Marco Rubio on Thursday morning, saying he just can't understand why Big Bad Obama won't call for a DOJ investigation into the IRS:
MARTHA MacCALLUM: If you really want to make a statement as president about how egregious you think this is, why would you not want want to do that [open a criminal investigation]?
MARCO RUBIO: I don't know. Look, what I think he should have said yesterday is that in addition to this being outrageous, we want the Justice Department to fully investigate this, and if this has been done deliberately and there's a crime here, people will be prosecuted.
I actually doubt there was any criminal activity, but given the importance of having a politically neutral IRS, it seems reasonable to investigate whether any criminal laws were broken. And that's why I'm pleased to inform Marco that on Tuesday, the Obama administration announced that it had
retroactively agreed to his demand:
WASHINGTON—Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday the Justice Department has opened a criminal probe of the Internal Revenue Service's treatment of tea-party groups, while an investigative report blamed the agency's managers for allowing the practices to continue for more than 18 months. [...] Mr. Holder said Tuesday he ordered the department's probe Friday after the IRS apologized for what it said was inappropriate scrutiny of tax-exemption requests by conservative groups with "Tea Party" or "patriot" in their names.
Of course, the one thing that nobody will investigate
is this...
3 Groups Denied Break by I.R.S. Are Named
...because those groups all supported Democrats. And as we all know, it's okay to enforce the law against Democrats. Just don't do it to Good Honest Conservative American Patriots.
(via Sam Stein)