Maximus,
If Obama didn’t authorize it or even know about it, who do you think did? Was it someone else in his administration?
Highly unlikely. No one else in his administration who would be likely to do so would have any authority upon which the IRS would act on. Who would make that call? The Secretary of State? The Secretary of the Treasury? His campaign manager? His press secretary? There is simply no way at all that a call like that gets made without some sort of paper/email trail, none of which has materialized to that effect.
What would you do if you were a mid or low-level IRS employee who was just told by someone claiming to represent the administration’s wishes to dig deeper into Tea Party groups? Wouldn’t you report it to someone else in the IRS? Of course. You might ask around, you might report it, you might look deeper into who it was who told you to do this in the first place, since it’s basically an action that would put your career at risk. But whatever you did, there would be a trail of some sort, and the fact that it’s now public would be an opportunity to step up, save your job and say, “I was acting at the behest of the President of the United States.”
And if someone in the administration went to the IRS head without Obama’s knowledge, that too would get exposed far earlier than it did. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the Bush-appointed head of the IRS would ask around a bit, at the very least, if someone from the Obama administration told him to essentially perform an action that would put his career in serious jeopardy. Just like I mentioned that he would be far more likely to blow the whistle on the whole thing if he knew Obama was behind such a request, he would also blow the whistle if ANYONE in his administration made the same request.
The simple theory is always the most likely, not this convoluted conspiracy to bury a minority element of the GOP.
The Tea Party is a group that, in a general sense, has railed against taxes of virtually any and all kinds. So of course the IRS is going to look a little deeper into their activities when they apply for tax-exempt status. The simple answer is that the IRS was simply doing its due diligence by looking further into the legitimacy of the tax-exempt status of a group that, generally speaking, has been against taxes from the word “go”.
THAT is what is going on here. Sure, it looks convenient, but guess who else wasn’t thrilled about the Tea Party? The old-school, entrenched Republicans who stood to lose from their upward trajectory as well. It’s no secret that the GOP was completely out of touch with reality when it came to Romney’s chances of winning the election; many of the top wizards were shocked that he lost and lost so decisively. It isn’t out of the realm of likelihood at all that perhaps if anyone ordered this investigation it was people within the GOP who were against the Tea Party faction and blindly assumed that they could win without their added support or that their added support brought unwanted attention to the GOP at a critical time.
There’s nothing conspiratorial about that either, at least not to the extent that your theory goes. I think it’s FAR more likely that a party that made some pretty colossal mistakes down the stretch and has already shown to be less-than thrilled with the Tea Party minority within its ranks simply blew this one as well, and that’s assuming that there was a political motivation at all. It’s a far more plausible scenario than someone or some group within Obama’s administration going behind the President’s back and ordering the IRS to conduct an unethical investigation under the false pretense that the President is backing it. It’s even less plausible that the President himself was directly or knowingly behind it. It IS plausible that certain people within the IRS simply looked further into the tax status of groups that have publicly and vocally expressed opposition to taxes and the IRS in specific.