RUSH: We had breaking news at the end of yesterday’s big broadcast that Darrell Issa, after having consulted with legal counsel, said that he was going to recall Lois Lerner before his committee.
As you know, she showed up yesterday and said, (impression), “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it! Nobody saw me do anything. You can’t prove anything! I didn’t do it, had nothing to do with it,” and then refused to say anything more under questioning, invoking her Fifth Amendment. At which point, Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said, “You can’t do that. You can’t show up here and issue your denials and make a statement and then shut it down. That isn’t what the Fifth Amendment is for.”
No less a legal mind than Professor Dershowitz at Harvard agrees. You can’t use the Fifth Amendment that way. So the latest we had at the end of the program yesterday was that Issa was going to recall her, but he hasn’t yet. I looked, I tried to find the latest bit of news on this before the program. As far as I’ve been able to tell, Darrell Issa has not called Lois “Stonewall” Lerner back to his committee to testify. We mentioned yesterday that this woman really, really had it out for the Christian Coalition back in the 1990s.
I mean, the only way to describe it is “hatred.” Under the direction of Lois “Stonewall” Lerner, the Federal Election Commission (that’s where she worked in the nineties) sued the Christian Coalition. She harassed them for three election cycles. She lost the case. She even asked one conservative during the case if Pat Robertson prayed over him. I mentioned this yesterday. It was Ollie North. She wanted to know, “What did Robertson pray over you? What did he say?”
North said, “What the hell is this? That has nothing to do with anything here,” but she was hell-bent on finding out. She’s got Christianity and Christians on the brain here, folks. There’s no other way to say it: She’s got a hatred. Anyway, that performance led to her being promoted to the IRS, where she used the same kind of behavior in hassling and delaying the tax-exempt authorizations for Tea Party groups, including pro-life and conservative 501(c)(3)s, the various tax-exempt statuses.
Five hundred conservative and Christian groups were illegally targeted by the Obama IRS during her tenure. Of course, she doesn’t know anything about it. She didn’t do anything wrong. Obama doesn’t know anything about it. Jay Carney said Obama doesn’t know anything about it; it’s a good thing Obama doesn’t know. Nobody knows anything about it. Well, Trey Gowdy just took this Shulman guy apart, Douglas Shulman, yesterday on all of this. In fact, let’s grab those sound bites.
Trey Gowdy is the guy who stood up yesterday and said to Lois “Stonewall” Lerner, “You can’t do that. Mr. Chairman, she can’t just come in here and invoke the Fifth Amendment after testifying,” and he was right. There was even a smattering of applause in the room. So, later yesterday, Gowdy, during the House Oversight Government Reform Committee hearing on the IRS scandal, was talking and interviewing and questioning Douglas Shulman, the former IRS commissioner.
We have three sound bites here, and here’s the first…
GOWDY: Can you give me the name of a single person who was involved in the original decision to target conservative groups for disparate treatment?
SHULMAN: I’m — I’m not aware of those names.
GOWDY: Why can’t you give me a name?
SHULMAN: So that… Uh, at the same time that I learned and that it was being stopped, I was, um, also told that the inspector general, uh, was aware of it.
GOWDY: Mr. Shulman, is the inspector general the only person who can investigate wrongdoing within the IRS?
SHULMAN: Um, my, uh general practice —
GOWDY: If there’s someone wielding a knife in the parking lot, are you gonna call the inspector general? Are you gonna wait until his or her investigation’s over before you stop it?
RUSH: It continued. That wasn’t the end of it.
GOWDY: Did you do anything to verify that the practice, as insidious as it was, was stopped?
SHULMAN: The, uh, inspector general was gonna be looking into it, and that’s what —
GOWDY: But is it that you “can’t say yes or no” or you’re just choosing not to say yes or no? Can you answer the question: Did you do anything, personally, to make sure that this insidious discriminatory practice was stopped? Yes or no?
SHULMAN: At the time that I learned about it, I also learned two things. The first was that it was being stepped and the second was —
GOWDY: And what did you do to verify that it was stopped?
SHULMAN: The responsible deputy of the Internal Revenue Service told me it was being stopped.
RUSH: What does this sound like to you? It sounds like a parody. It sounds like numerous parodies that we have produced of congressional hearings in the past. It sounds like an absolute parody. “I telling you what I saw was the inspector…” Yes, but can you name them? Just give me a name, yes or no? Who was it that allowed this to continue? “Mr. Chairman, I looked at every which way, frontwards and backwards, and the inspector general handled it.” I tell you what. I’ll tell you the way this is gonna go.
I’m just gonna make a prediction here, folks. I hope that I’m wrong. But I have intelligence gathered by experience on my side. As this pressure mounts from Republicans on these committees investigating the architects of the scandals — for example, Lois “Stonewall” Lerner — if she does end up back before the committee, if Issa does officially bring her back up there, what’ll happen is he’ll ask her question after question after question, and she’ll say, “Fifth Amendment. Fifth Amendment. Fifth Amendment,” and if Issa does it the right way, it will go on for hours.
Just ask her every question you have and make her invoke the Fifth for every question. I’ll tell you what the media’s gonna do. The media will say that she just fell prey to a trap that was set by these evil House Republicans. “They forced her into pleading the Fifth Amendment in the first place,” and they’re gonna end up making her the victim. That’s probably being tossed around now, strategically within the media: How to make her look like a victim. That’s gonna be a tough sell, because the last thing this woman looks like is a victim. This woman looks like she’d be right at home with some whips and chains.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s the final sound bite of Trey Gowdy and Doug Shulman. By the way, everybody is making a big deal out of the fact that Shulman was a Bush appointee. All right, let me deal with that. We must. Yeah, he was a Bush appointee, but he’s a Democrat. Douglas Shulman is a Democrat. He gave the Democrat National Committee $250 a month before Bush appointed him to his job. Do you know what Shulman is? Shulman is one of countless Bush appointees who were put there by Bush — Democrats — in order to show bipartisanship.
Remember he had that Florida aftermath — all this acrimony, hatred and partisanship — and Bush put a lot of Democrats in positions, and he left a lot of Democrats in positions — as a show of good faith, in an attempt to show compassionate conservatism, in an attempt to mend fences with the Democrats. It didn’t matter. It never will work that way. It never does matter. But that’s what Bush was trying to do. Shulman’s a Democrat. He’s a lifelong Democrat. He’s a Democrat partisan. Here’s the last sound bite…
GOWDY: Did you investigate why conservative groups were being targeted?
SHULMAN: Excuse me?
GOWDY: Did you investigate…? So you can’t give me a single name. You can’t answer the “who.” Can you tell me the “why”? Why were conservative groups…? Why was the culture such, under your watch, that an employee felt comfortable targeting conservative groups? Did you investigate that?
SHULMAN: Y’know, from my reading of the report, I can’t tell if it was political motivation or if it was tone deaf, somebody trying to expedite a way —
GOWDY: You still don’t know that this was political?
SHULMAN: Excuse me?
GOWDY: You still don’t know that this was political!
SHULMAN: I’d defer to the inspector general.
GOWDY: Well, I’ll tell you this, Mr. Shulman. Your predecessor said that he wasn’t sure if it was partisan, and that requires the listener to be as stupid as the speaker, to utter a comment like that.
RUSH: We’ll be back, folks. That sums it up.