WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s chief of staff was told an investigation had found that Internal Revenue Service employees improperly scrutinized Tea Party and small-government advocacy groups seeking tax-exempt status before the report was made public, White House press secretary Jay Carney said.
Obama wasn’t informed of the probe at the time, Carney said. Chief of staff Denis Mc-Donough was told by White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler about the inspector general’s audit and the likely findings after Ruemmler was briefed on it on April 24, he said. The president said he learned of the audit when the likely findings were first made public May 10.
“We knew of the subject of the investigation, and we knew the nature of some of the potential findings,” Carney said. “But we did not have a copy of the draft report, we did not know the details, the scope, or the motivation surrounding misconduct, and we did not know who was responsible.”
The decision to keep the president in the dark underscores the White House’s cautious legal approach to controversies, as well as an apparent desire by top advisers to distance Obama from problems threatening his administration.
Carney defended the decision to keep the president out of the loop on the IRS audit, saying Obama was comfortable with the fact that “some matters are not appropriate to convey to him, and this is one of them.”
Republicans, however, are accusing the president of being unaware of important happenings in the government he oversees.
“It seems to be the answer of the administration whenever they’re caught doing something they shouldn’t be doing is, ‘I didn’t know about it,’” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told CBS News. “And it causes me to wonder whether they believe willful ignorance is a defense when it’s your job to know.”
The information given to Ruemmler was “very top line,” and it was she who decided not to notify Obama, Carney said. It’s a “cardinal rule” that the White House or Treasury Department not intervene or appear to intervene in an independent investigation, he said.
Carney said Ruemmler was informed by the Treasury Department’s General Counsel’s office April 24 that the inspector general for tax administration was completing a report that found that IRS employees had improperly scrutinized political organizations seeking tax-exempt status by searching their applications for words such as “Tea Party” and “patriot.”
The previous week, on April 16, Ruemmler had learned more generally that there were a number of inspector general reports being finalized and that an IRS investigation was among those reports, Carney said.
Carney’s comments Monday are at odds with what he told reporters last week, when he said the White House counsel “only found out about the review being conducted and coming to conclusion by the inspector general.”
Carney insisted the two statements aren’t in conflict and that Monday he just provided additional information.
The White House counsel “was told, broadly, that there’s an inspector general audit reaching its conclusion,” he said. “The potential findings are that some people improperly targeted conservative organizations in their applications for tax-exempt status, but there was no specificity about who, about motivation, certainly no names of involvement, and it was not concluded.”
Four congressional committees and the Justice Department are investigating the inspector general’s findings that the IRS, beginning in 2010, targeted for extra review anti-tax Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status.
Obama forced out the acting IRS commissioner, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has ordered agency officials to deliver within 30 days a plan to correct any “systemic” shortcomings.
Hearings are scheduled for this week, including one by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee with testimony from Douglas Shulman, an appointee by President George W. Bush who was the IRS commissioner from March 2008 to November 2012.
The IRS actions have drawn criticism from Democrats as well as Republicans. The Senate Finance Committee directed the IRS to identify the agency employees and managers who devised or approved the guidelines for identifying “potential political cases” by targeting groups seeking tax-exempt status.
The panel asked for a list of “all words or phrases” that were used to flag organizations for special scrutiny, according to a letter from thepanel’s chairman, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, and its top Republican, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, that was released by the committee.
It also asked whether the IRS audited donors or other individual taxpayers associated with those organizations.
Carney said Ruemmler told senior staff about the report’s findings, though he declined to say who the officials were, other than McDonough. He said there was communication between the counsel’s office, McDonough’s office and the Treasury Department about the potential findings.
The IRS matter is one of three controversies that have consumed the White House over the past week. In each instance, officials have tried to put distance between the president and questionable actions by people within his administration.
As with the IRS investigation, the White House said Obama learned only from news reporters that the Justice Department had subpoenaed phone records from journalists at The Associated Press as part of a leaks investigation. And faced with new questions about the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, Obama’s advisers have pinned responsibility on the CIA for crafting talking points that downplayed the possibility of terrorism, despite the fact that the White House was a part of the process.
Information for this article was contributed by Julianna Goldman, Roger Runningen, Hans Nichols and James Rowley of Bloomberg News; and by Charles Babington, Julie Pace, Stephen Ohlemacher, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Jim Kuhnhenn and Monika Mathur of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 05/21/2013