The scandals buzzing about Barack Obama are nearing their origins. The proof of this was seen this past weekend when the heavyweights were sent out to distract America from the truth.
“There’s been no suggestion — the independent, the prosecutor looked at this, excuse me, the inspector general said there was no politics involved in this,” Plouffe said. “No one has indicated at all that the White House is involved. The IRS director was appointed under President [George W.] Bush, served under both presidents, attested…. So this was not a political pursuit.”
……..
ROVE: Baloney. Baloney.
PLOUFFE: Not baloney, Karl.
ROVE: If it was not political then why are only conservative groups being targeted?
PLOUFFE: There were liberal groups targeted.
ROVE: Oh really? Name one. Name one. But what conservative, what liberal group had Tea Party or patriot in its name that it was targeted? Not a single liberal group has appeared to say…
PLOUFFE: You’re taking license here, Karl.
ROVE: No, I’m not. I am not at all.
PLOUFFE: This was not an effort driven by the White House. It would be the dumbest political effort of all time. OK? This was IRS people —
ROVE: I didn’t suggest it was being driven by the White House. But I do think when the President—
PLOUFFE: So you think people sitting in the Cincinnati office decided —Rove finished up by blaming the president and said those at the top in the Obama administration should have done a better job in policing the IRS.
“No, no, I think people sitting in Cincinnati, Laguna Nigel, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., listened to Sen. Max Baucus, Sen. Chuck Schumer, President Obama,” Rove added. “When President Obama goes out in 2008, 2010 and calls these groups, quote, ‘a threat to democracy,’ he’s blowing the dog whistle.”
“We have a culture at the IRS that has been going after conservative groups,” Rove added. “And this administration has done an ineffective job of managing it. When this issue came up in 2010, if the administration was serious about it, President Obama should have picked up the phone and called Geithner at Treasury and said, ‘You better get your secretary for Treasury or the undersecretary to check into this because this is corrosive of our democracy to have the IRS targeting conservative groups.’”
Valerie Jarrett: Sh*t happens
“In any given day, our administration has about 2 million employees, and things happen,” Jarrett tells the Boston Globe. “We put in process procedures to make sure if there has been any wrongdoing, there will be appropriate consequences, and we will move on.”
Jarrett just wants to move on from the scandals. And, she says, the American people want these scandals not to serve as a distraction.
“We have every confidence that people within the White House have behaved appropriately,” Jarrett says. “People all around the country are counting on us not to get distracted or bogged down by this.”
She adds, “I think everybody knows he’s doing his best. … Our focus is moving the country forward.”
The scandals, the Boston Globe summarizes, are “the singling out of the groups by the IRS, and … the Department of Justice’s combing through phone records of journalists at the Associated Press.” On the IRS scandal, the president of the United States claims to have found out about the targeting of conservatives through press reports–despite the fact that the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, knew about it for weeks prior.
Remember that Obama secret meeting with the liberal press? It’s bearing fruit. The Obama sycophants are in full bloom:
NY Times Editor Jill Abramson:
BOB SCHIEFFER: It’s also about nobody seems to know anything. Officials at the White House didn’t know about the IRS and the troubles they were having. Who knows who knew what was going on in Benghazi when they were trying to draw up these things. And then we get to this leak investigation. It seems to me this might go beyond the Justice Department.
JILL ABRAMSON: It’s very easy to lump all of these issues together. I know that they absorb journalists inside of Washington. But I’m not sure how much any of these particular issues has absorbed the American public who I think are hoping against hope that the economy is at last showing some strength and maybe giving the President some credit for the fact that there are some hopeful signs and who are concerned about things like the continued soaring costs of health care, which the Times had on the front page today.
SCHIEFFER: But you don’t, you wouldn’t say that you think it’s not something we ought to be concerned about?
ABRAMSON: No, I mean, clearly I’m very concerned about the leak cases, which is why I came here to talk to you this morning. But I’m just not sure, you know, they come together and create, you know — quote, unquote — “an atmosphere of scandal.”
BOB WOODWARD: No, that’s absolutely true. But we need facts. We need evidence…
And of course, Candy Crowley
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.
And he called the administration’s top spokesman a liar.
Last month the IRS said it had identified two “rogue agents” in the department’s Cincinnati office who were overly aggressive in the handling of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status. Issa said his committee has found otherwise.
“As late as last week the administration’s still trying to say there’s a few rogue agents in Cincinnati when in fact the indication is they were directly being ordered from Washington,” Issa told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Issa’s committee provided CNN partial transcripts of its interviews with Cincinnati IRS agents. Crowley read from one transcript in which an investigator asked an agent if directions for extra Tea Party scrutiny had emanated from Washington. “I believe so,” the agent said.
Crowley was not impressed. “It’s totally not definitive,” she said of the excerpt.
Prepare to be inundated with this sort of tripe with both greater frequency and urgency.