“Pulitzer Prize Creative Fiction”: Thomas Pickering Dissects Congressional Follies, Media Coverage, And ‘Cover-Up’ Charges
No doubt the degraded quality of congressional oversight astonishes Thomas Pickering, the distinguished American diplomat who oversaw the State Department’s Benghazi review board — although he tries not to say so too directly. For his demanding and difficult effort – only the most recent in a long history of public service under both Republican and Democratic administrations — Pickering has found himself under sustained attack by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the excitable partisan who chairs the House Government Reform Committee.
Last Friday, Issa subpoenaed Pickering to deliver a taped deposition to the committee behind closed doors, without offering a public chance to answer the charges already lodged by Republicans against the Accountability Review Board report authored by Pickering and retired admiral Mike Mullen.
Immediately prior to this latest skirmish, Pickering spoke with The National Memo about the ARB report, political maneuvering by the administration’s adversaries, and media coverage of the Benghazi “scandal.” Asked whether he had ever experienced or seen anything resembling Issa’s conduct, Pickering said, “No, I haven’t.…I suspect that on this particular issue, this guy [Issa] is driven by whatever will maximize his capability to be tough on the administration. This seems to be one effort he’s kind of landed on to make that happen. But I’m only guessing here,” he added.
Meanwhile, Pickering hasn’t noticed much attention being given on Capitol Hill to the extensive recommendations that he and Mullen made to improve security in dangerous posts around the world. “I can’t tell you whether anyone [in Congress] has sat down and examined them and wanted to have hearings on [the recommendations]” – instead of the notorious “talking points” developed by the White House last September. “So far I haven’t seen any evidence of that.”
For Pickering, the subpoena issued by Issa must be especially confusing. Ever since the Government Reform committee announced its planned hearings on Benghazi last winter, its leadership has repeatedly failed to establish a time when the review board chairman — perhaps the most important witness – could testify. Although at first Pickering says he thought they were “genuinely interested” in getting his testimony, he became “increasingly less inclined” to appear before the committee “as the thing became more politicized.”
Before the May 8 hearing, he made a final effort to arrange to testify publicly. But via the White House and the State Department, he learned that his presence was not desired. Before Issa issued his subpoena to Pickering on Friday, he and Mullen had sent a letter requesting an opportunity to testify publicly – and said that they are “not inclined to give testimony in a closed hearing before that [happens].”
Having listened to Issa and others take potshots at him, Mullen, and their report for several weeks, Pickering wants to rebut some of the misinformation they have propagated, for the record. He wants to address claims that the military “could have relieved or in fact changed the situation by sending men or equipment or both the night of the event” – and specifically assertions by Gregory Hicks, the former Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya, that four Special Forces soldiers should have been dispatched to Benghazi from Tripoli. Pickering says those four officers would have arrived in Benghazi too late to help and were needed in Tripoli anyway to treat the wounded, who were brought there after the Benghazi attack.
“The third question that has come up,” said Pickering, “is why we didn’t investigate the Secretary of State” and her deputies. The “simple and straightforward answer” is that “they played no role in the decision making which was relevant to the preparations for meeting the security crisis in Benghazi,” and the role they did play on the night of September 11 “was fairly clearly portrayed to us by other people who attended the meetings, and we had no questions about it. We thought that what they did made sense and fit exactly what should have been done.”
What Pickering may mention, if and when he does testify in public, is the role of Congress, which he considers primarily responsible for underfunding the protection of diplomatic posts abroad. Fortunately, legislative idiocy has not prevented the redirection of almost $1.5 billion in funds to improve security in dozens of posts, both physically and with additional security officers and Marine guards.
Aside from the weak oversight of Congress, Pickering also seems critical of the media coverage of Benghazi. In preparing to chair the Accountability Review Board, Pickering said, he “asked for, received, and read all of the press reporting that the State Department could find and put together for me, covering the events in Benghazi and the aftermath, from the initial attack right through to the day we submitted our report.”
He undertook this required reading because “I thought there would be useful ideas, leads, analyses that had to be taken into account. What I found in general was a very significant amount of wild, and I think fictionalized, made-up kind of information…
And in effect much of this alleged a kind of betrayal of those people, in one way or another, all of which I thought bordered on Pulitzer Prize creative fiction but didn’t bear any relationship to what we were able to determine, both from the documentary evidence, from the extensive film footage that we had an opportunity to review carefully, and of course the interviews we had with people who were on the spot.” Indeed, Pickering believes that the ARB report is “the best compilation I’ve seen of what actually took place.”
Pickering won’t comment on the “talking points” controversy, which wasn’t relevant to the ARB investigation. But he resents broader allegations by the Republicans and their allies in the media — in particular “the allegation that I would be engaged in a cover-up…I hope people feel that I’m a more honest and hopefully more dedicated public servant than that. “
“Our interest was to do everything we could to find out what happened,” Pickering said, “and then on the basis of that [investigation] to make as clear recommendations as we could to help the State Department and other agencies so that it wouldn’t happen again. That was our motive, that was the driver, and that’s where we went. Any effort to cover up would have been a betrayal… We did everything we could in terms of the national interest in saving future lives.” He believes it is vital to defend the credibility of the report and prevent it from being undermined. “That’s why I’m interested in talking to the American public now, because I think the report is a good report. And so far I haven’t heard anything that I believe we didn’t consider carefully.”
As for his critics, “I would hope they would read the report. If they have, maybe they need to read it again.” He laughed. “Both Mike Mullen and I believe that it’s important that we have this opportunity, either through Chairman Issa or some other committee, to deal with the people who have concerns about the report and tell them how we were thinking and why we reached the conclusions we did.”
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, May 19, 2013
“Hoping No One Will Know The Difference”: Conservatives Shift Gears On IRS To “Income Tax Audits”
Something odd happened to Barack Obama’s approval rating last week: nothing. With a bunch of controversies swirling about the administration, one might think Americans would be thinking less of his performance. Yet the latest polls from Gallup and CNN both show his job approval essentially unchanged, at just at or above 50 percent.
So far anyway, these “scandals” are, like most scandals, an almost completely partisan phenomenon. Yes, there are some—Watergate, Iran-Contra—where the facts are so damning and undeniable that even the president’s own party can’t help but acknowledge them. But Benghazi and the IRS are not Watergate or Iran-Contra. Perhaps they’ll turn out to be, if we find out something completely shocking. Perhaps we’ll discover that Barack Obama is on tape personally ordering the Cincinnati IRS office to put the screws to Tea Party groups, just as Richard Nixon was on tape ordering his aides to get the IRS to audit his political opponents. But that hasn’t happened yet.
So conservatives are trying something new. If you were paying close attention the last couple of days, you saw them bringing up a new charge, one unrelated to the actual controversy: IRS income-tax audits. At first glance that may seem strange. After all, there hasn’t been any evidence that anyone was audited because of their political beliefs or activities. This controversy is about political groups being given undue scrutiny when they applied for 501(c)(4) status as “social welfare” organizations. The part of the agency that carries out those reviews doesn’t audit individuals’ tax returns. Yet here was Peggy Noonan, claiming “The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.” The “evidence” for Noonan’s explosive charge is that she read about a couple of conservatives who were among the 1.5 million Americans who were audited by the IRS last year (read Nate Silver for more on how unbelievably stupid Noonan’s allegation is). Here‘s an account of the weekend’s Virginia GOP convention, at which a whole slate of Tea Partiers was selected to run in November’s elections there: “By being here today, every one of you has just signed up for an audit by the I.R.S.,’ Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, said in a keynote speech. ‘You are officially now on the White House enemies list.'”
We’ll be hearing more of these stories. Because after all, if 1.5 million Americans were audited last year, plenty of them were conservatives. And plenty of those will be happy to tell their stories to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or Peggy Noonan. “I signed up for my local Tea Party, and not six months later the IRS came after me!” they’ll say. Some of these stories will be told in high-profile forums, and others in more obscure outlets; for instance, here’s a conservative writer telling her tale of oppression to the Catholic News Agency. During her audit, she says, “They only wanted to talk about who was paying me to do my writing.” Really? “Hendershott said that the questions were not explicitly political, but she interpreted them to mean the agency was ‘wanting to know if there were individuals or groups who wanted me to write to advance their cause.'” Maybe. Or maybe because she’s a writer and they were auditing her income taxes, they were asking her who paid her to write because that’s where she gets her income. Just tossing that out there.
It’s pretty obvious what’s going on here. On one hand, nobody likes the IRS, so people are ready to believe the worst about the agency’s activities. On the other hand, getting your 501(c)(4) application subjected to unusual scrutiny is not something most people can relate to. Even worse, the reporting that’s emerging about the IRS office in Cincinnati (see here) paints a picture not of some coordinated effort at political oppression, but of a bunch of overworked, ill-trained people who barely understood the standards they were supposed to apply to these applications and didn’t get the support they needed from Washington. They ended up acting inappropriately, but it wasn’t a criminal conspiracy, and it didn’t reach up to the heights of power.
For conservatives, that’s not a very satisfying story. But they know that everyone fears getting their tax returns audited. So why not just tell everyone that’s what happened?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 20, 2013
“Tea Party Is An Election Category”: The IRS, Non-Profits, And The Challenge Of Electoral Exceptionalism
What the IRS scandal really shows us is that it’s getting harder and harder to draw a line between electioneering and political speech.
As the report of the IRS Inspector General shows, the agency’s scrutiny of conservative groups applying for non-profit status was, more than anything, a clumsy response to a task the IRS is ill-equipped to carry out – monitoring an accidental corner of campaign finance law, a corner that was relatively quiet until about 2010.
That corner is the 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization, belonging to what are sometimes called “social welfare” groups, which enjoy the triple privilege of tax exemption (though not for their donors), freedom to engage in some limited election activity, and, unlike other political committees (PACs, SuperPACs, parties, etc.), freedom from any requirement to disclose information about donors or spending. The use of (c)(4)s as campaign vehicles didn’t originate with the Citizens United decision in 2010 (Citizens United, the organization that brought the case, was already a (c)(4)), but the decision seems to have created a sense that the rules had changed, and even small groups – especially, apparently, local Tea Party organizations — rushed to create (c)(4)s.
501(c)(4)s are not prohibited from engaging in political speech of most kinds. They are free to be “biased” without jeopardizing their tax exemption. They can advocate for or against legislation, they can lobby the government or criticize it. They don’t have to make any effort to be “non-partisan” – for example, they can support a proposal that is only supported by members of one party, or directly advise only members of one party. And they can engage in some activity directly intended to influence the outcome of an election, as long as that doesn’t constitute the organization’s primary purpose.
There’s some confusion about the definition of “primary purpose,” discussed in great depth elsewhere, but what the IRS was trying to do was to identify organizations that seemed more likely to be heavily involved in electoral activity. Since the organizations were new, there was no way to look at their actual activities to see whether they were mostly electoral. So the agency had to rely on clues in the applications, like names and telltale phrases. If organizations had words like “Democrat” or “Republican” in their titles, for example, it would be reasonable to look more closely at their election activities, or possible future activities, than an organization that called, for example, “Save the Turtles.” I’m told that organizations with the names of political parties do receive extra scrutiny, even if in some cases, like “Students for a Democratic Society,” the word might mean something unrelated to the name of the party. That’s what the closer scrutiny would find out.
“Tea Party” in 2009 and 2010 was unquestionably an election category – there were “Tea Party” candidates and there was a “Tea Party Caucus” in Congress. It was not unreasonable for the IRS to use that phrase as an indicator that an organization using that phrase might be more inclined to engage in elections. There are comparable phrases on the left – for example, the term “Netroots” might suggest election involvement, as there were groups that identified and endorsed “Netroots” Democratic candidates in 2006 and later. Perhaps there were simply fewer organizations applying for (c)(4) status with that word, or they came in before the 2010 flood, or perhaps the IRS did screen on that word – we don’t know.
While there’s a perfectly plausible case for the IRS to use flag-words that indicate an election-focused movement, the actual questions asked of the groups do raise some concerns. If accurate, they did seem to go beyond evidence that these organizations were primarily engaged in elections, such as questions about lobbying and the role of family members.
But the reason these questions are complicated for the IRS, or for any agency assigned to police these complicated distinctions, is this: The line between robust political speech and influencing elections has become frightfully difficult to draw. Finding the right line around what is an “election” is really the fundamental problem in campaign finance. Almost everyone accepts the premise of “electoral exceptionalism” – elections are structured and require some particular rules, different from the rules that apply generally to political speech. The rule in most states that keeps campaigners 75 or 100 feet from the voting booths is the most obvious uncontroversial restriction on political speech, and there is broad acceptance of the idea that direct contributions to candidates and campaigns should be limited to prevent corruption and dependence. But what happens after that? What about outside spending that looks just like campaign spending? We used to think there was a clear distinction between “issue ads” that were expressing a view on an issue and “electioneering communications” that were the equivalent of campaign contributions. That distinction is actually what the Citizens United case was about — the provision of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that defined broadcast communications that mentioned a candidate within 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election as electioneering, which had to be financed with regulated funds.
That was an improvised line then, and it’s gotten even blurrier since. Part of the problem is partisanship – it used to be, for example, that there were environmentalists in both parties, supporters of social spending in both parties. A political ad about the environment was just that. But what’s an ad or brochure attacking “Obamacare” during the election year? Every Republican opposes it, and they’ve given it the name of the president. The Tea Party was based on issues, yes, but above all else, it was based on unflagging, total opposition to Obama and congressional Democrats.
To figure out where election advocacy begins and regular political speech ends in these cases was certainly more than mid-level IRS bureaucrats in Cincinnati could handle. But it’s not an easy challenge for anyone. All the noise about IRS “targeting” and about free speech and corporate speech is a distraction from a real challenge of money in elections: finding an agreement on the line around an “election,” and establishing some clear rules for what happens within that line in order to ensure that elections are fair and open and don’t lead to corruption.
By: Mark Schmitt, The National Memo, May 16, 2013
“Worsening Jobs Crisis”: America’s Middle Class Is Burning To The Ground, While Washington Fiddles With Scandal Nonsense
At last, some excellent economic news for folks long-mired in the stagnant labor market!
At least, those were the headlines recently trumpeted across the country. “Jobs Spring Back,” exclaimed a typical headline or report that companies added a better than expected 165,000 private-sector jobs in April. Wow — the thunderous, three-year boom of prosperity that has rained riches on Wall Street is finally beginning to shower on our streets, right?
Well, as dry-land farmers can tell you, thunder ain’t rain. Read beneath the joyful headlines hailing April’s uptick in job numbers, and you’ll see the parched truth.
For example, more than a third of working-age Americans are either out of work or have given up on finding a job. Also, last month’s hiring increase was almost entirely for receptionists, waiters, clerks, temp workers, car-rental agents and other low-wage positions with no benefits or upwardly mobile possibilities. On the other hand, manufacturing — generally the source of good, middle-class jobs — did not add workers in April and has cut some 10,000 jobs in the last year.
Especially problematic was the continued rise in underemployment — people wanting full-time work, but having to take part-time and temporary jobs. Underemployment is also pounding college graduates. While they’ve been more successful than non-grads at landing jobs, they’re not getting jobs that fit their career goals or even require the degrees they spent money and time to obtain. Indeed, many of those rental agents and restaurant employees you encounter hold four-year degrees, forcing everyone else to scramble for the few, even lower-paid jobs further down the skill ladder.
Meanwhile, the next graduating class is already beginning to flood into the labor market from colleges and high schools with nowhere to go.
In May, another headline shouted: “Stock Market Soars.” It expressed delight that the Dow Jones Average topped 15,000 for the first time in its history.
Yet this index of Wall Street wealth gives a totally false picture of our nation’s true economic health. Yes, the privileged few are doing extremely well. But the workaday many are struggling — and falling further and further behind as the jobs market sinks steadily from mere recession down into depression.
The monthly unemployment reports don’t tell the depths of misery that’s out here in the real world, beyond the view of Wall Street and Washington elites. For example, President Obama hailed the news that unemployment dipped to 7.5 percent in April. Unstated, though, was the stark reality that this good-news dip was not due to a jump in job offerings, but to a bad-news labor market so weak and discouraging that more and more Americans are dropping out of it or never entering it.
More than a third of our working-age population is no longer even in the job market, and only 58.6 percent of us are employed. Put the opposite way, 41 percent of the potential workforce is not working — about 102 million people. One more statistic, and it’s a chiller: More than one out of five American families report that, last year, not a single family member had a job.
Our people are trapped in a jobs crisis that is sucking the economic vitality out of our nation, but our leaders refuse even to acknowledge it, much less cope with it. In fact, corporate chieftains are deliberately exacerbating the crisis by hoarding trillions of dollars that ought to be rushed into job-creating expansions, and politicians keep adding to the casualties by gleefully eliminating the middle-class jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters, police and other valuable public employees.
America’s middle class is burning to the ground, while Washington fiddles with nonsense and Wall Street feathers its own nest. It’s disgraceful.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, May 15, 2013
“Uniquely American And Uniquely Stupid”: The Makings Of The Next Debt Ceiling Debacle
I hate to interrupt fulminations about President Obama’s three incredible shrinking scandals with something as prosaic as concern about the GOP’s threatening to sabotage the economy, but a couple of bits of real news emerged yesterday regarding the debt ceiling (yes that, again).
It’s actually a perfect juxtaposition: On the same day that an interview with Standard & Poor’s top U.S. credit rating analyst warned of tinkering with the debt ceiling, House Republicans huddled up to brainstorm about what their price should be for not deliberately tanking the economy.
On the one hand you’ve got an interview National Journal did with Nikola Swann, “Standard & Poor’s top analyst for the U.S. credit rating.” You will recall that Standard & Poor’s downgraded its rating of U.S. debt in 2011 after the last debt ceiling showdown. And you will recall that that showdown was engineered by the GOP as a political hostage-taking situation: Virtually everyone (or virtually everyone who is responsible) acknowledges that raising the debt ceiling is necessary to avoid the U.S. government defaulting on its obligations, which would be financially cataclysmic, but the Republicans threatened to force that exact scenario if they didn’t get spending cuts.
Now the debt-ceiling-fight countdown clock is ticking once again (the Treasury started its “extraordinary measures” to avoid default at noon today), with the moment of crisis expected to hit some time between August and year’s end. Does the prognosis look any better? “We have not seen any strong evidence that the political system as a whole is more effective, more stable, or more predictable than we thought it was in 2011,” Swann told National Journal’s Stacy Kaper. “There does seem to be, especially in recent years, an overall trend in the U.S. to effectively make major policy decisions at the last moment in a crisis setting. We don’t see that as credit-positive.”
That’s delightful understatement. He goes on to say that in order to avoid another credit downgrade, the U.S. should extend the debt ceiling for five years and bring the debt-to-GDP ratio under control with a plan that is actually credible. House Republicans passed a bill (which stands zero chance of becoming law) which would allow the Treasury to prioritize government payments (which would still leave the government in a position of not paying its bills … it would just be not paying for goods and services while making sure that its debt holders are taken care of). “This does not sound like a very comfortable scenario,” he says in another bit of understatement.
The final point in the interview is the most instructive:
S&P rates over 120 sovereign governments, including all of the wealthy developed ones. Of those, there are very few that have anything similar to the U.S. debt ceiling. Of those countries that do have some kind of legislated limit on the amount of debt, that limit is set as part of the budget-setting process. It almost never is divided the way it is in the U.S. We don’t think it is helpful to credit quality.
The very idea of a debt ceiling that doesn’t rise with authorized spending is, in other words, both uniquely American and uniquely stupid. Why? Because it lends itself to the kind of irresponsible hostage taking the Republicans are gearing up to engage in yet again.
And it’s a political terrorism scheme that is increasingly disengaged from reality (to which its connection was tenuous at best anyway). To wit: The last time around the GOP objection to the debt ceiling was grounded in rising deficits; this didn’t make their threats less irresponsible but at least established a plausible-sounding connection between their threat and their demand. But the budget deficit is, as my bloleague Pat Garofalo wrote earlier this week, the incredible shrinking issue. As a percentage of the economy, it is now roughly half of what it was when President Obama took office.
But Republicans know they’ve got a hostage so they’re bound and determined to extract a ransom. Hence the brainstorming session they held yesterday where 39 different members of the House GOP conference arose to offer their idea of what policy they should demand in return for not intentionally tanking the global economy. The ideas, according to various reports, ranged from approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to doing something about partial-birth abortion.
My personal favorite item comes from Jonathan Strong’s account at National Review Online:
The Ryan budget passed by the House assumes repeal of Obamacare. So if House Republicans were to press for enactment of the Ryan budget in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, that would entail repealing Obamacare – which is why there are pangs of doubt within the GOP leadership about whether that strategy is realistic.
So GOP leadership thinks demanding that the president sign onto the radical Ryan budget is unrealistic because it would necessarily involve repealing Obamacare? As if the Ryan budget’s dramatic cuts to discretionary spending and gutting of Medicare and Medicaid would be evenly remotely acceptable were Obamacare not involved? The whole scenario yesterday has the air of fantasy – like my wife and I arguing over what we’ll do when we win the Powerball tomorrow night (she looks oddly askance at my plan to commute via jet pack).
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 17, 2013
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