Cleta Chronicles: IRS scandals, part 1

Cleta Mitchell may be the most dangerous woman in America. She is the prominent Washington attorney who represents several clients victimized by the criminal misconduct of the IRS over the past four years. She speaks with authority when she asserts, as she did recently in her testimony before a congressional subcommittee, that the Obama administration is responsible for “lies upon lies” covering up the multifarious, politically inspired wrongdoing of the IRS.

Cleta took the lead in the outstanding Heritage Foundation program on the IRS and the Obama administration this past Friday. At Heritage’s off-the-record lunch following the presentation, Cleta spoke exactly as she does in public: straight and to the point.

Despite the fact that she had clients to meet and work to do back in her office at Foley & Lardner, Cleta graciously consented to answer a few questions on video for Power Line readers following the lunch. She even found a quiet spot — Heritage’s Clare Boothe Luce conference room — for us to talk.

In the two-and-a-half minute video below, the first of five that I will post this week, Cleta comments on President Obama’s statement to Bill O’Reilly in the pre-Super Bowl interview that the extensive and ongoing IRS misconduct involves “not even a smidgen of corruption.”

Please permit me to leave you with 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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