Txdigest.com

An Australian judge is ordering two media outlets to pay American economist Peter Schiff more than half a million dollars for defaming him.

It’s the latest fallout in a bizarre scandal in which the IRS and the governments of five other countries joined together to target Schiff, a frequent guest on conservative media, with the “biggest tax evasion investigation in the world.”

Despite poring over every detail of a bank he ran in Puerto Rico, authorities failed to come up with a single charge. But government agents apparently leaked the existence of the investigation to the New York Times and Australian media outlets The Age and 60 Minutes, both of which are owned by Australian media giant Nine. The journalists took Schiff’s advocacy for low-tax policies as evidence that he would break existing tax law.