IRS Scandal NSA The Daily Banter

As the IRS Scandal Goes Down in Flames, An Important Lesson for the NSA Story

My Tuesday column begins like so:

So it appears as if the so-called IRS scandal has finally evaporated into nothingness. The central claim in this non-scandal was specifically that the IRS had been unfairly and exclusively targeting conservative tea party groups and, it was assumed, rejecting the 501(c)4 applications filed by those groups. The immediate analysis was that President Obama had grossly abused the mighty federal government as a means of political retribution. Calls for impeachment ensued, and a congressional investigation was launched by Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Yesterday, however, we received further confirmation via a document published by the AP that the IRS was also scrutinizing left-wing 501(c)4 groups using “be on the lookout” (BOLO) terms like “progressive,” “Occupy,” “Medical Marijuana,” “occupied territory advocacy,” “Green Energy Organizations” and “Healthcare legislation.” We also learned that the IRS used BOLOs to target newspapers that applied for non-profit status as educational publications.

Come to think of it, we’ve kind of known since the beginning that liberal groups were also examined and rejected for non-profit status. Back when the scandal originally broke, Bloomberg reported that at least three liberal groups were scrutinized, and two of the groups were denied tax exempt status. Later, we discovered that out of 176 organizations that were granted tax exempt status in 2010, 122 were conservative and 48 were liberal/non-conservative. In other words, more than twice as many conservative groups were approved over liberal groups.

We’ve been aware of these massive gaps in the integrity of the story because many of us asked very serious questions from the beginning. We endeavored to discover how the process works inside the IRS, what events and decisions created the influx of 501(c)4 groups and whether the scrutiny was a matter of routine or if politics skewed the process.

While some of us were asking questions, the Republican Party, led by the conservative entertainment complex, blindly lost its collective shpadoinkle and engaged in histrionics that almost entirely superseded its histrionics over the Benghazi non-scandal.

There’s a valuable lesson here, one that ought to be considered in the context of the NSA story. [READ ON]