“There is a culture of intimidation throughout the administration. The IRS is just the most recent example,” McConnell said on Sunday’s Meet the Press. “What we’re talking about here is an attitude that the government knows best, the nanny state is here to tell us all what to do and if we start criticizing, you get targeted.”

Since news broke, the senator has been particularly combative, slamming the president in interviews and on his popular campaign team social networks, where the senator is already campaigning, despite not yet having a challenger (besides his own extremely low approval ratings). Democrats and Tea Partiers have offered ideas for challengers to unseat the candidate—a possible Tea Party-Democrat coalition was even floated—but no serious candidates have thrown their names in the ring.

McConnell’s strong response to the scandal has earned him support from the far right: last week, the senator was endorsed by one of the groups targeted in the IRS probe, TheTeaParty.net.

“With the new revelations that the IRS has been targeting Tea Party groups, we need Sen. McConnell more than ever,” said Niger Innis, the chief strategist of TheTeaParty.net.

McConnell has faced tough criticisms from Tea Partiers over spending in recent years and has sought to shore up the far-right’s support, stumping for the movement several times and hiring Jesse Benton, a Tea Party strategist, to run his reelection effort.

Sen. McConnell “has been standing up for his Tea Party Friends for over a year,” Benton told MSNBC, declining to answer whether the combative statements were a rallying point designed for or particularly successful with the Tea Party.

Instead, Benton pointed to the senator’s leadership on the issue; indeed, McConnell was one of the first to demand an investigation on IRS profiling. (Though, as David Gregory pointed out on Meet the Press, early in his career, McConnell railed against abuses of the nonprofit exception—the same abuses the IRS was investigating when they improperly profiled groups.)

McConnell shows no sign of dropping the issue. He told Breitbart News the recent IRS revelations were “just the beginning of the story. This is no little thing. This is a big thing. The good news about it is they finally got caught,” he said. “This is just one example of an administration-wide effort to silence critics.”

Carney said at a briefing a week ago: ”My understanding is that the White House Counsel’s Office was alerted in the week of April 22nd of this year, only about the fact that the IG was finishing a review about matters involving the office in Cincinnati. But that’s all they were informed as a normal sort of heads up.”

And two days later, Carney described the notification as “a top-line notification,” adding: “[I]t was also made clear that the matter was still under review and not completed.”

But in Monday’s briefing, he revealed that after White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was informed that the probe was coming to its conclusion, she told White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior White House staff. Carney also said that Ruemmler was made aware of the report’s key finding: that IRS personnel had improperly targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny. And he added that the White House then held meetings with the Treasury Department to discuss strategy for responding to the report.

“There were conversations with White House chief of staff and with Treasury about the anticipated timing of the release of the report and the potential findings,” Carney said.

Carney didn’t tell reporters last week about any of that information.

The evolving story doesn’t offer evidence that the White House was aware of the targeting at any point before last month. But it does raise questions about whether it’s being fully forthcoming in its public statements on the issue.

“You only gave us a version,” one reporter said.

Carney also said that the information wasn’t shared with the president, suggesting that this was done to avoid any chance of improper intervention in the IG report.

“The cardinal rule is that you do not intervene in an independent investigation,” Carney said.

Several GOP lawmakers appeared on the Sunday news shows over the weekend promising to investigate any potential White House involvement in the tax agency’s wrongful targeting of conservative groups before the 2012 election. But any evidence of such a link is, to this point, largely non-existent.

President Obama–who accepted the resignation of two top agency staffers last week–said he was unaware of the IRS’ practice until media reports surfaced earlier this month. He has promised to hold other IRS officials accountable and work with Congress to make sure “this doesn’t happen again”.

Related: Treasury knew of IRS audit, but likely little more

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said as much over the weekend, hitting all five major Sunday morning talk shows to defend Obama on the IRS, as well as against Republican accusations that the administration was involved in a cover-up on the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi and the Justice Departments’ decision to issue a subpoena for AP journalists’ phone records.

Pfeiffer told NBC’s Meet The Press that the IRS targeting is a “problem that needs to be addressed. We need to make sure it never happens again.” He added, however, that he doesn’t buy the theory that there’s a cloud of scandal that’s hanging over the president.

“I think we’ve seen this playbook from the Republicans before. What they want to do when they are lacking a positive agenda is try to drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped up hearings and false allegations,” said Pfeiffer. “We’re not going to let that happen. The president has got business to do.”

It’s not stopping GOPers from trying.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared on the same show insisting “there is a culture of intimidation throughout the administration. The IRS is just the most recent example.”

Meet The Press host David Gregory pressed further, asking the Kentucky lawmaker if there was any evidence that the president directed a “culture of intimidation” at the IRS to target his opponents. McConnell acknowledged “I don’t think we know what the facts are.” Gregory noted, “That hasn’t stopped you from accusing.”

Republican Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, who chairs the House committee looking into the IRS, also admitted there was no evidence. “We don’t have anything to say that the president knew about it.” At the Congressional hearing on Friday, he went as far as to say the IRS scandal shows a “culture of cover-ups” and “political intimidation” within the Obama administration.

And then there’s Sen. Rand Paul, who claimed on CNN that there’s a memo that proves agency officials were “targeting people who were opposed to the president.” When asked further about the written document by anchor Candy Crowley, the Tea Partier admitted he had only heard about the memo. “Well, we keep hearing the reports…I haven’t seen a policy statement, but I think we need to see that,” he said.

Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio argued on ABC’s This Week that a special counsel to investigate the IRS would be necessary. Congress continues to hold hearings on the subject this week, and Attorney General Eric Holder has also ordered an investigation.

Despite the lack of evidence of White House involvement, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin insisted the IRS drama was just another example of “big-government cronyism” on Fox News Sunday. “This is rotten to the core. This is arrogance,” the failed 2012 vice presidential candidate added.

Obama has since installed a new, temporary boss for the IRS and has greenlighted a 30-day review of the agency’s operation. “Everything will be looked at,” Pfeiffer told Fox News.

The Senate Finance Committee has scheduled a hearing on the IRS on Tuesday and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has one planned on Wednesday

For more, tune into Hardball at 5 and 7 p.m. ET. We’ll have more on the GOP in search of a White House scandal with MSNBC analysts Michael Steele, former RNC chair, and Joan Walsh of Salon.com.

Inspector General J. Russell George told the House Ways and Means committee Friday that on June 4 he had informed the department’s general counsel that he was conducting an audit relating to IRS’s treatment of tax exempt organizations. George said he told Deputy Treasury Secretary Neil Wolin later, but could not recall the exact date.

Outgoing acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller (R) and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (L). Russell George are sworn-in during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups on Capitol Hill, May 17, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Reed

In a statement released after George’s testimony, Treasury confirmed that department officials were told of the probe in June 2012. The statement noted: “Mr. George also testified that he did not inform Treasury officials at the time of any results or audit findings.” It said it’s “standard practice” for George to tell Treasury officials about the audits he was working on.

Treasury also appeared to argue in the statement that it would have been improper for officials to take any action upon learning of the audit’s existence. ”Treasury strongly supports the independent oversight of its three Inspectors General, and it does not interfere in ongoing IG audits,” the statement said.

Claims of an administration cover-up are undercut by the fact that lawmakers probing the issue were given similar information about the IG’s audit not long afterwards. In July 2012, George sent a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa, who chairs the House Oversight committee, The New York Times reports, telling him: “We would be happy to provide a status update [on the audit] to the subcommittee staff.”

And in October, George’s office posted on its website a list of the audits it was conducting, including one on the IRS’s treatment of political groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Issa and other lawmakers have complained that IRS officials kept them in the dark until last week about details of the targeting. Lois Lerner, the director of the agency’s exempt organizations division, Doug Shulman, its commissioner until last fall, and Steven Miller, its acting commissioner until last week, knew by last year—earlier in Lerner’s case—that the agency had conducted improper targeting of Tea Party groups, but failed to tell Congress despite being asked directly.

But there’s no evidence that Wolin and other Treasury Department officials had similarly detailed knowledge. Rather, they appear to have been told only of the existence of the audit—just as Issa was a month later.

A senior White House official told the Times that last month, the White House’s top lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, was informed of the audit’s completion, around the same time that Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew—a former White House chief of staff—also was told. Again, there’s no evidence that either was told of the report’s findings.

Still, the confirmation that Treasury was aware of the investigation last year seems likely to fuel Republican efforts to implicate the Obama administration more broadly in the controversy.

“We’re going to continue this investigation and get to the bottom of this, Rep. Paul Ryan said on Fox News Sunday. “Who knew? What did they know? Why did they do this?  How high up in government did it go?”

Dan Pfeiffer, a senior White House adviser, pushed back on that line. “Look at what the Independent Inspector General said in the report and to Congress on Friday,” Pfeiffer said. “One, there is no evidence this came from anyone other than the IRS. Two, this was not necessarily based on political motivation.”

Christie, his wife, and their four children will appear in six television and radio ads intended to drive visitors to the Shore this summer and boost the economy in beach towns hit by Hurricane Sandy.

The first wave of federal emergency relief dollars paid for the $25 million, one-year contract with the public relations firm that spearheaded the “Stronger than the Shore” campaign.

But Democrats said his starring role gives him an unfair advantage to boost his political image. Christie is running for re-election this year.

“This is something where as a governor you demonstrate competence, and that’s exactly what people are not seeing in their leaders right now,” Mike Allen, Politico’s chief White House correspondent, said on Monday’s Morning Joe.

Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded, made landfall on Oct. 29, 2012, in southern New Jersey. More than six months later, thousands of residents are still displaced and struggling to rebuild their lives and communities.

Christie said last month that he had no regrets working with President Obama on his state’s recovery, despite political blowback. Republicans criticized him for working with the president, but the governor challenged the critics to put themselves in his shoes.

“What the president and I did at that time is we saw suffering together,” Christie said last month. “When you see that, you’re either going to step up and be responsible or you’re not. We stepped up and were responsible.”

Hours before Christie was scheduled to give his State of the State address in January, Democratic State Senate President Stephen Sweeney said Christie “prayed a lot and got lucky that a storm came.”

The former secretary of defense under President George W. Bush said that the controversy over administration talking points following the attack that left four Americans dead was eroding public trust in Obama’s presidency.

“You think of a manager, a leader,” Rumsfeld said. “When something like this happens, you call people in, you sit them down, and you let them know that you intend to find ground truth fast. And he [Obama] seems not to have done that.”

“I think people looking at the changed stories on Benghazi and the way the talking points were altered are of a view that they were trying to support a narrative that, in fact, did not exist,” he said.

Rumsfeld himself has been accused of creating a false narrative in the build-up to the Iraq War. In his 2011 autobiography, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld said that he had made a “misstatement” about Saddam Hussein storing weapons of mass destruction in Baghadad and Tikrit, which was one of the justifications for going to war.

At the time, Rumsfeld denied that the Bush administration had deliberately misled the public about the threat that Iraq posed to the American people.

“While I made a few misstatements—in particular the one mentioned above—they were not common and certainly not characteristic,” Rumsfeld wrote. “Other senior administration officials also did a reasonably good job of representing the intelligence community’s assessments accurately in their public comments about Iraqi WMD, despite some occasionally imperfect formulations.”

A new CNN poll Sunday showed that, while a majority of Americans said that both Benghazi and the IRS are important issues and that the GOP was not overreacting to them, 53% of the public still said that they approved of Obama’s job performance.

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Despite declaring on Friday that “others may get distracted by chasing every fleeting issue that passes by, but the middle class will always be my number one focus,” the president finds himself under fire from his progressive allies in Congress.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), for example, took to Twitter recently to declare he’s taking on the president.

I will do everything in my power to block @barackobama’s proposal to cut benefits for #SocialSecurity recipients through a #chainedCPI.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 8, 2013

And Sander’s is not alone in his opposition to the president’s plan to use a “chained” consumer price index (CPI) to lower cost-of-living adjustments paid out by Social Security.

“The homeless, the helpless and the hapless in our society, they’re the last that ought to be taking it in the next for deficit reduction,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) at a recent news conference.

“CPI was originally a Boehner-McConnell demand,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois). “It was a bad idea then and it’s a really bad idea now.”

In addition, the president is also offering $400 billion in Medicare cuts over the next ten years. All this as the deficit shrinks faster than expected.

“Don’t tell anybody, Ed, but I think we’re going to beat the president on this,” Sanders told Ed Schultz on May 11 edition of The Ed Show on MSNBC. “When the middle class is disappearing and the gap between the rich and everybody else is growing wider, you don’t assault the middle class by cutting Social Security and benefits for disabled veterans.”

Sanders also said that Social Security has not added one nickel to the deficit and has nothing to do with deficit reduction. He says Social Security today has a $2.6 trillion surplus and is paid for independently by the payroll tax.

Instead of cutting benefits, Sanders recommends lifting the cap on taxable income on Social Security from $113,000 to $250,000 to make it “strong for the next 75 years,” an idea Obama supported as a candidate in 2008.

“I think the president continues for some very, very strange idea to keep believing that if he makes major concessions to the Republicans that somehow he’s going to get something back in return,” Sanders said. “I really don’t know why he continues to think that. It hasn’t worked up to now.”

What happened here is outrageous and inexcusable and unless those of us who strongly disagree with the Tea Party on many issues defend it from any impairment and allow it to be as wrong as it wants to be, we impair our democracy.

Despite his condemnation of the IRS’ actions regarding the targeting of conservative groups applying for 504 (c)4 status, Doggett did not believe that the current tax system was “rotten to the core” as some Republicans suggest. Echoing the argument MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has been making about the IRS law, Congressman from Texas went after the statute itself–specifically, the IRS’ interpretation of the words “exclusively” and “primarily.”

I don’t believe there’s any lack of clarity in the statute here. The statute that is in effect, has been in effect for decades and it requires that before there is tax-exempt status, as Mr. Lawrence O’Donnell, as the Crew Group, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has pointed out in a petition, you are to be denied this status if you are not exclusively engaged in social welfare according to the statute, is that not correct? The statute is explicit. It uses the word “exclusively.” The regulation the IRS adopted 30 or 40 years ago uses different language…

I’m just asking for a clear reading of the statute. …It was only after a regulation adopted long ago, long before any of you were at the IRS, that changed exclusively to primarily, that there was any discretion for this section to be involved in this operation…

Over the course of his questioning, Doggett accused GOP lawmakers of using this scandal and the 504 (c)4 tax exemption status as a way to pour more “secret money” into campaigns in an effort to stall Obamacare, which will be enforced by the IRS when it is fully implemented.

It is important that in addressing and fully correcting one wrong, we not commit and be involved in other wrongs, such as encouraging the proliferation of secret corporate money, not just the proliferation and pollution of our democracy by that money, but that it be tax-subsidized secret corporate money…

That we not permit those who have an agenda that is now been voted 37 times to try to undermine the full and effective implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act so that the health care crisis is ended for families across this country. That’s what’s at stake here, that’s what’s been discussed here.

Republican Congressman Vern Buchanan of Florida, who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, joined Morning Joe on Friday prior to the hearing to discuss his concerns regarding the IRS’ actions.

“I’m concerned about the culture of the IRS,” he said. “As someone who’s been in business for 30 years, I know there’s a belief and a value system, that culture can be good or it can be bad. Obviously we’ve got a lot of problems within the IRS; a lot of questions that need to get answered…We can’t be in the business of targeting Americans.”

Karen Kenney, the coordinator for the San Fernando Valley Patriots, told The Washington Post this week that after applying for nonprofit status, her group received “pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe.”

But that (very) up-close look may have made sense: Kenney is active in Republican politics in southern California. She ran in 2010 for an internal GOP position, and has spoken at least twice since 2011 at the San Fernando Valley Republican club, in her capacity as a local Tea Party leader.

Kenney didn’t respond to a request for comment, but it’s not just her. The president of the Greater Phoenix Tea Party, Chris Rossiter, told Politico that after applying, his group received an inquiry from the IRS with 35 questions, and he described a phone conversation he said the group’s founder had with an IRS agent.

That founder was Kelly Townsend, who last year was elected as a Republican to the Arizona statehouse. A post on the Tea Party group’s website congratulated Townsend on her win.

Neither the Post nor Politico mentioned these ties to the GOP in their stories, which portrayed the IRS scrutiny as self-evidently burdensome.

Townsend told MSNBC she had no problem with being asked about the group’s political work, but objected to a drawn out process, saying the application is still pending more than three years after it was submitted.

“The biggest issue to me was not the questions,” she said. “It was the time frame. They cannot explain why it took two years to even initially contact us.”

Tea Party Demonstrators outside of the House Chamber on Capitol Hill in Washington, Saturday, March 20, 2010. (AP Photo/Harry Hamburg)

The involvement of Tea Party activists in Republican politics doesn’t necessarily mean their applications should have been rejected. What counts as political work, and just how much of it a group can do while still claiming tax-exempt status, is a contested issue—which is part of the problem. And most people agree that using keyword searches for terms like “Tea Party” and “patriot” was a bad way for IRS agents to approach their work.

But it does suggest it was reasonable for the IRS to take a close look. Indeed, many of those concerned about the influence of money in politics have long argued that rather than being too intrusive, the IRS is actually too ready to grant applications for tax-exempt status—known as “c4” status—even to organizations that do substantial political work.

“The IRS has not been enforcing the tax code,” Craig Holman, a lobbyist for good-government group Public Citizen told MSNBC. “They have been allowing groups to hide under the c4 tax status that are actually political front groups.”

There’s little agreement on just where the line between political and nonpolitical should be drawn. The tax code itself says that c4 groups must be exclusively committed to social welfare. In other words, they can’t do any political campaign work at all. But court decisions have established they can do an insubstantial amount of such work. And the IRS has said that applicants merely need to ensure that their “primary purpose” is social welfare, but has never developed a clear standard to define what that means.

Political group or nonprofit? Or both?

As a result, some big-money groups, like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads GPS or the liberal Priorities USA, have assumed that political work can amount to 49.9% of what they do. The IRS gave both groups c4 status—which allows them not just to avoid paying taxes but, more important, to keep their donors secret—though both clearly appear designed to sway the outcome of elections.

Public Citizen argues that the IRS should enforce the “insubstantial” standard, meaning that once a group gets to 25% or 30% political, they’re violating the law. And for several years, his group and others have been urging the IRS to take a second look at groups like Rove’s.

“What the IRS should have been doing, and they should have done this long ago…is start taking a look at groups that are in fact electioneering, even if they have c4 status, and determine whether or not their c4 status should be revoked,” Holman said.

Holman said he’s concerned that in the wake of the controversy, the IRS will be even more wary of scrutinizing applications for tax-exempt status.

“The IRS clearly never really wanted to enforce the tax law,” he said. “And this gives them every reason to stay away from doing so.”

Related: Two IRS scandals hit Washington: One you’ve heard of, one you haven’t

But Holman added that one silver lining could emerge for those worried about money in politics. The last week’s events have helped create a consensus that the IRS shouldn’t be in the business of subjectively interpreting what qualifies as non-political, Holman said, and that a “bright-line” standard should be created.

A bill that would require the IRS and the FEC to team up to create such a standard was introduced earlier this year by Sens. Ron Wyden and Lisa Murkowski.

The IRS controversy has “given a lot more attention to the problem with these groups that are politicking anonymously,” Ken Willis, a spokesman for Wyden, told MSNBC.

And Alan Viard, a tax expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, this week laid out a version of the idea in response to the Tea Party tempest.

“The danger of future abuse will persist,” Viard wrote, “if the standards remain vague and susceptible to political manipulation. So, Congress must spell out clear rules about what is and is not permitted for (c)(4)s,” adding: “[T]hey should be as clear and objective as possible, so that the IRS can’t be strict with some groups and permissive toward others.”

“With conservatives jumping on top of this, this is a perfect opportunity to try to set up a bright-line standard, so we clearly define what is electioneering and what isn’t,” Holman said. “This is the solution. Let’s get the IRS outta here.”