Throughout the Scandal Mania season in May, the right tried to remain focused on the controversies they truly cared about: Benghazi and the IRS. The story about AP phone logs was interesting, but was dismissed as a distraction (it didn’t help that Republicans largely agreed with the Justice Department’s actions). The NSA story was a blockbuster, but GOP lawmakers couldn’t think of anything President Obama did that they disapproved of.
And so the party kept Benghazi and the IRS on the front-burner, to the exclusion of everything else.
That proved to be an unfortunate decision. By late May, efforts to turn the attack in Benghazi into a political controversy had completely unraveled, with every Republican allegation having been discredited. No problem, conservatives said, there’s still the IRS story to obsess over.
Except, it’s finished, too. The original charge was that the White House used the tax agency to target political enemies, but we now know the IRS applied the same scrutiny to liberal and conservative groups, and the White House wasn’t involved anyway.
If you’re House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, what do you do? Apparently, you quickly try to switch back to your original love. House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Tuesday subpoenaed four State Department officials as part of his investigation into the administration’s response to the Benghazi mission attack. In a sharply worded letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Issa wrote that State chief of staff David Wade has been uncooperative since being first approached in mid-May with the request to make 13 State Department personnel available for depositions. Captain Ahab is hunting two white wales, and hasn’t quite figured out that both will always be just out of reach.
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