A nonprofit group with ties to Charles G. and David H. Koch provided grants of $236 million to conservative organizations before the 2012 election, according to tax returns the group is expected to file Monday, underscoring the broad reach of the political movement the two business executives and their advisers have built in recent years.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/us/politics/tax-filings-hint-at-extent-of-koch-brothers-reach.html?ref=us    

Freedom Partners, as the group is now known, is playing a bigger role for the Kochs as the brothers seek a tighter rein over the advocacy groups and political organizations that their donor network finances and expand their involvement in Republican political causes.
The group, formerly known as the Association for American Innovation, functions as a clearinghouse for money and message strategy. Like other such groups on the right and left, Freedom Partners raises money from donors and then distributes it to other groups — most of them other nonprofits that mix issue advocacy and election advertising — to spend.
The arrangement gives the donors an extra layer of anonymity and blurs the original source of money that fuels controversial campaigns.

 The scale of Freedom Partners’ fund-raising is striking: It raised $256 million between November 2011 and last year’s election, according to the returns, details of which were reported on Thursday by Politico. That rivals or exceeds the annual budgets of the largest advocacy groups in the nation, like the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
But the returns also reflect a significant shift in the tax strategies the Koch operation deploys to avoid challenge from the Internal Revenue Service, which limits how much nonprofit groups can spend to aid or defeat candidates.
Other donor clearinghouses, along with nearly all of the political groups they support, register with the I.R.S. as “social welfare” groups under Section 501(c)4 of the tax code. That has let such groups spend money on elections while keeping their donors secret — drawing increasing regulatory and legislative scrutiny from critics who assert that some of the groups are violating campaign laws.

But Freedom Partners established itself in November 2011 as a 501(c)6 “business league,” typically a trade association of corporations, like the Chamber of Commerce, organized to promote a common business interest. Instead of donors, it has more than 200 “members,” each making a minimum $100,000 contribution, which Freedom Partners classifies as member dues. The approach gives it many of the same advantages social welfare groups have, with one significant addition: Some contributions to the group may be tax deductible as business expenses.

A majority of the Freedom Partners board consists of longtime Koch employees, like Richard Fink, an executive vice president of Koch Industries who supervises the brothers’ public relations, lobbying and political operations. Freedom Partners also gave $32.3 million to Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political organization co-founded by David Koch.