Over the last couple of years, while watching the various and continual Congressional hearings and investigations, which mainly go nowhere and take no action, a standard pattern has emerged. Maybe emerged is too weak a word. Rubbed in our faces is a better description.
Some of our most powerful, most feared, and most revered government institutions have been led and misled by those at the top who feel above the law and beyond reproach. The arrogance and hubris of these very highly placed people, government servants all, is shocking as well as sickening. From the FBI, the IRS, the DOJ, and other three- letter organizations, the leadership has betrayed the public trust and hoisted themselves on their own petard of self-interest and political agenda.
The IRS Targeting Conservative Organizations
In my mind, it started a couple of years ago with the IRS and Lois Lerner. Watching her flaunt her position, out and out lie, and then act as if she was too entitled to be bothered answering the investigating committee’s questions was infuriating. I watched as she made a self-serving statement and then decided not to answer any other questions standing on the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Trey Gowdy pegged it quite correctly when he said: “You don’t get to tell your side of the story and then avoid the very process that we have in this system for eliciting the truth which is cross-examination.” The Fifth Amendment right doesn’t work that way. Lerner should know this as well as anyone as she is a licensed attorney. In 2005 she became Director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The blowup happened in 2013 when the IRS, under her direction, targeted conservative groups, either denying them tax-exempt status outright or delaying that status until they could no longer take an active part in the 2012 election.
Congress found Lois Lerner in contempt. The investigation also discovered she conducted IRS business while using a second email account other than her official government account, in the name of “Toby Miles.” That was the name of her dog. To make the matter even worse, the IRS claimed her computer crashed, and everything was lost. Somehow the backup tapes of her emails had been “mistakenly” erased making retrieving damning emails conveniently impossible.
The investigation could not determine why or when Lerner’s computer crashed. There were two other sources of emails that could have been queried, but the IRS did not search, review or examine the two separate sources of backup tapes, the server harddrives, or the loaner laptops. The backup tapes were erased even though the IRS was on notice to preserve any evidence requested in the investigation.
Eventually, pressure from the congressional committee investigations ultimately forced the production of new, previously-undisclosed e-mails.
In a statement released in June of 2015, the IRS said it has “fully cooperated with the investigation,” but acknowledged the backup tapes should not have been erased. “The IRS recognizes there was a clear breakdown of communication in one part of the organization regarding the need to preserve and retain the backup tapes and information,” the statement said, noting that an internal review found the erasure wasn’t intentional.
A Feckless Series of Investigations
In 2015, the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation found “substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment, and institutional inertia” but “found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”
More on that later, but this finding foreshadowed a series of ineffective DOJ and FBI investigations that determined those involved with the support of the liberal agenda could, without worry, flaunt the law, commit crimes, and be protected by the very organizations tasked with stopping it. The FBI and the DOJ were “in the bag” in this effort which became even more evident as other investigations repeatedly excused clear criminal violations committed by those pushing the left’s liberal agenda.
Amazingly, Lois Lerner was once president of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws. Makes you wonder how that organization was run with such a partisan and ethically devoid person at the helm.
IRS Director Koskinen’s Testimony Insults the American People
Speaking of the IRS, we cannot forget the most elitist, conceited, and condescending person I have ever witnessed in one of these congressional hearings. None other than IRS Director Koskinen. On December 20, 2013, Koskinen was confirmed by the US Senate to head the IRS as he took office following the IRS scandal in which conservative political groups were targeted for extensive scrutiny (Lois Lerner). The Washington Post, with their rating of truthfulness, awarded Koskinen “Three Pinocchios” for statements he made during his congressional testimony where he stated, “the inspector general found inappropriate criteria were used to select organizations for further review—he did not refer to it as targeting.”
Continuing in that theme, Koskinen told Congress that 30,000 emails from the account of a central figure in the scandal, Lois Lerner, had been lost. Koskinen had known about the lost emails in April but did not inform Congress until the information was publicly disclosed in a separate court case. Koskinen stated, “We confirmed that backup tapes from 2011 no longer existed because they have been recycled, under the IRS normal policy.”
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to censure IRS head John Koskinen as a result of the IRS targeting scandal.
Ironically, in September 2014, the Treasury Department inspector general reported that it had found 760 tapes from which it later recovered Lerner’s emails.
Once again, the obvious bias raised its head, and the Justice Department notified Congress in October 2015 that there would be no charges against Lois Lerner or anyone else in the IRS. This triggered 19 Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee led by the committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz who filed a resolution to impeach Koskinen.
Koskinen was accused of failing to prevent the destruction of evidence by allowing the erasure of backup tapes containing thousands of e-mails written by Lerner. This was after those tapes had been requested by the committee, and the IRS had a duty to preserve them. Koskinen was also accused of making false statements under oath to Congress.
Jason Chaffetz said Koskinen “failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled. Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress.”
“The Resolution expresses the sense of the House that Mr. Koskinen engaged in a pattern of conduct inconsistent with the trust and confidence placed in him as an officer of the United States, urges Mr. Koskinen’s resignation or removal, and requires forfeiture of his government pension and any other federal benefits for which he is eligible,” the Oversight committee Republicans wrote in a statement.
In one very heated bit of testimony, Koskinen said. “I don’t think an apology is owed; not a single email has been lost since the start of this investigation.” Koskinen made this incredulous statement to a dais full of skeptical GOP members during the hearings. What Koskinen did was to allow subpoenaed documents, including 422 tapes that may have contained as many as 24,000 Lerner emails, to be destroyed on his watch.
Just for reference, as of June 2014, Koskinen had contributed almost $100,000 to Democratic candidates and groups. In the end, Koskinen was spared impeachment and retired on his terms in 2017.
The FBI Takes Center Stage, Exhibiting More Arrogance
Enter stage left, very left, James Comey. What can we say except…wow! He felt he could do whatever he wanted. He violated FBI rules, security procedures, and decided to write what he characterized as private memos about a meeting with the President. He did this while on FBI time using government equipment and facilities. He then decided on his own; he was in charge, so he consulted himself, clandestinely leaking those documents to a cutout to get the documents into the press. His purpose in all this was to force the appointment of Robert Mueller and start the investigation of the President.
During this, he is summarily fired as director of the FBI. He then is called to testify before Congress and is less than truthful about his actions in statements, spinning the story in a way that makes him look like the proverbial altar boy with nothing but good intentions. His testimony would have been comical if it wasn’t so important.
The Clinton Email Investigation
Without authority, Comey took it upon himself and made the prosecutorial decision for the Attorney General. He determined that no charges would be filed before he ever interviewed the principles, Hillary Clinton and her staff, in the email/private server affair. The investigation, if you could call it that, had a predetermined outcome. Comey and others in his inner circle decided there would be no charges before they ever gathered the facts. The entire investigation was faulty, tainted, and a joke.
After being dismissed from the FBI, Comey embarked on the “worldwide sell my book tour.” He has become a caricature of a pious and self-righteous buffoon. It is sickening. His sole mission now seems to be to paint the President in any poor and uncomplimentary light possible. Comey has so damaged the FBI by his actions it will take decades to recover, if ever.
More Problems at the FBI
Let’s not forget the man behind the curtain, Peter Strzok, the deputy director for counterintelligence at the FBI and then a member of the independent counsel investigating the Russian involvement with the Presidential election. That investigation is turning out to be more of an attempt to get President Trump and advance the left’s agenda more than any real investigation.
Peter Strzok was the highest-ranking member of the FBI on the Mueller investigation panel. He was removed from that position once the over 50,000 text messages between him and his adulteress paramour, FBI attorney Lisa Page, became public knowledge. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged thousands of messages extremely disparaging of Trump. The bias in this agent was mindboggling.
In a 2016 text message, Strzok told Page: “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s (Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI) office that there’s no way Trump gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
The congressional investigation demanded the FBI provide the text messages between Strzok and Page to the oversight committee, but the FBI’s technical system had failed to preserve five months’ worth of texts between Strzok and Page. The Justice Department later said that the technical lapse had affected thousands of FBI-issued phones, which failed to store text messages for periods of up to a year.
Sure sounds like a common problem among the government agencies when they are asked to produce damning evidence. Sort of like “the dog ate my homework.”
He was eventually forcibly escorted from the FBI building and on Friday, August 10, 2018, he was officially fired.
Strzok talked about Andrew McCabe, who has since been fired and is facing criminal charges of lying to federal officers.
In June of 2017, President Trump announced his intention to nominate Christopher Wray to be the next Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a replacement to James Comey who was dismissed by Trump in May of 2017. McCabe took control, but problems soon followed.
Andrew McCabe was Comey’s choice as deputy director of the FBI. In 2017, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice, along with the US Senate Judiciary Committee, investigated McCabe over concerns that he should have recused himself from the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server because of a potential conflict of interest.
McCabe’s wife Jill McCabe, while running for the Virginia State Senate as a Democrat, received $467,500 and was one of the biggest recipients of campaign cash from a longtime Clinton family ally.
After the OIG report came out, the writing was on the wall for McCabe, and he attempted to go on paid-leave until retirement. He did not quite make it and was fired just days before he would have earned a full pension.
In March of 2018, the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility cited the inspector general’s conclusions and recommended that McCabe be fired. Attorney General Jeff Sessions followed the recommendations and fired him in March 2018. The Attorney General stated, “Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor – including under oath – on multiple occasions.”
In April, the OIG report released to Congress indicated that McCabe lied to or misled federal investigators at least four times, with three of these instances occurring while he was under oath. Subsequently, the Inspector General referred its findings to the United States Attorney’s Office in Washington D.C. for possible criminal charges against Andrew McCabe for lying to FBI investigators.
The DOJ and the Man Effectively at the Top
And at last, we come to Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein authored the memo recommending the firing of Comey and, as Deputy Attorney General, he appointed the independent counsel, Robert Mueller. Rosenstein has taken the same direction as those other entitled high officials. He should have recused himself from the various Mueller investigations as he was a central approving party in many of the actions that lay at the center of the Russian/Clinton/Trump affair. He signed off on questionable FISA warrant applications and has been the target of Republican members of Congress, especially the Freedom Caucus.
In regards to requested information, Rosenstein has been at the center of constant delays and stonewalling. He has hampered the release of evidence to the Oversight committee, and fought the investigations through bureaucratic subterfuge. His constant stalling eventually pushed the Republican side of the committee to introduce articles of impeachment against him.
Final Takeaways
In the end, there are several takeaways. I am currently studying law and will become an attorney after almost forty years as a law enforcement officer. Each one of these figures mentioned in this article, and many not mentioned but still deeply involved, are lawyers. They all know the rules and professional ethics lawyers vow to follow.
I recently finished my studies in professional responsibility and just this last weekend took the Multistate Professional Responsibilities Exam, an exam every prospective lawyer must take and pass. The actions these people have taken—the falsifying, misleading, hiding evidence, lying to investigators, leaking classified info and even speaking in public about investigations—violate those rules. The rules are called the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and breaking those rules brings serious consequences, or at least to the normal lawyer it does.
It can result in discipline from suspension to fines to disbarment. In my opinion, these people should be treated just like anyone else and held accountable. That has indeed happened before, think Bill Clinton and the loss of his law license.
Lastly, and I think there is a bit of poetic justice here, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and now Peter Strzok have all heard those very iconic words—“You’re Fired!”
