Quote of the Day: Darrell Issa Wins the Chutzpah Award for June

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From Republican attack dog Darrell Issa, responding to a request from Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) that he release full transcripts of interviews with IRS workers, not just cherry-picked excerpts:

Your push to release entire transcripts from witness interviews while the investigation remains active was reckless and threatened to undermine the integrity of the Committee’s investigation.

Once again, there’s a little piece of me that admires such naked chutzpah. Issa is basically saying that it’s OK to release little pieces of the interviews that are ripped out of context to create a false impression of White House involvement, but it would be reckless to release full transcripts that pretty clearly shows the White House had nothing to do with any of this.

Who thinks up this stuff? It might occur to me to mumble something about an ongoing investigation and then duck back into my office, but to go on the offense and explicitly suggest that releasing full transcripts would be reckless? It takes a special kind of mind to think you can get away with that.

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It’s risky, but also unavoidable: A full one-third of the dollars that we need to pay for the journalism you rely on has to get raised in December. A good December means our newsroom is fully staffed, well-resourced, and on the beat. A bad one portends budget trouble and hard choices.

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We simply can’t afford to come up short. There is no cushion in our razor-thin budget—no backup, no alternative sources of revenue to balance our books. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the fierce journalism we do. That’s why we need you to show up for us right now.

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