Issa Committee May Investigate One Of Its Own Members.

True The Vote Takes On Oversight Member Elijah Cummings For Allegedly Colluding With Lerner’s IRS

April 22, 2014 by Ben Bullard 

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Not long ago, on the same day the House of Representatives voted to hold Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) accused fellow Oversight member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) of taking an inappropriate, meddlesome interest in True the Vote, a conservative nonprofit group Lerner’s Internal Revenue Service division eventually targeted for discrimination.

Now True the Vote has taken up the fight, suggesting it may have sufficient grounds to convince the Oversight Committee to widen its IRS investigation to include one of the committee’s own members: Cummings himself.

The organization’s attorney, Cleta Mitchell, told The Daily Caller over the weekend that True the Vote has had a pending complaint against Cummings before the Office of Congressional Ethics since February. Her extensive interview on the topic, along with comments to the media last week, may indicate that True the Vote is ready to play its hand against Cummings and the role he allegedly played in directing the IRS’s attention to the Texas-based nonprofit during President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign

Mitchell told The Daily Caller:

On behalf of True the Vote, we filed a complaint against Rep. Cummings on February 6 with the Office of Congressional Ethics asking the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether Rep. Cummings or any member of his staff had played any role in getting any of the agencies that went after Catherine Engelbrecht and her family after she became involved with True the Vote. Two IRS audits about the business, her personal tax returns, two visits from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a surprise visit from OSHA, seven visits from the FBI. I mean, these are not coincidences. And so we wanted to know what role Rep. Cummings or any of his staff had played in any of that and why Rep. Cummings undertook to misrepresent that he was conducting an investigation of True the Vote, which we think was in violation of House rules.

Since the Oversight Committee first began looking into the IRS scandal in February 2012, Cummings has said early, often and repeatedly that the ensuing House Oversight investigation has amounted to nothing more than a partisan witch hunt that will never find a smoking gun.

But Mitchell and True the Vote now maintain that Cummings was, the whole time, attempting to defuse the investigation before Oversight members realized Cumming’s alleged involvement in the broader scandal. And Mitchell should know — she was the one who got a straight (or at least unequivocal) answer out of Cummings when she asked him about it during a Feb. 6 Oversight hearing:

Ms. Mitchell: We want to get to the bottom of how these coincidences happened, and we’re going to try to figure out whether any — if there was any staff of this committee that might have been involved in putting True the Vote on the radar screen of some of these Federal agencies. We don’t know that, but we — we’re going to do everything we can do to try to get to the bottom of how did this all happen.

Mr. Cummings: Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. [Mark] Meadows [R-N.C., Oversight Vice Chair]: Yes.

Mr. Cummings: I want to thank the gentleman for his courtesy. What she just said is absolutely incorrect and not true.

Mitchell filed the ethics complaint against Cummings, on behalf of True the Vote, that same day.