WASHINGTON DC – Senator Ted Cruz says the IRS scandal “harkens back to the days of Richard Nixon,” and proves that President Obama keeps an “enemies list.”

“This is part of a distressing pattern of the Obama administration of being less than honest with the American people and using the machinery of government to target their political opponents,” Cruz tells National Review in an interview.

“It harkens back to the days of Richard Nixon and maintaining a political enemies list and treating the federal government as a tool to exact the administration’s retribution,” he adds.

“I believe the president owes an accounting to the American people,” the senator says, “when senior administration officials speak directly to the American people and utter flat-out falsehoods, as Jay Carney did when he said the State Department had never edited the talking points, when in fact ABC News has reported there were a dozen edits from the State Department of those talking points; or as the IRS did, when the head of the IRS testified before Congress that there was no targeting of political appointees when senior officials at the IRS knew for a fact they had been doing precisely that – targeting conservative groups, targeting tea-party groups, targeting Jewish groups, targeting pro-Israel groups, engaging in conduct that is completely inappropriate for an agency of the federal government.” (read more)

IRS DC INVOLVEMENT – Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea party-affiliated groups.

IRS employees in Cincinnati also told conservatives seeking the status of “social welfare” groups that a task force in Washington was overseeing their applications, according to interviews with the activists.

Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, told reporters on Friday the “absolutely inappropriate” actions were undertaken by “front-line people” working in Cincinnati to target groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names.

In one instance, however, Ron Bell, an IRS employee, informed an attorney representing a conservative group focused on voter fraud that the application was under review in Washington. On several other occasions, IRS officials in D.C. and California sent detailed questionaires to conservative groups asking more than a dozen questions about their voter outreach and other activities, according to the documents.

“For the IRS to say it was some low-level group in Cincinnati is simply false,” said Cleta Mitchell, a partner in the law firmFoley & Lardner LLP who sought to communicate with IRS headquarters about the delay in granting tax-exempt status to True the Vote.  (read more)