Freedom Line Blog

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey says appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS scandal would be a bad idea because the investigator would still report to the President.

Better, Mukasey said, for congressional investigations to continue, with a potentially ironic assist from one of the most corrupt divisions in the Department of Justice.

“Ironically, if you decide to have a criminal investigation, I would think that perhaps the proper entity to investigate is the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which has been charged politicizing the way it enforces the law and would have an excellent opportunity to redeem itself and get out from under those charges if it were to conduct an impartial investigation,” Mukasey added.

Though I’m a big fan of Mukasey, particularly his tenure as AG, I just don’t see how the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division gets near this case. In order to prove Mukasey right, the Division would have to conclude in its investigation that major wrongdoing occurred, recommending resignations, fines or criminal charges. Anything less and the Division will be accused of rolling out a whitewash to cover for the Obama administration.

This doesn’t even mention the fact that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, as the Mukasey quote alludes to and our own Quin Hillyer has argued, is a breeding ground for corrupt applications of the law. How these legal weasels can be trusted with playing such a sensitive investigation straight is beyond me.

No, the closest we’ll get to an independent arbiter on any of the Obama scandals will be the federal judiciary, and even then there’s no guarantee. Best for the House to continue exercising its oversight responsibilities until they find some smoking guns.

H/T: The Daily Caller