On CNN’s State Of The Union, Rep. Darrell Issa’s IRS scandal disintegrated on national television when he couldn’t name a single piece of evidence that proved that IRS singled out and targeted conservative groups.
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On CNN’s State Of The Union, Candy Crowley asked Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) for a smoking gun in the IRS scandal. Issa answered with a non-answer, “We sent your people almost four hundred pages of the report, and that details item by item email by email statements that she made versus other people. The nature of the beast just like a criminal prosecution is that you build a case.”
Crowley pressed Issa by asking him for a fact, or a direct piece of information. The California Republican continued to stumble, “It’s a case file that’s built including her musing on working for the president’s 501(c) Organizing For America.”
Candy Crowley asked Issa if he would release the full transcript of the interviews, and Issa made excuses for why he couldn’t. Candy Crowley deserves some credit for pressing Issa by not letting him come on her show and spew his usual BS. Issa tried to get into his conspiracies by claiming that Lerner wanted to work for Organizing For America, but Crowley didn’t let him off the hook.
The IRS scandal, just like Benghazi and all of the other Republican scandals, falls apart under the slightest bit of examination. It would have been beneficial to Rep. Issa if he had named one piece of evidence that Lerner intentionally targeted conservative groups, but he couldn’t point to a smoking gun because one doesn’t exist. There is no smoking gun. The IRS scandal is nothing more than Issa abusing his investigative powers in order to weave the threads of a conspiracy theory together into something that he hopes will bring down the Obama administration.
It was more than a year ago that the IRS didn’t just target conservative groups. They were examining both conservative and liberal groups. After the Citizens United decision, the IRS was flooded with applications for tax exempt status by conservative groups. The reason why these groups were flagged is because they were breaking the law by engaging in partisan political activities while claiming to be social welfare organizations.
The point of the Republican targeting of the IRS has always been to warn the agency to stay away from the conservative dark money groups. Republicans are trying to protect the power of right-wing billionaires to try secretly to buy elections.
There is no evidence to support what Issa is claiming, but there is plenty of evidence that Issa’s investigation is a politically motivated witch hunt. The real criminal here isn’t Lois Lerner. It’s Darrell Issa.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
