Saturday, June 22, 2013

The IRS "Scandal" Souffle Collapses

From Jonathan Chait's article in the latest New York Magazine:
"When the IRS first revealed that its Cincinnati office had attempted to enforce its nonprofit laws using a search function that disproportionately impacted conservatives, Republicans were certain it must have come from the White House. They were going to follow the facts. But all of the facts point in the same direction, which is that the Obama administration had nothing to do with it at all. That was the conclusion of the agency’s inspector-general report, as well as the House Oversight Committee’s own interviews, which the Republican majority tried to suppress and which (when the Democrats released them) showed the operation was an independent, well-intentioned effort to enforce the law led by an IRS official who happens to be a conservative Republican."
Over the last three years, when literally thousands of right-wing teabagger groups flooded the IRS claiming to be "social welfare" organizations to claim a tax exemption, by law the IRS had to screen the applications to weed out the clearly political, of which there were thousands.  When the Rethuglicans tried to tie it to the White House, they failed.  To his great credit, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) exposed the charade when he released the complete transcripts of the IRS staff interviews, which had been very selectively quoted by scummy bungler Rep. Darrell "Grand Theft Auto" Issa (R-Conspiracyland) to hint at a White House-IRS connection.

This marks the second "scandal" that Grand Theft Auto Issa has puffed up and watched deflate, the first being Benghazi!  BENGHAZI!! which was a thinly-veiled attempt to damage the political future of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and dirty-up the President at the same time.