Guy Benson | May 21, 2013
One of the bizarre permutations of the ongoing IRS scandal is the manner in which the agency made the story public. As you'll recall, the revelation came in the form of IRS official Lois Lerner's response to a question asked at a public Q&A session with the American Bar Association. National Review's Kevin Williamson quickly surmised that the question itself may have been coordinated in advance to give the appearance of an "unplanned," and therefore forthright, public mea culpa. His suspicions were confirmed by acting IRS commissioner Stephen Miller during last week's House hearings. The source of the supposedly impromptu question has since copped to her role in the scheme as well. But what remained unresolved, though, was the issue of who dreamed up the secretive plan. Until today. Take it away, Stephen Miller:… |"I'll take responsibility for that...[it] was an incredibly bad idea." Yeah, it was. It was even a worse idea for Lerner to mislead the public about whether the question was planted (the questioner also initially denied any such arrangement). She was the one who planted it, apparently at Miller's behest. Lerner's lies continue to pile up, yet she somehow still has her job……Miller again insisted that the widespread targeting program was not the product of partisan bias (cough), but rather arose from a desire to be more "efficient." Allahpundit flayed this talking point yesterday:
If the IRS’s big problem circa 2010 was that it was overwhelmed with nonprofit applications (or so the agency falsely claims), why did that lead to unusually onerous demands for information? The typical government response to unmanageable workloads is to cut corners, yet the agency ended up asking Engelbrecht to send them copies of every Facebook post and Tweet that she ever sent, amid hundreds of other questions. That’s odd, no? You would think the big scandal to come out of a glut of tax-exempt petitions is that those petitions were being approved unusually quickly and with little scrutiny. Instead the opposite happened. Go figure.
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