Free Republic

This week the New York Post [1] reported that Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has emerged as a leading contender for the top spot at DOJ. The race to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder has included the controversial Labor Secretary Tom Perez, and like Perez, MayorkasÂ’ tenure in the federal government is filled with a considerable amount of ethics-defying shadiness.Prior to taking his current position as the number two man at DHS, Mayorkas was head of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is mandated to administer the biggest immigration system in the world...

**SNIP** Other information in the ‘Vaughn index’, according to Judicial Watch, included: –Numerous emails that detail Attorney General Holder’s direct involvement in crafting talking points, the timing of public disclosures, and handling Congressional inquiries in the Fast and Furious matter. –DOJ communications (including those of Eric Holder) concerning the White House about Fast and Furious. –Communications to and from the United States Ambassador to Mexico about Fast and Furious.

The largest newspaper in South Dakota broke a story that could cost the GOP a red state Senate seat. The Fiscal Times reports:  The three-way race for South Dakota’s open Senate seat got more complicated Wednesday, when the Sioux Falls Argus Leader published a page one story alleging that former Governor Mike Rounds, the Republican candidate and current leader in the polls, had approved $600,000 in state assistance to a company that was about hire a member of his cabinet. According to reporter David Montgomery, then Secretary of Tourism and State Development Richard Benda requested the assistance for Northern Beef Packers about two...

President Obama believes in big government. He truly believes that government is best able to decide the great issues of the day. He’s expanded government like no other President since LBJ in the 60’s. Obamacare alone is the biggest government program since the Great Society. Obama has added nearly $8 trillion in new debt. Yet for all of Obama’s belief in big government, his administration has done more to hurt the image of government than any administration since Nixon. In that, the damage Nixon did was about corruption at the top. With Obama the damage he is doing is to...

You may be wondering why Barack Obama, with his propensity to name “czars” for every problem that ails us, has not named an Ebola Czar. The reason is because he has, in fact, named an Ebola Czar. So why are we constantly seeing Dr. Tom Frieden of the CDC embarrass himself in press conferences instead of our Ebola Czar? It turns out Dr. Nicole Lurie, the czar in charge of potential infectious disease catastrophes, has made the most of her time by funneling federal dollars to Democratic donors. That would be the federal dollars the left says we need more...

Complete Headline: EXCLUSIVE: RFK Jr will be deposed in bitter divorce battle by the husband of his 'mistress' - weeks after he wed Cheryl Hines Robert F Kennedy Jr. is set to be quizzed over the exact nature of his relationship with his alleged mistress Chelsea Kirwan, MailOnline can reveal. The Kennedy scion, who only married actress Cheryl Hines just weeks ago, will be dragged into the bitter divorce battle between Mrs Kirwan and her estranged husband, plastic surgeon to the stars Laurence Kirwan. Dr Kirwan’s lawyers have informed Chelsea's legal team that they plan to depose both her and...

Two years ago a slew of Secret Service agents got busted for hiring prostitutes while on an official trip in Cartagena, Colombia. That scandal erupted after an agent failed to properly pay a woman for her services. They were fired and the White House denied aides had any involvement. Now, the Washington Post is out with a stunning report about the scandal not only detailing that former White House presidential advance team member and volunteer Jonathan Dach officially registered a prostitute as an overnight guest in his hotel room, but that White House aides knew about Dach's actions and interfered with...

The EPA is poised to “do an IRS” — similar to what the tax agency had to do with dismissed top official Lois G. Lerner — and officially notify the National Archives that it may have lost key electronic records, according to a think tank that’s suing to get text messages under an open-records request. Justice Department lawyers told a federal court on Tuesday that the alert will be coming soon, in a case that’s shaping up as a significant battle over whether government agencies are required to keep cellphone text messages as “official” records. In this case, researcher Chris...

ABC’s Scandal, which has a fresh episode tonight, last week featured “President Fitzgerald Grant,” supposedly a Republican, channeling Piers Morgan as he used the State of the Union address to plead for more gun control: “How many other people’s children are we going to let die before we put a stop to this?” “Grant,” played by Tony Goldwyn, recalled how his teen son died of a “fluke” infection (not true, that’s one of many of Scandal’s wild conspiracies), but “there were thousands of people last year who lost their lives in a completely avoidable way.” He then compared gun rights...

At first, this story from the Washington Post seems impossible to believe. After all, the White House insists that they were cleared of any involvement in the Cartagena prostitute scandal by, er, their own internal investigation — a claim that White House aide Eric Schultz repeated to the Post’s Carol Leonnig and David Nakamura. That settles it, right? Wrong: But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that...

While strong cases can be made for both Benghazi and Fast and Furious, most voters consider Barack Obama’s misuse of the IRS to be his administration’s worst scandal so far. But, as we wrote last year, targeting of conservative non-profits for harassment is not the only dimension of the IRS scandal. In addition, there is strong reason to believe that one or more White House political appointees have illegally accessed private taxpayer information and used it for political gain.Austan Goolsbee directed Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and later chaired his Council of Economic Advisers. In August 2010, Goolsbee conducted...

Julia Pierson, the director of the United States Secret Service, resigned on Wednesday amid a rush of criticism over recent White House security breaches. "Today Julia Pierson, the Director of the United States Secret Service, offered her resignation, and I accepted it," said Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. "I salute her 30 years of distinguished service to the Secret Service and the Nation." Joseph Clancy, the former special agent in charge of the presidential protective division of the Secret Service, will take over as interim director, Johnson said. Johnson also announced the formation of an independent panel to investigate...

Politico obviously had no problem finding Lois Lerner for an exclusive interview that it published on Monday. So why can’t the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., find Lois Lerner so that a federal grand jury can interview her? Perhaps the Obama administration doesn’t want Lerner answering any real questions about what happened at the IRS when it was targeting conservative organizations. While Lois Lerner gave a lengthy interview to Politico in the presence of her legal defense team, including her husband, who is also a lawyer and a partner at a major law firm,...

Hillary Clinton has revealed that she worked through her husband’s affair whilst he was President by making him go through an agonising 'truth and reconciliation' process. The former US Secretary of State said that she forced Bill Clinton into South Africa-style hearings where he had to be completely honest before she forgave him. She said she was inspired by the country's former leader Nelson Mandela and that she had to act otherwise she would remain in a mental 'prison' for the rest of her life. Mrs Clinton, 66, has rarely spoken about her husband’s infidelity with White House intern Monica...

A senior communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder seemingly called House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa's staff by accident and asked for their help spinning new revelations about the IRS scandal, Issa said in a September 8 letter to Holder. The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes...

Head of Marshals Service in Chicago reassigned AP , Associated Press Sep. 9, 2014 4:02 AM ET CHICAGO (AP) — The U.S. Marshals Service has announced it has replaced the head of its Chicago office for the past four years in a re-organization, appointing an interim chief for its high-profile northern Illinois district. Darryl McPherson, who was named to the top Chicago post by President Barack Obama in 2010, was recently reassigned to the same office's judicial security division, said Drew Wade, an agency spokesman in Washington. Wade, however, declined to discuss why the 17-year Marshals Service veteran was moved...

Resident Obama has come under attack from critics lately for the pandemic chaos evident at home and abroad. The President has been called “aloof,” “bored,” “disinterested,” and “incompetent.” Pundits universally decry his inaction. Inaction seems to be the criticism leveled by all with their own preferred adjective attached.Amidst all of the criticisms of the President’s inaction, has it even been considered by mainstream commentators or by the average citizen that his inaction is, in fact, action? When he’s accused of only being concerned with political appearances instead of solving problems, is it possible that to him creating the right political...

A top House Republican on Thursday accused the Justice Department of helping a former department lawyer duck an interview about the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) pressed Attorney General Eric Holder to provide contact information for Andrew Strelka to the House Oversight Committee by Friday. Republicans say that Strelka’s tenure with the government illustrates a conflict of interest in the Obama administration’s investigation into the IRS scandal. Strelka once worked for Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the controversy. After moving to the Justice Department, Strelka defended the IRS against...

He mocked President Barack Obama over the controversies that have plagued his second term. “It’s sorta like the Old MacDonald’s farm of scandals. Here a scandal, there a scandal, everywhere a scandal,” Paul jabbed, adding of Obama’s ISIS strategy “If the president has no strategy, maybe it’s time for a new president.” But Paul saved special scorn for Clinton, the prospective frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, specifically highlighting her role in the events surrounding the deadly 2012 attacks on American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. “If she wants to be commander in chief and she cannot protect our embassies,...

It’s a late entry, and a sad one, but the trove of stolen celebrity nudes that hit Reddit like a bomb over the weekend may just qualify as the Internet story of the summer. After all, it’s the perfect Internet scandal: sex, Bitcoin, shadowy hackers and long-reigning Internet darling Jennifer Lawrence. And yet, the ongoing incident — which the FBI has said it’s investigating — is far more than a tawdry tabloid story. It also raises a lot of profoundly important issues about technology, security, privacy and power in the digital age. There are practical implications, as well: The leak...