On Friday, CNBC correspondent John Harwood tweeted that Chris
Christie’s traffic scandal was “durably damaging” because it was a
“direct govt-on-citizen crime - not indirect like graft, not personal
(sex). Extremely rare.”
But when Harwood was accused by Twitter
user Eric Swanson that he and others in media were being tougher on
Christie’s traffic jam controversy than Barack Obama’s scandals, Harwood
responded that “On Obama/IRS, no one’s found anything close to ‘time
for traffic problems/got it’ connecting the WH.”
Perhaps Harwood just hasn’t been looking hard enough on the “durably damaging” IRS-Tea Party scandal, because there have been e-mails that have tied-in White House officials.
On October 9 [1] The Blaze
reported that “Sarah Hall Ingram, the Internal Revenue Service official
who used to head the office directly involved in the targeting of
conservative groups, may have shared confidential taxpayer information
with White House officials, according to 2012 emails uncovered by the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.”
The Blaze’s Becket
Adams added “White House officials, including White House health policy
advisor Ellen Montz and deputy assistant to the president for health
policy Jeanne Lambrew, were also apparently involved in sharing
confidential taxpayer information, according to the Oversight emails.”
Harwood also bypassed the latest IRS bombshell, that an Obama donor [2] was just named to head the IRS-Tea Party investigation.
The following is the Twitter exchange between Harwood and Eric Swanson:
— Geoffrey Dickens is Deputy Research Director at the Media Research Center. Follow Geoffrey Dickens on Twitter. [3]