While House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is not ready to demand a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS conservative and Tea Party targeting scandal, he warned that Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice should not be trusted to handle the investigation on its own.
“We definitely should not solely rely on the work of that Department,” Goodlatte said in his interview with Breitbart News on Tuesday before Wednesday’s hearing. “The first thing that Congress needs to do is exercise its own oversight responsibilities, which includes the work being done by the Ways and Means Committee and has been ongoing for quite some time by the way.”
Goodlatte said he was first made aware of the scandal well before the election, because Tea Partiers in his district reached out to him to express their concerns. “I contacted them and indicated that I wanted to pursue this further on their behalf because I felt this was outrageous over a year ago,” Goodlatte said. “The Congress will in many respects investigate this aggressively. What is done beyond that, I think, is going to depend upon what comes out of these initial investigations. Whether that leads to something further or not, it depends on what kinds of criminality becomes apparent and who is involved in doing that and whether the public and their representatives in the Congress are satisfied that the investigation and the prosecution of those who violated the law is being done well. If it’s not, I think we will look for other avenues to pursue it. But right now, I think we need to get more of the facts. They’re coming out by the hour right now.”