The Obama Administration is still stonewalling IRS scandal documents

I’m not surprised to learn, via Katie Pavlich’s post at Townhall, that the Obama Administration is hiding even more smoking-gun emails pertaining to the IRS scandal, even though Freedom of Information Act requests were filed over a year ago.  

It’s a fairly straightforward request for correspondence between Democrat members of Congress, such as unindicted co-conspirators Sen. Carl Levin and Rep. Elijah Cummings.  Levin and Cummings are just the tip of the iceberg.  These FOIA requests are going to unveil a massive trove of emails that show Democrat politicians blatantly using the IRS as a political weapon to take down conservative groups before the 2012 election.  The emails recently unveiled by Judicial Watch show Levin picking targets for IRS scrutiny and slow-walking like Lyndon Johnson selecting Vietnam bombing targets.  The response from the IRS Tax Exempt Organizations division included assurances that their procedures were “flexible” enough to harass the hell out of whatever political targets Levin fed them.

Try to imagine the media reaction if it was a year after a Republican Administration’s IRS harassed and intimidated left-wing civil rights and environmental groups during a presidential election, and mysteriously ended up auditing a good 10 percent of their donors.  After long months of obfuscation, a FOIA lawsuit from a liberal watchdog group (or let’s be candid, a mainstream media organization, because you can bet your bippy they’d be all over this story if the political polarity was reversed) uncovered long-concealed emails that showed, say, Senator Ted Cruz feeding lists of liberal political groups to compliant IRS agents.  There wouldn’t be any other story in the media; the very pillars of heaven would have come tumbling down; the streets would ring with howls for the immediate resignation of the Republican senators and congressmen involved; riot police would be clashing with protesters.

And of course, no one in the Beltway-media axis would tolerate the slightest delay in producing all documents related to the scandal.  But here we are, a year later, and IRS lawyers have responded six times by saying they needed more time to comply with the FOIA requests, using exactly the same excuses each time.  The bombshell emails uncovered by Judicial Watch last week were pried loose with a lawsuit, not the orderly response to a lawful request.  Somehow it’s taking over a year to pull a bunch of emails together.

It stinks to high heaven, it’s absolutely unacceptable, and it’s another example of the patented Obama strategy of burying scandals in quicksand until they suffocate.  Drag out the investigation forever, release each tiny scrap of documentation after fighting an epic battle to keep it secret, stretch the revelations out over the span of months and years, tell whatever lies are necessary to survive from one week-long media cycle to the next… and declare the whole thing an “old story” that only obsessives still care about.

The people trying doggedly to get at the truth are portrayed as insincere political hacks.  Those who keep secrets and evade justice are given endless benefit of the doubt.  The media pats itself on the back for keeping its beloved Obama Administration alive for another month.  And out in flyover country, a systemic crisis that is dangerously eroding Americans’ basic trust in their government grows steadily worse.