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@Mike: The IRS lost $2 million in court. Is that what “overzealous” means to you? It strikes me as an odd turn of the phrase. It’s weird also to juxtapose saying that there was “overzealous” behavior with declaring it “fake news.” One statement admits that something is there, the other statement denies it. Claiming both things at once seems to require a bit of chutzpah.
I note that your the Newsweek article was written long before the judgement I pointed out and hasn’t been updated recently that I can see. It’s from 2017 (10/10/17 at 12:23 PM EDT) though perhaps they’ve written other stories since then?
When we get to the heart of it, Newsweek’s Neil H. Buchanan claims: “As tax professor Philip Hackney points out, the non-scandal was always a two-part story: (1) the IRS targeted right-wing groups for extra scrutiny, and (2) the Obama Administration had ordered them to do so.”
So which part is the lie? Well, not the first part, Neil admits:
“What we learned in 2013 is that the unit within the IRS that reviews 501(c)(4) applications had been using the names of organizations as an initial filter to determine who was likely to be engaged in impermissibly pervasive political activity.”
To be more precise, he agrees that the actions occurred, but believes there is some other motive for the actions. Too bad he does not appear to be aware of the responses FOIA requests that show more about what they were trying to get. E.G. they requested donor names why, again?
https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/JW1559-003827.pdf
Neil more directly disputes the second part, though:
“We never had any proof that the second part was true.”
Thing is, there are tons of docs obtained from FOIA, which the article doesn’t even mention:
Neil H. Buchanan simply doesn’t bother to address any of those docs. The article references a TIGTA report, but doesn’t appear to link to it, nor does it seem to do anything but offer conclusions allegedly based on said report without seeming to do so much as quote material parts thereof.
Heck, the “Dorf on Law” blog Newsweek links to writes this:
“No one has ever claimed that the IRS employees did nothing wrong. That was all covered in the TIGTA report, and the IRS’s leadership had already ended the practice before the report was issued.”
This is pretty much the opposite of what Newsweek itself claims! Given their willingness to cite sources that directly contradict their own article and apparent ignorance of the docs revealed by FOIA, it’s hard to take their assertions that they’ve seen no evidence as anything but a statement of their own ignorance.
Moreover, that bizarre excuse from Dorf strikes me as being like a man who argues that he should go free because he stopped beating his wife before the cops showed up. Did no one notice that it’s also an admission of guilt?
Is this part of that one-sided dishonesty Neil wrote about?
“I recently wrote about “one-sided dishonesty” in American politics. My claim was that Democrats are occasionally dishonest in the old-fashioned political sense, shading the truth and sometimes getting caught, whereas Republicans have applied the principles of mass production to the propagation of lies.”
A statement like this makes it hard to see the article as some unbiased review of the facts, and this also impeaches any pretense of impartiality for Neil’s own judgement of the motives regarding part one.
Is this what “fake news” means now? That we have no evidence except for the part where they admitted to the practice and paid millions of dollars in settlements?
Because it’s kind of a weird definition and, like a certain Alice, I’m going to have to complain if these words can really mean all of these things at the same time.
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