In no uncertain terms and with no hedging, The New York Times reports that the Obama administration was aware of the fact that the IRS was targeting Tea Party groups as far back as June of 2012. The Treasury Department’s Inspector General confirmed that he told senior Treasury officials in June of 2012, a full five months before Election Day:

The Treasury Department’s inspector general told senior Treasury officials in June 2012 he was investigating the Internal Revenue Service’s screening of politically active organizations seeking tax exemptions, disclosing for the first time on Friday that Obama administration officials were aware of the matter during the presidential campaign year.

We still don’t know for sure what the President knew or when he knew it, but this does confirm that the administration was aware of the fact that Obama’s political enemies were under fire by the IRS and covered that fact up during an election year.

As Lisa Meyers of NBC News told “Morning Joe” today, “Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

The first time President Obama was asked when he found out about the IRS scandal, he told the media that he learned of the news last Friday, the same way the rest of us did — from the news media.

Thursday, a Bloomberg reporter asked the President when he or anyone else in the White House learned of the scandal. The President dodged the question.

With this latest news confirming when the Administration first learned of the IRS scandal, we now know that, along with Benghazi and the unfurling Associated Press scandal, there were three scandals brewing and unfolding in the White House during an election year. But we are only now hearing about them — six months after Barack Obama was safely re-elected.

This fact says as much about the failure of our lapdog national media as it does about President Obama. Why just this morning the Times itself dismissed the IRS scandal on its editorial page.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC