WASHINGTON – The Internal Revenue Serviced scandal today spread further within the White House and closer to President Obama.
White House spokesman Jay Carney today disclosed that Obama’s chief of staff, Dennis McDonough, and other top White House officials had advance warning that the IRS was targeting conservative groups.
But he insisted McDonough and the other White House officials purposely kept Obama out of the loop.
McDonough “rightly chose not to take action” to inform Obama, Carney told reporters at the daily White House briefing.
“That’s what any White House should do,” he said. “The cardinal rule here is you do not intervene in an independent investigation … particularly when the final conclusions have not been releases.”
McDonough joins a growing list of White House officials who knew about the Treasury inspector general’s investigation into the IRS wrongly targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny of their tax-exempt status.
Previously, it surfaced that White House Chief Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler learned of the IG probe on April 22, three weeks before President Obama claims he learned of it from news reports.