A former Democratic lawyer and pre-eminent expert on political advocacy and election law has a lot to say about the IRS scandal in this Daily Caller interview.
“This is a sea change! People need to understand — this has never happened before in my lifetime and I don’t think anybody’s lifetime, where you have the president of the United States, elected members of Congress calling on the IRS to silence their political opponents, and having the IRS management and top brass doing what the politicians wanted them to do, and essentially taking sides in a philosophical and political debate between conservatives and liberals,” said Cleta Mitchell, a partner at Foley & Lardner.
“The more we allow government to mushroom and metastasize, we become more like the former Soviet Union where you have the commissars who have laws for everybody else, the little people, that don’t apply to them, and they use the government to go after their opponents and people are afraid of the government,” Mitchell said. “I mean, this is happening. And we have to stop it.”
Contrary to the president’s allegation to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly on Feb. 2 that there is “not a smidgen of corruption,” the IRS scandal is going from bad to worse as newly released emails have revealed even more information.
Now, the Department of Justice, the Federal Election Commission and even the White House Counsel’s office have been alleged to be involved.
Mitchell said in the interview, “Remember who runs this administration. These are Chicago pols … and they really don’t like opposition.”
She described how the liberal elites were threatened by the emergence of the tea party movement. Obama, Mitchell says, is “very thin-skinned,” and his team wanted “to shut these people up.”
Can Congress even exert its power to get to the bottom of this? Will legal rights of the IRS brass thwart the ability of Congress to get testimony from this top bureaucrat?
When Congress returns to Washington, the House of Representatives is expected to vote to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with their investigation.
Lerner, who plead the Fifth Amendment in order to not provide Congress her testimony, lives in a $2.4 million home. So far, House Democrats in two major committees voted in lock step to protect this critical Obama administration official.
WATCH PART 2:
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