Rep. Jim Jordan, head of the House Freedom Caucus, said Wednesday the similarities between the Justice Department’s investigation of IRS targeting and its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails is similar enough to make him “nervous” about how the Clinton investigation will end.
“I’m very nervous about a Justice Department that I think is way too focused on politics and not singularly focused on the administration of justice,” Jordan told the Washington Examiner.
The Ohio Republican, who sits on the House committee that hopes to grill the IRS commissioner next week, said President Obama publicly dismissed the possibility of wrongdoing while each investigation was underway, politicizing both the IRS and the Clinton email probe.
“We know it’s political because the chief — the highest person in the executive branch, the president of the United States — said on national television, ‘There’s no corruption here. Not even a smidgen,'” Jordan said of the Justice Department’s investigation into whether the IRS singled out conservative groups for extra scrutiny at the height of the 2012 election.
“If that’s not sending a message to the very people who work for him and his administration and his Justice Department that, ‘Hey, everything’s ok, you don’t have to prosecute anyone,’ I don’t know what is.”
President Obama said in a February 2014 interview with Fox News that there was no evidence to suggest the tax agency’s targeting of Tea Party groups was the result of corruption. The Justice Department did not wrap up its investigation of the IRS scandal until October 2015, at which time no officials were charged with a crime.
Jordan noted the president made the same overture in the Clinton email controversy when he proclaimed during an October interview that Clinton’s private server arrangement did not put national security at risk. FBI agents are presently investigating the former secretary of state’s decision to host all government communications on her personal email network.
But many Republicans have said they worry the Justice Department will decline to prosecute Clinton given her position as the Democratic Party’s presumptive standard-bearer.
Jordan highlighted an additional similarity between the IRS and Clinton email investigations that arose when implicated officials chose to exercise their Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer questions, then their respective agencies claimed to have lost their emails.
“In the targeting scandal, Lois Lerner takes the 5th, and then, ‘Shazam!’ They lose her emails,” Jordan said of the former head of the IRS’s tax exempt unit, who resigned amid allegations that her office singled out conservative groups’ applications for extra scrutiny.
The IRS told congressional investigators it was unable to locate Lerner’s emails because the records had been lost in a computer crash.
“One of the key figures in Secretary Clinton’s email controversy, Bryan Pagliano, comes in front of the Benghazi committee, takes the 5th, and suddenly we find out [from the State Department], ‘Wow, we can’t find his emails either,” Jordan said.
Pagliano set up the private server in Clinton’s home and reportedly received an immunity deal in exchange for his testimony to the FBI.
In a recent Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, State Department officials claimed they could not find any emails sent to or by Pagliano during his stint at the agency.
