House Moves to Impeach IRS Director

Seems like someone has decided enough is enough. Story.

TL: DR version - House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz is introducing articles of impeachment against IRS Commissioner John Koskinen for obstructing the investigation into the Lois Lerner affair.

Interesting. There has been a huge push to ensure all IRS reporting documentation is current and correct - reporting who we pay and how much to the IRS in the last year. That push coincides with when this guy took office - Dec 2013.

Figures. Just when they get someone in office that is actually closing loopholes and ensuring payments are reported accurately, there's a 'scandal' to kick him out of office.

What is the procedure for removing Congressmen who conduct witch hunts?

It's not a witch hunt. So many top officials hard drives simultaneously died that it became a running joke between them, while the IRS's own investigators couldn't find a thing.

Gee, could this have anything to do with the 7,832nd congressional investigation of Benghazi's utter failure to yield anything at all?

What is the number of investigations into something significant? Especially if the minority party continues to carry the water for the administration.

No. Ever since the 2012 election, Congress has been trying to find out what the IRS was doing with targeting conservative groups in that election. The IRS stonewalled, essentially saying "the dog ate it." The IRS director took the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify. IRS claimed her hard drive was destroyed and denied that backups existed. It turns out they didn't even bother to look for any backups.

What went on is an intolerable crime, because if the IRS acts as a partisan political enforcer then our government is the walking dead, because we no longer have free elections, we only have elections between candidates who are approved by one party.

Something needs to be shaken up at the IRS. The deliberate lack of transparency, the appearance of far-ranging political corruption, and the implications of gross incompetency demand it.

Audit the fuck out of them and see how they like it.

I don't disagree. But, this guy has only been in office a year. He isn't responsible for decades of shit you're describing.

I don't think anyone has alleged it has been that way for decades.

Probably only in the Obama Admin.

you aren't serious.

Do you have any evidence that the IRS was used by the either of the Bush Admin. or the Reagan admin. to go after political opponents?

The Nixon Admin. might have.

Do you even differentiate between one posters response and another?

The Nixon Administration didn't. As I recall, Nixon suggested it and was told there's no way the IRS would ever do anything remotely partisan.

The IRS scandal cuts right to people's mistrust of government.

Rasmussen Reports poll

Fifty-two percent (52%) of Likely U.S. Voters continue to believe the IRS broke the law when it targeted the groups, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 24% say the IRS didn’t break the law when it went after Tea Party and other conservative groups, while just as many (24%) are not sure.​

The key there is that just 24% don't think the IRS broke the law.

Quinnipiac poll

American voters say 76 - 17 percent, including 63 - 30 percent among Democrats, that a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate charges the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. ​

Why would 76% of Americans want a special prosecutor appointed? Because they don't trust the IRS or the administration to conduct the investigation. They know it's a cover up.

It's called voting.

Except he has never done anything wrong and it is all based upon a 4ight wing lie which has been repeatedly debunked by Republican investigations themselbes. The truth never matters to these fucktard as long as they get a sound bite on partisan radio.

Did you notice how after their 11 hour circus act when Hillary stomped them and not a single new bit of information was covered (not to mention Hillary's poll numbers went up)... Suddenly the Republicans announced all other hearings would be in private without the media present?

These clowns made themselves look like shit bags live on national tv for 11 hours and now they are trying to hide their own circus act.

I was reminded of the 2004 hearings where Republicans just out and out lied about British MP George Gallaway, they blocked out an 8 hour live session to "confront him", but after he came to the US and beat the living shit out of them and their false accusations the Republicans cancelled their own hearing after just 45 minutes because they were being filmed looking so fucking stupid!

No, he did a bunch of things wrong, which will be in the impeachment articles. He suppressed evidence, lied to Congress in sword testimony, and a couple of other major no-nos.

What did you expect the GOP led hearing to reveal when ALL the Democratic members of the hearing were intent on protecting Hillary Clinton?

11 hours and not a single new topic while she beat them over the head with facts they already knew? Sorry, but this is what happens when you do nine investigations, going longer than watergate, for no other reason but to try to smear a candidate.

The Republicans know this is true and that is why they are trying to hide the rest of their witch hunt/circus from the American people.

Regardless of what the Republicans think or what didn't come out in the hearings........do you seriously think Hillary Clinton is innocent of any wrong doing?

I had to put up with her as First Lady of Arkansas for more than a decade and there are few politicians as truly loathesome as she is. She is Lady McBeth without the daggers.

Yes, everyone with even half a brain who has paid even the slightest amount of attention knows this has been 100% bull shit from the very start. I don't even like her and I know that. Shit, ALL of the Republicans have repeatedly admitted that is true but for some reason Fox won't broadcast that part (Gee, I wonder why? ). You must be a complete blithering idiot not to know that by now.

"But there have been so much partisan noise surely something must be wrong?!"

Why did she push the "Youtube video caused the attack" lie when it was shown the day of the attack she knew it was a regular terrorist attack? Hell she sent a message to her own daughter describing it as a terrorist attack.

Because, at the time, people really thought that as there were indeed protests about that. Later on that turned out not to be the case and it takes time for facts to become clear. Jesus, you are such a partisan hack! You would be the first to say battle field commanders do not have a perfect picture of events in real time yet you pull a 180 for partisan reasons. Seriously, you have no creditablit and look like a fool. You are barking up a tree which was proved to be the wrong one years and years ago. What is you major malfunction?

This nailed the Benghazi hearing. Only those inside the Far Right Bubble thought it accomplished anything. Everyone else thought Hillary mopped the floor with the Repubs. It looks like it will finally shut the door on Benghazigate.

What Hillary's Benghazi hearing revealed about life inside the Republican bubble
Paul Waldman

You'll be forgiven for not knowing who Sidney Blumenthal is. If you don't, and you tuned in midway through Hillary Clinton's testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, you might have concluded that Blumenthal is either a high-ranking al Qaeda leader, a Soviet spy, or some combination of Bernie Madoff and Ted Bundy. In any case, you might have concluded that he's a world-historical figure whose actions must be understood if America is to move forward into the future.

The ridiculously lengthy discussion about Blumenthal illustrates the problem Republicans have had with this entire investigation: They're stuck in their own bubble, unable to see what things might look like from outside it.

In case you don't know, Sid Blumenthal is a former journalist and longtime friend (and sometime employee) of the Clintons. For a variety of reasons, some more legitimate than others, Republicans regard him as a singularly sinister character. When it emerged that he had sent Hillary Clinton lots of emails about Libya (and other matters), they could barely contain their glee, going so far as to subpoena him to testify privately. He apparently failed to give them what they wanted, because up until now committee Chair Trey Gowdy has refused to release his testimony to the public. This is a replay of what happened in 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when independent counsel Ken Starr forced Blumenthal to testify about what he knew in that case (if you want a lengthy explanation of Blumenthal and his relationship to the Clintons, go here).

The point is that, from within the Republican bubble, Blumenthal's connection to Benghazi, even if it consisted only of sending Hillary Clinton emails about Libya in general, proves that something fishy was going on. So naturally they'll waste an hour or two of her testimony talking about the fact that he sent her lots of emails, which proves that...he sent her lots of emails.

This is what happens when you start an investigation that you're sure will uncover evidence of nefarious goings-on. When you can't find any malfeasance, you convince yourself that even mundane things are nefarious, like the fact that Hillary Clinton has a friend you don't like.

Consider another topic of discussion at the hearing: the different stories that came out in the immediate aftermath of the attack explaining why the attack had occurred. The situation was chaotic, in large part because there were nearly simultaneous incidents at other American diplomatic outposts in the Middle East, growing out of protests of an anti-Muslim video that appeared online. At first, the administration said the Benghazi attack was like those in Cairo and Tunis, but it later became clear that it was more organized and planned (though the perpetrators may have opportunistically launched the attack precisely because so many protests were going on in so many places).

How should we understand the administration's changing explanation? Was it mere spin? A reflection of the information that was available? Or was it scandalous? Throughout, Republicans have treated the Obama administration's response as though it were not just scandalous, but possibly criminal. For instance, in May of last year, we learned of a memo that a White House communication official wrote at the time, encouraging staffers not to say Benghazi represented a failure of administration policy. In other words, a guy whose job it is to craft spin crafted some spin. But Republicans reacted as though they had caught Barack Obama personally killing those four Americans. "We now have the smoking gun," said Sen. Lindsey Graham. "It's the equivalent of what was discovered with the Nixon tapes," said Charles Krauthammer.

A similarly enlightening discussion was brought up in Clinton's hearing, with Republicans expressing such faux-outrage you'd think they were talking about one of the most diabolical propaganda campaigns in human history, and not a few comments that a few administration officials made to a few television shows. At another point in the hearing, a Republican congressman spent nearly 15 minutes aggressively interrogating Clinton over whether — brace yourself — her press secretary tried to make her look good to reporters. Only a truly diabolical figure could contemplate such a thing.

We're all tempted to assume the worst about our political opponents. They can't be just people we disagree with or even people whose values are different from ours. If we're partisan enough, we end up thinking that everything our opponents do is for the worst motives. Those people on the other side don't even make mistakes; when they screw up, it just shows how venomous their very hearts are. It's the political version of what psychologists call the "fundamental attribution error," in which we attribute our own actions to circumstance, but we attribute other people's actions to their inherent nature. If I cut you off in traffic, it's because I didn't realize you were in my blind spot; if you cut me off, it's because you're a jerk.

And if Americans died at Benghazi, well it just had to be an outgrowth of Hillary Clinton's infinite capacity for evil. She got emails from a guy we don't like? Proof of just how wicked the whole thing was! Somebody in the administration described the events in a way that turned out to be inaccurate? Yet more proof!

Many conservatives watching the hearing no doubt concluded that it reinforced everything they think about Clinton: that she's dishonest and untrustworthy, that she's surrounded by unsavory characters, and that she is utterly at fault for the deaths of those four Americans in Benghazi. They also probably thought the Republicans on the committee were heroic in their efforts to pin her down.

But it's hard to imagine lots of Americans who would agree, unless they are already committed Republicans. It wouldn't be the first time Republicans thought they were doing great, while the rest of America saw the situation a little differently.

http://theweek.com/articles/584761/...-revealed-about-life-inside-republican-bubble

No. Nobody in the administration or on the ground ever thought it was a protest. They were e-mailing each other, and both the agents on the ground in Libya and the people in Washington were all telling each other it was a well planned, well coordinated terrorist attack. But it happened on 9/11 during election season, so they had to ditch that story and replace it with another, a concocted lie.

Great. I report from a moron. We didn't put boots on the ground in Libya because Sidney Blumenthal was sitting on the board of a private security company that wanted all the lucrative contracts. When Hillary "released" her e-mails with him she deleted the paragraphs that mentioned that angle. But Sidney's e-mails got hacked by somebody in Eastern Europe so the committee ran across the real copies of those e-mails.

Hillary severely damaged the national security interests of the United States, along with Libya and the entire region, to try to make herself lots and lots of money. The result was a disaster that saw four Americans killed, tens of thousands of Libyans killed, and tens of thousands more forced to flee for their lives, with thousands of them drowning in a desperate bid to get their families to safety. She should hang by the neck until dead, and then crows should feast on her corpse.

Conspiracy theory much?

We didn't have boots on the ground in Libya because, after weeks of DEMANDING military action in Libya and claiming the President was "leading from behind" by not attacking Libya... The President decides to do what Republicans in Congress had DEMANDED he do. He decided to aid the rebels with air strikes.

Of course, the second he did the Republican shit stains flipped a 180, declared it wreck less and risky, and wanted to make sure no US ground troops where involved. You will remember the Republicans did the exact same thing in Syria, first demanding military action and calling the President a coward for not intervining, then when poison gas was used and it looked like the US might intervine suddenly Republicans declared they were isolationist and the President should never use military force for any reason. After a diplomatic deal was reached where Assad would give up his weapons in return for us not invading then suddenly Republicans were back to declaring we just had to invade. In short, they are all clowns with zero integrity or creditability.