Pejman Yousefzadeh

Once again, I want to mention that I am really sick of writing about this issue. But it deserves the maximum amount of attention possible.

First off, it would appear that the Obama administration knew that the IRS was targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny back in the 2012 campaign:

There were new questions Saturday night concerning if anyone in the White House was aware of the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups.

Inspector General Russell George said he informed a deputy at the Treasury Department in June of 2012 about the probe into the IRS.

The Treasury Department confirmed the timeline but said they did not know the details of the investigation until last week.

It’s the first evidence that someone within the Obama administration knew about the practice during the presidential campaign.

It is unknown whether anyone in the White House was told of the federal investigation.

I can only hope that someone will be allowed to ask questions regarding this issue without hearing complaints that such questions are “offensive.” Speaking of the issue of what certain people knew and when they knew it …

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.

Can we ask questions about this as well?

A story in the Washington Post yesterday about the Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati office, which does most of the agency’s nonprofit auditing, clearly contradicted earlier reports that the agency’s targeting of Tea Party groups was the result of rogue agents.

The Post story anonymously quoted a staffer in Cincinnati as saying they only operate on directives from headquarters:

As could be expected, the folks in the determinations unit on Main Street have had trouble concentrating this week. Number crunchers, whose work is nonpolitical, don’t necessarily enjoy the spotlight, especially when the media and the public assume they’re engaged in partisan villainy.

“We’re not political,’’ said one determinations staffer in khakis as he left work late Tuesday afternoon. “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.”

(Emphasis in the original.) Meanwhile, I am pleased to note that Glenn Kessler has eaten his wheaties:

In the days since the Internal Revenue Service first disclosed that it had targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, new information has emerged from both the Treasury inspector general’s report and congressional testimony Friday that calls into question key statements made by Lois G. Lerner, the IRS’s director of the exempt organizations division.

The clumsy way the IRS disclosed the issue, as well as Lerner’s press briefing by phone, were seen at the time as a public relations disaster. But even so, it is worth reviewing three key statements made by Lerner and comparing them to the facts that have since emerged.

“But between 2010 and 2012, we started seeing a very big uptick in the number of 501(c)(4) applications we were receiving, and many of these organizations applying more than doubled, about 1500 in 2010 and over 3400 in 2012.”

Lerner made this comment while issuing a seemingly impromptu apology at an American Bar Association panel. (It was later learned that this was a planted question — more on that below.) In her telling, the tax-exempt branch was simply overwhelmed by applications, and so unfortunate shortcuts were taken.

But this claim of “more than doubled” appears to be a red herring. The targeting of groups began in early 2010, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC was announced on Jan. 21. The ruling led to increased interest in a tax-exempt status known as 501(c)(4). Most charities apply under 501(c)(3), but under 501(c)(4), nonprofit groups that engage in “social welfare” can also perform a limited amount of election activity.

At first glance, the inspector general’s report appears to show that the number of 501(c)(4) applications actually went down that year, from 1,751 in 2009 to 1,735.

But it turns out that these are federal fiscal-year figures, meaning “2010” is actually Oct. 1, 2009 to Sept. 30, 2010, so the “2010” year includes more than three months before the Supreme Court decision was announced.

Astonishingly, despite Lerner’s public claim, an IRS spokeswoman was not able to provide the actual calendar year numbers. By allocating one-quarter of the fiscal year numbers to the prior year, we can get a very rough sense of the increase on a calendar-year basis. (Figures are rounded to avoid false precision; 2012 is not possible to calculate.)

2009: 1745

2010: 1865

2011: 2540

In other words, while there was an increase in 2010, it was relatively small. The real jump did not come until 2011, long after the targeting of conservative groups had been implemented. Also, it appears Lerner significantly understated the number of applications in 2010 (“1500”) in order to make her claim of “more than doubled.”

Four Pinocchios are given to Lerner for her misstatements, though Kessler notes in the title of his post that she deserves “a bushel.” I couldn’t agree more.

Finally, let it be noted that the best satire has the ring of truth about it.

Just when you think you have seen it all …

We’ll start by noting yet more evidence that the IRS’s audits of political groups was entirely inequitable in nature:

When the Barack H. Obama Foundation sought tax-exempt status to raise money for good works in Kenya, the Internal Revenue Service provided quick help.

The IRS approved charitable status for the foundation, which was run by President Obama’s brother and named after his father, in about a month’s time. The IRS also agreed to give the group this important financial status retroactively, back to 2009, when it had begun its fundraising.

The 34 days the IRS’s Cincinnati office took to process the foundation’s application stands in contrast to the waits of several months — and sometimes longer than a year — that several conservative groups say they experienced with the same office. Obama has apologized, saying Americans have a right to be angry that the office improperly targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny.

And more:

The Internal Revenue Service scandal involving the apparently unjustified targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups has also hit home with the Hispanic community.

George Rodriguez, former president of the San Antonio Tea Party, said that when the organization applied for non-profit status, leaders were intimidated by IRS workers with excessive paperwork and meddling questions.

“They asked us all sorts of things that were out of the norm,” Rodriguez, now head of the conservative South Texas Alliance, told Fox News Latino. “We knew these questions were not the norm and we had our suspicions about them.”

Yes, I would like to write about things other than governmental malfeasance. But we go to blog with the administration we have, not the administration we wish to have.

So, let’s discuss the AP spying scandal. In general, the story revolves around the fact that Eric Holder had a very bad day yesterday:

As his Justice Department faces bipartisan outrage for , Attorney Gen. Eric Holder says he is not sure how many times such information has been seized by government investigators in the four years he’s led Justice.

During an interview with NPR’s Carrie Johnson on Tuesday, Holder was asked how often his department has obtained such records of journalists’ work.

“I’m not sure how many of those cases … I have actually signed off on,” Holder said. “I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few [and] pushed a few back for modifications.”

The Sgt. Schultz act didn’t play any better on Capitol Hill:

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: “I don’t know. I don’t know. . . . I would not want to reveal what I know. . . . I don’t know why that didn’t happen. . . . I know nothing, so I’m not in a position really to answer.”

No wonder there is now talk that we are soon to have a new attorney general. After all, when even the port side starts demanding Holder’s firing, you know that a change is comin’ soon at the Justice Department.

It doesn’t help that Holder blames his subordinates for the scandal instead of taking responsibility for the actions of the Justice Department he (currently) leads.

In the meantime, it is nice to see that the media has actually grown a spine. Of course, they only appear to do so when their interests are threatened, but it would appear that we have to take what we can get. Also of note:

The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,” he explained.

Anyone who is located on the starboard side of the political divide would tell you that this is part of the problem.

Remember when we were told by all and sundry that Benghazi was a nothing-to-see-here-move-along type of scandal? Yeah, that was funny:

Four days after the 9/11 anniversary attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the U.S. intelligence community knew very little about who did it, how it happened, and whether it was planned or not, according to 100 pages of internal emails released Wednesday afternoon by the White House.

Those emails provide the clearest record to date of the genesis of government-wide talking points for senior Obama administration officials that asserted that the Benghazi attacks stemmed from a demonstration that never occurred.

House Republicans have been calling for weeks for the White House to release the emails, claiming in a report issued last month from Republican leadership that the emails show the edits to the talking points were not done to protect classified information as the White House initially claimed.

The talking points were first generated by the CIA for a briefing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Nonetheless, the emails themselves raise more questions than they answer. For example, there is extensive discussion on the evening of September 14 about whether the talking points should mention Ansar al-Sharia, a jihadist militia the original CIA draft stated was a likely participant in the attacks. Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman at the time, asked whether or not mentioning the group would prejudice the investigation, and the FBI in later emails did not object. Still, the final version excised the reference to Ansar al-Sharia as well as a reference to Facebook posts the group had created suggesting a link to the attacks.

Because now, even more information has come out.

Start with the fact that we have yet another resignation:

President Obama on Thursday appointed senior budget adviser Daniel Werfel as the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, as that agency manages a scandal stemming from its targeting of conservative groups. The appointment is effective May 22.

More changes in the IRS leadership team were announced Thursday as well, with Joseph Grant, Commissioner of Tax Exempt/Government Entities Division, planning to retire on June 3, according to an IRS statement.

Obama on Wednesday demanded and accepted the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner, Steven Miller. The president said it is important to have a new leader for the organization while it attempts to put in safeguards to ensure the special screening of political advocacy groups does not happen again. Werfel has agreed to remain in the new job through Sept. 30.

Anyone who thinks that Grant’s resignation is just coincidental likely would be a good target for those seeking to unload subprime mortgage packages. Also, this is yet another nail in the coffin of the claim that responsibility for bad behavior was confined to low-level employees.

It’s also worth noting that the latest incredibly ridiculous excuse for the IRS scandal—courtesy of incredibly ridiculous people—is that the IRS abuses were justified by a “doubling” of claims from tea party groups for tax exempt status since the Citizens United ruling. The problem is that this excuse is utterly shredded by, you know, facts:

Applications for tax exemption from advocacy nonprofits had not yet spiked when the Internal Revenue Service began using what it admits was inappropriate scrutiny of conservative groups in 2010.

In fact, applications were declining, data show.

Top IRS officials have been saying that a “significant increase” in applications from advocacy groups seeking tax-exempt status spurred its Cincinnati office in 2010 to filter those requests by using such politically loaded phrases as “Tea Party,” “patriots,” and “9/12.”

Both Steven Miller, the agency’s acting commissioner until he stepped down Wednesday, and Lois Lerner, director of the agency’s exempt-organization division, have said over the past week that IRS officials started the scrutiny after observing a surge in applications for status as 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups. Both officials cited an increase from about 1,500 applications in 2010 and to nearly 3,500 in 2012. President Obama ask Mr. Miller to resign on Wednesday.

The scrutiny began, however, in March 2010, before an uptick could have been observed, according to data contained in the audit released Tuesday from the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration.

The number of 501(c)(4) applications for all of 2010 was actually less than in 2009.

“It doesn’t bear out the statement that there was a surge in 2010,” said Bruce Hopkins, a tax attorney specializing in nonprofits. “That’s inconsistent with what Lois said last week.”

Facts don’t matter to liars, of course. But they should and do matter to those of us who are morally decent and intellectually honest.

I have a lot to write about.

I’ll start with the fact that the president has asked for the resignation of Steven Miller, the acting director of the IRS. There was a lot of tough talk from the president about how the IRS’s actions were supposedly inexcusable and intolerable, but note that the IRS makes it very difficult to actually bring it to account for any abuses it engages in:

The IRS has usually done an excellent job of stifling investigations of its practices. A 1991 survey of 800 IRS executives and managers by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics revealed that three out of four respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie when testifying before a congressional committee.

The agency also has a long history of seeking to intimidate congressional critics: In 1925, Internal Revenue Commissioner David Blair personally delivered a demand for $10 million in back taxes to Michigan’s Republican Sen. James Couzens—who had launched an investigation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue—as he stepped out of the Senate chamber. More recently, after Sen. Joe Montoya of New Mexico announced plans in 1972 to hold hearings on IRS abuses, the agency added his name to a list of tax protesters who were capable of violence against IRS agents.

Meanwhile, for anyone who is still under the ridiculous impression that the IRS didn’t engage in any abuses when it came to its treatment of tea party groups …

The Internal Revenue Service asked tea party groups to see donor rolls.

It asked for printouts of Facebook posts.

And it asked what books people were reading.

I don’t envy anyone who is tasked with trying to defend this behavior, although some port-side commentators are still desperately trying to do so because in this case, the IRS targeted people they don’t like.

I’m going to link to an excerpt a bunch of material courtesy of Jim Geraghty’s excellent Morning Jolt below. Excerpt one:

At the time when tea party groups were targeted, Miller was a deputy commissioner who oversaw the division that dealt with tax-exempt organizations.

The report by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration does not indicate that Miller knew conservative groups were being targeted until after the practice ended. But documents show that Miller repeatedly failed to tell Congress that tea party groups were being targeted, even after he had been briefed on the matter.

Excerpt two:

The director of the Internal Revenue Service division under fire for singling out conservative groups sent a 2012 letter under her name to one such group, POLITICO has learned.

The March 2012 letter was sent to the Ohio-based American Patriots Against Government Excess (American PAGE) under the name of Lois Lerner, the director of the Exempt Organizations Division.

As Geraghty points out, this shows that “low-level employees” weren’t the ones primarily responsible for this scandal. Excerpt three:

In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.

That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn’t be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.

In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.

As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved in as little as nine months. With names including words like “Progress” or “Progressive,” the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups. They included:

• Bus for Progress, a New Jersey non-profit that uses a red, white and blue bus to “drive the progressive change.” According to its website, its mission includes “support (for) progressive politicians with the courage to serve the people’s interests and make tough choices.” It got an IRS approval as a social welfare group in April 2011.
• Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment says it fights against corporate welfare and for increasing the minimum wage. “It would be fair to say we’re on the progressive end of the spectrum,” said executive director Jeff Ordower. He said the group got tax-exempt status in September 2011 in just nine months after “a pretty simple, straightforward process.”
• Progress Florida, granted tax-exempt status in January 2011, is lobbying the Florida Legislature to expand Medicaid under a provision of the Affordable Care Act, one of President Obama’s signature accomplishments. The group did not return phone calls. “We’re busy fighting to build a more progressive Florida and cannot take your call right now,” the group’s voice mail said.

Like the Tea Party groups, the liberal groups sought recognition as social welfare groups under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, based on activities like “citizen participation” or “voter education and registration.”

And finally, excerpt four from Geraghty:

Eight months passed without word from the agency about the group’s application, Ryun said. In February 2012, Ryun’s attorney contacted the IRS to ask if it needed more information to secure its non-profit status as a 501(c)3 organization. According to Ryun, the IRS told him that the application was being processed by the agency’s office in Cincinnati, Ohio—the same one currently facing scrutiny for targeting conservative groups—and to check back in two months.

As directed, Ryun followed up with the IRS in April 2012, and was told that Media Trackers’ application was still under review.

When September 2012 arrived with still no word from the IRS, Ryun determined that Media Trackers would likely never obtain standalone non-profit status, and he tried a new approach: Starting over. He applied for permanent non-profit status for a separate group called Greenhouse Solutions, a pre-existing organization that was reaching the end of its determination period.

The IRS approved Greenhouse Solutions’ request for non-profit status in three weeks.

Tell me again how this is not a scandal.

As expected, the White House continues to blame everyone but itself for the scandal. The newest scapegoat is the Treasury department. Because God forbid that the White House itself start taking some responsibility for how unbelievably awful this scandal has gotten. Dana Milbank is one of the worst columnists around, but unlike the Obama administration, at least Milbank has eaten his Wheaties:

… Nixon was a control freak. Obama seems to be the opposite: He wants no control over the actions of his administration. As the president distances himself from the actions of “independent” figures within his administration, he’s creating a power vacuum in which lower officials behave as though anything goes. Certainly, a president can’t know what everybody in his administration is up to — but he can take responsibility, he can fire people and he can call a stop to foolish actions such as wholesale snooping into reporters’ phone calls.

Mitt Romney had his faults as a presidential candidate. But anything would be better than having a pretend president right about now.

You’re best off watching this at home—it is somewhat not safe for work (thought most of the naughty words have been bleeped out).

Behold the consequences of targeting one group of 501(c)(4)s, while another group is completely left alone:

In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.

That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn’t be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.

In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.

As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved in as little as nine months. With names including words like “Progress” or “Progressive,” the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups. They included:

• Bus for Progress, a New Jersey non-profit that uses a red, white and blue bus to “drive the progressive change.” According to its website, its mission includes “support (for) progressive politicians with the courage to serve the people’s interests and make tough choices.” It got an IRS approval as a social welfare group in April 2011.

• Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment says it fights against corporate welfare and for increasing the minimum wage. “It would be fair to say we’re on the progressive end of the spectrum,” said executive director Jeff Ordower. He said the group got tax-exempt status in September 2011 in just nine months after “a pretty simple, straightforward process.”

• Progress Florida, granted tax-exempt status in January 2011, is lobbying the Florida Legislature to expand Medicaid under a provision of the Affordable Care Act, one of President Obama’s signature accomplishments. The group did not return phone calls. “We’re busy fighting to build a more progressive Florida and cannot take your call right now,” the group’s voice mail said.

I double-dog dare anyone to tell me why and how this is justified. (Link via InstaPundit.)

Media Matters (which is very definitely on the port side of the partisan divide) has come up with talking points to defend the Obama administration’s decision to spy on Associated Press reporters. Because apparently, Obamaphilia is more important than protecting privacy, the work of journalists, and First Amendment freedoms in general.

There is a lot of nonsense being written on the IRS scandal—see here for nonsense from a reliably ridiculous source—but Professor Rick Hasen (who actually knows something about election and campaign finance law) has no problem whatsoever calling the IRS’s actions “terrible”:

Let’s not make excuses for the IRS. The agency shouldn’t have subjected conservative groups to special scrutiny. Campaign finance reform groups should have immediately called for hearings when this scandal broke: Imagine the hue and cry if the IRS during the Bush administration had singled out “progressive” groups for special tax scrutiny and sent them unprecedented questions about their contributors and activities. Given the danger going back to President Richard Nixon of using the IRS against political enemies, the agency has to be scrupulously nonpartisan and fair. Congressional investigations and the Department of Justice criminal investigation announced Tuesday are inevitable and warranted.

Professor Hasen thinks that the thing to do in response is to strengthen disclosure laws. I have no problem with that, but two things bear remembering: (1) Disclosure laws should not put any limits whatsoever on the amount of money that can be spent in supporting a 501(c)(4). I happen to think that money is speech, and if we can call flag-burning speech in Texas v. Johnson (a ruling I agree with, given my high regard for the First Amendment), then we can call spending money to advance political causes speech as well. (2) The identity of those who bankroll certain 501(c)(4)s may be somewhat interesting to know—I certainly would be less inclined to support a 501(c)(4) that I know is bankrolled by neo-Nazis or communists—but in the vast majority of cases, one really shouldn’t need to know the identity of bankrollers in order to be able to determine whether or not one supports the aims of various 501(c)(4)s. The nature and scope of the argument made by 501(c)(4)s matters a whole lot more than does the identity of those making the argument.

Given all of the new developments that seem to be occurring regarding Obama administration scandals, it’s a safe bet that five minutes after this blog post gets published, it will be out of date. But at least we can record the state of the administration’s scandals for the moment … until we discover, of course, that things are a lot worse than we thought they might be.

First off, it’s worth noting anew that when it rains, it pours:

When two storms collide, the weather gets hairy. For President Obama, the IRS and Benghazi stories converged this weekend for a self-inflicted tempest that threatens his credibility.

His people can’t get their stories straight.

Internal Revenue Service officials denied for months the targeting of conservative political groups for reviews of their tax exempt status. With investigators poised to expose the chilling operation, a high-ranking IRS official acknowledged it late last week and apologized for it.

The agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware.  That appears to be untrue. The Associated Press reported Saturday that senior IRS officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general’s report.

Politicizing the IRS threatens the integrity of an agency entrusted with Americans’ secrets and the taxes that fund government. It also fuels the paranoia of conspiracy theorists.

“This is outrageous,” said Democratic consultant Chris Kofinis. “The administration and the president need to condem this and act immediately. This is not a right-left issue.”

Several other Democratic allies of the White House expressed similiar sentiments while refusing to be named out of fear of retribution. Kofinis, who specializes in political communications, said the White House needs to explain itself. “Your first response can’t be to say the IRS is an independent agency,” a claim the White House has made, he said.

Later, at a White House news conference, Obama forcefully denounced the IRS actions as “outrageous” and said people will be held accountable.

On Benghazi, the president’s U.N. ambassador said five days after the Libya attack that the incident grew out of a street protest rather than a terrorist attack. Caught fudging the facts in the middle of a presidential campaign, a race in which Obama’s anti-terrorism record was a major selling point, the White House blamed Ambassador Susan Rice’s statement on “talking points” concocted by the CIA in virtual isolation.

Obama’s team stuck with that story until the truth was exposed amid a GOP congressional investigation. Emails leaked to news organizations last week show that both the White House and State Department were directly involved in scrubbing the CIA talking points of any mention of past threats and al-Qaida involvement. That is the exact opposite of what the Obama White House had claimed.  

Inexplicably, White House spokesman Jay Carney refused late Friday to acknowledge the contradiction.

Even worse, Obama himself ignored his administration’s obfuscations today, and instead called the debate over shifting explanations “a sideshow.” At the news conference, he turned the tables on GOP critics and accused them of playing “political games.”

Concerning Benghazi, Glenn Kessler is forced to give the president four whole Pinocchios for his claim that he called the attacks in Benghazi “an act of terrorism.

Now, let’s turn to the IRS scandal. As has been noted many a time, Joe Klein has been an Obamaphile since Barack Obama first emerged on the national scene. But lately, Klein has had trouble defending the president:

Yet again, we have an example of Democrats simply not managing the government properly and with discipline. This is just poisonous at a time of skepticism about the efficacy of government. And the President should know this: the absence of scandal is not the presence of competence. His unwillingness to concentrate — and I mean concentrate obsessively — on making sure that government is managed efficiently will be part of his legacy.

Previous Presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.

Oh, lest you think that we are finished with the IRS scandal, behold:

The IRS acting chief acknowledged Tuesday that the agency demonstrated “a lack of sensitivity” in its screenings of political groups seeking tax-exempt status, but he said those mistakes won’t be repeated.

In his first public comment on the case, Steven Miller said there was “a shortcut taken in our processes” for determining which groups needed special screening.

Miller has emerged as a key figure in the controversy over the IRS’ singling out of conservative groups for extra scrutiny. President Barack Obama said Monday that if the agency intentionally targeted such groups, “that’s outrageous and there’s no place for it.”

In an opinion piece in Tuesday’s editions of USA Today, Miller said conceded that the agency demonstrated “a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made.” He said screening of advocacy groups is “factually complex, and it’s challenging to separate out political issues from those involving education or social welfare.”

“The mistakes we made were due to the absence of a sufficient process for working the increase in cases and a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made,” Miller wrote.

Miller said the agency has implemented new procedures that will “ensure the mistakes won’t be repeated.”

On Monday, the IRS said Miller was first informed on May, 3, 2012, that applications for tax-exempt status by tea party groups were inappropriately singled out for extra scrutiny. Congress, though, was not told tea party groups were being inappropriately targeted, even after Miller had been briefed on the matter.

At least twice after the briefing, Miller wrote letters to members of Congress to explain the process of reviewing applications for tax-exempt status without disclosing that tea party groups had been targeted. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee, but again did not mention the additional scrutiny — despite being asked about it.

Miller’s op-ed, however, did not address why he did not inform Congress after he was briefed.

And more:

The same Internal Revenue Service office that singled out Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny also challenged Israel-related organizations, at least one of which filed suit over the agency’s handling of its application for tax-exempt status.

The trouble for the Israel-focused groups seems to have had different origins than that experienced by conservative groups, but at times the effort seems to have been equally ham-handed.

A leader of one of the organizations involved, Lori Lowenthal Marcus of Z Street, said Monday that she was convinced the added attention her group got was no accident.“I can’t believe it was just about Z Street, because it’s a tiny organization,” Lowenthal Marcus said of the group, which has been critical of President Barack Obama for being too cozy with left-leaning Jewish groups like J Street and with pro-Palestinian entities.

Maybe this story regarding Larry Conners’s claims is filled with falsehoods. But how many of you are willing to cavalierly dismiss it?

Larry Conners, a veteran local news anchor at KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis, says that the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting him since an April 2012 interview he conducted with President Obama — a fact that he dismissed as coincidence until the recent reports about the IRS targeting conservative groups.

“Shortly after I did my April 2012 interview with President Obama, my wife, friends and some viewers suggested that I might need to watch out for the IRS. I don’t accept ‘conspiracy theories’, but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me,” Conners wrote on his Facebook page late Monday night.

And this story serves as a hilarious momentary coda to the IRS scandal.

Things have now gotten bad enough with the IRS scandal that the Department of Justice has been forced to investigate. But the Department of Justice has its own problems:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said.

There is a background to this latest scandal that is worth mentioning:

President Barack Obama came into office pledging an unprecedented commitment to government transparency. During his first days in the Oval Office, Obama issued an executive order and two memoranda that were supposed to create a new climate of openness in Washington. One of the memos instructed government officials to “adopt a presumption in favor” of releasing information.

Nine months later, Obama needs to reread his own instructions. A federal shield law for journalists that had been moving forward with broad support is now bogged down in the Senate Judiciary Committee due to limitations on information sought by the administration.

The Free Flow of Information Act strikes a reasonable balance between the public’s right to know and the government’s responsibility to protect the citizenry. It recognizes a reporter’s right to protect confidential sources in limited circumstances, as 36 states - including Texas - do.

The measure, however, would also compel journalists to disclose their sources in cases of imminent threats to national security or critical infrastructure and when the safety or welfare of individuals is at stake. In such cases, the government would take its arguments in favor of disclosing a reporter’s confidential sources before an impartial judge.

The administration initially supported this equitable process. Recently, however, it has decided it wants to be the arbiter of national security and its judge and jury. With White House opposition, the federal shield law legislation is now in danger of foundering in the Senate or being weakened to the point of ineffectuality.

This story is from three years ago. I guess it should have served as a warning of sorts. More:

Reporters across The Associated Press are outraged over the Justice Department’s sweeping seizure of staff phone records — and they say such an intrusion could chill their relationships with confidential sources.

In conversations with POLITICO on Tuesday, several AP staffers in Washington, D.C., described feelings of anger and frustration with the DOJ and with the Obama administration in general.

“People are pretty mad — mad that government has not taken what we do seriously,” one reporter said on Tuesday. “When the news broke yesterday … people were outraged and disgusted. No one was yelling and screaming, but it was like, ‘Are you kidding me!?’”