Smoking gun? Obama met with anti-tea party IRS union chief day before targeting began (UPDATE)

With the deliberate targeting of conservatives before the 2012 Presidential Election, with intrusive requests from detailing the content of members' prayers to providing back-end access to tea party groups' websites, and now with the Tea Party Patriots calling for a nationwide protest against the IRS abuse, the question still remains: Is Obama directly implicated in the IRS scandal? The American Spectator's Geoffrey Lord may be on to the smoking gun:

March 31, 2010.

According to the White House Visitors Log, provided here in searchable form by U.S. News and World Report, the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that Wednesday noon time of March 31st.

The White House lists the IRS union leader’s visit this way:

Kelley, Colleen Potus 03/31/2010 12:30

In White House language, “POTUS” stands for “President of the United States.”

The very next day after her White House meeting with the President, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Report, IRS employees — the same employees who belong to the NTEU — set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America. The IG report wrote it up this way:

April 1-2, 2010: The new Acting Manager, Technical Unit, suggested the need for a Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager Agreed.

In short: the very day after the president of the quite publicly anti-Tea Party labor union — the union for IRS employees — met with President Obama, the manager of the IRS “Determinations Unit Program agreed” to open a “Sensitive Case report on the Tea party cases.” As stated by the IG report.

In light of this revelation, just as with Benghazi, we're faced with the same question: What did the President know, and when did he know it? Of course, this President's answer on the trio of scandals surrounding his administration right now is as far away from 'the buck stops with me' as can be...

TheHill: The White House is circling the wagons as one of the most feverish periods of President Obama’s tenure enters its second week.

Obama and his aides have taken a more aggressive stance in recent days after fumbling their initial response to headline-grabbing scandals at different government agencies.

The administration’s strategy is centered on a simple defense: “Our basic thrust is that nobody, here, did anything wrong,” an Obama administration official told The Hill. “That’s why none of this is going to stick.”

Even though there is no evidence yet of wrongdoing in the White House, it does not mean that Obama will emerge scot-free from the furor over the IRS’s treatment of conservative groups, last year’s fatal terrorist attack in Benghazi and the Department of Justice’s seizure of phone records from The Associated Press.

Now that the knowledge of his little meeting has been revealed, you can be assured that there'll be no confession, no responsibility.

Looks like the IRS isn't the only one we should be protesting.

UPDATE: If the White House's chief lawyer knew about the IRS scandal 'weeks ago', then as the DC Trawler states, "There's no way Obama is telling the truth about when he learned of the IRS scandal."

WSJ: The White House’s chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday.

That disclosure has prompted a debate over whether the president should have been notified at that time.

Oh, he knew...