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He did not say whether any other White House officials knew of the coming report. White House aides did not respond to repeated questions from McClatchy about whether McDonough or other senior advisers knew about the coming report.
On Sunday, senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer made appearances on five major Sunday morning talk shows to answer questions on the IRS, but he also declined to disclose the details of who knew what when.
“It’s important to know what we actually knew, which is just that there was an investigation, it was coming to conclusion,” Pfeiffer said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “Not that we knew the results. We didn’t see the report until it was released last Wednesday.”
Carney was peppered with IRS questions at the White House briefing Monday, struggling repeatedly to say whether he knew the information last week or why he did not inform reporters of the information last week. “I can’t remember specifically,” he said. “I’m not sure that I knew it at that time.”
Presidential historian Robert Dallek said more needs to be known before determining if the White House has been deliberate in withholding information or has simply misjudged the sensitivity of the issue. “The question here is the divide between doing these things with some intent of a coverup, and just sort of not paying attention to what turns out to be an issue they should have paid attention to,” he said.
Carney said Monday that the White House counsel’s office was notified by the Treasury Department’s inspector general’s office on April 16 of its coming report, eight days earlier than previously reported. Some members of Congress also were notified.
Carney said the White House counsel’s office routinely receives notice of pending inspector general reports. He said Ruemmler was told on April 24. And senior aides in the West Wing also were told, Carney said, though he did would not say who or when. None told the president, he said.
“I think there is a tendency to want to protect the president,” said James Pfiffner, a professor of public policy at George Mason University in Virginia who studies the presidency. He expressed surprise that Obama wasn’t told about the inspector general’s findings. “It would seem that somebody would say, ‘We’ve got this problem, we’re on it, we’ve punished people, we’ve changed the policy.’ You would think that might have happened.”
However, he cautioned, if the wrongdoing was done by lower-level federal employees with no outside influence, White House officials might have determined it didn’t warrant informing the president.
“I can understand why they might not do it if they thought it was somebody at that level,” he said.
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