The IRS controversy is heating up, again, with new revelations, today, from career IRS officials in Washington DC.
New testimony from career IRS officials revealed that the Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner overruled the judgment of a career Washington, D.C. IRS lawyer and ordered Tea Party cases to go through a multi-layer review that included her senior advisor and the IRS Chief Counsel’s office.
“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.
Another Oversight and Reform hearing on the improper IRS targeting of conservatives is scheduled for tomorrow morning at 11:00 am. Eastern.
Giddy-up!
Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the of the House Oversight Committee, appeared on Fox News with Martha MacCallum to discuss the upcoming hearing.
He repeated his contention that the targeting was not isolated to Cincinnati, “but in fact went to Washington, and then went up the chain from there.”
And he noted that the biggest obstruction into the committee’s investigation is ranking member, Rep. Elijah Cummings, “who keeps saying that we know everything we need to know and it’s over, and when corrected, he takes a little while, and then comes back and says there’s nothing there, there.” He promised that the notion that progressive groups were targeted, too would be dispelled once and for all, by IG Russell George’s testimony.
FOX News reporter Carl Cameron told Bill O’Reilly tonight that House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) has information that will move the IRS scandal up into the White House.
“What he said to me today was make sure to watch tomorrow’s hearing because he’s going to present the evidence to prove it…. That he can get it right up all the way into the White House before it was all revealed.”
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