The cracks in Obama's story on the IRS scandal are adding up

From the WSJ:

The White House's chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday.
That disclosure has prompted a debate over whether the president should have been notified at that time.
In the week of April 22, the Office of the White House Counsel and its head, Kathryn Ruemmler, were told by Treasury Department attorneys that an inspector general's report was nearing completion, the White House official said. In that conversation, Ms. Ruemmler learned that "a small number of line IRS employees had improperly scrutinized certain…organizations by using words like 'tea party' and 'patriot,' " the official said. . . .

Possibly the WSJ should have asked not "whether the president should have been notified at that time" but "if the president was notified at that time."  Of course, Jack Lew, Obama's chief of staff at the time, knew about this last fall.  How many people right next to Obama have to know about this before it can be assumed that Obama also knew before he claims that he found out from the media reports.  This is hardly the first time that I felt that the media was covering on this for Obama.  Now we have this amazing statement from someone working in Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati office: 

“We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.” . . .

UPDATE: Now Democrats are making the only defense that they can for Obama -- that his closest aides never told him about the IRS scandal.  Obama feints great anger about this scandal, but it apparently never dawned on his closest aides that he would care enough about the IRS scandal.  If they so let him down, why aren't these people being fired?   From The Hill newspaper:

Senior White House officials were briefed about a federal audit of the IRS’s improper focus on conservatives, but they decided not to tell President Obama about it, press secretary Jay Carney claimed Monday.
White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler learned about the report in April and made the decision not to tell the president, even as other senior staffers got wind of the audit by Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, Carney said.
Denis McDonough, White House chief of staff, was among those told about the nature of the report, which found that Tea Party and other small-government advocates seeking tax-exempt status were tagged for special screening because of their names.Carney defended the decision to keep the president out of the loop, saying conclusions often change in the final stages of inspector general reports. It also would’ve been inappropriate, Carney added, for the White House to involve itself in an ongoing investigation. . . .

UPDATE: Even the press is covering the shifting Obama administration story line about who was informed about the IRS scandal.  Politico notes how many people very close to the president knew about this scandal, but that somehow none of them mentioned it to him despite the fact that he now claims that he cares intensely about the issue.

Even Politico has a headline: "The White House's shifting IRS Account"

They note: "Monday’s revelation amounts to the fifth iteration of the Obama administration’s account of events, after initially saying that the White House had first learned of the controversy from the press." 

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The IRS scandal grows: Deliberately delaying info until after the election, hiding information, clear evidence that people right next to Obama knew about the problem

OK, so senior Obama officials were told of IRS probe last year, but they did nothing with this information?  Now we are told how upset and outraged they are by this information, but if they were so outraged, wouldn't they have said something publicly about this last year?  

“We have zero tolerance for this kind of behavior,” [Jack] Lew said.

Isn't the proof of their lack of outrage shown by their lack of action?  From The Hill newspaper:

Russell George, Treasury’s inspector general (IG) for tax administration, testified that he told the department’s general counsel and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin about the probe in June of 2012 — months after media reports started detailing Tea Party complaints about the IRS. . . .
But the attention is quickly shifting to Wolin, who is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee and Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Wednesday, where he will be grilled on what he and other Treasury officials knew — and when.
Treasury confirmed Friday that George’s office told Wolin about the forthcoming audit last year, and that the inspector general personally told Treasury Secretary Jack Lew about it in March. Lew confirmed that timeline in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
But the Treasury department also says neither Lew nor Wolin found out about the inspector general’s findings until they started filtering out to the public last week. . . .

NBC's Lisa Myers "reported this morning that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election."  Obama administration officials clearly knew what the scandal was about (conservative groups being targeted) in June 2012.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has apparently been less than forthcoming in his answers to questions about the scandal.  It looks as if Lew knew about the scandal while he was Obama's chief of staff, which means it is quite possible that Obama knew about it as well.  Examples of how difficult Lew is with speaking openly about what he knew can be seen here:

. . . Bloomberg's Al Hunt asked Lew, whose Treasury Department oversees the IRS: “When were you first notified that IRS agents were targeting conservative groups like the Tea Party?”
Instead of answering Hunt’s question directly, however, Lew instead chose to answer when he first learned about the IG report, a tactic President Barack Obama also used earlier this week during a press conference.
“I learned the substance of this report last Friday when it became a matter of public knowledge,” Lew claimed. “Before that, in mid-March [2013], I had had a conversation, just a getting-to-know-you conversation, with the inspector general right after I started, and he went through a number of items that were matters they were working on. And the topic of a project on the 501(c)3 issue was one of the things he briefed me was ongoing.”
Hunt then asked whether former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Lew’s deputy, Neal Wolin, or the general counsel knew about the IRS’s political profiling of conservative groups.
“I think that there was-the heads-up that I got was something that was a matter of public knowledge,” said Lew. “It was posted on the IG's website in the fall of 2012. I believe that other is typically the practice that an inspector general notify the agencies when matters are opened. I was not aware of any details.”
It is possible that "fall of 2012" could refer to a period of time before the election. Regardless, Lew would have discovered the investigation in his capacity as President Obama's chief of staff, meaning that it is possible the president knew of the investigation in 2012 as well. . . .

A very different take on the same interview is available from Politico.  Others, such as acting IRS director Steve Miller, are having massive memory failures.

. . . That’s the kind of week Miller is having. To make matters worse, he spent most of the hearing saying he didn’t remember things — like the details of how he first learned of the targeting — and insisting he didn’t mislead Congress by not telling lawmakers.Over and over again, Miller swore he just answered the questions lawmakers asked him in various letters. “I answered the questions as they were asked,” Miller told Charles Boustany of Louisiana.
At times, Miller struggled to find phrases that wouldn’t sound politically tone deaf. He tried to pick a fight over whether the IRS search terms should even be called “targeting” — even though they included terms like “tea party,” “Patriots” and “9/12,” and the inspector general report says specialists were told to look specifically for tea party applications. . . .

Miller also made laughable claims such as the targeting of conservative groups, and conservative groups only, was simply an effort to make IRS agents "more efficient in their workload selection." 

Now we learn that since the IRS knew that a critical IG report was coming out, the Obama people asked a member of the press to raise the whole issue in a press presentation a week ago.

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INCREDIBLE: IRS SHARED CONFIDENTIAL INFO FROM CONSERVATIVE GROUPS WITH LIBERAL ORGANIZATIONS

Just when you thought that the IRS scandal couldn't get any worse, this comes up.  Confidential information on the conservative groups that the IRS was hassling were given to Liberal organizations.  From the Daily Caller:

The division of the Internal Revenue Service that improperly scrutinized the tax-exempt status of conservative groups sent confidential information on 31 conservative groups to the well-funded liberal nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica, according to a revelation made by ProPublica Monday.
“The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year,” according to the ProPublica report.
“In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved — meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We madesix of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.),” according to ProPublica. . . .

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Obama's past IRS abuses can't be blamed on "low level workers," Austan Goolsbee and the Koch Brothers

This isn't the first time that President Obama's administration has abused the IRS's powers.  Austan Goolsbee who was Obama's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors told reporters the amount of money that the Koch brothers had paid in taxes in 2010.  Note that this, like the abuses against the Tea Party, also occurred in 2010 and that it involved people that that administration hated as much as the Tea Party.  The current ruckus isn't the first time that Obama administration abuses of the IRS have been compared to the Nixon administration.

President Obama claims that he has "no patience" for the "outrageous" IRS mess, but if true, why didn't he do anything or even comment about Goolsbee's actions?

This is part of the discussion from my book Debacle (references in book):

[Austan] Goolsbee also learned how to punish the president’s political adversaries. The battle between the Koch bothers and President Obama hasn’t gotten as much coverage as that between George Soros and Republicans, but it is about as bitter. A New Yorker headline gives one side of the “The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”71 Goolsbee entered the fray at an August 27, 2010, press briefing where he let slip that he knew that Koch Industries, a multibillion-dollar energy business run by the libertarian Koch brothers, had paid no income taxes. “[W]e have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax, some of which are really giant firms. You know, Koch Industries is a multibillion-dollar business,” Mr. Goolsbee told reporters during an on-the- record background briefing on corporate taxes. 

Koch Industries is a privately held company and therefore their tax returns and tax payments are not normally publicly available. This recalls shades of Richard Nixon’s abuse of the Internal Revenue Service to collect information on his enemies, and there were serious questions of how Mr. Goolsbee obtained this information. At first, the White House sent Politico an email explaining that the information was publicly available and referenced testimony to the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and Koch’s own website.72 But they were just dead wrong. How much taxes Koch Industries pays appears in neither place. 

The Obama administration then switched to a second line of defense: that Mr. Goolsbee simply misspoke, that he didn’t mean to say what he said, and that it was merely a coincidence that he had just happened to guess their tax information.73 But it was quite a lucky guess. The IRS’s Inspector General promised to look into whether Goolsbee had illegally gotten confidential tax information,74 but a report was never released, and with Democrats in control of both the Senate and House at the time, there was no congressional pressure on the Obama administration to release the report.75  . . .

UPDATE: There is no public record of whether you are an S corp.  There is a public record if they are an LLC, but they can be set in various forms and that won't be public record.  They could also be a C corp and that wouldn't be public information.  Thus for Goolsbee to even know that they are an S corp or what version of being an LLC would be problematic.  Specifically on the point The Koch's lawyer had this point:

"contrary to the administration official's statement on what sources were used by the administration, neither the Koch website nor Forbes' list of private companies has information regarding Koch's tax filing status.  This is confidential information.  Given these facts, one must wonder why the White House is anonymously commenting on the confidential tax status of Koch Industries."

UPDATE: Here is another example of abuse.

”It is likely that someone at the Internal Revenue Service illegally leaked confidential donor information showing a contribution from Mitt Romney’s political action committee to the National Organization for Marriage, says the group.” . . .  

UPDATE: Fox News has this updated discussion on Goolsbee.  If the last paragraph in the quote below, it sounds as if many people in the Obama administration were in on this leak of IRS info.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney took some heat Tuesday after he told reporters that nobody in the Obama administration had targeted conservative groups in the past.  

Many questioned the statement and pointed to a 2010 incident involving Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Goolsbee told reporters on Aug. 27, 2010 that Koch Industries, a billion-dollar energy company run by the politically influential Koch brothers, paid no income taxes. 

The tax records of Koch Industries -- a private company – would not have been public information and therefore should not have been known to Goolsbee. At the time, the Obama team backpedaled and said the information was made public in two places – which turned out to be untrue. Then the Obama administration said Goolsbee had misspoken and that he had guessed the company’s confidential tax information. 

At the time, the IRS had promised to look into the Goolsbee gaffe but a report was never publicly released. 

A source familiar with the situation suggested to FoxNews.com Tuesday that Goolsbee’s comments were a “calculated” attempt by the administration to insert Koch’s name into his discussion about companies that don’t pay taxes. . . .

Rush Limbaugh had this extended discussion where a caller (me) brought up the Goolsbee example.

RUSH: To the phones. People been waiting patiently as always. Up first, John in Philadelphia. Hello, sir. Thank you for the call.
CALLER: Oh. Thank you very much. You know, I think this is a very important issue. This isn't the first time that the Obama administration has abused the IRS' powers. In 2010, at the same time they were going after the Tea Party, Austan Goolsbee -- the chairman of the president's council of economic advisers -- was using the IRS to go after the Koch brothers, probably somebody that they hated as much as the Tea Party. There was a press briefing where Goolsbee told the press how much money the Koch brothers have been paying in taxes. You know, at first they said that the information was "publicly available," and when that turned out not to be the case, the administration said, "Well, you know, he simply accidentally guessed the exact amount that they pay."
RUSH: You know, that's exactly right. I'd forgotten that, but you're exactly right. Austan Goolsbee did tell the press how little the Koch brothers were paying in taxes -- in his perspective, how little -- and there was no way he coulda known that.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Unless somebody at the IRS had shared the data with him.
CALLER: Right. This is cover-up by the Obama administration. The inspector general for the IRS was supposed to release a report on Goolsbee, and after the furor died down they kept on delaying it.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Eventually they just never released the report on Goolsbee. So this is one thing. If you want to go and show that this is a pattern -- you know, and Goolsbee's not just some low-level staff person. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. And the Obama administration should finally be forced to release the inspector general report on what Goolsbee knew and how he released that information.
RUSH: Well, technically it's not how he released it; how he got it. There's only one way he could know it, and that is if he was able to pick up the phone, call the IRS, and say, "Give me the numbers on the tax return for the Koch brothers and for Koch Industries," and if the IRS gave him the information, bammo! Major, major violation. And, you're right. They've tried to let the passage of time cause everybody to forget about it, because there have been events take place in subsequent days which have taken precedence.
Those events have caused everybody to forget about it. You didn't. You're exactly right.  . . . 

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Even the Washington Post has a devastating discussion of the IRS targeting conservative nonprofits

Well, with Obama's Benghazi coverup being compared to Watergate (only with deaths), Obama apparently felt that he had to out do Nixon on abusing the IRS.  Here are some of the points gleaned from a piece by the Washington Post.

IRS officials claimed that there was no political bias behind the targeting of these conservative groups, but they failed to produce any examples of similar targeting of groups with non-conservative-sounding names. . . . Lerner wouldn’t say whether anyone is being disciplined, then appeared to say there was no disciplinary action, then went back to saying she wouldn’t comment. . . . Lerner said she disclosed the information because someone asked her about it Friday morning — indicating that she had no plans to release the information publicly, despite the confirmed wrongdoing. . . . When asked how they found out about the wrongdoing, Lerner said the investigation stemmed from media reports about conservative groups claiming that they were targeted, not from any internal review. . . . 

UPDATE: Unfortunately, other recent concerns about IRS abuses of power have been arising.

The American Civil Liberties Union released documents in April showing that investigators in the IRS criminal tax division believed the agency could access emails and text messages without a warrant. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, demanded answers from acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller on how many emails were accessed and why. . . . 

UPDATE2: Politico has a somewhat less critical discussion.  If Shulman didn't know about this problem, the question is why Lerner or these other "senior" IRS appointees didn't tell Shulman about it.

low level employees in the IRS’ Cincinnati office began flagging conservative groups as early as 2010, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Lois Lerner, who directs the agency’s tax exempt groups unit, said applications were scrutinized if they included words such as “patriot” or “tea party.” . . . 
Lerner has so far declined to say when she first learned of the targeting practice and told reporters on Friday she didn’t remember when she notified her bosses.
But a TIGTA report due out this week will say that senior IRS officials knew about the activities as early as 2011. That would seem to contradict testimony then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman provided to Congress in 2012 when he told lawmakers that the agency wasn’t providing extra scrutiny to groups because of their political affiliations. . . .

UPDATE3: Even Susan Collins was very upset Obama's response to the IRS abuse.

. . . "I think it's very disappointing that the president hasn't personally condemned this and spoken out," Collins said. "His spokesman has said that it should be investigated, but the president needs to make crystal clear that this is totally unacceptable in America."Collins said on CNN's "State of the Union" that "it is absolutely chilling" for the IRS to target political groups.The tax agency acknowledged Friday that it had singled out groups with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their names for additional scrutiny of their tax-exempt status. The agency blamed the actions on a small group of employees.
"I just don't buy that this is a couple of rogue IRS employees," Collins said. . . . 

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Obama's whistleblower problem

Or this from the NY Post:

The US diplomat who was second in command in Libya during the fatal attack on the Benghazi consulate fought back tears yesterday when he told lawmakers about his colleagues’ final moments — and said he was “stunned” by administration claims it was sparked by a spontaneous protest. 

Gregory Hicks, the first person to testify to Congress who was on the ground in Libya during the fateful night of the Sept. 11, 2012 siege, told a House committee that he was incredulous just five days later when UN Ambassador Susan Rice said on Sunday talk shows that the assault was not a terrorist attack. 

“My jaw dropped,” Hicks said. “I was embarrassed.” . . .

After listening to the testimony above or reading reports such as in the New York Post, please tell me how that is consistent with this administration claim.  From an earlier report on ABC News:

On Tuesday, both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry addressed claims being made by House Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committee leaders that the administration is impeding the Congressional testimony of State Department and CIA employees who survived the attack. 

“I’m not familiar with this notion that anybody’s been blocked from testifying,” said the president. “What I’ve been very clear about from the start is that our job with respect to Benghazi has been to find out exactly what happened, to make sure that U.S. embassies, not just in the Middle East but around the world, are safe and secure and to bring those who carried it out to justice.” . . .

Instead it looks like Chaffetz was the one who was correct regarding the Benghazi whistleblowers.

“Absolutely, and more than one,” Chaffetz said on “Fox News Sunday” when asked if the Obama administration had blocked potential witnesses. “There are people who want to testify that have been suppressed. …They’re scared to death of what the State Department is doing with them.” . . .

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank had this summary:

Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 U.S. diplomat in Libya the night Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed, was to be the star witness for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the man leading the probe of the Obama administration’s handling of the attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi.  But despite Issa’s incautious promise that the hearing’s revelations would be “damaging” to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hicks didn’t lay a glove on the former secretary of state Wednesday. . . . 

Suppose that we take everything that Milbank says about the facts are correct, that no direct evidence implicated Clinton.  You still have the problem that Clinton's number 2 person was direct implicated.  If this was a Republican administration, would Milbank not be asking for further investigation to see how high things actually run?

But the problem goes beyond Benghazi.  See for example this article on Politico:

The watchdog who tracks the billions of taxpayer dollars spent to rebuild Afghanistan says government officials have tried to silence him because they think he's embarrassing the White House and Afghan President Hamid Karzai by pointing out the waste and fraud. 

John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, used a speech at the New America Foundation on Wednesday to blast government “bureaucrats”' who have told him to stop publicizing damning audits that detail case after case of waste, corruption and mismanagement of rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan. Some government officials have even complained that they aren't allowed to pre-screen or edit his reports, he said.  

“Since my appointment by the president last summer, I have been surprised to learn how many people both in and out of the government do not understand the role of an independent inspector general,” Sopko said. . . .

UPDATE: As David Limbaugh correctly notes, another example is Gerald Walpin (see here).

Judge Andrew Napolitano: "Lying to Congress carries the same criminal liability and the same punishment as lying under oath to Congress. I'm not suggesting that Mrs. Clinton lied, but I'm saying that a case could be made out, either legally in a courtroom if a prosecutor wanted to, and certainly politically in a public sphere should she decide to seek higher office."

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Another place to cut government spending: Obama Labor Department spending millions to help establish unions worldwide

Why should our government be funding union activity in the US let alone the rest of the world?  From Fox News:

. . . The bureau for the past several years has purportedly made numerous awards -- worth millions of dollars -- to the United Nations, the Solidarity Center and other similar groups, “whose stated objective is to help establish labor unions in foreign countries," the senators said. 

They also said the bureau recently awarded a Colombian labor organization $1.5 million to help workers improve their collective bargaining rights and $2.2 million to the Solidarity Center, an AFL-CIO organization, to strengthen unions in Haiti and Peru. 

In addition, the bureau purportedly awarded a $1.5 million grant to an international development company in 2011 to assist labor unions in Vietnam engage in collective bargaining, the lawmakers said.  . . .

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General Electric cuts of loans to Gun Shops: Was there Obama administration influence?

Given how closely General Electric is linked to the Obama administration and the massive government subsidies that it receives, why doesn't anyone in the media try figuring out if their refusal to give loans to gun companies is related to GE trying to please to the Obama administration.

General Electric Co.  is quietly cutting off lending to gun shops, as the company rethinks its relationship to firearms amid the fallout from the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. 

This month, Glenn Duncan, owner of Duncan's Outdoor Store in Bay City, Mich., said he received a letter from GE Capital Retail Bank in which the lender said it had made "the difficult decision" to stop providing financing services to his store. Other gun dealers have received similar notices. . . .

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The environmental cost of Obama not letting oil pipelines be built

If you don't allow pipelines to be built, the oil gets shipped by railroad.  Unfortunately, because of many government regulations, the railroads have a lot of accidents.  Delaying the Keystone Pipeline for years means a lot more oil gets shipped by the Burlington Northern railroad (his supporter Warren Buffet owns the railroad).  From the WSJ:

From 2010 to 2012, 112 oil spills were reported from U.S. rail tanker cars, up from just 10 in the previous three years, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, a part of the Department of Transportation that tracks most releases of hazardous materials. But the amount of crude leaked in spills has declined since 2008, when a big accident in Oklahoma released more than 1,900 barrels. On August 22, 2008, a BNSF Railway Co. train carrying crude derailed northeast of Oklahoma City; five tanker cars leaked oil that caught fire, leading to an evacuation of nearby residents. 

Questions about the safest way to transport crude are bubbling up as President Barack Obama considers whether to approve an expansion of the Keystone pipeline, which would move crude from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Pipelines carry much more crude than trains and have fewer leaks per mile, though failures can be serious. In 2010, for example, an Exxon Mobil Corp. pipeline spilled 1,500 barrels of oil into Montana's Yellowstone River in an hour. The possibility of oil spills from derailments is only beginning to be on the public's radar. . . .

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Geithner facing renewed corruption charges from 2007

Banks would have been willing to pay a huge amount of money for this information.

In the summer of 2007, as storm clouds gathered over the world's financial system, then-New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner allegedly informed the Bank of America and other banks about the possibility the U.S. central bank would lower one of its critical interest rates, according to a senior Fed official. 

Jeffrey Lacker, the head of the Richmond Fed, originally raised the allegation during a Fed conference call in August 2007, and he stuck to his 5-year-old claim against the current U.S. treasury secretary in a statement provided to Reuters on Friday. 

"From conversations I had prior to the video conference call on August 16, 2007, I was aware of discussions among a few large banks about borrowing from their discount windows to support the asset backed commercial paper market," Lacker said in the statement. "My understanding was that (New York Fed) President Geithner had discussed a reduction in the discount rate with these banks in connection with these initiatives." 

According to transcripts of the call released by the Fed on Friday, Geithner at the time denied that banks knew the Fed was considering cutting the discount rate. The Fed regularly releases transcripts of its policy meetings with a five-year lag. . . . 

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