Election Law Blog

WaPo’s fact checker gives Lerner Four Pinocchios for a number of statements she made in connection with the IRS controversy.

AP: “There’s an irony in the Internal Revenue Service’s crackdown on conservative groups. The nation’s tax agency has admitted to inappropriately scrutinizing smaller tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, and senior Treasury Department officials were notified in the midst of the 2012 presidential election season that an internal investigation was underway. But the IRS largely maintained a hands-off policy with the much larger, big-budget organizations on the left and right that were most influential in the elections and are organized under a section of the tax code that allows them to hide their donors.”

NYT reports.

WaPo: “The story of the IRS’s policy of targeting right-leaning groups, which played out over several years in Cincinnati, Washington and dozens of other cities and towns, was one of a bureaucracy caught in a morass of uncertainty and outside pressure. The actions also confirmed the suspicions of many conservatives after they had complained for years of harassment by the tax agency.”

Aaron Blake writes for WaPo.

WaPo reports.

WSJ: “The White House’s chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday. That disclosure has prompted a debate over whether the president should have been notified at that time.”

Weigel:

TaxProf has an extensive collection of links.  Here is the most recent set of coverage (and this SNL skit).  Earlier coverage:

• IRS Admits to Targeting Conservative Groups in 2012 Election (May 10, 2013)
• WaPo and WSJ Agree: IRS Targeting of Conservatives Is Appalling (May 11, 2013)
• Schmalbeck on the IRS ‘Targeting’ of Conservative Groups (May 12, 2013)
• The Deepening IRS Scandal (May 13, 2013)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 5 (May 14, 2013)
• Jon Stewart and Vic Fleischer on the IRS Scandal (May 14, 2013)
• Inspector General: Ineffective IRS Management Allowed Agents to Target Conservative Groups (May 14, 2013)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 6 (May 15, 2013)
• Ellen Aprill, The TIGTA Report on the IRS Scandal: Questions About the IRS and About the Report (May 15, 2013)
• Phillip Hackney, The TIGTA Report on the IRS Scandal: Be on the Lookout for False Partisan Witchunts (May 15, 2013)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 7 (May 16, 2013)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 8 (May 17, 2013)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 9 (May 18, 2013)

WSJ reports.

LA Times deep dive.

Extensive front-page NYT report.

Roger Colinvaux has written this CNN oped.

New SacBee column.

Here.

See the Update at the bottom of this Pro Publica story.

Bloomberg View:

Until Congress passes the Disclose Act, which would end the practice of anonymous political spending, the IRS will continue to oversee groups that spend millions to influence the political process. What’s more, well-financed, powerful groups with deep political connections and access to first-rate legal advice will continue to whiz through the IRS express lane while genuine citizen organizations, Tea-Party-inspired and otherwise, will endure long waits to have their applications approved. The inspector general found one hapless applicant waiting 1,138 days for approval. We don’t know the victim’s name. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t “Rove.”

I make the pitch for DISCLOSE II to solve the broader IRS problem here.

Must-read Pro Publica deep dive.

Jonathan Bernstein wants unlimited disclosed contributions to candidates.

Here.

NYT on today’s hearing.

WaPo reports.

Andy Kroll reports for Mother Jones.

Important item in the Chronicle of Philanthropy (via Jonathan Adler).

Whether or not the total number of c4 applications were going up, c4 political spending was exploding, beginning with WRTL and continuing into Citizens United.  See my charts here from last year’s presentation at Stanford PACs, based upon data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

WaPo went to talk to the Cincinnati office workers.

A picture’s worth a 1000 words.

Following up on this post, it turns out that not only was Lerner going in prepared to bring up the tea party targeting; the question was planted too.  Watch.

Apparently the Lerner response on Friday (to a question, not in her prepared remarks) on Tea Party targeting was planned.  {Update: It’s even worse than we thought: the question was planted too}

Look: the IRS should have revealed its targeting of Tea Party groups much sooner, and it should not have had officials fail to report it (or perhaps even lie about it) when asked by Members of Congress.

But simply as a matter of PR, if the IRS decided it needed to get out in front of the damning upcoming TIGTA report, this was not the way to do it.  It should have issued a press release later that day on Friday, ahead of the weekend.  But it did it this way, in an offhanded, almost cavalier way (look at the exact text of what Lerner said: “So I guess my bottom line here is that we at the IRS should apologize for that, it was not intentional, and as soon as we found out what was going on, we took steps to make it better and I don’t expect that to reoccur.”) as part of the answer at a tax meeting where word was sure to leak out; it then was unprepared for questions at the press call afterwards (including the Lerner line that she was not good at math—true she’s a lawyer, not an accountant, but the optics) and then no formal response for a few days, and then apparently posting further private information about who was approved and put through this process on its website.

The bumbling nature of this seems to demonstrate that Lerner and others did not realize, at all, the extent to which this was politically radioactive and damaging.  The IRS probably isn’t an agency used to interacting often with the national press, and it shows, very starkly, in this incident.

More about today’s hearings later.

Andy Kroll writes for Mother Jones.

Watch Bloomberg (via Political Wire)

Politics, money and power: Inside the IRS’ targeting of conservative social welfare groups

The Problem of IRS’s Dwindling Credibility

Gary Bass and Beth Kingsley have written this oped for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

‘Tea party’ nonprofits rarely endorsed political candidates

Do nonprofits’ names imply political activity? Most social welfare nonprofits don’t have politically charged names

Matea Gold, soon of WaPo, writes this article for the LA Times.