IRS - Gate news of the day - Lerner put on paid leave after refusing to resign ? After blowing Fifth Amendment posture by giving her statement before the House Committee , she's set up to be held in Contempt when she's called back !

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-23/irs-lois-lerner-put-involuntary-paid-vacation

IRS' Lois Lerner Put On Involuntary Paid Vacation

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/23/2013 18:56 -0400

• Barack Obama

The IRS' Lois Lerner may not be the most proficient when it comes to hiding years of alleged conservative group persecution, or subsequently pleading the fifth and avoiding self-incrimination in what she dubs is a perfectly legal misunderstanding even as she makes on the record statements defending her innocence, but when it comes to being put on "involuntary" paid leave, she shows private sector efficiency and results. According to Bloomberg, "Lerner is being replaced on an acting basis, the IRS said today. Lerner has been placed on paid administrative leave, said a Democratic aide who was informed of the decision. The move wasn’t voluntary, the aide said." So whereas taxes paid by conservatives were being used to fund her witch hunt of other conservatives, going forward the government worker, who oddly enough is being replaced"despite having done nothing wrong", will be paid to do nothing. Sound like a hole in one mission accomplished for this administration.

And who will be replacing Lerner?

The IRS announced that Ken Corbin, a deputy director in another division of the tax agency that processes individual and business returns, will be acting director of exempt organizations.

Corbin, who has been at the IRS since 1986, is a “proven leader during challenging times,” acting commissioner Danny Werfel wrote in a message to employees today.

“He has strong management experience inside the IRS handling a wide range of processing issues and compliance topics as well as taxpayer service areas,” Werfel wrote. “Combined with his track record of leading large work groups, these skills make him an ideal choice to help lead the Exempt Organizations area through this difficult period.”

Werfel became acting commissioner yesterday, assigned by President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew to come up with a strategy for improving the agency within 30 days.

So... they are shutting the IRS down?

As for Wefel, we hope he at least knows how to plead the fifth correctly in 2-4 years if/when he too is called to testify before Congress for auditing everyone who made over $100,000, or whatever passes for the definition of an "unfair fat cat" at a time when total US debt will be $22 trillion, when the Fed has been discredited, when rates are soaring, and when the USSA government has to commission the NSA to look deep inside every savings account - offshore and domestic - just to find whose money it will need to confiscate to pay its own apparatchiks first and foremost ? 

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/23/surprise-lois-lerner-placed-on-administrative-leave/

Surprise: Lois Lerner placed on “administrative leave”; Update: Lerner refused to resign?

POSTED AT 5:21 PM ON MAY 23, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

  

Via NRO, this isn’t really a surprise. Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein both called for Lerner to goyesterday, a day after their little powwow at the White House. Maybe that’s a coincidence or maybe it’s something more, but either way it’s proof that even liberals thought it was time for another sacrifice to appease the scandal gods.

Lois Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service’s director of exempt organizations, has been placed on administrative leave, according to a source in the agency’s Cincinnati office.

Lerner on Thursday afternoon sent an e-mail to employees in the exempt organizations division she oversees stating, “Due to the events of recent days, I am on administrative leave starting today. An announcement will be made shortly informing you who will be acting while I am on administrative leave. I know all of you will continue to support EO’s mission during these difficult times.” She concluded, “I thank you for all your hard work and dedication,” adding, “The work you do is important.”

Old White House ally Carl Levin and new White House ally John McCain sent the IRS a letter just this morning calling for Lerner’s termination, and now here we are.

Why “administrative leave” instead of a firing? Three reasons. One: Now that Lerner’s stated publicly that she did no wrong and invoked her Fifth Amendment right in Congress, the Due Process President probably doesn’t want to pull the trapdoor until she’s given her side of the story. If in fact it turns out that the order to target conservative groups came from somewhere else, canning her straightaway would make a bad situation worse. Two: As we know from Benghazi, “administrative leave” is the administration’s preferred way to handle a crisis. It’s a nice middle ground between doing nothing at all, which plays badly with voters, and firing someone outright. Why kick someone off the payroll when you can simply “suspend” them, keep the checks coming so they stay quiet, and then quietly reinstate them later after the public’s stopped paying attention?

And three, as Dan Foster reminds us today at NRO: It’s exceedingly hard to fire a federal employee, thanks in part to the sort of government unions that are routinely championed by Barack Obama.

[A]s a civil servant, she is protected by both the full weight of federal law and the advocacy of a powerful union, making her tricky to get rid of…

Part of the reason so few federal workers are let go is surely the, shall we say, culture of lowered expectations synonymous with government bureaucracy. But the greater part of it is that firings are complex and time-consuming. Forty-nine states have “at-will” employment laws, meaning that, specific contracts and covenants aside, a private-sector employer can let an employee go for any reason at all, with a few exceptions for things like discrimination and (ironically enough) the intimidation of whistleblowers. But in Washington, the process can take 18 months or more.

“It’s much more difficult to fire government workers, because it requires much more evidence of wrongdoing, and it is a longer process for creating the paperwork, for documenting it, and so forth,” Donald Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, tells me. “There are lots of cases where supervisors give up, and either decide it’s easier to transfer [a poor employee] or, in the time-honored tradition, to promote them.”

Exit question: Will this affect Lerner’s willingness to testify? If she feels wronged by being suspended, it might convince her to give up the goods on some higher-up, assuming she has the goods. But then, that’s the virtue of administrative leave from the IRS’s perspective — by keeping her employed, they’re giving her an incentive to keep her mouth shut. If she plays ball and stays silent, there may yet be a job for her again a few months from now.

Update: Yep.

Andy Levy        ✔ @andylevy

Lois Lerner is on administrative leave with pay, or as we used to call it back in the day, vacation.

5:25 PM - 23 May 2013

Update: Can’t fire her for the reasons stated above, so there’s only one way to get her out the door for good. No dice:

Eamon Javers        ✔ @EamonJavers

Sen. Grassley stmt: "My understanding is the new acting IRS commissioner asked for Ms. Lerner’s resignation, and she refused to resign."

6:32 PM - 23 May 2013

If they wanted her gone, does that mean they’re not worried about what she might say in testimony? They’re taking a gamble.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/23/alan-dershowitz-issas-right-lerner-waived-her-right-against-self-incrimination-by-giving-an-opening-statement/

Alan Dershowitz: Issa’s right, Lerner waived her right against self-incrimination and should be required to answer questions

POSTED AT 11:21 AM ON MAY 23, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

  

Yesterday I gave you an expert’s skeptical take on whether she inadvertently waived her Fifth Amendment right. Today, via Newsmax, here’s another expert with the inevitable “au contraire” — and he’s not hedging his bets either. Watch the clip and you’ll find him treating this as an easy lay-up for Issa in court; he actually uses the term “open-and-shut case” and accuses her lawyer of malpractice for letting her give a statement. Is he right? At the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr says it’s hard to tell because there simply isn’t much precedent. The case may turn on the specifics of the statement itself: Remember, she went so far as to say she’d done nothing wrong. Is that an assertion of fact, in which case she should be made to answer questions challenging that assertion? Or is it something more like a plea in response to a charge?

The tricky part is how to characterize Lerner’s testimony before she invoked the Fifth Amendment. On one hand, if you say that Lerner merely expressed her view that she is innocent but did not actually testify as to any facts, then you could say she did not waive her rights with her statement. Questioning would not be about the details of facts she already testified to, but rather would require her testimony on a subject she declined to testify about. On the other hand, if you say that Lerner’s reciting the allegations and then denying them effectively testified about the allegations, then you could say that she did testify and did waive her rights. From that perspective, she already testified about “the subject” by saying that she did not violate any IRS rules or submit false testimony, and further questioning would be about the details of why she thinks that.

I’m not enough of a Fifth Amendment nerd to have strong views on which side is right. So I posed the question earlier today (based on press reports of what Lerner said, not the full transcript) to a listserv of criminal procedure professors that includes some serious Fifth Amendment experts. Opinions were somewhat mixed, but I think it’s fair to say that the bulk of responders thought that Lerner had not actually testified because she gave no statements about the facts of what happened. If that view is right, Lerner successfully invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and cannot be called again. But this was not a unanimous view, it was not based on the full transcript, and there are no cases that seem to be directly on point. So it’s at least a somewhat open question.

That’s one theory, that the privilege was waived because of the particulars of what Lerner said. The other theory, expressed yesterday by law prof James Duane, is that the setting matters more than the content of what she said. Simply put, Congress isn’t a courtroom. Lerner’s not a criminal defendant. She’s a witness in an investigation, and a witness can be selective in deciding which questions she wants to answer. The downside for her in asserting the privilege is that, while juries aren’t permitted to draw a negative inference from the defendant’s decision to remain silent, there’s nothing barring the public from drawing whatever inferences they want. That’s the point of bringing her back for another round of questioning. Even if Issa lets her slide by not holding her in contempt if she re-asserts the privilege (contempt would send the matter to court), forcing her to invoke it serially in response to dozens of questions will look shady as hell. Her choice.

If you can spare the time, watch the full vid for Dershowitz’s thoughts on Obama’s double standard regarding leaks that hurt the administration versus leaks that make them look good, like the big “kill list” revelation in the Times last year that showcased President Badass bringing down the hammer on suspected jihadis five months out from the election. There is indeed one law for his friends at the NYT and one law for Fox News.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/23/what-did-ruemmler-know-and-when-did-she-know-it/

What did Ruemmler know, and when did she know it?

POSTED AT 10:01 AM ON MAY 23, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY

  

Two weeks ago, no one had heard of the IRS targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. A week ago, no one in the White House knew anything about it.  My, how things change when the pressure is on.  After finally admitting that White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler knew about the Inspector General investigation weeks before Lois Lerner and IRS Commissioner Steve Miller planted a question at a public event to apologize for its findings (and manipulate the coverage), we subsequently discovered that Ruemmler notified Barack Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough.

That prompted the question of when Obama himself was informed of the scandal, a question further provoked by Obama’s careful parsing of the question into an answer about when he found out the contents of the IG report.  Today, the Washington Post offers up a more robust version of the White House’s latest limited hangout on the matter:

As soon as White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler heard about an upcoming inspector general’s report on the Internal Revenue Service, she knew she had a problem.

The notice Ruemmler saw on April 24 gave her a thumbnail sketch of a disturbing finding: that the IRS had improperly targeted tea party and other conservative groups. She shared the news with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and other senior White House aides, who all recognized the danger of the findings.

But they agreed that it would be best not to share it with President Obama until the independent audit was completed and made public, in part to protect him from even the appearance of trying to influence an investigation. …

But Ruemmler and McDonough’s careful plan for the IRS was upended on May 10, when Lois Lerner, a senior official at the agency, broke the news by admitting that the IRS had given extra scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Senior White House officials were stunned to see the IRS trying to get ahead of its own story — and in doing so, creating a monstrous communications disaster for an administration that appeared not to know what its agencies were up to.

Does anyone else see the glaring contradictions in this narrative?  First, according to the strategy as explained here, the decision was to share this conclusion among a wide variety of senior White House staffers — but keep the President in the dark so it didn’t appear he was interfering with a report that was already complete. Why wouldn’t that also apply to the senior staffers involved?   After all, if the report was to be somehow quashed or skewed, Obama wouldn’t be the one to pick up the phone to do it — and risk getting impeached for obstruction of justice.  It would be one of Obama’s senior aides making that call, up to and including McDonough, if it was to happen at all.

Second, according to this article, the strategy was to let the IRS publicize the report and then react to it.  Then, suddenly, they’re shocked, shocked when the IRS publicizes it ahead of the release.  It “upended” their “careful plan,” which apparently was to tell a bunch of people in the White House except the man in charge, and then stay quiet.  How, then, did the release “upend” a “careful plan”?

But just how complete was the report when Ruemmler first learned of it?  We already know that the investigation was completed almost a year ago, a few months before the election.  The Daily Caller points to a number of meetings between Ruemmler and Treasury Counsel Christopher J. Meade last fall:

Although White House Chief Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler claims to have learned about the IRS audit scandal only last month, she had three unprecedented one-on-one meetings last year with the Treasury Department’s chief lawyer, who has known about the inspector general’s investigation of the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative nonprofits since at least June 2012. …

Christopher J. Meade, Treasury Chief Counsel, met with Ruemmler on September 27th, December 11th, and December 13th, 2012, according to White House Visitor Records requests. The two had never met one-on-one prior to these meetings. …

Meade was one of the first members of President Barack Obama’s administration to find out about the IRS investigation in June 2012, when he became the Treasury Department’s acting general counsel.

The two also met with fifteen other people on July 2nd, 2012 and with fifteen other people on July 17th.

The unusual timing of the meetings suggest that Ruemmler and potentially other White House members may have known of the IRS Inspector General Report months earlier than has been reported.

It’s possible the topic never came up, although that seems a little difficult to believe.  The scope of the potential damage when it was revealed that the IRS had harassed filers on the basis of their political beliefs must have been obvious.  That’s especially true of those who kept postponing the report, and the two IRS Commissioners who independently knew of the targeting but never bothered to inform Congress, even though Congress had previously demanded answers from both on the complaints.  If Meade knew about the investigation, would he have just sat quietly through several meetings with the top lawyer in the White House and let his bosses get blindsided by it?

It’s possible, but … I wouldn’t bet in that direction.

Update: For some reason, I keep writing “Neil McDonough” when Obama’s CoS is DenisMcDonough.  I think I did that yesterday, too.  I’ll go back and fix it if I did. It’s one of those name tics that I can’t shake for some reason, and I apologize for the error.

Update: The meetings started in the fall, not the summer.