Apparently prosecutors make good Congressmen sometimes -- especially in the face of corrupt officials. Trey Gowdy raises an important legal point, and then turns the IRS's defense into an invitation to consider what criminal charges ought to be brought against them.
I love hearing an IRS official stating that he doesn't need to know the law, because you can use "common sense" to know what's right. Yes, in theory, that's how it ought to be. The law ought to line up with common sense, such that an ordinary person need not be a lawyer in order to know how to behave in a fashion that is both moral and lawful. That is the only proper way to arrange a state, given the practical need of division of labor in an advanced economy: we can't train everyone as lawyers, because time and money for education are limited and we need most people to do other things. Therefore, the law should accord with the common sense, so that honest people can rely on the resources they can actually expect to have in order to be good citizens and avoid criminality.
Nothing could be further from the actual facts of how our Federal laws and regulations are ordered, however. How charming to see the defense -- which any court would reject were it raised by a citizen without legal training -- raised by a high official of a Federal regulatory agency who is himself a lawyer!
4 comments:
I particularly love hearing an IRS commissioner who's a lawyer claim he doesn't know what "spoliation of evidence" is, especially this year. Give me the biggest break. I'm not sure this guy would admit he knows what taxes are.
And I would NOT want Mr. Gowdy on my heels when I had a guilty conscience. He's got the classic "I'm just a country lawyer" thing going, all Jeff Foxworthy, but completely in command of his argument. Not that it will matter to most Americans, who will never see any of this.
Trey did more damage to K's mental defenses than Ryan's blustering. Difference between a trained interrogator vs merely an angry one with power.
You're right about that to a degree, although there's more than one way to interrogate. One of the best ones I ever knew was a female, who was good at getting her subjects to think they were going buddy-buddy with her in complaining about their bosses.
One person on the net described a customs experience at the Israeli airport, where a female agent interrogated him on certain aspects of his visit and background. He noted that he was continually distracted by her looks, as if they had custom ordered one just for him.
Which, they may have if they had access to Mossad's records of internet profiles of his girlfriends. Not that Mossad has such things, publicly speaking.
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