Kevin Drum

Rep. Darrell Issa says he is "deeply disappointed" that Rep. Elijah Cummings went ahead and released the full transcript of a House Oversight Committee interview with an IRS screening manager that Issa wanted to keep under wraps. Then this:

His own previous release of excerpts from this very same transcript undermines his claims that the Committee is somehow trying to keep some specific revelation from public view.

I'm not even sure what to call this. Chutzpah? Something else? Basically, Issa released a few highly misleading excerpts from the interview and repeatedly refused to release the whole thing. So Cummings released some excerpts on his own, and somehow this is supposed to be evidence that Issa wasn't trying to hide anything? Say what? I'll bet Nixon was sorry he didn't think of that defense.

While we're on the subject, though, I pulled a muscle last night reading the full transcript of this interview. (Seriously. It still hurts.) And for what it's worth, it really doesn't prove that there was no White House involvement in targeting tea party groups. The interviewee was a low-level manager of a screening group that does initial sorting into "buckets" of 75,000 applications per year. He made it clear that applications get only a cursory review in his group; that tea party applications were grouped together mostly for the sake of consistency; and that after three days his folks never see these applications again. He did state that he had no reason to think the White House was involved in the higher-level review of tea-party applications, but it was clear that he really had no way of knowing. It was way above his pay grade.

None of this is to say the White House was involved. There's never been any evidence of that, and based on what we know it's vanishingly unlikely. Republicans are just blowing smoke on this. Nonetheless, this particular transcript doesn't really tell us anything aside from the fact that a low-ranking manager was unaware of any political influence. But he probably wouldn't be even if there was.

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Today, disclosures about NSA surveillance programs leapfrogged the Atlantic to Germany:

“We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information, not just in the United States but in some cases here in Germany,” Mr. Obama said during the news conference. “So lives have been saved.”

He did not provide any details. But Mrs. Merkel, who acknowledged that Germany has received “very important information” from the United States, cited the so-called “Sauerland cell” as an example of such anti-terrorism intelligence cooperation.

Hmmm. So I guess the Sauerland cell is example #5 of terrorist plots broken up via NSA surveillance. This dates back to 2006, though. Of the 50 plots that Obama mentioned today (following Gen. Alexander's testimony on Tuesday), I wonder how many of them have been broken up recently?

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The Congressional Budget Office has scored the Senate's immigration reform bill, and the news is pretty good for deficit hawks. According to CBO estimates, the bill would:

• Increase federal direct spending by $262 billion over the 2014–2023 period. Most of those outlays would be for increases in refundable tax credits stemming from the larger U.S. population under the bill and in spending on health care programs....
• Increase federal revenues by $459 billion over the 2014–2023 period. That increase would stem largely from additional collections of income and payroll taxes....
• Decrease federal budget deficits through the changes in direct spending and revenues just discussed by $197 billion over the 2014–2023 period.

Compared to its baseline estimates, CBO also projects that if the immigration bill is passed, GDP will increase a bit over the next decade; wages will go down a bit but then rise in the decade after that; capital investment will rise; and the productivity of labor and of capital will go up. All of these effects are fairly small, however. Economically, a pretty reasonable takeaway is that immigration reform would probably have a positive effect, but not a large one.

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The House Intelligence Committee held a hearing today about the NSA's covert surveillance programs, and to demonstrate just how tough-minded they planned to be, here's what they called it:

How Disclosed N.S.A. Programs Protect Americans, and Why Disclosure Aids Our Adversaries

Fair and balanced! NSA's director testified that domestic surveillance had helped prevent over 50 "potential terrorist events":

In addition, the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sean Joyce, listed two newly disclosed cases that have now been declassified in an effort to respond to the leaking of classified information about surveillance by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor.

Mr. Joyce described a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange by a Kansas City man, whom the agency was able to identify because he was in contact with “an extremist” in Yemen who was under surveillance. Mr. Joyce also talked about a San Diego man who planned to send financial support to a terrorist group in Somalia, and who was identified because the N.S.A. flagged his phone number as suspicious through its database of all domestic phone call logs, which was brought to light by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures.

The Kansas City man is Khalid Ouazzani, who, as part of a plea bargain in 2010, admitted that he sent money to Al Qaeda. He was never charged with planning any attacks inside the United States, and the NYSE bombing was described as "nascent plotting," so it's hard to know just how serious this was. Still, at least Ouazzani actually did something. The San Diego man merely planned to send money.

So far, the government's examples of terrorist plots prevented by the NSA's surveillance programs have been pretty thin. Aside from these two, they've also taken credit for stopping David Headley and Najibullah Zazi. But Headley scouted locations for the 2008 Mumbai bombing, which was successful. So no points there, though NSA might have prevented Headley from doing further damage. As for Zazi, he was indeed planning suicide bombings on the New York subway, but it's unclear just how instrumental NSA surveillance really was in catching him.

None of this is to say that NSA's claims are false or that their surveillance programs are ineffective. But most of their claims are unverified, and the few they've made public appear to have been exaggerated. So take this all with a grain of salt.

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