The Plot Thickens….Obama Met With IRS’ Top Lawyer

Not only that, the meeting was two days before that same lawyer wrote up the new guidelines for Tea Party groups.

The meeting William Wilkins attended with the President included 13 people, and took place in the White House on April 23, 2012.  The next day, the IRS Commission, Wilkins’ boss, was logged in to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.  And on April 25,  “Wilkins’ office sent the exempt organizations determinations unit “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general’s report.”

I’m sure this is all just a coincidence, and anyone calling attention to it is a hater and ought to be audited by…..wait!  Strike that!
My opinion carries very little weight in things of this kind, anyhow — all I’m working with is the data, some experience in observing human nature, and a bit of common sense.  But here is a letter sent to the TaxProfBlog by an attorney who works in the counsel’s office of a federal agency (anonymous for obvious reasons):

As someone who works as an attorney at an agency general counsel’s office, I think people are missing the significance of Obama meeting with the IRS chief counsel in the White House. Understand, agency general counsels are not authorized to give legal advice to the President. They advise their agency heads. Only the AG and by delegation the Office of Legal Counsel to the President is authorized to give legal advice to the President. In my seven years of working at a General Counsel’s office, I have never once heard of our general counsel meeting with the President. OLC would go crazy if he did. I have worked on a couple of legal opinions that did go to the White House. And each time they were staffed through OLC. Nothing went to the President that wasn’t signed off on by OLC and delivered to him by OLC.

So I can’t for the life of me come up with any kind of innocent explanation for why Obama would have met with the Chief Counsel of the IRS. That meeting shouldn’t ever happen, and especially not without the Commissioner of the IRS being there. Presidents just don’t go to agency chief counsels with legal questions. Presidents don’t go to anyone with legal questions. Their staff does. The idea that the President would sit down with some random agency chief counsel and discuss some pressing legal issue is just bizarre to anyone who has worked in the legal field at that level. I am not sure the reporters covering this story understand how legal advice is actually delivered to the President and just how out of the ordinary that meeting was.

If you are still interested, and if you want to be informed so that we can defend freedom in America, the Legal Ethics Forum has a post up that includes a number of links, plus the comments from other lawyers include one that is illuminating regarding possible claims of privilege.

None of this is business as usual, and if the GOP lets it slide, they they deserve to be supplanted by The American Conservative Party….or whatever a new second party will be named.