ProPublica’s job is to report the news rather than to make
news ourselves, but sometimes we find an article of ours to be itself a subject
of public debate. Last week was
such a time, when two articles we had published back in December and January became the
subject of significant attention in light of the uproar over IRS oversight of
the process for granting tax exemption to so-called “social welfare” groups
under section 501(c)(4). We
triggered that attention, with a third article we published on
May 13, setting out everything we knew about the circumstances of our previous stories.

Largely
ignored in a public outcry last week—radio rants, Twitter storms,
congressional, presidential and prosecutorial posturing– were the following:

Our pieces in
December and January raised very serious questions about whether six different
“dark money” political groups seeking tax exemption had made false statements
on their applications. Those
applications are signed under penalty of perjury . If any false statements were made
knowingly, the groups— including Karl
Rove’s Crossroads GPS —may have committed a crime. There is no indication,
however, that either the IRS or the Department of Justice has done anything
since January to investigate whether such crimes were indeed committed. The groups in question happen all to be
conservative. Not one congressional
Republican has, to my knowledge, expressed any concern about this possible
criminality.

Even more remarkably,
leading public figures have asserted as fact that they know how we came to
receive nine documents in the mail—statements that appear to have little
basis (and in some cases, no basis at all).

The former acting
Commissioner of Internal Revenue said on May 17 that the agency’s inspector
general had found that the disclosure to us was “inadvertent”—we had
requested the applications, but they should not have been sent to us before
they were approved. The IRS
followed later the same day with a statement to the same effect—but then
refused to answer questions about who had made the mistake, and why they should
be believed when they denied having acted intentionally (and thus likely denied
committing a crime).

What really seems
to have happened at the IRS in Cincinnati, across the last three presidencies
(a Democrat, then a Republican, then a Democrat), and across two turns of the
partisan screw in the House of Representatives, from Republicans to Democrats
to Republicans again, is that the agency has been starved of resources, and
badly mismanaged.

But while it took the IRS four long days
to tell people about their conclusion of “inadvertence” and the same four days
for ProPublica to report out the
dysfunction , people like Rush Limbaugh, and their followers and
fellow travelers on Twitter and in the fringe press, rushed headlong to
judgment. Here’s what Limbaugh
said
about the mid-level federal employees at the IRS in Cincinnati on Tuesday: “The
people at these government agencies have been stocked with leftists for decades
now, and they’re all activists.”
What evidence did he offer for this? None. How could he know that someone in a
large bureaucracy, shuffling thousands of pieces of paper, didn’t make a
mistake? He couldn’t, and he
didn’t.

Well, you might
say, that’s Limbaugh. But it wasn’t
just Limbaugh. Stephen Moore writes
for the Wall Street Journal (where I worked for 15 years, and where Mr. Rove
also writes). Yet, he called the documents we were sent “ illegally leaked .” He knew nothing more than Limbaugh. “What is the motivation,” Moore asked, “for
leaking these documents? The answer is that the left is trying to dry up the
money of tea party and conservative groups by intimidating donors.” He noted that another group, in another
case, had its donor list released.
But in our case, there were no donor lists, and we had redacted the
limited financial information on the forms we published. Moreover, these applications are
completed with the expectation that they’ll eventually be made
public—because they are when they are approved. Never mind all that; presumably no need
to mention it.

And what of the
investigators? Congressional
committees leapt into action. The
inspector general for the IRS had apparently already investigated. The President demanded another
investigation; the Department of Justice said it had commenced a criminal
inquiry.

Knowing that such
is the way in Washington, we waited at ProPublica for someone to send us a
subpoena, show up on our doorstep, or maybe just call. Nothing. Nothing since December 13, when we told
the IRS we had these documents they weren’t supposed to have sent us—or
since the next day, when we published that fact. Nothing before the inspector general
reached his conclusion, nothing before the congressional hearings started televising
their demands for answers and their righteous indignation, nothing since.

In point of fact,
the investigators would have found out that we have nothing of value to
them. But the fact that they didn’t
even ask tells you a lot. And it
reinforces the point that much of the heat generated last week on this subject
is just the latest expression of Washington cynicism and its consequences—that
the talk show hosts and their fellow travelers, and the representatives and
senators and officials in the executive branch, aren’t really looking for
answers here. They’re just putting
on a show.