WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama found himself in the unusual position on Monday of echoing GOP outrage about revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted tea party groups, while slamming his adversaries for creating “a sideshow” for reviving a the 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. “Coming within a week of revelations that the White House lied to the American people about the Benghazi attacks and the IRS targeted conservative Americans for their political beliefs, 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 nonprofit status to undergo more scrutiny.
But Obama said that 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. “I will not tolerate it.”
But on a second battlefront with Republicans, the confrontation about 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 for inaccurate comments made by Susan Rice, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations.
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 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.
But the president pushed back, saying his administration officials have been forthcoming about Benghazi and suggested that 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 about the actions of IRS personnel – are easily explained.
The public paid limited attention to last week’s congressional hearings about Benghazi, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Forty-four percent of Americans say they are following the hearings very or fairly closely, virtually unchanged from late January when Hillary Clinton testified. Last October, 61 percent 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 people 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.”
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