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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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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