Do new IRS revelations prove there is no Tea Party scandal?

The Internal Revenue Service probably won't ever be popular, but its reputation has taken a big hit since revelations in May that several dozen conservative-sounding applicants for tax-exempt status were singled out for special scrutiny. Officials at the IRS's Cincinnati office used "Be On the Look Out" (BOLO) lists with an evolving (and devolving) list of terms, including "Tea Party," "patriot," or "9/12."

The subsequent shake-up at the IRS brought in a new commissioner, Danny Werfel, who said on Monday that the use of BOLO lists continued until at least April, that he'd formally put a stop to the spreadsheets last week — and that the breadth of the search terms was much wider than reported in a damaging inspector general's report.

Along with conservative and small-government tax-exempt applicants, IRS officials in Cincinnati also flagged groups whose applications contained words like "progressive," "occupy," "medical marijuana," and Israel. The final BOLO list from April contained the search term "Green Energy Organizations."

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"House Democrats can hardly contain their delight" at the new revelations, says David Weigel at Slate. The extra scrutiny for "lefty/libertarian causes" seemingly "contradicts the theory that conservatives and only conservatives came under the laser."

Amid the delight, Democrats are a little miffed. Most of the IRS drama has taken place on Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-Calif.) House government oversight committee, but it was Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee who released the new lefty-targeting BOLO lists. Rep. Sander Levin (Mich.), the top Democrat on the committee, pointedly asked Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George why he didn't include the "progressive" groups in his bombshell report or subsequent testimony before Congress.

Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald says the documents prove that there was never anything partisan about the scrutiny:

The "whole scandal is entirely bogus," Seitz-Wald elaborates at Salon. "False. A fiction." The fact that the IRS targeted all sorts of political-sounding groups proves "it wasn't really singling out anyone."

That's what liberals want you to think, says Eliana Johnson at National Review. But according to documents reviewed by National Review, Johnson says, "it is inaccurate to say that the applications of progressive and liberal groups were subjected to the same scrutiny as those of Tea Party groups, or even that a surprisingly broad array of criteria was applied to screen applications for tax exemption."

At the very least, the IRS's new revelations "bolstered its contention that delays experienced by Tea Party groups applying for nonprofit status were a symptom of mismanagement and not politically motivated action," say Richard Rubin and Julie Bykowicz at Bloomberg News. And more generally, it complicates "what had been seen as targeted scrutiny for small-government groups."

"The BOLO list in my mind loses this sinister nature," Jeff Trinca, a chief of staff to the IRS restructuring commission in the 1990s, tells Bloomberg. It looks like mostly "another way of creating criteria lists to try to deal with the huge volumes that come through the agency." But that doesn't mean the IRS handled the situation well. The agency didn't provide its Cincinnati staff with enough guidance, and they sort of went "crazy with these questions," Trinca adds. "The whole thing was just an absolute debacle."