KARMA: Federal Judge Slaps Texas GOP Bush Donor With Billion Dollar Fine For Tax Fraud

One of the most notorious Republican donors over the last 40 years has been busted for tax fraud and slapped with a hefty penalty.

Billionaire businessman Sam Wyly has been a Republican since the 1960s and contributed heavily to the presidential campaigns of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

After backing Bush 41 in 1988, they helped Bush 43 build his own political power by supporting his campaign to  be Texas’ Governor in 1994 and contributed to his presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004.

Wyly even contributed to the Swift Boat campaign that slandered Democratic candidate John Kerry’s service in the Vietnam War.

In short, Wyly is one of the reasons why George W. Bush became president for eight years and why we ended up with two wars in the Middle East and an economic collapse.

Well, karma has finally caught up to Wyly and it bit him right on the ass.

As it turns out, Wyly is a tax dodger who shielded much of his fortune through a series of trusts in the Cayman Islands to hide stock sales from the IRS for more than ten years between 1992 and 2004.

That’s right. one of George W. Bush’s biggest financial supporters was committing tax fraud the whole time while he simultaneously gave millions of dollars to Republican campaigns.

And a federal judge smacked him for it on Monday.

According to Reuters:

A federal bankruptcy judge in Texas on Monday ordered former billionaire Sam Wyly to pay $1.11 billion in back taxes, interest and penalties after finding he committed tax fraud by shielding much of his family’s wealth in offshore trusts.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Barbara Houser in Dallas calculated the payout after ruling on May 10 that Wyly and his late brother Charles conducted a “deceptive and fraudulent” scheme to cheat the Internal Revenue Service.

The payout includes roughly $135.5 million of taxes, $402.1 million of interest, and $570.1 million of penalties.

It definitely makes one wonder what other big Republican donors like the Koch brothers have been hiding all this time. After all, they hate the federal government so much that they are buying conservative lawmakers to destroy it from within, and the IRS is a major target that Republicans have been particularly keen on eliminating. Sam Wyly getting busted for tax fraud gives a little insight into why they may be so obsessed with completing that goal.