-By Warner Todd Huston
The ongoing revelations of the intimidation of conservatives executed by Obama’s IRS and FEC agencies are still coming to light but an interesting wrinkle to the story is the close relationship between CNN and NBC/MSNBC and those inside the administration perpetrating that intimidation.
NBC/MSNBC had recently hired former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn as an on-air analyst to comment on what is going on in Washington today. CNN has also featured Dunn as a panelist from time to time. Both did so ostensibly because Dunn is one of those most involved in the Washington scene and is a major player as a K Street lobbyist.
Dunn is a key operative at the well connected SKD Knickerbocker, a DC-based campaign communications group, and is also intimately connected to many other firms and lobbying efforts.
In fact, Dunn raised eyebrows during the 2012 presidential election when it was discovered how integral she was as a consultant for firms lobbying the administration even as President Obama was then claiming, as he has claimed for years, that he was eliminating lobbyists in his administration and “changing business as usual” in DC.
At the time, some Obama campaign aides privately complained that the revelations of just how much lobbying the former White House aide was involved in made their claim that they were cleaning up Washington look like empty rhetoric.
Since joining NBC/MSNBC, Dunn became another in a long list of former White House officials turned media talkers. It has become pretty plain that the Progressive media is revolving door for Obama administration officials (and vice versa), which is bad enough, but Dunn is also closely connected to one of those involved in the intimidation of conservatives being perpetrated by the Obama administration.
Dunn, you see, is the wife of Bob Bauer, the man whose name is now connected with new revelations that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) used IRS honcho Lois Lerner as a source of information to help him launch illicit investigations of the conservative group American Issues Project.
This new story of intimidation was reported by The Wall Street Journal on August 1 and revealed that Dunn’s husband, Bob Bauer, had illicitly contacted the IRS’s Lerner to get tax information of the conservative group so that he could use it in an investigation he was pushing at the FEC.
“This matters because FEC staff didn’t have permission from the Commission to conduct this inquiry. It matters because the IRS is prohibited from sharing confidential information, even with the FEC,” the Journal pointed out.
For the FEC to informally enlist the aide of the IRS to get dirt on an opponent just isn’t legal. But Anita Dunn’s husband, Bob Bauer, did so anyway.
Yet here we have CNN and NBC/MSNBC relying on Anita Dunn for commentary on Washington, the same Anita Dunn whose husband is involved in one of the most insidious attacks on American’s First Amendment rights in ages.
Both CNN and NBC/MSNBC should alert its viewers to this connection when Anita Dunn comes on to deliver her analysis so that viewers know they are getting the opinion of someone with a lot to hide.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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