If this was the work of someone in the White House or another Presidential appointee, we can fix that by firings or even impeachment.
It may be an even scarier proposition, however, if people within the IRS dreamed this up and just thought that harassing and suppressing conservative groups was the right thing to do. The latter would indicate corruption deeply embedded in the federal bureaucracy, an even harder problem to fix. Given the performance before Congress by that asshat former Acting Director, we may have a problem deeply embedded in the IRS, the second most powerful agency in the government.
Sorry, that’s a good attempt to defend Obama, but the IRS couldn’t get away with this without approval from above.
IRS employees did not spontaneously think this up themselves. That would be insane. I will bet that a lot of them are sweating bullets right now thinking about jail terms, because what they have done is so blatantly illegal that they would never have dared to do it on their own.
The ethos would have encouraged them and made them trust orders from above, no matter how illegal, since it appears that 100% of the employees at the Cincinatti office donated either to Obama or to Sherrod Brown.
But the orders came from elsewhere.