marc thiessen is an american enterprise institute scholar, charlie, and marie harf, former state department person, all fox news contributor fox news contributor s. great to have you with us tonight. charlie, take the first go at this, the latest in this irs scandal. i really think it s kind of like 2016 all over again, a complete rejection of barack obama s eight years in congress. it is the trump administration kind of apologizing for the mistakes that barack obama made, and the worst of it is the palletization of every aspect of our government. but it also puts the notion that lois lerner, this is just mismanagement and that lois lerner didn t do anything wrong, and it raises a real question about whether or not the justice department will reevaluate its decision not to prosecute her, because they have evidence now
justice department. he says it is a clear sign she had it out for conservatives. these e-mails really show lois lerner s political bias and state of mind. look this is a serious matter when conservatives only were targeted. progressives weren t. reporter: it has been more than a year since lerner came to congress and refused to answer questions. she since retired from the irs but republicans are demanding accountability and now they are renewing their call for a special prosecutor to investigate. in may, lerner was found in contempt of congress. in june, irs officials said many of her e-mails were destroyed in a computer crash. she s maintained her innocence through her attorneys but they had no comment when asked by abc news about the new e-mails. the messages that surfaced raised new questions about whether tea party groups were targeted and whether lerner s bias against conservatives was pervasive inside the agency. jeff zeleny, abc news, capitol hill. the victim of a tea part
some newly released e-mails suggest that lois lerner didn t think much of right-wing republicans. lerner used to head the irs division that handled request for tax-exempt status. e-mails show learner deliberately targeted conservatives. here is abc s jeff zeleny. reporter: a new look at lois lerner, the irs official at the middle of the firestorm targeting tea party groups. she never explained herself. taking the fifth when called before a congressional committee. i have not done anything wrong. i have not broken any laws. reporter: but new e-mails may reveal a clue about her politics. it turns out she was openly hostile to at least some right-wing republican groups. so we don t need to worry about alien terrorists, she wrote, it is our own crazies that will take us down. another irs employee replied, well, you should hear the whacko wing of the gop. lerner uses salty language to describe conservative talk radio hosts. now the chairman of the house ways and means committee
we now have stage 2 of what the irs is doing with these latest new regulations they ve proposed that would completely shut down the political speech of these same organizations. all right. so let s say that it happened. there s enough evidence to say that it happened. and we have plenty of anecdotal evidence from tea party people themselves. we tried, they gave us the run-around, they audited us. dr. ben carson got audited. now, somebody had to order this. somebody had to make it happen. lois lerner, obviously her attorney feels she s got some criminality problems or she wouldn t take the fifth. if lois lerner didn t have any criminality problems, why would she bother? maybe she s shy. i don t know. do you see it that way? i do see it that way. particularly because remember, before she asserted the fifth the first time she said, i did not do anything wrong but then she went ahead and asserted the fifth amendment. okay. so suspicion falls on her, and then if it falls on her and
conservative organizations. the same thing didn t happen to liberal organizations. and by coincidence this all happened just before the president s re-election. many of those organizations still haven t been granted their tax-exempt status. so we know that but we don t know who did what. respond to this, if you would. this is an e-mail from lois lerner, who won t say anything. tea party matter very dangerous. this is an e-mail from her to her subordinates. this could be the vehicle to go to court on the issue of whether citizens united, overturning the ban on corporate spending applies to tax-exempt rules. what does that mean? citizens united, overturning the ban. what does that mean? what it means is they were very unhappy over the fact that the supreme court said in that case that non-profit organizations can engage in political speech. i mean, that s this is a political memo, lois lerner venting she didn t like the supreme court s ruling. and then she says, cinci, that