There was a time when flipping Congress the bird was considered
something of a serious transgression, but no longer. Hillary Clinton is
the third Obama administration official or former official to blow off
congressional investigators and the third to escape legal punishment.
The first two were Attorney General Eric Holder and IRS official Lois
Lerner. In both cases, the accused party was charged but the Justice
Department refused to prosecute.
Attorney General Eric Holder was charged with contempt of Congress in
2012 when he refused to furnish the House Oversight Committee with tens
of thousands of pages concerning the Fast and Furious gunwalking
scandal. Operation Fast and Furious was an ill-conceived initiative
involving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that deliberately
allowed straw purchasers to buy more than 2,000 guns and transport them
across the Mexican border to drug cartels. One of those guns was used to
murder a US Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry. The total number of
Mexican victims is more difficult to calculate but can probably be
counted in the hundreds.
Holder doesn’t think he should be required to provide any additional
Fast and Furious documents because he’s already provided thousands of
pages. The fact that he’s withholding
tens of thousands of
pages isn’t supposed to matter. He willingly gave up the ones he wanted
Congress to see, so what difference does it make if he’s still clinging
to the incriminating ones? At one point, his Justice Department even
offered to furnish a “fair compilation” of the outstanding documents if
congressional Republicans agreed, in advance, to end their
investigation.
Chutzpah.
… Lois Lerner has about the same amount
of respect for Congress as Holder, which is to say none at all. When she
was at the IRS, her office deliberately targeted conservative
organizations for special scrutiny, often failing to grant their status
after years of examination while similar liberal groups were
rubber-stamped. Groups that contained the words or phrases “Tea Party,”
“patriot,” or “9/12” were singled out, as were groups that were critical
of government policy. Groups were asked if any of their leaders had
intentions of seeking public office in the future, even what they prayed
about.
The whole operation had the appearance of either an intelligence
gathering operation, a fishing expedition to find any excuse to deny the
tax-exempt status, or an attempt to keep opposition groups tied up with
onerous paperwork. A combination of all three is certainly not outside
the realm of possibility.
… Last week we learned that Eric Holder is exercising his “discretion”
in the Lerner case. He has decided that her unqualified declaration of
innocence does not preclude her pleading fifth amendment. She can have
her cake and eat it too.
So Hillary Clinton is in good company. She won’t go to jail; she
won’t even be forced out to pasture, as disgraced old politicians used
to be when caught violating the law and their oaths of office. She’s a
new breed of politician, characterized by her shamelessness, just as we
are a new kind of voting electorate, ready to elect her the next
president. Congress is a joke and defying its subpoenas carries no
penalty.
those few reporters who have the nerve to ask her about it and she will then waltz effortlessly to the Democratic nomination, if not the White House.
