The Smoking Gun?

Jeff Dunetz has the story of the IRS, Austan Goolsbee, and the Koch Brothers:

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) has agreed to hand over 2,500 documents that could show the IRS passed along confidential taxpayer data to the White House. These documents were collected by TIGTA, as part of an an investigation into whether the IRS was improperly giving information to the White House.

While the TIGTA investigated whether the IRS leaked confidential taxpayer data to the White House, but never released a report. But now they will turn the documents it collected to the group Cause of Action.

The TIGTA investigation began when Austan Goolsbee, the former chair of the White House’s Counsel of Economic Advisers, implied that Koch Industries doesn’t pay any corporate income tax. But Goolsbee would not legally have access to that information.

That’s a slender thread upon which to hang an entire scandal, but it’s the kind of thread which could unravel an Administration, if you keep pulling on it enough.