The establishment press's general refusal to cover clearly newsworthy developments in the Obama administration scandal involving the targeting of conservative, tea party, prolife and other groups by the Internal Revenue Service has been so negligent and blatant that several leading conservatives, including the MRC's Brent Bozell and talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, called it out in an open letter earlier this week.
Consistent with the rest of their colleagues, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, appears to have had no substantive story on the scandal since July 18 -- and that one was about primarily Democrats beating the false meme that progressive groups were supposedly targeted similarly. The AP's negligence extends to the tax agency's shocking level of non-cooperation with House Ways & Means Committee investigators, as will be seen after the jump.
Yesterday, committee Chairman Dave Camp issued a press release, coming within inches of directly accusing the agency of obstruction of justice (HT Rare via TaxProf):
A Google News search at 4:30 p.m. on Camp's full name in quotes reveals that only the Hill has any coverage of the IRS's failure to comply with document requests -- and that report by Bernie Becker is quite sugar-coated:
Camp, Levin press IRS for more documents
Top tax writers in the House are pressing the IRS over what they’re calling the slow delivery of documents on the current targeting controversy.
Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) and the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Sandy Levin, noted in a Wednesday letter that the committee had received about 13,000 pages of documents for its investigation, more than two months after its first request.
The IRS had said back in June that it had collected some 65 million pages worth of documents, leading Camp and Levin to ask Wednesday what the agency was doing to expedite the committee’s request.
“We are concerned that, at this rate, the full production will take months,” Camp and Levin wrote to Danny Werfel, the interim IRS leader.
Becker acts as if there's some legitimate debate as to whether 13,000 documents of 65 million supplied in two months is "slow." At that rate, it will take 416 years for the IRS to turn everything over.
If the George W. Bush administration had exhibited similar lack of speed during the Joe Wilson-Scooter Libby non-scandal I prefer to call Nadagate, you can be assured that the establishment press would have been all over it. But now, it's crickets, and as Bozell, Limbaugh and others asserted in their letter, it's disgraceful.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
