FBI Finally Contacts Tea Party Groups Targeted by IRS

Why, it seems like it was about
seven scandals ago when last we heard about the IRS targeting Tea
Party nonprofit groups for extra-special possibly politically
motivated scrutiny. While I’m sure some people figured it was all
water under the bridge by now, the FBI has finally gotten around to
actually contacting people at these groups for their investigation.
The Washington Times has heard from a lawyer
representing some of them. However, there’s now a new cause for
concern: The DOJ lawyer overseeing the investigation is a donor to
President Barack Obama. That certainly makes things a
bit awkward:

The progress was revealed a day after The Times reported that
the Justice Department lawyer who is leading the investigation into
the IRS, Barbara Kay Bosserman, has donated more than $6,000 to
President Obama’s presidential campaigns — a move that, for many
Republicans, has called into question the entire investigation.

“They say the fox isn’t good to guard the henhouse; the fox is
probably not good to investigate the henhouse, either,” said Sen.
Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican. “I think these investigations need
to be done by independent people outside of the
administration.”

Mr. Holder ordered an FBI investigation in the days immediately
after the internal auditor of the IRS revealed that the agency had
been inappropriately targeting tea party groups for intrusive
scrutiny and wrongly delayed the approval of hundreds of
conservative groups’ applications for tax-exempt status.

Little has been heard about the progress of the investigation in
the eight months since, and House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa began his own investigation into
the FBI’s efforts.

Given the nature of government, I do have to wonder if there’s a
major DOJ attorney capable of leading the investigation who
hasn’t made donations to major political figures (imagine
who would be complaining if she had donated to Mitt Romney). Not
terribly long after the scandal broke, it appeared that the
executive branch was
treating the matter seriously and acknowledged that what
happened was absolutely unacceptable. But then at a press
conference later White House spokesman Jay Carney derided the
scandal as
“phony” partisan outrage. It was a bizarre approach, given that
partisanship is arguably the source of the scandal in the first
place. By any reasonable definition, this is a partisan
scandal.