that says tea party. that s a shorter way to do it. it s like profiling. why don t i look at the ones that say patriot. that s right wing by current nomenclature. i can shorten my time in getting the job done. is that what happened? as you understand it? not exactly. what happens is, there is a river of applications flowing into the cincinnati office. between 60,000 and 70,000 a year. the irs has about 150 to 200 employees there. and they have to categorize the work. the less complicated work goes to employees with less experience. the more complex stuff goes to employees with greater experience. and they have to categorize it. there s some 370 pages of irs a regulations that these people need to be familiar with. and so it really is a huge task to try and get explain cut to the chase here. why would they look for patriot or look for tar party in the
here. the transparency. yes. that s why he should have been more aggressive a few weeks ago. line, i understand. we all know how this works. i m sure that there were echoes of this thing rattling around from the irs like like noise from a barrel somewhere during the fall campaign. they didn t want this somebody didn t want this coming out. even maybe the irs people were smart enough politically to say, let s not put this out now. i m not blaming the white house for that. okay. things happen during the midst of a campaign in an administration that administrations don t want to have get out. okay? that s happened from the beginning of time. but if you re president, what you do after you ve won is you say, i was shocked i m shocked. yeah. i m shocked to find that out. i m going to get rid of okay. the only thing is, i don t believe i m a little different than you. i don t see, steve, how anybody in the white house would have the brass to call up somebody in the irs in
the irs one of its top officials has gone silent. lois lerner, the irs executive who first went public with the agency s inappropriate activity was called to testify before the congress today but chose instead, she did, to plead the fifth amendment. let s listen to her explanation. i have not done anything wrong. i have not broken any laws. i have not violated any irs rules or regulations, and i have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee. and while i would very much like to answer the committee s questions today, i ve been advised by my counsel to assert my constitutional right not to testify or answer questions related to the subject matter of this hearing. well, lerner went under fire, of course, for that decision and was called out by representative trey gowdy of south carolina for refusing to answer any questions, which she did today. mr. cummings just said we should run this like a
clean house and fire everybody who was tangentially involved in this, knew about it. it s too late now. now, that s ultimately going to happen. but i suspect it s going to happen after there s been a fair amount of political damage done to the administration. you know, i like a lot of what obama s trying to do. i hope he gets a big immigration bill that really works. i think the health care thing has got to work. there s a lot of things that are important to this country regardless of what happens here on this story. i got the ask the simple question myself all the time when i sit here at this desk. suppose it was the other way around. suppose w. was still president and they were picking off every progressive group and screwing them around on the tax policy. and the president was saying, i ll get to that. we learned a little more today. we heard a little more. they were dribbling out. i d say, wait a minute. these guys had something to do with it. i would immediately think guys aroun
the deficit is coming down. this could be a time for him to come into bloom. and to really fight for things important like immigration reform. instead, we re playing defense instead of offense. he should have been on offense. it s so easy, i got to say i wonder. i just wonder. howard fineman, thank you. steve schmidt. great to have your strategic thinks. what happened in the cincinnati irs? we re going into the bowels of that office and talk about what happened to screw that up. who directed those workers to target their enemies? what happened? we ve got really good reporters coming up. also experts who ran that lonely irs outpost that has given us so much trouble. also, oklahoma is in great need after being hit by monday s ef-5 tornado. president obama will travel there this sunday to get a firsthand look at the tornado damage. and you may have worried it would come to this. look, i made some big mistakes and i know i let a lot of people down. i ve also learned some tough lesson