Bloomberg Writer Calls IRS Targeting of Tea Party 'Faux Scandal'

While penning praise of Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, liberal columnist Albert R. Hunt of Bloomberg also took a moment to call the IRS harassment of conservatives a “faux scandal.”

Hunt’s op-ed is filled with wide-eyed praise of Obama’s Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, calling him “skilled” and “efficient.” McDonough is a “high-energy” guy praised by both Republicans and Democrats, Hunt is pleased to say.

Along with the effusive praise, Hunt also added a sentence taking a shot at those who feel that Obama and his IRS have abused their power to harass conservative groups in hopes that they would give up advocating for their right-of-center point of view.

Yet in the same moment, amid the fawning assessment of McDonough’s excellence, Hunt offered up some criticism of the man’s work.

Hunt says that McDonough “…took flak for failing to get the vice president and secretary of state sufficiently involved in the early decisions on Syria, for reacting slowly to the faux scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service, and for not adequately anticipating the flawed Obamacare rollout.”

For a “faux scandal,” the assaults the IRS and other Obama agencies unleashed almost exclusively on conservative groups sure were vicious. Take, for example, the testimony of True The Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht before a House committee.

Engelbrecht details the harassment she received at the hands of Obama’s regulatory agencies after she started the voter integrity group that has become a target of liberal hatred.

“[During nearly] two decades of running our small business, my husband and I never dealt with any government agency, outside of filing our annual tax returns,” Engelbrecht said during her testimony. “We had never been audited, we had never been investigated, but all that changed upon submitting applications for the non-profit statuses of True the Vote and King Street Patriots. Since that filing in 2010, my private businesses, my nonprofit organizations, and family have been subjected to more than 15 instances of audit or inquiry by federal agencies.”

Engelbrecht isn’t the only conservative who has found an avalanche of audits and “investigations” instigated at the hands of the Obama administration. Jay Sekulow, who also testified before Congress on behalf of several affected groups, said, “The IRS asked for the identity of donors, for passwords for websites, the political activity even of family members, and asked broad questions designed to expose every aspect of the groups’ First Amendment-protected activity.”

Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the America Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), went on to say, “Millions of Americans with good reason perceive the IRS as inherently partisan, doubt the Obama Administration’s good faith in faithfully executing the laws of the United States by defending the First Amendment rights of all American citizens, and are understandably cynical when an avowed partisan accepts the assignment to investigate perhaps our nation’s most politically-significant scandal.”

Sekulow was referring to the administration’s decision to put a committed Obama campaign donor in charge of the investigation into the IRS.

The testimony of these two is only the tip of the iceberg of those harassed by Obama’s IRS and other agencies. With all that, it doesn’t appear to be a “faux scandal” at all.