Issa Reverses, Louis Lerner Must Testify

iroots.org May 22, 2013 No Comments

Earlier today, Darrell Issa had allowed Lois Lerner, an IRS official, to be dismissed from a hearing after she had invoked her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. During the lunch hour, Rush Limbaugh freaked out about this on-air. Within a few hours, Rep. Issa reversed his decision and now vows to haul her back for testimony…

“I’m not gonna answer one question you ask me about this,” and Issa excuses her, and she and her lawyers get up and leave. I’m like everybody else watching this, “What the hell just happened here? We just let a witness go! So I’m waiting for some reaction from legal beagle friends of mine. I haven’t heard back from any of them that I asked. But I want to know if Trey Gowdy’s right. I want to know if he’s got a point.

Lois Lerner shows up, she makes a statement, and then issues her denial, and then inserts or invokes her Fifth Amendment right — which she’s clearly free to do, but she’s afraid it might incriminate her criminally. So the media’s all concerned about this. They really are. “This is the worst thing that coulda happened to the regime,” they’re saying, “the optics of this.” But there aren’t any optics. Issa shoulda kept her there all afternoon and asked her a hundred questions and made her invoke the Fifth on every one of them!

That’s how the Democrats would do it. There should be some discussion on whether or not she can show up and make a statement, and issue a denial, and then invoke the Fifth and get out of everything, get out of answering questions. Trey Gowdy said, “This can’t happen! She’s gotta sit here and answer our questions.” RushLimbaugh.com

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa said embattled IRS official Lois Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights and will be hauled back to appear before his panel again.

By the afternoon, Issa was taking a harder stand.

“The precedents are clear that this is not something you can turn on and turn off,” he told POLITICO. “She made testimony after she was sworn in, asserted her innocence in a number of areas, even answered questions asserting that a document was true … So she gave partial testimony and then tried to revoke that.”

He said he was not expecting that.

“I understand from her counsel that there was a plan to assert her Fifth Amendment rights,” he continued. “She went ahead and made a statement, so counsel let her effectively under the precedent, waive — so we now have someone who no longer has that ability.”

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