Bombshell: IRS Chief Counsel Was Involved in Targeting Tea Party Groups

IRS abuse of Tea Party groups can be chalked up to “rogue employees” in Cincinnati, huh? Not according to the latest from the Washington Post.

The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney.

In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review applications that the agency had screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity.

Previous accounts from IRS employees had shown that Washington IRS officials were involved in the controversy, but Hull’s comments represent the closest connection to the White House to date.

The IRS counsel is a political appointee. Obama appointed Wilkins to that position in April 2009, so he was there across the entire abuse regime. Previous testimony in the IRS scandal has revealed that Wilkins learned of the abuse by at least August 4, 2011, but White House spokesman Jay Carney told the press in May 2013 that Wilkins never bothered to inform the White House about it. This new information calls the previous testimony into question: Wilkins apparently knew of the abuse earlier than August 2011, because his own office was involved in it. His likely excuse: His staff went rogue and acted stupidly on their own. No one is ever in charge of, or accountable for, anything in Obama’s government, unless they’re in the military or otherwise expendable. Wilkins is probably too high to be expendable.

We’re getting ever closer to discovering that the White House through its counsel’s office was involved in, and probably directing, the abuse of citizens who were organizing to speak out against the Obama agenda. Catherine Engelbrecht’s case indicates that the IRS abuse is just one line of attack; the Obama government unleashed the full alphabet soup on her after she founded True the Vote.

That’s part of why Eric Holder has been unleashed on George Zimmerman. The right hand is hammering an innocent man while the left hand tries to wave Obama’s most dangerous scandal away. They’ll risk civil unrest to keep this particular scandal off the front pages.