IRS Corruption: Depends on What the Meaning of "Corruption" Is

In his interview last night with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, the President insisted that there hadn't been even a "smidgen" of corruption in the IRS targeting of conservative groups. The problem, of course, is that -- conveniently enough -- he simply doesn't have enough information to know whether that's the case.

There are several big issues in the scandal that remain unaddressed, including the facts that:

• The FBI has not spoken to all of the victims of the targeting. In fact, it hasn't spoken to any of them. Whatever exoneration it's offered is based only on the assertions of the IRS officials involved.

• The White House has not released any information about whom IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman was meeting with when he visited The White House an unprecedented 157 times. In fact, some of his meetings were with political operative Stephanie Cutter. If the meetings were innocent, only about implementing ObamaCare, why not just release the logs?

• There is still no answer to the question of who released he confidential tax information of a number of conservative groups -- a crime.

Cleta Mitchell -- a well-respected Washington attorney representing many of the targeted groups, reacted to the President's comments in an interview with the Wall Street Journal's Mary Kissel:

Just as setting a tone for one's administration makes it easy for "deniable" dirty work to be performed, refusing to learn the facts makes it easy to assert that there are no facts worth knowing.