T HE IRS SCANDAL, which has riveted the publics attention for months, is much larger and much more complex than the Obama administration wants to acknowledge. The targeting of conservative groups by the IRS, the most serious of the Obamagate scandals, is no more the responsibility of rogue agents in Cincinnati than the massacre in Benghazi is of a rogue videographer. This scandal is rather the result of a strategy set forth by the White House and its progressive allies in the Washington bureaucracy and policy apparatus to silence conservative groups and individuals deemed to be a political threat to the current administration. While President Obama called this massive abuse of the IRS inexcusable, his administration has found plenty of excuses not to get to the bottom of it, as his press secretary Jay Carney initially promised it would. In the first flurry of damage control, Obama told the media he had instructed Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew to investigate, but Obama left out the probability that Lew learned of the targeting and perhaps coordinated it in May 2012, when he was the presidents chief of staff.
Conservatives looking for empirical evidence of what they knew by experience was happening to them as a result of IRS scrutiny placed hope in the report issued by J. Russell George, the Treasury Department inspector general for tax administration, at about the time the scandal erupted. This report indeed authenticated the focus on conservative groups and the use of Tea Party, patriot, 9/12, and similar search terms. But we still dont know the exact criteria by which the IRS constructed its be on the lookout (BOLO) list, the fulcrum used to give groups excessive screening. Nor is there any indication that the report used the agencys extensive data-mining capacity to investigate the abusive and illegitimate targeting. Such deficits give the report the feel of damage control, despite its revelations, rather than a rigorous attempt to get to the bottom of things.
It is profoundly against the American grain that the federal tax code should have become a fun park for the powerful.
As late as June 2013, long after Congress began investigating the scandal that the administration promised was a mistake of the past, pro-life groups were still being badgered for information about their anti-abortion activities. Weve had three more groups come to us that have had problems with the IRS some very recent, some current or still pending, Peter Breen, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society which represents pro-life groups targeted by the IRS told the Daily Caller. Its continuing, and it needs to be addressed.
In an August 2013 closed-door session of the House Ways and Means Committee, an unidentified IRS agent testified that Tea Party groups were still being forced into special secondary screening because the IRS still hasnt come up with new guidelines for granting tax-exempt status that guarantee an apolitical process. Meanwhile, months after the FBI announced that it would launch an investigation into the IRSs targeting of conservative groups, these groups and their legal representatives are still waiting to hear from the bureau.
Rather than being cured, this disease is at best in remission, as the House Oversight Committee, led by Representative Darrell Issa, tries to discern what the IRS did, to whom, and for how long. But this much is already apparent: a timeline extrapolated from White House visitor logs shows that the Obama administration has been dishonest about nearly every facet of the scandal, in which an archetypal pattern of response can be seen. First, plead ignorance. (If the president isnt in the loop, he cant be held accountable.) Next, offer a plausible story that involves low-level employees, to be floated by sympathetic bloggers and journalists. (It helps if the talking points are provided to these journalists in closed-door meetings.) Finally, when caught lying, slow-walk any investigation and promote anyone associated with the scandal, so it will be tougher for Congress to compel them to testify.
A CROOKED PATH
Then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner met with then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Schulman, then-White House Chief of Staff Lew, and President Obama on May 10, 2012. The timing is significant because the president claimed that he didnt learn of the targeting until almost exactly a year later, in May 2013, when he saw a story about it on television, although Issa had repeatedly expressed concerns that the IRS was unfairly targeting Tea Party groups.
A flurry of activity after this White House meeting suggests an effort to get everyone on the same page over the next year. On June 4, 2012, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin met with J. Russell George, the IRS inspector general for tax administration, who was already working on the report mentioned above in response to Issas complaints, about ongoing audits being pursued by the agencys watchdog office. On September 10, Geithner himself met with George. On September 19, Steven Miller who had by then replaced Schulman as IRS commissioner met again with Geithner. On September 27, Geithner met with Deputy Secretary Wolin and later with Shulman, who in testimony before the House in March 2012 had gone out of his way to deny that any extra scrutiny was being given to conservative groups. The purpose of this meeting was primarily to plan the implementation of Obamacare, whose protection, we now see, was deemed important enough to justify IRS intimidation of groups opposing it.
Although White House Chief Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler claimed to have learned about the IRS auditing of conservative groups only in April 2013, she had three unprecedented one-on-one meetings in 2012 with the Treasury Departments chief lawyer, Christopher J. Meade, who had known about the report Inspector General George had begun working on since at least June of that year. Meade met with Ruemmler on September 27, December 11, and December 13, according to White House visitor records. The two had never met one-on-one before.
The meetings served one purpose to alert all the relevant administration officials about the talking points for the forthcoming report George was about to deliver. In anticipation of this event, the White House battened down the hatches. Shulman and Geithner resigned, putting them, for all practical considerations, beyond the reach of Congress. Lew, the new Treasury secretary, could avoid testimony by having the president claim executive privilege, given his past job as White House chief of staff.
