President Obama found himself in the unusual position Monday of echoing
Republican outrage over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted
Tea Party groups, while slamming his adversaries for creating "a sideshow" for
reviving a long simmering imbroglio over his administration's response to last
year's attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Libya.
By the end of the day Monday, the administration found itself battling yet
another potential crisis as lawyers for the Associated Press charged that the
Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of
reporters and editors for the AP in what the news agency called a "massive and
unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.
"We take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal
regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone
records of media organizations," the Justice Department said in a statement in
response to the AP's allegations. "Those regulations require us to make every
reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means before even
considering a subpoena for the phone records of a member of the media."
Attorney General Eric Holder is scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary
Committee on Wednesday, and will likely face questions on the matter.
"This is obviously disturbing," said Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House
Oversight and Government Committee. "Americans should take notice that top Obama
Administration officials increasingly see themselves as above the law and
emboldened by the belief that they don't have to answer to anyone."
Obama stopped short of apologizing for the IRS or calling for any particular
action against agency officials in his first public comments since the IRS
acknowledged last week that employees in the Cincinnati office routinely
required conservative organizations seeking non-profit status to undergo more
scrutiny.
Obama said anyone found to be guilty of such actions should be held accountable,
while calling the actions by agency personnel "outrageous."
"I've got no patience for it," the president said in a joint news conference
with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who was visiting the White House on
Monday. "I will not tolerate it."
On a second battlefront with Republicans, the ongoing confrontation over the
administration's response to last year's attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi,
Libya, that left four Americans dead, Obama is not giving an inch.
Republicans hammered Obama during last fall's presidential campaign over
inaccurate comments made by Susan Rice, Obama's ambassador to the United
Nations, made days after the incident suggesting the attack was related to
protests spurred by an anti-Islamic video.
And Republicans have revived scrutiny of the White House on Benghazi in recent
days, including last week's House Oversight Committee hearing that featured the
No. 2 U.S. official in Libya at the time of the attack describing how his pleas
for a military response to the assaults were rejected. Last week, internal
e-mails unveiled showed that his senior aides and State Department officials
edited out references to terrorism in early "talking points" put out by the
administration last September.
The president pushed back, saying administration officials have been forthcoming
about Benghazi and suggested Republicans are more interested in scoring
political points than figuring out how to prevent such incidents from happening
again in hot spots where U.S. diplomats and other personnel are deployed.
"There's no 'there' there," Obama said.
From a strictly political calculus, Obama's sharply contrasting responses to the
two brewing scandals -- dismissive on Benghazi while expressing outrage over the
actions of IRS personnel -- are easily explained.
The public paid limited attention to last week's congressional hearings on
Benghazi, according to a Pew Research Center poll published on Monday.
Forty-four percent of Americans say they are following the hearings very or
fairly closely, virtually unchanged from late January when Hillary Rodham
Clinton testified. Last October, 61% said they were following the early stages
of the investigation at least fairly closely.
But getting picked on by the IRS, whether you agree with the Tea Party or not,
is something that folks of all political stripes can relate to.
"It's like a tire, they wear out after a while if you keep driving them," said
John Straayer, a political scientist at Colorado State University. "This thing
with the Internal Revenue Service could resonate with people for a while, just
because it is the IRS and people can relate to it in a way ... but I'm not sure
how much staying power that it will have either."
With the IRS debacle, lawmakers -- including Republican upstart Sen. Marco Rubio
-- are effectively raising questions about how this could happen under the watch
of someone who promised to bring a new kind of leadership to Washington.
Rubio, of Florida, on Monday called for Obama to fire acting IRS Commissioner
Steven Miller and filed legislation that calls for the mandatory firing of IRS
employees who willfully violate the constitutional rights of a taxpayer.
White House spokesman Jay Carney deflected questions on whether the IRS and
Benghazi controversies could make it even more difficult for Obama to work with
Republicans in Congress who had already proven resistant to working with him on
his legislative agenda.
At a political fundraiser Monday in New York, Obama lamented that some
Republicans are "fearful of their base, and they're concerned about what Rush
Limbaugh might say about them."
"My intentions over the next 31/2 years are to govern," Obama said. "If there
are folks who are more interested in winning elections than they are thinking
about the next generation, then I want to make sure there are consequences to
that."
