The 'Lost' (sic) IRS Emails of Lois Lerner, Watergate and Howard Baker

'What did the President know...and when
did the President know it? Senator Howard Baker

We had more than few younger folks look at us quizzically this past week when we brought up the similarities between the current 'lost' (sic) emails and destroyed hard drives at the IRS and Watergate which was 'the greatest constitutional crisis since the beginning of time' according to the Washington Post and other liberal opponents of President Richard Nixon.

• 'Do you know who 'Senator Sam' Ervin of North Carolina was and what role he played in the Watergate hearings? 
• Do you know who Rufus Edmisten was and what role he played in the Watergate hearings? 
• Did you know Hillary Rodham (later Clinton) was fired from her job on the investigations committee?' we asked.

'Crickets' was all we heard.

Before you pooh-pooh the comparison between Watergate and this current IRS scandal if you are a staunch defender of President Obama and his Administration, take a look at the similarities between Watergate and the facts as we know them today about the IRS:

1.  'Watergate' started as a bungled burglary at Democratic National Headquarters located in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. when Richard Nixon's CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect The President) tried to intimidate or subvert the 1972 Presidential Campaign of Senator George McGovern.
2. 'Loisgate' (for lack of a better name) started as an heavy-handed effort to intimidate hundreds of Tea Party organizations and deny them non-profit status after Obamacare was passed in early 2010.
3. Both were ignored by the mainstream media when uncovered as insignificant random occurrences.
4. Both Presidents in office at the time had very strong and insular advisors close to the President who defended him at every turn and at every cost. (Nixon had Haldeman and Erhlichman; Obama has Valerie Jarrett)
5. Both Presidents were very secretive and protected a lot of information from becoming public.
   
   President Obama and his handlers have famously spent more money sealing his documents from his childhood, before college, through college and grad school than probably has been spent on sealing and storing the Kennedy Assassination records.
   
   President Nixon once famously broke into one of his law school professor's office at Duke University during the weekend of final exams, not to steal the test before it was given but simply to find out if he had aced the final or not before final grades were posted Monday morning.
   
   He just couldn't stand the suspense of not knowing he had been perfect on the exam as it turned out to be.
6. Lois Lerner pleaded the Fifth Amendment so as to prevent her testimony from incriminating her in any wrong-doing with the IRS scandal.
   
   G.Gordon Liddy, perhaps the mastermind of the Watergate 'plumbers' who broke into the DNC HQ in 1972, pleaded the Fifth Amendment as well.
   
   Very strange to see anyone who is completely innocent of any charges against them plead the Fifth Amendment, yes?
7. Both Presidents at the time dismissed each incident as nothing more than a trivial matter. Nixon said 'I am not a crook!'. Obama has just laughed off the IRS scandal as certain rogue agents in Ohio overstepping their bounds.
   
   
8. Both incidents have significant 'memory loss' in the form of erasure of pertinent evidence.
   
   Rosemary Woods, secretary to President Nixon, somehow performed a yoga-like stretch for 18.5-minutes (!) where her foot pushed a pedal that erased those critical 18.5 (!) minutes of White House Oval Office taped sessions between Nixon and his aides.
   
   EVERY email between Lois Lerner and 6 of her closest aides working on these non-profit applications from Tea Party groups were lost in a complicated computer crash that just affected those 7 computers (!). EACH of those hard drives were subsequently destroyed after the House Ways and Means Committee requested both the emails and the hard drives.

We asked a computer expert last week about the chances of only these 7 computers at the IRS all crashing at the same time such that their hard drives were rendered useless and had to be destroyed. Some were in Washington D.C., the others were in Cincinnati, Ohio. The 'crashes' (sic) occurred in 2 different parts of the country at exactly the same time in two different time zones.

The computer expert explained those chances thusly:

'The chances of all of these specific 7 computers crashing at the same time in Ohio and Washington DC, all independent of a broader computer system crash that destroyed both the entire IRS system in both Ohio and Washington DC, is 100,000 times less probable than you and I both being struck by a double bolt of lightning right now out of a rogue thundercloud popping up on this bright sunny day and then both of us being swallowed up by a huge gaping hole here on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh North Carolina caused by an enormous earthquake that usually only happens on the San Andreas Fault in California

In other words: 'Not. Likely'.

And this computer expert voted for President Obama! Twice!

Just to continue on this history lesson for the younger folks but also to remind the older folks, Nixon was not forced to resign because of the bungled Watergate burglary. He was forced to resign when members of his own Republican Party in the House and the Senate began to believe he was involved in the cover-up and lied about his involvement in the cover-up.

It wasn't the idiotic burglary that did in Nixon. It was the cover-up. It is almost always the cover-up that does in politicians.

Former Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, who passed away last week at age 88, posed the significant turning point question of the entire Watergate hearings in 1973 when he asked this one simple question:

'What did the President know and when did he know it?'

When the line of evidence kept leading up to the Oval Office in the White House, that is when leading Members in the House and Senators in the Senate went to President Nixon and told him they had lost confidence in his leadership and he should resign because they would support his impeachment.

Right now, we have not yet seen that direct line of evidence between Lois Lerner and President Obama and his advisors in the White House. In fact, if history is any pattern, President Obama will keep saying that the first time he ever heard of this IRS scandal was when he read it in the papers and heard it on the news.

If President Obama had no knowledge of anything going on wrong at the IRS; the NSA; Benghazi, in Iraq with the ISIS invasion and on and on and on, then 1 of 2 things must be true but not both:

He is either the most out of touch President we have ever had in American history or he is completely insulated so that he can claim 'plausible deniability' as they used to say in the Nixon White House. In either case, one has to wonder what good it is to have a President who is neither engaged in the serious work of running this nation's business or interested in running as clean of an operation as possible while serving as the Chief Executive.

Those lost emails and destroyed hard drives at the IRS makes it almost laughable to believe they did not contain any incriminating evidence that would implicate officials higher up in the Obama Administration.

When will Members of the Democratic Party start to lose confidence in President Obama and start to run for the hills? They have their own political futures to defend this year, you know. We have never seen an elected Member of Congress or Senate in his/her right mind in a contested district or state fall on their sword for a failing President from either party.

All it took in Watergate was one break, one direct link to connect the dots which led to the White House. Assistant FBI Director Mark Felt, otherwise known as 'Deep Throat' told intrepid Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein to 'follow the money'.

Which they did.

Maybe American journalism is not totally dead  and some intrepid reporter will connect the dots in 2014 on this IRS Scandal.

Maybe a modern-day Mark Felt will step forward from the shadows and help some reporter get to the bottom of this, missing emails, destroyed hard drives and all.

Maybe Lois Lerner will turn state's evidence once it becomes clear that she may be facing some serious time in a federal penitentiary unless she cooperates with House Republicans and other prosecutors to turn over incriminating evidence.

And then again, maybe this really was the work of some seriously overzealous IRS staffers led by Lois Lerner and no one else but a bunch of Watergate burglars who are still alive and well somewhere.

Where is G. Gordon Liddy lately anyway?

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