Kim Strassel is doing actual journalism at the Wall Street Journal, unlike nearly everyone else in the mainstream media, looking into the IRS' targeting of conservative non-profit advocacy organizations. Her article this week on Lois Lerner's suspiciously missing emails is priceless; here are the money paragraphs:
As to Ms. Lerner's behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.
Is there something in those lost emails? The fact that they are "lost" at all probably answers that question.
Hmmm... using the IRS to intimidate political opponents was one of the articles of impeachment against Nixon in Watergate. Consider then the following Machiavellian scenario:
1. The Obama Administration knew that using the IRS to silence political speech by conservative groups in the course of an election campaign was illegal and almost the definition of a "high crime and misdemeanor" because it attacks and betrays the heart of the system of democracy -- the right of individual citizens to organize for the purpose of advocating political positions.
2. But the Obama Administration had learned the lesson of Watergate.
3. Nixon wasn't impeached because Rosemary Woods erased 18 1/2 minutes of a particular Oval Office tape.
4. Nixon was largely impeached because Woods didn't erase all of them!
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