"The Justice Department notified members of Congress that it is closing its two-year investigation into whether the IRS improperly targeted tea party and other conservative groups."

"There will be no charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner or anyone else at the agency, the Justice Department said in a letter."

The probe found "substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints. But poor management is not a crime. We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution," Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik said in the letter. "We also found no evidence that any official involved in the handling of tax-exempt applications or IRS leadership attempted to obstruct justice. Based on the evidence developed in this investigation and the recommendation of experienced career prosecutors and supervising attorneys at the department, we are closing our investigation and will not seek any criminal charges."

"They called me back to testify on the IRS ‘scandal,’ and I too[k] the 5th again because they had been so evil and dishonest in my lawyer’s dealings with them."

Said Lois Lerner, in email.

"Prosecutors believed Gov. Scott Walker committed a felony when he was Milwaukee County executive for his role in the rejection of a lease extension for county office space..."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports, based on a 2011 request for a search warrant that prosecutors made public yesterday. The original investigation — the John Doe investigation — was secret. The revelations are now coming in connection with the civil lawsuit brought by Cindy Archer.

The Journal presents this as significant because Walker has been saying that he was never a target of the investigation. Walker campaign spokeswoman AshLee Strong responded:

“The information released today comes from a case that has been closed for more than two years,” Strong said. “It is another example of the politics involved in this process as people who could not prove things in a court of law are attempting to win in the court of public opinion.”

This point seems almost stronger when/if we know that Walker was a target. The investigation was, apparently, extremely aggressive, and if they were out to get Walker and smelled enough blood that they believed he'd committed a felony, then the complete failure to pin anything on him is quite an endorsement. I thought we all commit 3 felonies a day — or... that's the meme that expresses how easy it is to find a law on the books that they can pin on you if they want to get you badly enough. How did Walker slip free of the grip of prosecutors who wanted to get him?

Back to the Wisconsin State Journal article:

Prosecutors... were looking into signs of misconduct and bid-rigging regarding competition to house the Department of Aging in private office space. [John] Hiller, a real estate broker who at the time was Walker’s longtime campaign treasurer, was quietly working for one of three bidders seeking to provide office space and buy an aging building known as City Campus owned by Milwaukee County.

[John Doe investigator Robert] Stelter argued in the warrant request that Walker committed a felony when in June of 2010 he used a personal email account to ask Hiller for a letter that rejected Department of Transportation and Public Works director Jack Takarian’s request for a six-month extension for the county’s Department on Aging office lease in the Reuss Federal Plaza in Milwaukee. That rejection set up the need for a later deal “against the interests of Milwaukee County,” the warrant said. Hiller then forwarded the email to Jensen, according to the search warrant request, who then with Hiller wrote the letter rejecting the extension.

Interesting... the things that happen or may be happening in personal email. Personal email is taking the place of phone conversation in our lives, and the kind of communication that once evanesced remain to haunt us... unless we're good at deleting our email.

Isn't it strange that Scott Walker faced such intense scrutiny over email about the rejection of a lease extension for county office space? Compare that to the subject matter of the lost emails of Lois Lerner and Hillary Clinton!

UPDATE: "Gov. Scott Walker says he didn't know he was a target of the now-closed John Doe probe until this week, when newly released court documents showed he was under investigation for misconduct in office."

"Wisconsin’s Friend at the IRS/Emails show a common cause in restricting political speech."

A Wall Street Journal editorial (Google some text to get your own link if that doesn't work for you). Excerpt:

Former IRS tax-exempt director Lois Lerner ran the [IRS]’s policy on conservative groups. Kevin Kennedy runs the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) that helped prosecutors with their secret John Doe investigation of conservative groups after the 2011 and 2012 recall elections of Governor Scott Walker and state senators.

Emails we’ve seen show that between 2011 and 2013 the two were in contact on multiple occasions, sharing articles on topics including greater donor disclosure and Wisconsin’s recall elections. The emails indicate the two were also personal friends who met for dinner and kept in professional touch. “Are you available for the 25th?” Ms. Lerner wrote in January 2012. “If so, perhaps we could work two nights in a row.”...

Sources tell us that in 2012 and 2013 John Doe investigators asked the IRS to look into a conservative group that was among the primary targets of the Wisconsin Doe investigation. The IRS doesn’t appear to have followed up, but the request shows Wisconsin prosecutors saw their pursuit of independent groups as part of a common agenda with national Democrats....

"Lois Lerner is toxic — and she knows it. But she refuses to recede into anonymity..."

"... or beg for forgiveness for her role in the IRS tea party-targeting scandal."

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lerner said in her first press interview since the scandal broke 16 months ago. “I’m proud of my career and the job I did for this country.

I thought of a clever argument that could be used to sell the story that some computer snafu ate all that Lois Lerner email.

It seems as though no one — not even the administration's fans in the mainstream media — accepts the explanation, which demands that we believe that the IRS's approach to handling email was mind-bogglingly incompetent.

Here's my idea for an argument: Call attention to the big screw-up with the Obamacare website. You wouldn't have believed that a computer system that big, that important, and that well-funded would be so abysmally bad, but we know it was.

Think about it. If you hadn't yet seen that atrocious roll out of the Obamacare website, and you heard a prediction of what it would be like — and that prediction was what we now know happened — you would have said: That's ridiculous! It cannot be that bad.

It was that bad!

Okay. That's my free advice to IRS-scandal fighters. Go ahead and use it. And feel free to use the larger version of this argument whenever you get in trouble: We're not evil. We're just terribly incompetent.

ADDED: Today, there are new claims that of computer crashes destroying more email from additional IRS investigation targets.

A propos of the Lois Lerner spoliation: Spooooooool!

The news of nothing.

Drudge has looked like this for quite a while:



That links to a Daily Mail story — "Obama rules OUT sending troops back into combat in Iraq but promises to review military options – including air strikes" — that includes an effort to extract a comment from George W. Bush:

Former President George W. Bush has been reluctant to weigh in on the latest developments in the region where he spent years deploying military assets that Obama would later pull back.

A request for comment from the former president was met with a non-response from his communications director Freddy Ford, who told MailOnline: 'I don’t have a comment for you. When he left office President Bush decided not to criticize his successor.'

Everyone already knew that, but the Mail made it into something that could be reported, and Drudge is featuring what is, essentially, the news of nothing.

With so many newsworthy things happening right now — the VA scandal eclipsed, the Bratquake reduced to a 1-day story, the Lois Lerner spoliation, Bergdahl (Bergdahl? Who's Bergdahl?), Hillary snapped — the news of nothing rises to the top and just sits there.

What is the ever-enigmatic Drudge trying to say?

Nothing?

"Did The IRS Really Lose Lois Lerner's Emails? Let a Special Prosecutor Find Them."

That headline — at the National Journal — says exactly what needs to be said.

For decades the received wisdom has been it's not the crime, it's the coverup. And here we see evidence of a coverup. What kind of crime must there be that after all these years of warnings that it's the coverup that will get you, we've got a glaring, egregious coverup?!

Oh? Do they say maybe it's not a coverup? Maybe Lois Lerner's emails really did disappear in a computer crash? We need a neutral prosecutor to find out what happened. There's zero reason to take that on faith.

How could it possibly be that government operates this way, with high-level government officials working with one computer that could crash and take everything with it? Aren't there central computers, backed up multiple times, with a record of everything?

We're talking about the IRS. Doesn't it have multiple, backed up records on all of us taxpayers?

Give us a special prosecutor, because it's not acceptable to tell us we're supposed to believe this story of disappearing evidence....

"Tell Ruth she needs to get on the stick and that the next election cycle is around the corner."

"This is obviously a wonderful idea (that’s why we suggested it). I think you told Greg all you can tell him, unless you want to tell him that we’re taking guidance plan suggestions.”

The "Smoking Gun" in the IRS scandal.

"Just as nobody would trust John Mitchell to investigate Richard Nixon, nobody should trust a partisan Obama donor..."

"... to investigate the IRS’s political targeting of President Obama’s enemies. Sadly, 'in the discretion of the Attorney General,' Eric Holder has chosen to reject the bipartisan tradition of the Department of Justice of putting rule of law above political allegiance. Both Nixon Administration Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Clinton Administration Attorney General Janet Reno appointed special prosecutors whose integrity was beyond reproach; Eric Holder should do likewise. To date, nine months after a damning Inspector General report, nobody has been indicted, many of the victims have not even been interviewed, and Lois Lerner has twice pleaded the Fifth. And yet the Attorney General refuses to allow a genuine — and impartial — investigation."

That's Ted Cruz, waving the WORSE THAN NIXON sign.

After Lois Lerner re-asserts the 5th, Cummings yells at Issa and Issa cuts the microphone.

Issa is closing down the meeting, Cummings asserts what he calls a "procedural question" that's really a political scolding, and Issa cuts the microphone and walks out. It's pretty unpleasant. Here's the video:

Who put "acute political pressure" on Lois Lerner "to crack down on conservative-leaning organizations," and why did Lerner need a "plan" to avoid "a per se political project"?

Former IRS official Lois Lerner has decided she will testify before the House Oversight Committee, the committee chair Darrell Issa revealed on "Fox News Sunday" this morning. Previously, Lerner had refused to testify, citing the Fifth Amendment right not to be a witness against oneself, so what changed?

Issa notes that the Committee's position is that Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights by testifying up to a point before invoking her privilege and assures us that they have not given her immunity in exchange for her testimony. Conceivably, she has come to accept that the privilege has been waived and that she needs to testify or be held in contempt.

The Fox News moderator, Chris Wallace, quoted the report by the Republicans on Issa's committee, which said that Lerner "was keenly aware of acute political pressure to crack down on conservative-leaning organizations." Who put this pressure on Lerner?

ISSA: That's one of our questions. She says things like they put pressure. So e-mails indicate that there was pressure. We don't know whether it was the president shaking his fingers at the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court over Citizens United or whether it was...

WALLACE: During the State of the Union Address?

ISSA: During the State of the Union, where she felt the pressure. Only she can tell us where she thought that pressure was.

WALLACE: The report also cites a newly discovered e-mail from September 16th, 2010, in which Lerner discusses how to check whether groups seeking tax exempt status are engaged in improper political activity. This is an e-mail to other people in the IRS. And she says, quote, "We need to have a plan. We need to be caution so it isn't a per se political project." What do you think that e-mail shouts?

Shouts? Wallace leaned hard on that. And I put it in boldface. (That's me shouting.) I think it must mean that it was a political project and they were hard at work figuring out how to make it not look like what she knew it was. That's a smoking gun. Here's how Issa put it:

ISSA: It's a series of e-mails. And when you read them in context, what you realize is she's trying to walk back any kind of ability for someone to look at the record and say, aha, this was political targeting. And, yet, it clearly is political targeting.

"Darrell Issa’s committee says Lois Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights..."

"... but her attorney says she isn’t going down without a fight."

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 22-17 on Friday that the embattled IRS official voluntarily waived her rights by reading an opening statement during a hearing last month on the agency’s tea party targeting scandal.

George Bush "demanded a level of accountability and candor that this president has not."

Jennifer Rubin, on today's "Fox News Sunday":

I think the question is whether the president is ever going to order his people to cooperate. Lois Lerner took the Fifth and was then put on [administrative leave].... But [Obama] has not sent out an order as George Bush did, in the Valerie Plame decision, I do not want anyone in this administration to refuse to cooperate. That cost some people in his administration dearly. But no one took the Fifth in that case. Karl Rove testified, Scooter Libby testified. He demanded a level of accountability and candor that this president has not. And I think that whole hide the ball mentality, and the president's unwillingness to push his people forward to give a complete story is going to hurt him as well.

WaPo article "On IRS issue, senior White House aides were focused on shielding Obama" seems to be about throwing White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler under the bus.

Here's the article.

[White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, and other senior White House aides] agreed that it would be best not to share [news of an upcoming inspector general’s report on the Internal Revenue Service] with President Obama until the independent audit was completed and made public....

... Obama’s top aides were trying to shield him from any second-term scandal that might swamp his agenda or, worse, jeopardize his presidency....

But Ruemmler and McDonough’s careful plan for the IRS was upended on May 10, when Lois Lerner, a senior official at the agency, broke the news.... Senior White House officials were stunned to see the IRS trying to get ahead of its own story...

I don't know how much of this to believe, but the article strains to portray Ruemmler as narrowly legalistic:

Fred Thompson opines that Lois Lerner has waived her 5th Amendment privilege.

"As best I can remember, there is no case on point involving a congressional hearing."

Although court cases, both criminal and civil, are applicable, though somewhat different standards are applied, the general rule as to waiver is [the same]. Even in the court decisions, however, there is probably no case on point. As I stated, people simply don’t usually get themselves in this position. Also, the cases are very fact-specific.

Issa says Lois Lerner waived her right against self-incrimination...

... by making an opening statement before invoking her Fifth Amendment privilege. She asserted: “I have not done anything wrong.... I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.”

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a former federal prosecutor, said Lerner lost her rights the minute she started proclaiming her innocence, and that lawmakers therefore were entitled to question her. But Ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland said hearing rules were not like those of a courtroom.

During the incident, Issa did not flat-out say whether or not Lerner had indeed waived her rights but instead tried to coax her into staying by offering to narrow the scope of questions.

By the afternoon, Issa was taking a harder stand. “The precedents are clear that this is not something you can turn on and turn off,” he told POLITICO. “She made testimony after she was sworn in, asserted her innocence in a number of areas, even answered questions asserting that a document was true … So she gave partial testimony and then tried to revoke that.”