Cartoon credit: teachufr.org
A
few days ago, Glenn Reynolds (Mr. Instapundit) published a column in USA Today
about the IRS scandal and Tea Party groups:
Last week saw the passage of a
grim milestone in government corruption: Pepperdine University Law
Professor Paul Caron’s TaxProf blog marked the 1000th
day of the scandal involving the IRS’s deliberate political targeting
of conservative “Tea Party” groups.
. . .
But what happened in the IRS
scandal wasn’t
a case of bureaucrats slow-walking ideas they think are dumb. It was,
instead, a case of bureaucrats
targeting people because of their political views.
Ohio Tea Party activist Justin
Binik-Thomas noticed in 2012 that the IRS was asking Tea Party organizations if they knew him. The
IRS denied that
it was targeting people based on their political views, then admitted that it
was doing so but blamed low-level
employees in the Cincinnati office.
Then it turned out that, as the
Treasury Inspector General found, there
was much more going on. The next day, the acting IRS commissioner resigned.
There was much talk about
accountability, even from President
Obama, but, in the end, we got something that looked more like a
whitewash.
As Caron wrote:
"On May 22, 2013, the IRS
director (of exempt organizations) asserted her Fifth
Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to testify
before a House committee. She was placed
on administrative leave. The following month, it was revealed that she received
a $42,000 bonus.
She retired in September.
"On Jan.
9, 2014, it was revealed that the Department of Justice attorney leading
the investigation was a donor to the president's campaigns. A week later, the
Justice Department revealed it would not
bring any criminal charges. Attorneys for many of the targeted
political groups complained that
they had never been contacted in the investigation.
"On Feb. 2, 2014, the
president stated in
a televised interview before the Super Bowl that although there 'were some
bone-headed decisions out of a local (IRS) office ... (there was) not even a
smidgen of corruption.'
"On May 7, 2014, the House
voted 231-187 to hold the former IRS director in contempt of Congress
for refusing to cooperate in its investigation (six
members of the president's party voted with the majority). The House
also voted 250-168 to
request the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate (26
members of the president's party voted with the majority)."
Of course, nothing happened.
Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that the U.S. Attorney
was using "prosecutorial
discretion.” That discretion protected [former IRS director Lois] Lerner
from the grand jury.
Read the rest here.
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