A post by Maynard

It’s funny how facts age and fade. Was there really an IRS scandal, or was it just Republican mud-slinging? Isn’t it over?

Peggy Noonan observed this in her editorial, “Damage Control at Fortress IRS” (from July).

…the president and his spokesman just run around and call the scandal phony. That’s their big contribution: It’s phony. It was better in the old days, 2½ months ago, when they feigned outrage…

…House investigators this week said they have in fact received less than 1% of the documents they have been asking for from the agency…

…An observer might fairly say that the IRS appears to be stringing the story out, that they are more preoccupied with damage control than finding out what exactly happened in the tea-party scandal. Perhaps the agency, and the administration, is thinking that if they string the story out it may disappear into the summer. Maybe its momentum will be broken. Maybe people will begin to think, when they see an IRS headline on page B-12, that they’ve already read that story. Maybe slowing everything down will take the steam out of the entire investigation…

So we get those dribs and drabs of information, which we either seize upon or dismiss.

The latest drib/drab is the Daily Caller report, which you perhaps saw, “White House, IRS exchanged confidential taxpayer info”. It includes a link to a post on Darryl Issa’s government page displaying selected emails between the IRS and the White House. The Caller explains:

Top Internal Revenue Service Obamacare official Sarah Hall Ingram discussed confidential taxpayer information with senior Obama White House officials, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

What exactly does this mean? Is it another ho-hum story? I’m not sure what to make of it.

RedactedThankfully, WSJ’s Taranto steps in with a note of clarity in this section labeled “6103 Skidoo”.

At issue was the White House’s assault on religious liberty. Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS’s top ObamaCare official, “attempted to counsel the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate,” the Caller reports. Emails between Ingram and White House officials Ellen Montz Jeanne Lambrew, “had numerous redactions with the signifier ‘6103’ “

Okay, you look at the Issa post and you do indeed see emails redacted with “6103”. Taranto quotes the definition of 6103 redaction:

Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code forbids a federal employee from “disclos[ing] any return or return information obtained by him in any manner in connection with his service as such an officer or an employee.”

An extremely disturbing contradiction has just passed before your eyes, which essentially amounts to an admission that the IRS has perpetrated a major felony. Pause for a moment and see if you can find it.

Give up? Here’s the rub: The IRS has redacted the emails sent to Issa on the grounds that the redaction was required by law to prevent the disclosure of confidential information that must be kept internal to the IRS. However, the letters that have been redacted are the texts that were sent to the White House by the IRS.

In other words, in asserting that the IRS was required by law to redact these emails supplied to Issa, the IRS is tacitly confessing that that same law was broken when the IRS sent the original texts to Obama’s senior people.

Phony scandal? Welcome to Obama’s America.

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3 Comments | Leave a comment
  1. dennisl59 says:

    Impotent Issa and his incompetent staff have been over their heads from day one pursuing any of the ‘phony scandals’. After all the hearings, testimony, etc…they still have NOTHING to prove to the American people they’re protecting the interests of the Nation against the Repressive Administration led by el Presidente’. imho.

    posted 10/10 1051pm Texas[Civil Disobedience]Time

  2. Alain41 says:

    Speaking of fading facts as we come up to the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination; George Will’s recent column on how the media responded after JFK was shot, ie, instead of blaming crazy communist, it blamed extreme right wingers. (Will does history well.)

    “…The next day, James Reston, the New York Times luminary, wrote in a front-page story that Kennedy was a victim of a “streak of violence in the American character,” but especially of “the violence of the extremists on the right.”…”
    http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/george-will/george-will-when-liberals-became-scolds/article_f3bec602-299e-5910-b904-746f6bdc6620.html

    And to show how relevant Will’s column is, NPR interviewed an author of a new book which is focused on how Dallas was extreme right-wing and that milieu drove Oswald. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2013/10/10/npr-hates-dallas

    Thank goodness for new media.

  3. Kitten says:

    Is here any wonder why Congress’ approval numbers are so dismal? This felonious administration has gotten away with so much because Congress won’t stand up to Obummer and all his goons. They hem and haw and yawn and scratch their butts, and nothing happens to the people perpetrating crimes against Americans on a daily bases. American people like winners, and underdogs. Congress may be full of “top dogs”, but they’re still a bunch of losers.

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