Freedom Line Blog

Here’s a quick rule of thumb for the IRS scandal dogging the Obama Administration: things will only get worse. The most recent domino to fall: those claims that the abuse was quarantined to the agency’s Cincinnati office just don’t hold up. From the Wall Street Journal:

Two Internal Revenue Service employees in the agency’s Cincinnati office told congressional investigators that IRS officials in Washington helped direct the probe of tea-party groups that began in 2010.

Transcripts of the interviews, viewed Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, appear to contradict earlier statements by top IRS officials, who have blamed lower-level workers in Cincinnati.

Elizabeth Hofacre said her office in Cincinnati sought help from IRS officials in the Washington unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations after she started getting the tea-party cases in April 2010. Ms. Hofacre said Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, closely oversaw her work and suggested some of the questions asked applicants.

“I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” she said, according to the transcripts.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. A low-level government employee is the most risk-averse creature on the planet. That doesn’t prevent them from being wildly incompetent or occasionally venal, but it’s not the stuff of which sweeping ideological crusaders are made. That tends to require direction from above. How far up the chain it goes remains an open question.