RUTHFULLY YOURS

It can be hard to keep track of Obama-era targeting of the political opposition by federal administrative agencies. But this week brings fresh hope that such abuses will not be repeated.

The Journal reports:

President Donald Trump will nominate Charles Rettig, a California tax lawyer, to run the Internal Revenue Service, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.

If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Rettig will take one of the most thankless jobs in Washington.

Of course in recent years it has been thankless for especially good reason. During the Obama administration, the tax agency targeted conservative organizations for exceptional scrutiny and even harassment. Last year the IRS settled lawsuits brought by organizations that had been mistreated simply because they advocated for limited Constitutional government. The government shelled out millions of dollars to settle one suit involving 428 organizations, according to an October report in the New York Times. In a separate case brought by different organizations, an apology for the IRS’s egregious conduct was enough to resolve the litigation.

Reported the Times:

The settlements were the conclusion of two legal battles that have dogged the I.R.S. since the initial lawsuits were filed after a 2013 treasury inspector general’s audit that found groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names received more scrutiny over their applications for tax-exempt status. The revelations plunged the I.R.S. into a firestorm that ultimately led to the ouster of its acting commissioner and prompted accusations that the agency was being used as a political weapon by the Obama administration.

While Mr. Obama did force the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner in the wake of the scandal in 2013, he made no serious effort to reform the agency and proclaimed that the targeting had involved “not even a smidgen of corruption” long before his government had finished investigating.

Here is one more reason why the Nunes memo is consequential: Its release prompted the Justice Department and FBI to grant the Senate Judiciary Committee’s request to declassify portions of its criminal referral of dossier author Christopher Steele for making false statements to federal officials. The new information corroborates a key allegation in the Nunes memo that “Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI.”

Shortly after the president authorized the publication last Friday of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo, Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray asking them again to declassify parts of the referral.

“Much of the information in the declassified [House Intelligence] memorandum overlaps with the information in the criminal referral made by Senator Graham and me,” Grassley wrote. “That information has now been declassified and can no longer properly be deemed as classified in our criminal referral. Accordingly, I ask that you immediately review the classified referral in light of today’s declassification and provide a declassified version of it to the Committee.”

‘Hide the Ball’
Just as the FBI had attempted to halt the Nunes memo’s release, Bureau officials initially tried to block portions of Grassley’s January 4 referral from public view, insisting it contained classified information and warning that the Bureau was “deeply concerned that granting exceptions to this policy would send a troubling signal.” Grassley blasted the FBI’s excuse from the Senate floor on January 24, accusing FBI leadership of “falsely claiming that three of our unclassified paragraphs each contain the same or single classified fact,” because the sections in question are from “non-government sources and do not claim to repeat or confirm any information from any government document.”

The House Intelligence Committee’s summary memo of highly classified FBI and Justice Department documents confirms what has been public knowledge for over a year: Some of America’s highest officials used U.S. intelligence’s most intrusive espionage tools to attempt to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and then to cripple Donald Trump politically. Being of one mind with the rest of the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, these officials acted symbiotically and seamlessly with them, regardless of any cooperation that may have existed.

The party-in-power’s use of government espionage to thwart the opposition violates the Fourth Amendment and sets a ruinous precedent. Having done so under color of law—specifically, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—makes it a lot worse.

Unfortunately, the summary memo—to say nothing of the Democrats’ and their kept media’s reaction to it—focuses largely on whether the FBI and Justice Department dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s as they obtained a warrant from the FISA court to do the spying. This misrepresents high crimes as merely technical violations. Worse, it risks leaving in place a law under which those in charge of the government may violate the basic tenets of American political life with reasonable hope of impunity.