The Fake Story About the IRS Commissioner and the White House (Only 11 times, per Atlantic)

The Atlantic ^ | May 31, 2013 | Franke-Ruta

[NOVACPA]

The latest twist in the conservative effort to tie the IRS tax-exempt targeting scandal to the president is to focus on public visitor records released by the White House, in which former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman's name appears 157 times between 2009 and 2012. Unfortunately, few of those pushing this line have bothered to read more than the topline of that public information. Bill O'Reilly on Thursday called them the "smoking gun" and demanded of Shulman, "You must explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions." His statement built on a Daily Caller story, "IRS's Shulman had more public White House visits than any Cabinet member." An Investors Business Daily story and slew of blog items repeated the charges.

"The alibi the White House has wedded itself to is that it had to work closely with the IRS to implement ObamaCare," the Investor's Business Daily has written -- as if that were not true.

And yet the public meeting schedules available for review to any media outlet show that very thing: Shulman was cleared primarily to meet with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill. He was cleared 40 times to meet with Obama's director of the Office of Health Reform, and a further 80 times for the biweekly health reform deputies meetings and others set up by aides involved with the health-care law implementation efforts. That's 76 percent of his planned White House visits just there, before you even add in all the meetings with Office of Management and Budget personnel also involved in health reform.

[UCANSEE2]

Apologists at the Atlantic have a full plate...

[UCANSEE2]

All executives keep this type of documentation.

Like Lisa Jackson and 'richard windsor' ?

[tacticalogic]

Subpoena Schulman’s work diary at the IRS to see how many times he had meetings at the WHm and with whom.

We've already seen how they use multiple email accounts to hide what they're doing. Don't see any reason to believe they wouldn't keep multiple work diaries.

[UCANSEE2]

So he wasn’t having an affair with Michelle?

Oh, come on... We all know Michelle is rarely even at the White House. If he was having an affair with Michelle, there would be records of visits to the Bahamas, Aspen, Monaco, etc.

[okie01]

Big deal! The fact remains that Shulman visited the White House complex an extraordinary number of times for the leader of a non-political / independent agency, especially in comparison to visits by his predecessors.

AND we know that campaign staff (e.g., Stephanie Cutter) attended many of the "healthcare meetings".

So, even the "healthcare meetings" remain questionable.