Watchdog Group Asks IRS to Investigate Cain Aide’s Charity

Herman Cain's chief of staff, Mark Block.<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qhm-22Q0PuM">Herman Cain</a>/YouTube

On Monday, uber-attorney Gloria Allred announced that she is representing a fourth woman allegedly harassed by GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, thereby ensuring that controversy will continue to grab DC headlines for at least another week. But ultimately, it’s items like this that could cause things to get real ugly, real fast for the Cain campaign:

Today, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a letter requesting that the Internal Revenue Service investigate a charity operated by Wisconsin political veteran Mark Block that spent over $40,000 of tax-exempt donations to pay for private jets, travel, and computers for Herman Cain’s presidential bid. CMD also requested an examination of other Mark Block-related groups sharing the same address or other commonalities. Mr. Cain, who has denied knowing who paid for his various travels, is not the target of these requests to the IRS.

CMD joins Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in raising official concerns about the role Block’s non-profit, Prosperity USA, played in getting Cain’s campaign off the ground. As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel first reported, Prosperity USA appears to have advanced tens of thousands of dollars to the Cain campaign, footing the bill for trips to Vegas, flights, and iPads. But those debts do not show in Cain’s Federal Elections Commission filings. As a non-profit, CMD is legally prohibited from making either direct or in-kind contributions to a campaign. As we noted previously, Block has a history of playing fast and loose with the tax code; he was suspended from working on elections in Wisconsin for three years in the early 2000s after turning a non-profit voter registration outfit into a campaign organ during a judicial election.