In a two-minute 40-second Mitch McConell ad, titled "Demand Answers," he ties Obama to the recent IRS scandal rocking the White House, where the IRS was used to punish Obama's enemies, ending with the words “Intimidation, Retaliation, Secretive” across the screen with the audio of Barack Obama saying: "We’re going to punish our enemies, and we’re going to reward our friends."
That comment was made in a interview conducted by Univision with Obama in 2010.
[WATCH]- Demand Answers (Below the video is the description via The Hill)
The ad includes footage of IRS tax official Lois Lerner pleading the Fifth amendment during a congressional hearing on the agency’s targeting of conservative political groups and accuses the Obama administration of a “culture of intimidation.”
“Again and again, this administration and its allies have used the resources of the government itself to intimidate and silence those that oppose it,” McConnell says in the two-and-a-half-minute-long video, entitled “Demand Answers.” “I think that the leader of the free world and his advisers have better things to do than to dig through other people’s tax returns.”
The video cuts from clips of Lerner and other IRS officials either defending or claiming ignorance of the agency’s actions to a clip of Nixon saying, “if the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”
The video closes with the words “Intimidation, Retaliation, Secretive” unfurling on the screen over audio of Obama saying: “We’re going to punish our enemies, and we’re going to reward our friends.”
This ad capitalizes on the recent revelations that the IRS deliberately and systematically targeted conservative groups, Tea Party, Patriot and 9/12, as well as reports of the IRS putting additional scrutiny on pro-Israel groups who were told their tax exempt applications had to be sent to "a special unit in D.C. to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the Administration's public policies."
There are also questions about how many Mitt Romney donors were audited after being publicly targeted on Barack Obama's campaign website. (WuA covered both the pro-Israel targeting and the Romney donor audits, here on May 11, 2013)
With more and more coming out about the IRS targeting, every day, and Democrats like Max Baucus saying "a lot" more is going to come out, and recent reports showing that the IRS Commissioner visited the White House 118 times in 2010 and 2011, this is the perfect time for McConnell's ad tying obama to the IRS.
Full Wake up America coverage on the IRS scandal can be found here.