According to Carl Cameron’s report of a conversation he had with Darrell Issa yesterday, today’s hearing in the House Oversight Committee will connect the dots in the IRS scandal all the way to the White House.  That’s hardly a great strategy in setting expectations — unless Issa really knows he can deliver on that promise.  Starting at 11 am, we’ll soon find out (via Common Cents and Gateway Pundit):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eQtCvY9oeqg

The star of today’s show will almost certainly be Carter Hull. When his name first popped up, it seemed that Hull might have been at the BOLO nexus, and possibly the key to the scandal. His testimony in depositions didn’t disappoint, either.  Instead of being a driver of the effort, Hull told investigators that he had been placed in the “demeaning” position of having his approval authority stripped on Tea Party cases, which went to Washington and the IRS chief counsel’s office rather than concluded positively for the applicants, as he would have determined.

Expect Issa and Republicans to spend a lot of time with Hull, drawing him out on those points, and with Elizabeth Hofacre as well.  She has been a gold mine of information on the lower-level operations, and will likely serve to rebut Democrats’ attempts to show equivalence between treatment of conservatives and progressives in the tax-exempt unit.  That will balance out the efforts of Democrats on Oversight to pillory J. Russell George for not providing them that equivalence in the first place.

The fireworks should be spectacular today, with the hearing shifting from a veneer of bipartisanship earlier this summer to a full-fledged partisan battle to control the IRS scandal narrative now.  We have the live-embed code from Oversight here, but just in case, here’s their page for today’s hearing.   We’ll have the open thread here and add posts on newsworthy moments as the day progresses.

Live streaming video by Ustream

Update: The Ustream channel had some issues with embeds, but it’s been fixed now.