The Mother of All IG-Gate Updates

On the Internet, stuff gets scattered around so that you never see it all in one place. Today's IG-Gate Update at the Hot Air Green Room pushes the story forward:

Behind closed doors on Capitol Hill last week, I asked a Republican source about the investigative efforts of Democratic staffers for the House Oversight Committee.
"Honestly?" the source said. "They're useless."
More than three weeks have passed since Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) joined the committee's ranking Republican, California Rep. Darrell Issa, to launch an investigation into the case of former Amtrak inspector general Fred Wiederhold Jr. . . .
Despite the "grave concerns" expressed by Towns and Issa three weeks ago, however, Republican sources on Capitol Hill have complained that Democratic staffers on the Oversight Committee have not shown much zeal for the investigation. Sources say Democratic staffers have skipped meetings and conference calls to which they were invited by GOP investigators, who are attempting to work with Grassley's staff in order to prevent unnecessary duplication of efforts. Sharing documents and scheduling interviews with witnesses, allowing Republican and Democratic investigators from both chambers an opportunity to question these witnesses, is a demanding logistical task. And GOP staffers complain that this task seems to be lacking in terms of bipartisanship. . . .

Read the whole thing, because toward the end, I make this point:

This is a huge story, involving multiple investigations, and 1,200 words here don’t even begin to summarize the 1,400 words there [at The American Spectator on Monday], to say nothing of the 400 words I did last night about the SIGTARP report.

Like I said, read the whole thing, and follow the links, because this is one big sprawling mother of a story. The best I can do in any single chunk is to bring in new facts, new quotes, new angles, and link to as much other the other stuff as possible. (That Green Room article includes more than 25 links, including the link to the Spectator article, which has more than a dozen links.)

If you'll go to Bob Belvedere's WWU-AM and scroll down, he's got a huge IG-Gate link dump with my reporting, Byron York's reporting, columns by Michelle Malkin, reports from ABC News, the Washington Post, etc. There's a lot of stuff out there, in other words, and you need to see it all if you want to try to understand this thing.

"Try," I say, because I don't even claim to understand it all yet. My sources talk about things and sometimes I can tell they're trying to drop me a hint of something they want me to write about, e.g., "Who Is Eleanor Acheson?" It's important to ask the right questions, as one of my sources said.

On the one hand, there is the temptation to focus on one aspect of the story -- the Washington Times keeps calling this "WalpinGate," which is too narrow -- but on the other hand, you've got to be careful not to waste time playing "connect-the-dots" with things that might not really be connected. Yes, there's a pattern, but that doesn't mean there's a conspiracy.

Still, as I predicted on June 18 -- right after Michelle Malkin's first column on the Walpin case slapped me upside the head -- this story isn't going away anytime soon. June 18 was the same day IG Fred Wiederhold delivered his report to the Amtrak board and suddenly retired, and also the same day Chuck Grassley made public his letter about the International Trade Commission IG, Judith Gwynne.

So barely a week after Walpin got his June 10 quit-or-be-fired ultimatum from White House lawyer Norm Eisen, there were two other IG cases. Then we have the case of the watchdog who's still hanging tough, SIGTARP, Neil Barofsky. The bailout watchdog showed yesterday how much trouble he can cause, and it's therefore no mystery why Treasury's giving Barofsky a hard time. (My money's still on Barofsky as the IG most likely to get a Cabinet secretary sent to federal prison.)

IG-Gate is a big mother, you see. Because I'm on deadline for a print magazine article, there's no time for me to do a complete aggregation now, but here are the major IG-Gate articles I've done so far:

• July 21: IG-Gate UPDATE: Behind the Scenes of the Investigations
• July 20: Behind Closed Doors
• July 14: The Little Scandal That Could
• July 9: Democrats Question AmeriCorps Officials Stonewall on IG Case
• June 28: Media & IG-Gate: Question the Timing?
• June 28: NTC Special Report: Obama vs. the Watchdogs
• June 25: Grassley: Amtrak 'Systematically Violated' IG Law
• June 25: Obama Plays Hardball With Watchdogs
• July 19: The 'Domino Theory' in the IG Scandal

Each of those items is chock-full of links to other items. As you can see, just six weeks into this story, there's a lot of stuff out there -- and, no doubt, a lot more to come. Just keep hitting the tip jar.

One of these days, I plan to hit the American Spectator with the mother of all expense reimbursement requests -- "$800 for fireworks?" "Promotional activity. Perfectly legitimate, Al." -- but in the meantime, Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Just in case you're wondering why Professor Reynolds loves this story so much, I once again remind you to read the whole thing. The professor's drooling at the prospect of The Mother of All Chris Dodd Updates.

Meanwhile, be sure to check out the IG-Gate Rule 3 memo, which offers more tasty watchdog morsels.