NBC reports on IRS scandal - ‘the decisions were made in Washington’

This morning, NBC News ran a lengthy piece on the IRS scandal as part of its "Open Channel" blog. Most of the article was a rundown of information we've already seen on a thousand conservative websites - which we can assume means it was all completely new to anyone who gets their news from NBC.

In all seriousness, the mere fact that NBC is running an article like this is a good indicator of the both the growing severity and far reaching implications of the targeted audit fiasco. Normally, NBC would just be running cover for the administration. That they've been forced to report honestly on the matter means it's too big for them to hide. It's also an omen that suggests things are going to get worse. Otherwise, they'd ignore the scandal altogether in an effort to let it die. While most of it was a simple summation, there was one tidbit in their report may give us some indication where the overall investigation is headed. Buried in the middle of the piece is the following:

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'Decisions ... made in Washington' Cleta Mitchell, another attorney representing conservative groups that allege they were targeted, said an IRS agent in Cincinnati told her a “task force” IRS office in Washington, D.C., was making the decisions about the processing of applications, and that she subsequently dealt with IRS representatives there. “(The IRS agent in Cincinnati) told me that in fact the case would be transferred to a special task force out of Washington, and that he was told – he was the originally assigned agent – that he wasn't allowed to make decisions, the decisions were all going to be made in Washington,” Mitchell said. “I know that this process was going on in Washington because I've dealt with those people.”

This is the first we've heard of someone within the IRS blowing the whistle on their Washington superiors. If decision-making authority over Tea Party audits was removed from the regional Cincinnati offices and was transferred directly to a D.C. task force, that's huge news. Not only does it mean that administration officials in D.C. were involved, it also means the admin created the line about "low-level rogue agents" in an effort to make patsies out of agents within the Ohio offices. It also suggests that those agents would know exactly who was behind the effort - at least one or two steps up the IRS "chain of command." The agent referred to in the NBC piece is small potatoes, and may or may not have done anything legally wrong. The House Oversight Committee should find out who they are, give them immunity, and get them in front of Darrel Issa - immediately.