Rep. Elijah Cummings–ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee–made good on his promise to release more transcripts from the committee’s interviews with workers at the Cincinnati IRS. Despite protests from chairman Darrell Issa, Cummings made available Tuesday the full interview of the IRS Screening Group Manager, who handled groups applying for tax-exempt status.
“This interview transcript…debunks conspiracy theories about how the IRS first started reviewing these cases,” Cummings wrote in a letter to Issa. “Answering questions from Committee staff for more than five hours, this official—who identified himself as a ‘conservative Republican’—denied that he or anyone on his team was directed by the White House to take these actions or that they were politically motivated.”
The “conspiracy theories” Cummings mentions were disseminated by Issa himself. On May 14th, Issa said unequivocally, “This was the targeting of the president’s political enemies effectively and lies about it during the election year, so that it wasn’t discovered until afterwards.” But he had no evidence to support this claim.
And not only does Issa lack evidence to support his nutjob claims, the evidence that the committee does have 100% contradicts those claims. If anything, the "conservative Republican" whistleblower came forward out of a desire to vet Tea Party organizations to make sure they didn't screw up fundraising rules for the big Republican groups. He was helping the GOP, not targeting them.
In other words, if anyone's guilty of politics in the IRS, it's conservatives who want to make sure that the Citizens United gravy train of campaign billions rolls on unimpeded. Imagine that.
Nice of Darrel to actually find the real scandal in this mess. Will he do anything about it?
What do you think?
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