RUSH: Now, it was just yesterday at the fundraiser in Harvey Weinstein’s fashionable West Village home in Manhattan. Again, Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel were in the audience. This morning on Good Morning America, here is portion of Jonathan Karl, the White House correspondent’s report about the IRS scandal — and, lo and behold, I end up being in this report.
KARL: That’s not good enough for some conservatives, who point to past references the president has made to Tea Party groups.
OBAMA: I’ve been a little amused over the past couple of days where people are having these rallies —
FOLLOWERS: (laughing)
OBAMA: — about, “Taxes! Taxes!” You would think they would be sayin’, “Thank you.”
FOLLOWERS: (laughing)
RUSH ARCHIVE: The Obama regime is using government to investigate people.
KARL: And now some of those who say they were unfairly targeted are speaking out about their experience and those inappropriate requests.
WOMAN: The IRS wanted to see my personal Facebook page. They wanted to see my personal Twitter account with pictures of my children on it.
KARL: There are almost certainly more shoes to drop.
RUSH: And one of them dropped this morning in the Washington Post: “IRS
Officials in Washington were Involved in Targeting of Conservative Groups.” It was IRS officials in Washington, not “low-level employees in Cincinnati.”
This, of course, is my fault, too.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, a random act of journalism from the Washington Post, of all places. The Washington Post has found that the IRS’s scrutiny of conservative groups was not contained among low-level workers in the Cincinnati office. Now, the Cincinnati office, by the way — I have since learned — is exclusive to tax-exempt status and tax-exempt organizations. It’s not some insignificant little satellite office off the beaten path that handles a few things here and a few things there.
This is THE place where every application for tax-exempt status goes through. So Obama and the administration said, “Well, it’s just, you know, a bunch of low-level rogue people. They’re acting on their own, pretty much, in Cincinnati.” However, the Washington Post today: “Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
“IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to Tea Party-affiliated groups, the documents show.” So some of the scrutiny came from IRS headquarters. What a shock! What an absolute shock! Who would have believed this?
Now, “IRS employees in Cincinnati told conservatives seeking the status of ‘social welfare’ groups that a task force in Washington was overseeing their applications, according to interviews with the activists.” In other words, even the low-level workers in Cincinnati were being told what to do by a task force in Washington. So this whole story that it was a bunch of low-level people in Cincinnati that were acting pretty much on their own, is totally blown up now by the Washington Post.
“Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS…” Did you hear what she said shortly after this story broke? “Well, I’m not very good at math.” Well, that’s helpful. A chief officer of the Internal Revenue Service is admitting, “I’m not very good at math.” “Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, told reporters Friday that the ‘absolutely inappropriate’ actions were undertaken by ‘front-line people’ working in Cincinnati to target groups with ‘tea party,’ ‘patriot’ or ‘9/12’ in their names,” all of which we now know was a series of lies.
These actions were not done by “front-line” or “low-level” people, and not just in Cincinnati — and they were not just targeting names but anything indicating they were conservative. Ms. Lerner also lied about when she found out about this. She actually learned about this in June of 2011. Now, you try lying to the IRS and see what happens to you. “In one instance, however, Ron Bell, an IRS employee, informed a lawyer representing a conservative group focused on voter fraud that the application was under review in Washington.
“On several other occasions, IRS officials in Washington and California sent conservative groups detailed questionnaires about their voter outreach and other activities, according to the documents. ‘For the IRS to say it was some low-level group in Cincinnati is simply false,’ said Cleta Mitchell, a partner in the law firm Foley & Lardner who sought to communicate with IRS headquarters about the delay in granting tax-exempt status to True the Vote.” So we know now that the woman in charge of this division at the IRS did not tell the truth on practically every single point.
These actions were not done by front-line or low-level people, and not just in Cincinnati. Lois Lerner also lied about when she found out about this scrutiny. She actually learned about it in June of 2011. We also now know, thanks to the Washington Post story, the IRS was even lying to senators and congressmen who wrote to them to ask about the tax-exempt applications of conservative groups. We also know now that the IRS was not just targeting keywords in the groups’ names.
They were targeting anything that indicated they were conservative. In fact, the Washington Post even points out, quote, “Although some of the groups were explicitly labeled ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot,’ others that came under intense scrutiny were focused on challenging the Affordable Care Act — … Obamacare — or the integrity of federal elections,” which is kind of disturbing here, folks, since the IRS is going to be the enforcement agency of Obamacare.
Andrea Mitchell (NBC News, Washington) said, ” “The fact they went after the Tea Party here … feeds the Republican critics, and this is one of the most outrageous excesses I?’ve seen in all my years in journalism.” Andrea Mitchell (NBC News, Washington) is calling this “one of the most outrageous excesses” that she has ever seen in all of her years of journalism. You know, it begets the question. I said yesterday that over the weekend I was asked constantly, “Rush, how come the media is so anti-IRS in this?”
Folks, I’m gonna tell you. This may describe you. American conservatives are so jaundiced by this administration and the media today, that many of them — and again, this may describe you — fully expected the media to support the IRS in targeting Tea Party groups, groups that had “patriot” in their name or groups that were forming to fight Obamacare. Such is the corruption in Washington today that many, decent, good, old-fashioned American citizens when this story happened actually expected the media to encourage the IRS, to keep looking further at conservatives.
They were shocked that the IRS would be criticized by the media, and they were asking me why I thought that was. I said, “I can understand why you’re perplexed by it. It is a mystery. But I think the answer is that the IRS is the collection agency of the statists. The IRS is the collection agency of socialism.” Remember, these people are all about as much money as possible flowing to government. They are all about tax increases. They are all about the government getting bigger.
Anything that happens that encourages people to be suspicious of their collection agency is not good. So they’re gonna take this on, and they’re gonna try to pile on the IRS just to limit the damage. Because, unlike you, they don’t really fear the IRS. They think the IRS is key; the country can’t get along without it. It’s the collection agency of socialism. Socialism needs all the money. It needs a majority of all money flowing into Washington and being spent and redistributed by Washington.
Anything that might corrupt that whole process, they can’t allow to fester. Now, this IRS thing. This is going to hit a nerve with increasing numbers of people in the public — I think much more so than Benghazi, because this is something people can identify with. People understand this, like the House Bank Scandal. That was so easily understandable. The House Bank Scandal was very simple. Members of Congress could go to the bank… Most people didn’t even know there was a bank specifically for members of Congress.
But there was, and members could go there and write checks for money they didn’t have. It turned out that their salaries were irrelevant. It didn’t matter what they earned. They could get checks cashed any time they wanted, and they were able to run those deficits, those bills that they owed the bank, and there was very little pressure ever to repay it. Once people learned that, that was easily understood. You can’t do that at your bank. You can’t go cash a check for which you don’t have money and get away with it and then go do it again and again and again.
Well, same thing here.
This one is easily understandable: The IRS targeting people.
People suspect this anyway. Now this is confirmation of it. I’m not saying it’s more important than Benghazi, don’t misunderstand. I’m just saying that people can identify with this easier. So you have this. You have Benghazi. You have the media ticked off now because the AP was targeted for almost Soviet-style treatment by the administration, by the Department of Justice. I don’t know how long any of this is gonna last, but I guarantee you it’s gonna last longer than the regime thinks or wants it to.