ZeroHedge -
The IRS conservative targeting scandal is going from bad to worse.Following the Friday revelations that despite all prior appeals to the contrary, the IRS did in fact apply political bias and prejudice in targeting conservative groups who had applied for exempt status (and who knows what other prejudice when targeting non-liberals entities - perhaps it is time to do an analysis of what the ratio of conservatives to liberals audited each year is?), culminating with the farcical response by an IRS official during the Friday press meeting...
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this may be just the beginning of a major political scandal which in addition to tangential fallout crushing the alleged "impartiality" of the Obama administration, additionally validates many of the heretofore right-wing "conspiracy theories." And as Zero Hedge has shown time and again, it is not a conspiracy theory if it is a conspiracy fact.What makes things worse for the IRS, the US Treasury, its then-head Tim Geithner, and of course, Barack Obama,
is that according to a draft report prepared by the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration, expected to be released this week, and seen by AP,
is that senior IRS officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as the spring/summer of 2011, well before the 2012 election as we announced before. What makes matters worse, is that
it was not only "low-level" employees as the IRS tried to justify its prejudice on Friday, but high level personnel, among which at least one head of division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, and likely all the way to the very top, that were well aware of the witch hunt.
From AP:
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Attempts by the IRS to contain the fallout to lower level employees will become very complicated once it becomes public knowledge, that "on Aug. 4, 2011, staffers in the IRS' Rulings and Agreements office "held a meeting with chief counsel so that everyone would have the latest information on the issue.""
So everyone knew about it.
But this is a very sticky problem because at a congressional hearing March 22, 2012, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, who had previously stated on the record that no groups had been targeted, testified under oath as follows: "There's absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people" who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman said at the House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing."
Oops.
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