Reports surfaced Monday alleging that the administration of President Barack Obama knew more about the IRS targeting scandal than they let on, and that some in the White House may have known about it as early as Summer 2012.
According to Politico, Senior White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was notified of the preliminary results of an official probe into allegations of IRS targeting even before the entire affair was made public. The Internal Revenue Service admitted earlier this month, through top official Lois Lerner, that the nation's tax collector unfairly targeted 501 c)4 and other related organizations for reasons as simple as their title having the words "patriot", "conservative" or "tea party" in it.
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Obama told the public on May 10 that he only recently learned of the "unacceptable" behavior of the IRS, reportedly through the same news reports the public had. The final report by the Inspector General was later released May 14. The newest controversy is over whether the White House should have reported preliminary findings of the report over IRS targeting, after they allegedly received such notices in April.
Obama's communications director, Dan Pfeiffer told CBS' Bob Schieffer on "Face The Nation" Sunday that top officials at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue "didn't see the report until it was released last Wednesday."
Pfeiffer later appeared with Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday, criticizing the Republican response to one of three major scandals rocking the Obama White House, "the assertion...that somehow the president allowed this to happen and didn't take action is offensive," Pfeiffer said. In addition to the IRS targeting fiasco, the Obama administration is dealing with blowback over the White House response to the Benghazi terror attack, as well as reports of the Justice Department surveilling Associated Press staff.
The New York Post's Michael Goodwin wrote a column over the past weekend that alleged that Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury Secretary and New York Fed chair, either knew of and didn't disclose or should have indeed been told of such targeting against conservative groups when the Treasury Department reportedly was made aware of such allegations in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaigns.
Goodwin wrote that the Treasury's deputy secretary at the time, Neal Wolin, was informed of an audit by the IRS inspector general into claims of mistreatment of conservative groups by the agency. The IRS must approve all applications by 501 c)3 and c)4 organizations for tax-exempt status.
Wolin was reportedly one of a number of top officials notified by the inspector general in June 2012. As Goodwin put it, the assertion that the number two man at Treasury didn't tell Geithner or Obama of such possibly game-changing revelations in the midst of a contested election would be "willfully ignorant of human nature".
Geithner's replacement, Jacob 'Jack' Lew said that he himself learned of the investigation in March. The president's initial televised statement on the admitted IRS targeting read in-part "If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on...then that's outrageous." However, all of the new revelations of prior knowledge by a number of White House officials may call into question whether a key piece of the president's words were forthright: the "if" clause. Did the president know of the targeting up front, or did forces within Washington attempt to hide the proceedings on the president's behalf?
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