The hunt for a White House link to IRS scandal

What happened

Republican lawmakers intensified efforts this week to directly link the White House with the Internal Revenue Service scandal, as conservative groups subjected to the agency’s heightened scrutiny testified before Congress for the first time. Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.), the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, claimed that employees from the IRS’s Cincinnati office had privately told his office that the targeting of 500 conservative groups was “directly ordered” by Washington, though he conceded he had no direct evidence of that. In congressional hearings, anti-abortion, pro-marriage, and Tea Party–affiliated groups testified that they had faced years of delays and politically motivated “harassment” from the IRS after applying for tax exemption. Becky Gerritson, leader of an Alabama Tea Party group, told lawmakers she had to hire attorneys to deal with the avalanche of paperwork required by the agency. “This was a willful act of intimidation to discourage a point of view,” she said.

The IRS also came under fire for profligate spending this week, after a Treasury audit revealed it had spent $50 million on over 200 employee conferences between 2010 and 2012. Acting IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel called the spending “an unfortunate vestige from a prior era,” and pledged to regain the nation’s trust. “The agency stands ready to confront the problems that occurred,” he said.

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What the editorials said

The testimony of conservative groups vividly demonstrated why this scandal “far exceeds previous abuses of the tax agency,” said the Washington Examiner. While Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon scrutinized the returns of powerful political enemies, this time the IRS went after ordinary Americans driven by “simple love of country.” You don’t have to be conservative to understand “the stone cold fear” these people must have felt, said the Boston Herald. The IRS is “the one federal agency you don’t argue with—the agency with the power to audit, to make life miserable, and to ruin.”

The IRS’s behavior was certainly troubling, said The Baltimore Sun, “but seems little connected to the chief executive.” No evidence has yet emerged that the White House even knew about what was happening at the IRS, let alone ordered it. That hasn’t stopped Republicans from leveling wild accusations at Obama “on the slightest thread of hearsay.” Why doesn’t the GOP at least pretend to be conducting a real investigation, instead of concocting unsupported allegations?

What the columnists said

Republicans have always believed Obama is guilty of everything and anything, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. “And so, they are going to hold hearings until they confirm their conclusions.” Darrell Issa makes for a perfect investigator, since he knows so much about unethical behavior, said Joan Walsh in Salon.com. This camera-chasing, right-wing caricature was once indicted for stealing his brother’s car and later accused of torching his own car-alarm factory for an insurance payout. Talk about “ethically compromised.”

The evidence of White House involvement is real, said Andrew Stiles in NationalReview.com. White House logs show that the now-deposed commissioner of the IRS, Douglas Shulman, visited the White House 157 times, whereas his predecessor did so once. Why? It’s also telling that Shulman’s wife, Susan Anderson, is an Obama supporter who works for Public Campaign, a liberal nonprofit group. The idea that politics had nothing to do with this scandal “is becoming harder and harder to believe.”

Shulman did not visit the White House 157 times, said Steve Benen in MSNBC.com. The logs show only that Shulman was given security for 157 “routine White House gatherings” to discuss such matters as the IRS’s role in Obamacare, not to meet with Obama. The records show he actually attended only 11 of these events. And yet conservatives “continue to push a bogus story.” By trying so hard to turn this into Watergate, Republicans only hurt themselves, said Leonard Pitts in The Miami Herald. Even the Republican National Committee chair, Reince Priebus, cautioned his party to pull back on the impeachment rhetoric, saying the scandal might have a greater impact “if we present ourselves as intelligent.” As Issa is demonstrating, “that’s a mighty big if.”