Free Republic

Top House committee chairmen said Wednesday that they have learned that the IRS sent some tea party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status through special scrutiny at the direction of agency officials in Washington, in a revelation that appears to confirm political targeting. The committee chairmen released partial excerpts of interviews with IRS employees that show they were prepared to rule on some of the tea party groups’ applications, but Lois Lerner, an official at the root of the investigation, overruled them and instead created the complex and intrusive inquiries that have become the center of a Washington scandal. Carter Hull,...

The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney. In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review applications that the agency had screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity. Previous accounts from IRS employees had shown that Washington IRS officials were involved in the controversy, but Hull’s comments represent the closest connection to the...

On Sunday we reported that former IRS Boss Douglas Shulman’s wife, Susan Anderson, is a top ranking executive with a left-wing organization called Public Campaign which could potentially have a lot of interest in who may have been targeted by the IRS. Today the story took another turn toward supporting that hypothesis. It seems that Susan Anderson’s boss, Nick Nyhart, had several visits of his own to the White House. In all he visited seven times with two visits recorded as meetings with President Obama. So let’s do a quick recap. Shulman has 157 White House visits logged. His wife...