The Republican chairman of a powerful House committee has moved to impeach the head of the Internal Revenue Service, saying he has violated the public trust and obstructed congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah said IRS Commissioner John Koskinen failed to comply with a congressional subpoena, allowed documents to be destroyed and misled the public. Chaffetz is chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which has been investigating the IRS for more than two years.
Chaffetz called impeachment an appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and said it will send a clear signal that the IRS is under repair.
Eighteen Republicans on the committee joined Chaffetz in co-sponsoring the impeachment resolution. The measure now goes to the House Judiciary Committee.
(AP)
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5 Responses
Hopefully, this idiotic proposal by the deputy assistant nut-job-in-chief will meet the fate it deserves in the Judiciary Committee.
This is quite rare. Usually impeachment is for judges (who serve life terms) or a president. Usually an appointed official who has alienated the Congress to such an extent will resign long before impeachment is discussed.
Politically the Obama administration is taking a gamble since if the House votes to impeach, the Senate is required to conduct a trial which will result in spotlighting the IRS’s “alleged” (but apparently true) policy of targetting conservative groups for harassment, and since the President is standing by his appointee, he won’t be able to avoid the issue – and this will be during a presidential campaign.
This could be a big a bonanza for the Democrats as the Benghazi show. An impeachment trial in the Senate will allow them to show that the IRS was concerned about political organizations (mostly, but not entirely, conservative ones) illegally masquerading as “social welfare” organizations in order to hide their sources of funding.
Charliehall: If the IRS in fact was focusing on conservative groups, rather than liberal groups, that pretty much establishes that the Obama administration was using the IRS to persecute its enemies. It is politically devastating. Abuse of power to persecute enemies was the second count of the Nixon impeachment. You will have IRS employees in open court taking the “Fifth” when asked about it. While the most-blue third of the country thinks that persecuting conservatives is correct policy, most everyone else will be outraged.Just as Nixon takes credit for the Democrats’ victories in 1974 and 1976, this could be big.
The Benghazi investigation, other than showing that Hillary is a typical boomer when it comes to computers, that the whole line the Obama administration put out about the attack being about a Christian’s anti-Islam video was totally without merit, suggesting either incompetence or malice but precluding good faith error. The Republicans got a smoking gun out of it.
“If the IRS in fact was focusing on conservative groups, rather than liberal groups, that pretty much establishes that the Obama administration was using the IRS to persecute its enemies.”
It was focusing liberal and conservative groups alike. It is just that a lot more conservative groups were trying to get around the law. That should be politically devastating — to conservative groups.
“The Benghazi investigation, other than showing that Hillary is a typical boomer when it comes to computers, that the whole line the Obama administration put out about the attack being about a Christian’s anti-Islam video was totally without merit, suggesting either incompetence or malice but precluding good faith error.”
The House Intelligence Committee report showed otherwise, and the Benghazi Committee has found nothing whatsoever to contradict this.
“The Republicans got a smoking gun out of it.”
The smoking gun is the admission by Kevin McCarthy, confirmed by Richard Hanna, and proven by the outrageous behavior of the Republicans at last Thursday’s hearing, is that there was only one purpose to the Benghazi investigation: To try to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming President of the United States. Their malice and incompetence may have backfired.