About a week ago, in a transparently desperate attempt to salvage the IRS "scandal," House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) decided to play a dangerous game. He's still not playing it well.
The congressman's goal, of course, is to discover an imaginary connection between IRS scrutiny of groups seeking tax-exempt status and the White House. To that end, Issa dispatched hand-picked investigators to interview IRS employees in Cincinnati, and then released carefully edited portions of the transcripts, in the hopes of fueling the controversy.
The Oversight Committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, has seen the full transcripts, concluded that the entire case has been "solved," and urged Issa to lay his cards on the table -- release the full transcript and let the public see what the IRS officials actually said.
Yesterday, Cummings received Issa's response.
One week after he released partial transcripts of interviews with IRS officials involved in the scandal surrounding the targeting of conservative groups, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said releasing the full transcripts would be "reckless" and "irresponsible."
Oh, I see. When the chairman of the House Oversight Committee releases edited transcripts with cherry-picked quotes, that's fine. When he accuses the White House press secretary of being a "paid liar" for no apparent reason, that's fine. But if he were to publish a complete transcript of questions and answers between committee investigators and IRS employees, that would be "reckless" and "irresponsible."
Making matters worse, just 10 days ago, Issa specifically said, "The whole transcript will be put out." Now it would be "reckless" and "irresponsible" for Issa to do what he already said he would do?
It's reached the point at which even some House Republicans are struggling to defend the Oversight Committee chairman.
Politico ran this piece yesterday:
Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana, a senior Ways and Means Republican who chairs the panel's Oversight subcommittee, criticized Issa's tactics, saying the release of partial transcripts could "adversely alter our ability to get future information from other IRS employees."
"Just simply from a process standpoint, you don't want to do that and alter what others might say," Boustany told POLITICO. "I really am concerned that it could tip this into the political realm rather than a true detailed investigation to get the facts out."
For his part, Cummings is still threatening to make the full transcripts public if Issa continues to refuse.
At this point, I'm less interested in the IRS controversy, which appears to have evaporated rather quickly, and more interested in Issa's antics and misplaced ethics. Keep in mind, last week, Issa's office leaked partial transcripts to major newsorganizations, apparently keeping hidden the one part of the transcript that mattered most -- the perspective of the conservative Republican at the IRS who set the Tea Party review in motion, without any influence from the White House.
When Republicans did this in the 1990s, it was a scandal unto itself.
