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Thursday, May 15, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 371

Judicial Watch, New Documents Show IRS HQ Control of Tea Party Targeting:

Judicial Watch today released a new batch of IRS documents revealing that its handling of Tea Party applications was directed out of the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC.  The documents also show extensive pressure on the IRS by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) to shut down conservative-leaning tax-exempt organizations. The IRS’ emails by Lois Lerner detail her misleading explanations to investigators about the targeting of Tea Party organizations. ...

“These new documents show that officials in the IRS headquarters were responsible for the illegal delays of Tea Party applications,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is disturbing to see Lois Lerner mislead the IRS’ internal investigators about her office’s Tea Party targeting. These documents also confirm the unprecedented pressure from congressional Democrats to go after President Obama’s political opponents. The IRS scandal has now ensnared Congress.”

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/05/the-irs-scandal-13.html

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Comments

Paul Streckfus: "I am confident that Lois Lerner has nothing to add. It really was dysfunction and incompetence, two conditions very common in Washington, D.C."

How can Streckfus be "confident," when new revelations are dragged out of the administration every day? He knows less than the House investigative committee which finds that there is a lot more to learn.

If Lerner has nothing to add, then she wouldn 't mind foregoing clinging to the Fifth Amendment and not being in contempt of Congress.

And, for Streckfus to blame the IRS scandal, which targeted only political opponents, to be a sympton of bureaucrtatice incompetence is a joke.

Really, isn't Streckfus just another partisan hack who wants others to believe that this is a "phony scandal" and for everyone to move along as there is nothing to see here?

Posted by: Woody | May 15, 2014 10:14:05 AM

Horse hockey. The processing unit in Cincinnati didn't know how to handle the large volume of applications they were receiving after Citizens United. The matter was referred to headquarters for guidance. Headquarters (Commissioner's side and Chief Counsel) was in the process of working out a template to handle the cases when the "scandal" broke. One of the IRS' overriding objectives is uniformity. Uniformity is desirable, but it almost always slows things down. That, essentially, is the IRS "scandal" in a nutshell. You can keep trying to spin it into a conspiracy all you want, but in the end, what you will find is a bunch of bureaucrats in Cincinnati and Washington who were trying to achieve uniformity.

Posted by: Publius Novus | May 15, 2014 9:53:06 AM