The scandals are falling apart

The scandals are falling apart
By Ezra Klein
The Washington Post

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. Let’s go through them.

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.

That perception, too, seems to be changing. Mike Allen’s Playbook, which is ground zero for scandal CW, led Thursday with a squib that says “the West Wing got its mojo back” and is “BACK ON OFFENSE.” Yes, the caps are in the original.

The smarter voices on the right are also beginning to counsel caution. ”While there’s still more information to be gathered and more investigations to be done, all indications are that these decisions – on the AP, on the IRS, on Benghazi – don’t proceed from [Obama],” wrote Ben Domenech in The Transom, his influential conservative morning newsletter. “The talk of impeachment is absurd. The queries of ‘what did the president know and when did he know it’ will probably end up finding out “’just about nothing, and right around the time everyone else found out.’”

I want to emphasize: It’s always possible that evidence could emerge that vaults one of these issues into true scandal territory. But the trend line so far is clear: The more information we get, the less these actually look like scandals.

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.

Well, the IRS scandal...is still a scandal. Perhaps it doesn't touch the WH, I dunno. But Treasury officials were informed in last June that the Treasury Department’s inspector general was looking into the IRS' process for screening “politically active” groups applying for tax exemptions.

This means that top Obama officials knew something was up during the 2012 presidential election.

Steven Miller, who was appointed IRS interim head on Nov. 9, 2012, knew of the conservative targeting in May of the same year.

However, during a congressional hearing in July 2012, he made no mention of the scandal.

This all came out in the hearings.

Something else of interest. Why did the IRS do all of this? Simple. The IRS did what some powerful Dem Senators wanted them to do.

Over the last three years, Democratic senators repeatedly and publicly pressured the IRS to engage in the very activities that they are only now condemning today. SOURCE

2010 Max Baucas (D-MT) Dem senator of the powerful Senate Finance Committee (overseas the Treasury Dept) sent a letter to the IRS and demanded they investigate these groups.

2012 Chuck Schumer (D-NY) sent another letter and gets 6 other Dems to cosign with him:

Mike Bennett (D-CO)
Al Franken (D-MN)
Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Mark Udall (D-NM)
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

Peter Welch (D-VT) also sent a letter at Schumer's request as well as Carl Levin (D-Mich), who sent letters to both the IRS and the Dept of Treasury.

These are not low level people.


As for Benghazi...

Bryant wrote: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,

Nevertheless there was interference from someone.

CIA director David Petraeus was surprised when he read the freshly rewritten talking points an aide had emailed him in the early afternoon of Saturday, September 15. One day earlier, analysts with the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis had drafted a set of unclassified talking points policymakers could use to discuss the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. But this new version​—​produced with input from senior Obama administration policymakers​—​was a shadow of the original.

These were strong claims. The CIA usually qualifies its assessments, providing policymakers a sense of whether the conclusions of its analysis are offered with “high confidence,” “moderate confidence,” or “low confidence.” That first draft signaled confidence, even certainty: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.”

All told, the draft of the CIA talking points that was sent to top Obama administration officials that Friday evening included more than a half-dozen references to the enemy​—​al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, jihadists, Islamic extremists, and so on.

The version Petraeus received in his inbox Saturday, however, had none. The only remaining allusion to the bad guys noted that “extremists” might have participated in “violent demonstrations.”SOURCE

There is no way anyone can get me to believe Obama didn't know we were running guns to the Syrian rebels in defiance of an international treaty we have with Russia. Or that he had no idea that the compound came under attack and that the Ambassador had been calling for help. Or that help was less than 3 hours away. If he didn't know...he'd have had to been in a coma. But he wasn't! He went fundraising the very next day!

Now the AP/ Justice Dept thing...probably was legal. As I understand it, a subpoena had been issued by a judge and imo, leaks do need to be found out and stopped. It was very possible that the AP was the source of many leaks that may have been vital to national security. So I'm not paying much attention to that anymore.

But the Benghazi thing continues to infuriate me. The IRS thing does too but less so.

1) The IRS scandal is the very definition of the word conspiracy. Many people shy from that word. It brings on ideas of the tin foil hat, but in this case people, from one side of the spectrum, conspired to try and damage the other side of the spectrum. Top officials publicly admitted they knew it was happening, yet no one took steps to stop it. WH officials, yes even the President himself, are lying when they say they didn't know. It was publicly admitted to months and months ago. Most involved are still employed.

2) Those involved with Benghazi have admitted to being idiotic, incompetents who had no idea how to handle the situation. We actually have teams specifically designed just for that situation, yet they were not used. Most involved are still employed.

3) While technically legal, there is no precedent for it. There are other, commonly used avenues that can be used for this. This was an abuse of power, yet supporters of the admin are too busy defending the admin to even be worried about the worrisome precedent that action set. Buch of silly little partisans if you ask me.

So to recap:
We have government officials who conspire against those with whom they don't agree. We have government officials who admit to being idiots. We have government officials whom abuse the system. We have an admin who is so incompetent they don't even know what is going on and have not even attempted to find out, much less terminate, those responsible........

........and you are fine with this........you are even defending this......amazing.

Yeah totes rosy colored glasses. As if the right has ever pulled the strings behind what the media reports. Meanwhile nobody in the admin knows anything, they always point the finger at justice or state, who also point the finger back and forth and on whoever else they can ( like the intel community or funding, when both of those excuses have been debunked), intimidation on the part of the white house to suppress eye witness testimony, demoting one of the whistleblowers with 30 some years of service, and youre telling me the IRS thing is just two random employees in cincinnati? And of course lets not forget fast and furious, which WE STILL HAVNT GOTTEN TO THE BOTTOM OF, thanks to the customary stonewalling of information from this most transparently corrupt admin in history. So either A, were completely rudderless and obama has no clue wtf is going on anywhere in the government, or B, he's neck deep in all this shit, and is just a dirty chicago politician.