Friday, June 14, 2013

Where's... Holly?


There's a version of "Where's Waldo" going on in Washington.
An IRS source says that the Internal Revenue Service has fired Holly Paz, the director of the agency’s Rulings and Agreements office. The source says Paz was fired last Friday, and a second IRS source tells National Review Online that Paz “dropped of the edge of the world” that day, and that her agency-issued computer, phone, and Blackberry show no activity since then. The IRS would not confirm or deny reports of Paz’s firing, citing her right to privacy as protected by federal law.

As of Thursday, the voice mail on Paz’s work phone remains active and callers are asked to leave a message for Paz, though nobody answered repeated calls placed to that number. Calls to the mobile phone number listed under Paz’s name in the IRS’s internal directory are sent straight to voice mail, and indicate her mailbox has not yet been set up.

Who is Ms. Paz?

As the director of Rulings and Agreements, Paz served as the first line of management in Washington, D.C., that oversaw both the tax-law specialists who provided guidance to agents in Cincinnati reviewing tea-party applications and the Determinations Unit in Cincinnati charged with processing those applications. Paz has served in that position since January 2011, reporting directly to Lois Lerner...
Oh. Ms. Paz was the IRS hack in Washington who did Lois "The Fifth" Lerner's dirty work in the suppression of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

It gets better. Here's the hoot:

Lawmakers have also raised eyebrows at the fact that Paz was present when members of the inspector general’s team interviewed her subordinates during the course of their investigation. In a May 23 Oversight Committee hearing, chairman Darrell Issa expressed his astonishment, saying he was ”shocked” to find that Paz “participated in virtually every one of the interrogations or interviews with her own subordinates.” He added, “In those, of course, one of the questions the IG had to ask was, ‘Did anyone tell you to do this?’ If that question was asked, their own superior was in the room.” 
Even the ranking member of the committee, Democrat Elijah Cummings, no fan of Issa’s investigations into the administration’s misconduct, had harsh words for Paz. “It sounded like Ms. Paz felt like she needed to be in the room because she wanted to be able to defend herself – or the agency, I don’t know – based on what may have been said or the information gathered in that interview,” Cummings told inspector general J. Russell George. “Usually when you are conducting an investigation . . . you want to keep your witnesses separate because you’re in search of the truth and you are trying to make sure there’s no advantage of a person hearing what somebody else said.”

According to Issa, Paz told the committee that either she or Lois Lerner requested to listen in on the interviews. He read from the committee’s interview transcript, quoting Paz: “I can’t remember if I made the request or Lois Lerner made the request, but we discussed that in order for the IRS to be able respond to the report we had to understand what information [the inspector general] had and what they were being told.”
Heh. During the Treasury Inspector General's investigation of the attack on conservative groups, interviews by "investigators" with the little pawns were always carried out with their supervisors in the room. 

So you can imagine how the question "who told you to do this?" was answered.

If this were a movie, at this point we'd complain that the plot was ridiculous.

But there's more.

Treasury inspector general J. Russell George-- the apparatchik in charge of the "investigation" of Barack Obama's IRS in which subordinates were asked about crimes committed by supervisors who were in the room with them-- dated Michelle Robinson when they were students together in Harvard Law School.

Michelle Robinson Obama, that is.

It would be nice if we could walk out of this movie. The plot is absurd-- nobody could be this corrupt. But we can't walk out, because this movie is about us. 

7 comments:

  1. Here's a good one called "The Cincinnati Lie"

    http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=1AC3B98C-531A-4988-B23B-5CDB8E8ED4B5

    Every word that comes out of their mouths is a lie. All they know how to do is lie and bully people with the power of government. They're like third world banana republic dictators.

    TRISH

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJune 14, 2013 at 10:15 AM

    One of the questions posed by the proglodytes about the NSA controversy goes something like this: "Isn't it hypocritical to criticize Obama for NSA spying but not to have criticized Boo!sh?"

    As a long-time opponent of the "Patriot" Act, I am unmoved, of course.

    But for those who initially supported the Patriot Act and are now alarmed that the racketeers in the White House are watching their keystrokes (fuck you, Barack), George Will has a spot-on response:

    Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan. Now she also is a national security problem because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government...

    The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.


    Pigs like Lois Lerner and her politically deranged partisan accomplices are the precise reason many citizens now fear the intelligence community.

    And thank God for that. There's a silver lining in every cloud.

    [H]as there been a bigger con man in the White House than Barack Obama?
    --- Ralph Nader, Pacifica Network's "Democracy Now"

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    Replies
    1. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJune 14, 2013 at 10:22 AM

      By the way, I just did a Google search for "Fuck you" barack.

      I got 8,640,000 results. Maybe Mathoo will draw us a little map and publish that "hard data".

      Delete
    2. I’m sure Lois Lerner didn’t know about the NSA programs any more than you or I did. It’s not like Obama or can simply can sign a permission slip and let anybody do whatever they want with the Data. Let’s all hope that we come out of this mess with new national security legislation that clearly defines how the data can be used and by whom.

      -KW

      Delete
    3. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJune 14, 2013 at 11:01 AM

      You missed the point entirely, Popeye.

      "Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her..."

      The government is infested with these pigs. Consider Lisa Jackson's use of the "Richard Windsor" e-mail to avoid FOIA requests. Jackson's imaginary boyfriend, "Richard Windsor" (in the criminal world, that's called an "alias") even received ethics awards, training certficates, and - if memory serves - a government credit card.

      If you want to trust those lying pigs, fine.

      Delete
  3. Issa, the toothless dim-witted pit bull, has got nothing. This Partisan hack will try to keep it in the news a bit longer, and conservatives will of-course take the unproven allegations as statements of historical fact, but basically, the story is over.

    -KW

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    Replies
    1. Considering how much they've already admitted, I don't think that they're unproven allegations. All defenses employed by the administration have unraveled, so I wouldn't get carried away with such wishful thinking just yet.

      TRISH

      Delete