IRS scandal, cont’d: “It was pretty much a proctology exam through your earlobe” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Once the scandal momentum gets going, however, people start in on all sorts of efforts to connect dots that may not have any necessary connection or even qualify as dots at all. Example: at the Daily Caller this morning, reporter Patrick Howley is out with a story headlined, “Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner’s husband’s law firm has strong Obama connections.”

Curious, I read on to see which law firm with strong Obama connections Lerner’s husband, an attorney named Michael Miles, is a member of. It turned out to be Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan, a pillar of the Atlanta legal establishment known for its strong tax practice.

Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan is a so-called BigLaw firm. Per the American Lawyer’s profile, it has 387 lawyers and represents all sorts of clients, with an emphasis on corporate work across a wide range of industries.

So what’s the evidence that Sutherland has “strong Obama connections” or is tight with White House Democrats? Here it is: according to Howley, the firm:

hosted a voter registration organizing event for the 2012 Obama re-election campaign, praised President Obama’s policy work, and had one of its partners appointed by Obama to a key ambassadorship.

Really? In a 387-lawyer BigLaw firm, those are the strongest Obama links Howley was able to come up with? As with virtually all BigLaw firms, Sutherland has attorneys active in both parties who host events favorable to one side or the other. It took me only a minute or two on search engines to confirm that Sutherland lawyers and alumni are quite successful in landing prominent appointments under Republicans. Here’s a 14-year Sutherland alum (though he’d moved on to other employers in the interim) who served as National Executive Director of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney in 2000 and went on to a distinguished career as ambassador appointed by that administration. Here’s a Sutherland attorney (“top lawyer at the Pentagon for six years”) nominated by President George W. Bush to the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Of course, some BigLaw firms do have a distinct coloration that falls toward one side of the political spectrum while tolerating the occasional maverick from the other. Is this true of Sutherland? I consulted the Open Secrets database and found that in the last election cycle the firm’s lawyers donated $41,700 to Mitt Romney and $35,413 to Barack Obama. In Congressional races, the firm’s lawyers donated $38,040 to Republican candidates and $25,350 to Democrats. The biggest recipient by far in the Congressional races? Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who got $16,250 from Sutherland lawyers. Overall, these figures would rank Sutherland as not a particularly heavy hitter among law firms in federal donations. Twenty other law firms’ attorneys gave upwards of $1.2 million in the last election cycle, mostly leaning much more toward the Democratic side than did the donations from Sutherland’s attorneys.

I suppose “Embattled IRS official Lois Lerner’s husband’s law firm has strong Ted Cruz connections” would have made for too confusing a headline on a Daily Caller lead story.

The Daily Caller fires a blank at Lois Lerner is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

The Treasury Inspector General’s report on the affair, released yesterday, is here. (Coverage roundup: Paul Caron, TaxProf.) It makes clear that many groups were singled out because of their controversial political stances and then subjected to both objectively unreasonable document demands (e.g., for thousands of pages of documentation) and objectively unreasonable delays (e.g., for two years) in resolving their applications. (The Service seldom if ever actually denied applications from the singled-out groups, perhaps because its actions would then have come under more rigorous court review). Meanwhile, other groups with controversial views of a different political valence were waved through. It is not a question of whether applications for tax exemption should somehow be “approved without question,” as some have contended, but whether they should come under review that is even-handed and with no more delay and regulatory burden than is inherent to the process. At Time, Michael Scherer collects past examples that suggest IRS retaliation against political adversaries is something of a tradition in America. (Similarly: Cato video podcast).

P.S. Defending itself against the Inspector General’s report, the IRS says the applicants flagged for special scrutiny “included organizations of all political views.” It points to three such left-leaning groups — out of 471 in all singled out for extra screening. [Bloomberg via Newser] Much more: Gregory Korte, USA Today (“As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved … the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups.”) Meanwhile, L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik is unafraid of going way out on a limb to defend what the Service did: if you don’t want to be harassed for your dissidence, it seems, you shouldn’t have sought (c)(4) status in the first place.

Yet more: Reuters has illuminating coverage of how the Service tried to break one of the year’s biggest stories on a Friday afternoon via a friendly question before a room full of tax lawyers. (“They made a bet that this would be the quietest way to roll it out,” [Eric Dezenhall] said of the IRS strategy. “It didn’t work.”) “Did Citizens United Critics Push the Agency To Misbehave?” asks my Cato colleague John Samples, while Tim Lynch adduces “Some Empirical Evidence of IRS Political Manipulation”. The BBC has a lexicon of political scandal euphemisms (“tired and emotional,” “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” etc.)

Was the IRS scandal a surprise? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

P.S. A blog reaction from Tom Freeland.

“‘I’ll take care of it’ — with five words, a billionaire transformed into a felon” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

More from Kevin LaCroix:

An earlier WSJ.com Law Blog post reported (here) that Cauley was in fact a protégé of Bill Lerach. Today’s article on Bloomberg (here) about Cauley’s criminal sentencing notes that Cauley joins a growing list of plaintiffs’ securities class action attorneys who have “been jailed for felonies,” including Bill Lerach himself and his former law partners, Mel Weiss, Steven Schulman and David Bershad, and including even Marc Dreier.

These gentlemen of course made their living for many years accusing corporate officials of fraud. Ahem. Yes, well…isn’t ironic, don’t you think?

Gene Cauley gets seven years is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Mississippi: Judge DeLaughter sentenced to 18 months is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Two books set to hit on Scruggs scandal is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Attorney toppled diet-drug case Goliaths” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“Gallion gets 25 years, Cunningham 20 in fen-phen fraud case” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

At a barbershop in 1994, [Cauley] says, he picked up Forbes magazine and saw a profile of Lerach; it was the famous article, where the attorney was quoted as saying, “I have the greatest practice . . . I have no clients.”

Cauley approached Lerach and was soon launched in a thriving class action practice (“His usual way to deal with things was to yell and bang things and threaten,” said a fellow plaintiffs lawyer, Glen DeValerio of Boston.) It came crashing down under revelations that the Little Rock, Ark.-based lawyer took $9 million from clients’ settlements to spend on firm overhead and unrelated investments. [Koppel/WSJ, ABA Journal, interview-based WSJ Law Blog story first, second]

The rise and fall of Gene Cauley is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system