09 Feb 2014 Democratic Congressmen Seek Investigation of IRS Inspector General for Reporting Alleged IRS Wrongdoing Against Conservative Groups
It seems the inspector general is a Republican.
Not long after the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice appointed an Obama bundler to investigate the are-conservatives-being-targeted-by-the-IRS? scandal, two influential Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are complaining that the IRS inspector general who released a report revealing significant details of the scandal can’t be relied upon because he’s not independent — he used to work for Republicans on the Hill and was appointed to his job by George W. Bush.
One of these men, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), said last year that everything is already known about the scandal that needs to be known. He wanted the investigation ended. Now he wants it expanded, but to investigate the inspector general who alleged wrongdoing, not to find if wrongdoing occurred.
The other Congressman, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), called the inspector general “a tainted IG.” (Does he believe the DOJ investigation is “tainted”?)
The Congressmen also complained that Democrats had been left out of certain meetings. As the blog Weasel Zippers reports:
Why might some Democrats have been kept out of meetings? Because Congressional Democrats were being looked at during the investigation for their role in the IRS targeting.
Seems reasonable.
In any case, as long as the Department of Justice completes a comprehensive investigation of the charges in the actual scandal, including the IG’s report, it won’t matter in the end. If a through investigation is done, we’ll all find out what happened, and the IG will either be vindicated, or he won’t be.
No need Congressmen Cummings and Connolly to fuss…
…unless they have some reason to suspect that Eric Holder’s Department of Justice won’t conduct a full investigation.
The House of Representatives should appoint a special investigator with full subpoena powers to investigate this scandal. Possibly he or she will reach the same conclusion the DOJ investigation reaches, but if that happens, it is still worth doing, because then the public will have far more confidence in whatever that conclusion is.
And while I’m on the subject of the IRS scandal, readers might be interested in an interview my husband and the National Center’s president, David Ridenour, did on the scandal on WGSO-AM’s Jeff Couere show in New Orleans Friday. The recording is rather long because they took questions from callers, so feel free to listen to, as the president might say, only a smidgen. You’ll still get good content.