Gingrich, possibly breaking the law, funneled $150k to anti-gay 'traditional marriage' groups in Iowa last year

The AP is reporting that Newt Gingrich raised and funneled $150,000 in the last year to anti-marriage groups in Iowa so that he could protect the tax status of the organization doing the fundraising.

Potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich quietly lined up $150,000 to help defeat Iowa justices who threw out a ban on same-sex marriage, routing the money to conservative groups through an aide's political committee.

Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker who has aggressively courted the conservatives who dominate Iowa's lead-off presidential caucuses, raised the money for the political arm of Renewing American Leadership, also known as ReAL.

Why did Gingrich make such an effort to funnel money into anti-equality campaigns in Iowa? 3 Marriages and social conservatives.

The effort seemed tailored for social conservatives, whose support Gingrich will need if he is to mount a credible campaign in Iowa and who may hesitate to back the thrice-married candidate.

The most important question is why the groups Gingrich is tied with didn't use the money themselves and run the recall campaign in Iowa. As the AP explains if they had they would have been breaking the law governing their tax status.

He lined up the cash for ReAL Action, Tyler's activism arm. But Tyler said the political group backed away from running the anti-judges campaign itself; lawyers cautioned the spending could violate the group's nonprofit status, which requires that it remain somewhat aloof from electoral politics. The group was founded under a tax provision that allows it to keep donors anonymous but bars it from making politics its primary purpose.

Campaign finance attorney Marcus Owens notes that funneling the money isn't going to insulate Newt's organization from legal backlash.

"It is not customary in the political world for large sums of money to shift hands without a clear objective," said Marcus Owens, a Washington attorney who for a decade led the Internal Revenue Service tax-exempt division. "To give money unfettered to organizations that have announced they are going to be undertaking a recall effort is not going to protect you."

This is a federal IRS violation but in motive it's very similar to what Tom Delay was indicted for in Texas. I'm not sure what would trigger an investigation but funneling money to protect the tax status of Newt's group seems illegal.