When the 'government is for the government'
Is there a pattern of gross abuse of power at the very highest levels of our government?
Admittedly, I’m a conservative; and I’ve voted Republican more often than Democratic, but I’m not a member of any political party.
Today I noticed a headline concerning potential impeachment proceedings for the head of the IRS. A few years ago there was a big flap over the IRS targeting conservative organizations, as opposed to liberal organizations. Here’s an excerpt from this article published by Fox News today, Sept. 21, 2016: “In May 2013, the IRS conceded that during the 2010 and 2012 elections, it subjected conservative groups seeking tax exemptions to excessively harsh examinations. Many groups with those tax-exemptions play major roles in political campaigns, and they are not required to reveal donors.” This article went on to state that: “In June 2014, the IRS told Congress that it lost an unknown number of Lois Lerner’s emails when her hard drive crashed in 2011. Then in June 2015, the IRS inspector general said the agency had accidentally erased 422 backup tapes in March 2014 that could have had up to 24,000 of Lerner’s emails.”
No doubt you are also aware of the Hillary Clinton email scandal where she conducted State Department business on a private server, sometimes involving classified documents, then she subsequently “lost” 33,000 of those emails. The FBI however, did manage, to recover many of them and did investigate her for possible wrongdoing.
During the FBI’s investigation, Bill Clinton’s jet, quite coincidentally, landed alongside the U.S. Attorney General’s jet at some airport and Bill talked absolutely alone with her for 30 minutes — strictly personal matters you understand, grandkids and the like. Then just a few days later the FBI director (who works for the AG) completed the investigation and determined she was “extremely careless,” in the handling of state secrets, but not grossly negligent and without intent to mishandle classified documents. Thus no charges would be filed. Also coincidentally, there were no tapes or transcripts of their interviews, and how many of her staff members took the Fifth? Just a few weeks ago, we learned that Hillary’s IT support contractor accidentally wiped her server with “Bleach Bit,” a sophisticated and expensive tool, a couple of days after Hillary received a congressional subpoena for that server.
Meanwhile, military intelligence analysts have been instructed to dumb down their reports on ISIS to match President Obama’s rhetoric that ISIS is just the JV team.
I admit any one of these instances could have been an accident or coincidence, but all of them? You know the saying, “if it quacks like a duck…” And besides, we have reliable, conscientious news agencies that dig into and report the news without bias, right? Maybe not so much! Recently CBS edited Bill Clinton’s remarks regarding Hillary’s health by removing his initial statement that she “frequently” had episodes similar to what happened at the 9/11 memorial service and leaving only his follow up correction. Yes, it might have been a slip of the tongue, but please let me decide that.
Have we really come down to “government for the government” instead of “…for the people”?
Bill Caldwell
Libby