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Here's my favorite part of the IRS scandal yet. According to the Inspector General's report, the Cincinnati office of the IRS developed an acronym for "Be On the Look Out." Yep, they turned it into BOLO. Apparently the spreadsheet which listed words and phrases that might indicate political activity became known as the "BOLO Listing." I expect this to take Twitter by storm any second now.

UPDATE: Pardon my ignorance. Turns out this is a standard police term. A "BOLO alert" is issued when police are trying to find someone suspected of a crime. I guess the IRS appropriated the term, they didn't invent it.

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Polar bear image by Patrick Kelley / US Coast Guard via US Geological Survey at Flickr. John Kerry photo courtesy the US Congress at Wikimedia Commons.

Secretary of State John Kerry is headed to Kiruna, Sweden, tomorrow, 14 May, for a ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council, the only diplomatic forum focused exclusively on the Arctic region. Members represent the eight nations with territory north of the Arctic Circle (Canada, the US, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden), plus representatives of Arctic indigenous peoples. The Council's concerns include a broad swath of environmental issues stemming from a wildly changing global climate amplified in the Arctic.

The meeting comes 25 years after Kerry hosted climate change hearing with Al Gore in the Senate and nothing happened. This year's Arctic Council is focused on mitigating a future oil spill as drilling in the far north ramps up. Ministers will be signing of an historic Arctic Marine Oil Pollution Preparedness and Response Agreement. The State Department describes this as an agreement that will "forge strong partnerships in advance of an oil spill so that Arctic countries can quickly and cooperatively respond before it endangers lives and threatens fragile ecosystems."

Sounds great, except we can't contain offshore spills, no matter the level of cooperation. Still, Kerry's attendance will boost interest in an obscure Council and the problems—for most—of a faraway place. 

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The more we find out about the editing of the Benghazi talking points, the more the evidence points in one direction: this was a CIA fiasco from the start. As we all know by now, the Benghazi mission was primarily a CIA operation, and they were the ones responsible for security there. But when it came time to write up talking points for public consumption after the September 11 attacks, they immediately started trying to shift blame. Here is David Brooks writing about the role of State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland:

On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland....[She] noted that the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of warnings before the attack.

Remember, this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring intelligence.

Marcy Wheeler had a more pungent assessment a few days ago:

In other words, the story CIA — which had fucked up in big ways — wanted to tell was that it had warned State and State had done nothing in response....The truthful story would have been (in part) that CIA had botched the militia scene in Benghazi, and that had gotten the Ambassador killed.

Today Jake Tapper tells us that previous reports about the role of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes have also been mistaken. Rhodes didn't say anything to suggest that the White House was concerned with protecting the State Department's reputation. All he said was this: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation." The next day, when everyone got together to vet the talking points, they were stripped down to their final mushy state.

Greg Sargent has more here. This was, pretty clearly, a turf war, and the evidence increasingly suggests it was a war started by the CIA. The State Department has already largely owned up to its own failures in the ARB report released last year. So far, though, the CIA hasn't.

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Rena Schild/Shutterstock

When Lois Lerner, a top IRS official, revealed last Friday that agency staffers had singled out conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny over their potential political activities, she blamed low-level, "frontline" staffers in the agency's Cincinnati office, a hub of activity that handles tens of thousands of applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS later said no high-level officials were aware of these controversial actions.

As it turns out, the current acting IRS commissioner knew that staffers were flagging applications from certain conservative groups a year before Congress and the public found out about it. And members of Congress are steaming mad that the IRS was aware of the questionable practices of some of its staffers and didn't speak up about it. Several Republicans claim that Congress was misled by the IRS and its top brass about these actions.

The IRS said that current acting commissioner Steven Miller learned on May 3, 2012, that staffers had been picking out conservative groups for greater scrutiny than is typical. (Miller was deputy commissioner at the time.)

Yet Republican lawmakers say Miller neglected to tell Congress about the systematic singling out of conservative groups in subsequent interactions. Miller wrote two letters to Congress after his May 2012 briefing about how the IRS reviews applications for tax-exempt status, but did not mention the scrutiny of tea party groups. On July 25, 2012, Miller testified before the House ways and means oversight subcommittee on the subject of "organizational and compliance issues related to public charities." During questioning, Miller was asked about tea party groups being harassed, but not about tea partiers specifically. He did not mention having been briefed on the IRS' actions.

"It is almost inconceivable to imagine that top officials at the IRS knew conservative groups were being targeted but chose to willfully mislead the Committee's investigation into this practice," Rep. Dave Camp, chair of the ways and means committee, said in a statement.

An IRS spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Miller wrote in an op-ed for USA Today on Tuesday that the IRS' singling out of conservative groups showed "a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made." He added that sifting through applications for tax-exempt status was "factually complex, and it's challenging to separate out political issues from those involving education or social welfare." He did not say why he didn't tell Congress about the tea party scrutiny when he learned of it in May 2012.

Other lawmakers say they corresponded with the IRS on the tea party issue and can't understand why the agency didn't share all of what it knew. "I wrote to the IRS three times last year after hearing concerns that conservative groups were being targeted," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), said in a statement Monday. "Yet it didn't occur to anyone at the IRS to let us know that this targeting was in fact happening? Knowing what we know now, the IRS was at best being far from forthcoming, or at worst, being deliberately dishonest with Congress. These are the facts and the questions we need answered."

They could be answered soon. On Friday, the House ways and means committee will hold a hearing on the IRS' tea party controversy. Other House and Senate committees have pledged to investigate the matter, too.

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