Spelling Bee Champ Correctly Spelled Weasel = Darrell Issa

The Record is Clear, Honest, and True: Mr. Issa's is Pure BS

Chairman Issa Shuts Off DEM Mic and DEM Speakers

The story here in part:

A new Democratic staff report released today by House Oversight & Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) shows months of interviews by Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) majority staff yielded absolutely no evidence of White House involvement or political targeting in the IRS’s enhanced screening of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Though Issa has refused to release the entire transcripts — as he pledged to do in June 2013 — the report contains the public portions of all 39 interviews interviewed by the Republican majority. The report notes that those interviewed include “employees from the Cincinnati and Washington D.C. offices at every level — from Screening Agents to the former IRS Commissioner to the Chief of Staff to the Treasury Secretary,” and “Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and individuals with no political affiliation.”

Each of the witnesses was asked whether they had any knowledge of White House involvement or political motivation. None reported any. This appears to contradict the allegation by Issa last May that this “was the targeting of the president’s political enemies effectively and lies about it during the election year, so that it wasn’t discovered until afterwards.” That claim was repeated by a wide array of House and Senate Republicans.

Here are two things that have Issa and his Witch Hunters in full apoplexy and denial:

WASHINGTON — Amid a flurry of Republican calls for a special prosecutor to investigate the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of conservative groups, the Justice Department is set to defend its own probe of the matter as exhaustive and sufficient during a House hearing Thursday on the department’s response to the scandal. A top Justice Department official will tell the hearing that the department is now looking at how some of former senior IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails disappeared -- a new area of inquiry, Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC News in an exclusive interview Friday.

“We've expanded the scope of the IRS investigation to deal with these lost emails,” Holder told ABC News’ Pierre Thomas. Specifically, the Justice Department and FBI are looking into “the circumstances of the lost emails,” Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole will tell a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee Thursday, according to excerpts of his prepared remarks provided to ABC News.

That was based on this: The IRS earlier had said that Lois Lerner's computer hard drive was destroyed three years ago, ending any chance of retrieving her lost emails. In court papers, the IRS said the hard drive was destroyed after two sets of trained technicians tried to retrieve the data. The tax agency said it was standard procedure to destroy old data storage equipment that may have contained confidential taxpayer information.

Here from Politico in part:  The IRS declared under oath and penalty of perjury on Friday that Lois Lerner’s hard drive is irrecoverable after being wiped clean by tech staff and recycled with an outside contractor, according to a court filing. Although an outside company was able to identify the serial number for the computer, the hard drive was wiped clean or “degaussed” and then recycled after several attempts to recover the data by IRS tech personnel, including a career forensic specialist with 25 years worth of experience.

Is there a bottom line here - any at all: Possibly “there is no there there.”

Mr. Issa can't stop issuing subpoenas. Since becoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2011, Issa has issued nearly 100 subpoenas – more than the last three committee chairman combined, according to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD).

Cummings points out that Issa's 96 subpoenas have been issued without any debate or vote in the committee. In a letter to Issa, Cummings argues that “issuing unilateral subpoenas with no legitimate justification undermines the credibility of this committee.” 

Finally the real Darrell Issa: Leading up to and following the 2010 elections, Issa was giddy at the chance of going toe-to-toe with Obama, whom he called “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times” in an interview with Rush Limbaugh in October of that year. 

A month later, he walked back the claim. “If I had to do it over again, I’d have parsed my words a little more carefully,” Issa told CNN’s Situation Room. “Do I think the president is personally corrupt? No. I should never have implied that.”

Yeah, that Darrell Issa ... if anyone needs to be investigated, in my view, it should be Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).