Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) said he thinks the Internal Revenue Service's "problems are going to get bigger and broader" as new information about a slew of recent scandals continues to emerge.
"This is going to get bigger and broader. This is the largest bureaucratic big government scandal we've ever had," Gingrich said during an interview with Newsmax.
Gingrich expressed concern over a report that former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times -- "dramatically more than any member of the cabinet" -- over a four year period. However, White House visitor logs contradict that report. HuffPost's Paul Blumenthal reported earlier:
The problem with this assertion, and the touting of Shulman's visits to the White House based on the publicly available visitor logs, is that it lacks context and relies on cursory reading of the logs.
In fact, according to visitor logs, Shulman only visited the White House -- the physical building -- 39 times when Obama was in office. The vast majority of Shulman's visits listed in the visitor logs, 115 of them, are for meetings at the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the West Wing, which houses offices for White House staff.
And who was Shulman visiting? The officials Shulman met with the most were Sarah Fenn -- 54 visits -- and Nancy Ann DeParle -- 40 visits. DeParle and Fenn were in charge of implementing the Affordable Care Act and Shulman's IRS had just been given broad new authority under the new health care law. Ten of Shulman's visits with DeParle took place at the White House, making up a quarter of his total White House visits.
Gingrich also criticized President Barack Obama over the scandal, asserting he's helped a "destructive culture of the left penetrating the bureaucracy."
"The fact is, today, we have a bureaucracy so big and so self-policing that we have no control as citizens. And it's going to take a very deep, substantial reform in order to be able to move away from the kind of threats we have to our very freedoms," Gingrich said.
Gingrich has slammed Obama over the IRS scandal before. In May 2013, he criticized the Obama administration's decision to "not profile terrorists but profile patriots" and called the scandal "almost madness."
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