Bring Back Ken Starr-Special Prosecutor Needed In IRS Scandal - NYTimes.com

Bring Back Ken Starr - NYTimes.com

Bring Back Ken Starr

Republicans are howling for President Obama to name a special prosecutor to investigate the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups. The president should call their bluff.

The president should announce that he has told the Justice Department to appoint an independent investigator with bulldog instincts and bipartisan credibility. The list of candidates could start with Kenneth Starr, who chased down the scandals, real and imagined, of the Clinton presidency. It might include Patrick Fitzgerald, who was special counsel in the Valerie Plame affair, winning the conviction of Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and who has successfully prosecuted two corrupt governors of Illinois, one from each party.

The special counsel (that is the formal term) should be assured an all-access pass to the people and records he needs to determine whether the treatment of conservative groups seeking special tax status was a) a ham-handed shortcut by overworked and badly guided bureaucrats, b) a systematic persecution of political opponents, or c) some combination of the two. He should be charged with asking who knew what when, and whether the subsequent handling of the matter amounted to clumsiness or conspiracy. The investigation should work on a reasonable deadline – concluding well before the 2014 mid-terms – and the results should be made public in full.

Here are three reasons that, on this one, the president should give the Republicans what they claim to want.

First, it would demonstrate that the president understands that, in the cascade of controversies that have knocked his second term off course, the I.R.S. case is the one that matters most.

I don’t mean to make light of the other troubles lapping at the White House. Like most journalists, I find it disturbing that the Justice Department went fishing for sources in the phone records of the Associated Press without giving the news organization a chance to take the matter to a judge. We can now add to that the department’s dive into the emails and phone calls of Fox News correspondent James Rosen. As I’ve written before (here and here, for example) this is the most zealous administration in modern times when it comes to the pursuit of leakers. That’s chilling, but there’s no suggestion it’s criminal.

As for Benghazi, the third issue in the current scandal trifecta, the critics of the White House have reached the point where they are beating a dead horse – and it was the least important horse in the first place. Yes, the famous “talking points” and the email dump show a lot of people too focused on spin in the days after the attacks. In Washington, that hardly constitutes aberrant behavior. The goal now should be to diagnose and repair the shortcomings of intelligence and security, to reduce the danger of this happening again. That’s work for the administration and, if it can get beyond its obsession with embarrassing Hillary Clinton, the Congress. It is not work for a prosecutor.

The I.R.S. case is different. This is the one with the longest legs, because the I.R.S. is unloved, because political abuse of the agency has a long history, because for many Americans the I.R.S. is proxy for the entire federal government. It is also the only one where Republicans suggest that laws may have been broken.

Just to be clear, in case the Republicans have forgotten, that is the high bar a special prosecutor would be expected to get over.

“Special counsels are appointed where there is some reason to believe a crime has occurred,” said Katy Harriger of Wake Forest University, who has written extensively on special prosecutors. “Not just for any stupid thing the government does.”

The second reason to bring in a special prosecutor is that it’s the surest way to get answers the public might trust. The Republicans are not so much looking for “the truth” as they are looking for a resonant story line – whether it is Mitch McConnell’s theme that Obama has begotten “a culture of intimidation” (not that anybody seems very intimidated, least of all the Tea Party) or confirmation that Government Is The Problem, or the more plausible argument that the White House is too often AWOL. The Democrats, for their part, are not so much looking for “the truth” as trying to change the subject: it’s about the flood of special interest money from undisclosed donors, it’s about underfunding of the government, it’s about the desperate need for tax reform. What it’s about is this: at least one I.R.S. outpost engaged in behavior that was at best stupid and at worst alarming. It’s about shoring up America’s trust in its government, and in this president.

The third reason for a special counsel is that the government has serious business to conduct, and the scandal circus on Capitol Hill is a terrible distraction. Oversight, so-called, is what we do these days instead of passing a budget, reforming the immigration system, or processing the countless government and judicial appointments awaiting confirmation. Handing off the I.R.S. problem to a special counsel and putting congressional hearings on hold would allow everyone, including journalists, to turn their attention to all that unfinished business. Besides, as Professor Harriger points out, Congressional hearings could interfere with the independent investigation. (Several of the men convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal got their convictions thrown out because they testified first before Congress, with immunity.) If the investigation produces an unconvincing result, then fire up the subpoenas and recommence oversight.

To quote Peggy Noonan, who blew a gasket on the I.R.S. in the Wall Street Journal, “This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.” If that’s the case, both parties should stand aside and let a special counsel determine if what happened was criminal, or just dumb. Meanwhile, we have some governing to do.