WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service scandal yesterday reached all the way to the door of the Oval Office.
President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and other top Obama aides got an early warning last month that the IRS was targeting conservative groups, White House spokesman Jay Carney revealed.
McDonough is as close as you can get to Obama without touching the president.
Carney nevertheless maintained that McDonough and other top White House officials intentionally kept Obama in the dark about IRS abuses.
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 amid intense questioning from reporters. “The cardinal rule here is you do not intervene in an independent investigation . . . particularly when the final conclusions have not been released.”
Critics scoffed at the claim that Obama didn’t know.
“It’s hard to believe the president didn’t know about it,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee that is investigating the IRS abuses.
Add McDonough’s name to a growing list of White House heavyweights told in advance of the Treasury Department inspector general’s investigation that last week blew the lid off IRS targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny of their tax-exempt status.
The inspector general found that the IRS wrongly flagged tax-exempt applications that included the names “Tea Party,” “patriots,” “9/12 Project,” “government spending” and “government debt.”
Carney last week gave only a fuzzy account of who in the White House knew about the IG probe. He said only that some staff in the White House counsel’s office knew about it.
It turned out that White House chief counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was briefed about the IG’s explosive findings April 24, about three weeks before President Obama claims he learned of it from news reports.
Tea Party groups have been complaining about IRS harassment for nearly two years.
Peppered by reporters’ sharp questions, Carney insisted that Obama responded appropriately by not taking action until now.
“In response to those accusations there was an IG audit launched . . . and the findings are what we now know and the president’s response to those findings could not be more clear,” he said. “People need to be held responsible and we need to make sure this activity doesn’t happen again — because it is very important that the American people believe that the IRS applies our tax laws fairly and neutrally.
“I mean, nobody’s been more outraged by the reported conduct here than the president of the United States,” said Carney.
Meanwhile Senate investigators also are searching for links between the White House and the IRS misconduct.