There was “not even a smidgen of corruption” at the IRS, Barack Obama tells us. Obama blamed the targeting on rules that were “difficult” to interpret and that caused “bureaucratic” mistakes, but the rules have been in place since 1959 and until 2010 there didn’t seem to be a problem implementing them, nor was there any targeting of disfavored political groups. We know Obama’s lying partly because his lips were moving, but it was made clearer in the latest congressional hearing on the political targeting perpetrated by the IRS on Obama’s opponents.

House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) revealed a June 2012 email from Treasury attorney Ruth Madrigal to IRS officials, including Lois “Plead the Fifth” Lerner, regarding the political activity of tax-exempt groups and how the IRS could more easily keep tabs on those groups “off-plan,” which Camp noted means “hidden from the public.” No wonder Lerner refused to testify before Congress.

The email reveals that the proposed new rules published in the Federal Register in November 2013 were actually being ironed out at least by 2012, and other evidence suggests it was as early as 2011. That means the IRS’s targeting was clearly intentional and officials wanted to codify such tactics. Furthermore, the political targeting wasn’t, as Obama claimed, the result of “confusion” over the old rules. Indeed, IRS officials seemed to believe the Supreme Court had erred in its Citizens United decision on campaign finance reform, and they sought to rectify that via regulation.

Even the ACLU – no friend of conservatives – warned of its “serious concerns” with the proposed IRS regulations, saying that the IRS “threatens to discourage or sterilize an enormous amount of political discourse in America.” Indeed, the First Amendment was written to protect political discourse precisely of the kind coming from the Tea Party.

Nevertheless, new IRS Commissioner John Koskinen did the unthinkable at the hearing: He apologized for his agency’s targeting of Tea Party groups. It’s “intolerable,” he said, and “It won’t happen going forward.” Furthermore, “to the extent that people suffered accordingly, I apologize for that.” His apology is all fine and good, but it doesn’t fix the problem or stop the proposed new rules from codifying the abuse. It also doesn’t hold anyone accountable for effectively silencing the Tea Party in an election year. (In fact, IRS officials just received $62.5 million in bonuses.) Given what we know so far, the very legitimacy of Barack Obama’s re-election can be called into question because of a serious and scandalous abuse of power that went far beyond some “bureaucratic” mistakes in a Cincinnati office.