RUSH: Okay, folks, we just now are able to close the loop on all this. Harry Reid, this afternoon in Washington during a press conference on Capitol Hill, has pretty much confirmed everything I have been talking about for the last half hour. Listen to this.

REID: There are these shadowy political groups masquerading as social welfare organizations in order solicit anonymous donations from we don’t know who, big corporations and also wealthy people. That needs to stop. Preventing overtly political groups, like the ones run by Karl Rove, from masquerading as social welfare organizations is really a critically important task, whether these groups are on the left or on the right. But the IRS may not be the right organization to perform the task. But perhaps what we haven’t done, leaves that organization as the only one we have to look to.

RUSH: He is excusing the IRS for leaking illegal information to advance his political point of view! Harry Reid says: Well, maybe the IRS shouldn’t be the one to do it, but if nobody else has done it, it leaves them as the only one we can look to. So there are “shadowy political groups masquerading as social welfare organizations.” Thirty-one conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status are now “shadowy political groups masquerading as social welfare organizations.”

All the IRS has to do is turn down the application!

That’s all the IRS has to do.

If it’s a “shadowy political group masquerading,” the IRS can deny them the tax-exempt status and that’s it. Instead what the IRS did is share the information on the applications with this group Pro Publica (and who knows, probably with Harry Reid) and the Democrats in the media. Since 2010, they have been running with this information. They’ve been impugning, mischaracterizing, basically trying to destroy these conservative groups as illegitimate.

Now we’ve learned, since Pro Publica tried to get ahead of it and has admitted, that they got the information from the IRS, ’cause they could see where this was headed. They didn’t want it reported that they received the information. They wanted to be the ones to report it as though they were whistleblowers. This is phony baloney, plastic banana, good-time rock ‘n’ roller stuff. So Harry Reid is now confirming the IRS did this, and he is excusing it, because the IRS is helping him impugn, criticize, and defame his political opponents.

That is unbelievable. “There are these shadowy political groups masquerading as social welfare organizations … like the ones run by Karl Rove… [T]he IRS may not be the right organization to perform the task. But perhaps what we haven’t done, leaves that organization as the only one we have to look to.” They don’t care, folks. The law doesn’t matter to them. Propriety doesn’t matter to them. He’s just admitted it. He’s just admitted what has really been going on here.

The Senate majority leader has just admitted it.

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RUSH: Harry Reid was essentially saying that the IRS needs to be given even more power to do this job even better. What the IRS has been doing is leaking private information to the media. That’s what they have been doing, and Harry Reid today basically said that they need to be given even more power since they’re the only ones that really can do this.

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