Rachel Maddow Reveals More Scandalous Details About IRS Tea Party Targeting

5/16/13 - Rachel Maddow tonight highlighted another potential problem in the growing IRS targeting scandal plaguing the Obama administration this week. The tax-collecting agency provided private tax information about several conservative groups, including ones whose applications had not been fully processed yet, to the website ProPublica. Maddow said that strictly speaking, this was illegal, and will only make things worse for the IRS.

Maddow claimed that the Tea Party now suddently "wants to be back on the wings of the IRS scandal," and said that things are awkward politically because essentially everyone else agrees with them on this scandal. She acknowledged the "improper scrutiny" being given to conservatives groups that seemingly eluded their liberal counterparts.

Maddow highlighted how the same IRS Cincinatti office involved in the targeting scandal released documents to ProPublica for the site's series of posts on groups misleading the IRS about their political activities. Documents were provided for a number of conservative groups, even from nine that were not approved yet by the IRS, which is technically illegal because "it's supposed to be secret" if an application has not been approved.

When ProPublica attempted to find out why exactly they were given the documents, Maddow said the IRS's response was basically "We shouldn't have done that!" She admitted that the agency "screwed up here" and could end up making its level of scrutiny worse after this week.