Now, leaving aside that she doesn't seem to have been the one who authorized the enhanced scrutiny of these groups, and that she reported having a computer failure and requested her emails be recovered right away, that the IRS had recovered her response email threads, and that for the most part, the IRS scrutiny of the various political-ish groups was in practice bipartisan, it sort of looks like the committee is fishing for stuff that might not even be helpful to them. But since all this computer failure occured before any investigation, it doesn't seem like anything was done to block an investigation that wasn't even happening yet.
This cache of emails we're talking about is in the thousands. I've heard about a tactic some big law firms use to stymie a civil case by just flinging all the docs they've got at the plaitiffs to bog them down in research. It seems to me like the GOP folks are asking to get more info than they should reasonably need to use or want. Why would they want to do that to themselves, unless this is more about fault-finding than fact-finding? If they knew what they were looking for, they certainly wouldn't be barking up this particular tree?
Just a thing I wonder about.
Aaaannd: Apparently Issa already knew about this, so?
4 comments:
I think they fixate on Lerner because she's a woman, and she has a name that suggests she's one of "those people", but not, of course, "those people", IYKWIMAITTYD.
She serves as a focus for their hate, like Saul Alinsky or Frances Fox Piven.
I think, for whatever reason, it might be easier to suppose the worst of women, because we're allegedly the more devious of the species. In her background, the one thing I find interesting is that before she was with IRS, she was with FEC, which might have given her more of an impetus in general to be leery of "not-so nonpolitical" groups, but she has generally been described by people who know her as not especially political herself. Not as a rule, a radical, in other words.
Hi Vixen, I see that the sentiment here seems to suggest that this whole issue is about persecuting women.
I'm afraid this option is not available for me inasmuch as I am married to someone who spent 30 years in the IT industry working for Fortune 500 companies. As a consequence, she has a grasp of the technical dimensions and the various laws at each level that were violated.
However, none of this matters, because Eric Holder will never prosecute any of the people involved.
This will be good news to one side of the issue, but actually it only represents the triumph of ideology over principle. As you know, I have said in the past that ideology is the new fundamentalism, and here we have an example of it.
Obviously the consequences to us all of weaponizing the IRS transcend whatever ideological justification is summoned to excuse it.
Still, some will regard this as a win for their side. Regrettably, they will ultimately discover that the only thing that is won is their own destruction.
Perhaps the following should be our new national anthem
I'm not fully sold on the "whole issue" being about "persecuting women"--I've seen Cummings get his mic shut off and John Koskinen get kind of badged the other day, so I don't think she's necessarily getting especially rougher treatment. What I do think though, is that for whatever reason, Issa and co. haven't figured out how to get anything useful out of her and might be missing something--she's a person.
I don't think they've tried to get a fix on her motivation for pleading the 5th. Or rather, I think they're necessarily assuming she's covering up for someone else. And, with the contempt charge (which DOJ, as you say, is very unlikely to pursue), I think there is an assumption that she's more likely to open up if leaned on--how is that challenging her motivation, though?
It's only just recently, a year into this, that I've heard Issa use the term "proffer"--now I think, this makes more sense, if she is actually the "low-hanging fruit" here. Could they have gotten something more if immunity was on the table earlier, saving themselves and her a bunch of hassle? (Not that I know they'll get anywhere even still...) I've been saying this hearing sometimes looks like is it being done for the sake of the hassle itself.
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