by Ben Shapiro
Meanwhile, the White House continued to claim that President Obama had remained in the dark about the IRS scandal, despite Jay Carney admitting that the White House had been informed as early as April 2013. “There’s been some legitimate criticisms about how we’re handling this,” Carney said in May 2013. Carney then blamed White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler for not telling President Obama—the same woman the White House tried to throw under the bus for the administration’s failed PR rollout on the Benghazi scandal.113
THE AFTERMATH
By August, the White House felt enough time had passed to try to brush the IRS scandal under the rug. President Obama began using a new phrase in his speeches: “phony scandals.” He said that the Republicans’ focus on such “phony scandals” had prevented him from getting any work done.114 Carney later clarified: “I think we all remember a few weeks ago when Washington was consumed with a variety of issues that, while in some cases significant, there was an effort under way to turn them into partisan scandals. I don’t think anybody here would doubt that . . . when it comes to the IRS, as I said the other morning, the President made very clear that he will—that he wants the new leadership there to take action to correct improper conduct, and that is happening and he expects results. What some in Congress have failed to do despite many attempts is to provide any evidence—because there is none—that that activity was in any way known by, or directed by, the White House, or was even partisan or political.”115
And poof! Just like that, by utilizing the Old Jedi Mind Trick, the White House expected the entire situation to disappear. A new man, Acting Commissioner Danny Werfel, was on the job. The evidence didn’t matter. Obama had done his due diligence. Nothing to see here. These were not the droids America was looking for.
Except nothing changed. The IRS reportedly has never stopped its targeting of conservative groups. In early August, House Ways and Means Committee chairman Representative Dave Camp (R-MI) released testimony from an agent who told the committee that the IRS continued to give special scrutiny to Tea Party groups. According to that agent, Tea Party groups were still being sent to the holding tank of “secondary screening” because the IRS had developed no new guidelines. Here’s the conversation between the investigator and the agent:
INVESTIGATOR: “If you saw—I am asking this currently, if today if a Tea Party case, a group—a case from a Tea Party group came in to your desk, you reviewed the file and there was no evidence of political activity, would you potentially approve that case? Is that something you would do?”
AGENT: “At this point I would send it to secondary screening, political advocacy.”
INVESTIGATOR: “So you would treat a Tea Party group as a political advocacy case even if there was no evidence of political activity on the application. Is that right?”
AGENT: “Based on my current manager’s direction, uh-huh.”
That was six weeks after the new acting IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, told the committee that the criteria for targeting had been stopped.116 As Representative Aaron Schock (R-IL) told Fox News in August, “After the investigation had already begun, after the illegal behavior had already been exposed, they were asking pro-life groups how much of their time was being spent in prayer, how much of their time was being spent outside of abortion clinics, things that are clearly illegal for the IRS to ask when it’s determining the tax-exempt status of any organization.” He continued, “despite [President Obama’s] promise to the American people that it was going to stop, it hasn’t. . . . I would remind you that the only reason the American people are continuing to hear about this, the only reason that we know that the illegal targeting is continuing, is because we have a Republican-controlled House. The Democrats on the committee have already said if they ran the place, the investigation would be complete.”117
Unbowed by the IRS scandal, Democrats continued to push forward with their persecution of conservative nonprofits. Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) announced in late August 2013 that he would join up with liberal nonprofits Campaign Legal Center, Democracy 21, and Public Citizen to sue the IRS to encourage them to increase scrutiny of nonprofits. Democracy 21 and Public Citizen were two of the groups that petitioned the IRS over conservative nonprofits in 2011.118
Treatment of the Tea Party didn’t improve, either. In May 2013, Tea Partiers showed up in Orlando, Florida, to protest the local IRS office over the scandal. The Department of Homeland Security—Janet Napolitano’s office, which had always worried so much over those crazy Tea Party kooks—showed up to monitor the protests.119
It still paid to be an IRS agent, though. On June 5, 2013, the IRS reported that it would pay out $70 million in employee bonuses. Over the previous five years, the IRS paid out $92 million in bonuses.120 The IRS is slated to be the chief beneficiary of Obamacare; some studies say that 16,500 new employees will have to join the IRS to help with the Obamacare implementation.121
So, what happened to the other people involved in the IRS scandal? They’re doing quite well, naturally.
Lois Lerner, director for exempt organizations: The day after invoking the Fifth Amendment, Lerner was placed on paid administrative leave—meaning paid vacation. She wrote her colleagues, “Due to the events of recent days, I am on administrative leave starting today. An announcement will be made shortly informing you who will be acting while I am on administrative leave. I know all of you will continue to support EO’s mission during these difficult times.”122 Despite a House vote to declare that Lerner’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment was improper after she declared her innocence, Lerner will likely not testify again.123 Her lawyer stated that Lerner would not testify again unless the House gave her immunity from prosecution. “They can obtain her testimony tomorrow by doing it the easy way . . . immunity,” said the lawyer.124 Lerner continued to earn $177,000 per year,125 until she retired in September 2013.
Holly Paz, director of rulings and agreements: Paz was placed on administrative leave at about the same time Lerner went on her paid vacation. Her lawyer told the Wall Street Journal, “Holly Paz did nothing wrong and in fact she was an ideal employee, an ideal public servant.”126
Sarah Hall Ingram, commissioner for tax-exempt organizations: Ingram ended up heading up the Obamacare IRS office. The unit has been tasked with enforcing Obamacare. And as we’ll see, the application of Obamacare is already eminently political. “Now more than ever, we need to prevent the IRS from having any role in Americans’ health care,” Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said upon hearing of Ingram’s new job.127 Between January 2011 and June 2013, Ingram visited the White House 165 times. Between 2009 and 2012, she received more than $100,000 in bonuses.128
Douglas Shulman, commissioner of the IRS: Shulman presided over the IRS for virtually the entirety of the targeting. He told Congress, “I feel very comfortable with my actions.”129 He retired with full benefits in November 2012.
Steven Miller, acting commissioner of the IRS: Miller earned $100,000 in bonuses in the five years before his resignation.130 He was preparing to retire anyway—his term was limited by statute. Nonetheless, both the Obama administration and Miller pretended that his decision to retire was some sort of incredible act of sacrifice and strength.
Joseph Grant, former commissioner for tax-exempt and government entities: Grant retired from the IRS on June 3, 2013, just days after receiving a promotion to that role, meaning he had little involvement in the situation at all. He kept his benefits.131
Carter Hull, tax specialist in exempt organizations: Hull reportedly retired, keeping his benefits.132
CLOSING ARGUMENT
“The IRS!” Jerry Seinfeld once exclaimed. “They’re like the mafia, they can take anything they want!”
Seinfeld would have loved President Obama. Presidents have historically used the IRS as a tool of intimidation and oppression. The Obama administration has followed that pattern, all the while ensuring that nobody gets blamed for a basic violation of Americans’ rights and blaming con
servative paranoia for focus on the IRS’s discrimination in the first place. While the left proclaims that the IRS never targeted conservative groups, the statistics simply don’t bear that out—just as with JFK, the IRS was careful enough to pick out a few specific liberal groups to check out, just enough to grant plausible deniability.
Except it isn’t plausible, and the American people know it. The House Oversight Committee staff report concludes, “As prominent politicians publicly urged the IRS to take action on tax-exempt groups engaged in legal campaign intervention activities, the IRS treated tea party applications differently. Applications filed by tea party groups were identified and grouped due to media attention surrounding the existence of the tea party in general.” President Obama and his Democratic allies had created that media attention. And the IRS regulators could read the tea leaves.133 In the process of reading those tea leaves, the IRS and the Obama administration violated both the Hatch Act and the “omnibus” provision of the Internal Revenue Code.
The targeting continues. In August 2013, Judicial Watch got hold of a training manual for the Department of Defense on “extremism.” The manual labeled “the colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule” extremists. “Nowadays,” the department warned, “instead of dressing in sheets or publicly espousing hate messages, many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.”134 With such nefarious characters running around, no wonder the IRS targets conservatives. That same month, Tea Party Patriots received a letter from the IRS requesting a “laundry list of requests related to virtually all the group’s activities, including its involvement in the 2012 election cycle and its get-out-the-vote efforts, fundraising activities, all radio and TV advertising, and other information,” according to the Washington Times.135
The result of such discrimination will be a general distrust of the government as a whole. In Italy, the population is so sick of corruption within the government that it avoids taxes at an incredible rate, shortchanging the tax funds approximately 18 percent of gross domestic product every single year.136 In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where enemies of the prime minister are considered enemies of the state and targeted regularly by tax officers, bribery is so lucrative that young people would rather become tax inspectors than engineers or oilmen. Naturally, the Russian people feel by wide margins that the government is corrupt.137
Americans are increasingly feeling the same thing. As of late May 2013, 76 percent of Americans wanted a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS scandal. We didn’t get it.138 As of August, 59 percent of Americans thought that the IRS scandal was a serious problem.139
The IRS represents the worst of American government: a faceless, vast bureaucratic agency without consistently applied rules, and easily exploitable by the corrupt or the malevolent. The Obama administration is both.
COUNT 4
UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION
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Whoever, lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any . . . information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it . . . [s]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
—18 U.S. CODE § 793
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OPENING ARGUMENT
On May 2, 2011, President Barack Obama swaggered to the podium in the historic Cross Hall of the White House. “Good evening,” Obama stated. “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.” It was an incredible moment—a cathartic moment for millions of Americans who had watched in horror as fellow Americans flung themselves from the flaming wreck of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, or saw smoke plume from the caved-in wall of the Pentagon, or smelled the ash rising from a hole in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Bin Laden was dead. President Obama had made the right call to go after him.
And President Obama didn’t let anyone forget who had made the call. In his speech to the nation, Obama focused on his central role in the bin Laden killing. “[S]hortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network,” he said. “Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team. . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.”1
President Obama’s credit-taking was graceless, but not criminal.
The same could not be said for his vice president. Speaking on May 4, 2011, at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C., Joe Biden—Uncle Joe, as he is termed by members of the media as a way of writing off his numerous gaffes—dropped crucial information to terrorists. “Let me briefly acknowledge tonight’s distinguished honorees,” he said. “Admiral Jim Stavridis is a—is the real deal; he could tell more about and understands the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALS and what they did last—last Sunday,” he blurted. “Folks, I’d be remiss also if I didn’t say an extra word about the incredible events, extraordinary events of this past Sunday. As vice president of the United States, as an American, I was in absolute awe of the capacity and dedication of the entire team, both the intelligence community, the CIA, the SEALs. It just was extraordinary.”
Then he dropped the other shoe: “And what was even more extraordinary was—and I’m sure former administration officials will appreciate this more than anyone—there was such an absolute, overwhelming desire to accomplish this mission that although for over several months we were in the process of planning it, and there were as many as sixteen members of Congress who were briefed on it, not a single, solitary thing leaked. I find that absolutely amazing.”2
Biden apparently believed that leaking information about the perpetrators of the bin Laden killing now had no consequences. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
The family members of SEAL Team Six realized the problem immediately. According to the Washington Times’ Jeffrey Kuhner, Aaron Vaughn, one of the SEALs, “told his mother, Karen Vaughn, to delete every reference to SEAL Team 6 from her Facebook and Twitter accounts.” Karen said, “I never heard Aaron this concerned and worried in his entire life. He called me and said, ‘Mom, you and Dad have to take everything down. Biden has just put a huge target on everybody.’ ”3 SEAL Team Six member Michael Strange told his father he had put together a will, just in case.4
On August 6, 2011, just over two months after bin Laden’s killing, terrorists in eastern Afghanistan shot down a U.S. military helicopter, a twin-rotor Chinook, carrying members of SEAL Team Six—the team whose identity Biden had leaked, and who had taken out bin Laden. Thirty Americans were killed, twenty-five of them from SEAL Team Six, including Vaughn. It was the single worst loss America had experienced in Afghanistan. “We don’t believe that any of the special operators who were killed were involved in the bin Laden operation,” said a senior U.S. military official. President Obama immediately released a statement mourning the “extraordinary sacrifices” made by the military.5 The Pentagon stated that SEAL Team Six had not been specifically targeted. The Defense Department said there was no “established ambush,” instea
d calling the attack “a lucky shot of a low-level fighter that happened to be living [in the area]. He heard all the activity and he happened to be in the right spot.” But insurgents apparently began bragging about the helicopter takedown immediately afterward, naming SEAL Team Six. The Defense Department further claimed that all of the bodies had been so badly charred that they had to be cremated—but Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said he had seen pictures of the bodies, and at least one deceased SEAL did not need to be cremated. The black box of the helicopter was never found, a coincidence Chaffetz called “awfully odd.”
At Dover Air Force Base, greeting the bodies of those killed in the attack, Charles Strange, Michael’s father, asked President Obama to investigate. After Obama began praising Michael, Charles responded, “I don’t need to know about my son. I need to know what happened to my son.” According to Charles, Obama never followed up on his promise to investigate.6 Billy Vaughn, Aaron Vaughn’s father, told Fox News, “The media has let [Biden] get away with saying ‘Uncle Joe’s gaffes.’ This is not Uncle Joe and he’s not some senile old grandfather. He is the second in command of the most powerful country in the world and he needs to take responsibility for the comments he makes and quit being given a pass.”7
