“A Misleading Pretend Scandal”: It Turns Out IRS Commissioner Did Not Visit The White House 157 Times After All
One of the more enduring legends put forth by those working overtime to stoke the fires of scandal within the walls of the Obama Administration, is the often cited tale of how the now departed IRS Commissioner, Douglas Shulman, visited the White House 158 times during his years serving the Obama Administration.
Surely, as the logic goes, there could be but one credible explanation for an agency boss spending so much time within the epicenter of executive power. If Commissioner Shulman had pitched his tent and made the White House his second home, it could only mean that he was a co-conspirator in a well-coordinated effort on the part of the president and White House staff to influence the 2012 election by putting a beat down on conservative money groups looking to gain tax exempt status and the ability to hide the names of their contributors as they raised millions to defeat the Obama re-election effort.
So compelling is this argument that it has become a ‘go to’ bit of circumstantial evidence in the effort to take the IRS ‘scandal’ to the doorstep of the Oval Office and beyond.
And why not? The story does add up to a fairly decent piece of speculative evidence…or at least it would if the story were true.
Sadly (for the scandal mongers), it turns out that the entire meme falls dramatically short when someone actually takes the trouble to dig just a millimeter under the surface to discover what really happened here.
The ball on this enticing bit of scandal bait got rolling when The Daily Caller, the conservative hatchet rag operated by Tucker Carlson, reported in a May 29th piece that IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had racked up more visits to the White House than “even the most trusted members of the president’s cabinet.” The article appeared to be carefully put together, so much so that it came complete with a chart revealing how the second most active visitor to the West Wing, Rebecca Blank, was a very distant second to the tally put up by Commissioner Shulman.
The problem is—in what is becoming something of a tradition for The Daily Caller—the website managed to sort of ‘semi-report’ the story without feeling much of a need or desire to gather or report all of the details and facts as, to do so, would have been highly inconvenient to the intent of the article.
Reacting to the Daily Caller story, Bill O’Reilly immediately demanded that Mr. Shulman “explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions.” Considering how odd such an extensive visitation history would be for the boss of a second level government agency, O’Reilly’s request was not an unreasonable one.
However, Mr. O’Reilly’s insistent demand turns out be unnecessary as readily available public records have already answered the questions he sought to have answered. All someone need to do is look at these records to know the reason for Shulman’s visits (which turn out to be far, far fewer than 157.)
As reported by Garance Franke-Ruta in The Atlantic —
“And yet the public meeting schedules available for review to any media outlet show that very thing:
Shulman was cleared primarily to meet with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill. He was cleared 40 times to meet with Obama’s director of the Office of Health Reform, and a further 80 times for the biweekly health reform deputies meetings and others set up by aides involved with the health-care law implementation efforts. That’s 76 percent of his planned White House visits just there, before you even add in all the meetings with Office of Management and Budget personnel also involved in health reform.”
If you are wondering why the IRS Commissioner would be so actively involved in meetings involving the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, you will want to keep in mind that the Internal Revenue Service is at the center of the action when it comes to enforcing the mandate and penalty provisions of the law. As a result, any serious meeting regarding the execution of the Affordable Care Act would not make much sense without Shulman, or a high-ranking member of his staff attending in his place.
But even this does not tell the entire story.
You see, while the records reveal that Mr. Shulman was cleared for entry into the White House 157 times, these records speak only to the result of the clearance required by the Secret Service for someone seeking entry into the building and do not speak to whether or not Shulman actually attended the meetings for which he was cleared.
As someone who has, myself, been to the White House on a few occasions, I am keenly aware that nobody without a permanent entrance pass (given to those who have their office in the complex) gets in the door of the White House or the Executive Office Building unless specifically cleared for entry on a particular date and time by the Secret Service. Indeed, on one occasion, I had been cleared by the Secret Service to attend an event but, at the last minute, I had to pass on the White House visit when something came up. Yet, using the list relied upon by The Daily Caller, my skipped visit would be counted as an additional visit on my part if someone were counting.
What’s more, Franke-Ruta’s research reveals that the records tracking the time and date that a visitor signs in and out of a White House event suggests that Mr. Shulman signed in for just 11 events during the years 2009 through 2012 and signed out of 6 events during that same time frame.
Given the discrepancy between the ‘sign in’ and ‘sign out’ records noted above, it is certainly possible that Franke-Ruta may have actually been at the White House on additional occasions. However, there is absolutely no record—as claimed—that Mr. Shulman was at the White House 157 times. All we learn is that Shulman was cleared to come into the building for various meetings and events; meetings and events that made all the sense in the world given his key role in implementing Obamacare.
If you are wondering why Mr. Shulman would require Secret Service clearance so many more times than, say, cabinet members, it turns out that there is a very simple and clear explanation for this too—along with some understanding of Shulman’s testimony before Congress when he referenced going to the White House for an Easter Egg Roll.
“But there is no record that Shulman attended a White House Easter Egg Roll under Obama, most likely because large events organized by the East Wing, like that one, don’t always show up in the visitor’s access records. Neither do visits by staffers, journalists covering large events, or people who enter the White House grounds in their pre-cleared cars, like Cabinet members, who do not wait for badge swipes at the gate with the policymaking hoi polloi.
So, how can there be so much confusion when it comes to White House records tracking who comes in and who comes out?
Prior to Obama’s arrival, there were no such records published for the public to review. The decision to do so was a part of Obama’s stated quest for transparency when he first took office. As Franke-Ruta adds, “The real problem with combing through the White House visitor logs is that they were a system designed for Secret Service clearance and White House security, not as comprehensive means of documenting every visitor to the White House, high to low. They miss the top end and some of the social end of people visiting the White House — people who are cleared through separate processes designed to protect presidential security other than getting swiped in at the front gate for an appointment.”
Clearly, there is nothing even close to evidence suggesting that Commissioner Shulman visited the White House anywhere near the number of times suggested by The Daily Caller and immediately seized upon as a juicy bit of supposed evidence of White House involvement in this juicy story perpetuated by Darrell Issa and friends.
The true bottom line, however, is that those trying—and failing miserably—to make these pretend scandals stick should themselves be investigated within an inch of their lives for failing to set forth the true facts and data when the same becomes readily available. Failure to do so—whether on the part of supposed journalists or supposedly concerned Congressional committee chairmen—is malpractice, pure and simple, and a purposeful, malevolent misleading of the American public who would actually like to know what really happened here.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, July 7, 2013
“Investigate Darrell Issa”: Or How To Apply The Chairman’s Own Methods And Style To Him
Among the many reasons that Americans hold the House of Representatives in low repute – at historically abysmal levels, in fact – is the blatantly partisan and ideological misconduct of so many committee chairs. Without any evident embarrassment these mighty politicians deny science, defy mathematics, and dismiss every fact that contradicts their prejudices. But bad as these chairs tend to be, none is quite as flamboyantly awful as Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, a special investigative panel whose latest effort to conjure scandal from nothingness at the Internal Revenue Service would provoke his removal by a responsible leadership.
As we have pointed out repeatedly in these pages, and as testimony by the IRS inspector general has since confirmed, it is now clear that right-wing groups were not targeted for exceptional scrutiny. Moreover, there was no political motive in the agency’s treatment of the Tea Party and associated groups seeking tax exemption (in many cases illegitimately).
It is now equally obvious that the behavior of Issa himself, with his attempts to skew his committee’s investigation and conceal testimony that exonerated the agency, represents the most serious wrongdoing in the supposed “IRS scandal.” But this isn’t the first time that the California Republican, who happens to be the wealthiest man in Congress, has misused the broad powers of his chairmanship. Actually, that is all he does – as he demonstrated in equally opportunistic and amateurish examinations of both the Benghazi tragedy and the “Fast and Furious” affair.
Issa’s stewardship of the House Government Reform Committee has failed even by the standards of the Republican congressional leadership, which must have hoped that he would have collected some Obama administration scalps by now. He delayed the Fast and Furious probe solely to extend it into the election year, blustered against Attorney General Eric Holder, and accomplished…nothing.
There is little hope that Speaker John Boehner, who has enough problems maintaining a semblance of authority and dignity, will question Issa’s fitness to chair this important committee. But still we are left wondering: What would become of Issa if he were subjected to the Republican style of investigation? What if the presumption of guilt, the preference for insinuation over evidence, the omission of exculpatory facts, and the promulgation of conspiratorial speculations that feature in all of Issa’s theatrical probes were applied to him?
As the richest member of Congress, Issa seems to enjoy the same veneer of respectability that great wealth has provided to many dubious figures. But his past includes several troubling encounters with law enforcement, from alleged car thefts to weapons offenses. So what would the public learn from an Issa-style investigation of Darrell Issa?
First, the committee chair would reveal the troubling findings about Issa, namely that he was arrested not once but twice for illegal weapons offenses. Worse yet, he would explain, Issa had been convicted the second time. Then he would release slightly redacted copies of court records on file in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where Issa grew up, showing an arrest, charges of auto theft and carrying a concealed weapon only one month after his discharge from the Army in the winter of 1972. Those same records would also reveal that Issa and an older brother were both suspects in the theft of a “new red Maserati sports car” from an auto dealership, and that Issa was eventually indicted for larceny.
And then the committee might leak a second, even more damaging set of records showing that Issa had been picked up several months later on another weapons charge in Michigan, where he attended college. Police arrested him for possession of an unregistered handgun, leading ultimately to his conviction.
What we might not learn – at least not until the facts were excavated by less partisan probers – is that Issa was only 19 years old at the time; that the first set of charges in Ohio was eventually dropped by prosecutors; and that the Michigan charge was a misdemeanor, punishable by a $100 fine. Which young Issa paid.
Yet whatever Issa did as a foolish kid could be made to look quite sinister by a congressional committee chair like him, dedicated to trumping up minor irritations into major scandals. How fortunate he is that nobody in authority has ever misused the investigative power to smear him – and that those currently in authority over him have no appetite for reining in his abuses of that power.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 29, 2013
“Targeting Conservative And Liberal Groups Alike”: The So-Called IRS Scandal Ends With a Whimper
With Edward Snowdon on his whirlwind tour of countries unfriendly to the United States and the Supreme Court handing down a bunch of important decisions, this is a good week for stories to get lost in the back pages. So you may not have noticed that late yesterday, the IRS scandal, supposedly Worse Than Watergate™, came to a sputtering halt with the release of new documents in the investigation. The whole scandal, you’ll recall, is about how conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) status were given extra scrutiny, while other kinds of groups just slid by. Well, it turns out, not so much:
The instructions that Internal Revenue Service officials used to look for applicants seeking tax-exempt status with “Tea Party” and “Patriots” in their titles also included groups whose names included the words “Progressive” and “Occupy,” according to I.R.S. documents released Monday.
The documents appeared to back up contentions by I.R.S. officials and some Democrats that the agency did not intend to single out conservative groups for special scrutiny. Instead, the documents say, officials were trying to use “key word” shortcuts to find overtly political organizations — both liberal and conservative — that were after tax favors by saying they were social welfare organizations.
But the practice appeared to go much farther than that. One such “be on the lookout” list included medical marijuana groups, organizations that were promoting President Obama’s health care law, and applications that dealt “with disputed territories in the Middle East.”
Taken together, the documents seem to change the terms of a scandal that exploded over accusations that the I.R.S. had tried to stifle a nascent conservative political movement. Instead, the dispute now revolves around questionable sorting tactics used by I.R.S. application screeners.
Questionable sorting tactics! Not quite the scandal of the century. So why did the Inspector General’s report that started this whole thing characterize it only as the singling out of conservative groups, ignoring the fact that liberal groups got treated unfairly too, and with the same means, the BOLO (“be on the lookout” memo) that instructed agents to give special scrutiny to certain kinds of groups? Steve Benen points out that the Inspector General (IG) was responding to a request from Darrell Issa to investigate the treatment of conservative groups, so that’s the likely reason his inquiry was restricted in that way. So Issa first asked the IG for a restricted investigation, then he released excerpts of interviews with IRS officials cherry-picked to make things look worse than they actually were, and now this.
But this “scandal” was already dying. Despite the most fervent wishes of conservatives, there hasn’t been any actual evidence showing that orders to crush the Tea Party came right from the White House. So in the last few weeks they’ve been reduced to arguing that there was a conspiracy of winks and nods, whereby everybody just knew what to do, even if nobody actually told anybody what to do. President Obama gave a speech criticizing “dark money,” and IRS agents swung into action! Or maybe there was a real conspiracy, but we just haven’t found it yet despite all the looking (“Some person or persons made the decision to target, harass, delay and abuse,” wrote Peggy Noonan. “Some person or persons communicated the decision. Some persons executed them.”). You can sustain that for a while, but eventually, you have to produce something real. You can’t just speculate forever.
And frankly, I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with these BOLO lists per se. If you have a situation where a bunch of similar groups are being created all at the same time and they all appear to be political groups masquerading as social welfare organizations, it’s perfectly reasonable to group them together and have the same agents develop an understanding of what they do and whether they deserve tax-exempt status. The problem isn’t that they got put into a pile, it’s what happens afterward. And what’s been really appalling from what we’ve learned is that the IRS agents seemed to have only the barest understanding of what the law was and how they were supposed to apply it. Maybe once this is all over, we can get around to fixing that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 25, 2013
“The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth”: Darrell Issa Should Be Answering Questions Instead Of Asking Questions
Yesterday, much to the chagrin of House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) decided it was time for some sunlight in the IRS investigation. Committee investigators conducted lengthy interviews with IRS officials in Ohio, and while Issa was content to release cherry-picked excerpts from those interviews, Cummings released all 205 pages, letting everyone — voters, reporters, and policymakers — get the full picture.
And while I’ll confess reading the transcripts last night was remarkably dull, I continue to believe they should effectively end the controversy.
Republican and Democratic committee staffers interviewed IRS official John Shafer on June 6 about the agency’s decision to scrutinize a tea party group’s application for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) status. Shafer, who identified himself as “a conservative Republican” and said he’d worked for the IRS since 1992, said that he and a fellow screener initially flagged a tea party group and continued to do so with subsequent applications in order to maintain consistency in the process.
Throughout much of the interview, Shafer describes the mundane bureaucratic challenges of dealing with incoming applications for nonprofit status. He said his team flagged the first tea party application because it appeared to be a high-profile case, and he wanted to make sure all high-profile cases received similar attention.
Was the White House involved? “I have no reason to believe that,” Shafer said. Did he communicate to the then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman about the screening of Tea Party cases? “I have not,” Shafer added.
I imagine there will be additional hearings and debate, but I’m not altogether sure what more there is to talk about. Every claim Republicans have made, and every effort to create a conspiracy theory involving the White House, appears to have been completely discredited.
Indeed, at this point, I’d like to see Darrell Issa stop asking questions and start answering them.
For example, did Issa try to deliberately mislead news organizations and the public with selectively edited portions of information he knew to be incomplete?
Did Issa violate congressional ethics rules by using his chairmanship to cherry-pick misleading quotes from official transcripts?
Did Issa act alone or did he coordinate his activities with others?
How much public money has Issa spent as part of these endeavors? How much more does he intend to spend going forward?
Remember, we’ve seen controversies like this before. In 1998, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee shared misleading excerpts from official transcripts with reporters in the hopes of creating a political controversy. Indeed, this came directly from the office of the committee’s then-chairman, Dan Burton. When the deception came to light, Burton was forced to accept the resignation of one of his top investigators of suspected wrongdoing in the Clinton White House.
(The investigator’s name was David Bossie — who went on to form a little group known as Citizens United. You might have heard of it.)
At first blush, it looks like Issa pulled a very similar stunt. Will there be similar consequences?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 19, 2013
“An Incompetent Glory Hound”: Darrell Issa Is Really Terrible At His Job
In case you lost track of the IRS scandal, here’s where it’s at right now: House Oversight Committee members are releasing dueling transcripts of witness testimony to the press. There is a big fight about it. It is maybe kind of boring.
Darrell Issa, Republican chairmain of the committee, has been selectively releasing snippets of testimony to the press, all of it designed to support his contention that the IRS targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny of their nonprofit status was a political maneuver ordered or somehow directed by the White House. There is literally no evidence for that claim and it’s not true but Issa is sort of bad at his job in many important respects. Democratic ranking member Elijah Cummings asked Issa to please release full transcripts of witness testimony, but Issa refused, so Cummings just did so, with a full transcript of the committee’s interview with an IRS employee who seems to have been the first one to flag a “Tea Party” group’s application for tax-exempt status for further review.
This employee describes himself as “a conservative Republican” and he states outright that there was no political motivation, and certainly no White House responsibility, for the IRS’s actions.
Issa’s response to this is to claim that releasing the testimony will hurt his investigation because it will provide a “road map” for future witnesses wishing to mislead the committee. (Denying that politics had anything to do with it, who else would have independently come up with that?) The right-wing media response has been to basically ignore the content of what Cummings released and to trash him for attempting to defend the White House.
Cummings isn’t trying to sway right-wing bloggers, though. He’s not even trying to sway the public at large. What he’s trying to do is get the press to say outright what everyone in Washington already knows: Issa never has the goods to back up his claims. Cummings is trying to make it possible for the press to challenge Issa’s credibility without violating their own rules of objectivity.
Of course, everyone in the political press knows that Issa is a publicity hound who regularly makes outrageous accusations and insinuations and rarely has any evidence supporting his more outrageous claims. Everyone in the press knows this, but conventions of objective journalism prevent them from saying as much to their audiences, and so 47 percent of Americans believe the White House directly instructed the IRS to target conservative groups.
In that respect the IRS investigations looks like a huge success. But Issa’s record is actually really terrible. He has investigated everything he can think of and nothing went anywhere.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s one job is to get scalps. He is supposed to force embarrassing resignations. He has not yet forced a single one. When Issa took control of the House Oversight Committee in early 2011, he announced plans to investigate WikiLeaks, Fannie Mae, corruption in Afghanistan, the FDA, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and business regulations. He has investigated Solyndra and Fast and Furious and Benghazi and come up with nothing. So far the acting commissioner of the IRS has resigned, because the president asked him to. Issa hasn’t managed one single clean hit.
What Issa has managed to do is create a series of very silly graphics hyping his investigations in the style of funny image macros and film posters. He has managed to make conservatives agree with him that Barack Obama is the most corrupt president in history and he has managed to make a large minority of voters feel that the White House is probably hiding something.
In terms of the 2014 elections, he is, so far, probably helping the GOP more than he is hurting it. So Issa’s record, honestly, is mixed. He is quite bad at his job in most respects, but not quite as historically useless as Tea Party mascots like Louie Gohmert. But it does seem to me that Republicans would be better served by not having an incompetent glory hound chairing the most politically useful House committee. I guess they don’t have a lot of great options, considering the rest of the House GOP.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, June 19, 2013
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