Outgoing acting IRS chief Steven Miller told Congress on Friday that there was not a deliberate effort at the agency to targeting individuals or groups on the basis of their political views, when asked about the former IRS chief’s statement months ago that there was “absolutely no targeting.”
“It was incorrect,” Miller said. “But whether it was untruthful or not — look, when you talk about targeting, we need to get into this, Dr. (Charles) Boustany. When you talk about targeting, it’s a perjorative term. What happened here, and I would like to go through the process, what happened here, someone saw some tea party cases come through, acknowledging that they would be engaged in politics. This is the time frame in 2010 when Citizens United was out. There was a lot of discussion in the system about the use of (c)4s. They decided, let’s group these cases, centralize these cases, the concept of centralization not troublesome, not targeting these people in that sense.”
Miller apologized for “foolish mistakes” but insisted that the target of certain tea party-related organizations had nothing to do with partisanship.
In response to GOP grilling about why he “misled” Americans, Miller said, “Mr. Chairman, I did not mislead Congress not the American people.”
Correction: A previous version of this piece misattributed an earlier quote by former IRS chief Douglas Schulman to Miller.