The death of two Watergate-era officials — Johnnie Walters and Howard Baker — is news any way you slice it.
But the news has added relevance today, coming as it does in the same week as IRS Commissioner John Koskinen’s smug and snarky appearance before Congress.
Walters, who died Tuesday at 94, was one of two IRS commissioners who resisted orders from the Nixon White House to use the agency as a political weapon.
Walters says that in 1972, he was handed a copy of Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” by White House Counsel John Dean and told to start auditing and investigating those on it.
A shocked Walters refused — his predecessor, Randolph Thrower, had resigned rather than comply with the same order — and hid the list in a safe. He stepped down a few months later and eventually turned the list over to congressional investigators.
His reasoning was simple: Although politically motivated IRS harassment had been done under JFK, Nixon’s order “would have ruined the entire tax system. If you louse that up, and it was loused up by these people, we don’t have a democracy.”
Cut to today. Unlike these Nixon orders, there’s no evidence Barack Obama or any White House official targeted Americans for IRS harassment.
But also unlike with Nixon, American organizations with political views contrary to President Obama’s have been harassed because of their politics by the IRS under Obama’s watch.
Which is why Walters had recently expressed his concern over the IRS targeting of conservatives. “[The] IRS must be run non-political,” he warned, or else “our tax system will fail.”
As for Howard Backer, who also died this week, he was vice chairman of the Senate select committee investigating Watergate when he famously asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?”
It’s a good question. But as we’re now learning with this newest scandal, sometimes we have to dig even deeper than that.