Should Lois Lerner be immunized?
Andrew C. McCarthy lays out the case for letting Lois Lerner off the prosecutor’s hook and putting her on the Congressional hearings’ hook by granting her immunity from prosecution for her testimony. Whether you believe that would be a good idea or not depends to a large extent on whether you think it’s more important to get her testimony or more important to send her to prison. In a perfectly just world, if she turns out to be guilty (and the evidence so far is that she is) then both would be nice. But we all know the world isn’t perfectly just, and so we may have to settle for either one or the other.
Or for neither, because if she’s not granted immunity she probably won’t be prosecuted either, since that would most likely be up to Eric Holder.
And so I’m with McCarthy on this, although reluctantly so because I’m one of those people who do care whether Lerner “ever sees the inside of a jail cell.” I just don’t think she ever will no matter what happens, so I’d settle for her testimony:
When officials prove unfit for government power, taking that power away is the highest public interest. Even if you’ve deluded yourself into thinking the Obama Justice Department would lift a finger to prosecute Lois Lerner, who cares if she ever sees the inside of a jail cell? What matters is laying bare the entirety of the scheme and finding out how high it goes: Who and what induced her to orchestrate the harassment of conservative groups? Why was the government’s fearsome tax agency placed in the service of the Democratic party’s political needs?
To get the answers to those questions, you need Ms. Lerner to testify. …
“But wait,” you say, “if we immunize her, we can’t prosecute her.” My first impulse is to say, “So what?” If she testifies truthfully and gives a full account of what happened, we’ll be a lot more interested in pursuing the officials who instigated the scheme than in prosecuting those who carried it out. But if “Who is going to jail!” is really your big concern, immunity for Ms. Lerner does not protect her if she lies or obstructs the investigation. The statute of limitations on such crimes will not have run out when a new administration takes over in 2017. She could still be prosecuted, and the penalties for those crimes are more severe than whatever her actions at the IRS could have earned her.
I also think that, even if “the scheme” for the IRS targeting of conservative groups didn’t originate with Lerner herself (which it may have; there’s a possibility she might have merely intuited that it would please the higher-ups and begun it on her own), she still isn’t likely to give us the names of those officials who did instigate it. I also doubt (although I could be very wrong about this) that the investigation will uncover any evidence in the form of emails and the like implicating those higher-ups, and that therefore learning their identities would rest on Lerner’s ratting on them. And then, if the effort to get her to spill the beans doesn’t succeed, and she’s been given immunity for testifying, there’s no one left to punish for what was probably the worst excess of IRS power in US history.
“Should Lois Lerner be immunized?”
Depends on what sort of disease she’s contracted.
“What matters is laying bare the entirety of the scheme and finding out how high it goes.”
I concur that incarcerating one woman, or one anybody, does not outweigh getting out in the open the extent of IRS’s authoritarian repression of dissent. Lefties will poo-poo it (or worse, but to h#ll with them anyway), but if there are any convinceables out there, getting a little truth out may well be worth it.
But even with immunity, will Lois Lerner talk? Does any reader here doubt her loyalty to The Idea, her commitment to The Movement?
If “we” grant immunity, we’d better be damn sure we get our money’s worth. Who in Congress will be up to the task? — especially given the government regime and enemedia trashing sure to follow.
I reluctantly agree also, they are going to need some states witnesses so to speak.
Although, I think she already has de facto immunity from the justice department and white house in terms of a promised pardon or outright lack of prosecution in exchange for silence.
We will never see any serious efforts from eric holders justice department on any crimes against conservatives, gun owners, republicans, verterans etc.
One thing we should not overlook in all this is that Lois Lerner is a career government employee who started out as a staff attorney at the Dept. of Justice, then moved up to the Federal Elections Commission, then up to the IRS.
That tells me she’s a tough, smart cookie because, in my time working with government bureaucrats in D.C., I saw what it took for them to successfully build their careers without getting destroyed by intra-agency politics, which can be very, very ugly.
Since Lois Lerner has been held in contempt of congress; is Eric Holder sending the contempt citation, or planning on sending the citation, to the grand jury? If the answer is no then granting Lerner immunity is the absolutely dumbest thing they could do. Let’s say that Holder refuses to carry out the original contempt citation (which I’m pretty certain how he’ll behave.) What happens if congress immunizes Lerner and she still refuses to testify or pulls the Democrat equivalent of Ollie North testimony? A second contempt of congress citation?
My issue with McCarthy’s take on this is that he seems desperate to get something to keep the investigation moving forward; and that immunizing Lerner would, like casting some sort of magical geas on her, compel her to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. My belief is that an immunized Lerner would more likely get up and dance on the table, flip all the attending Republican congressmen the bird then beat her chest yelling, “Watcha gonna do! Huh? Watcha gonna do?”
KRB
The truth of the Obama administration’s scandals will never be known until Obama is out of office (and Holder with him).
Personally, I’m a big fan of post-tenure prosecutions. I’m not sure they’ve ever happened to much extent in the U.S., since the driving idea seems to be “they’re gone…don’t put the country through this.”
This attitude is taken into account by the lawbreakers.
Milton Friedman said, “The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.” Expanding on that, you could also say that we should make doing the wrong things expensive.
Political malefactors should worry that their deeds will never be swept under the rug.
From an amoral analytical stance, post-tenure is the best time to prosecute someone: they are at the nadir of their power, and have little ability to obstruct the investigation.
Lerner should maybe start worrying about something a bit more serious than potentially testifying. For instance, it would be a shame if she ended up like Vince Foster or Ron Brown, to name just a FEW.