From the UK’s Daily Mail:
By David Martosko | 15 May 2013
In a hastily called press conference in the East Room of the White House, Obama told reporters that he had asked Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew to find out who was responsible for a program that targeted tea party groups and other conservative organizations for a special level of intrusive questioning after they applied for tax-exempt charitable statuses…
Why should the Treasury Department be in charge of investigating how it broke the law? Why not appoint a special counsel?
Lest we forget, a special counsel was appointed to investigate the Valerie Plame (non) scandal, even though everyone knew beforehand who had leaked her (non-classified) information.
‘Lew took the first step by requesting and accepting the resignation of the acting director of the IRS,’ Obama said. ‘It’s important,’ he added, ‘to institute new leadership that can help restore confidence going forward.’
But in an email to IRS employees, Miller claimed he would only be leaving next month because his assignment would be over.
‘It is with regret that I will be departing from the IRS as my acting assignment ends in early June,’ Miller wrote. ‘This has been an incredibly difficult time for the IRS given the events of the past few days, and there is a strong and immediate need to restore public trust in the nation’s tax agency.’
In fact, Mr. Miller was not the acting director when this illegal activity occurred. He was appointed November 10, 2012. The IRS had been scrutinizing conservative groups since March 2010. And we are supposed to believe that they had stopped by late 2012. (After the elections were over.)
However, Miller had been the Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement, which put him directly in charge of the Tax Exempt Entities Division. And, before that, Millar had been the Commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division. — So, in fact he might have been promoted in November for his fine work there, suppressing the Tea Party.
In fact, it turns out that Miller has a long history of being involved in these kind of IRS shenanigans.
From the Washington Examiner:
By Paul Bedard | May 14, 2013
Steven T. Miller, the acting IRS commissioner who managed the division that has admitted targeting anti-Obama Tea Party groups, was one of several agents who investigated anti-Clinton organizations including Judicial Watch during that Democrat’s administration, according to court documents and interviews.
Miller, who headed the IRS Services and Enforcement Division from 2009 until the end of last year, is named in court documents as part of a trio of Internal Revenue Service officials who allegedly characterized the 1998-2001 investigation of Judicial Watch as politically motivated.
According to court papers, one agent in the case reportedly told the legal watchdog group, "What do you expect when you sue the president?" Miller reportedly added that the Judicial Watch audit, coming after the group sent the White House a lengthy Freedom of Information Act request, "had created at least the appearance of a problem." …
At the time, several groups probing various Clinton administration scandals were being audited, leading to charges that the president was manipulating the IRS to target his enemies…
According to the IRS website, Miller, a lawyer, joined the IRS in the office of chief counsel in 1987 and "has served most of his 25 years at the IRS, an agency in the Treasury Department, in its Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division." That division is the one involved in the current scandal.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that the audit his group faced in the 1990s came from a complaint sent by a citizen and sent to the White House which forwarded it to the IRS. "This was all part of the pattern of the Clinton years," he said, adding that it cost his group "a lot of money" to fight the audit…
So history may be repeating itself with some of the very same players.
This article was posted by Steve Gilbert on Thursday, May 16th, 2013. You can leave a response.