Former IRS executive Lois Lerner is off the hook. After an investigation by the Justice Department over her refusal to answer Congressional questions about her role in targeting conservative groups, no contempt charges will be fired. But are both sides missing the point?
Former IRS executive Lois Lerner is off the hook. After an investigation by the Justice Department over her refusal to answer Congressional questions about her role in targeting conservative groups, no contempt charges will be fired. But are both sides missing the point?
Former IRS executive Lois Lerner is off the hook. After an investigation by the Justice Department over her refusal to answer Congressional questions about her role in targeting conservative groups, no contempt charges will be fired. But are both sides missing the point?
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
Today with me is Daniel McAdams who is the Executive Director of the Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
He's also the co-host of this program.
Welcome Daniel.
Hello there.
Good to be here.
Good to have you with us again.
And I thought we'd start off with talking about a subject that's in the news right now and has to do with Lois Lerner.
And she's been in the news for a while because she used to be the head of the IRS.
She got herself into some trouble.
So there's a slight bit of justice going on and she was using, believe it or not, using the IRS deliberately for political reasons to punish political enemies.
Can you believe that that could be possible?
It's outrageous.
It's outrageous.
But anyway, we know that she's really in trouble because the IRS, they finally had to get rid of her.
She's not the head of the IRS, and the IRS had to apologize.
But they want that over and done with just because they went and used this.
This to me really annoys me to know that a government legal agency, a law agency, is used in a political way.
Of course, that's all Washington is all about.
But you know, she was called before the Committee, ISIS Committee on Government Oversight, and she gave an opening statement, and then ISIS decided to ask her some question she refused to answer.
So they held her in contempt, and they sent her to the Justice Department.
And now it comes back.
The announcement is the Justice Department says the ex-IRS official is not in contempt.
Does that raise any questions in your mind?
So the Justice Department investigated one of its own essentially in the government and said no harm, no foul.
Right.
I was shocked.
But you know, when I was in office and you were assisting me so helpfully so often, we would get requests once in a while to vote on sending out a subpoena and authorizing people to be dragged before the committee.
Now, my position on that has generally been that if you're a private citizen, the Congress shouldn't be able to just grab any private citizen up and come down and start quizzing them on how they're running their football program or something like that.
But don't you think it's legitimate to treat people who are taxpayers' recipients and are working for the government?
Don't they have a responsibility, moral responsibility, and probably a legal responsibility not to get rid of their emails and cover up?
It's amazing how in the private sector, when they were called before committees, they were often treated so rudely and disrespectfully.
We always joked in the back, why do these people even bother to show up for these hearings?
But then when a government official comes, they're treated with kid gloves, essentially, and exonerated by their own government.
And they don't have to answer the questions.
And actually, it was a technicality that this was filed on because the Republicans argued that when she came and gave an opening statement, she waived her right of her Fifth Amendment and then, in a way, said she had a Fifth Amendment.
So it's a technicality that could be sorted out, but I don't think that is really the issue.
This one issue I've already mentioned, and that is the tactics of the IRS to be used.
And I believe they work with the Justice Department as well, you know, to come together.
So you have the Republicans making a heyday.
Whether or not they have a true belief in a different policy or not is a different story.
But politically, this was dynamite, you know, to do this.
But of course, then the Democrats come along and they're in charge of the Justice Department.
And all of a sudden, this thing seems to be washed aside.
I think, as you point out, it doesn't seem the Republicans are really arguing the core issues of it.
They're arguing a technicality.
I almost wonder, maybe I'm too cynical.
I almost wonder if they look at this and say, uh-huh, that's a good idea when we get the White House back.
And if we get nabbed for it, we can say, hey, the Democrats did it too.
Well, you know, it sort of sets me up for saying that we have a good idea on how to prevent all this.
Repeal 1913.
You know, get rid of the IRS, the income tax, and the Federal Reserve System.
Because all this does is breed corruption.
So a lot of this is a result that why are they so interested in helping and penalizing?
It's because government is so big.
I think this is what breeds all the money in politics.
A lot of times I work closely with progressives, and they think regulating money is a solution to this abuse, and I want to regulate government.
If government wasn't able to pass out so many favors and the IRS having the power to punish people, I think we would have a lot less of this.
Once again, I think this is a reflection of big government.
I don't think this is going to be the solution.
I don't think she's going to tell the story.
I think this is like closing it out.
And it'll be interesting to see what happens about Hillary Clinton's responsibility for keeping records and all.
She may well be able to get out of that and we may promote her and make her president.
So it's a real shame as far as I'm concerned.
It isn't an example of a true incentive to have a rule of law.
You know, I spent a lot of time looking at how the U.S. is perceived abroad and our reduced image overseas.
And I also look a lot at the hypocrisy of U.S. policy and especially foreign policy.
But the State Department and various government-connected NGOs like Freedom House, they're always putting out reports ranking freedom overseas, political freedom overseas.
You can imagine how something like this is seen overseas.
And you can imagine if, for example, in Iran, they were able to point out that the government was being used to target political opponents.
It would be in the State Department report.
It would be in the Freedom House report.
There it just goes to show you how terrible they are.
And so I wonder if people at our government think that people overseas just don't seem to notice that we're doing the same thing.
But that's routine.
They would use this as the argument for punishing a country, and we'll deny them.
We'll put on sanctions or deny them this or that.
But they don't ask the question that you ask is, how do we treat our own people?
Do we have a legal right to do it, to tell China or anybody else to follow these rules on human rights?
We have a moral right to maybe speak out and do our best.
But I think that it is so bad when we don't set a good example.
This is my argument all the time.
If we set the right example, maybe somebody would follow us.
But how do we treat our whistleblowers?
We have laws to protect the whistleblower, but if they release information explaining how the torture events went on, they might be the only people who get punished for it, not the people who did the illegal torturing.
So we know that there's a X-CIA agent in the UK.
John Teriyaku was in prison.
He was just let out, but he was the only one who went to prison over torture because he blew the whistle.
And look at David Petraeus, who had leaked information that was even more sensitive.
It was the SCI-level information that he leaked to a woman he was having an affair with to bolster his image in her biography of him.
Nothing's happened.
As a matter of fact, apparently he's still advising the White House on military policy.
You know, there's always a sentiment for equal justice under law, and I think that's very important because I think our courts aren't in support of equal justice when it comes to the enforcement of drug laws.
But sometimes equal justice in our society today and human rights is equal distribution of wealth.
So it's a poor understanding about what rights are and self-reliance and responsibility.
So we do have a mess, but fortunately, I sense that there has been a lot of people waking up.
I've been encouraged by the young people I meet, and they are interested in looking at this.
I've had the young people come in, and you met them, people who are interested in the young people don't like our foreign policy, and they don't like the Federal Reserve, and they don't like the IRS, and I think they're honestly dedicated to equal justice.
Remind 8% Leadership00:00:18
It's not an overwhelming number, but I'd like to remind everybody, you don't have to have 51%.
You have to have 8%, 9% of leadership preaching what is right, because those are the ones that gave us the government that we have today.