Like many people who were supposed to be finishing something, I wasted a little time on Facebook today and came across a Republican friend's reaction to a new break in the IRS scandal. This, he said, was the story "going nuclear" -- this discovery by the Ways and Means Committee that there was a "push to audit Senator Chuck Grassley."
Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) announced the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative individuals includes a sitting United States Senator. According to emails reviewed by the Committee under its Section 6103 authority, which allows the Committee to review confidential taxpayer information, Lois Lerner sought to have Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred for IRS examination.
“We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking," said Camp. “At every turn, Lerner was using the IRS as a tool for political purposes in defiance of taxpayer rights."
That certainly sounds bad, but given that the news of the IRS "losing" years of Lerner emails had effectively restarted the scandal, I'm not sure this strange and less-than-it-seems story amounts to Chernobyl. What did Lerner actually do? The timeline is provided by Ways and Means in the form of an email that includes previous e-mails in a string. I'll just post them chronologically. In the first e-mail, from Dec. 3, 2012, we see a sort of garbled reminder that Lerner should attend a [redacted] event.
The next morning, Lerner asks Matthew Giuliano, an attorney who was at the time a manager at the IRS, if the invitation was kosher.
Giuliano quickly responds. (The time stamps don't match up here, but this appears as a response to the above email.
To which Lerner responds:
That's it. That's the whole discussion. Lerner is ridiculously quick on the trigger to suggest referring the invitation to "exam," but even there, it's not clear that she wants Grassley referred as much as she wants an invitation that appears to be flouting rules. After she gets an explanation of everything it would take for Grassley to be at fault, Lerner shrugs and adds that she wouldn't want to share a stage at the event, the details of which, again, are obscured. That's a "push to audit" the senator?
I'm not naive enough to think the lack of things happening here means there's no story. When I asked the Twitterverse what the scandal was, I was asked rhetorically whether I was "okay" with Lerner's aborted audit and her itch to "criminalize GOPers." Let me be clear: I am as much against Lerner's "audit of Chuck Grassley" as I am Lerner's decision to set a school bus on fire and cut the brakes, watching it careen off a bridge and into a canyon. As she appears to have done neither of these horrible things, I'd argue that the vanishing of the IRS's and EPA's tranches of emails, for reasons that confound techies, are much more scandalous than the hour Lerner apparently spent wondering if she had to refer a senatorial speaking invitation to the exam department.
(It would be nice to ask Lerner what she meant, but she's hardly doing an AMA right now.)
