May 25, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The latest reporting in the matter of Fox News Channel’s James Rosen indicates the Obama administration fought to keep the search warrant for Rosen’s private email account secret, arguing that the government might need to monitor the account for a lengthy period of time. Thank you, Ryan Lizza. And one more thing. Despite Eric Holder’s protestations of ignorance regarding the Rosen matter, NBC reports that Holder himself authorized the warrant
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May 25, 2013 — Scott Johnson
As ABC and other news outlets had it, the White House billed President Obama’s speech at the National Defense University on the status of our efforts to thwart agitated acolytes of a certain belief system as “The Future of Our Fight Against Terrorism” (for that lapse into Bushspeak regarding “Terrorism,” read “Violent Extremists”). The White House text of the speech is posted here without a title. I thought the speech
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May 24, 2013 — Scott Johnson
A knowledgeable reader who asks us to withhold his name writes to comment on our post “On section 1203.” Our reader writes: I’m writing to comment on your post on the IRS and section 1203. Like the retired CID agent you quote, I’m a regular reader and a fan. I’m also an attorney with many years of service with Chief Counsel’s Office of the IRS. I agree with most of
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May 24, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Since the rancid Weiner (Anthony) announced his campaign for the mayoralty of New York, I’ve been looking for an excuse to enter the Weiner (punning) sweepstakes. Now I think the Houston Chronicle may have provided the fodder. Finding the local angle in a New York story, the Chronicle reports on Weiner’s incredibly efficient rehabilitation in Houston: Anthony Weiner’s New York mayoral candidacy was only made more improbable today after he
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May 24, 2013 — Scott Johnson
I have greatly admired the work of James Rosen over the years. He seems to me a classic old-fashioned reporter, as the events of the past week have strongly suggested. And while working his day job at Fox News, he also wrote an intensely interesting biography cum history, The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate. Rosen’s biography of Mitchell was unjustly neglected upon its publication in 2008.
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May 23, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota is home to the largest Somali community in the United States, numbering at least 25,000. If it takes a village, we have a couple. Yet we know amazingly little about the Somali community, probably because we are afraid to ask the relevant questions. We know they are mostly Muslim — we can see the hijabs, we are familiar with the many local controversies to which their faith has given
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May 22, 2013 — Scott Johnson
A reader with a long background of employment at the IRS writes on an aspect of the IRS scandal that hasn’t received much attention and that draws on his experience at the agency: I’m a fan and regular reader. Thanks for your yeoman’s work on the IRS scandal. I’m also retired from a 35-year law enforcement career, 22 of which were at the IRS Criminal Investigation Division, so I have
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May 22, 2013 — Scott Johnson
My daughter Eliana has a carefully reported piece at NRO on the IRS scandal that was posted late yesterday afternoon. The piece is titled “Oversight from Washington, all along.” I hesitate to highlight or praise the work of my own daughter, but Hugh Hewitt is under no such inhibition. Hugh praises the work of Eliana as well as that of his Townhall colleague Carol Platt Liebau as “The real reporting
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May 22, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Writing from memory yesterday morning, I recalled the role George Will had played as National Review’s Washington columnist during Watergate. I was faithfully reading the magazine in 1973 and 1974, and I think I was remembering Will’s NR columns accurately, but I was also recalling an inside account written, I thought, by William Buckley or NR senior editor Jeffrey Hart. I couldn’t find what I was thinking of in Buckley’s
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May 21, 2013 — Scott Johnson
At the moment I am listening to the ostentatiously liberal Judge Mark Bennett of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa summarize the Supreme Court’s employment law decisions of the past year. Judge Bennett wants us to know that he has got his mind right (i.e., left), and how. I understood that from his disparagement of the conservative Supreme Court justices as “the usual suspects.” That
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May 21, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Having lived through the Watergate scandal and the impeachment of President Nixon, I recall that one conservative journalist stood out from the pack. As the Washington columnist for National Review, George Will regularly exposed the Nixon administration’s lines of defense as the lies that they were. He distinguished himself both for his merciless analytical rigor and his skills as an anatomist. Will was in the infancy of his now long
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May 20, 2013 — Scott Johnson
I’m attending the two-day Upper Midwest Employment Law Institute in St. Paul this year. It’s a great program that attracts leading practitioners from all around the country. I have attended several times in years past, but this year I’m here because I need the continuing legal education credits (including Minnesota’s offensive get-your-mind right elimination-of-bias requirement) before June 30. The institute program draws a large audience which begins with plenary sessions
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May 20, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House counsel was advised of the Inspector General’s audit findings weeks ago. Doug Ross has compiled a useful IRS scandal timeline into which this latest tidbit fits. A friend with substantial experience as a chief executive officer looks back on what we have learned to date about the IRS harassment of Obama administration political opponents. He raises the issue of executive responsibility:
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May 20, 2013 — Scott Johnson
What is the provenance of the Muhammad video in the Benghazi talking points? Our inability to answer the question is in itself a clue. Steve Hayes follows the paper trail and reconstructs what his reporting has revealed to date in the Weekly Standard article “What about the video?” Steve characterizes the attribution of causal effect to the video a “quadruple bank shot,” but leaves open the question of who was
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May 19, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Charles Enderlin is the France 2 Jerusalem correspondent who broadcast the incendiary account of the death of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura at the hands of Israeli troops operating in the Gaza Strip in September 2000. Based on film footage provided by a Palestinian cameraman, Enderlin’s report has become infamous among students of Arab propaganda both for its destructive effects and for its probable falsity. The al-Dura affair bids to join the
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May 19, 2013 — Scott Johnson
What did President Obama do on the evening of 9/11/12 when our men were under attack in Benghazi? The invaluable Andrew McCarthy reminds us that Obama and Secretary Clinton had a 10:00 p.m. phone call of which many (including, I think, Chris Wallace) have lost sight. This morning when Wallace asked Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer what Obama was up to that evening, Pfeiffer declared the line of inquiry “offensive.” Translation:
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May 19, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Our friends at RealClearPolitics have posted Steve Chapman’s Chicago Tribune column “The false Nixon equivalence.” It addresses the subject I took up in “Nixon’s IRS” and, more broadly, in “A Watergate footnote.” Chapman makes the case that comparisons of Obama with Nixon in the matter of the current IRS scandal are misguided. I think the comparison is useful. The outrages committed by the IRS under Obama in the past few
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