Recommending That the House Find Lois G. Lerner in Contempt of Congress

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. Speaker, about 3 years ago, all of our offices starting getting phone calls from constituents saying they are being asked very unusual questions by the IRS. They were applying for non-profit status. They were patriot groups, they were Tea Party groups, and they were constitutional groups. Whatever their name might be, they were getting these questions

coming back in. Questions like: Tell us, as the IRS, every conversation you have had with a legislator and the contents of those conversations. Tell us, and give us copies of the documents that are only given to members of your organization. If there is a private part of your Web site that is only set aside for members, show us all of those pages. And by the way, all of those questions were prefaced with a statement from the IRS as, whatever documents you give us will also be made public to everyone.

So the statement was: Tell us what you privately talked about with legislators, and tell us what only your members get because we are going to publish it.

So, of course, we started to get questions about that. The inspector general starts an investigation on that, and on May the 10th of last year, 2013, Lois Lerner stands up in a conference, plants a question in the audience to talk about something completely irrelevant to the conference so she can leak out that this investigation is about to be burst out. Four days later, the inspector general launches this investigation and says that conservative groups have been unfairly targeted--298 groups have their applications held, isolated. They were asked for all these things, and when they turned documents in, they were stored. The initial accusation was that this was a crazy group from Cincinnati that did this.

So our committee happened to bring in these folks from Cincinnati. They all said they wanted to be able to advance these applications, and they were told, no, hold them. We asked the names of the people in Washington who told them to hold them. We brought those folks in. They said they wanted to also move them, and they were told by the counsel's office to hold them.

As we continued to work through point after point, through person after person, all of them come back to Lois Lerner's office, Lois Lerner, who had come in before us May 22, 2013, made a long statement professing her innocence, saying she had done nothing wrong, had broken no law, and then said: I won't answer questions.

What is at stake here is a constitutional principle: can a person stand before a court or before the Congress and make a long statement saying ``I have done nothing wrong'' and then choose to not answer questions? This is a precedent before every Congress from here on out and in front of every court. Can this be done?

We would say no. It is not just a statement about accepting that she is guilty, though all the evidence leads back to her and her office. It is that if you have the right to remain silent, do you actually remain silent during that time period?

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