Not the White House, nor the Obama 2012 campaign, nor Democratic National Committee had any immediate comment Tuesday when contacted by ABC News and asked about comments made by Koch referring to the 2012 campaign as a repeat of the Iraq War.

“We have Saddam Hussein, this is the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months,” Koch said in comments at a private gathering in Colorado in June, first reported by the progressive Brad Blog  and Mother Jones Magazine. ”For the life or death of this country.”

ADD Philip Ellender, President and COO, Government and Public Affairs for the Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC, said in a statement that “Koch was not referring to President Obama in his remarks. The ‘Mother of All Wars’ is a common phrase, frequently attributed to Saddam Hussein on the eve of the first Gulf War. Amid record U.S. unemployment, continued economic decline, and loss of liberty, the U.S. has been plunged into its own ’mother of all wars.’ Our nation’s future will be determined in the coming months by the choices Americans make to address the serious economic issues facing our country.”

The billionaire brothers Charles Koch and his brother David have given tens of millions of dollars to various conservative and libertarian causes over the years. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote about them last Summer.

Earlier this year, Democrats in Wisconsin – pointing to their support for the Republican government and the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, said the Koch brothers were “the poster children of the effort by multinational corporate America to try to redefine the rights and values of American citizens,” as Democratic Representative Gwen Moore told the New York Times. 

Ellender also said in his statement that, “It is a matter of public record that similar seminars – all of them private and off-the-record – are held by those who seek the opposite: ever-greater government influence and control over our lives. There are reports about surreptiously (sic) recorded audio taken out of context from a June 2011 conference hosted by Koch Industries. As is typical by far-left groups, these reports attempt to make more false claims about Koch. Specifically, they assert that Charles Koch referred to President Obama as ’Saddam Hussein.’”

-Jake Tapper