The former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman is widely reported to have visited the White House well over 100 times after 2008 when he took over the agency, just as the IRS was preparing to target Tea Party groups in earnest.
What's more interesting, however, isn't the aggregate number of visits he made, most of which occurred in the wake of the passage of ObamaCare in 2010 and which are detailed in the logs as health-care related discussions, but that he made so many visits to the White House prior to March 2010.
Earl Glynn here has made an exhaustive study of the White House logs and finds Shulman visited the White House 9 times in 2009 alone.
Shulman's predecessor Mark Everson, by contrast, recalls making just one visit to the White House in the five years between 2003 and 2007, as reported by Susan Ferrechio here:
'The frequent trips to the White House under Obama far outnumbered the times other administrations felt the need to meet with the IRS, according to Mark Everson, who led the IRS under former President George W. Bush. Everson said he remembers making only one trip to the White House between 2003 and 2007 and said he felt like he'd "moved to Siberia" because of the isolation.'
In Shulman's testimony before Congress he has denied discussing targeting of Tea Party groups, but he also testified that he doubted he visited the White House as many times as reported, as recounted here:
“I don’t accept the premise that there are 118 visits to the White House,” he objected. “That may or may not be true.”
Yeah right, that's because there were 157 visits, not 118.
The guy's a Slick Willie who absolutely must parse so that if and when we get the goods on the guy at least he'll avoid a perjury charge:
[A]ll of Shulman’s answers were parsed and delivered in practiced legalese. He almost never answered anything with simple assertions, opting for “recollections” and “as far as I can remembers.” In his apparent painstaking efforts to avoid making any statement that might ensnare him in a perjury controversy, Shulman seemed unable to cleanly field simple questions about his opinion. So he hedged and qualified and dissembled — and looked really guilty doing so.
