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Buffalo vs. Waukesha: To Biden, Some Mass Killings Are Worse Than Others
President Joe Biden delivers remarks May 17 in Buffalo, New York, decrying the mass shooting that occurred there three days earlier. Biden’s failure to travel to Waukesha, Wisconsin, after a similar massacre there six months earlier raises questions about his motivation for going to Buffalo. (Photo: Scott Olson/ Getty Images)
If the following news headlines were paired in an essay question on a high school Advanced Placement civics test, it might well be framed as “Compare and contrast.”
“Biden will travel to Buffalo on Tuesday following mass shooting, official says” — CNN, May 15
“Psaki says Biden has NO [emphasis in original] plans to visit Waukesha after the deadly Christmas parade attack ‘at this time’ because sending the president to a community ‘requires a lot of assets.’”— Daily Mail, Nov. 29
How can one explain the Biden administration’s diametrically different responses to these two mass killings, one week shy of six months apart?
Granted Buffalo, N.Y., is less than half the distance from Washington, D.C., that Waukesha, Wisconsin, is, but does sending the president to upstate New York really require fewer “assets”?
On May 14, a gunman killed 10 people and wounded three others at a Buffalo supermarket. Eleven of the victims were black, two of them white. Facing a first-degree murder charge is Payton Gendron, 18, who is white.
Last Nov. 21, an SUV struck and killed six people and injured 62 others at a Christmas parade in Waukesha. Police said the driver deliberately drove in a “zig-zag pattern” to hit as many people as possible.
Darrell Brooks, now 40, was arrested and charged with six counts of first-degree intentional homicide and 77 other charges. Brooks is black. All six who died were white, as were most of those who were injured. As if to downplay the racist angle, however, CNN initially reported: “A car drove through a city Christmas parade, killing six people,” as though it was one of those newfangled self-driving cars.
Gendron and Brooks each posted hateful, incoherent, racist rants online before their attacks.
Given the particulars of the two massacres, then, one might be forgiven for suspecting President Joe Biden’s visit to Buffalo after shunning Waukesha was a partisan political calculus aimed at feeding red meat to his left-wing base. If true, that would be both shameless and indefensible.
Absent any other explanation, we’re left to conclude that Biden views some crime victims as more equal than others and, by extension, some perpetrators as more heinous than others. In point of fact, both Buffalo and Waukesha were incidents of domestic terrorism and deserving of equal condemnation.
While there’s a role for a president as “comforter-in-chief” in the face of senseless tragedies like these, it’s hard to see how its helps comfort those who are grieving over losing family members, friends, and loved ones for Biden to inject politics into what should be a somber and solemn occasion.
“White supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison. It really is. Running through our body politic. And it’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes,” the president thundered May 17 in remarks at Buffalo’s Delavan Grider Community Center.
“We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America. None,” he added.
While few if anyone would dispute that, Biden would have been on firmer ground had he also denounced, with equal vehemence, Brooks’ online anti-white screeds for what they were—black supremacy. Racism is despicable, regardless of the color of its practitioners.
Also, in recounting other mass killings, Mr. Biden inexplicably left out Waukesha altogether, as though it never happened, citing Charleston, South Carolina; El Paso, Texas; Pittsburgh; Atlanta; Dallas; “and now in Buffalo. In Buffalo, New York.”
“[W]e are seeing an epidemic of hate across our country that has been evidenced by acts of violence and intolerance,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement the day after the Buffalo shootings. “We must call it out and condemn it. Racially motivated hate crimes or acts of violent extremism are harms against all of us, and we must do everything we can to ensure that our communities are safe from such acts.”
That’s a keen grasp of the obvious, Madame Vice President, but it would come across as more sincere if all hate crimes and mass killings were condemned equally, regardless of the race and ethnicity of the victims and perpetrators—and without regard to any perceived political advantage in condemning some, but not others.
This article first appeared at WashingtonTimes.com.
Open letter to President Obama (Part 656)
(Emailed to White House on 6-25-13.)
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here.
The federal government debt is growing so much that it is endangering us because if things keep going like they are now we will not have any money left for the national defense because we are so far in debt as a nation. We have been spending so much on our welfare state through food stamps and other programs that I am worrying that many of our citizens are becoming more dependent on government and in many cases they are losing their incentive to work hard because of the welfare trap the government has put in place. Other nations in Europe have gone down this road and we see what mess this has gotten them in. People really are losing their faith in big government and they want more liberty back. It seems to me we have to get back to the founding principles that made our country great. We also need to realize that a big government will encourage waste and corruption. The recent scandals in our government have proved my point. In fact, the jokes you made at Ohio State about possibly auditing them are not so funny now that reality shows how the IRS was acting more like a monster out of control. Also raising taxes on the job creators is a very bad idea too. The Laffer Curve clearly demonstrates that when the tax rates are raised many individuals will move their investments to places where they will not get taxed as much.
______________________
I hope we get the bottom of this mess at the IRS!!!
- June 7, 2013, 6:40 p.m. ET
Cleta Mitchell: How to Investigate the IRS
Cleta Mitchell, the attorney who helped expose the tax agency’s abuses, has a road map for identifying the culprits. It doesn’t stop in Cincinnati.
By JAMES FREEMAN
The woman who helped expose IRS abuse of conservative activists has more news to share: The abuse continues, and she sees no evidence that the White House, the IRS or the Justice Department is doing anything to end it. “This is not in the past tense. This is still going on,” says Cleta Mitchell, perhaps the country’s pre-eminent expert on campaign-finance and political tax law.
In 2012, Ms. Mitchell worked to persuade members of Congress that reports of IRS harassment of conservative groups were credible. GOP lawmakers demanded information from the IRS and triggered the internal audit that finally forced the agency last month to acknowledge abuses it had previously denied. Now Ms. Mitchell is determined to end the abuse and identify the culprits.
Don’t bet against her. A partner at elite international law firm Foley and Lardner, Ms. Mitchell is sketching out a road map to uncover the truth and force reform—whether or not the Obama administration cooperates.
So far it looks like the administration will not. Ms. Mitchell represents nine conservative organizations that, beginning around 2010, were subjected to unusual delays, in many cases unlawful demands for information, and in some cases unlawful releases of their confidential data. But she reports that despite filling out the paperwork required by law and regulation, only one of the nine has received the customary IRS approval letter to operate as a tax-exempt group. She says another client received a new letter from the IRS with “very bizarre questions” as recently as three weeks ago.
The Justice Department is allegedly conducting a criminal investigation of the IRS abuse. Has anyone from Justice contacted her or her clients to gather evidence? “Not about this. The FBI’s contacted some tea party leaders about their meetings and who comes to their meetings,” she says. “I guess they viewed the tea party as domestic terrorists.” She is puzzled that the feds aren’t asking about IRS targeting: “You’d think that they would, wouldn’t you?”
Terry Shoffner
They should, and perhaps the Securities and Exchange Commission ought to start a case file as well. Ms. Mitchell says she learned this week that the IRS even intervened in the business dealings of a donor to conservative causes. “There were two public companies that were in the process of trying to do a merger and somehow the IRS stepped in and demanded all this information and said, ‘If you don’t give it to us we’ll stop this merger,’ ” she says. “But I cannot get [the donor] to come forward . . . ‘Look I’ve been through this hassle with the IRS. I don’t need any more.’ People are really afraid and the donors are the most afraid.”
She has heard “a number of reports” of conservative donors “having been audited or hassled,” but she doesn’t have a sense of how many cases there might be. “I hear about them all the time, but so far they’ve been the most reluctant of all to talk.”
Ms. Mitchell, on the other hand, shows no fear as she talks strategy in Foley’s Georgetown office overlooking the Potomac River. Maybe that’s because this Oklahoma native has already overcome her share of daunting challenges.
“I was raised by a single mom. My dad was kind of a no-account,” she says with a chuckle. “But my mother made up for it. She was a very strong woman. Raised six kids.” And she demanded excellence from all of them. After Ms. Mitchell’s first term at the University of Oklahoma, “I made one B and my mother went around telling everyone that I hadn’t done very well but she hoped I’d do better the next semester.” She graduated with high honors and a Phi Beta Kappa key.
Like many of her classmates, she also developed a love for the school’s famed football team and proved to be as demanding about the Sooners as her mother had been about grades. Shortly after the team’s current coach, Bob Stoops, was hired in 1999, she met him at a Washington reception. “You know, coach,” she recalls telling him, “the good thing for you is you only need to win three games a year”—against powerhouses Nebraska, Oklahoma State and Texas. When Mr. Stoops responded that Nebraska wasn’t on the schedule that year, she replied: “Well, lucky you, you only have to win two games.”
These days, winning for her clients doesn’t necessarily mean collecting big damage awards. She says the harassed conservative groups are more focused on getting the truth out and ensuring that the IRS’s appalling conduct is stopped and never repeated. But the lever of potential monetary penalties could be useful in persuading senior government officials to come clean. Ms. Mitchell is hopeful that, even if the Justice Department sits on its hands, a combination of private lawsuits and congressional investigations can help ascertain who gave the order to target conservatives.
She has filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of an organization called True the Vote that names the IRS as well as previous and current IRS officials as defendants. She promises more lawsuits, including one on behalf of the National Organization for Marriage that had its documents leaked to its antagonists at the Human Rights Campaign.
Ms. Mitchell credits attorney Jay Sekulow for his suit on behalf of other conservative organizations and is encouraged by the work of lawmakers like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.). “They’re just getting started to get to the answers. The first round is the IRS dissembling, denying, deflecting. And now hopefully we’re beginning to get to some real information,” she says.
Thus far, senior IRS officials in office when the abuses began have often provided untruthful answers, first by telling Congress in 2012 that the IRS wasn’t targeting President Obama’s ideological opponents and more recently by suggesting that low-level employees were to blame. Sometimes they’ve been unwilling to provide any answers at all, such as when Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS unit overseeing tax-exempt organizations, asserted her Fifth Amendment privilege to avoid self-incrimination, but not before proclaiming her innocence at a congressional hearing.
In the civil lawsuits, government defendants will still enjoy their Fifth Amendment rights, but the truth may come out anyway. Ms. Mitchell notes that “civil discovery is much broader and doesn’t allow for as much opportunity to refuse to answer. There’s a magistrate who is appointed to oversee” and resolve disputes on specific questions. And if a person is forced to answer a question during a deposition, “the perjury statutes apply.”
But even if officials find ways to remain silent, they might not be able to contain the relevant information. Ms. Mitchell adds that “we are most interested in seeing documents,” and that includes emails. Such documents have hardly been examined, because while the IRS’s internal audit recently forced the agency to acknowledge abuses it had previously denied, the inquiry consisted mainly of interviews of staff with a supervisor present.
After denying for a year that IRS employees were targeting conservatives, IRS brass were forced by the imminent release of the audit last month to change their story. But they settled on another inaccurate claim: that the problems centered on a few misguided employees in a Cincinnati office. This was contradicted by a Wall Street Journal report this week that Cincinnati workers were being directed and even “micromanaged” by Washington, according to what one IRS employee told congressional investigators.
“I think the press has done a good job of exposing that it wasn’t just in Cincinnati,” Ms. Mitchell says. “I knew it wasn’t.” One of her clients has been waiting for approval for nonprofit status since 2009, she says, and for all that time the application was being considered in Washington. “I was told by the agent in Cincinnati, ‘Oh well, you send this stuff to us, but we have to send it all to Washington.’ ” She says that some unusual information requests to conservative groups have also come from the IRS office in Ogden, Utah.
She adds: “I just want to know who did what and when, and I want them to issue the letters and I want them to stop targeting and go back to the process” that prevailed before the current era of abuse.
This current era appears to have begun sometime after the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president, though the Obama campaign itself offered something of a preview. As the Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel has noted, in the summer of 2008 Obama campaign General Counsel Bob Bauer urged the Justice Department’s criminal division to investigate the officers and donors of a group called the American Issues Project after it ran a negative ad about Mr. Obama.
The organization was a client of Ms. Mitchell’s, so she learned firsthand about the tactics of the Obama campaign and Mr. Bauer: “He would send a letter to the Justice Department demanding that my clients be criminally prosecuted for exercising their First Amendment rights. And then I would write a response, and then he’d write another letter, and I’d immediately write a response.”
Mr. Bauer was named White House counsel in late 2009, shortly before the IRS appears to have begun its harassment of conservatives. Now in private practice, he seems like the kind of former official that conservatives might want to question under oath. Could it happen?
“We’d have to find that there was some communication between him and the IRS or something like that,” says Ms. Mitchell. Though much may remain to be discovered, she says, the targeting of conservatives in recent years has been remarkably open: “The communications were all pretty public. That’s one of the things that I don’t think has gotten enough attention, is the use of the IRS as a political tool. There are 17 Democratic senators who will literally sign anything put in front of them going after conservative organizations.”
She is referring to letters sent during the last election cycle by various Democrats urging IRS investigations, some of the letters even referencing specific conservative organizations. But Ms. Mitchell might just as easily mention the many speeches in which Mr. Obama has vilified groups opposing his policies and denounced them as threats to democracy or foreign-backed front groups.
All of this history inspires skepticism that the Obama Justice Department will make the abuse of conservatives a high priority for prosecution. So the job may fall to private attorneys like Cleta Mitchell. If she is intimidated at the prospect of taking on the IRS, she is showing no signs of it. “Where I come from in Oklahoma,” she says, “the wide open spaces are not just geography. It’s a mentality. You can be whatever you’re hoss enough to be.”
Maybe it’s the IRS’s turn to worry.
Mr. Freeman is assistant editor of the Journal’s editorial page.
A version of this article appeared June 8, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: How to Investigate the IRS.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
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