On May 7, 2014, a bipartisan
House Resolution was passed,
calling for Eric Holder to appoint a Special Counsel in the investigation of
the IRS targeting of conservative groups.
On July 30, 2014, a hearing
was held by the House Judiciary Committee entitled, “The IRS Targeting Scandal:
the Need for a Special Counsel.” This hearing dealt with the question of
whether United States Attorney General Eric Holder should appoint a Special
Counsel to investigate the IRS targeting scandal, to discover how far it went,
and to determine who exactly was involved in the cover-up of the scandal.
In August of 2014, Federal
Judge Emmet Sullivan launched an
independent inquiry into the recent issue of missing emails from Lois Lerner’s
account.
As of today, we are still
unsure of many things revolving around this disgusting abuse of power by
Obama’s Administration. Even after the aforementioned resolution, hearing, and
independent investigation launched by a federal judge, we still do not have an
independent counsel investigating the IRS scandal and subsequent cover-up.
Chapman Law Professor Ronald
D. Rotunda was a witness at the July 30 hearing, and wrote an article on this
appointment of special counsel, stating:
There
is no longer a special statute that provides for a Special Prosecutor or
Independent Counsel. However, the Attorney General does not need a statute to
appoint a Special Counsel. There was a Special Counsel in the Teapot Dome
scandal despite a lack of statutory authorization. Similarly, there was no
statutory authorization for the Special Counsel in the Watergate scandal.
What
we have now, as in the case of Watergate, is a regulation. In Title 28 of Code of
Federal Regulations, Section 600.1. It provides that the Attorney General “will
appoint a Special Counsel” when he determines that “criminal investigation of a
person or matter is warranted,” and the Department of Justice has a “conflict
of interest” and “it would be in the
public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume
responsibility for the matter.”
Further substantiating the
need for a special counsel to investigate this case is a letter signed by 47 out of 73 federal
government Inspectors General (including many who were appointed by Obama!).
This August 4, 2014 letter explains that the Obama administration is
obstructing their investigations into government corruption and mismanagement.
Professor Rotunda offers
further proof of the current extraordinary circumstances, stating
Emails
disappear. IRS backup disks are destroyed, while the IRS is involved in
litigation to turn over those backup disks. The IRS does not appear to keep the
records that the law requires it to keep. The President assures us that there
this is no hint, “not a smidgen of corruption,” before the DOJ completed its
purported investigation. That prejudgment undermines the investigation. There
is also the appearance of a conflict when Department of Justice lawyers who are
political appointees of the President are in charge of the investigation that
involves the national co-chair of President Obama’s Reelection Campaign. The
Washington, D.C., Rules of Professional Conduct governing lawyers, Rule
1.7(b)(4), provides there is a conflict if a lawyer’s professional judgment “may
be adversely affected” by his own “personal interests.”
Professor Rotunda ends his
article by explaining that while the Special Counsel regulation is not a
statute, it is still the law.
As
the Supreme Court explained in United States v. Nixon, when referring to the
regulations that governed the Attorney General’s appointment of a Special
Counsel: “So long as this regulation is extant it has the force of law.” The
Court went on to summarize the precedent as holding that “so long as the
Attorney General’s regulations remained operative, he denied himself the
authority to exercise the discretion delegated to the Board even though the
original authority was his and he could reassert it by amending the
regulations.”
This Administration should
appoint a special counsel immediately so we can continue investigating in a
non-partisan way.
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