As one of his final acts as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) released a 226-page report that debunks his own claim that the White House was coordinating the IRS scandal.
Issa released a 226 page “report” that contained cherry-picked excerpts from interviews, guesses, assumptions, and conspiracy theories.
The big takeaway from the report is that Issa found no connection to the White House in the IRS scandal. Here is a sample of the kind of guesswork and assumptions that fill the report. On page 161, “Other documents suggest that the IRS may even have aided Democrat legislators in partisan policy initiatives. For example, as Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) engaged in a lengthy correspondence with the IRS about section 501(c)(4) organizations in 2012, IRS personnel assisted his staff by providing information for some of the letters. In one e-mail, with the subject “[w]orking on the next letter,” Senator Levin’s staff sought answers from the IRS about its treatment of six applications, including Crossroads GPS, American Action Network, and the Club for Growth.”
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The documents suggest that maybe the IRS could have been working with Democrats.
Issa’s report is such a failure that the main takeaway from it is that California conspiracy theorist Republican couldn’t find any connection to the White House. The New York Times reported, “An 18-month congressional investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s mistreatment of conservative political groups seeking tax exemptions has failed to show coordination between agency officials and political operatives in the White House, according to a report released on Tuesday.”
In over 200 pages, the Republicans could not find one piece of concrete evidence that the White House had anything to do with IRS’s behavior. Issa rejected all evidence that progressive groups were also targeted, and he continues to ignore the reason that the IRS targeted the 501(c) groups. The conservative groups were breaking the law by asking to tax-exempt status despite the fact that they were engaging in partisan political activity.
The IRS should have been targeting the groups because they were trying to get out of paying taxes. Issa’s own report confirms that there was no White House conspiracy. Obama wasn’t using the IRS to hold down conservatives. Issa was lying. He refuses to release the full transcripts of the interviews. The full evidence reveals that there is nothing to the IRS conspiracy theory. That is why Darrell Issa refuses to make all of the interview transcripts public.
Darrell Issa spent two years as chairman of the Oversight Committee trying to get Obama. In the end, Issa fell flat on his face, and his years of conspiracy theory went up in flames.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
