On Monday’s “On the Record” on the Fox News Channel, host Greta Van Susteren had representatives from both the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and Leadership Institute to talk about the IRS scrutiny they faced around the same time in 2011, which is now the center of an investigation by California Rep. Darrell Issa and his House oversight committee.
After their appearance on “On the Record,” Pat Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” reacted to their remarks by saying the timing of the audits of both those organizations was no coincidence.
“This is no accident,” Buchanan said. “This is clearly some kind of policy directive and I think it’s going forward as a consequence of basically the vendetta that’s been conducted against the tea party starting back in 2010 where you would have thought listening to television that we’re dealing with people trying to pull off a Beer Hall Putsch. Let me mention now that this idea of a ‘phony scandal’ — It’s not a phony scandal and the president knows it. His numbers are going down. The respect for the IRS is going down. People are following this story. It’s continuing along. But they’re not getting much help from the mainstream media because it doesn’t fit the script.”
Buchanan encouraged Issa to see if he could determine if the audits were random or deliberate. But he added that he suspected there was a political calculation with President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s current approach with the situation, calling it a “phony” or “fake” scandal.
“They not only should be heard, I would hope that Rep. [Darrell] Issa would call for the entire file of the audits of both institutions to see if it was from some kind of random selection or it was deliberately targeted because it does seem a little odd that both of them would get targeted in 2011,” he said. “But I can tell you what Jack Lew and yes, the president, are doing right now. They’re saying to themselves, ‘Look, this is a political problem now. Some of our guys did something wrong. What we got to do is give nothing more than what they subpoena and can get from us because they’re out to damage us, our administration, our reputation.’ This is sort of like something of a cover-up. They’re not going to give out any more information because they’ve concluded it’s political and basically, they concluded it hurts them and they’re not going to cooperate.”
He went on to explain that during his time in White House, under two different presidents with two different scandals, there was a similar way of thinking.
“He’s gone straight into political mode,” Buchanan added. “Look, I was in Nixon’s White House during Watergate. I was in Reagan’s White House during Iran-Contra. I can tell you the mind-set there is this — they’re saying, ‘Look, that was a mess out there what the IRS did. How could they have done it? We might have been berating the tea party and culturally or psychologically, so people did it. But now they’re trying to hurt us. So, don’t give them anything more and let’s counterattack.’ That’s what’s going on in my judgment on the part of the president of the United States. It is hurting him and it’s hurting the IRS. And I think that’s one of the reasons you’re getting the attitude we’re getting from President Obama. He is sinking in the polls and it’s getting to him.”