For the last month, Republicans have been trying mightily to paint the IRS’s Tea Party targeting scheme as proof that the Obama administration is wielding its federal powers as a weapon against opponents. And, despite the lack of evidence, many reporters have readily embraced this storyline.

In recent days, though, several journalists have begun pushing back.The most remarked-upon example is Candy Crowley. On Sunday, Darrell Issa, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, appeared on her CNN show, State of the Union. He claimed that the committee’s interviews with IRS employees in the Cincinnati branch office, which improperly singled out Tea Party groups for scrutiny, suggested that the effort “was coordinated right out of Washington headquarters” and provided excerpts of interviews that ostensibly support these allegations. But Crowley was wary. “I want to talk about how problematic it is to get excerpts, because we know that you interviewed these people probably for hours,” she said. “It’s hard for us to judge what’s going on.” She then highlighted a passage from one excerpted interview:

Congressional investigator: So is it your perspective that ultimately the responsible parties for the decisions that were reported by the IG are not in the Cincinnati office?


IRS employee #1: I don’t know how to answer that question. I mean, from an agent standpoint, we didn’t do anything wrong. We followed directions based on other people telling us what to do.

Congressional investigator: And you ultimately followed directions from Washington; is that correct?

IRS employee #1: If direction had come down from Washington, yes.

Congressional investigator: But with respect to the particular scrutiny that was given to Tea Party applications, those directions emanated from Washington; is that right?

IRS employee #1: I believe so.

“It’s totally not definitive,” Crowley continued. “You know that your critics say Republicans—and you in particular—cherry-pick information that go to your foregone conclusion. So it worries us to put this kind of stuff out. Can you not put the whole transcript out?” Issa replied that he planned to make the entire transcript public and predicted that congressional investigators would prove the targeting was “coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters.” To which Crowley responded, “But as yet you don’t have that direct link.”

The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta also deserves props for cutting through the breathless rhetoric. Last week, The Daily Caller reported that former IRS commissioner Doug Shulman had visited the Obama White House at least 157 times, a finding the Caller claimed “strongly suggests coordination by White House officials in the campaign against the president’s political opponents.” After taking a hard look at the Caller’s source documents, Franke-Ruta discovered that the conservative news site had skipped over important context. While Shulman had been cleared to attend 157 meetings, the vast majority of those clearances were for meetings with officials involved in implementing Obama’s healthcare law—an effort in which the IRS plays a major role. Moreover, Shulman apparently only attended a fraction of them. As Franke-Ruta wrote:

Indeed, of the 157 events Shulman was cleared to attend, White House records only provide time of arrival information—confirming that he actually went to them—for 11 events over the 2009-2012 period.

Poof. There goes the Caller’s theory.

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Mariah Blake writes for the United States Project, CJR's politics and policy desk. She is based in Washington, DC, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, Salon, The Washington Monthly, and CJR, among other publications.