As then-director of the Internal Revenue Service's exempt-organizations office in Cincinnati, Cindy Thomas never publicly commented on the controversy over the tax agency's targeting of Tea Party groups — a scandal that engulfed her division and its employees.
But privately, Thomas skewered Lois Lerner after the IRS official tried to blame "low-level" workers in Cincinnati for the scandal.
"Cincinnati wasn't publicly 'thrown under the bus' (but) instead was hit by a convoy of Mack trucks," Thomas steamed at Lerner in a May 10 e-mail that was recently discovered by congressional investigators on the House Ways and Means Committee, which is probing the scandal.
Thomas fired off the e-mail hours after Lerner, then director of the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt groups, publicly acknowledged the agency had subjected applications from Tea Party groups to extra scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle.
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