Cleta Chronicles: IRS scandals, part 2

Cleta Mitchell is the Washington superlawyer who represents numerous clients victimized by the multifarious criminal misbehavior of the IRS. Cleta sat down with me to field a few questions following her outstanding presentation at the Heritage Foundation program on the IRS scandals this past Friday. In the three-minute video below, I ask her to describe the origin of the scandals. Can she trace the source?

Cleta traces the scandals to President Obama and concludes with some choice words on the role of our “state media,” as she calls them, in falling down on the story. Tyler O’Neill’s account of Friday’s Heritage program also focuses on the origin of the scandals.

Cleta’s tracing of the origin of the scandals to Obama calls for my usual reminder: The charge that Richard Nixon attempted to misuse the IRS for political purposes made its way into the second of the three articles of impeachment against him. Nixon “endeavoured” to misuse the IRS, in the fancy British spelling of the word used in article 2. Nixon’s efforts to misuse the IRS were futile. They went nowhere. Nixon and his henchmen desired the IRS to “screw” their political opponents, but their efforts were a pathetic failure.

Nixon henchman Jack Caulfield astutely complained that the IRS was a “monstrous bureaucracy…dominated and controlled by Democrats.” As we have come to see, Caulfield was on to something. By contrast with Nixon’s failures to misuse the IRS, the IRS have very effectively “screwed” Obama’s political opponents, and we have yet to learn what the president knew and when he knew it.

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