Free Republic

Neil Barofsky is a lifelong Democrat who was appointed by George Bush to be the Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP). He has done superlative work over the last two years in uncovering vast waste of taxpayer dollars. He also has started looking into whether the car closings ordered by the Obama administration were influenced not by efficiency or economy but whether dealers were chosen to be saved based on their minority status. His latest report - buried by much of the media - was highly critical of how the Treasury was using suspect methodology...

NOTE The following text is a quote: www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/statement-nsc-spokesman-mike-hammer-council-inspectors-general-integrity-and-effici Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release July 15, 2010 Statement by NSC Spokesman Mike Hammer on the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency Evaluation of the IG's Operations in Afghanistan A joint team at NSC and OMB received a preliminary briefing today from the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), which is a statutory body of IG’s. At the request of the NSC and in coordination with the Department of Defense and the Department...

A new report released yesterday (.pdf) by Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) warns that Obama administration efforts to bailout homeowners through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) are ineffective and will not stem the sweeping tide of foreclosures. The $75 billion HAMP program was created with a promise to bailout 3 to 4 million homeowners in foreclosure, paying lenders to modify troubled mortgages. Foreclosures reached 2.8 million in 2009 and are on track to exceed that total with over 932,000 foreclosures filed in the first three months of 2010, the report found.

Violating its own guarantee of unprecedented transparency, the White House is blocking an investigation into the controversial firing of an inspector general who exposed one of President Obama’s political supporters—a California mayor—for misusing federal funds. First Lady Michelle Obama was reportedly behind the contentious June dismissal of AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin and congressional investigators want to interview the aide (Jackie Norris) who may have given the order. At the time Norris was the First Lady’s chief of staff but the White House counsel’s office has blocked investigators from interviewing her, according to a national news report. Norris is currently...

Complete with a raft of documents and exhibits, fired AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin on Wednesday filed a motion for summary judgment in his lawsuit demanding reinstatement to his job -- his own motion not even waiting for the judge to rule on the Obama administration's motion to dismiss the case without hearing or trial. A close perusal of his motion, affidavits, and exhibits suggests to me, for the first time, that this case has potential to reach the Supreme Court regardless of how the lower court rules.... Thus we get a glimpse of the tangled web of interests and...

Even as congressional investigators demolish White House explanations for its firing last summer of a key inspector general, new documents show that an entire second area of misleading administration statements has gone largely unexplored. Each new revelation in the case suggests that Gerald Walpin, the fired IG for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), ought to be reinstated to his job. We'll get to that second area of dispute in a few moments; it's a doozy. First, though, because this is all rather confusing, a review of the particulars is in order. ~snip~ Yet just two days after...

Oversight: After an unjust firing and campaign of character assassination, the former AmeriCorps inspector general has been cleared of acting improperly. Now where does he go to get his job and reputation back? On June 10, Gerald Walpin was fired with one hour's notice as the watchdog of AmeriCorps in violation of a federal law requiring Congress to be given a heads-up 30 days in advance. He then fell victim to a campaign of character assassination. When pressed for a reason for the sudden and improper dismissal of a federal watchdog, the White House responded with a letter to Sens....

Just hours after Sen. Charles Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa released a report Friday on their investigation into the abrupt firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin, the Obama White House gave the lawmakers a trove of new, previously-withheld documents on the affair. It was a twist on the now-familiar White House late-Friday release of bad news; this time, the new evidence was put out not only at the start of a weekend but also hours too late for inclusion in the report.

A federal appeals court has ordered a civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case that originated in Minnesota to begin serving her prison sentence. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan today also upheld Lynne Stewart's conviction, which was based in part on illegally aiding her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, during a visit with him at the federal prison in Rochester, Minn., in May 2000. She was convicted of smuggling messages between Abdel-Rahman and a terrorist group. Stewart was sentenced to a little more than two years in prison.

Well before Gerald Walpin was fired as the inspector general of AmeriCorps, government documents show that he and the agency’s management did not get along, to say the least. Documents obtained by CNSNews.com through a Freedom of Information Act request, including e-mails, letters and memos, demonstrate a confrontational relationship between the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), the agency that runs AmeriCorps, and its inspector general, whose ouster in June prompted questions from Congress. A corporation board member wanted to “let the record reflect” what he says was Walpin’s confusion at a Mar. 20 board meeting, the member’s notes...

"The Justice Department's inspector general has agreed to investigate whether ACORN has applied for or received any DOJ grant money, in the wake of bipartisan criticism of the community activist group's operation. And seven other inspectors general are being asked by two congressional members to take a look at their funding mechanisms."

Former Vice President Dick Cheney never attempted to influence or intimidate the CIA's inspectors in order to get the findings he wanted on the CIA's review of enhanced interrogation techniques, the agency's inspector general has told FOX News. In a rare response for a request to comment, CIA IG John Helgerson confirmed Tuesday that he met personally with Cheney during the course of the investigation, and despite allegations on Web blogs, the former vice president made no effort to influence his work. "The VP (whom I had long known reasonably well, as, in a non-IG capacity, I used to brief...

Republicans this week pronounced Barack Obama’s six-month-old $787bn (€553bn, £477bn) stimulus a failure. But Earl Devaney, the former secret service agent who heads Mr Obama’s stimulus monitoring board, says critics do not yet have the tools to judge accurately. Mr Devaney, who meets weekly with Joe Biden, the vice-president, to monitor the outflow of stimulus money, is scrambling to set up the most complex government website in history by the October 10 deadline imposed by Congress. He predicts that the site, which will enable journalists and citizens to monitor every dollar that comes out of Washington and match it with...

First it was I.G. Walpin who was investigating BO 's supporter on the misused of Americorp funds. Now it is I.G. Weiderhold for investigating Amtrak’s activities. The Inspector General Act, amended last year and CO-SPONSORED by Barack Obama to: require the President to notify Congress in writing within 30 days the reasons for removing an Inspector General from office. Did Obama knowingly break the law on this one or did TOTUS forget to tell him he couldn't do it.

I just have to wonder what kind of uproar and front page news stories would be coming out daily if the Walpin/Johnson IG Firing Story had happened during Bush's watch. You know the answer to that question. We would be blasted by the story daily, for weeks on end. But under the Obama administration the MSM doesn't utter a peep. Except for Byron York reporting in The Washington Examiner that is. Before I get to his story let's do a recap of the scandal, since it's been weeks and weeks since the story came out. There are four players in...

After seven weeks of trying, investigators looking into President Barack Obama’s abrupt firing of AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin are still unable to answer the most basic question of the whole affair: Why did the president do it?

The Special Inspector General for TARP, Neil Barofsky, made headlines this week when he estimated that the Obama administration had committed itself to spending as much as $24,000,000,000,000 to fix the American economy. The Treasury fired back at its own SIGTARP, saying that Barofsky inflated the numbers and that they had no intention of spending almost twice America’s annual GDP. In an interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper, Barofsky explains that the White House currently has dozens of programs dispensing cash, and that the caps on all of those add up to the $24-trillion mark:

Just six months into his presidency, President Barack Obama's administration is the target of a federal lawsuit, and that by a civil servant who alleges he was dismissed from his post in violation of the requirements of a law that Barack Obama himself once sponsored in the Senate. Yet despite all this, the July 21 Washington Post print edition failed to carry the story, directing readers with this 39-word teaser atop page A15 (The Fed Page) to a Post blog: Former Inspector General Files Suit: Gerald Walpin, an inspector general who was fired last month by the Obama administration, has...

Gerald Walpin, the former Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service whom President Obama took the unusual step of firing last month, filed a lawsuit against the CNCS on Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia The suit seeks to force "to reinstate Mr. Walpin as the Inspector General and to declare unlawful and ineffective the efforts to date to terminate him from his office." In addition, the suit seeks that Walpin be awarded "costs and legal fees associated with this action" as well as any "further relief as may be appropriate in this...

"Staff doesn't speak for the committee," a source on Capitol Hill explained last week. "The committee speaks for the committee." That's the practical meaning of Senate Rule 29, which has been invoked regarding the Homeland Security and Government Oversight Committee investigation into last month's firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin. The committee's chairman, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, is entirely within his prerogative to protect the integrity of the investigation via Rule 29, which reads, in part: