Ongoing Controversies

Floor Speech

Mrs. FISCHER. Madam President, I rise today to discuss a number of ongoing controversies of national importance, including the IRS's unfair treatment of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, the secret gathering of journalists' phone records by the Department of Justice, and the administration's response to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

Both the House and the Senate have held hearings with the former and acting IRS Commissioners, as well as the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration, who conducted an internal audit and authored the report revealing the pattern of government abuse within the IRS tax exempt division.

While I am pleased that Congress is judiciously exercising its oversight powers, very few questions have been answered. The pattern of inconsistent explanations continues. We still do not know who exactly initiated the practice of wrongfully targeting conservative groups.

Ironically, the Acting IRS Commissioner, Steven Miller, testified under oath that there was absolutely no political motivation behind the practice; however, Mr. Miller could not identify the names of the individuals whose motives he was supposedly vouching for. How is that even possible? Nebraskans know better than to buy that bill of goods.

We still do not know why this abusive policy was implemented in the first place. IRS officials have maintained that the extra scrutiny given to conservative groups was an attempt to deal with an influx of applications. As a number of fact checkers and media outlets have noted, that surge in applications did not happen until well after the targeting began. The reasoning for the practice put forth by the IRS simply does not align with the facts.

We still do not know why the IRS believed it had the right to release confidential data which it had wrongly requested in the first place. They released that to third parties with adversarial interests to those conservative groups in question. The progressive publication ProPublica admitted it obtained from the Internal Revenue Service illegally leaked confidential tax forms from nine organizations.

All of the groups whose records were improperly released were conservative. Why did the IRS leak these records? What was their goal? Why did only conservative organizations have their confidential information leaked? Why did the White House senior staff, including the White House Counsel and the White House Chief of Staff, fail to inform the President of this egregious government overreach by the IRS?

Former Special Counsel to President Clinton, Lanny Davis, recently wrote an opinion piece in the Hill:

With all due respect to someone who has impeccable legal credentials, if she did have such foreknowledge and didn't inform the President immediately, I respectfully suggest Ms. Ruemmler is in the wrong job and that she should resign.

Politico recently reported--the story keeps changing:

The White House explanation of what it knew about the IRS story ahead of the first press reports on the controversy shifted once again Thursday.

Let me repeat that, "shifted once again.''

It seems that some folks from the White House cannot get their facts straight. Why? The White House Press Secretary admitted yesterday that officials in the White House discussed how and when the IRS would tell the public the agency had been targeting conservative groups. The eventual public disclosure was made by IRS Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division Director Lois Lerner, who revealed the pattern of government abuse with an intentionally planted question at an otherwise little-noticed Washington, DC, lawyers conference.

It is outrageous that despite numerous congressional inquiries asking the IRS for answers in both public hearings and formal letters, the IRS would first reveal the truth through a charade of a ``planted'' question. Then Lerner went on to earn herself a ``bushel of Pinocchios'' from the Washington Post fact checker for her series of misstatements and ``weasley wording.''

Whatever happened to the President's worthy goals of promoting the most accountable, the most transparent, the most open administration in history? I do not appreciate being misled, and Nebraskans do not either.

Regarding the secret collection of the Department of Justice of over 100 Associated Press journalist phone records, two key questions remain. Why didn't the Department of Justice ask the Associated Press to voluntarily cooperate before issuing those subpoenas as the law requires? And why did the Department of Justice fail to abide by the law and inform the Associated Press that the records were subpoenaed, denying them the opportunity to appeal that heavy-handed play?

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson put it well:

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists' phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn't chilling, it's just plain cold.

But, once again, the overreach does not stop there. Recent news has surfaced that a Fox News journalist was criminally investigated for doing his job, lawfully soliciting information from a government source. The Post describes the investigation in vivid detail. They used security badge access records to track the reporter's comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter's personal e-mails.

This assault on the First Amendment is unacceptable and the intimidation of reporters through unnecessary criminal investigations and excessive surveillance raises serious questions about the freedom of the press. The President and the Department of Justice have yet to come forward with credible answers. The American people are still waiting.

Finally, I would like to briefly touch on the tragic attack on our consulate in Benghazi. Much attention has been paid to the internal White House e-mails and changes to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's talking points explaining the source of the attacks.

I believe a key question still remains to be answered: Why for 2 weeks did the administration propagate the tale that it was a YouTube video-inspired attack when officials knew almost immediately it was carried out by affiliates of al-Qaida? That is a pretty simple question.

Why were the American people told an anti-Islam YouTube video prompted the attacks when it was known it was not? No one has answered this very basic question.

Instead of providing answers to these questions, a top White House adviser has impugned the integrity of those seeking the truth by decrying persistent questioning as a ``witch hunt.'' It is time for the President to put politics aside, demand accountability from his staff, and step up and do his job.

Congress is doing its part by conducting serious oversight hearings on both the IRS overreach and the Benghazi attack. Yet critical government witnesses--such as the IRS Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division Director Lois Lerner--refuse to cooperate, insisting on pleading the Fifth Amendment during hearings to set the record straight.

It is up to the President. It is up to the President to transform this culture of arrogance and change the above-the-law attitude that seems to have a grip over his departments and agencies. Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is not going to cut it anymore. We simply cannot afford to have a President on the sidelines. This unraveling saga of government gone wild demonstrates exactly one of two things: either the height of government incompetence or gross abuse of power. Rather than sending surrogates out on the Sunday talk shows to claim ``the law is irrelevant'' with regard to that IRS overreach, I call on the President to work with Congress to build back the people's trust.

This includes taking responsibility for the actions of those working within the executive branch, enforcing the laws, and removing all those responsible for this disturbing pattern of government overreach.

I yield the floor.

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