George Will: Why the IRS Case Merits a Special Prosecutor
by Keith Koffler on June 23, 2014, 2:15 pm
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, George Will yesterday cogently outlined the case for a special prosecutor to probe the IRS scandal.
Here are his points, which I’ve quote in bulleted format:
WILL: We can no more expect Mr. Holder to investigate this White House than we could have expected John Mitchell to investigate the Nixon White House. Here’s — we know six things, Chris:◾We know first the targeting occurred
◾Therefore, second, we know that this is worse than article two of the Nixon impeachment count, which said Nixon endeavored to use the IRS. The IRS back then resisted.
◾Third, we know that this became public in an act of deceit when Lois Lerner planted a question with a friend in an audience to try and get this out on her own terms.
◾Fourth, we know that she has taken the Fifth Amendment because she has a right to do this when she has a reasonable suspicion that there might be criminal activity involved.
◾Fifth, we know that from the timeline you put up today, that there has been 13 months of stonewalling on this.
◾And sixth, now we know that not only her hard drive, but six other people intimately involved in this suddenly crashed in an amazing miraculous coincidence – religions have been founded on less – ten days after the investigation started. That’s why we need a special prosecutor.
I would add one:
◾Seventh, the president of the United States squashed any type of internal federal probe by foreordaining the conclusion when he said the scandal had “not even a smidgen of corruption” to it.
Let’s put this in perspective: The nation’s extraordinarily powerful tax agency targeted the president’s political opponents. This is unequivocal. Evidence that could prove White House or other type of conspiracy has been destroyed. This clearly merits a drop-in from Woodward and Bernstein, which of course can’t happen now.
Oh, wait a second.
WOODWARD: I mean take Benghazi, a highly politicized issue. And I’ve looked at all those e-mails that were released. It takes a day to make sense of them. And if you dig into it, there are unanswered questions. . .
And Carl’s exactly right, you put 10 people on that and you say, go to work. You don’t have to give me the answers tomorrow or the next day, but take your time. The same on the IRS scandal. That is a real issue. Some people should move to Cincinnati and get hotel rooms and say, we’re going to talk to everyone who worked in that division of the IRS.
BERNSTEIN: Also, as happened in Watergate, let some Democrats get up and say, we want a real bipartisan investigation of what happened in Cincinnati, in the IRS. Get it out in the hands of the Republican grandstanders who are trying to make political points instead of conduct a serious investigation, and put together and start to get some facts as happened in Watergate.
But there are not Woodward and Bernsteins for Obama. Too many reporters are sympathetic to the president. And in journalism today, news outlets are unwilling to devote their depleting resources to investigative journalism, which takes time and money and creates the risk that a reporter might not have an update for the website every day.
There will be no special prosecutor. There will be no serious investigative reporting. And we risk having what might be one of the worst crimes ever committed by the executive branch successfully covered up.
