McConnell: IRS Revelations 'Just The Beginning'

EXCLUSIVE: McConnell: IRS Revelations 'Just The Beginning'

 

by Ben Shapiro                              

On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) fired back on assertions by the IRS that its efforts to target conservative groups were relegated to low-level employees. “Of course not,” he told Breitbart News. McConnell noted that he had raised the issue of IRS targeting of conservatives in 2012, and further noted that the Washington Post “dismissed it as a bunch of red herrings.”

The scandal, McConnell said, extends up the chain. “The Obama effort to shut up opponents isn’t limited to the IRS,” he stated. “It applies to the FCC [Federal Communications Commission], SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], FEC [Federal Elections Commission], HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] …. And you remember, the Obama campaign last year published a list of eight businessmen who it believed were enemies.”

McConnell further noted reports that the Department of Health and Human Services had been contacting businesses “skeptical about the implementation of Obamacare and asking them to contribute money to sell the program to the American people. That’s absolutely improper if not illegal. This administration will stop at nothing to get its way. It will do anything it can to silence its critics.”

McConnell said would not trust any Democrat-led investigation into the IRS scandal. He added with regard to a House investigation of the IRS’ activities, “I’m confident they will do it in the way in which it ought to be conducted, with a high level of skepticism about an agency trying to silence the critics of the Obama administration.”

He also added that the recent IRS revelations were “just the beginning of the story. This is no little thing. This is a big thing. The good news about it is they finally got caught. They finally messed with an agency everybody fully understands. When they try to quiet the critics through other agencies, it doesn’t get attention. This does. Everybody understands the IRS and how powerful they are. This is just one example of an administration-wide effort to silence critics.”

 

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).