IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/06/25...n-irs-trouble/

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

Is this another smoking gun?

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/0...un-108754.html

As a young man in early 1974 I watched Watergate unfold and spoke out loud that it I felt more and more that the White House and Nixon were involved. My viewpoints were not well received by
older workmates. In a sense I was a renegade.

With this IRS scandal there is no evidence yet of White House involvement; there is of some Democrat Senators asking the IRS to investigate, and the ranking Democrat on the House committee may be in violation of rules. There is nothing wrong with looking to see that organizations are in compliance for tax free status, but it is incorrect to not apply this to organizations on both sides of the political spectrum; which was clearly not done.

Maybe this was just a corrupt group at the top, but the direction this has taken so far, and the lost evidence of key figures, calls for an independent, detailed investigation.

[verdo]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

The real truth behind the IRS "scandal." Reality tends to be more interesting than fiction

[Raz]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

The real truth behind the IRS "scandal." Reality tends to be more interesting than fiction

So he gets the "real" truth from Time Magazine - and it shows (Surprise! Surprise!) that the whole "scandal" was in fact a plot by the "Right Wing" to shut down investigation of their "technically" illegal money running to candidates. AND Time "showed" that Liberal groups were investigated just as often as Conservative groups.

P-U-L-L-E-A-Z-E!

[verdo]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

I see little hard evidence to suggest otherwise. This and the benghazi incident seem to be trumped up partisan BS to target Obama as far as im concerned. With the myriad of legitimate things that Obama could be attacked for, i find it silly that people still cling on to these largely debunked myths over what actually happened.

[Raz]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

I see little hard evidence to suggest otherwise. This and the benghazi incident seem to be trumped up partisan BS to target Obama as far as im concerned. With the myriad of legitimate things that Obama could be attacked for, i find it silly that people still cling on to these largely debunked myths over what actually happened.

Debunked by who? Joe Klein, Margaret Carlson, Nancy Gibbs and other purveyors of Leftist hog-slop at Time magazine?

Raz is a "silly person"?


Treasury: IRS targeted 292 Tea Party groups, just 6 progressive groups

by Paul Bedard - June 27, 2013

Refuting Democratic suggestions that progressive groups were also swept up in the IRS probe of the tax status of Tea Party organizations, the Treasury Department's inspector general has revealed that just six progressive groups were targeted compared to 292 conservative groups.

In a letter to congressional Democrats, the inspector general also said that 100 percent of Tea Party groups seeking special tax status were put under IRS review, while only 30 percent of the progressive groups felt the same pressure.


The Wednesday letter to the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee punched a huge hole in Democratic claims that progressive groups were targeted as much as the Tea Party groups from May 2010-May 2012, the height of the Tea Party movement.


The letter from the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed that there just weren't many progressive groups who even sought special tax exempt status. A total of 20 sought it, and six were probed. All 292 Tea Party groups, meanwhile, were part of the IRS witch hunt.


"At this point, the evidence shows us that conservative groups were not only flagged, but targeted and abused by the IRS," said Sarah Swinehart spokeswoman for the Ways and Means Committee.


"As we gather the facts, we will follow them wherever they lead us. Chairman [Rep. David] Camp encourages all groups, regardless of political affiliation, that feel they may have been targeted to come forward and share their story."

Democrats had noticed that the word "progressives" was on the so-called Be On The Lookout, or BOLO, list. But the Treasury IG suggested that the list wasn't used.


The operative paragraph from the IG letter:


"Based on the information you flagged regarding the existence of a 'Progressives' entry on BOLO lists, TIGTA performed additional research which determined that six tax-exempt applications filed between May 2010 and May 2012 having the words 'progress' or 'progressive' in their names were included in the 298 cases the IRS identified as potential political cases.

We also determined that 14 tax-exempt applications filed between May 2010 and May 2012 using the words 'progress' or 'progressive' in their names were not referred for added scrutiny as potential political cases. In total, 30 percent of the organizations we identified with the words 'progress' or "progressive" in their names were processed as potential political cases.
In comparison, our audit found that 100 percent of the tax-exempt applications with Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names were processed as potential political cases during the time frame of our audit."

http://washingtonexaminer.com/author/paul-bedard



Read it for yourself.

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

So the Time magazine author is saying that Lois Lerner didn't have to take the 5th after all?!?

It's saying that the lost emails of Lerner and 6 other KEY people didn't matter?

It's saying that someone didn't really have to first concoct a false story that the entire event was the fault of two low level crooks in Cincinnati?

After all that has happened how could anyone believe anything from this administration?

As for Benghazi, the made up story of the Anti Arab film has found to be a sham. This was clearly an Al-Qaeda attack, which should have been foreseen.
The entire gun running operation to Syrian "rebels", some of whom now make up ISIS, was a bankrupt strategy from the beginning. This anti gun American
administration sure gets mixed up in gun incidents way too much (Benghazi and Mexico).

As an aside we rarely see real journalism any more. Just two factions, only praising their side's viewpoint while attacking the others. There are no journalists
anymore, only propagandists for each side.

[lektrode]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

So the Time magazine author is saying that Lois Lerner didn't have to take the 5th after all?!?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!
riiiiight....
so guess that means her phalanx of lawyers - with the AG himself likely her main counsel - F'd up ????

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!

if i did hafta work another all-nighter tonite, i'd be goin fer 'the trifecta' (since i'm already bettin on the daily double ;)

.....After all that has happened how could anyone believe anything from this administration?

As for Benghazi, the made up story of the Anti Arab film has found to be a sham. This was clearly an Al-Qaeda attack, which should have been foreseen.
The entire gun running operation to Syrian "rebels", some of whom now make up ISIS, was a bankrupt strategy from the beginning. This anti gun American
administration sure gets mixed up in gun incidents way too much (Benghazi and Mexico).

and THEN there's 'free' birth control and 'marriage' rights....

As an aside we rarely see real journalism any more. Just two factions, only praising their side's viewpoint while attacking the others. There are no journalists
anymore, only propagandists for each side.

+1

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

This keeps getting more involved:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archive...roximately.php

These people seem to not only to be behaving in an illegal manner, but are being arrogant in doing so. Nixonian to the nth degree.

[Woodsman]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

Nixonian to the nth degree.

Not even close to Nixonian. Not even in the same league as Nixon. If Obama and Holder played the game with 1/16 the unadulterated hate and viciousness of the Nixon and Hoover tag team, never mind Mad Dog Lyndon, the denizens of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee would be soiling their Depends as we speak. Nobody gets that kind of power anymore.

It's like the good doctor said:

"Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man–evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency."


"He Was a Crook"

by HUNTER S. THOMPSON

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

DATE: MAY 1, 1994

FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER….HE WAS A LIAR ND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA. …BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."–REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing–a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know Iwill go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, andI am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hatedNixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don’t worry," he said. "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive–and he was, all theway to the end–we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instinctsof a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by thehead with all four claws.

That was Nixon’s style–and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon’s immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president’s body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable–some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern–but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man–evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him–except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon’s final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children’s sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers–but they knew there was nothing they could do about it–not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon’s last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole’s stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for ’96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won’t even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments–most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism–which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon’s meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise–a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he’d run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.) It was Hoover’s shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon’s downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director’s ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon’s right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee’s flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director–who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean’s relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that’s what Bill Clinton says–and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can’t be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. he was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon’s vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn’t argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn’t bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that–but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure, Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon’s spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives–whether you’re me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin’s daughter or your fiancee’s 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS UP

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close….

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn … pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness…toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell’s apartment.

Ah…nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. But how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization … involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation?"

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

Of course Nixon was a crook as I proclaimed publicly in early 1974. But Obama and his Chicago cronies are just a bit more subtle, but as committed as Nixon.

The IRS refused to do the bidding of Nixon. This IRS, as well as the EPA, FEC, Justice, and who knows what other agencies, seem to be fully supportive of the control
freak crew in the White House. This goes far deeper, and unfortunately the MSM is complicit.

This is neither right nor left. This is wrong above legality.

A massive, national protest may be shaping up for this weekend.

[Woodsman]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

Of course Nixon was a crook as I proclaimed publicly in early 1974. But Obama and his Chicago cronies are just a bit more subtle, but as committed as Nixon.

The IRS refused to do the bidding of Nixon. This IRS, as well as the EPA, FEC, Justice, and who knows what other agencies, seem to be fully supportive of the control
freak crew in the White House. This goes far deeper, and unfortunately the MSM is complicit.

This is neither right nor left. This is wrong above legality.

A massive, national protest may be shaping up for this weekend.

I know, vt, we agree. I just wanted to post Thompson's obit.

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/21/no...s-still-exist/

How convenient!

Now these computer crashes include the rest who had communications with lerner. There are still "less than 20" crash victims.
Of course all of them are connected to this investigation of the IRS targeting only right leaning groups.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/26/me...uters-crashed/

[Master Shake]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

Not even close to Nixonian. Not even in the same league as Nixon.

We agree on that point. Nixon was a grade school thug compared to Obama. The other big difference is that the mainstream media didn't carry Nixon's water like they do for Obama.

[vt]

Re: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Secretly Drafted New Rules To Restrict Conservative Groups

ROTFLMAO!!


http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/09/09/Letter-Holder-Aide-Accidentally-Calls-Issa-For-Help-Spinning-IRS-Scandal

Letter: Holder Aide Accidentally Calls Issa Staff for Help Spinning IRS
by Jonathan Strong 9 Sep 2014 1679 post a comment

A senior communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder seemingly called House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa's staff by accident and asked for their help spinning new revelations about the IRS scandal, Issa said in a September 8 letter to Holder.

The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes the call was intended to be made to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cumming's staff, the ranking member on the oversight panel, the letter said.

According to the letter, Fallon – who is not named in the letter but confirmed he made the call – asked if the aides could release the IRS scandal documents to “selected reporters” to give Fallon an “opportunity to comment publicly on it.”

Fallon explained to Issa aides that the Justice Department's Office of Legislative Affairs had not permitted him to release the documents to the public and he wanted to get ahead of the story “before the Majority” – meaning Issa – could share it, according to the letter.

Issa aides – who had placed the call on speakerphone – were “caught off guard by the unusual nature of the call and the odd request” and asked Fallon to “e-mail the material for evaluation.”

“At this point,” Fallon “abruptly placed the call on hold for approximately three minutes.” When Fallon returned to the call, “he was audibly shaken. He immediately stated that there was a 'change in plans' and that there would be no effort” by DOJ to release the material early.

Fallon “proceeded to pitch the idea that the Department and the Committee should 'help one another' while simultaneously saying that 'you need to say what you need to say.'”

In the letter, Issa told Holder the phone call suggests ongoing coordination between DOJ aides and Cummings' staff to undermine oversight committee investigations.

Fallon's “efforts to prejudice the Committee's oversight work demands examination,” Issa wrote.

Fallon, however, said in a written statement that nothing untoward occurred.

“There is nothing inappropriate about department staff having conversations with both the majority and minority staff as they prepare responses to formal inquiries. That includes conversations between the spokespeople for the Department and the committee,” Fallon said.

Other than confirming he made the phone call in question, Fallon did not respond to any of the details of what took place during the call.

The letter referred to a “subsequent explanation” from Fallon that “he simply called to improve the Office of Public Affairs' working relationship with the Committee” but said the explanation “is inconsistent with statements and requests he made before he placed the call on hold.”

“It strains credulity to believe that the Department would seek to begin to improve relations via a telephone call between two individuals who had never spoken to each other before at 5:01pm on a Friday afternoon at the end of a District Work Period in the waning days of the 113th Congress,” Issa wrote.

Issa said he is “disturbed” by the “apparently longstanding collaboration between the Obama administration and Ranking Member Cummings' staff to obfuscate and prejudice the Committee's work through under-the-table coordination.”

At the outset of the 112th Congress, when Republicans had just taken control of the House, Democrats forced former Rep. Edolphus Towns to step down as ranking member for fear that Issa would run roughshod over him. Since then, Cummings is widely considered to have done an effective job pushing back against Issa-led investigations.

In many cases, documents provided to congressional committees by the White House and administration are preemptively leaked to the media as they are being released to Congress. Called the “document dump,” the practise frequently occurs on Friday afternoons to help mitigate the political damage from the news contained in the documents.