Recommending that the House Find Lois G. Lerner in Contempt of Congress
Floor Speech
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, I call up the report (H. Rept. 113-415) to accompany the resolution recommending that the House of Representatives find Lois G. Lerner, Former Director, Exempt Organizations, Internal Revenue Service, in contempt of Congress for refusal to comply with a subpoena duly issued by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.
Mr. Speaker, on May 22, 2013, the committee started a hearing to investigate allegations that the IRS had, in fact, used a flawed process in reviewing applications for tax-exempt status.
To wit, I subpoenaed Lois Lerner to testify at that hearing because she was head of IRS' Exempt Organization's Division, the office that executed and, we believe, targeted conservative groups. The two divisions of the IRS most involved with the targeting were the EO Determinations unit in Cincinnati and the EO Technical unit in Washington, D.C., headed by Lois Lerner.
Before the hearing, Ms. Lerner's lawyer notified the committee that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment privilege and decline to answer any questions from our committee members. Instead of doing so, Ms. Lerner read a voluntary statement--self-selected statement that included a series of specifics declarations of her innocence.
She said:
I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.
She then refused to answer our questions. She invoked her Fifth Amendment right. She wouldn't even answer questions about declarations she made during her opening statement.
Mr. Speaker, that is not how the Fifth Amendment is meant to be used. The Fifth Amendment is protection. It is a shield. Lois Lerner used it as a sword to cut and then defend herself from any response.
A witness cannot come before the committee to make a voluntary statement--self-serving statement and then refuse to answer questions. You don't get to use the public hearing to tell the press and the public your side of the story and then invoke the Fifth.
Additionally, Mr. Speaker, after invoking the Fifth, when asked about previous testimony she had made and documents, she answered and authenticated those and then, again, went back to asserting her Fifth Amendment rights.
It is disappointing that things have come to this point. Lois Lerner had almost a year to reconsider her decision not to answer questions to Congress.
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself an additional 30 seconds.
In the meantime, after invoking, she gave a no-strings-attached interview to the Justice Department. This was said to the press entirely voluntarily before a large gathering. Her position with respect to complying with a duly issued subpoena has become clear. She won't. Her testimony is a missing piece of an investigation into IRS targeting.
We have now conducted 40 transcribed interviews and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents.
Mr. Speaker, the facts lead to Lois Lerner.
I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, if they hadn't made their applications, perhaps they wouldn't have been asked the inappropriate, abusive questions like, What books do you read? Who are your donors? as has happened.
With that, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Cantor), the leader of the House.
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I would like to correct the record. It is now 40 transcribed interviews, and we have received 12,000 emails from Lois Lerner today. So that $14 million probably went up a little bit because today the IRS finally turned over some of the documents they owed this committee under subpoena for over half a year.
I now yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica).
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, nobody answered the debunking that we put out, this document, nobody. This document makes it clear it was all about targeting and abusing conservative groups, and the gentleman from Virginia knows that very well.
With that, it is my honor to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Lankford), who has championed so many of these issues in our investigations.
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I simply want to correct the record. Earlier, a minority Member stated that, with 35 words said by Lois Lerner, our count is 305. Hopefully, their inaccuracy of their experts will be considered the same.
With that, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gosar).
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Vermont in advance for his ``yes'' vote on this because the only way to send this to the court to be decided is to vote ``yes.'' In fact, we are not trying Lois Lerner. We are determining that she should be tried. The question should be before a Federal judge.
With that, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Wyoming (Mrs. Lummis), a member of the committee.
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I have worked long and hard with the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia. She is a good person, but her facts simply are 100 percent wrong. Every single one of her assertions were simply not true. You can go to pages 11, 12, and 13 of this 400-plus page report, and you can see none of those statements are true.
We would have accepted a proffer from the attorney. We were not given one; although I will say he did tell us, one time, we wouldn't like what she said if she said something. When I went on national television, I did so because of written communication that indicated that she would appear and testify.
Additionally, the gen tle lady did make one point that was very good. It was very good. The attorney told us that she needed another week to prepare, which we were willing to give her; but when we learned it was actually inconvenient for the attorney to necessarily prep her, we said, if he would come in with his client and agree that she was going to testify, we would recess and give her the additional week.
When they came in that day, no such offer was on the table from her attorney, but, in fact, he said she had decided that she simply didn't want to speak to us--not that she was afraid of incrimination--because you can't be afraid of incrimination and not afraid, back and forth. That is pretty clear.
Her contempt for our committee was, in fact, contempt for the body of Congress, while she was happy to speak at length, apparently, with the Department of Justice, perhaps with that $6,000 or $7,000 contributor to President Obama that is so involved in that investigation.
With that, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bentivolio).
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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I regret that we have to be here today. If it is within my power, if at any time Lois Lerner comes forward to answer our questions, I am fully prepared to hear what she has to say, and at that point I would certainly ask
that the criminal prosecution be dropped. It may not be within my power after today.
For more than a year, our committee has sought to get her testimony. For nearly a year we have sought to get her to testify honestly. It was shocking to us on the committee, on the top of the dais, that a lawyer represented by a distinguished lawyer would play fast and loose with the Fifth Amendment assertion. It is a pretty straightforward process to assert your rights. In fact, her attorney may have planned all along to have a controversy. I will never know.
What I do know is we asserted that she had waived because we were advised by House counsel, an independent organization, that she had. We continue to investigate, and only today, nearly a year after a subpoena was issued, the Treasury, the IRS, actually gave us another 12,000 emails. Like earlier emails, they indicate a deeply political individual, partisan in her views, who apparently was at the center of deciding that when the President, in this well, objected to Citizens United, that it meant they wanted us to fix it, and she was prepared to do it. That is for a different court to decide.
The only question now is did she in fact give testimony, then assert the Fifth Amendment, then give some more testimony, and can we have that kind of activity.
We have dismissed other people who came before our committee, asserted their Fifth Amendment rights. After enough questions to know that they were going to continue to assert, we dismissed them. We have a strong record of respecting the First, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth Amendment and so on. That is what this Congress does, and we do it every day, and our committee does it.
Rather than listen to debate here which was filled with factual inaccuracies, refuted in documentation that is available to the American people, rather than believe that the minority's assertion should carry the day because the gentleman from Georgia said if about eight different if-thens, then they would vote for this, well, I believe that the gentleman from Vermont said it very well when he said: We shouldn't be doing this. We shouldn't be finding her guilty. This should be before a judge. He may not have understood what he was saying, because what he was saying is exactly what we are doing. We are putting the question of did she properly waive or not and should she be back before us or be held in contempt and punished for not giving it.
This won't be my decision. This will be a lifetime-appointment, nonpartisan Federal judge. The only thing we are doing today is sending it for that consideration. If the court rules that in fact her conduct was not a waiver, then we will have a modern update to understand the set of events here.
We will still have the same problem, which is Lois Lerner was at the center of an operation that systematically abused Americans for their political beliefs, asked them inappropriate questions, delayed and denied their approvals.
The minority asserted, well, they could have self-selected. Maybe they could have, maybe they should have, but it wouldn't change the fact that under penalty of perjury the IRS was asking them inappropriate questions which they intended to make public.
The IRS is an organization that we do not have confidence in now as Americans. We need to reestablish that, and part of it is understanding how and why a high-ranking person at the IRS so blatantly abused conservative groups in America that were adverse to the President, no doubt. But that should not be the basis under which you get scrutinized, audited, or abused, and yet it clearly was.
Mr. Speaker, it is essential we vote ``yes'' on contempt. Let the court decide, but more importantly, let the American people have confidence that we will protect their rights from the IRS.
With that, I urge support, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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