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| President Barack Obama gestures during a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, Monday, May 13, 2013, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. The president Obama said during the news conference that the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups is "outrageous" and anyone involved needs to be "held fully accountable." |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- President Barack Obama tried to swat down a pair of brewing
controversies Monday, denouncing as "outrageous" the targeting of
conservative political groups by the federal IRS but angrily denying any
administration cover-up after last year's deadly attacks in Benghazi,
Libya.
Simultaneous investigations - and
demands by Republicans for more - have put the White House on the
defensive, emboldened GOP lawmakers and threatened to overtake a
second-term Obama agenda already off to a rocky start.
During
a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, the
normally even-keeled Obama appeared agitated over the resurgent
investigation into the September attack at a U.S. diplomatic compound in
Benghazi. He dismissed the Republican-driven effort as a "sideshow"
that dishonors the four Americans who were killed, including Ambassador
Christopher Stevens.
"There's no there there,"
Obama declared in his first public comments since GOP lawmakers
launched new hearings on the matter. "The fact that this keeps on
getting churned up, frankly, has a whole lot to do with political
motivations."
Seeking to keep another
controversy from spinning out of control, the president rebuked the IRS
for scrutinizing the tax-exempt status of groups with conservative
titles such as "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their names. Those
responsible, Obama said, must be held "fully accountable."
"I've got no patience with it," he added. "I will not tolerate it and we will find out exactly what happened."
The
president said he first learned of the matter Friday when it was
reported by news organizations.
Spokesman Jay Carney said later that the
White House counsel's office was alerted on April 22 that the IRS
inspector general was completing a review of an IRS office in
Cincinnati.
Neither issue appears to be going
away any time soon. On Monday, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of
the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, asked authors of an
independent government review into the Benghazi attack to meet
privately with committee investigators. And the House Ways and Means
Committee said it plans to hold a hearing on the IRS matter on Friday.
The
two controversies are the latest in a series of unexpected challenges
that have consumed the White House since Obama began his second term in
January. Among the others: the Boston Marathon bombings, Syria's alleged
use of chemical weapons and fresh nuclear provocations from North
Korea.
It's hardly the start Obama's team
envisioned after he solidly won re-election in November. The White House
had hoped to achieve an early victory on immigration overhaul, make
another run at a sweeping deficit reduction deal, and perhaps take a
stab at tackling climate change.
But those
plans were upended even before Obama's inauguration, when the horrific
December massacre of 20 school children and six adults in Newtown,
Conn., thrust gun control to the forefront of Obama's domestic agenda.
That legislative effort failed on Capitol Hill last month, leaving Obama
with a political defeat and giving critics of immigration reform more
time to organize their opposition.
Obama still
has an opportunity to reverse course and claim a big second-term
victory if immigration changes can be approved. Draft legislation being
debated in the Senate has bipartisan support, and Republicans have a
political incentive to back an overhaul given the growing political
power of Hispanic voters, who voted overwhelmingly Democratic in 2012.
For
the White House, the challenge will be to keep Capitol Hill focused on
immigration and other legislative priorities, not a persistent cycle of
investigations.
"The American people want
Washington to focus on the issues that matter most to them," Carney said
Monday. "The imperative for getting things done still exists."
However, Republicans made clear that they plan to keep pressing the president on both Benghazi and the IRS.
"The
administration continues to lose credibility by failing to answer even
the simplest questions, refusing to take full responsibility and failing
to produce a plan to move forward," Republican National Committee
Chairman Reince Priebus told The Associated Press. "As we learned from
Watergate, concealing information from the public is a dangerous
practice."
The IRS has apologized for what it
said was "inappropriate" targeting of conservative political groups. The
agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were
aware.
But a draft of an inspector general's
report obtained by the AP says senior IRS officials knew agents were
targeting tea party groups as early as 2011. The Treasury Department's
inspector general for tax administration is expected to release the
final report this week after a yearlong investigation.
The
Benghazi investigation has trailed Obama for months, with many
Republicans focused on how the White House first explained the attacks
to the American people. Administration officials initially said the
attacks appeared to grow out of a spontaneous demonstration, though it
later concluded that they were planned acts of terror.
The
White House has insisted there was no effort to change the initial
administration "talking points" to downplay the prospect of terrorism.
But
emails made public last week concerning the talking points that U.N.
Ambassador Susan Rice used five days after the Sept. 11 assault showed
State Department and other senior administration officials asking that
references to terror groups and prior warnings be deleted.
The
White House has insisted that it made only a "stylistic" change to the
intelligence agency talking points which Rice used to suggest on five
Sunday talk shows that demonstrations over an anti-Islamic video
devolved into the Benghazi attack.
On Monday,
Obama said the focus should be on making sure that diplomats serving
around the world are adequately protected, which he acknowledged was not
the case in Benghazi.
"If anybody out there
wants to actually focus on how we make sure something like this doesn't
happen again, I'm happy to get their advice and counsel," he said.
The
two controversies largely overshadowed Obama's meeting with Cameron,
which centered in large part on next steps for addressing Syria's fierce
civil war. The British prime minister, whose government has been more
aggressive on Syria than Obama's has, declared there was "no more urgent
international task" that quelling the violence in Syria.
However,
both leaders offered no indication of an imminent decision to directly
send weapons to Syrian rebels or take other military action. Instead,
they put their hopes in a glimmer of cooperation from Russian President
Vladimir Putin, who has helped keep Syrian leader Bashar Assad in power.
