Last week, senior IRS official Lois Lerner was speaking at the American Bar Association conference in Washington, D.C. when she was seemingly-spontaneously asked a question about IRS discrimination against conservatives. She then admitted that the IRS had “used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title.”
The question, it turns out, was not spontaneous at all.
After Kevin Williamson of National Review revealed that the questioner was closely connected with the IRS, acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted before Congress that the question was planted. “I did talk to Lois about the possibility of … did it make sense for us to start talking about this in public,” he said. When it became clear that the inspector general’s report indicted the IRS for such discrimination, Miller and Lerner decided to pre-empt the report with the planted question. Miller said that Lerner and he discussed “what would be said and how we might do it.”
Asked for clarification on whether the question had been pre-planned, Miller said, “I believe that we talked about that, yes.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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