The moment is arriving

I'm old enough to remember Watergate; my dad had a strong interest in politics and we were faithful watchers of the evening news and maintained a subscription to the local newspaper, so we stayed up on things to the extent one could 40 years ago. The key thing about Watergate was that the news media in this country were following and sharing the developments every day, so Watergate was a constant presence, a drumbeat in the distance that was continually getting louder.

Forty years on, if you want to hear the drums, you need to check with London first:

Republicans dropped a hammer on IRS Commissioner John Koskinen during a testy hearing covering the disappearance of emails tied to the agency's tea party targeting scandal.

The emails, covering the period January 2009 to April 2011, belonged to embattled former official Lois Lerner and could shed light on whether an expansive scheme to single out conservative groups for special scrutiny was guided by members of Congress or administration officials outside the IRS.

'The committee requested all of Lois Lerner’s emails over a year ago,' said House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa. 'And we subpoenaed the emails in August 2013 and again in February 2014. ... You worked to cover up the fact they were missing and only came forward to fess up on a Friday afternoon after you had been caught red-handed.'

'You personally did not cause the targeting,' he told Koskinen, referring to the tea party scandal. 'You personally did not destroy the emails. But by your actions and your deception, you now own this scandal.'
'We have a problem with you,' Issa sniped at the front end of a three-hour, 36-minute ordeal, 'and you have a problem maintaining your credibility.'

That is the reportage from the Daily Mail, the sometimes salacious London newspaper which has been dominating the coverage of the various machinations of this scandal. The Washington Post, which led the way in covering Watergate, is devoting some coverage of the event, but you need to scroll down their website a fair amount before you find anything about it this morning. Here's a screen shot:

Scroll down a bit and you do get there, eventually:

Nothing on what happened last night, yet, but you do get dueling opinion columns, with Michael Gerson decrying the IRS and noted praetorian guard Dana Milbank decrying the investigations of the IRS. Scroll down a bit more, and you finally see this:

The takeaway? The leading watchdog in Washington would prefer not to cover this unpleasantness, which they'll happily leave to the tab with the Page 3 girls. Still, the coverage of the salacious tab is useful, because it does remind us that Congress is going to push this matter and that eventually the courts are going to get involved. The drumbeat might be hard to hear, but it's out there.