CLIFF KINCAID
May 28, 2013
Jeffrey Lord's story in the American Spectator about a "smoking gun" in the IRS scandal has backfired. He
implied that the head of the IRS union had personally met with President Obama to plot against the Tea Party when there is
no evidence of such a meeting or such plotting. Instead, as the
Daily Caller and
U.S. News & World Report have
reported, the union chief had been part of a "Workplace Flexibility
Forum" in the Old Executive Office Building attended by 200 people and
featuring Obama as a speaker.
Lord is a fine columnist, but Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel had previously
pointed out
that the smoking gun evidence of presidential wrongdoing has been right
in front of us all along, in the form of various statements by the
President and other administration officials attacking and demonizing
the Tea Party, as well as demands from Democrats and their allies that
conservative groups be scrutinized by the IRS. This was pressure from
above that had its intended effect-to disable the Tea Party movement
during the 2012 elections.
"The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama
picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies," Strassel
commented. "But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington.
Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was
exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest
that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds;
publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see
harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action."
In fact, the pressure came not only from the Democratic Party, but
from various George Soros-funded groups and journalists, one of whom,
Seth Rosenfeld,
obtained personal financial information
about filmmaker Joel Gilbert and his financial backers. The Gilbert
case, which involves a massive invasion of privacy and harassment of
donors to an anti-Obama film, is potentially even more serious in a
legal sense than scrutiny of Tea Party groups by the IRS. In addition,
the IRS reopened Gilbert's 2009 tax return, and simply denied all of his
business expenses, even though they were well-documented.
