WhatFinger

Drain the swamp

Why is Trump's Justice Department still defending the IRS in the targeting of conservative groups?

By Dan Calabrese ——--August 14, 2017

American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

To some degree I understand this. When someone sues the government, the government's lawyers defend the government. They wouldn't be doing their jobs if they switched sides and agreed with the plaintiffs. Even if it concerns actions of a previous administration that were clearly wrong, the government's lawyers still have to look out for the government's interests and limit the damage of any potential judgment against it. That doesn't change when you change presidents.
But there's looking out for the government's interests, and then there's the stonewalling we saw on behalf of the IRS during the Obama Administration. If the Trump presidency means real swamp drainage, you'd think at the very least we'd have seen the end of that. So far, at least, the Trump DOJ isn't doing anything very differently form the Obama DOJ when it comes to the lawsuits conservative groups have filed against the IRS for the targeting scandal we've discussed at length here. As the Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel explained on Friday, you'd almost think there's been no change in leadership at all:
That money is now going to fight Mr. Trump’s administration. In recent months the Justice Department has continued refusing to hand over documents or make witnesses available for depositions. The plaintiffs finally managed to depose Ms. Lerner and another key IRS player, Holly Paz, earlier this summer. But their counsels successfully demanded that the transcripts be kept secret from the public. As former federal employees, Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz are presumably getting backup from government lawyers. The suit has slowly ground through discovery and is teed up for trial early next year. Yet in its latest stunt, the Justice Department has asked for summary judgment—arguing that the facts are so far beyond dispute that the judge should dispense with the trial and simply rule now. This is laughable. The judge is unlikely to even consider it, meaning the motion is nothing more than a way to waste further time and sap the plaintiffs’ resources.
To this day, conservative nonprofits are being toyed with by the IRS. The Texas Patriots Tea Party has waited five years for tax-exempt status and has continued to receive round after round of intrusive agency questions, long after the scandal was exposed and the IRS promised reform. Other litigants are experiencing the same treatment. The IRS is fighting Judicial Watch in a suit over document requests. Government lawyers are hamstringing a suit against the IRS brought by Z Street, a pro-Israel nonprofit—as described last month in an op-ed on these pages. The problem is that the same old Obama-era lawyers have been left to run these cases in the same old hostile ways. Who are these people? Laura Beckerman, one of the lead lawyers defending the IRS in the Ohio class action, left government only this month. Her LinkedIn profile says she is now pro bono coordinating counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. CREW is among the most liberal outfits in the capital, fanatically devoted to taking down conservatives. That’s the type still calling the shots in Mr. Trump’s bureaucracy. The Justice Department’s job is to defend the government, but it is also supposed to pursue justice. And there is no question the IRS did wrong. It has been documented by the Treasury Department’s inspector general and admitted by the IRS itself. It’d be one thing if the plaintiffs were demanding a billion-dollar payout, but they aren’t. Their main request is that the IRS come clean on what happened, and the government is resisting with all its power. The real question is why the Justice Department is even fighting this suit, when it ought to be leading a renewed investigation into what happened and how it got covered up.

Support Canada Free Press

Donate
The primary issue here appears to be that the same Obama-loyalist lawyers who were handling the case before are now Obama holdovers handling the case. These people always had an interest in stonewalling the information being sought by the plaintiffs' lawyers, not only to help the government in defending the case but also to prevent public exposure of how things work in the swamp. This seems like the type of situation that's rife for an amicable settlement given the facts of the case and change in leadership, assuming the legal staff at the DOJ can be made to see it that way. The Justice Department could offer to settle the case for a reasonable amount and provide swift review and approval of all outstanding cases, as well as a change in policies (and personnel where necessary) to ensure that this kind of nonsense won't happen in the future. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen - another Obama holdover - won't like that very much. But to tell the truth, the first personnel change that should be made should be Koskinen's ouster. He's been one of the guiltiest parties in the perpetuation of this whole thing, as well as the foot-dragging and stalling that's made it so difficult to get to the bottom of things. Maybe President Trump figured that the IRS would stop its misbehavior once he was in office, or that Jeff Sessions would not need to be told to change the DOJ's approach here. Clearly neither of those things has happened, and we already know that at every level of the federal bureaucracy, there are federal employees resisting President Trump's agenda. There's no reason to think it would be any different at the IRS. Drain the swamp. Settle this case, give Koskinen his walking papers and force the IRS to embrace the "service" part of its name. And not service of their own agendas. Service of the people. A radical concept but maybe with the right new leader there's a chance they can grasp it.
Subscribe

View Comments
Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

VIEW Comments

Sponsored