The Internal Revenue Service is under fire for inappropriately targeting conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status.
In this case, the gist of the scandal can be expressed in 140 characters, as The Associated Press did on Twitter last week: "IRS apologizes for inappropriately targeting conservative political groups in 2012 election".
The tensions continued with Mr. Carney's defense of the White House in the investigation over whether the I.R.S. inappropriately targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny and his push back on questions relating to the the seizure of telephone records of Associated Press journalists, over which the press relentlessly grilled him.
President Obama is facing one of his roughest stretches in office after questions about the government's response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the admission by the Internal Revenue Service that it inappropriately targeted conservative groups which sought tax-exempt status, and the revelation that the Justice Department subpoenaed communications by The Associated Press.
Officials there, the agency said, were the ones who inappropriately targeted conservative groups for scrutiny.
WASHINGTON -- The Internal Revenue Service agents who inappropriately targeted conservative groups had been following orders from the Obama administration, House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif). said on Sunday.
The IRS released the list on May 15, after senior official Lois Lerner announced that the IRS had been inappropriately targeting conservative groups in its review of groups seeking tax exempt status for political activity.
Lerner's answer to a planted question at a May 10 American Bar Association meeting in which she announced that the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative groups from 2010 through 2012 sparked the current controversy and round of hearings.
In The Devil's Dictionary (1906), the American writer Ambrose Bierce cynically (but not inappropriately) defined the conservative as "a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others".
That detail notwithstanding, throw the words "I.R.S.," "inappropriately," "targeting" and "conservatives" into the same sentence and the news story is evident.
