Lois Lerner has finally broken the silence since pleading the Fifth before the House Oversight Committee. She granted an interview to Politico magazine, in which she did more whining than sharing any useful information.
What caught the most attention was that she said people shouldn’t be so angry with her, and compared herself to Jeffrey Dahmer:
BQ Among the hate mail, Lerner’s “favorite” is one that says she’ll “go down in history as the worst person ever in the United States.”
“I just thought, ‘Boy, worse than Jeffrey Dahmer?’” she asks, her face crinkling up, eyebrows pinching together in disbelief.
This statement, see, came in the middle of complaining about the “harassment” she’s received since leaving the IRS. It seems conservatives are trying to ruin her life.
Lerner doesn’t think she’s that bad…she just used the powers of her public office to punish her political enemies and grant favors to causes she liked. It’s not like she ruined anyone’s life.
See, she still thinks she did the right thing. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “I’m proud of my career and the job I did for this country.” She’s claimed that she isn’t even a political person, saying, “What matters is that my personal opinions have never affected my work.”
Maybe if she says it enough times, people will believe her?
However, people who have worked with her say she held such strong opinions that they did affect her work. A former coworker at the FEC, where Lerner prosecuted campaign finance violations, told Politico, “Lois’s ideology is against money in politics, is ‘anti-contribution’; that’s her bias. Her ideology inhibited fair administration of the law.”
Aside from asserting her innocence, the reporter notes that Lerner “studiously avoided answering fundamental questions about her role in the IRS scandal that could land her in deeper trouble with Congress.”
But she didn’t shy away from explaining how hard it has been for her to pay her legal fees. No one will hire her—imagine that! And a $100,000 federal pension doesn’t go as far as it used to.
In short, Lerner refuses to back down on her refusal to cooperate or give any information about her actions during a scandal that she’d rather the country could just let go. But the more defiant statements the public hears, the less willing we are to drop the matter. The citizens of America can’t back down—we need real answers. If Lois Lerner isn’t willing to give them, they can be found other ways.
