Free Republic

On August 12, Joe DiGenova, attorney for one of the Benghazi whistleblowers, told Washington D.C.'s WMAL that one of the reasons people have remained tight-lipped about Benghazi is because 400 U.S. missiles were "diverted to Libya" and ended up being stolen and falling into "the hands of some very ugly people." DiGenova represents Benghazi whistleblower Mark Thompson. He told WMAL that he "does not know whether [the missiles] were at the annex, but it is clear the annex was somehow involved in the distribution of those missiles." He claimed his information "comes from a former intelligence official who stayed in...

The Internal Revenue Service is still targeting tea party and conservative groups in their applications for tax-exempt status, a full three months after the scandal first erupted. "In plain English, the IRS is still targeting tea party cases," an aide to Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Washington Examiner.Camp, a Michigan Republican, released a transcript of testimony from an IRS agent who told a Ways and Means investigator that the agency was still targeting such groups, the Examiner reports. The testimony was given in a closed-door session on Aug. 1, according to the...

A new video shows Lois Lerner talking about the pressure being brought to bear on the IRS to halt GOP money going into the 2010 election: Newly uncovered video shows Lois Lerner discussing the political pressure that swirled around the IRS in 2010. Lerner says "everyone" was "screaming at" the IRS to stop the flood of money pouring into the 2010 elections through 501(c)(4) groups as a result of Citizens United. Lerner spoke to a small group at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy on October 19, 2010, just two weeks before the wave election that brought the Tea Party...

America has a two-party system. But it’s not Republicans versus Democrats. It’s the ruling class — Republicans and Democrats — against everyone else. Consider how President Obama just gave Congress its very own Obamacare waiver. Obamacare includes a provision that should cost each member of Congress and each staffer $5,000 to $11,000 per year. Needless to say, the ruling class was not pleased. Congress wasn’t about to try to exempt itself from this provision explicitly, though. If John Q. Congressman voted to give himself an Obamacare waiver that his constituents don’t get, he wouldn’t be John Q. Congressman much longer....

Valerie Jarrett is a well-known figure in the Obama administration. She has been around Barack Obama for several years and is probably most remembered for her statement that payback time would come after the 2012 election. Many have speculated that she is the real power in the White House and given Obama's infatuation with her, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that was the truth. What really troubles me is how she seems to be at the center of every important decision or event that takes place within the Obama administration. Her name is continually popping up and Benghazi is...

<p>To adapt H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the cynicism and self-dealing of the American political class. Witness their ad-libbed decision, at the 11th hour and on the basis of no legal authority, to create a special exemption for themselves from the ObamaCare health coverage that everybody else is mandated to buy.</p>

The New York Times Company may be facing some serious scrutiny over its planned sale of the Boston Globe to Boston Red Sox owner John Henry for a mere $70 million, after having paid $1.1 billion in 1993. The owner of the San Diego Union-Tribune, Douglas Manchester, is alleging that his higher bid was rejected by the company. John Lynch of the Boston Herald writes: A losing Boston Globe contender is claiming his San Diego media company outbid Red Sox owner John Henry - and would have gone even higher - a bombshell allegation that he says could delay the...

Suddenly it is imperative that Congress investigate details surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens. I've never felt that way before. But Jake Tapper's scoop changed my mind. To be clear, it isn't at all certain that the CIA was secretly funneling Libyan weapons to Syria, long before Congress "lifted its hurdles" on arming Syrian rebels. But if CNN's report is correct, the CIA is at minimum trying to hide something huge from Congress, something that CIA agents might otherwise want to reveal -- itself a reason for Congress to press hard for information. And if speculation about moving...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama has chosen a retired corporate and government official with experience managing numerous organizations in crisis to take over an Internal Revenue Service under fire for targeting political groups. Obama said his nominee for commissioner of the tax agency, John Koskinen, "is an expert at turning around institutions in need of reform." "With decades of experience, in both the private and public sectors, John knows how to lead in difficult times, whether that means ensuring new management or implementing new checks and balances," Obama said in a statement. "Every part of our government must operate...

Today, the Thomas More Society has submitted an updated second memorandum to Congressman Aaron Schock (IL-18) of the House Committee on Ways and Means, detailing additional evidence of continued IRS targeting of pro-life organizations. Despite claims by the Obama Administration that the harassment has ceased, the Society produced over 230 pages of documentation showing that the federal government is still interrogating pro-life groups beyond the scope of its legal authority, infringing upon these organizations’ First Amendment rights of assembly, free speech, and religious liberty.“Despite claims to the contrary, the IRS continues to target and harass pro-life and conservative charities, illegally questioning...

<p>While speaking at an annual conference of hacker and cybersecurity experts on Wednesday morning, National Security Agency head Gen. Keith Alexander was heckled by members of the audience for his agency’s surveillance operations and for his controversial testimony before Congress.</p>

Rep. Darrell Issa has announced that he is expanding his investigation into IRS targeting of conservative groups to deal with alllegations that the tax agency put groups already tax exempt under additional scrutiny. The Hill: The IRS subjected conservative groups already granted tax-exempt status to additional scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) charged on Monday. Issa called on a Treasury watchdog already looking into the IRS to investigate the matter, and signaled he would expand his committee's probe into improper targeting of political groups given the new revelations. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the...

Since the ouster of Mohammed Morsi from the presidency of Egypt on July 3, there has been a noticeable uptick in the number of attacks against security personnel and installations in the Sinai Peninsula. Eight army checkpoints were attacked on Monday alone, according to Ma'an News Agency. New claims from Egypt's Interior Ministry suggest that in an attack over the weekend, a US-made missile may have been fired by militants at a security installation in el Arish. The Times of Israel reports: Jihadists attacked the Egyptian security headquarters in northern Sinai ostensibly using an American-made ballistic missile, Egypt's interior ministry...

CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Treasury secretary Jack Lew on Sunday got specific about President Obama’s contention that “phony scandals” are distracting lawmakers from tackling the important issues facing the country. With regard to the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, Lew said, there is “no evidence” that any political appointee was involved in the matter, and “The attempt to try to keep finding that evidence is creating the kind of sense of a phony scandal that was being referred to there.” “We have to distinguish reality from the part that is phony,” Lew told NBC’s David Gregory. He went...

Amazingly, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew doesn't think it's "appropriate" for him simply to ask the IRS's chief counsel (and President Obama's political appointee) William Wilkins what he knows about the targeting scandal. Obviously, it's much easier to continue to insist that there's "no evidence" of wrongdoing if one goes far out of one's way to avoid learning any potentially unwelcome facts. Jack Lew Refuses To Answer If William Wilkins Has Been Asked About IRS Targeting

The establishment press's general refusal to cover clearly newsworthy developments in the Obama administration scandal involving the targeting of conservative, tea party, prolife and other groups by the Internal Revenue Service has been so negligent and blatant that several leading conservatives, including the MRC's Brent Bozell and talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, called it out in an open letter earlier this week. Consistent with the rest of their colleagues, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, appears to have had no substantive story on the scandal since July 18 -- and that one was about primarily Democrats beating the false meme...

“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals,” p. 126 As the amnesty debate rages on, one has to ask: Why is it so important to this criminal administration to give a license to illegals to come into America? While most Americans are under the delusion that people favor this administration, the real question is, who exactly supports Barack Hussein Obama? Let’s go down memory lane and recollect just who (so you’ve been told) gives him all this support. If you remember...

July 18,2013 IRS Political Targeting Scandal: Democrats, Media Desperate to Shut It Down as Links to White House Emerge by Graham Noble A damning indictment of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) continues to emerge Thursday, during a Congressional investigation into the agency’s targeting of Conservative organizations. Congressional Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media are desperate to shut this investigation down as details linking the IRS strategy to the White House emerge. The Democrats are arguing that delays in processing applications for tax-exempt status from TEA Party and other ‘patriot’ groups – plus the extra scrutiny that these groups...

Scandal: A retiring IRS lawyer implicates the IRS chief counsel's office, headed by an Obama appointee, as well as the head of the IRS' exempt organizations office. The targeting included a Tea Party Senate candidate. In Thursday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee, 72-year-old retiring IRS lawyer Carter Hull implicated the IRS chief counsel's office headed by William J. Wilkins, who attended at least nine White House meetings, and Lois Lerner, head of the exempt-organizations office, in the IRS scandal. In so doing, he made clear the targeting of Tea Party groups started in Washington and was directed from Washington....

Congressman Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, said today on the House floor that survivors of the Benghazi terror attack have been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements: "On Tuesday I raised the question of why none of the Benghazi survivors, whether State Department, CIA, or private security contract employees have testified publicly before Congress," said Wolf. "According to trusted sources that have contacted my office, many if not all of the survivors of the Benghazi attacks along with others at the Department of Defense, the CIA have been asked or directed to sign additional non-disclosure agreements about their involvement in...

About 50 people fled from a suspected immigrant smuggling truck as a Sheriff's Department car approached in Jim Wells County, Texas

The IRS has been credibly accused of targeting conservatives as a way to minimize their participation in the 2014 elections. But there is a mirror image to their suppression in the last cycle; the Obama campaign's utilization of Big Data to bring liberal partisans to the polls. It was something that the press writing of admiringly both before and after the election, for example: Time: How Obama's number-crunchers helped him win Businessweek: Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big-Data Brains Other outlets have confessed to some trepidation: Gizmodo: How the Obama Campaign Uses Your Personal Information to Get Your Money...

“There are legitimate questions to be asked about political groups that are hiding behind a 501(c)4 status,” Nyhart said in a statement provided to ABC. “It’s unfortunate a few bad apples at the IRS will make it harder for those questions to be asked without claims of bias.” Visitors to the 1133 19th St. NW office floor shared by Common Cause and Public Campaign are greeted at the sign-in desk for Common Cause, with Public Campaign’s office located to the visitors’ left-hand side. Nyhart described the close relationship between the groups in his April 23 eulogy for Edgar on the...

In the summer of 2010, with Republicans poised to take over the House and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in line to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the White House started urging reporters to write negative stories about the congressman’s past, a new book says. (article continues at link)

This is one of those many instances when we realize how dangerous (and stupid) big government really is. If there is one thing we can almost always depend on, it is that any legislation that is passed by Congress and signed into law by the President will have unintended consequences. Many times, legislation is used for purposes for which it was not intended. Immigration reform meeting Obamacare fits that description nicely. It is also a good example of what happens when the people we vote into Congress fail or refuse to do their jobs. Would it be too much to...

Twelve different groups within the IRS targeted conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt nonprofit status, according to the attorneys representing tea party plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the IRS. The revelation disproves the suggestion by a top congressional Democrat that only one IRS group was responsible for scrutinizing tea party and conservative applications.

The public won't officially see or hear President Obama's climate change speech before he delivers it this afternoon at Georgetown University, but liberal supporters already have it — and are even commenting on it hours in advance.

The recent IRS and NSA scandals reveal that the Federal government, during the first term of President Obama, used the IRS to weaken the political campaigns of Obama's opponents, and that the NSA collected and stored personal information on virtually all Americans under the guise of national security. The IRS scandal proved that Federal agents refused 501(c)3 and (c)4 status to conservative political groups. That tax-exempt status was needed for political groups to receive donations. The Supreme Court has ruled that campaign donations -- to any political group or party -- are free speech. The IRS then, by denying tax...

In an email sent hours before his death in a fiery single-car crash in Los Angeles Tuesday, award-winning journalist Michael Hastings reportedly wrote that he was working on a “big story” and was going to “go off the radar for a bit.” The subject of the email was “FBI investigation re: NSA,” KTLA reports. A copy of the email, sent on Monday, was reportedly provided to KTLA by Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, who was a recipient of the email. “Hey [redacted copy], the Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates.’ Perhaps if authorities arrive ‘BuzzFeed GQ’, er HQ, may...

"IRS Sent $46 Million in Tax Refunds to 23,994 ‘Unauthorized’ Aliens — All at the SAME Address in Atlanta" The IRS sent more than $46 million in tax refunds to 23,994 “unauthorized” alien workers who all listed the same address in Atlanta, Ga., in 2011, according to an audit report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). However, the Atlanta address that received millions of dollars in refunds was not the only address apparently housing thousands of “unauthorized” aliens. In fact, it wasn’t even the only address in Atlanta that was claiming such a situation.

June 21, 2013 IRS Sent $46,378,040 in Refunds to 23,994 ‘Unauthorized’ Aliens at 1 Atlanta Address Terence P. Jeffrey (CNSNews.com) - The Internal Revenue Service sent 23,994 tax refunds worth a combined $46,378,040 to “unauthorized” alien workers who all used the same address in Atlanta, Ga., in 2011, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).That was not the only Atlanta address theoretically occupied by thousands of “unauthorized” alien workers receiving millions in federal tax refunds in 2011. In fact, according to a TIGTA audit report published last year, four of the top ten addresses to which the...

Not only did the former IRS commissioner visit the White House dozens of times during his tenure, but his chief of staff was reportedly making those visits even more frequently. The Washington Examiner reported Friday that Jonathan M. Davis, the chief of staff for former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, appears to have visited the White House campus up to 310 times between late 2009 and early 2013. Sources told the Examiner that Davis, who had little background in tax policy, largely served as a political aide. It's unclear what he was doing at the White House all those times. Shulman,...

The IRS Is Defying An Obama Administration Order To Give Employees $70 Million In Bonuses Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated PressJune 20, 2013 WASHINGTON (AP) — Already reeling from a pair of scandals, the Internal Revenue Service is drawing new criticism over plans to hand out millions of dollars in employee bonuses. The Obama administration has ordered agencies to cancel discretionary bonuses because of automatic spending cuts, but the IRS says it's merely following legal obligations under a union contract. The agency is about to pay $70 million in employee bonuses, said Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a senior Republican on the...

The IRS is set to pay roughly $70 million in employee-union bonuses, contrary to an Obama administration directive to halt such rewards amid the deep, government-wide budget cuts known as sequestration. The apparent deal with the National Treasury Employees Union is scheduled for Wednesday and was made public by Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Grassley's office said the information came from a "person with knowledge of IRS budgetary procedures." The IRS is already facing widespread criticism, which started last month when IRS officials acknowledged that agents had improperly targeted Tea Party groups and conservative organizations for additional scrutiny...

A new film claims the official government report on the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 is an elaborate fabrication, but the most shocking part of the story is that charges are being leveled by some of the very investigators who put the report together. Six experts who appear in the film were members of the National Transportation Safety Board investigation team that concluded the crash was an accident, but they now claim they were silenced by their superiors. The movies, "TWA Flight 800" will debut on EPIX TV next month, on the 17-year anniversary of the crash.

Leaders on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are escalating the battle over the investigation into the IRS tea party targeting scandal. Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel’s top Democrat, released hundreds of pages of transcripts today of an interview the committee conducted with a self-described “conservative Republican” IRS nonprofit screening manager in Cincinnati who says one of his employees was the first to single out a tea party group applying for a tax exemption. And he said he agreed with the decision. “In this particular case, it was apparent that there was not enough information that was allowing...

James O’Keefe is back – this time targeting cell phone stores participating in the government program to offer free phones to low income individuals – or ‘Obamaphones.’O’Keefe’s latest video features his investigators getting free phones from a store in Philadelphia, explicitly telling the employees that they planned to sell them for cash to buy designer hand bags or heroin.One employee responds, “Hey, I don’t judge.”Another responds, “Just keep it to yourself.”Another employee reminds an investigator that it’s illegal to sell the phone, but tells her to “plead the Fifth” if she is caught.

As Hillary Clinton prepares for a possible presidential run in 2016, it appears that she could have knocked then-candidate Barack Obama off the 2008 primary ballot in Indiana. If anyone, including her campaign, had challenged the names and signatures on the presidential petitions that put Obama on the ballot, election fraud would have been detected during the race. But at the time, no one did. On Monday, there was some closure to the case, though, as the four defendants who were convicted or pleaded guilty in the state's presidential petition fraud scandal were sentenced. Only one received prison time for...

WASHINGTON (AP) — An Internal Revenue Service supervisor in Washington says she was personally involved in scrutinizing some of the earliest applications from tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status, including some requests that languished for more than a year without action. Holly Paz, who until recently was a top deputy in the division that handles applications for tax-exempt status, told congressional investigators she reviewed 20 to 30 applications. Her assertion contradicts initial claims by the agency that a small group of agents working in an office in Cincinnati were solely responsible for mishandling the applications. Paz, however, provided no evidence...

The Democratic National Convention may be long over, but its organizers have not forgotten the almost half a million dollars worth of electronics they seem to have lost. Organizers of the Charlotte, N.C., convention have filed a police report for lost and stolen electronics, some of which they appear to have valued at as much as 62 times the listed market prices. A reportedly stolen 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop? $75,537. The price listed on the Apple website is $1,199. A lost iPhone? $30,503. A lost Blackberry? $54,250. The DNC did not respond to a request for comment. Calls to the...

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed in a recently released audit report that in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 more than 1,000 Internal Revenue Service employees misused government charge cards issued by Citibank. The report said that during the two years in question agency employees sent Citibank a total of 325 bad checks written on personal accounts that had insufficient funds to cover them, that agency officials with top-secret security clearances had their charge accounts suspended for failure to pay the balances, and that the IRS had a tendency of being “overly lenient” in disciplining those who misued...

WASHINGTON — The State Department has hired an alarming number of law-enforcement agents with criminal or checkered backgrounds because of a flawed hiring process, a stunning memo obtained by The Post reveals. The background problems are severe enough that many of the roughly 2,000 agents in State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security can play only limited roles in agency efforts to police bad conduct and prosecute wrongdoers. ... “Department intakes of new . . . officers since the hiring surge a decade ago have reportedly been flawed, with ‘mitigation’ of troubling histories including criminal matters,” according to a December 2012 memo...

A State Department whistleblower has accused high-ranking staff of a massive coverup — including keeping a lid on findings that members of then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s security detail and the Belgian ambassador solicited prostitutes. A chief investigator for the agency’s inspector general wrote a memo outlining eight cases that were derailed by senior officials, including one instance of interference by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.

Well, golly, this might be just a tad inconvenient for the establishment spin on PRISM, if true. After the Washington Post and then the Guardian exposed the NSA’s Internet snooping program, a few of the named Internet companies denied giving the NSA any access to their servers. Instead, they told the New York Times that they provided blocks of information pursuant to FISA court orders and placed them in virtual dropboxes for the agency to access. That would, as Red Alert Politics notes, make the program legal and narrower than originally thought, although still a worrisome development for privacy. However,...

I agree with Jonathan’s post both in terms of substance and the media response to the NSA/surveillance stories. On the former: the PRISM program, in the right hands and used with discretion, can be justified based on the threats to America. But in the wrong hands–in executive branch hands that have abused power and punished political enemies–it has the potential to be misused. Which brings me to the current chief executive. My views on President Obama are such that very little would surprise me in terms of the ethical lines he would cross in order to gain and maintain political...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Computer forensics shows that IRS employee committed crime that calls for five years in prison The National Organization for Marriage, a conservative organization, claims that it has forensic evidence which proves that its donors’ private information was illegally leaked by the IRS. The Blaze reports:John Eastman, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, accused the IRS of intentionally leaking confidential donor information to groups hostile to his organization.“This just smells and I hope this committee gets to the bottom of it,” he said, adding that his group had “identified that [the leaked information] came from within...

Health Reform: Months before ObamaCare takes full effect, its popularity has hit an all-time low. And that's before the public experiences firsthand the many ill effects it will impose on the nation's health care system. Shortly before Democrats rammed ObamaCare through Congress, President Obama's pollster, Joel Benenson, wrote in the Washington Post that "once reform passes, the tangible benefits Americans will realize will trump the fear-mongering rhetoric opponents are stoking today." Not quite.

LIVE THREAD House Oversight Committee on IRS Spending Practices Witness list http://oversight.house.gov/hearing/collected-and-wasted-the-irs-spending-culture-and-conference-abuses/

In 2010, the Internal Revenue Service dropped $4 million on a swanky conference in Anaheim, California where IRS employees learned, among other things, how to be “direct and honest, open and transparent” when speaking with taxpayers. The IRS employees learned from a “pioneer in the field of eliminating defensiveness” how to stop communicating using the “rules of war.” The pricey event included lavish hotel rooms for IRS officials at the Anaheim Marriott and elsewhere, according to a report by the Treasury Department Inspector General. Ellison was paid $7,000 by the IRS for conducting four 90-minute workshops, according to the Inspector...

The Internal Revenue Service has failed to turn over documents requested by the powerful Senate tax-writing panel, which is investigating the tax agency´s practice of targeting conservative organizations. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the panel´s top Republican, gave the IRS a May 31 deadline to answer dozens of questions related to the special scrutiny the agency was giving to right-leaning groups seeking tax-exempt status. But the troubled IRS let the deadline go by.