> In late September 2017, an exhaustive report by the Treasury Department's inspector general found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny, blunting claims that the issue had been an Obama-era partisan scandal. The 115-page report confirmed the findings of the prior 2013 report that some conservative organizations had been unfairly targeted, but also found that the pattern of misconduct had been ongoing since 2004 and was non-partisan in nature.
The whole thing was advocacy groups across the spectrum getting additional scrutiny in their 501(c)(4) applications, which requires that lobbying and political campaign activity not be a "primary activity" of the organization. I won't argue that the IRS handled such investigations in a ham-handed, overly-invasive way, but in the larger view, it doesn't appear to have been driven by a specific ideology.
The democratic position was some left wing organizations were targeted as well so it was nonpartisan, but it was far less in number and severity. It's not really a defence. They are forced to cover it here:
> Initial reports described the selections as nearly exclusively of conservative groups with terms such as "Tea Party" in their names. According to Republican lawmakers, liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement had also triggered additional scrutiny, but at a lower rate than conservative groups. The Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee issued a report, which concluded that although some liberal groups were selected for additional review, the scrutiny that these groups received did not amount to targeting when compared to the greater scrutiny received by conservative groups.
Wikipedia being not biased puts the democrats claim up front, repeating it throughout the article several times and buries the republican perspective with things like "Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee" when they don't make the same implication when democratic controlled groups comment on the matter. They also bury the destruction of evidence that occurred. The government eventually settled with the conservative groups it targeted.
While it's not surprising there are still a non-trivial number of people who refuse to believe that organs of the government are weaponized and retaliate against people who shed light on what they thought they could do in secret.
Maybe it's not that they can't believe it, maybe they just can't believe that it is an inherent characteristic of government organs.
In this case it certainly seems that an overreach happened, I for one can believe that. It's certainty regarding how deep this goes that escapes me (and I think most people).
That's a bit of an understatement.