Hot Air – by ED MORRISSEYThis is actually a follow-up to yesterday’s report on the pushback from “low-level employees” at the Cincinnati office of the IRS, but an important one. Reuters took a look through the transcripts of an interview with agent Elizabeth Hofacre, who named Carter Hull as an HQ-based attorney who helped craft the questions that harassed conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. While officials like Lois Lerner, Steve Miller, and Douglas Shulman claimed that no one in Washington knew what was going on in Cincinnati until 2011 at the earliest, a misaddressed e-mail from Hofacre inadvertently notified a number of DC officials a year earlier than previously admitted:
A misfired email from a U.S. Internal Revenue Service employee in Cincinnati alerted a number of Washington IRS officials that extra scrutiny was being placed on conservative groups in July 2010, a year earlier than previously acknowledged, according to interviews with IRS workers by congressional investigators. …
The transcripts show that in July 2010, Elizabeth Hofacre, an IRS official in Cincinnati who was coordinating “emerging issues” for the agency’s tax-exempt unit, was corresponding with Washington-based IRS tax attorney Carter Hull.
In April 2010 Hofacre had been put in charge of handling tax-exempt status applications from conservative groups by her Cincinnati supervisor.
She was asked to summarize her initial findings in a spreadsheet and notify a small group of colleagues, including some staff in the Washington tax-exempt unit. However, she sent her email to a larger number of people in Washington by accident.
“Everybody in DC got it by mistake,” Hofacre said in the transcripts. She later clarified that she did not mean all officials but those in the IRS Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements unit.
Would none of those officials have alerted higher management after getting an e-mail like that by accident? That seems pretty unlikely, unless political targeting was so widespread as to keep it from being newsworthy. If that’s the case, then all of these officials have a lot more explaining to do either way. So will Shulman, who told Congress categorically in March 2012, more than a year and a half later, that no targeting was taking place when it now is apparent that IRS HQ knew full well it was.
Of course, there is one sure way to find out — subpoena everyone copied on Hofacre’s e-mail. Ask each of them if they found the content disturbing enough to notify their supervisors or managers. If they did, subpoena them and ask them what they did about it. Go high enough up the ladder and investigators will eventually get to Lois Lerner, Douglas Shulman, Steven Miller, and maybe even above them.