IRS Targeting Launched By Cincinnati Staff Conservative, Democrat Says

The scandal over the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative nonprofits originated when a self-described conservative in the agency’s Cincinnati office in 2010 sent a problematic application to a Washington technical office for guidance, according to interviews with a House staffer cited on Sunday talk shows.

The interpretation of the disclosure quickly broke along party lines.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, appeared on two shows blasting his colleague, chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who has been working with Ways and Means Committee staff with special clearance to interview IRS employees in private before public hearings, and to re-examine applications for tax-exempt status from activist groups who suffered delays and burdensome requests for information from the tax agency. Selected excerpts from the interviews have been released by House Republicans.

“Chairman Issa has a tendency to make strong allegations and then go chasing the facts and usually never finding them,” Cummings said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” with similar comments made on CNN.

“We have a situation here where we now have interviewed the manager of the exec office in Cincinnati of the IRS,” Cummings said on CBS. “He is a conservative, 21-year veteran who spent six hours with our committee the other day talking in an interview. And he explained to us that this Tea Party situation started with one case back in 2010. Somebody -- one of his screeners brought it to him; he looked at it and said -- he said, ‘We must send this to the technical office in Washington because this is high-profile; this is a unique situation, and we want to have consistency.’ ”

Stressing a need to protect the integrity of his committee’s investigation, Cummings said, “Chairman Issa, with all due respect, is absolutely wrong. This Republican manager said there was no White House involvement, no political involvement, none of that. He made the decision doing the best he could to have some kind of consistency.”

Issa on Sunday issued a rebuttal. "I strongly disagree with Ranking Member Cummings' assertion that we know everything we need to know about inappropriate targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS and the case is, in his word, 'solved.' His extreme and reckless assertions are a signal that his true motivation is stopping needed congressional oversight and he has no genuine interest in working, on a bipartisan basis, to expose the full truth.” Issa added that the only thing Cummings left clear is that “if it were up to him the investigation would be closed.” Issa continued: “Fortunately, the decision to close the investigation is not his to make. Both House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp and I are committed to leading a fact-based investigation that fully exposes all relevant facts about IRS efforts to target Americans for their political beliefs."

Cummings on Sunday also sent Issa a direct letter coupled with a staff memo summarizing the results of the interviews with IRS staff in Cincinnati that Issa has not released publicly. “Your actions over the past three years do not reflect a responsible, bipartisan approach to investigations, and the committee’s credibility has been damaged as a result,” Cummings wrote. “Your approach in all of these cases has been to accuse first, and then go in search of evidence to back up your claims. Rather than apologizing or correcting the record when the evidence does not fit your narrative, you have selectively leaked excerpts of interview transcripts, documents, and other information, and you have withheld evidence that directly contradicts your claims, is exculpatory, or provides a more complete and fair understanding of the facts.”

Cummings asked Issa to change his approach and “develop consensus findings based on the evidence before the committee,” release full transcripts of all interviews with only limited redactions to protect privacy and issue a “comprehensive and bipartisan report with recommendations adopted by the full committee.”

The IRS employee who made the assertions has not been identified, but committee aides have identified his manager as John Shafer, according to Reuters.