the dangers of anthropogenic global warming.

“After emails were hacked from a climate research center in England—the so-called ClimateGate scandal—Koch groups manipulated several of the emails to claim the science underpinning the concerns on climate change was a hoax,” Fang writes.

None of the emails were altered or edited, however.

Fang says the accusation of “manipulation” refers only to attempts to use the emails as evidence of a “hoax.”

Organizations that used the emails to subject the theory of man-made climate change to scrutiny were funded by the Kochs as a means to avoid regulations that might hurt the company’s bottom line, Fang writes.

What Fang does not mention is that the Koch brothers also provide funding to groups and individuals that warn of the dangers of global warming.

“Denying the threat of global warming only permits the Koch brothers to make vast amounts of money from their pollution-based empire,” Fang writes.

Koch subsidiary Georgia Pacific has received an award from the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency for its “significant contributions to protecting the environment.”

Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have also received dozens of other awards for environmental stewardship and sustainability.

Fang does not mention of those accomplishments or the groups and individuals that have received funding from Koch that have warned of the dangers of anthropogenic global warming.

The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation is one of the largest donors to the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project whose founder, University of California Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, insists “humans are almost entirely the cause” of global warming.

Patrick Michaels, the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Koch-funded Cato Institute and the keynote speaker at a 2008 conference held by the Koch-funded Heartland Institute, proclaimed: ”Global warming is real and people have something to do with it.”

Fang also dismisses Koch support for other progressive causes pushed for by Obama.

Koch-funded groups including the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation supported the 2010 repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy banning gays openly to serve in the U.S. military.

Reason magazine, which is editorially independent from but also published by the Reason Foundation, has also published a libertarian case against right-to-work laws, which progressives vehemently oppose.

Fang insists the Kochs “adamantly fought every progressive policy [Obama] proposed” and writes off their support for socially liberal causes as “a Trojan horse for imposing their radical economic views.”

One such “Trojan horse”: The American Museum of Natural History to which David Koch has donated $35 million. The museum is a compendium of evidence for evolution, Koch support for which Fang says is “mostly a ruse.”

So sinister are the Kochs, Fang writes, that they ally with groups that oppose them on key pieces of legislation.

He includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a major Koch ally in opposing the president’s agenda. But he also identifies Koch opposition to the 2009 stimulus bill, which the Chamber supported, as a key plank in the brothers’ anti-Obama campaign.

Fang said he did not claim these groups have identical agendas.

The Nation on Tuesday issued a 370-word correction to an Earth Day piece by Fang that alleged a conspiracy to sink efforts to address climate change.

“We apologize for the errors,” wrote the Nation editors.

The Government Accountability Institute (GAI) combed official records to produce a report on how the president has allocated his time. It found Obama has spent only six hours in meetings on the economy so far this year.

The data “give the impression of a president who doesn’t look like he’s terribly serious about, or very well informed on, economic policies,” wrote Nile Gardner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.

“The economy is the number one issue for the American people, yet President Obama appears more concerned with perfecting his golf swing than he does with advancing the prosperity of his own country,” Gardner added.

The GAI gathered information from the official White House calendar, Politico’s presidential calendar, and media reports on the president’s activities.

The report finds Obama has spent only 474 hours in meetings on economic issues during his presidency, compared to 976 hours on vacation or the golf course.

Economic issues have remained at the top of Americans’ list of political priorities throughout Obama’s presidency but the time he spends in meetings on the issue has declined dramatically since taking office.

“Throughout 2009, President Obama had 140 days with economic meetings. By 2012, the number of days with a scheduled economic meeting decreased to 29 (a 79 percent decrease),” the GAI report found.

“People understand that presidents have the most stressful job in the world and need a break from time to time,” GAI president Peter Schwiezer told Breitbart.com.

“There will be some who will be encouraged by the numbers and some who will wish the president spent more time in economic meetings. As a government watchdog group, we just tabulate the numbers and let others decide how to interpret them,” Schwiezer added.

He also noted GAI’s methodology gives the president the benefit of the doubt in some areas. It only counts six hours of each vacation day as leisure time, for instance.

“Like most people, presidents still do work while on vacation,” Schweizer said. “So we really went out of our way to fairly and accurately reflect how the president spends his time.”

The GAI report was a follow-up to a similar report released in July 2012, which found the president “has spent less than 4 percent of his total time in economic meetings or briefings of any kind” since assuming office.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

House Republicans on Wednesday signaled that despite some opposition from more conservative members they will move forward with a vote on legislation designed to insure Americans with preexisting conditions.

The bill drew a veto threat from the White House because it pays for a high-risk insurance pool using money from a preventive care fund contained in the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Some Republicans have dubbed the preventive care money a “slush fund.”

“We are still having conversations with our Members and are proceeding as scheduled,” a Republican leadership aide told the Washington Free Beacon Wednesday afternoon.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) considered pulling the legislation from Wednesday’s floor schedule after some said leadership could not muster the 218 votes necessary for passage.

However, Cantor said Wednesday that he was “forging ahead” with the legislation.

The bill, titled the Helping Sick Americans Now Act, would fully fund the Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), a stopgap measure designed to insure Americans with preexisting conditions until Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges come online.

The exchanges are scheduled to be up and running in October but implementation of key portions of the law has already been delayed.

Republicans said they see a three-fold opportunity with the legislation: improve health coverage for the most grievously ill Americans, ding the administration for failing to insure those Americans while working through Obamacare’s bureaucratic morass, and draw funds from an Obamacare program Republicans say is wasteful and unaccountable.

Rep. Joe Pitts (R. Pa.), the legislation’s sponsor, says the Prevention and Public Health Fund, from which the bill finances the PCIP, “has no Congressional oversight and has directed funding to programs at the Centers for Disease Control that have little or nothing to do with public health.”

“My bill takes money from a wasteful, duplicative fund, moves it into a program that has bipartisan support and helps pay down the debt,” Pitts said in a news release on the legislation.

The administration announced in February that it would stop admitting applications for PCIP coverage. It cited a lack of funding for the program.

Pitts’ bill is part of a slate of legislation that Cantor touted at a Republican conference meeting this week as examples of “putting our conservative principles first to help people first.”

But some House conservatives are loath to increase funding for any Obamacare program even if it means taking funds from other, less appealing programs.

“It’s pretty simple. We’re shifting money from one part of Obamacare we don’t support to another part of Obamacare we don’t support,” said Rep. Justin Amash (R., Mich.). “That’s a nonstarter for me.”

Some conservative groups, including Heritage Action for America and the Club for Growth, oppose the bill while others, including Americans for Tax Reform and FreedomWorks, support it.