IRS Agents keep taking the Fifth.

Not to distract from the Supreme Court wars, but there’s an ostensibly nonpartisan situation going on over at House Oversight:

A second IRS employee summoned to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee invoked the Fifth Amendment on Wednesday and refused to answer questions — a flashback to Lois Lerner, who did the same during a hearing on the agency’s scandal last month.

Gregory Roseman, who worked as a deputy director of acquisitions at the IRS, exercised his constitutional rights when Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) started interrogating him about panel findings that he helped a friend procure potentially $500 million worth of IRS contracts.

The “friend” is one Braulio Castillo, who is accused of using his connections to directly benefit his newly-acquired company Strong Castle – while apparently denying the relationship when asked. The other major allegations – manipulating the rules involving subsidizing businesses that operate in specific business zones, and manipulating the rules for special consideration for disabled veterans – probably fall under the category of “the crime is that it’s legal*.” Still, the relationship between Roseman and Castillo is apparently… problematical.

More to the point, it’s of course intolerable to the Republic to allow the people who gather our taxes to recreate the Byzantine civil service system. The Internal Revenue Service enjoys a remarkable reputation, historically speaking: which is to say we allow tax collectors to live among us in society, and never make them wear special clothing so that an angry mob can find them easily whenever the ruling class feels the need for a good, tension-relieving pogrom. Cases like this erode that reputation at the best of times; when coupled with the realization that the IRS has also been a political weapon for the last five years… well. It becomes very easy to believe and expect that the whole organization is rotten to the core.

Which is a problem, because we happen to need the tax revenue. My various libertarian friends to the contrary.

(Via Hot Air)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Although that didn’t stop Rep. Tammy Duckworth – an antiwar Democrat who is nonetheless also unquestionably a disabled combat veteran – from savaging Castillo in a fashion that I might politically tut-tut (Castillo didn’t make the system that he was manipulating), but personally found very satisfying.

5 thoughts on “IRS Agents keep taking the Fifth.”

  1. Pingback: Tammy Duckworth may not be my Ideological Soulmate, but WOW! | Thinking Out Loud

  2. Well, I’m one of your various libertarian (commenters), and I happen to think that we need the tax revenue too. I believe that taxes can be justified on libertarian grounds. And just because I don’t believe that most of our *current* taxes could be so justified…doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the truth of your penultimate pre-sentence signature.

  3. Meh, the I.R.S. has been a political weapon for the Democrats since the day it was created (The Wilson iteration, don’t know about the first one). That, I think, is why Nixon had to be destroyed, because the Democrats knew exactly what the I.R.S. could do, and they weren’t going to share. We are just hearing about it now because of the Internet and people like you keeping it going, despite the desperate attempts of the MSM to bury the story like they did old splash’s fun….

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