Republicans slammed the Friday announcement by President Donald Trump’s justice department that it will not investigate the official who allegedly oversaw the IRS’ secret sabotage of Americans’ civic groups before the 2012 election.

“This is a terrible decision,” said a statement from Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees taxes and the IRS. His statement continued:

It sends the message that the same legal, ethical, and Constitutional standards we all live by do not apply to Washington political appointees – who will now have the green light to target Americans for their political beliefs and mislead investigators without ever being held accountable for their lawlessness. Not only has the Department of Justice chosen not to hold [IRS manager] Lois Lerner criminally liable for obstructing an official investigation by the Inspector General, the Department continues to defend the Internal Revenue Service’s unconstitutional actions against taxpayers in ongoing civil litigation.

“The decision not to prosecute Lois Lerner is a miscarriage of justice,” said an accompanying statement from the chairman of the tax policy subcommittee, Illinois Rep. Peter Roskam. He continued:

On top of Ms. Lerner’s actions against taxpayers – denying tax-exempt status to groups for political gain and failing to protect taxpayer information – the Department’s response blatantly ignores our most troubling finding: that Ms. Lerner intentionally misled federal investigators in a flagrant violation of the law. This is unacceptable and Ms. Lerner must be held accountable. Our democracy is injured when those who taxpayers entrust with great authority ignore the law to advance their own political agenda without repercussion.”

Tom Fitton, head of the Watchdog law firm Judicial Watch, joined the criticism, saying:

DOJ and FBI conspired with Lerner’s IRS. No surprise they won’t prosecute her or themselves. @realDonaldTrump should order a review.

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) September 8, 2017

I have zero confidence that the Justice Department did an adequate review of the IRS scandal. https://t.co/eHNvqNqFcQ @JudicialWatch

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) September 8, 2017

The scandal has been underway since 2013 when the IRS admitted that its officials had slow-rolled and blocked routine requests for tax-exempt status from conservative Tea Party groups while giving quick approval to liberal groups. That obstruction of tax-exempt status made it difficult for the conservative groups to raise funds needed to campaign against then-president Barack Obama during the 2012 election. Under Obama, the IRS and the justice department stonewalled and blocked subsequent investigations, via many tactics such the destruction of email records.

GOP officials and members of the non-profit groups hoped that Trump’s deputies would investigate and prosecute the wrongdoing.

But the September 8 letter from the Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department said it would not even reopen the investigation because officials require “proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a government employee intentionally discriminated against an applicant for a tax-exempt status based on viewpoint.”

Prior investigations had found mismanagement that disproportionately hurt conservative groups, and the recently appointed department officials reviewed the new reports and concluded that  “reopening the criminal investigation would not be appropriate based on the available evidence,” said the Friday letter from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd.

That answer was a response to an April 12 letter from the two GOP leaders on the tax committee, which included more information about Lerner’s activities, and a request that the department “take a fresh look at the evidence presented in the attached referral.” The referral is provided here.

“I have the utmost respect for Attorney General Sessions, but I’m troubled by his Department’s lack of action to fully respond to our request and deliver accountability,” Bray said in his Friday statement. “Today’s decision does not mean Lois Lerner is innocent. It means the justice system in Washington is deeply flawed.”

 

 

 

 

Marji Ross, president of Regnery Publishing, spoke with Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday regarding Regnery’s decision to sever ties with the New York Times Best Sellers list.

Ross cited multiple cases where conservative books did not appear to do as well on the New York Times Best Seller’s List as their actual sales numbers indicate they should have.

When approached about the seeming discrepancy, Ross said the Times gave two different explanations. “One is, it’s a secret. Our formula is a secret. We don’t tell anyone how we do it,” said Ross.

The other answer she cited was that the Times samples stores across the country, which means it is quite possible the Times could be polling stores more likely to sell fewer conservative titles than others, leading to a skewed result.

Regnery is opting to switch to Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller List instead “because it is book scans,” she said. “It’s based on book scans. It’s beautifully transparent. They print not only the ranking, but they print the book scan numbers, so you can see that book number one really did outsell book number two.”

Additional information available here:

“We refuse to continue to highlight a list which has an increasingly diminished value to our audience. Therefore, we will no longer promote, publicize or frankly even bother to mention this list,” Ross added.

“Instead, we will continue to track sales, as a large number of media groups do, through Nielsen’s BookScan report, and we will use the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list as our benchmark.”

In a letter to Regnery’s authors, she noted: “We are often told it’s foolish to bite the hand that feeds you. I say it’s just as foolish to feed the hand that bites you.”

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

LISTEN:

Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney discussed the North Korean nuclear missile crisis with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily.

Gaffney said “it may or may not be true today” that North Korea can launch a nuclear warhead with intercontinental range, “but it’s for sure the case that that’s imminent, if not actually true now.”

“The problem is, of course, that when you have that kind of capability in the hands of this kind of regime, it does pose a mortal threat to the United States,” he warned. “I am of course concerned that even one of their less-powerful atomic weapons could be used to destroy a city or devastate part of our country.”

“The really worrying thing, which Kim Jong-un has now made explicit, is the distinct possibility long warned about by me, and members of our Secure the Grid Coalition – Jim Woolsey, former director of Central Intelligence; Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House; Ted Cruz, senator; and many others – is an electromagnetic pulse attack,” he said.

Gaffney said such an attack “could conceivably be unleashed on us at any time, perhaps by a nuclear weapon, maybe not even a thermonuclear weapon but an atomic weapon on one of their satellites from a vantage point in space that would rain down immense amounts of electromagnetic energy that would destroy – not just damage, not just turn off temporarily, but destroy – large parts of America’s absolutely vital electric grid.”

“The consequences of that could be truly nation-ending,” he said. “This not hyperbole. This is the result of a whole series, 11 at least, of studies that the United States government has performed over the years, that if the grid goes down – it could be because of sabotage, it could be cyberattack, it could be because of solar storms of a very intense kind, but electromagnetic pulse man-induced through these nuclear weapons is one of the ways most efficiently to take out America.”

“If Kim Jong-un has that capability, I believe that is indeed an existential threat to America and to its people. We have to be clear about that, and we’ve got to be about the business of protecting this vital, critical infrastructure immediately,” he urged.

Gaffney explained that EMP attacks involve “interaction between what’s called gamma rays that are unleashed by a nuclear weapon in space, and the upper atmosphere, which results in intense electromagnetic energy being unleashed.”

“Everything in line-of-sight of that detonation will be exposed to three phases of pulse,” he continued. “A very short phase, which can fry electronic devices, microcircuits, and the sort. The second phase is a medium length. It’s kind of like lightning. We’ve done a pretty good job of protecting our assets against that. The third is the long wave phase, and that can be transmitted into things we really care about, like high voltage transformers critical to the functioning of the grid or generators for that matter, through the high-voltage power lines that go across this country. They serve as perfect antenna for this kind of pulse.”

“Some people poo-poo this. The most serious, the most competent, the most informed group in the country on electromagnetic pulse and the threats that it poses has been in business since the early 2000s, the Congressional EMP Threat Commission. I urge every one of your listeners to just go look at this commission’s work,” he said.

“If you understand the physics of this, and the United States military, by the way, has understood the physics of this since the early 1960s, you realize this is no joke. This is no drill. This is no exaggeration. This is truly, as I say, a mortal threat to our country. We know what to do to protect our grid. That commission has been recommending action on this for about 15 years. We have to get about it because the country – and truly, tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans’ lives – are on the line,” Gaffney said.

“Nuclear war of the kind that we’ve worried about in the past, particularly from the Russians, now the Chinese, cannot be dismissed. In fact, both of those countries are expending enormous amounts of money to build not only new nuclear weapons and delivery systems, including hypersonic and maneuvering weapons that are designed to defeat what limited missile defenses we have at the moment,” he pointed out.

“So it’s not to say that is not a problem. It’s a problem that is actually getting worse, even though we choose to avert our gaze from it. Barack Obama was insistent we were going to rid the world of nuclear weapons, starting with ours. We pretended that the Russians and the Chinese and so on didn’t matter, even the Iranians, who we’ve now helped move a ‘great leap forward,’ if I can use that expression, towards the bomb,” he said.

“But the thing about EMP is, as I say, conceivably a single nuclear weapon detonated in space high over the United States could do the job of an enormous nuclear laydown,” Gaffney warned. “That just means it’s that much easier. The trouble is, this isn’t just speculation. Kim Jong-un, in his remarks accompanying the announcement about this H-bomb, explicitly has threatened the United States with a devastating electromagnetic pulse attack. We ignore this at our extreme peril.”

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.