The IRS's internal auditor distorted the facts surrounding the IRS tea party targeting scandal, leaving Americans with the impression that the tax agency went after conservative groups without also targeting liberal groups, the Senate's top investigative panel said Friday.
Investigators said the IRS did mishandle applications for tax exempt status, including subjecting groups to years-long delays and "poorly coordinated reviews." But the report, written by Democrats who control the chamber, concluded that the IRS's "mismanagement" affected both liberal and conservative groups, clearing the agency of accusations of politically motivated behavior.
"The subcommittee found no evidence that political bias influences the decisions made by IRS personnel," the report concluded. "A review of nearly 800,000 pages of documents and nearly two dozen interviews produced no evidence of political bias influencing IRS decisionmaking about how to process [nonprofit] applications filed by conservative organizations, and no evidence that the IRS singled out conservative groups for harsher treatment than other groups."
The investigators said part of the proof was that "key IRS personnel" were registered Republicans or viewed themselves ideologically as aligned with the tea party.
Investigators also said the IRS must write new rules to push nonprofit groups out of political activities.
Of course there is absolutely NO reason to believe that Democrats investigating such serious charges of misbehavior by other Democrats might be influenced by the Democrats' shared desire to obstruct Tea Party opposition to the Democrats' political aspirations.
This simply would never happen. We're talking Democrats,remember.
We know there is not a smidgen of corruption in the IRS. We've been reassured of this by our Democratic president. Now we know that there isn't a smidgen of corruption in the ENTIRE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. And we are being assured of this by Democrats. Nice and tidy.
All saints, these guys. Knights on white horses.
Okay...that last one was obviously racist.
But I'm a Tea Partier...so of course I'm racist.
And now, it seems, I'm paranoid, too. Because I still believe that the IRS was out to get us.
Yeah right, no politically motivated behavior. That's why all those hard drives mysteriously crashed taking the email evidence with them and Koskinen lied repeatedly about having backups. As to key personnel being Republicans, even if it's true, it doesn't mean shit. They're bureaucrats first, Republicans second, and Americans a very distant third. Spit.
ReplyDeleteAS far as I'm concerned, they are ALL complicit. NONE of them, whether R or D want to give back any power and the Tea Partiers were the first real and formidable opposition any of them had ever seen. And they didn't like it one tiny bit. So they stopped it with everything they had.
DeleteAssholes. Every. Last. One.