The Nature of the Beast: The Breathless Press and the Phony IRS ‘Scandal’
While you were watching the Zimmerman trial, the narrative about the IRS targeting Obama’s enemies has been thoroughly debunked, writes Michael Tomasky.
The IRS “scandal,” lately dormant, is returning soon to a cable-news channel near you: tomorrow, Russell George, the Treasury Department inspector general who produced the original report at Darrell Issa’s request, is going back before Issa’s committee, and this time he’s in for some pretty serious grilling from Democrats. The evidence is now even more preponderant than it already was that there was absolutely no political agenda in the IRS’s review of 501(c)(4) applications. In fact, evidence is mounting that if anyone was behaving politically here, it was George—and, of course, Issa and the other Republicans who launched into their baseless tirades about “enemies lists” and other such nonsense.
Here’s what has happened while you were watching the Zimmerman trial or the immigration debate. Last Friday, Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on Issa’s oversight committee, sent Issa a letter asking that he recall George. Here are three examples of things Cummings’s investigators turned up about which they might like to hear George’s answers:
First, George apparently failed to disclose to the committee an interaction with his top investigator, who reviewed (at George’s request) some 5,500 emails from IRS employees. The investigator determined after his review that there was “no indication that pulling these selected applications was politically motivated.” They were singled out for review because the IRS employees weren’t sure how to process them. The investigator shared this finding with George, so evidently he knew about it. One might have thought that this would have been a relevant fact for George to share with the committee. But he did not.
Second, it has been George’s position that the word “progressive” was never used as a search criterion by IRS workers, a position that lent credence to the idea that only conservative applicants were targeted. But Cummings’s staff has now unearthed a Power Point presentation that was created for an IRS “workshop” meeting in July 2010 on how to handle sensitive cases. The second page of the Power Point is headlined “Politics” and features two photographs—an elephant and a donkey. Get it? Then, page three has the words “Tea Party”; page four, the words “Patriots” and “9/12 Project” (two more names that would indicate conservative affiliation); page five, the word “Progressive.” George had written to committee Democrat Sander Levin denying that “Progressive” was used as a screening term in 2010. But it clearly was.. . .
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/17/the-nature-of-the-beast-the-breathless-press-and-the-phony-irs-scandal.html