A friends who’s a member in good standing of the DC scandal bar chimes in on his take on the IRS scandal …
Here’s how I see the IRS scandal at present. The biggest problem is that no one really knows the facts. Russell George is a nice and honest guy, but any IG who would let a supervisor sit in all the interviews w/her subordinates isn’t really ready for prime time. He also probably didn’t do a world class job on email review etc.
Second biggest problem is Lois Lerner, who really has to go and has to go this weekend. You simply can’t run that division and have the confidence of the public and not be a distraction to your boss if you take the 5th. If she stays in the job having taken the 5th, everyone else will do the same. Just isn’t tenable for her to stay in the role and be effective. Issa may not be able to compel her testimony soon but he can put everyone else in a terrible spot if Lerner stays around on the active payroll after having stiffed congress while saying yes to all the other reviews and having planted a question and answered it at the ABA. And Cummings can’t break w/Issa on a basic issue like this. I also think Dems should pivot from the “good idea, bad execution” approach where they try to use this scandal to take out 501(c)(4)s. What the President needs is to change the channel, not switch to a slightly different plot line of the same show. He can come back at the 501(c)(4) issue, but later after the facts are out, the bad or incompetent people fired and forgotten, and competency in general is restored. Trying to keep the 501(c)(4) issue live now forces the Republicans to double down on the “bad execution” narrative, instead of everyone moving to talk to something else like tax reform, or health care or….remind me again what was the second term agenda supposed to be about? My point is simply that when you’ve got a bad hand in a very long game, you fold and move on to the next, you don’t double down. I think the right play is to have the new IRS guy reassign all of the major players, turn over a bunch of documents before the end of the long weekend, assign someone to manage this for him and try like heck to turn the dialogue to something really different. My fellow scandal lawyers generally feel the same way.
