House Sends Subpoena to Eric Holder on IRS Scandal, Big Three Nets Refuse to Report

May 21st, 2014 1:12 PM

Frustrated by the Justice Department’s stonewalling of its IRS scandal investigation the House Oversight Committee, on Tuesday, sent a subpeona to Attorney General Eric Holder but you wouldn’t know that if you got your news from the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks.

The news that committee chairman Darrell Issa sent the subpoena to Holder, after a Justice Department official in charge of election crimes refused to testify about his role in the IRS scandal, went unreported on the Big Three’s Tuesday night and Wednesday morning programs.

On Tuesday the Washington Examiner reported the following: “The committee wants Richard Pilger, director of the election crimes branch at the Justice Department, to testify about his phone call to former IRS official Lois Lerner in which he asked Lerner how ‘DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applications who ‘lied’ on their 1024s - saying they weren’t planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures,’ as she recorded in an email after their conversation.”

The Examiner’s Joel Gehrke relayed committee chairman Darrell Issa’s concerns: “‘The Department’s refusal to allow Mr. Pilger to testify about matters highly relevant to the Committee’s investigation unnecessarily delays and frustrates the Committee’s Constitutional oversight obligations,’ committee chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., wrote to Holder. ‘The Department’s obstruction in this regard, coupled with its failure to produce any relevant material to date, leads the Committee to conclude the Department is not seriously committed to cooperating with the Committee’s investigation on the Committee’s terms. Therefore, the Committee is issuing the attached subpoena for the production of all documents requested by the Committee on April 23, 2014.’”