The Larry Klayman-founded Judicial Watch and True The Vote, which is challenging the validity of black voters in Mississippi, have filed lawsuits against the IRS and will be granted hearings this week.
Judicial Watch and True The Vote are joining House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s inquisition into the emails of Lois Lerner.
True the Vote, which was granted a hearing on Friday, is asking the court to allow outside experts to examine IRS computers and records – in order to, as they put it in court filings, keep the agency “from engaging in and permitting any further destruction of evidence.”
True The Vote is alleging that the IRS is a corrupt agency that may intentionally permit the destruction of records and is asking for permission to allow their experts — Ha! — to examine the 3-year-old broken hard drive containing Lois Lerner’s email which could be in a landfill somewhere or possibly even recycled into a soda can. Barring that, they want the authority to establish their own oversight of the agency.
Good luck with that.
Judicial Watch, granted its own hearing on Thursday, says the IRS failed to tell the group and the court that it couldn’t retrieve all of Lerner’s emails.
“This will be an important hearing, as any representations to the court by the Obama administration will have ramifications way beyond misleading Congress,” said Jill Farrell, a spokeswoman for Judicial Watch.
As terrified as the White House obviously must be about a hearing into a fake-scandal, this probably won’t even get that far.
It seems likely to me that this fiasco will continue until Darrell Issa finishes his term as oversight committee chairman at the end of this year. The next chairman, whoever that may be, will likely want to launch their own signature investigation into something else, untainted by the serial failure of Darrell Issa.
It’s amusing to think that we’re essentially resigned to the idea that the oversight committee will only be used for political purposes in the future. That’s the real legacy of Issa. He didn’t find the smoking gun but he did turn a valuable and essential function of Congress into just another political side-show.
If future administrations are less cooperative or forthcoming, the tenure of Issa could be one reason why.