Accountability.

For years, administration officials have used the power of the federal government to isolate their opponents. Meanwhile, the unionized employees who populate the IRS and other agencies across the country routinely take their cues from union bosses, whose political donations and speeches show their support for the White House. When it comes to rewarding friends [...]

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Accountability.

Via RCP, most Democratic hacks in seeking to limit Obama’s culpability for IRS-gate go no further than noting that Doug Shulman, the commissioner during the malfeasance, was a Bush appointee. (And a donor to the DNC, although you never hear that mentioned.) Pelosi checks that box here but goes a step further. Because the federal [...]

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Bipartisan.

Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts came down on the IRS’ witnesses admirably today, knocking them for abuses of freedom of speech and breaches of trust by comparing them to those routinely employed in Communist, repressive regimes. In his statement is none of the perfunctory acknowledgment of wrongdoing that’s merely a preface to demanding more efficient [...]

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Game change.

See for yourself. Issa’s committee was told last year that the report would be ready in September, two months before the election. Eight months later, the bomb finally dropped. Why? Did the IG initially underestimate the volume of malfeasance and how long it would take to dig it up? Or are there other, more cynical [...]

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Higher-ups.

The idea that this targeting practice was isolated in some off-shoot Ohio office was preposterous from the beginning. Even if no other office were involved, Cincinnati is the central office for clearing tax-exempt applications and has been since the late ’90s. Its location in Cincinnati just gave apologists a convenient way to imply it was [...]

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Incrimination.

Can’t do better than Popehat’s wry take: IRS Official to Reaffirm Importance of Constitutional Rights In Response To Congressional Inquiry latimes.com/news/politics/… — Popehat (@Popehat) May 21, 2013 Hey, remember when Steve Miller insisted there’s nothing illegal about the IRS targeting a particular political faction for extra scrutiny? He was wrong, potentially: There are civil-rights laws [...]

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Blame.

Fun from MSNBC’s early afternoon “news” bloc of programming via Noah Rothman. The logic is ironclad and inexorable: Doug Shulman, appointed IRS commissioner by Bush in March 2008, was so fiercely loyal to his Beltway Republican masters that he decided to risk his career to kneecap conservative insurgents’ nonprofits in 2010 … even though Bush [...]

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Terrific.

Via the Standard, the obligatory reply to this morning’s news. For argument’s sake, assume it’s all true — Obama knows zip zero zilch about malfeasance in his administration apart from what he learns by watching TV. A conscientious exec who found himself in that position, being repeatedly blindsided by underlings, should probably be … pretty [...]

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"Seventeen different instances of government agency involvement."

Via the Right Scoop, a video companion to Jillian Kay Melchior’s must-read today at NRO about the Kafkaesque government gauntlet run by “True the Vote,” a nonprofit devoted to training people to be election monitors. Why might an org like that attract federal scrutiny? Catherine Engelbrecht, the group’s founder, thinks it’s because she’s an active [...]

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Mysteries.

Ed’s “WaPo versus WaPo” post spotlighted a quote from an IRS employee claiming that there had to be a “directive” issued to the Determinations Unit to get them to focus on tea partiers. Was there? Actually, yes — and, via Mickey Kaus and Sean Higgins, we know that from the lede of an NYT article [...]

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Scandalmania.

Any hunches as to what’ll be front and center on this morning’s shows? Top Obama crony Dan Pfeiffer will appear on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and probably the Food Network if they’ll have him to spin the IRS scandal, Benghazi, the DOJ’s Associated Press probe, Sebelius’s shakedown of health-industry execs, and whatever new scandal [...]

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Abuse.

So many people are sad about America and cynical about its government. They don’t expect anything good to happen. They think certain poisons have entered the system and nothing can be done about it. Leviathan will not be cut back or tamed, Leviathan will go on abusing the citizen. People are all too willing to [...]

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It's come to this.

Via the Examiner and NRO, a few more credible, confidence-inspiring breadcrumbs from this morning’s Ways and Means hearing. It’s starting to make sense now why protesting Planned Parenthood might present a risk to your tax-exempt status, isn’t it? The second clip is of Miller saying that he did indeed ask his underlings who was targeting [...]

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Catharsis.

Via Greg Hengler, the word from the Republican intelligentsia is to go ight-lay on the andstanding-gray to make it harder for the White House to hide behind the “partisan politicization” fig leaf, but there’s nothing especially partisan about this rant. Kelly’s hot not so much because right-wing groups were targeted but because the IRS is [...]

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Lies.

A provable lie via the Washington Free Beacon. Or will this too be spun as evidence not of deceit but of idiocy, with IRS employees simply too stupid to be trusted to find a document when asked? There’s your slogan for the next three and a half years of Hopenchange. “Liars, or merely idiots?” The [...]

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Plus ... "targeting" is bad, mm-kay?

As the New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman said 90 minutes into the hearing, this was one of the few really interesting revelations at today’s grilling of IRS Commissioner Steve Miller.  Remember the impromptu, extemporaneous apology given by Lois Lerner a week ago at a law conference for the targeting of conservative groups, an apology that [...]

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"It would be a mistake to treat this as just one scandal."

The hearing was supposed to start at 9 ET in the House Ways and Means Oversight subcommittee, but it got started a little late. First up — former acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller, who just got forcibly retired about a month early. CBS News has a live embed for those wanting to follow along: CBS [...]

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Payback?

If it’s true, it would be the first time anyone has linked the issue in any way to the White House.  Lanny Davis writes in The Hill today that he’s heard White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler knew for “several weeks” without informing Barack Obama, and she needs to resign … if his sources are correct. So who [...]

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Politics.

Republicans must guard against the temptation to count on scandal to deliver election victories in 2014 and 2016. It is a lesson they should have learned in 1998.
 Republicans expected to make large gains in Congress that year but ended up losing five House seats and standing pat in the Senate. The problem was not [...]

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Charades.

We already knew last night that he was planning to leave, rendering O’s big IRS scalp-taking a joke, but what we didn’t know for sure was whether the White House was aware that Miller was inching towards the exit. Answer: Yep, they were. His term is actually limited by statute. Miller, a 25-year career IRS [...]

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Frightening, anyway.

Really? Was the IRS impotent when it blocked hundreds of applications from conservative groups for tax-exempt status over three years while allowing applications from progressive groups to sail through? Was the Department of Justice impotent when it seized the phone records from multiple Associated Press offices over a leak investigation?  Not exactly; the only impotence [...]

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Excuses.

Good work by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, although we could have guessed that this was the case. Here’s what Lois Lerner said in her initial statement last week copping to the agency’s malfeasance: “We get about 60,000 applications for tax exemption every year, most of them are 501(c)(3) organizations. But between 2010 and 2012 we [...]

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Attacking free speech and religious liberty as far back as 2009?

The Inspector General of the Treasury reported this week that the IRS began applying extra scrutiny and conducting harassment of Obama administration opponents as early as March 2010. However, for at least two pro-life groups, that scrutiny appears to have started a year earlier. Joel Gehrke reports that one group was told its tax-exempt application [...]

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"They simply did what their bosses ordered."

Last night, Barack Obama tried to take control of the narrative on one of the scandals that have rocked his administration by announcing that IRS Commissioner Steve Miller had resigned by request of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.  As it turns out, Miller was leaving in a month anyway, but the outgoing IRS chief took the [...]

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