Justin's Political Corner
Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).
But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal.
The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.
On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough.
1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.
The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They’re also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG’s recommendations to make sure this never happens again.
If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there’s no evidence of that. And so it’s hard to see where this one goes from here.
2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA.
As for the White House’s role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn’t much of one. “The internal debate did not include political interference from the White House, according to the e-mails, which were provided to congressional intelligence committees several months ago,” report The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. As for why the talking points seemed to blame protesters rather than terrorists for the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans? Well:
According to the e-mails and initial CIA-drafted talking points, the agency believed the attack included a mix of Islamist extremists from Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and angry demonstrators.
White House officials did not challenge that analysis, the e-mails show, nor did they object to its inclusion in the public talking points.
But CIA deputy director Michael Morell later removed the reference to Ansar al-Sharia because the assessment was still classified and because FBI officials believed that making the information public could compromise their investigation, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate.
So far, it’s hard to see what, exactly, the scandal here is supposed to be.
3) AP/Justice Department:. This is the weirdest of the three. There’s no evidence that the DoJ did anything illegal. Most people, in fact, think it was well within its rights to seize the phone records of Associated Press reporters. And if the Obama administration has been overzealous in prosecuting leakers, well, the GOP has been arguing that the White House hasn’t taken national security leaks seriously enough. The AP/DoJ fight has caused that position to flip, and now members of Congress are concerned that the DoJ is going after leaks too aggressively. But it’s hard for a political party to prosecute wrongdoing when they disagree with the potential remedies.
Insofar as there’s a “scandal” here, it’s more about what is legal than what isn’t. The DoJ simply has extraordinary power, under existing law, to spy on ordinary citizens — members of the media included. The White House is trying to change existing law by encouraging Sen. Chuck Schumer to reintroduce the Media Shield Act. The Post’s Rachel Weiner has a good rundown of what the bill would do. It’s likely that the measure’s national security exemption would make it relatively toothless in this particular case, but if Congress is worried, they always can — and probably should — take that language out. Still, that legislation has been killed by Republicans before, and it’s likely to be killed by them again.
The scandal metanarrative itself is also changing. Because there was no actual evidence of presidential involvement in these events, the line for much of this week was that the president was not involved enough in their aftermath. He was “passive.” He seemed to be a “bystander.” His was being controlled by events, rather than controlling them himself.
And yet, even if the scandals fade, the underlying problems might remain. The IRS. could give its agents better and clearer guidance on designating 501(c)(4), but Congress needs to decide whether that status and all of its benefits should be open to political groups or not. The Media Shield Act is not likely to go anywhere, and even if it does, it doesn’t get us anywhere close to grappling with the post-9/11 expansion of the surveillance state. And then, of course, there are all the other problems Congress is ignoring, from high unemployment to sequestration to global warming. When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Eric Holder says he’s ordered a Justice Department investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny.
He said the FBI was coordinating with the Department of Justice to see if any laws were broken.
At a news conference Tuesday at the Justice Department, Holder called the practice, in his words, “Outrageous and unacceptable.”
Holder’s comments come a day after President Barack Obama said that, if the agency intentionally targeted such groups, “that’s outrageous and there’s no place for it.”
H/T: Huffington Post
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of calls.
H/T: bigstory.ap.org
Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) president Michael Farris, who last year warned that children who wear glasses may be placed under the control of the United Nations, is now wondering if President Obama will ban homeschooling with an executive order.
Farris yesterday spoke to Jim Schneider of VCY America on Crosstalk about the legal dispute between his HSLDA and the Justice Department in the case of German citizen Uwe Romeike. Romeike is seeking asylum in the U.S. in order to homeschool his children as it is banned in Germany.
HSLDA claims that the German government is suppressing a particular social group — homeschoolers — while the DOJ argues against granting asylum because the country’s law is neither “selectively enforced” nor “metes out disproportionate punishment” against people of a particular religion.
Farris asserts that the Justice Department’s stance in the case is proof that President Obama may soon issue an executive order banning homeschooling.
h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW
During remarks at the University of Baltimore School of Law Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder said he is unsure whether he will keep his post for a second term, CBS DC reports. “That’s something that I’m in the process now of trying to determine,” Holder said. “I have to think about, can I contribute in a second term?” Holder, the first African-American attorney general, has led the Department’s vigorous efforts to enforce the Voting Rights Act, and first announced in 2009 that the Department would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act. He has withstood vicious attacks by Senate Republicans and was held in contempt of Congress for his alleged participation in a botched gun sting operation known as “Fast and Furious.”
H/T: Think Progress
Fox appears poised to manufacture a scandal involving the New Black Panther Party appearing at a polling station in Philadelphia.
On Election Day 2008, two members of the New Black Panther Party appeared outside a polling station in Philadelphia, with one of them carrying a club. The Department of Justice (DOJ) under then-President George W. Bush brought a civil voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and several of its members over the incident. After President Obama took office, the DOJ decided to pursue the case against the defendant carrying the club but dropped the lawsuit against the other defendants.Fox and other right-wing media outlets obsessed about DOJ’s decision to drop some of the claims, saying that DOJ was corrupt and refused to pursue charges against African Americans. The story never added up and was dismissed by a broad and bipartisan group of media and political figures.
But Fox appears ready to go through the same cycle again, highlighting a reported member of the New Black Panther Party who reportedly showed up outside the doors of a polling station and was shown on video opening a door for someone going inside. Co-host Steve Doocy stated that “the organization claims they are monitoring the 2012 election, but some critics say that it looks like intimidation like in 2008.”
h/t: Adam Shah at MMFA
For nearly two years, House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) has tried to exploit the tragedy of a series of botched gun stings that led to a federal law enforcement agent’s death in order to score political points against Attorney General Eric Holder. The gun stings that are the focus of Issa’s witchhunt against Holder began when George W. Bush was president and Holder was an attorney in private practice. Nevertheless, Issa eventually forced the House Republican leadership to hold a contempt of Congress vote against Holder, although the leaders buried that vote on the same day that the Affordable Care Act was upheld in a likely attempt to prevent Issa’s witchhunt from receiving much media coverage.
This week’s Inspector General report was no whitewash. It recommended discipline against 14 DOJ officials and found “a pattern of serious failures” associated with the gun stings. In other words, it proves that Holder’s Justice Department is fully capable of examining its own dirty laundry and determining which officials need to be disciplined or removed because they performed their job poorly. Issa’s witchhunt does little more than distract from this important effort.
Investigation finds no evidence AG Eric Holder knew of ‘Fast and Furious’ gun-running sting
A long-awaited report on the U.S. government’s controversial gun-trafficking operation known as “Fast and Furious” released Wednesday found no evidence that Attorney General Eric Holder knew of the botched effort to trace the flow of guns to Mexico’s drug cartels prior to its public unraveling in January 2011.
(via nbcnews)
A redistricting plan signed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) intentionally discriminated against Hispanic voters, a three-judge panel unanimously ruled Tuesday. The judges found that seats belonging to white incumbent members of Congress were protected under the plan while districts belonging to incumbent minorities were targeted for changes.
The court was “persuaded by the totality of the evidence that the plan was enacted with discriminatory intent,” according to the ruling. There was “sufficient evidence to conclude that the Congressional Plan was motivated, at least in part, by discriminatory intent,” the court found.
All three judges said they were overwhelmed with the amount of evidence showing the law was intentionally discriminatory, writing in a footnote that parties “have provided more evidence of discriminatory intent than we have space, or need, to address here.”
All three redistricting plans — for Texas’ congressional delegation, its state House of Representatives and the state Senate — were blocked by the federal court. The Supreme Court had earlier ruled that interim maps drawn by a federal court were invalid.
That country club reference is tied to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who chairs the House Oversight Committee that oversees the Justice Department. A lawyer for Smith had requested that a country club be moved out of a Hispanic district and into his.
The Republican attorneys general of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, North Dakota and Texas filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court arguing that a key provision of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. Significantly, the brief points to the fact that the Voting Rights Act impedes laws intended to make it more difficult for racial minorities to cast a ballot as a reason why Court should cast a skeptical gaze on the landmark voting rights law responsible for breaking the back of Jim Crow:
South Carolina and Texas, both Covered Jurisdictions, have not yet been permitted to enforce their voter-identification requirements, despite the fact that these laws are similar to the Indiana law upheld in Crawford. The DOJ denied preclearance for South Carolina’s voter-identification law. South Carolina has filed a declaratory judgment action, seeking reconsideration of DOJ’s preclearance denial. Trial begins on August 27, 2012.
Texas, like South Carolina, requested DOJ’s preclearance. Despite Texas’s responses to DOJ’s repeated requests for more information, DOJ still had not provided a preclearance decision six months after the State’s initial submission. By then, DOJ had rejected South Carolina’s similar law and, facing a likely similar rejection, Texas opted to file a declaratory judgment seeking preclearance. The DOJ eventually rejected Texas’s request for administrative preclearance nearly seven months after the initial submission. Trial was held from July 10 through 13, 2012, and Texas is awaiting a preclearance decision from the district court – more than a year after its legislature enacted the voter identification law.
Supporters of voter ID laws, which require voters to present ID at the polls, claim they are necessary to prevent an epidemic of voter fraud at the polls. This is false. In reality, a person ismore likely to be struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud.
What voter ID laws will do, however, is disenfranchise thousands of American citizens who want to do nothing more than lawfully exercise their right to choose their own leaders. Moreoever, the voters disenfranchised by voter ID are disproportionately likely to be racial minorities, low-income voters or students — all of whom tend to favor Democrats over Republicans.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) accused Attorney General Eric Holder Tuesday of calling the state’s voter ID law a “poll tax” in order to “inflame passions and incite racial tension.”
In a written statement, Perry called on President Barack Obama to “disavow his Attorney General’s offensive and incendiary comments” about the voter ID law, which seems likely to be blocked by a federal court under the Voting Rights Act.
“In labeling the Texas voter ID law as a ‘poll tax,’ Eric Holder purposefully used language designed to inflame passions and incite racial tension,” Perry stated. “It was not only inappropriate, but simply incorrect on its face.”
WASHINGTON — A panel of three federal judges in D.C. posed skeptical questions on Friday about Texas’ voter ID law during closing arguments in a trial about whether the measure is discriminatory.
The panel of federal judges — George W. Bush appointee Rosemary M. Collyer, Clinton appointee David S. Tatel and Obama appointee Robert L. Wilkins — hopes to issue a ruling on the case in “quick order,” according to Collyer, who expressed doubts about the findings of Texas’ experts in the case.
John Hughes, a lawyer for Texas, argued in his closing arguments that people who want to vote already have an ID or can easily get it. Hughes argued that if the state’s voter ID law really disenfranchised anyone the D.C. “courtroom would be filled” with Texans who couldn’t obtain voter ID.
In one of the more awkward exchanges, Hughes offered a semi-defense of literacy tests after one judge said that the reason literacy tests were racist years ago was because of inequalities in the education system. The judge asked if it was Texas’ theory that there would be a problem with literacy tests today. Setting aside other laws banning literacy tests and poll taxes, Hughes said he did not believe a literacy test would violate Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
When a judge noted that some voters would have to travel 120 miles to the nearest DMV to obtain a voter ID, Hughes argued that people in those areas had to travel “long distances to do any number of things.” The judge pointed out that people who live more than 100 miles from a courtroom aren’t even allowed to be subpoenaed because it is “unduly burdensome,” but Hughes argued that traveling far distances was a “reality to life of choosing to live in that part of Texas.”
He argued that the bill gives discretion to poll watchers when matching individuals to names on the voter rolls and could give them “the opportunity to discriminate against Hispanics.”
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized lawmakers Monday for voting to hold him in contempt of Congress last week, saying Republicans have made him a “proxy” to attack President Obama in an election year.
In his first interview since Thursday’s vote, Holder said lawmakers have used an investigation of a botched gun-tracking operation as a way to seek retribution against the Justice Department for its policies on a host of issues, including immigration, voting rights and gay marriage. He said the chairman of the committee leading the inquiry, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is engaging in political theater as the Justice Department tries to focus on public safety.
The House voted Thursday to make Holder the first sitting attorney general in U.S. history to be held in contempt, after he withheld certain documents that lawmakers have demanded as part of their investigation of Fast and Furious.
As part of the gun operation, run by the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, federal agents watched as more than 2,000 guns hit the streets; their goal was to trace them to a Mexican drug cartel. Two guns linked to the operation were later found at the scene where a Border Patrol agent was killed.
The Justice Department has provided Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee with 7,600 documents on Fast and Furious. Republicans, however, have pressed for more records about the department’s internal deliberations, saying they want to determine who knew about the operation and when. They have also questioned why Obama invoked executive privilege to keep the documents from them.
Defending his actions
In the interview, in a stately fifth-floor conference room at the Justice Department, the attorney general defended his handling of the case, saying that when he found out about Fast and Furious, he ordered an internal investigation, stopped the use of certain tactics in gun cases and made personnel changes. He also reiterated his belief that turning over the documents would have a “chilling effect” on department lawyers who prepare materials for cases.
“I’ve been a line lawyer, and I know what it would mean to think that ‘if I write this, it is going to someday come before a congressional committee,’ ” Holder said.
Those arguments have not resonated with Republicans or with some Democrats. Seventeen moderate Democrats who face tough reelection contests joined the vote against Holder; several said they thought the attorney general was thumbing his nose at the House’s oversight responsibility.
h/t: Sari Horwitz at WaPo
The Department of Justice is telling Congress that it won’t prosecute Attorney General Eric Holder for contempt of Congress over his decision to withhold information about the “Fast and Furious” gun-tracking operation.
In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, the department says that it will not bring the congressional contempt citation against Holder to a federal grand jury and that it will take no other action to prosecute the attorney general.
Yesterday, the full House approved a precedent-setting resolution to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress. It was the first time a sitting Cabinet member has been held in contempt.
The final vote was 255-67, with only two Republicans voting “no.” 108 Democrats abstained from voting on what they have long argued is a politically motivated stunt. Many walked out of the Capitol in protest.
Republican lawmakers can still take Holder to court to enforce their demand for documents.
BREAKING: The House votes 255-67-113 to hold AG Eric Holder in Contempt of Congress. 17 DINOs joined w/ GOP. #EricHolder #GOPWitchhunt
— Justin Gibson (@JGibsonDem) June 28, 2012
