IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Emails: IRS official said Lerner threw Cincinnati office under the bus.

An IRS official blasted Lois Lerner for her attempt to blame the agency’s targeting scandal on low-level employees in Cincinnati, according to newly released emails.

“Cincinnati wasn’t publicly ‘thrown under the bus’ (but) instead was hit by a convoy of Mack trucks,” wrote Cindy Thomas, former director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Cincinnati, in a May 10, 2013 email to Lerner obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Thomas wrote the email on the very day that the IRS targeting scandal broke when Lerner, a senior agency official based in Washington, D.C., admitted that her exempt organizations division engaged in improper targeting of conservative groups. Lerner initially claimed that the agency’s Cincinatti office was solely responsible for the practice. The New York Times went to bat for the administration, characterizing the Cincinatti office as a “backwater” filled with “low-level employees.”

But Thomas wasn’t having it.

“As you can imagine, employees and managers (in the Cincinnati tax-exempt division) are furious,” Thomas wrote to Lerner.

Well, it’s no fun being the first-line scapegoats.