is anyone at the irs really being held accountable? forbes media chairman and editor-in-chief steve forbes joins us. good to see you, greta. greta: how do we make sure we have real action to clean things up? i think ultimately the only way, yes, you ll have more congressional investigations, which have been very educational, but ultimately i think we need a special prosecutor, who has subpoena powers, the powers to call grand juries, who can do a systemic investigation, who can start from people right on the ground and go up the chain, right into the white house. we had an irs commissioner, as we know, paid over 150 visits to the white house when his predecessor paid one visit to the white house. you have to do intein a systemic way. i don t like special prosecutors, but the abuse here, where they just didn t go after an enemies list, but citizens all around the country of a particular political persuasion,
acceptance. i think they re still in the rejection phase. he s still trying to figure out, can i do a foreign trip, make a big speech, to get people not to think about it. the next phase, and this happens in any big scandal, the amount of time you have to spend being briefed, the number of new things imagine the president suddenly walking in and saying, oh, gee, turns out the internal revenue service commissioner was in this building 157 times. you got to stop and say, who was he meeting with? i don t with the president 157 times. then you get the next story. then you get the next story. part of what happens is, you lose a great deal of your energy to be a leader just having to absorb all these punches, having to be briefed on what do they mean, how are we going to handle them, what are we going to do? greta: how do you make the determination whether something is political or something is a legitimate inquiry? i think this is something republicans have to be very
responsibility. there were lots of hints, sent letters, but didn te particularly fast. no, they didn t. we saw this before in the late 1990s, when there was a round of scandals, not on a scale we have today, but took outside scandals to bring about a real change. congress does not have a sadly affected oversight, but that s another reason why we need a special prosecutor. house side is going to sur sue investigations. senator durbin of illinois went on tv on fox last weekend and admitted that he did it and said he was straightforward about it. so congress can only do so much. we need a special prosecutor to get to the whole thing. we have a whole record. i think it will go in the white house, not just the irs. then we can take real remedial action, including a drastic downsizing of the irs. being a compassionate conservative, even though these people partied on the taxpayer
we have to have that kind of special prosecutor today. greta: if it furnishe turns t the president had nothing to do with this, no knowledge, totally confined within the irs, does he still have responsibility being the head of the country? absolutely. he set the tone for it back in 2010, when he pointed out these organizations, sometimes by name, hinting that they re controlled by foreign entities. then you have eight to ten senators sending letters to the irs, demanding investigations, threatening the irs that they didn t investigate. the irs going to respond and it did. it played politics on a scale we ve never seen before. we ve had abuses before, but never on such a systemic scale. it came from the president. the amazing thing is, greta, he didn t have to use secret meetings to do it. he did it right out in public. greta: is the congress also to be held accountable? they have oversight
the first stage is based on the facts we have now to determine who can no longer hold a position of trust within the irs. the second stage, which i know is where you re going, is to determine whether there was any underlying malfeasance or issues that would warrant dismissal. we ll follow the facts where they take us. we do not have that completed review if you don t know there s underlying malfeasance, why was somebody asked to resign? because it was determined they could no longer hold a position of public trust because of failures of oversight. so they were asked to resign just for to restore public trust for public perception, but or maybe political purposes? no, i wouldn t say that. i would say that when there s a breakdown in management, when there s gross mismanagement, you have to make tough decisions about whether that person can continue to hold their position of trust. greta: lois lerner on administrative leave, but still collecting a government paycheck from y