Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
The mystery surrounding Internal Revenue Service tax audits against critics of President Bill Clinton during his administration has been cracked. A smoking gun has just been released by the IRS. The unmistakable evidence is that the supposedly nonpolitical tax agency responds to complaints by prominent politicians.
The IRS, perhaps unknowingly, incriminated itself July 8 with a 1,500-page document dump answering to four years of freedom of information requests by the watchdog organization Judicial Watch. The material shows that the IRS audit of Judicial Watch was preceded by written complaints from the White House and prominent Democratic members of Congress. Furthermore, existence of supposedly secret audits was unsealed thanks to a Justice Department tax litigator who is, implausibly, active in local Democratic politics.
Judicial Watch's lawsuits have made the organization as obnoxious to the Bush administration as to its predecessor. Nevertheless, the White House is concerned about one abuse close to the political bone: IRS disclosure of confidential tax information about the Republican candidate for governor of California.
Novack also says in the piece that the Bush administration is upset with Judicial Watch for filing a law suit against veep Dick Cheney but doesn't explain that the suit concerns Cheney's behavoir while he was CEO of Halliburton. (John King of CNN has written a piece on the suit while Warren Vieth of the Los Angeles Times has written an even better piece on the same topic.)
Judicial Watch has issued a press release on the IRS documents. If Judicial Watch wants to boost their credibility they will soon pubish all of the documents on the web so the public and journalists can take a look at them and see if they add up to everything Judicial Watch says they do.
Even a brief gander at judicialwatch.org will show that the group is conservative and I certainly don't agree with all of their cases but I commend their vigilance over both Democrats and Republicans.
Hopefully this will also be a wake up call to journalists to realize that while investigative reporting take a lot of time and effort, that it is worth it.
It certainly isn't an overdone activity. posted by micah holmquist at 7/29/2002 02:20:00 PM
