Thursday, June 26, 2014

New IRS Emails Show Lerner Targeted GOP Senator Charles Grassley For Audit

by JASmius

Not really a bombshell, as such, since at this point Lois Lerner's bona fides as an institutional partisan assassin for the Obama White House are well, well established.  Yet breathtaking in the stratospheric degree of brazenness it takes to go after a sitting opposition Senator, not to mention the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, on the flimsiest pretext that happens to fall into her lap:

Startling new emails from the woman at the center of the IRS tea party-targeting scandal show that in 2012 she suggested referring Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley for a possible audit.

The email exchange —  released by the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday —  took place in December 2012, and shows that Lois Lerner, former director of the IRS' Exempt Organizations Unit, mistakenly received an invitation to speak at an event. Her invitation was meant for Grassley.

Lerner and Grassley were both invited to speak at a seminar, ABC News noted. The group mixed up their tickets and Grassley’s invitation indicated the group was also paying for Grassley's wife to travel and attend the seminar. Grassley's wife, Barbara, is a lobbyist.

The House Ways and Means Committee did not name the group hosting the seminar, but said instead of forwarding the invitation to Grassley's office, Lerner immediately suggested that the issue should be referred for examination.

Referred for examination when, and before, any wrongdoing had taken place.  First, receiving such an invitation is not illegal.  Second, the Grassleys accepting the invite and attending this seminar would not have been illegal unless they hadn't included any perqs Mrs. Grassley had received on their 2012 F1040.  So....either Lois Lerner didn't understand the law her division of her agency is charged with enforcing, or she was so used to abusing that police power that she just did what came naturally to her.  And that was....

....exploiting what she saw as an opportunity.  Both diverting public attention from IRSgate by bringing down the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee as a "tax cheat" and perhaps the organization that put on the seminar as part of Chuck Grassley's eeeeeevil "conspiracy".  "Don't worry, my fellow Americans; Lois Lerner is on the case, seeing gestating Republican cultures of corruption and aborting them before they can even be born!" Barack Obama would have thundered at his "bombshell" presser.

Don't hold your breath waiting for him to hitch himself to this wagon now.  In fact, this "bombshell" email revelation further compartmentalizes IRSgate as something Lois Lerner did.  She is the White House's second line of defense after the "handful of rogue agents in Cincinnati" BS.  And since she's out of the Regime, and all the true "bombshell" emails linking the scandal to the White House are, supposedly and conveniently, "gone" - which is itself a diversionary tactic, as the recycling of Double-L's hard drive cannot preclude the emails' being on other servers elsewhere, it just makes them that much harder to forcibly divulge - each and every disclosure of all the outrageous abuses she carried out in Barack Obama's name further stokes "Lernergate," as opposed to IRSgate, with nary an Obama fingerprint in sight.

I could quote the bland "official" IRS "We can't comment on this other than to say that we would NEVER to ANYTHING like THAT" statement, but what would be the point?

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