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              US Official: White House Was Unaware of IRS Misdeeds

   by Michael Bowman

   A senior Obama administration official says the White House had no
   knowledge of misdeeds being committed by America's tax collecting
   agency - one of several scandals engulfing the administration.
   The Internal Revenue Service has admitted to singling out conservative
   political groups for heightened scrutiny in recent years.  The IRS is a
   politically-independent agency within the Treasury Department, which is
   headed by a member of the president's Cabinet.  And so the question
   arises: did the White House know of improper IRS behavior before an
   independent investigator's report was released earlier this month?
   White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer says no. "The first that the
   White House was made aware of it was from the Treasury Department a few
   weeks ago.  And not the details of what happened, not the results of
   the investigation, but that an independent investigation was about to
   conclude," he said.
   Speaking on CBS' Face the Nation program, Pfeiffer said the White House
   had a hands-off approach to the probe. "You have a cardinal rule, which
   is you do nothing to interfere with an independent investigation and
   you do nothing to offer the appearance of interfering in an
   investigation.  So we, I feel like we handled this the appropriate
   way," he said.
   White House assurances do not satisfy Republican Congressman Paul Ryan,
   who was Mitt Romney's running mate in last year's presidential contest.
   "What we do now know that, for roughly two years, the IRS was targeting
   Americans based on their political beliefs," he said. "So we are going
   to continue this investigation to get to the bottom of this: who knew
   [about the scandal]?  When did they know?  Why did they do this?  How
   high up in government did it go?"
   Speaking on the Fox News Sunday television program, Ryan dismissed last
   week's assertion by the IRS' former acting commissioner that the
   targeting of certain political groups constituted errors and "poor
   customer service".
   "People deserve a government they can trust, that is honest,
   impartial.  To try and suggest that this is just bureaucratic snafus
   [mistakes] - we already know that that is not true," he said.
   In addition to the IRS scandal, Congress has been probing the
   administration's actions during and after last year's attack on the
   U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans,
   including the ambassador, and whether the Justice Department acted
   properly in secretly seizing phone records form the Associated Press.
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References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/white-house-unaware-of-irs-misdeeds-us-official/1664109.html