Tea Party & patriot groups

78% of those held up were NOT conservative orgs, so your assertion is abit unsecured.

“According to the Director, Rulings and Agreements,” the IG’s report explains, “the fact that the team of specialists worked applications that did not involve the Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 groups demonstrated that the IRS was not politically biased in its identification of applications for processing by the team of specialists.”

While, even if true, that doesn’t excuse the inappropriate and unfair use of those terms to identify which applications to flag, the IG’s report bears out the general assertion. As you can see in the following chart [from page 8 of the IG's report, page 14 in the PDF], of the 298 cases flagged as “potential political cases” by the IRS during the period reviewed by the Inspector General from early 2010 through May 2012, just 96 of them (less than one-third) were flagged due to the inappropriate name criteria…

So again, what did Lois Lerner apologize for? Why did the former Head of the IRS apologize for? The IG is not independent and, while he seems like a nice man, I do not trust his conclusion that there was "no politics" involved in targeting these groups. Actually, that sounds rather silly since we all know that mostly all of the 501 c applicants are in fact political.

So to say we picked out any group with tea party in their name and it was not for their "politics" sounds dumb.

Those profiled were asked more indepth and irrelevant and illegal questions than those who were not profiled.

If a Tea Party Group that was asked to submit the names of all the members, then Organizing for America should have been asked the same question (They were not I suspect).

On Tuesday, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) backtracked from his commitment to release transcripts of interviews with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents that allegedly prove how political officials in the Obama administration directed the IRS to target conservative groups applying for 501 (c)(4) status. Now, the Committee’s top Democrat is daring Issa to allow him to publicize transcripts that appear to undermine those claims.

In a letter sent to the Chairman on Thursday, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) asked Issa to review interviews with IRS officials he intends to release and “identify any specific text you believe should be witheld from the American people.”

The interview Cummings seeks to release allegedly shows a Screening Group Manager in Cincinnati admitting that the first instance of targeting conservative groups occurred after a screener “highlighted the first Tea Party case in February 2010.” The manager, a Republican, identified the case as “high profile” and sent it to technical officials in Washington for guidance. He also assured investigators that he “took this action on his own, without any direction from his superiors, and without any political motivation.” Cummings’ letter also notes that another IRS screener confessed to developing the inappropriate targeting terms like “Patriot” and “9/12″ and began using them in his searches.

“You chose to make very serious and unsubstantiated allegations before the Committee had conducted even a single interview of any IRS employees, you chose to unilaterally release select excerpts from these interviews to try to support your claims,” Cummings says in his letter. “Based on the totality of your actions to date, it seems very difficult for you to argue now that releasing the full transcripts to the public will somehow compromise the integrity of the Committee’s investigation.”

Issa has called White House Press Secretary Jay Carney a “paid liar” and suggested that someone in the White House was aware of the inappropriate screening. He initially promised to release all of the Committee’s documents, but later claimed that publicizing the full results of the Oversight Committee’s investigation would “needlessly jeopardize the integrity of the investigation and hamper the Committee’s ability to get to the truth.”

Several Republicans have also criticized Issa’s tactics, calling on him to release the full transcripts from the Committee’s investigations. “Let’s see everything. Let’s see it all,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) told a local station. ” And let’s see all the transcripts and you know let’s have a fair, objective analysis of this.”

Issa will have until Monday to respond to Cummings’ request.

Mitch McConnell delivered a speech today at the American Enterprise Institute to officially signal that the IRS scandal has entered its post-fact phase. 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.


McConnell’s speech is an attempt to reframe the issue in a way that it can survive the utter absence of incriminating facts. One method he employs is to flip around the burden of proof:



Now we have an administration that’s desperately trying to prove that nobody at the top was involved in any of this stuff, even as they hope that the media loses interest in this scandal and moves on …


Got that? Before Republicans were going to prove that Obama’s administration was involved. All of the evidence suggests it wasn’t. So now McConnell is framing the question as Obama trying to prove he wasn’t involved. Which, of course, he can’t. For that matter, McConnell can’t prove that he didn’t mastermind the IRS. You can’t prove a negative.


McConnell also argues that the scandal is larger than facts about illegality or misconduct — “what we’re dealing with here is larger than the actions of one agency or any group of employees.” By "larger," McConnell means the scandal is just the same nebulous suspicions they have always had about Democrats running the government:



The attacks on speech that we’ve seen over the past several years were never limited to a few Left-wing pressure groups or the DISCLOSE Act. They extend throughout the federal government, to places like the FEC, the FCC, HHS, the SEC, and as all Americans now know — even to the IRS. These assaults have often been aided and abetted by the administration’s allies in Congress.


The “Disclose Act” is a proposed measure that would require unregulated political groups to publicly disclose their donors. Back when campaign finance reformers were trying to actually put limits on outside donations, McConnell was a fierce advocate of this idea. Since the Supreme Court killed spending limits, disclosure has become the best reformers can hope for, and McConnell has now turned against it and indeed portrays it as a sinister Nixonian attempt to suppress free speech.


The belligerent and borderline-paranoid tone of McConnell’s speech today is a kind of covered retreat, signaling the IRS scandal’s turn into a vague trope that conservatives use with other members of the tribe, the way liberals liked to say “Halliburton” during the Bush years, to signal some dark beliefs they don’t need to back up.

Mitch McConnell Realizes IRS Scandal Is Over

John Shafer, manager of the tax-exempt division in the IRS Cincinnati office had told congressional investigators that BOLOs were applied not for purposes of punishing conservative groups, but to ensure that similar organizations were being categorized and screened by the same group of IRS officials. The concern, he said, was that two different tea party groups would get two different decisions on non-profit status. So, the Cincinnati office developed filters to make sure that everything was categorized as cleanly as possible, he said.

Democratic staffers on the House Ways and Means Committee released a copy of a BOLO list Monday that showed the word "progressive" was one of those a filters.

Common thread is the word 'progressive,'" the document reads. "Activities appear to lean toward a new political party. Activities are partisan and appear as anti-Republican. You see references to "blue" as being 'progressive.'"

The document released by House Democrats shows that the IRS was grappling with a wave of difficult-to-define organizations looking for tax-exempt status. The BOLO document notes that 176 applicants for 501c4 status had used the same address in their applications.

Under a section titled "Watch List," the agency put "health care legislation" as an "issue name," advising that new applicants were subject to secondary screening. The IRS also listed "medical marijuana" as an issue name to watch, as well as "occupied territory advocacy."