Rep. Cummings: IRS "Case Solved. Move on"

[n david]

With all the furor over the explosive revelations that the NSA was conducting unprecedented domestic surveillance of phone and internet users, you may have missed this.

Rep. Elijah Cummings went on the talk shows yesterday saying the IRS issue is solved and he feels Congress should wrap it up and move on. According to Cummings, the culprit is none other than a conservative Republican IRS Manager and not the White House.

A self-described conservative Republican who is a manager in the Internal Revenue Service office that targeted tea party groups told investigators that he, not the White House, set the review in motion, the top Democrat on the House watchdog committee said Sunday.

"He is a conservative Republican working for the IRS. I think this interview and these statements go a long way to what's showing that the White House was not involved in this," Cummings said.

Fortunately, Rep. Darrell Issa is not convinced and will not be ending his committee's hearings.

"The American public wants to know why targeting occurred and who was involved," said oversight chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in statement released Sunday. "The testimony excerpts Ranking Member Cummings revealed today did not provide anything enlightening or contradict other witness accounts. The only thing Ranking Member Cummings left clear in his comments today is that if it were up to him the investigation would be closed."

I'm calling this a steamy pile. The reason is because it flies in the face of several facts. First, remember the White House was caught lying about it to begin with. The first version of the story was that it was "just a couple rogue employees in the Cincinnati office" who did this. Then after a few hearings, we have emails which prove that to be a lie; that there were several offices in a few different states that were involved, including the DC office.

Then we were told that they were aware until the day it came out; when in fact, the WH Counsel, Chief of Staff and senior staffers knew about it well before that time. There's also contradictions from Shulman, Lerner and other administration officials as to when the IRS officials learned of the scandal.

So this "partial transcript" which Cummings used yesterday is suspect at best. He said he would release the partial transcript, but not the full transcript. Why not the full transcript? Is he doing what the WH and Democrats accused Republicans of doing with the Benghazi talking point emails and just releasing the parts that help his narrative? If the self-described conservative Republican manager is the initiator, release the full transcript.

Not buying it.

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