IRS hid scandal during 2012 election to help Obama get elected

Thursday, May 30, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: IRS scandal, 2012 election, Obama

(NaturalNews) By now most Americans know that the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS)targeting of conservative, "patriot" and similar groups by some members of the the agency's tax exempt status division did so for political reasons, but the political motivations behind those actions didn't stop there, according to additional details that continue to pour out of this scandal.

What's more, the scandal - one of many scandals currently engulfing President Obama's administration, perhaps the most corrupt in American history - has certainly gotten the attention it deserves from the nation's mainstream media (perhaps because of the scandals - one involving the Department of Justice's illegal tapping of 20 Associated Press phones - involved a top media outlet). But whatever the case, we're glad they're on board.

NBC's Lisa Myers reported Sunday, May 19, that the IRS timed its admission of guilt to occur after the 2012 election, so as not to hurt the president's reelection chances - a calculated and deliberate decision and one that shows just how intense the level of political motivation was involved in targeting conservative organizations.

'IRS commissioner knew for more than a year'

According to Myers, who was being interviewed by hosts from MSNBC, the IRS commissioner "has known for at least a year that this was going on and that this had happened."

Here's more from the interview:

And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What's going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when - after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don't disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we - if you can - what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.

Very different, indeed.

One thing Republicans probing this ever-widening and chilling scandal will want to know, pointed out MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, is "when did the president figure all of this stuff out, and is he really...is he so disconnected from the IRS that he and his attorney general and anybody that matters found out that this rampant abuse was going on in one of their top offices when the rest of us did?"

He also asked Myers about the insignificance of the president's firing of the acting IRS director - Steven Miller, who has stonewalled successive congressional panels about what he knew and when, as well as outrageously claimed that the targeting of the conservative groups was legal - when Miller was on his way out anyway. And he wanted to know about the potential impact of promoting the very IRS official in charge of the offending division (Sarah Hall Ingram) to what will become one of the most important IRS offices in the future - the one handling implementation of Obamacare.

'No one had the integrity to step forward'

Myers:

Well, you remove the commissioner because he is the guy at the top. He's the guy responsible, he's known and he didn't tell anyone - allegedly. I don't think this woman who's going to be - who's now in charge of implementing Obamacare is going to stay in that job for very long now that (this scandal) has been revealed.

But there is a broader question here: Even if you believe that this targeting was...basically carried out by frontline employees in the Cincinnati office - and there's a lot of reasons to believe it was much broader than that - but if you do you, you look at the timeline, and a series of middle managers working their way up the totem pole learn that this had happened as is going on. Yet they see their agency deny it to Congress. No one came forward as a whistleblower. So many people knew this had happened, and no one had the integrity to come forward and correct the record. So you have to worry about the entire culture, I think, and integrity of the IRS.

For the record, as career federal jobs become more unionized, federal workers will increasingly vote for the party responsible for Obama and his scandals (http://www.gallup.com).

Sources for this article include:

http://www.weeklystandard.com

http://www.mcclatchydc.com

http://www.humanevents.com

http://www.gallup.com