Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly offered what he described as “disturbing” new information in the investigation of the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups, suggesting on-air Thursday night that the frequency with which the agency’s former commissioner visited the White House could be a “smoking gun.”
Former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, O’Reilly pointed out, visited the White House 157 times — far more than other top Obama administration officials.
“By comparison then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the White House forty-three times. Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta twenty times,” O’Reilly said. “So what the heck was Mr. Shulman doing at the White House with that kind of frequency?”
As The Atlantic detailed, the vast majority of Shulman’s White House visits dealt with health care policy and, in fact, only attended 11 of those scheduled meetings between 2009-2012.
Shulman was appointed by former President George W. Bush to lead the agency in 2007 and served in the post until 2012.
It wasn’t the first time O’Reilly openly speculated about President Barack Obama’s role in the IRS targeting. During an appearance on “The Daily Show” last week, the pundit floated an unsubtantiated theory that Obama’s inner circle was motivated to crack down on tea party groups after the conservative movement’s success in the 2010 midterms.
“Now this is speculation but it’s educated speculation because I think that’s what happened,” O’Reilly told host Jon Stewart during the interview.
This post has been updated.
