Eliana Johnson:
Thursday’s Oversight Committee hearing on the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups is likely to be a showdown between Internal Revenue Service officials based in Washington, D.C. and a Cincinnati agent who accused them of micromanaging her work. Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa is calling Washington lawyers Carter Hull and Steven Grodnitzky as well as a Cincinnati-based agent, Elizabeth Hofacre, to testify on Thursday, according to a congressional source.
In her interview with committee investigators, Hofacre accused Hull of micromanaging her processing of tea-party applications from Washington. “I was essentially a front person,” she said, “because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on them without Carter Hull’s influence or input.” Hull also appears to have caused some of the delays experienced by tea-party groups who applied for tax exemption. According to Hofacre, she eventually stopped receiving feedback from him and, as a result, tea-party groups stopped getting responses from her as their applications languished on his desk.
Not everyone likes being pushed under the bus, apparently.