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Two days before Christmas, when the eyes and ears of all Americans, young and old, are focused on Congress, in particular on the outgoing chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Darrell Issa dropped the bombshell that will change our Christmases forever more.
After 18 months of investigations, millions of documents, scores of subpoenas and dozens of “tumultuous hearings” on the alleged I.R.S. scandal, Mr. Issa released a 226-page summary of the panel’s findings today, the day before Christmas Eve, knowing that it would get the world-wide attention it deserves.
The report quoted e-mails filled with scandalous comments about a conservative group. Comments such as “This org gives me an icky feeling.”
Sadly, the investigation “failed to show coordination between agency officials and political operatives in the White House,” according to the New York Times.
But do not despair, true to the Christmas legend that where there is horse manure there must be a pony, Republicans are determined to find the elusive Christmas pony, even if it is next Christmas, or the one thereafter; even if it takes millions of additional documents, millions of additional taxpayer dollars and millions of additional pounds of icky manure to carefully sift through.
The Times:
A representative for Mr. Issa, Caitlin Carroll, would not comment on the failure to find a link to the White House but noted that the investigation was not over. It will continue in the 114th Congress under the committee’s new chairman, Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, after congressional investigators recovered thousands of I.R.S. emails thought to have been lost in a series of computer crashes.
The Times also reports, “Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the committee, who has compared the inquiry about the I.R.S. to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s investigation of suspected communists in the 1950s, was sharply critical of the report.
“It is revealing that the Republicans — yet again — are leaking cherry-picked excerpts of documents to support their preconceived political narrative,” Mr. Cummings said, “without allowing committee members to even see their conclusions or vote on them first.”
Those are some icky cherries.
Jason Easley at Politicususa — you know, that real Liberal site with “no corporate money and no masters” — aware of the Christmas spirit in which Issa intended his bombshell to be received, puts it in an even more “Christmas-spirit” way:
In over 200 pages, the Republicans could not find one piece of concrete evidence that the White House had anything to do with IRS’s behavior. Issa rejected all evidence that progressive groups were also targeted, and he continues to ignore the reason that the IRS targeted the 501(c) groups. The conservative groups were breaking the law by asking to tax-exempt status despite the fact that they were engaging in partisan political activity.
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The IRS should have been targeting the groups because they were trying to get out of paying taxes. Issa’s own report confirms that there was no White House conspiracy. Obama wasn’t using the IRS to hold down conservatives. Issa was lying. He refuses to release the full transcripts of the interviews. The full evidencereveals that there is nothing to the IRS conspiracy theory. That is why Darrell Issa refuses to make all of the interview transcripts public.
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Darrell Issa spent two years as chairman of the Oversight Committee trying to get Obama. In the end, Issa fell flat on his face, and his years of conspiracy theory went up in flames
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