If you can't make a scandal stick to a president with facts, make the scandal you want up and hope people don't actually fact check it.
A defiant IRS Commissioner on Friday refused to apologize for the loss of ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails, and said the agency produced what they could, at a combative hearing marked by accusations by Republicans of IRS deceit.
The meeting comes a week after the agency revealed that two years worth of emails to and from Lerner, the ex-official at the center of the tea party targeting controversy, were lost when her hard drive crashed in 2011.
“I don’t think an apology is owed,” chief John Koskinen told Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp after the Republican lawmaker asked for one at the first hearing on the email issue.
Democrats said there was no evidence of bad faith, but the GOP accused Koskinen of hiding the missing emails from Congress, saying the agency and the White House knew for months there was a problem before they told the Hill. They chastised him for not mentioning it during several appearances before Congress this spring.
“You can blame it on a technical glitch, but it is not a technical glitch to mislead the American people,” Camp said. “What you have lost is all credibility.”
We can't actually prove you're lying, so we're just going to accuse you of it anyway. Meanwhile, how quickly we forget that the Bush administration lost tens of millions of emails until almost a year after he left office.
White House computer technicians have found 22 million e-mails that were believed to have been lost during President George W. Bush’s administration, according to the Associated Press.
The discovery was announced Monday by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which filed lawsuits against the Executive Office of the President, or EOP, over the e-mails in 2007.
The two groups had initially filed a Freedom of Information Act request for e-mails in the wake of a scandal involving the Justice Department, which had fired U.S. attorneys around the country in an apparent political bid to rid the department of prosecutors who didn’t adhere to the White House’s conservative agenda. The missing e-mails were also potentially crucial to the investigation into the Valerie Plame–CIA leak scandal.
But of course they were mislabeled. 22 million emails worth of mislabeled. Republicans didn't bat an eye. But one person's emails go missing, and it's a national scandal.
Go figure.
It's simple, really: Republicans know that they routinely attempt to destroy any e-mail trails when setting out to violate the law (See e.g. Scott "Perp" Walker of Wisconsin). Thus, they are simply attributing their own behavior patterns to others.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note - these actions were performed by persons appointed to the IRS during the Bush Administration. We're currently seeing a power struggle between the Country Club Republicans and the Tea Party Republicans - and these IRS bureaucrats were appointed by Country Club Republicans. Isn't it more likely that if there was intentional targeting of Tea Party groups, it was done by Republicans eager to route political donor money to groups favoring the Country Club Republicans, such as Karl Rove's organization? Wouldn't a Karl Rove-inspired conspiracy seek to blame the illegal acts of Country Club Republicans on the Obama Administration - as a form of twofer? Wouldn't this explain why Lois Lerner made the IRS' actions public in such a clumsy way?
I'd like to see Democrats bring up this possibility - especially around the 4th of July, when the sound of heads exploding would blend in with the rest of the fireworks. This would open the door to investigating all the e-mails that went missing during the Bush Administration, as standard Republican M.O. - it would be interesting to see whether one of the same IT companies involved in other, similar Republican illegalities were involved here.