Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) wasted enormous congressional resources over the last 18 months trying to inflate the IRS "scandal" into a mountain. The release Tuesday of his final, petulant report on the affair marks what may be its final decline into a mouse.
The bottom line: Contrary to his assertions in countless appearances on Fox News, there's no evidence that the Obama White House directed -- or indeed was involved in any way -- in the supposed targeting of conservative nonprofit groups for special scrutiny by the IRS. There's no evidence that "tea party" groups were exclusively targeted, as opposed to tax-exempt "social welfare" organizations from across the political spectrum.
The evidence set forth in the report, which was issued by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's GOP majority without sharing it first with the Democratic minority, instead depicts an IRS struggling to apply complicated rules for nonprofits engaging in political activity, all without guidance from Congress.
Issa launched his investigation last spring with the charge that the IRS had screened c-4 applications for words such as "tea party" in their names in an effort to deprive conservative organizations of a tax exemption.
Of course that turned out to be bullshit as the report reveals that the IRS also applied scrutiny to various liberal groups seeking the c-4 exemption as one of the keywords they were looking for was "progressive."
In fact the ONLY group applying for the exemption, who did not receive it, was a group called Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office.
So in other words there was a wild goose and Darrell Issa spent millions of taxpayer money to chase it around for a year and a half.
And let's not forget that Issa wasted similar amounts of taxpayer money in his "Fast and Furious" and Benghazi investigations.
God what a tool.
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