Free Republic

President Barack Obama vetoed a bill Friday that would cap the taxpayer-funded expense accounts of former presidents. Obama said he supports the bill’s goal, but he sent the measure back to Congress because it would immediately end salaries and benefits to staffers carrying out the official duties of former presidents. He says the measure doesn’t provide enough time for these employees to be moved to another payroll.Obama says the bill would also interfere with the Secret Service’s ability to protect ex-presidents. …

NBC has expanded its probe into embattled news anchor Brian Williams to examine his expense accounts, New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman reports. Williams, whom NBC suspended for six months without pay on Tuesday, has come under fire since admitting last week that he misled the public by claiming to have come under enemy fire aboard an Army Chinook during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The “NBC Nightly News” anchor also faces scrutiny over claims he’s made about his experiences during Hurricane Katrina and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War.

there are a lot of Brian Williams fabrications. Like, a lot. And yesterday’s suspension of the anchor over revelations that he exaggerated stories from the Iraq War allegedly stemmed from a larger internal investigation at NBC, with enough findings to compile a full dossier and enough allegations to prompt an overview of his expense accounts. ... sources at NBC say that Williams’ history of stretching the truth was well-known, and NBC execs had tried to curb his habits for the past decade: ... NBC was also investigating his expense accounts for reasons unknown

LONDON (Reuters) - Embarrassing disclosures about the vast expenses claims of MPs amount to a "McCarthy-style witch-hunt" that risks driving politicians to suicide, a Conservative MP said on Friday.