White House records show former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman signed in for 11 visits, not 157 between 2009 and 2012 as claimed by the Daily Caller and Fox News, The Atlantic revealed.
Here’s a case where President Obama’s efforts toward transparency have greatly confused the pretend journalists hiding out at the propaganda machine known as The Daily Caller. The President opened up the White House visitor logs to the public. But The Daily Caller, which purports to be competent at covering the White House when they’re not heckling the President, thought those logs were something other than what they are. Thus, they concluded that they had found the smoking gun to tie Obama to the IRS “scandal” ala Nixon, except without the tapes and without any proof that these alleged meetings were about anything other than their stated purpose.
The Daily Caller’s absurd attempt to conclude “coordination“:
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Publicly released records show that embattled former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House at least 157 times during the Obama administration, more recorded visits than even the most trusted members of the president’s Cabinet.
… But the scope of Shulman’s White House visits — which strongly suggests coordination by White House officials in the campaign against the president’s political opponents — is even more striking in comparison to the publicly recorded access of Cabinet members.
Of course, it’s hard to get proof of “coordination” when the meetings didn’t take place. It turns out that Garance Franke-Ruta, a rather industrious writer at The Atlantic, bothered to sift through all of the documents in order to determine that actually, former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman signed in for 11 visits, not 157, between 2009 and 2012 (my bold):
The latest twist in the conservative effort to tie the IRS tax-exempt targeting scandal to the president is to focus on public visitor records released by the White House, in which former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman’s name appears 157 times between 2009 and 2012. Unfortunately, few of those pushing this line have bothered to read more than the topline of that public information. Bill O’Reilly on Thursday called them the “smoking gun” and demanded of Shulman, “You must explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions.” His statement built on a Daily Caller story, “IRS’s Shulman had more public White House visits than any Cabinet member.” An Investors Business Daily story and slew of blog items repeated the charges.
“The alibi the White House has wedded itself to is that it had to work closely with the IRS to implement ObamaCare,” the Investor’s Business Daily has written — as if that were not true.
“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,” Garance Franke-Ruta concludes (based on that pesky thing called actual evidence).
These logs were available to the Daily Caller, and IBD, and as Garance Franke-Ruta points out, the logs are a system for Secret Service and White House security, so if your name is on there, you were cleared for a visit. You may or may not have had a visit. That part is important, because that’s where the Daily Caller tripped on their efforts to provide Fox News with an anti-Obama headline they could jack up as the “smoking gun”. They were further tripped up by their lack of understanding regarding what the logs represent, yet they are a member of the White House press pool.
The Daily Caller also seems unaware that these logs were not made public by the Bush administration, so when they claim that Shulman’s predecessor only visited once, they are basing that on the opacity of the former administration rather than on facts. (But this is all about freedom and accountability, not about attacking Obama, even though Heritage directed Republicans to attack Obama rather than legislate.)
It’s just like The Daily Caller and Fox News to: a) not bother to read, b) assume that it’s fair game to conclude that what the visits say they were for is not actually what they are for, with no proof, c) to ignore the fact that the visits were cleared for policy discussions on healthcare at least 76% of the time and d) to accuse Obama of being Nixon, even though there is absolutely not one shred of evidence that the White House had anything to do with the IRS trying to determine who was scamming the IRS with fake nonprofits.
Republicans tout “True the Vote” as their ultimate victim of the IRS, but True the Vote was found by a judge to have acted illegally in aiding Republicans, among other ethical and legal issues.
The real IRS scandal is that nonprofits have been allowed to function as PACs, polluting our political system with dark money. The remedy to the IRS “scandal” is for there to be a zero tolerance rule for all nonprofits. But of course, Republicans don’t want that to happen, because they outspend liberals 34-1 trying to influence politics with their “nonprofits”.
The Right jumped the Nixon shark with this one. In Nixon’s case, there was an actual smoking gun in the form of tapes proving that he targeted his “enemies” out of revenge. On these tapes, Nixon directed aides to use the IRS to go after his enemies. That’s a far cry from claiming that a meeting with healthcare advisers was really a meeting about the IRS, and the Daily Caller can “prove” their fictional conspiracy because there were so many meetings– only there weren’t.
(Click here to read an in depth analysis of Shulman’s visits, via The Atlantic.)
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