For some, government is the gift that keeps on giving. The rest of us just keep on giving to government, often to be outraged at how our tax dollars are being spent. This is one of those cases.
May 2024 marks a decade since Lois Lerner, with a bipartisan vote, was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee. You may recall Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service, publicly admitted in 2013 that the agency selected for more intense scrutiny applications containing the words “tea party” or “patriot.” Lerner said that she would request documents such as donor lists from these organizations – well outside agency protocol.
Or perhaps you remember then-IRS commissioner John Koskinen smugly telling Congress that the agency had somehow, very unfortunately, destroyed 24,000 of Lerner’s emails.
You may also remember that Lerner’s big boss, President Barack Obama, shrugged off the scandal, claiming there was “not even a smidgen of corruption.” Just “bone-headed decisions.” So “bone-headed” that in 2017 the Department of Justice ultimately settled two cases involving roughly 469 tea party organizations for millions of dollars, admitting that the government unlawfully targeted them based on their political views. This hard-fought admission by the federal government has come at an even greater cost than many may realize.
Indeed, this cost has been a closely held secret until recently uncovered by my organization, the Functional Government Initiative (FGI). As it turns out, after Lerner was identified as having led the effort to target non-profit groups based on political ideology, the government began a nearly-decade-long effort to subsidize her white-shoe legal defense. FGI analyzed billing records obtained via Freedom of Information Act litigation and found that a law firm representing Lerner and her deputy has billed the government more than $600,000! That number excludes the time and expenses of DOJ lawyers also working on her behalf, bringing the true cost of Lerner’s conservative targeting scheme that taxpayers have been forced to pay significantly higher. That’s a lot of smidgens.
The Obama DOJ closed its two-year criminal investigation into Lerner based on “the recommendation of experienced career prosecutors and supervising attorneys at the department.” (In the years since the public has learned exactly how objective those experienced career prosecutors can be when the target is on the correct side of the political aisle.) Lerner quietly retired. Today, with her legal bills footed by the very taxpayers she singled out, Lerner collects her government pension, augmented by $129,000 in government-funded bonuses she collected throughout her career. “Bone-headedness” is lucrative.
Compare this with the fate of former Trump Administration official Peter Navarro. He was convicted of two counts of contempt of Congress stemming from his failure to comply with a subpoena issued by the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Navarro is in prison, and there is no sign that the government shelled out taxpayer dollars to fund his legal defense.
The law is the same. How it’s applied to you appears to depend on where your political sympathies lie.
Lerner weaponized the IRS against taxpayers, and taxpayers ended up erecting a $600,000-plus shield to stave off accountability for her actions. In fact, at least a portion of these legal bills appear to have paid for her attempt to prevent the public from even reading her deposition transcript where her clear political motivations behind the targeting scandal were on full display. But avoiding accountability is endemic to the federal bureaucracy. FGI only uncovered this information about Lerner – exactly the kind of information the Freedom of Information Act was designed to supply the public – after being forced to sue the DOJ. Unsurprisingly, a decade on from Lerner’s contempt and the IRS’s “accidental” destruction of her emails, the dysfunction in Washington only gets worse the closer you look.
The questionable decisions of “experienced career prosecutors” seems to be a regular headline given the increased weaponization of the DOJ in the last few years. The public starts deserves an answer as to why there are different standards for different officials. And the public should be told exactly what the going price of a smidgen is, and how it compares with the average bone-headed decision.