lawyers and executives in washington. and confused about the rules they were enforcing. so what s really going on here? one man with some insight into what lois lerner was up to today and what she might have known is marcus owens. he s with me now. he held her same position in the irs, director for tax exempt organizations, from 1990 to the year 2000. he s now a tax lawyer in private practice. mr. owens, thanks for coming on. enlighten us. why do you think she took the fifth? well, she had to. there have been calls for a criminal investigation. department of justice has answered those calls. and she s been accused of lying by members of congress. she had no choice, frankly. why not i m just going to play average citizen here. you can be the sophisticate from the government. or former government. why if you have nothing to hide and you re a truth teller and you re of sound mind, and she seems to be, why doesn t she sit in that witness stand and answer truthfully? what s she got to
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responsibility. the fact that you a top reporter for the new york times doesn t know yet who s in charge, it does make people think, what kind of an operation is this where nobody knows what anybody is doing? it s very strange, if you were watching yesterday s testimony, at one point they said they said the current irs they said we think we know who the manager and the specialists were. then they come back a few minutes later and say, actually, we thought we knew who the person was and we asked them. and we were wrong. and i find it astonishing. you would think it would be evident in document traces, e-mail traces, who got this going. even the ig apparently couldn t figure that out, which speaks to a level of kind of ineptitude in that office to some extent. you know, i have to ask about lois lerner, the one who s on the skillet now for taking the fifth. she should get credit, i think. i m not a lawyer in this case, but she should get credit for having blown the whistle on th
the white house. not that they instigated it. but they made a fateful decision to stay away from it and not shut it down. they didn t shut it down. and their argument is, you don t mess with the irs. i talked to a top obama person today who said, look, i m not so stupid that i m going to mess around with the irs. maybe that s true then. but the moment that lois lerner said on may 10th that we done wrong, the president shouldn t have waited another instant. he should have fired everybody. he could have gotten his hands on. he should have been the i think he should have been the chief prosecutor in this case. steve schmitt, would you advise the president if you were chief of staff, mr. president, you ve got little time. you better get out in front, or else mr. issa is going to get out in front. how about this, mr. president? you be the good guy. you blow the story. it s inexplicable why they didn t do it. there s has to be an awareness that barack obama was elected on the presidenc
it s called rolling disclosure. instead of getting ahead of that irs story, they ve taken a bumbling and piecemeal approach explaining what they knew and when they knew it. let s look at the timeline. may 10th. not so long ago. irs official lois lerner reveals the agency had inappropriately scrutinized conservative groups. president obama says he learned about the issue from news reports on that very day. white house press secretary jay carney sidesteps questions about the administration s prior knowledge telling the press corps i learned about it today. may 13th. three days later. carney says the white house was actually first told about the investigation of the matter sometime during the week of april 22nd. what were they told? they were informed the inspector general was finishing a review but that s all they were informed. turns out that wasn t true either. this monday carney said that white house officials were actually told key details about the ig report. that it focused on the