Congressman: Time for special prosecutors

'There's just so much there ... and it already stinks to high  heaven'

 

Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, is now demanding a special prosecutor look into  the Obama administration’s involvement in several scandals making national  headlines.

Gohmert, a candid lawmaker who doesn’t mince words, has been in the spotlight  recently for speaking boldly about the scandals in Washington.

On May 15, Gohmert got into a heated exchange with Attorney General Eric  Holder during a House Judiciary Committee hearing. When Holder challenged the  congressman’s truthfulness, Gohmert shot back, “You point out one thing that I  said that was not true.”

The attorney general  replied, “I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know,” but he didn’t  cite any inaccuracies by Gohmert.

The next day at a Capitol Hill news conference in which tea-party members  described abuse by the IRS, Gohmert inferred that the president is a tyrant.

The congressman thundered, “If the AP story has taught anything it should be,  to the media, that when there is a tyrannical despot, the media will be one of  the early victims – you will be used as helpful savants for awhile, and  then when you’re no longer needed, you will be pressured and put out of business  as well.”

WND asked Gohmert what Congress should be doing about the Obama scandals,  beginning with abuses at the Justice Department.

“We’ve already found the attorney general in contempt, and that did nothing,”  he said. “We have all kinds of issues we’ve asked the Justice Department about  and they are not providing any answers.

“So, unless we have legislation that creates a special prosecutor to deal  with an attorney general who is in contempt of Congress and who will not address  the issues he’s created, we won’t get to the bottom of it.”

The House of Representatives found Holder in contempt last June for refusing  to turn over documents in the Fast & Furious scandal.

The Justice Department’s  latest scandals involve secretly obtaining a massive number of phone records  from the Associated Press while pursuing a leak, naming a Fox News reporter an  unindicted co-conspirator for gaining access to confidential information from  the State Department and targeting another Fox News reporter and a producer  pursuing the Fast & Furious gun-running scandal.

“The Justice Department misused the judicial process. To get a warrant to go  after a Fox News reporter who was simply trying to get a scoop, there’s nothing  illegal about that,” Gohmert said. “If people had known how wide and deep the  Fast & Furious situation was, it certainly could have affected the last  election. So, they go after a reporter who’s going to try to get to the bottom  of it. The Justice Department is actually protecting itself there.

“Holder claims the AP leak was one of the most egregious he’s ever seen.  Well, apparently every leak that makes the Obama administration look bad is  egregious.”

He added, “Instead of just violating the Constitution so completely and so  brashly and going after the AP, the more appropriate thing to do would be to  say, ‘You know what, we’ve got only a handful of people in this administration  who knew this information that was leaked. Let’s check just those folks’ phone  lines. Let’s see who they were meeting with, and we’ll make the determination  from there.’ But that’s not what they wanted to do. They didn’t want to catch  the leaker in the administration. They would much rather intimidate the AP and  go after all the other records that they could use to help intimidate them in  the future. It’s just incredible.”

WND asked Gohmert what Congress should do about the IRS’ harassment of  conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

“Now that we have at least one IRS official (Lois Lerner, head of the  tax-exempt organizations division) who has taken the Fifth Amendment, we’re not  going to be able to get to the bottom of it without using the judiciary process,  so it looks like we’ll have to pursue that ourselves,” indicating this scandal  will also require a special prosecutor.

But Gohmert didn’t stop there.

“I think we need to be dismantling the IRS so this can never happen again.  You can actually change the outcome of an election by intimidating those who  won’t speak up and by preventing groups from obtaining legal status so they  won’t raise money and hold gatherings,” he said. “We’ve created a system where,  unless you get a certain tax status you can’t raise money and go out and speak  your mind. You have to have IRS approval. They figured that out and intimidated  people who could have affected the election.

“So, it is bad. We’ve got to dismantle the IRS to the point it can never do  that again.”

Gohmert suggested a flat tax would help prevent IRS abuse of power, adding,  “If we are going to have an IRS, it will have to be just a shadow of its current  self and never have this kind of power to affect elections again, as it it  appears it may have.”

Asked whether he believes the orders to harass conservatives came from the  top, Gohmert replied, “That’s what we don’t know yet. They threw a heck of a  firewall around the president. Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe it’s one of those  situations where everyone’s so desperate to keep this president in power that  they would use and abuse the IRS to try to intimidate opponents of the  president.”

Gohmert didn’t say whether he believes it’s time to have a special prosecutor  look into all the serious questions about the attack on the U.S. diplomatic  mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012. For starters, he’d like to know  whose idea it was to blame the attack on an anti-Islamic video that has since  been proven unrelated to events there.

“Apparently, there was a 10 p.m. call between [former Secretary of State]  Hillary Clinton and the president and, gee, right after that call they start  talking about a video. But at two in the morning, when [former deputy chief of  mission in Libya] Greg Hicks says [U.S. Ambassador to Libya] Chris Stevens’  last, dying desperate words were, ‘We’re under attack,’ it is clear it was not  about a video. Everybody knew it was not about a video. They knew it was an  attack. [The attackers] knew exactly where to plant the mortars.

“Sending Susan Rice out (to push the video in the talk shows) – I feel  quite sure she didn’t know she was not telling the truth. They sent her out  because she wouldn’t know she was lying, and she was quite convincing.

As a former U.S. Army captain, Gohmert is shocked the military didn’t send  forces to respond to the attack.

“What happened at Benghazi is just unthinkable,” he said. “We have an  American tradition of protecting your fellow soldiers. You never want to be left  hanging by yourself. If somebody is out there without enough help, then you try  to go help them.

“Then you find out there was military personnel ready to go, but they were  told to stand down. I’ve been trying to get in touch with some of those people,  and it’s tough. Apparently they like to send these guys on training missions  where they can’t use their cell phones, which means you have a heck of a time  trying to talk to them about when they were ordered to stand down.

“There’s just so much there, we haven’t got nearly to the bottom, and it  already stinks to high heaven.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/congressman-time-for-special-prosecutors/#wHQTClQyeseZUjDJ.99