A Coincidence?

Garance Franke-Ruta: 

Sean Higgins of the Washington Examiner raises an interesting question.
"What kicked off the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party groups?" he asks. "The Treasury Department's Inspector General apparently knows but the rest of us cannot. His report on the scandal includes three timelines of events, but in each case, the first item in the timeline has been redacted."
"The mystery date was apparently February 25, 2010," he concludes from reading the reports. "...The reference to February in both appendixes indicates something particularly noteworthy happened then in the evolution of the IRS's policy. What was it?"

After reviewing some of what was going on in February 2010:

And then this caught my eye.
On February 23, 2010, Robert Wright, writing for the Times' Opinionator blog, looked at "The First Tea Party Terrorist?" His column on the Andrew Joseph Stack incident is chilling in retrospect and in light of the IRS's subsequent decision to begin sorting exemption applications for groups with "Tea Party, "Patriot" "9/12" and other conservative buzzwords in their names for referral to a specialist.
On February 18th, Stack had flown a small airplane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, killing himself and IRS agent Vernon Hunter and injuring 13 on the ground. Stack left behind a six-page rant against the federal government and the IRS. His conclusion: "I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."
Readers took issue with Wright's description of Stack as a Tea Party type, leading to him to update the column to note: "When I said in this column that you could in principle follow my logic to conclude that Joseph Stack was a Tea Party terrorist, I should have added the explicit reminder that this logic depended on accepting the somewhat squishy definition of 'Tea Party' ideology that, I argue, is appropriate given the still-inchoate nature of the movement."

A week after he flew a plane into an IRS building, Tea Party groups started getting questioned on their non-profit applications. As the article notes:

Stack was not a member of his local group, the Austin Tea Party Patriots, as its founders repeatedly tried to make clear in February 2010.

The timeline is definitely interesting, though.