He has a role in the IRS e-mail scandal.
Detroit — “If you had to put a headline on what’s happening today, it’s ‘Mr. Integrity retires from the Senate,’” said Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) as part of a joint Senate–media schmoozefest honoring the retirement of the chamber’s longest serving member, Carl Levin.
In truth, however, “Mr. Integrity” leaves under the dark cloud of the most serious political scandal since Watergate.
Levin has been central to House investigations — led by his also-retiring Michigan colleague Representative Dave Camp (R.) — into whether top Democrats used the IRS to handicap tea-party groups in order to win the 2012 election. The investigation has been repeatedly stonewalled, most notably by the disappearance of e-mails that might reveal correspondence between Levin and IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner.
Not a word of it has made the media’s laudatory farewells; Americans have largely been kept in the dark about IRSgate thanks to Democrats’ allies in the press. Michigan media poured treacle on the departing Levin Friday. “Levin is Michigan’s longest-serving U.S. senator ever but his accomplishments far outdistance his longevity,” cheered Michigan’s largest paper, the liberal Detroit Free Press, in a typical dispatch.
This fall, Free Press editor Paul Anger gave Levin the paper’s “Shining Light Award,” gushing that the Michigan senator has “transcended politics and left a legacy of incomparable leadership.”
Levin decried “soundbite journalism” in his departing remarks on the Senate floor, but the cozy relationship between Levin and press corps is a greater concern. Levin and his media chorus trumpet his populist politics, yet his record is riddled with questionable public policy. Levin was a key supporter of the Community Reinvestment Act and the weakening of federal lending standards, which were at the heart of the 2008 subprime-mortgage financial crisis. When Republicans in 1999 attempted to strengthen lending practices, Levin stood in the way. “I oppose the provisions weakening the CRA,” thundered Levin from the well of the Senate.
Media coverage cheered Levin’s parting call to give more money to the needy “by closing egregious tax loopholes that serve no economic purpose.” Yet Levin is a key proponent of one of the tax code’s most infamous giveaways to the rich: a $7,500 tax break for well-to-do buyers of battery-powered cars. Indeed, Levin — a millionaire himself — benefited personally from this provision when he bought a $40,000 plug-in Chevy Volt.
But it is Levin’s connection to the IRS scandal that is most disturbing.
The destruction of Lerner’s e-mails has prevented congressional investigators from learning the details of her correspondence with senators — including Levin — who were calling on the IRS to silence grassroots Republican groups at the same time the agency was denying tea-party groups nonprofit status.
“Sen. Carl Levin, the head of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exchanged at least 12 letters . . . with the IRS in 2012 alone,” reported the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel in a June 19 column. “IRS officials, including Ms. Lerner, met with Sen. Levin’s staff in 2013. And former IRS Acting Commissioner Stephen Miller testified that the IRS acted in part because Sen. Levin was ‘complaining bitterly’ to the agency. In what forums? Were email conversations also taking place, behind the scenes, between the Levin office and Ms. Lerner and other IRS officials?”
Michigan media have largely ignored the scandal even as Camp — House Ways and Means Committee chairman and a respected, moderate Republican — has led hearings into the IRS’s obstruction. Strassel is virtually alone among national media in reporting on the most explosive political scandal since Richard Nixon’s cover-up.
Media outlets weren’t shy, however, in trumpeting Levin’s own claims of cover-up when it came to CIA interrogation tactics. “It reminds me of Watergate,” said Levin last Wednesday after a partisan Senate report disclosed that the agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogations after Levin pushed for an investigation into detainee treatment.
“We’re walking down the road which is a very dangerous road . . . for our country,” says Levin of the CIA interrogations allegedly contained on destroyed videotapes. The same might be said of the destruction of e-mails that could have shown whether Washington’s most powerful Democrats were using the IRS to win an election.
— Henry Payne is an auto critic for the Detroit News and a syndicated editorial cartoonist.