Senior IRS Officials Knew About Conservative Groups Being Targeted In 2011
Via Ed Morrissey, it seems that the IRS targeting conservative groups isn’t something the IRS top brass just found out about it, and it wasn’t just some isolated low-level incident.
That, according to the Associated Press:
A federal watchdog’s upcoming report says senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups in 2011.
The disclosure contradicts public statements by former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, who repeatedly assured Congress that conservative groups were not targeted. ….
That report says the head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups learned that groups were being targeted in June 2011. It does not say whether Shulman was notified.
Remember, yesterday the Obama administration was making it seem like these were new revelations:
Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.
Rather, Lerner said, they were a misguided effort to come up with an efficient means of dealing with a flood of applications from organizations seeking tax-exempt status between 2010 and 2012.
It seems, at best, that top-level Obama IRS officials knew what was going on and tried to hush it up. Or, at worst, it was happening at the specific direction of someone in the Obama administration with partisan motives.
Either way, this looks really bad for Obama.
