Actually, the first three words are usually sufficient to cover what far more often than not seems like a house organ for the DNC (QED), but as Larry O’Connor writes at the Washington Free Beacon, “Unrepentant political hack Lois Lerner finally broke her 16-month silence by granting Politico an exclusive interview Monday. She was flanked by not one, but two lawyers running interference for any challenging questions from reporter Rachael Bade:”
Lerner is allowed to pose a rhetorical question that Ms. Bade (and apparently her editors at Politico) cannot or refuse to answer for their readers:
“How would I know two years ahead of time that it would be important for me to destroy emails, and if I did know that, why wouldn’t I have destroyed the other ones they keep releasing?”
We, the reader, never hear Ms. Bade’s answer and her editors never research the issue in any real way to inform us of the facts behind Lerner’s supposed “gotcha” moment.
The truth is divulged in a Wall Street Journal analysis of evidence uncovered via a congressional investigation, not a puff piece bit of rah-rah “journalism.” (emphasis mine)
As to Ms. Lerner’s behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.
The answer to Lerner’s suggestion is pretty simple. “Ms. Lerner, there is a letter from Chairman Camp asking you about the tea party group targeting in June of 2011. Your hard drives ‘crashed’ ten days after you received that letter. Why are you pretending you didn’t learn about the targeting until 2013?”
Naturally though, as O’Connor goes on to adds, “Instead, Ms. Bade directs her ire not at Lerner for using her byline for PR purposes. No, Bade knows who the real enemy is. She took to Twitter Monday night and attacked Fox News for criticizing her work.”
Yes it’s true: the entire universe is controlled by Channel #360 on your DirecTV dial.
Other than the aspects the Koch Brothers control, of course.
Related: Glenn Reynolds asks, “wonder if, when they assigned this story to Rachel Bade, her bosses warned her how such a fluff-job might harm her credibility as a reporter?”
Nonsense! A long career at the Politico, a gig at MSNBC or CNN and/or a job in the Obama or Hillary White House are now all but guaranteed.
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