Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the scandal involving targeting of conservative organizations and tea party groups, has retired, according to the Associated Press.
BREAKING: IRS official at heart of tea party scandal retiring; Lois Lerner had been on paid leave
— The Associated Press (@AP) September 23, 2013
Lerner first disclosed the improper targeting earlier this year at an American Bar Association conference when she responded to a planted question, which triggered a firestorm over the agency’s actions and its handling of the situation.
In June, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform approved a resolution determining that Lerner had waived her Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination after she made opening statements in a May hearing before refusing to answer further questions about the matter.
Lerner had been placed on paid administrative leave in May.
The IRS offered the following statement regarding Lerner’s retirement, according to FOX News Insider:
We can confirm today that Lois Lerner has retired. Under federal privacy rules, the IRS cannot comment further on individual employee matters.
Additional general information if needed:
Since May, the IRS has taken decisive actions to correct failures in Exempt Organizations management, replacing top leadership throughout the chain of command. In addition, IRS Acting Commissioner Danny Werfel created an Accountability Review Board to fully review information to ensure proper oversight in handling personnel issues.
There are established rules in place for government agencies on personnel actions, and the IRS has been following these procedures every step of the way. We have been — and continue to be — committed to doing this process thoroughly and fairly.
As Werfel has made clear, the behavior cited in the May TIGTA report was the result of mismanagement and poor judgment. The IRS is making important progress on fixing the underlying management and organizational deficiencies in the EO area identified by TIGTA. Our goal is to restore the public’s faith and trust in the tax system.
We have sent nearly 400,000 pages of documents to Congress and facilitated dozens of employee interviews. We look forward to continuing to cooperate with Congress and other investigations.
(Lois Lerner runs from House Hearing after pleading the 5th)
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Comments
After soaking taxpayers for her PAID VACATION, this despicable reprobate criminal – who should be in prison for her actions – now gets to live the life of luxury on her humongous taxpayer-funded pension.
Retirement does not give her immunity from prosecution. If only we had some GOP lawmakers with cojones.
If she were to be prosecuted and subsequently convicted of a felony, would her fat pension be safe?
OTOH, she probably would be pardoned by the little puppet emperor prior to his leaving office in 2017…
“If only we had some GOP lawmakers with cojones.”
We have some, but they’re thwarted at every turn.
That’s a big and fruitless ‘IF’!
Not sure how to get anyone prosecuted with Eric Holder running the Justice Department. In past Administrations, special prosecutors of some sort or another would have likely be appointed to pursue this scandal, as well as others, such as Fast and Furious, and, maybe even ultimately Benghazi. Sure I missed some, given how much less than honorable behavior has been going on and has been studiously ignored by the DoJ.
Congress cannot itself prosecute anyone. Prosecution is an Executive Branch power, and any sort of special prosecutor has to have some tie to the DoJ or the President, even if just token. But, when you have an AG who has politicized his department, and essentially ignores all calls for appointment of a special prosecutor, and the MSM covers for him and his boss, instead of taking them to task for their failure to appoint people to get to the bottom of these scandals, what can you do? Essentially nothing, except try to make your case about the corruption to the public in general and your base in particular, and hope that your party can clean things up a bit if and when they regain control over the Executive Branch.
Problem is that with the MSM covering, there is no downside any more for lacking honor. And, the left seems to have lacked it much more over time. Clinton got away with more than he should have, but ultimately had to agree to the appointment of a special prosecutor when confronted with the semen stained blue dress. Obama is even more shameless, which a lot didnt think possible. It is about power, and as long as his party controls the White House, and, thus, the nation’s prosecution apparatus, there is no way to prosecute any Democrats who remain on the President’s good side (I am esp. thinking right now about his former economic advisor Jon Corzine).
Something tells me this story isn’t over quite yet.
Now she is taking the golden parachute. But will it deploy or not?
Is that a political appointee position? If so, the president could have fired her at any time for no reason at all. The fact that she stayed this long after planting her foot firmly in ‘it’ speaks volumes.
No – my understanding is that there are only two political appointees in the IRS, the commissioner and chief counsel – whose office seems to have had some oversight of the extra scrutiny and time being inflicted on Tea Party and other conservative non-profit allocations – and even some organizations that have already had their applications approved.
But that is really part of the problem here, that the senior and mid level career civil service employees at that agency (and apparently others) have been highly politicized. A good part of the reason that the Federal Civil Service was set up in the first place was to prevent politics from encroaching into the day to day running of the federal government. Now we find that a lot of these so-called non-partisans are highly partisan in the way they conduct agency business, but since they have close to life tenure, there is little that the political appointees of the opposite party can do to redirect agencies.
Some of this may be happenstance, since progressives are likely much happier at spending their work lives with the government, esp since liberals tend to believe much more that the government can solve many, if not most, problems than conservatives do. But not all of it is happenstance. Like tends to hire like. But parts of this Administration have gone further. For example, staff attorneys at Holder’s DoJ apparently are now screened for ideology, with some activities on applicants’ resumes getting them excluded (such as membership in the Fereralist Society in LS), and others getting them preference. What this means is that when the Dems lose the White House, a large cadre of progressive activists will remain in government service, immune to a great extent from being fired.
The trouble is bigger than Lois Lerner. How many more like her? How do we find out how this really came down? How many more governmental orgs does the Obama campaign have its fingers in? How many other ways do they use the power of government against opponents and perceived enemies? What do they do with all the oppo-research they get via the NSA? How much worse is this going to get when Obamacare kicks in and all these databases are merged?
It’s extremely troubling. It looks like it’s going to be allowed to go on, and get worse, and no one is going to stop it.
Not sure if it really is the Obama campaign that was involved here. Rather, I suspect that it was just a lot of fellow travelers. The civilian federal workforce (and civilian government workers in general) tend to be much more sympathetic to Democrats than Republicans. Why? I think that there is a lot of self-selection going on. Those who believe that governments can and should solve society’s problems are more likely to go into, and stay in, government service, than those who believe that the best government is the one that governs the least. With those with lesser skills, government service may be, by far, the best job that they can get. But, a lot of managerial and professional employees (Lerner was both – a supervisor and an attorney) probably could have at least earned as much elsewhere, and not had to put up with the BS and brain damage inherent in government service. For some, it is the security. But, for a lot, I suspect that it is the ideology. Add to this, of course, that IRS employees mostly seem to belong to one of the most militantly left-of-center government employee unions. And, this doesn’t even get to the intentional screening of career mid level civil service employees on their political ideology being implemented by some agencies, notably Eric Holder and his DoJ.
So, what I really think happened is that mid, and maybe high level career employees at the IRS heard the President talk about auditing his enemies, and then about how evil the Tea Party people were, and believed, through their ideological blinders, that was true. And, as a result, (illegally) used their discretion to try to help their side, the Democrats in general, and Obama in particular. Lerner, for one, should have known better – she is an attorney, and presumably took the same Con law classes that all law students do, passed a bar exam that tests on Con law, etc. But, she has obviously been an ideological warrior for quite some time – at least since before she left the FEC to go to the IRS. What is really scary to me though is that until she was called to testify under oath before Congress, I don’t think that she really realized that what she had been doing for so long was illegal and just plain wrong. She put herself in the spotlight by really opening up the can of worms, and then she testified that she believed that she had done nothing wrong (before invoking the 5th Amdt).
We have always known that government employees tend strongly to vote Democratic. After all, they can be seen as just voting their own interests, which essentially include growing the government, giving them more job security and more chance for advancement. But, what is scary with this scandal, and this Administration, is the realization of the extent that this army of federal employees will utilize the discretion they have for ideological ends. To get their people elected, and their enemies punished. Growing up, just thought that sort of things happened in machine towns like Chicago. But, were safe by just not living anywhere with that level of political corruption. Our federal government has far more power than any city, and esp. some of the agencies that seem most politicized these days, notably the IRS and the DoJ. The good may be that a lot more people are waking up to this danger.
And slowly the IRS Scandal goes to sleep. There will be no action at all from the administration and even Darrell Issa’s investigation will soon peter out.
Lerner always has had the retirement angle to take but she is giving up all that paid leave she has been receiving. Does she believe – or has she been assured – that contempt of Congress was a useless threat from clawless cats?
Excuse Me Ladies..
Image burned in my mind, was the still shot of her Smug Bitch pose, nose in air, head tilted back, ala, Barry..
This One!
http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Lois-Lerner-IRS.-007.jpg
I think I may have stumbled upon the quote of my own lifetime when I typed out on a different blog:
George Orwell got one thing massively wrong when he wrote “1984”, and that was to assume that an oppressive government was also competent.
I hope people in her local community make the remainder of her existence on this earth miserable.
She likely lives in a Democrat enclave in which she is a heroine.
She gets to retire? That’s it? She gets a taxpayer funded pension after this? Does anyone in the congressional GOP, besides Cruz and Lee, have any balls? Issa is always investigating, but he never pulls the trigger. Nothing ever gets done. No one ever pays. Now Lois Lerner walks and the vermin who worked with her, what?
Can she be named as a defendant in True the Vote’s lawsuit?
In other words, she got away with it.
This is exactly why filth of the likes of John Boehner should be removed from high positions in the GOP.
Had the likes of Ted Cruz been House Speaker — instead of a Squeaker — this woman Lois Lerner would be on her way to, prison, where she belongs.
She’ll get a show on MSNBC and after two years of falling ratings she’ll quit and take a job at the White House.