A Planted Question

Many posts have examined the relationship between reporters and political figures.  It is common for officials to plant questions at events that journalists cover. (Sometimes they plant questions with the journalists themselves.)  At The Huffington Post, Jon Ward writes of an example involving the IRS scandal:

A senior IRS official, Lois G. Lerner, was speaking on a panel at an American Bar Association conference in a ballroom at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. She was asked a question by a member of the audience, and disclosed then that IRS agents had "used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title."

A few days ago, Kevin Williamson at National Review reported that the person who asked the question of Lerner, Celia Roady, was a tax lawyer who had served on IRS-formed advisory committees that dealt with issues of organizations applying for nonprofit status.

Williamson wrote that sources on Capitol Hill said the question was "planted" and that "the IRS has informally admitted as much."

On Friday, the acting commissioner of the IRS admitted publicly that the question was planted.
"I did talk to Lois about the possibility of ... did it make sense for us to start talking about this in public," Steven Miller, acting commissioner of the IRS, told the House Ways and Means Committee during sworn testimony.

Miller said he and Lerner discussed volunteering the information publicly "now that the [IRS inspector general's] report was finalized, now that we knew all the facts, now that we had responded in writing and everything was done."

"We talked about what would be said and how we might do it," Miller said of his conversation with Lerner.

At USA Today, Gregory Korte provides some background:

It was an unusual way to deliver bad news, even in a town known for its selective leaks, Friday night news dumps and wag-the-dog distractions.

The Internal Revenue Service, apparently determined to get out ahead of an inspector general report critical of its handling of tax exemptions for Tea Party groups, came up with a plan: Lois Lerner, the official responsible for the tax-exempt division, would publicly apologize in response to a question at the American Bar Association conference in Washington.

...
Communications professionals said it was a puzzling move that backfired and alienated members of Congress.

"It violates the golden rule of political crisis management — disclosing critical facts early," said Nu Wexler, a former Democratic Hill staffer and vice president of Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications.

Lerner "had an opportunity to explain the full story in the May 8th hearing, and she passed. Members of Congress don't like being misled, and that's why two key House Democrats are now calling for her resignation," Wexler said.

Migration, Religion, and a Changing America

The Census Bureau reports:

International migration is projected to surpass natural increase (births minus deaths) as the principal driver of U.S. population growth by the middle of this century, according to three new series of population projections released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. This scenario would mark the first time that natural increase was not the leading cause of population increase since at least 1850, when the census began collecting information about residents' country of birth. The shift in what drives U.S. population growth is projected to occur between 2027 and 2038, depending on the future level of international migration.

The Pew Research Center reports:

Over the past 20 years, the United States has granted permanent residency status to an average of about 1 million immigrants each year. These new “green card” recipients qualify for residency in a wide variety of ways – as family members of current U.S. residents, recipients of employment visas, refugees and asylum seekers, or winners of a visa lottery – and they include people from nearly every country in the world. But their geographic origins gradually have been shifting. U.S. government statistics show that a smaller percentage come from Europe and the Americas than did so 20 years ago, and a growing share now come from Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East-North Africa region.

With this geographic shift, it is likely that the religious makeup of legal immigrants also has been changing. The U.S. government, however, does not keep track of the religion of new permanent residents. As a result, the figures on religious affiliation in this report are estimates produced by combining government statistics on the birthplaces of new green card recipients over the period between 1992 and 2012 with the best available U.S. survey data on the religious self-identification of new immigrants from each major country of origin.

While Christians continue to make up a majority of legal immigrants to the U.S., the estimated share of new legal permanent residents who are Christian declined from 68% in 1992 to 61% in 2012. Over the same period, the estimated share of green card recipients who belong to religious minorities rose from approximately one-in-five (19%) to one-in-four (25%). This includes growing shares of Muslims (5% in 1992, 10% in 2012) and Hindus (3% in 1992, 7% in 2012). The share of Buddhists, however, is slightly smaller (7% in 1992, 6% in 2012), while the portion of legal immigrants who are religiously unaffiliated (atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular) has remained relatively stable, at about 14% per year.1
Unauthorized immigrants, by contrast, come primarily from Latin America and the Caribbean, and the overwhelming majority of them – an estimated 83% – are Christian. That share is slightly higher than the percentage of Christians in the U.S. population as a whole (estimated at just under 80% of U.S. residents of all ages, as of 2010).2

Did Black Turnout Exceed White Turnout in 2012?

Previous posts have discussed the composition of the 2012 electorate.  At the Pew Research Center, Paul Taylor and Mark Hugo Lopez write:

The Census Bureau made big news last week when it reported that the black voter turnout rate (66.2%) exceeded the white voter turnout rate (64.1%) for the first time ever in 2012. But a closer look at the numbers raises some intriguing questions.

It’s possible that the lines may have first crossed in 2008. But it’s also possible they may not have crossed at all.

Let’s start with the second scenario. It’s based on data that suggest that last year, blacks may have been more inclined than whites to report that they voted when in fact they didn’t. This is known as a “social desirability bias,” a familiar concern among survey researchers.

The Census Bureau bases its estimates of voter turnout on self-reports from a survey of a nationally representative sample of about 55,000 households. The survey is conducted in the two weeks after each federal election and is considered the best source of information on the demographics of the nation’s electorate. However, this self-report method typically produces a modest over-estimate of turnout, and 2012 was no exception. According to the Census Bureau’s estimates, 133 million Americans voted last year, but according to the official state-by-state tallies, just 129 million did.

Moreover, if you analyze the discrepancies by state, as the Pew Research Center has (download our Election Turnout Rates by State data in Excel), you find a pattern that casts some doubt on the Census Bureau’s announcement. It turns out that the phenomenon of over reporting tended to be most pronounced in states that have the highest share of blacks in their citizen-age electorate.

Political Abuse of the IRS: Excerpts from the 1976 Report

Previous posts have discussed the growing scandal at the IRS.  It has precedents.

In 1976, the Senate's Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities reported on abuse of the Internal Revenue Service. (Click here for the full report).  Excerpts are below.

Pages 53-54:

The IRS program that came to be used against the domestic dissidents of the 1960s was first used against Communists in the 1950s. As part of its COINTELPRO against the Communist Party, the FBI arranged for IRS investigations of Party members, and obtained their tax returns. In its efforts against the Communist Party, the FBI had unlimited access to tax returns: it never told the IRS why it wanted them, and IRS never attempted to find out. In 1961, responding to White House and congressional interest in right-wing organizations, the IRS began comprehensive investigations of right-wing groups to identify contributors and ascertain whether or not some of them were entitled to their tax exempt status.  Left-wing groups were later added, in an effort to avoid charges that such IRS activities were all aimed at one part of the political spectrum. Both right- and left-wing groups were selected for review and investigation because of their political activity and not because of any information that they had violated the tax laws.

While the IRS efforts begun in 1961 to investigate the political activities of tax exempt organizations were not as extensive as later programs in 1969-1973, they were a significant departure by'the IRS from normal enforcement criteria for investigating persons or groups on the basis of information indicating noncompliance. By directing tax audits at individuals and groups solely because of their political beliefs, the Ideological Organizations Audit Project (as the 1961 program was known) established a precedent for a far more elaborate program of targeting "dissidents." 

Page 94-95:

The Special Service Staff: IRS Targeting of Ideological Groups. In 1969, the IRS established a Special Service Staff to gather intelligence on a category of taxpayers defined essentially by political criteria. The SSS attempted to develop tax cases against the targeted taxpayers and initiated tax fraud investigations against some who would otherwise never have been investigated.

The SSS originated as a result of pressure from the permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and from President Nixon, acting through White House assistants Tom Charles Huston and Dr. Arthur Burns.According to the IRS Commissioner's memorandum, Dr. Burns expressed to him the President's concern 

        over the fact that tax-exempt funds may be supporting activist groups engaged in stimulating riots both on the campus and within our inner cities.

The administration did not supply any facts to support the assertion that such groups were violating tax laws.

After the SSS was established, the FBI and the Justice Department's Interdivisional Information Unit (IDIU) became its largest sources of names. An Assistant IRS Commissioner requested the FBI to provide information regarding "various organizations of predominantly dissident or extremist nature and/or people prominently identified within those organizations."  The FBI agreed, believing, as one intelligence official put it, that SSS would "deal a blow" to "dissident elements." 

Among the material received by SSS from the FBI was a list of 2,300 organizations categorized as "Old Left," "New Left," and "Right Wing." The SSS also received about 10,000 names on IDIU computer printouts. SSS opened files on all these taxpayers, many of whom were later subjected to tax audits and some to tax fraud investigations. There is no reason to believe that the names listed by the FBI or the IDIU were selected on the basis of any probable noncompliance with the tax laws. Rather, these groups and individuals were targeted because of their political and ideological beliefs and activities. 

A Very Bad Day for the President

What's the one thing that the Obama administration could do that would alienate the entire press corps?  Brendan Sasso and Jordy Yager write at The Hill:

Federal prosecutors secretly obtained two months' worth of telephone records of Associated Press journalists in what the news agency described Monday as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.”

The Justice Department notified the AP on Friday that it had subpoenaed the records, which included more than 20 office, cellphone and home phone lines. The lines include the general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery.

Juliet Eilperin and Zachary Goldfarb write at The Washington Post:

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
...
Moreover, details of the IRS’s efforts to target conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency in May 2012, far earlier than has been disclosed, according to Republican congressional aides briefed by the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration ­(TIGTA) on the details of their reviews.

 Pro Publica discloses:

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year.

The IRS did not respond to requests Monday following up about that release, and whether it had determined how the applications were sent to ProPublica.

In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

The Washington Post gives the president four Pinocchios for his statement on Benghazi:

During the campaign, the president could just get away with claiming he said “act of terror,” since he did use those words — though not in the way he often claimed. It seemed like a bit of after-the-fact spin, but those were his actual words — to the surprise of Mitt Romney in the debate.

But the president’s claim that he said “act of terrorism” is taking revisionist history too far, given that he repeatedly refused to commit to that phrase when asked directly by reporters in the weeks after the attack. He appears to have gone out of his way to avoid saying it was a terrorist attack, so he has little standing to make that claim now.

Indeed, the initial unedited talking points did not call it an act of terrorism. Instead of pretending the right words were uttered, it would be far better to acknowledge that he was echoing what the intelligence community believed at the time--and that the administration’s phrasing could have been clearer and more forthright from the start.

Targeting Criteria

ABC News has released a portion of the IRS Inspector General's report on the agency's targeting of political groups.  One table lists the evolving criteria for flagging requests:

Lobbyists and Think Tanks

Previous posts have discussed the links between think tanks and economic interests. At The New Republic, Brooke Williams and Ken Silverstein write:

Washington lobbyists are required by law to disclose who they work for, how much they get paid and what issues they advocate for. But they’re not obliged to mention it when they do other work—like, say, appear as a policy expert at a think-tank event. [Ian] Brzezinski’s Atlantic Council bio, for instance, says he “leads the Brzezinski Group, which provides strategic insight and advice to government and commercial clients,” but it doesn’t disclose that he’s a registered lobbyist or identify his clients. The Rice University conference agenda listed Brzezinski as a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council without mentioning that he was lobbying for the company that wanted to build the project—or that another panelist was paying him. (Reached by phone, Brzezinski said he was unavailable and referred questions to the Atlantic Council; the Council did not return phone calls or emails requesting comment.)

Brzezinski’s role is hardly anomalous. We found at least 49 people who have simultaneously worked as lobbyists for outside entities while serving as top staff, directors or trustees of 20 of the 25 most influential think tanks in the United States, as ranked by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.