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Paul L. Caron
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Tuesday, August 12, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 460

IRS Logo 2Biz Pac Review:  Sharyll Attkisson’s Impressive Account of How Watergate Would Play Out in Obama Era:

Sharyl Attkisson, the former CBS News reporter who left the network complaining because of liberal bias, offered a sobering account of Sunday how she thinks Watergate would play out today in the Age of Obama.

And it sounds awfully familiar.

Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” Attkisson described what has basically been the pattern for every scandal of the Obama years – dubbed “phony scandals” by all the president’s men.

“I think that we’ve gone backwards since that time when we really felt empowered as journalists,” Attkisson said. “And all I can think is: What would happen today during a Nixon-type scandal?”

“Nixon would basically refuse to turn over tapes to Congress,” she said, in an apparent allusion to the IRS simply “losing” emails key to investigations of its targeting conservative groups.

“His aides would refuse to testify to Congress, or would take the Fifth, or would like to Congress with a fair amount of immunity,” Attkisson continued, describing the refusal of former IRS official Lois Lerner to testify before Congress and the stonewalling other administration officials have engaged in.

The Hill op-ed:  More Lost Emails — When Will Democrats Have Enough?, by Rick Manning (Citizens for Limited Government):

Twenty different Obama administration officials have lost or destroyed a portion of their email traffic. Email traffic that was, in some cases, under subpoena or in others requested as part of a larger inquiry into the conduct of the executive branch. ...

The brazenly contemptuous stonewall-and-erase-evidence approach to congressional inquiries preferred by the Obama administration is perhaps this president's greatest affront to our constitutional system of government.

When you have records going missing across an administration, it is impossible to conclude anything other than it is a coordinated and condoned cover-up, and not just a series of incompetent, coincidental keystrokes wiping out information.

The conclusions get even uglier when you realize that the IRS dismissed the government contractor responsible for maintaining back-up files of their emails concurrent with Lois Lerner and her band mysteriously having their computers flatline.

The question is, where are the Democrats in the face of this obvious malfeasance?

During the Watergate scandal that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon, a few Republicans came forward and urged the president to come clean. Yet, the silence is deafening from Democrats in both the House and Senate in the wake of this obvious obstruction of the congressional oversight function.

Where are the patriots on the Democratic side, who are willing to stand up to an executive branch that has declared them inconsequential?

National Review op-ed:  Stonewaller-in-Chief: We’re Transparent, but Don’t Ask For Any Documents, Says the Obama White House, by John Fund:

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned in reporting about Washington is a simple one: watch what politicians do, not what they say. There can be no better illustration of this than Obama’s summit meeting with African leaders last week. He used the meeting as an opportunity to tout the positive role inspectors general can play in fighting corruption in government agencies; at the same time that he was speechifying about this, some two-thirds of President Obama’s own inspectors general wrote a scathing letter to Congress complaining that his administration was placing “serious limitations” on their ability to do their jobs.

Wall Street Journal editorial:  Justice's IRS Connection: The Lawyer Who Had Tax-exempt Cases Coming and Going:

It was fishy enough when Democratic donor Barbara Bosserman was appointed to lead the Justice Department investigation of IRS targeting of conservative groups. Now there are new questions about Justice's staffing choice on one of the private lawsuits brought against the IRS.

We've been telling you about the pro-Israel group Z Street, which sued the IRS in 2010 on grounds that the agency engaged in viewpoint discrimination when it singled out 501(c) groups with Israel-related missions for additional scrutiny. The case has been handled by Justice Department trial attorney Andrew Strelka, who previously worked in the IRS office run by Lois Lerner that handled tax-exempt applications. ...

[R]ecently Mr. Strelka was withdrawn as the Justice Department's counsel of record on the Z Street case. A review of court dockets showed that he has also withdrawn from two other cases involving tax-exempt groups, including Judicial Watch's suit against the IRS. ...

If Mr. Strelka had personal knowledge of the processing of tax-exempt applications for groups like Z Street while he was assigned to the IRS, he should have recused himself from handling the case at Justice.

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