IRS Officials To Face Judge Who Once Sicced a Special Prosecutor on the DOJ

Mark your calendars for July 10. 

That is the day IRS officials get to explain to a federal judge why the tax agency didn’t inform the court that Lois Lerner’s emails had been lost even though the agency had knowledge of the missing emails and of other IRS officials’ missing emails. 

Things are definitely heating up for the IRS. 

On Friday,  attorneys for Judicial Watch sought a courtroom status conference “as soon as possible to discuss the IRS’s failure to fulfill its duties to this court under the law, as well as other ramifications of this lawsuit.” 

Emmet G. Sullivan, United States District Judge for the District of Columbia, quickly granted the hearing.

Former DOJ attorney Sidney Powell had nothing but high praise for Sullivan in her Friday piece in the NY Observer,  calling him “a federal judge who has the integrity and fortitude to seek Justice.” 

Turns out, Judge Sullivan is the judge who held federal prosecutors in contempt in the case of the unjust indictment against Senator Ted Stevens, which he dismissed. 

Emmet G. Sullivan, a graduate of Howard University and Howard Law who was appointed by President Clinton, is one of the heroes of my new book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. Judge Sullivan ordered an independent investigation of the Department of Justice, which revealed its corrupted prosecution of United States Senator Ted Stevens.

In the book, I write, “An experienced trial judge, Sullivan was a distinguished man and widely held in high regard. He was no ordinary federal judge; he had worked hard all his life on several different courts and had been appointed by three presidents representing both political parties. . . . He had great respect for the rule of law and strived to apply it equally and fairly in all cases in his courtroom.”

In the Stevens case, Judge Sullivan publicly upbraided the government lawyers before an overflow courtroom, “In nearly 25 years on the bench, I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case. . . . When the government does not meet its obligations to turn over evidence, the system falters.”

We’ll soon find out if the IRS scandal is “not on the level” – a “phony scandal”  being  “ginned up for the base,” as the president is wont to say.

“Emmet G. Sullivan is one judge who knows a cover-up when he sees one,” Powell writes. 

And that doesn’t bode well for the Obama administration, at all.