After reading Peggy Noonan’s editorial “A Battering Ram becomes a Stonewall” I agree with her assessment we need an independent counsel to get to the bottom of this controversy regarding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) not providing tax-exempt status to conservative groups. Given the importance of the IRS, we need to make sure that this agency remains apolitical.

I agree with Noonan’s assessment that our bureaucrats have become—“smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable.” They know how “to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids.” I believe the decision to “not let the president know” in a timely manner is contrived and artificial. The argument that “only when all the facts are known” is the appropriate time schedule for dissemination to the president is an artful ruse. It allows for air brushing reality and needless time delays.

I agree with Noonan:

We know the IRS commissioner wasn’t telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: “There’s absolutely no targeting.” We have learned that Lois Lerner lied when she claimed she had spontaneously admitted the targeting in a Q-and-A at a Washington meeting. It was part of a spin operation in which she’d planted the question with a friend. We know the tax-exempt bureau Ms. Lerner ran did not simply make mistakes because it was overwhelmed with requests—the targeting began before a surge in applications. And Ms. Lerner did not learn about the targeting in 2012—the IRS audit timeline shows she was briefed in June 2011. She said the targeting was the work of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office. But the Washington Post spoke to an IRS worker there, who said: “Everything comes from the top.”

While the foregoing is annoying, it is the following that I find most objectionable. The story came out of an interview by Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, with Catherine Engelbrecht.

Ms. Engelbrecht and her husband have a small manufacturing business. She became interested in public policy and founded two groups, King Street Patriots and True the Vote. In response to her application to the IRS for tax-exempt status, the U.S. government came down on her with full force. In brief, she was harassed so badly that it undermines one’s faith that we are living in a democracy.

In December 2010 the FBI came to ask about a person who’d attended a King Street Patriots function. In January 2011 the FBI had more questions. The same month the IRS audited her business tax returns. In May 2011 the FBI called again for a general inquiry about King Street Patriots. In June 2011 Engelbrecht’s personal tax returns were audited and the FBI called again. In October 2011 a round of questions on True the Vote. In November 2011 another call from the FBI. The next month, more questions from the FBI. In February 2012 a third round of IRS questions on True the Vote. In February 2012 a first round of questions on King Street Patriots. The same month the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms did an unscheduled audit of her business. (It had a license to make firearms but didn’t make them.) In July 2012 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration did an unscheduled audit. In November 2012 more IRS questions on True the Vote. In March 2013, more questions. In April 2013 a second ATF audit.

Why am I so upset? The IRS engaged in an overtly political operation against an ordinary American citizen such as us. In essence, the operation was not just a simple mistake emanating from a desire to streamline a process in one office in Cincinnati, Ohio. Instead, these vindictive activities emanated from calculated decisions in the highest echelons of the IRS.  Also, the mistake did not occur because “the law is murky.” The policy was a vendetta against conservative groups who were acting within the full scope of their constitutional guarantees of free speech.

In conclusion I agree with Noonan’s conclusion that unless we get an independent investigation

“The American people will never again be able to have the slightest confidence in the revenue-gathering arm of their government. And that, actually, would be tragic.”

Originally published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune