Johnnie Walters, RIP
Remembering when the IRS had integrity.
James Taranto
connect
June 27, 2014
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In the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS commissioner refused to play along with a corrupt administration, the New York Times reports. A White House aide handed him a list of 200 political "enemies" the president wanted investigated. In response, the commissioner asked: "Do you realize what you're doing?" Then, he answered his own rhetorical question: "If I did what you asked, it'd make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic."
The White House aide's reply was "emphatic," according to the Times: ""The man I work for doesn't like somebody to say 'no.' "
The commissioner went to his boss, the Treasury secretary, "showed him the list and recommended that the I.R.S. do nothing." The secretary "told him to lock the list in his safe." Later, he retrieved the list and turned it over to congressional investigators.
Johnnie Walters testifies before a Senate subcommittee, March 1973. Corbis
It's enough to restore your trust in the government--except that it happened more than 40 years ago. The corrupt order was delivered by John Dean in September 1972. The commissioner, Johnnie Walters, eventually "testified to various committees investigating alleged Nixon misdeeds," the Times reports. "He left office in April 1973." He died Tuesday; the Times article we've been quoting is his obituary.
Walters wasn't the first IRS commissioner to resist President Nixon's political pressure. His predecessor, Randolph Thrower, was fired "for resisting White House pressure to punish political opponents," as the Times notes. Thrower died this March at 100. When Walters took office in 1971, "his stated goals were simplifying the tax process and catching tax cheats," but his job "had grown more complex" when Nixon imposed wage-and-price controls in an economically ignorant effort to curb inflation.
But the obituarist dryly notes that "Mr. Walters had not been told of Nixon's other job requirements," which surfaced in a recorded Oval Office conversation: "I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he's told, that every income-tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends." When Nixon learned that Walters had refused to follow the wrongful order, he asked: "Why the hell did we promote him?"
Later, he told the aforementioned White House aide, John Dean: "You've got to kick Walters's ass out first and get a man in there." He added that the Treasury secretary, George Shultz, "needed to make sure that Mr. Walters left if he wanted to keep his own job," in the Times's paraphrase. Shultz remained in office until May 1974, three months before Nixon's resignation, and later served as President Reagan's secretary of state. He's still alive at 93.
This Wednesday, as Mediaite.com notes, Barack Obama's Treasury secretary, Jack Lew, testified before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, pressed him about the purported harmonic convergence of crashed computers that caused seven IRS employees' emails to go missing. "Sometimes a broken hard drive is just a broken hard drive," Lew said.
As far as we know, even Bill Clinton never said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
One group of experts, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, apparently disagrees with Lew and the current IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, as The Weekly Standard's Jim Swift reports:
IAITAM administers internationally accepted certifications for information technology professionals. According to the group's standards, if Lerner's supposedly malfunctioning hardware was properly destroyed, there would be records of it.
Dr. Barbara Rembiesa, president of IAITAM, questions whether there is documentation of the destruction of the files. Who performed the work, says Rembiesa, is important because not all IT professionals are IAITAM certified.
"The notion that these emails just magically vanished makes no sense whatsoever. That is not how IT asset management at major businesses and government institutions works in this country. When the hard drive in question was destroyed, the IRS should have called in an accredited IT Asset Destruction (ITAD) professional or firm to complete that process, which requires extensive documentation, official signoffs, approvals, and signatures of completion. If this was done, there would be records. If this was not done, this is the smoking gun that proves the drive or drives were destroyed improperly – or not at all."
Also on Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee released an eyebrow-raising email exchange from December 2012 (that is, postdating the alleged computer crashes). It seems that Lois Lerner, the IRS's since-ousted head of tax-exempt organizations, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee, were invited to appear together at a conference.
Lerner turned down the invitation, emailing Matthew Giuliano, a lawyer then employed as a manager at the IRS: "Don't think I want to be on stage with Grassley on this issue." (The "issue" and the identity of the conference sponsor are redacted from the email exchange.) But she observed: "Looked like they were inappropriately offering to pay for [Grassley's] wife. Perhaps we should refer to Exam?"
"We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking," Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp said in a press release. "At every turn, Lerner was using the IRS as a tool for political purposes in defiance of taxpayer rights."
Giuliano gingerly replied to Lerner that he was "not sure we should send to exam. I think the offer to pay for Grassley's wife is income to Grassley, and not prohibited on its face."
There's no indication that Lerner pressed the matter further, and the email exchange alone is consistent with the hypothesis that she was an overzealous enforcer but not a partisan one. That is the claim administration apologists have been making, though when you stop and think about it, that means their defense is that the IRS is indiscriminate in opportunistically snooping on private correspondence.
Anyway, everything else we know about Lerner and Obama-era IRS practices argues against that defense. "If this were a Republican administration," former Clinton aide Lanny Davis tells radio host Larry O'Connor, who quotes him in the Washington Free Beacon, "I'd be saying when hard drives have been obliterated and this recent Lois Lerner--I think very inappropriate, maybe innocent but completely inappropriate--'maybe we should look at Mr. Grassley' . . . there's no Democrat that I know of that wouldn't be asking a Republican administration to conduct an independent investigation."
Four decades ago, during a Republican administration that was brought down by corruption, the IRS turned out to be a bulwark of government integrity. Today the possibility remains that the IRS itself is the source of the corruption. As we've repeatedly argued, that would be even worse than an IRS that follows corrupt orders from the president. A corrupt administration can be replaced, as Nixon's was. It's harder to see what can be done if a vital and permanent institution of the administrative state has been corrupted.
