What’s the difference between Lois Lerner and Merrick Garland? Both are extreme liberals. Both held or hold senior government positions in the executive branch. Most importantly, both abused their government power to corruptly target their party’s president’s political opponents.
Lerner, the chief of the Exempt Organizations division of the Internal Revenue Service, oversaw that fearsome agency’s deliberate, unconstitutional, and illegal years-long targeting of groups that had “Tea Party” or “Patriots” in their name. She was allowed to retire from government service with her full pension and without having been required to face the consequences of her illegal actions.
Importantly, it wasn’t just her superiors at the IRS who failed to hold her accountable; even after the 2016 presidential election, when a new president had been elected and a new attorney general had been sworn in, the professional bureaucracy of the Department of Justice continued to turn a blind eye to Lerner’s wrongful actions. I personally met with newly-installed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to discuss the matter – as the head of Tea Party Patriots, the largest grassroots citizens group wrongly targeted by the IRS, I was intimately familiar with many of the most egregious examples of the wrongful targeting – and was shocked to learn how little he knew of the extent of what had happened. Clearly, his staff had kept him in the dark, and so the DOJ continued to do nothing to hold Lerner accountable.
That failure to hold her accountable for the actions she undertook was wrong, and it had negative consequences itself. That failure to hold Lerner accountable sent a signal – extreme liberals could abuse their government power to corruptly target their political opponents without fear of negative consequences.
It’s no wonder the weaponization of government agencies by liberals continued and even grew after Lerner’s experience.
It was just a few years after the IRS targeting scandal that senior officials of the FBI, and the CIA, and the Department of Justice wrongly deployed assets of their government agencies against their political opponent, Donald Trump, first when he was a candidate for president, and then continuing even after he was sworn in as president. Both the DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Special Counsel John Durham later issued reports detailing the wrongful years-long abuse of power directed against Trump.
Disturbingly, though, none of the major players involved in the abuse of power against Trump – not FBI Director James Comey, not FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, not FBI agent Peter Strzok, and not FBI lawyer Lisa Page, among others – were held to account for their wrongful actions. Neither were Hillary Clinton (whose presidential campaign conceived and launched the entire Russia collusion hoax) nor Jake Sullivan (who, as a Clinton campaign staffer, helped stoke the fires of the Russia collusion hoax, and now sits as Biden’s national security adviser).
Now comes Garland, President Biden’s choice for attorney general. Under his “leadership,” the DOJ has continued its pattern of abuse of power for political purposes against the boss’s political opponents:
In the fall of 2021, as Virginia’s gubernatorial campaign heated up over the issue of parental control of their own children’s education, Garland issued a now-notorious memo to all the U.S. attorneys’ offices and the FBI directing them to protect school officials against domestic terrorism. It came across as what it was – an attempt to threaten and silence parents who oppose teaching Critical Race Theory to their children.
A year later, the FBI under Garland’s control sent almost two dozen heavily armed agents to raid the home of Mark Houck, a married father of seven children, to arrest Houck for a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. A jury later took all of one hour to find him not guilty, but the message was sent – pro-life activists (that is, political opponents of Garland’s boss) felt intimidated and threatened.
Sometimes the abuse of power comes not from what DOJ officials do, but from what they don’t do – as when U.S. Marshals, operating under direction from Garland, refuse to arrest leftwing protesters illegally demonstrating
And, of course, Garland is fooling no one with his appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith to oversee the DOJ’s investigation of Donald Trump. Garland’s decision to use Smith as a “buffer,” so as to stoke the fiction that any prosecutorial decision is not political, is absurd. The fact that the federal government has indicted and is prosecuting the sitting president’s chief political rival, the leading candidate for the opposition party’s presidential nomination, is an outrageous abuse of power.
Robert Ray, who finished the Whitewater investigation as the special prosecutor who succeeded Kenneth Starr, sees the problem. “The Justice Department under a president who is a candidate for reelection is bringing charges against a former president who is a candidate in opposition for president within the election cycle,” he said recently. “I don’t know how the average American can consider that anything but a political act. A lot of people see that as weaponizing the Justice Department against an opponent.”
Not surprisingly, an ABC/Ipsos poll conducted after the indictment was unsealed Friday shows that by 47-37 percent, more respondents believed the charges were politically motivated than believed they were not.
So, back to that original question – what’s the difference between Lois Lerner and Merrick Garland? Lerner got away with it. Garland, on the other hand, can still be held accountable.
For violating his oath of office, for his regular and sustained abuses of power, it’s time to impeach Merrick Garland.
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
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