The DOJ lawyer who’s heading the investigation is an Obama donor and the FBI, after seven months of supposedly investigating this, only recently contacted tea-party groups targeted by the IRS. But other than that, everything here seems legit.

I was totally betting on Holder resuscitating a basically dormant scandal in an election year, when his boss already has his plate full with NSA angst and the endless ObamaCare car crash.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t plan to file criminal charges over the Internal Revenue Service’s heightened scrutiny of conservative groups, according to law-enforcement officials, a move that likely will only intensify debate over the politically charged scandal. The officials said investigators didn’t find the kind of political bias or “enemy hunting” that would amount to a violation of criminal law. Instead, what emerged during the probe was evidence of a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules about tax-exemption applications it didn’t understand, according to the law-enforcement officials… By its very nature, the investigation has been freighted with political suspicions. Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who has represented about a dozen groups that faced such questions by the IRS, said the FBI has yet to contact any of her clients about the issue. “As far as I can tell, nobody has actually done an investigation. This has been a big, bureaucratic, former-Soviet-Union-type investigation, which means that there was no investigation,” she said. “This is a deplorable abuse of the public trust, but I am not surprised.”

The Journal seems to think this will be a whip for the GOP in boosting turnout for the midterms. I … guess that’s true, but probably only as part of a laundry list: E.g., “we need to show the White House that America can do better than ObamaCare and chronic unemployment and Benghazi and punishing people because you disagree with their politics.” So awful was Obama’s 2013, in fact, that between the NSA fiasco, the gun-control push, dithering on Syria, spying on reporters, shutdown theater with the national parks, and of course the Chernobyl you and I know as Healthcare.gov, the IRS targeting at this point arguably doesn’t even place in his top five lowlights of the past 12 months. There’s too much failure to keep track of. He’s faster than the speed of scandal.

Go watch Alex Wagner, who hosts a show for Bridgegate TV, wondering if Benghazi and the IRS scandal are partisan chew toys that will never be dropped because there’s too much political benefit to the other side in keeping them going. Chris Hayes should have her on during tonight’s “special” to flesh out that idea.