And are upset that they are being blamed for doing what they were told to do
(UK Daily Mail) Interviews with IRS employees have established that the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service was engaged in targeting tea party groups and other conservative organizations for unfair levels of scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.
Rep. Darrel lssa, chairman of powerful House Committee of Oversight and Government Reform, made that startling announcement on CNN Sunday morning.
‘As late as last week,’ he said, ‘the [Obama] administration was still trying to say the [IRS targeting scandal] was from a few rogue agents in Cincinnati, when in fact the indication is that they were directly being ordered from Washington.’
How’d he come up with that statement?
A committee spokesman sent MailOnline partial transcripts of two interviews with unnamed IRS workers about the agency’s actions in early 2010, on whose testimony Issa based his bombshell statement.
One of those interviewees said it was ‘impossible’ for a few IRS agents to have orchestrated such widespread partisan targeting on their own.
‘Did [your supervisor] give you any indication of the need for the search [for tea party groups], any more context?’ one IRS witness was asked in a closed-door interview.
‘He told me that Washington, D.C., wanted some cases,’ came the reply.
The employee, who said he or she was evaluating 40 such applications for tax-exempt status from conservative organizations at the time, said ‘some went to Washington. D.C. … I sent seven.’
Cases were being requested from D.C.
Asked whether the problem ‘was originated in and contained in the Cincinnati office,’ as some Obama administration officials in Washington have claimed, the agent replied that ‘I still hear people saying we were low level employees, so we were lower than dirt, according to people in D.C. So, take it for what it is.’
‘They were basically throwing us underneath the bus.’
‘[W]e didn’t do anything wrong,’ the agent said, according to the partial transcript. ‘We followed directions based on other people telling us what to do.’
Sadly, these employees didn’t blow the whistle back when this started, but, then, most often low level employees are concerned about retaliation when they blow the whistle on upper levels, as well as worrying that no one at the upper levels will listen. The question for now is “will they blow the lid off this scandal?”
More at Scared Monkeys, The Gateway Pundit, protein wisdom, and Wake Up America (which has a partial transcript)
