http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/373843/holder-cruz-no-conflict-having-obama-donor-investigate-irs-scandal-andrew-c-mccarthy Holder to Cruz: No Conflict Having Obama Donor Investigate IRS Scandal
By Andrew C. McCarthy
March 20, 2014 3:04 PM
I know you’ll be shocked to hear that Attorney General Eric Holder has rejected Senator Ted Cruz’s call for an independent prosecutor to probe the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. I wrote about the senator’s demand when he made it two months ago (see here; see also the WSJ op-ed by Congressman Jim Jordan (R., OH), on the same topic, focusing on Lois Lerner’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment).
Senator Cruz has released a statement in response:
It is the height of hypocrisy for the Obama Administration to claim that the investigator leading the investigation into the IRS’s illegal program has no conflict of interest. The investigator is a partisan Democrat who has donated over six thousand dollars to President Obama and Democrat causes. Just as nobody would trust John Mitchell to investigate Richard Nixon, nobody should trust a partisan Obama donor to investigate the IRS’s political targeting of President Obama’s enemies. Sadly, “in the discretion of the Attorney General,” Eric Holder has chosen to reject the bipartisan tradition of the Department of Justice of putting rule of law above political allegiance.
“Both Nixon Administration Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Clinton Administration Attorney General Janet Reno appointed special prosecutors whose integrity was beyond reproach; Eric Holder should do likewise. To date, nine months after a damning Inspector General report, nobody has been indicted, many of the victims have not even been interviewed, and Lois Lerner has twice pleaded the Fifth. And yet the Attorney General refuses to allow a genuine–and impartial–investigation.
The integrity of the Department of Justice deserves better. The American people deserve better.
