IRS Director Lois Lerner To Plead Fifth

Lois Lerner, Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, will plead the Fifth rather than testify before the House oversight committee. John Nolte at Breitbart has the scoop. Excerpt:

Lerner has retained defense attorney William W. Taylor 3rd, who sent a letter to Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee. In the letter Taylor said, "She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course.”

Taylor is hoping Issa will excuse his client from having to testify in order to save her the embarrassment of having to invoke the Fifth in public. Per The L.A. Times, the committee hasn't yet answered her request one way or the other.

ADDED: National Journal reports that Issa "has issued a subpoena to Lerner anyway."

Since the IRS scandal broke wide open ten days ago, Lerner has been at the center of the controversy. She is not only the head of the division that oversaw the Kafka-esque harassment of President Obama's political foes; she has also been caught on numerous occasions making misleading statements.

Oh, love it: "Taylor is hoping Issa will excuse his client from having to testify in order to save her the embarrassment of having to invoke the Fifth in public." Well we are all happy to announce to the public that Lois Lerner is pleading the Fifth Amendment so she won't have to incriminate herself.

I wonder how we should interpret this silence from Director Lerner. Maybe we should ask Attorney General Eric Holder—he's the expert on the matter of silence interpretation.

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Creativity

With all his supposed accomplishments, Mike Wallace never did anything this cool.



No proof of the possibility of fraud without an ID, Mr. Attorney General? Quod. Est. Demonstratum.

"Faster than you can say furious." Lovely flourish.

Holder is well on his way to going down in history as a laughingstock and a failure.

"Reading helps you know what you're talking about."

Too funny. H/T Redstate.

Kudos to the frog puppet for doing this. My guess is that he'll suffer a lot of ostracism in the puppet community for taking the gig for a conservative issue commercial. Most puppets are hard core leftists.

OK, I know what you're thinking. The frog looks a little like McCain. Go ahead--admit it.

I like how disappointed the frog looks when he finds out Holder et al didn't read the law.

Redefining Patriotic

Andrew McCarthy's 'Representing' al-Qaeda is a must-read if you want to know the extent to which Eric Holder and the Obama Administration will go to blame Bush and set terrorists free. Prepare to be enraged. Excerpt:

The attorney general’s pep rally occurred just as the public was getting its first glimpse of the peculiar notions of “representation” shared by several Gitmo Bar veterans. Thanks to dogged investigative work (here and here) by Debra Burlingame and Tom Joscelyn (of, respectively, Keep America Safe and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies), we now know a good deal about several of these volunteer lawyers. To take just a few examples, they provided al-Qaeda detainees with a brochure that instructed them on how to claim falsely that they had been tortured; fomented a detainee hunger strike that disrupted security and precipitated fabricated reports that prisoners had been tortured and force-fed; provided the detainees with other virulently anti-American propaganda (for example, informing them about the Abu Ghraib scandal, comparing U.S. military physicians to Josef Mengele, and labeling DOJ lawyers “desk torturers”); gave the enemy-combatant terrorists a hand-drawn map of Gitmo’s layout, including guard towers; helped the enemy combatants communicate messages to the outside world; informed the detainees of the identities of other detainees in U.S. custody; and posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel.

Uhhhhh....well..... I mean.... uhhhhhh....