We’ve heard from several readers about this article last night in Bloomberg which some readers believe contradicts the main premise of the IRS scandal – that right-leaning or Tea Party groups were targeted for extra scrutiny. But I don’t think that’s what it says.
The Bloomberg article notes that liberal groups also got scrutiny, also got the questions that have gotten the IRS into trouble. It even suggests that one liberal group had its application rejected, which does not appear to have happened with any of the right-leaning groups. But that’s not the question. Or rather, it’s never been suggested, to the best of my knowledge, that only right-leaning groups got the extra scrutiny.
The Bloomberg article says that a total of 471 groups were subjected to the additional scrutiny that is now in question – a number that apparently comes from an IRS briefing to Congress yesterday afternoon but is not included in the IG report. The IRS apparently used a few different methods to select those groups. But the keyword searches only included terms – at least at the outset – focused on right-leaning groups. So yes, there’s a lot of hyperbole floating around but that doesn’t get around the central point that the keyword targeting initially employed by the IRS’s Cincinnati office used clearly focused on Tea Party or right-leaning groups.
