The timing of Obama’s meeting with IRS Chief Counsel
William Wilkins – just two days before Wilkins issued Tea Party targeting
guidance – is not the only thing, uh, strange about said meeting. The Tax Prof has received an e-mail
from an attorney in the general counsel’s office in a federal agency. The attorney states that this kind of
meeting with a President is out of the ordinary, improper, and, well, hard to
explain away.
I’ll restrain myself, dispense with further commentary,
and simply let the attorney speak:
As
someone who works as an attorney at an agency general counsel's office, I think
people are missing the significance of Obama meeting with the IRS chief counsel
in the White House. Understand, agency general counsels are not authorized to
give legal advice to the President. They advise their agency heads. Only the AG
and by delegation the Office of Legal Counsel to the President is authorized to
give legal advice to the President. In my seven years of working at a General
Counsel's office, I have never once heard of our general counsel meeting with
the President. OLC would go crazy if he did. I have worked on a couple of legal
opinions that did go to the White House. And each time they were staffed
through OLC. Nothing went to the President that wasn't signed off on by OLC and
delivered to him by OLC.
So I
can't for the life of me come up with any kind of innocent explanation for why
Obama would have met with the Chief Counsel of the IRS. That meeting shouldn't
ever happen, and especially not without the Commissioner of the IRS being
there. Presidents just don't go to agency chief counsels with legal questions.
Presidents don't go to anyone with legal questions. Their staff does. The idea
that the President would sit down with some random agency chief counsel and
discuss some pressing legal issue is just bizarre to anyone who has worked in
the legal field at that level. I am not sure the reporters covering this story
understand how legal advice is actually delivered to the President and just how
out of the ordinary that meeting was.
2 comments:
Maybe he was helping him with his itemized deductions and his contributions to some questionable non-profit organizations. :-)
Yes . . . that's it . . .now move along
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