Obama's Counsel Told of IRS Audit Findings Weeks Ago  —  The White House's chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday.

A rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe  —  When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

Hillary '16 Campaign Off to Excellent Start  —  Breaking news: according to a report in today's Washington Post, Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the presidency in 2016 have increased by approximately a zillion percent, due to the fact that her former chief strategist Mark Penn …

Exclusive: Hillary's Benghazi ‘Scapegoat’ Speaks Out  —  Raymond Maxwell, the only official at the State Department's bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to lose his job after the attacks, tells Josh Rogin that he's been scapegoated by Hillary Clinton's team.  —  Following the attack in Benghazi …

How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America  —  “Convenient race-talk” from a president who ought to know better  —  The first lady went to Bowie State and addressed the graduating class.  Her speech was a mix of black history and a salute to the graduates.  There was also this:

UPDATED: Virginia GOP Nominee For Attorney General Introduced Bill Forcing Women To Report Their Miscarriages To Police  —  If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year.

On Yahoo-Tumblr  —  It now looks pretty certain that Yahoo has pulled off a deal to buy Tumblr for 1.1B.  The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr's own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook …

7 Juicy Claims From A Romney Campaign Insider's New Book  —  Former policy aide Gabriel Schoenfeld's new book, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign: An Insider's Account , blames Romney's staff for his defeat.  Romney aides have dismissed the account , saying Schoenfeld was not as high …

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Three Signs There's a Cover-Up  —  The late columnist William Safire once said that a good clue that someone in Washington was engaged in “an artful dodge,” i.e., a cover-up, was that they used the phrase “mistakes were made.”  Safire defined it as a “passive-evasive way of acknowledging error …

How to Legalize Pot  —  THE first time I talked to Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at U.C.L.A., was in 2002, and he explained why legalization of marijuana was a bad idea.  Sure, he said, the government should remove penalties for possession, use and cultivation of small amounts.

State Dept. Spokeswoman Refuses to Criticize Iran for Excluding Women Candidates from Election  —  State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki refused to criticize Iran for excluding women candidates from the upcoming “election” there.  The remarkable exchange, which concludes with Psaki saying this …

Cincinnati Ground Zero of Exploding IRS Scandal, But Answers Hard to Find  —  The John Weld Peck Federal Building is shown in Cincinnati, May 14, 2013.  It houses the main offices for the Internal Revenue Service in the city.  (Al Behrman/AP Photo)  —  Welcome to Cincinnati - Ground zero of the exploding IRS scandal.