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Hundreds of pages of transcribed interviews reveal IRS employees in Washington were involved at an early stage in the improper targeting of Tea Party groups – but at least so far the trail stops well short of the White House.

Based on the interviews with two long-time IRS employees working in the Cincinnati field office, there's no smoking gun, no direct connection to the Obama administration or even any indication those involved in the flagging of conservative groups had political motives.

Rather, the transcripts from the ongoing investigation, recently viewed by NPR, paint a more mundane picture about the office at the center of the IRS scandal: a dysfunctional workplace where office politics in Cincinnati and Washington, not partisan politics, served as the animating force behind a scandal that would dominate cable news and newspaper headlines for weeks.

Here are six revelations from the 360 pages of transcribed interviews with Gary Muthert, a screener who processed applications for tax exempt status and assigned them to agents for further review, and Elizabeth Hofacre, an "emerging issues" coordinator who was tasked with the so-called Tea Party cases.

1) There's still no smoking gun.

There's nothing in the interviews to suggest the word came from on high to scrutinize Tea Party groups. The reality, according to Muthert account, was a lot less interesting.

He said a co-worker noticed in March 2010 an application from a Tea Party group seeking tax exempt 501(c)(4) status as a social welfare group. Muthert's manager then asked him to search for all the Tea Party-related files.

"When I was asked to research Tea Parties, it was like 'Okay, I understand why you would want me to look at these cases and see if there is going to be a million coming in or not,'" said Muthert, in his interview with a bipartisan group of congressional investigators.

501(c)(4) groups are allowed to participate in politics, but it can't be their primary activity. Screening applicants for political activity and trying to divine whether they qualify for tax-exempt status is not out of the ordinary. But ultimately, the Tea Party groups were lumped together and fell into a bureaucratic black hole facing excessively long wait times and intrusive questioning according to an inspector general's report.

2) The IRS bureaucracy can be stifling and soul-crushing.

Hofacre was initially the person in Cincinnati who was assigned the Tea Party cases. From the start, she said, it was an awful portfolio.

Hofacre told investigators she was "micromanaged to death" by a tax law specialist in the Exempt Organizations Technical office in Washington. (That lawyer, Carter Hull, was interviewed by congressional investigators on Friday, and the transcript hasn't yet been made available to reporters).

"I didn't have any authority," said Hofacre. "I mean, Carter Hull had the ultimate authority – or I don't know if he did, but I had to go through him to get any kind of authority to review the applications and make a determination."

According to her account, Hofacre had to fax every application to Hull – and some of them were quite thick, which took a long time to send. She'd write letters to the organizations asking for more information, but she'd have to send them to Hull first for review.

When the organizations responded, he'd have to review that, too, before determining the next steps.

"I sent every application to him. It didn't matter what I thought," said Hofacre, explaining that it was especially frustrating, because at her level on the government civil service pay scale she was supposed to have more autonomy, and usually did. "He had to review it. I mean, he wasn't looking for my opinion."

IRS Organizational Chart