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Documents obtained from the Health and Human Services Department through a Freedom of Information Act request show that on the day the Affordable Care Act became law, the agency received fast-track authority to hire 1,814 new high-level employees to put Obamacare into practice, at a likely cost of more than $159 million per year. The hiring request was approved by the Obama administration's Office of Personnel Management despite a government-wide hiring freeze. Judicial Watch, a nonprofit that has told MailOnline it files 'hundreds' of such FOIA requests, showed MailOnline the documents on Thursday. They show that HHS designated the hiring...

IRS employees have a prominent role in Obamacare, but their union wants no part of the law. National Treasury Employees Union officials are urging members to write their congressional representatives in opposition to receiving coverage through President Obama’s health care law. The union leaders are providing members with a form letter to send to the congressmen that says “I am very concerned about legislation that has been introduced by Congressman Dave Camp to push federal employees out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and into the insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act.”

AUSTIN, TX - If Howard Antelis looks familiar, it's because he's the guy who blew the whistle on the IRS. "I'm horrified and ashamed and embarrassed by what I've seen," the veteran IRS tax examiner told 13 Investigates last summer. "We've been allowing the U.S. taxpayer to get robbed for years now... and we should all be outraged at what's going on." Antelis, along with a tax preparer in central Indiana, helped WTHR expose massive fraud involving the IRS. Eyewitness News discovered the federal agency had been giving away billions of dollars in improper tax credits to undocumented workers. Making...

A 49 second video briefly running through some of the scandals that surround Hillary Rodham Clinton http://www.libertyfirstnews.com/anti-hillary-clinton-group-releases-chilling-first-video/

He works at one of the three-letter intelligence agencies and oversees construction of a $1.2 billion surveillance data center in Utah that is 15 times the size of MetLife Stadium, home to the New York Giants and Jets. Long Island native Harvey Davis, a top National Security Agency official, needs that commanding presence. His role is to supervise infrastructure construction worldwide for NSA, which is part of the Defense Department. That involves tending to logistics, military installations, as well as power, space and cooling for all NSA data centers. In May, crews broke ground on a $792 million computing center...

And they should. CBS reoprts that NSA Director Keith Alexander made an “emergency visit� to Capitol Hill to head off a potentially embarrassing vote to defund his agency’s trawling of phone and Internet records. House Republican leaders allowed a vote on an amendment by Rep. Justin Amash to use the power of the purse to rein in the NSA, and the panic shows that the effort might well succeed in the Senate when the budget comes to the upper chamber: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO With a high-stakes showdown vote looming in the House, White House press secretary Jay...

House Speaker John Boehner (R.,Ohio) Tuesday endorsed the Obama administration’s plan to ship arms to Syrian opposition forces battling President Bashar al-Assad. “The effort to help the right set of rebels in Syria is in our nation’s best interest,” Mr. Boehner said in response to a reporter’s question.

Confidential tax records of several political candidates and campaign donors were improperly accessed by government officials, but the Justice Department declined to prosecute any of the officials involved, even in one “willful” violation of the law, an IRS watchdog reported. In a July 3 letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), the Treasury inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) J. Russell George acknowledged that government officials had illegally accessed tax records of candidates and donors in four instances since 2006. TIGTA determined that in three of the cases the access was “inadvertent.”

The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, met with Obama on April...

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel. That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed...

It may turn out that within the IRS abuse of Tea Party, conservative, Jewish and other groups was another layer of abuse: women. Catherine Engelbrecht so far has the most harrowing story to tell, of abuse by multiple executive branch agencies after she founded the grassroots election security watchdog True the Vote. Now former Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell is naming names, saying that her tax information was compromised the very day she announced her Senate candidacy. That same day, the IRS slapped a lien on a house that it believed she owned, only to withdraw that lien when...

According to Arabic News Channel TV14 and reported on by Egypt Daily News, Obama’s relationship with recently deposed Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi goes far deeper than mere support as a democratically elected President. Per TV14, Obama conducted secret negotiations with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood outside of normal diplomatic channels. According to sources cited by TV14, Obama secretly transferred eight billion dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood—not the Egyptian government—as payment to guarantee that a large portion of the Sinai Peninsula be turned over to the terrorist organization Hamas, an avowed enemy of both the United States and Israel.

The Justice Department refused to act after being presented with evidence that a government official had "willfully" accessed private tax documents, it was reported Tuesday. The evidence against the person was laid out in a letter from J. Russell George, the Internal Revenue Service inspector general. He told top Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley he did not know why Justice had not acted, The Washington Times reports. "We presented evidence of a willful unauthorized access to the Department of Justice, but the case was declined for prosecution," George wrote in a letter to Grassley. George said there was evidence of three...

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano suddenly announced last week that she was resigning her position at the embattled agency in order to take a $750,000-a-year job as president of the University of California system. This will more than triple her salary, which was $200,000 at DHS. The timing of her resignation is highly unusual for a member of the president’s cabinet. Most cabinet members who leave after a president’s first term don’t wait an extra six months into the second term. Many believe she abruptly left DHS because of some sordid dealings that are about to be discovered. Her tenure...

Let’s play Guess The Federal Agency in order to see where the next political scandal may originate. Here are a few hints: This bureaucracy supposedly has safeguards to prevent politicization, enforces a broad, arcane, and contradictory regulatory and statutory code, and treats potential targets of investigations as guilty unless they prove themselves innocent. Wait a moment … I just described nearly every federal agency in existence. My bad.In this case, though, I’m talking about the Federal Election Commission, which is tasked with enforcing the Byzantine, irrational campaign regulations put in place over the last several decades on federal candidates and...

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore. And welcome to part two of our discussion with Thomas Drake. He is a former National Security Agency senior executive. He blew the whistle on multibillion-dollar fraud and a vast Fourth Amendment-violating secret surveillance and data mining program that he says fundamentally weakened national security and eroded civil liberties. He was charged under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration and faced 35 years in prison. The criminal case against him ultimately collapsed and the charges were dropped. Thank you for joining us again, Mr....

<p>Janet Napolitano to resign as Homeland Security Secretary on Friday. Developing ...</p>

If there was one scandal I thought might actually stick on Barack Obama, it was his widespread use of the Internal Revenue Service to target his political enemies. I should have known better. I witnessed a scandal of this magnitude forgotten about by the media, by Congress and by other investigators after initial outrage was expressed. And that’s exactly what appears to be happening this time around. To review what happened this year, with this administration, the IRS initially admitted holding up tax-exempt letters for tea-party organizations. For days, and even weeks, it was a steady drip, drip, drip with...

Lois Lerner is a nasty piece of work, and one aspect of her arrogance could well be her undoing. She enjoyed wielding her power so much that she boasted about it, and in doing so in a 2011 interview with Business Week, she conceded a point that could be used to prove criminal culpability. Patrick Frey, who writes Patterico's Pontifications, uncovered the incriminating crowing: A reader sends a very interesting tidbit buried in a November 17, 2011 Businessweek.com article about the IRS and not-for-profit universities. The article is about the IRS making inquiries into "whether schools improperly claimed tax-exempt status for...

President Obama has just nullified, all by his lonesome, a provision in a duly-enacted law: the employer mandate in ObamaCare. It's one thing to give priority to enforcing one law over another, such as stressing interdiction of cocaine over marijuana. But to just cancel a law is quite another matter. In "Obama's never-mind presidency" on July 5 in the Washington Post, George Will writes: Although the Constitution has no Article VIII, the administration acts as though there is one that reads: "Notwithstanding all that stuff in other articles about how laws are made, if a president finds a law politically...

House Republicans plan to advance a package of bills this month in response to the recent Internal Revenue Service controversies involving inappropriate scrutiny of conservative groups and lavish spending on a 2010 conference in Anaheim. One of the measures, bound to meet with opposition from the federal workforce, would allow agencies to place senior career officials on paid or unpaid leave while they are under investigation for abuses. A similar bill passed the House last year but died in the Senate. Another proposal in the GOP package would require agency leaders to approve government conferences and hold them accountable for...

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become ALMOST A PARALLEL SUPREME COURT, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

Leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have provided new insight into how the government monitors domestic and foreign communications for threats to national security. Although the government has disclosed some additional details about the programs in response to the leaks, important questions remain about the nature and scope of the surveillance programs. Without that additional information, it is impossible to know the extent to which the government is peering into the lives of Americans in the name of national security, according to privacy advocates. 1. What other data is being collected under the Patriot Act? The first...

<p>A lawyer for Tea Party groups targeted by the IRS says his clients haven't even been contacted by the FBI, which is supposed to be investigating the matter. This development comes after former FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers he didn't know who the lead investigator was in the probe.</p>

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here is Bill in Gainesville, Florida.  Bill, I'm glad you waited.  It's great to have you on the program today, sir.  Hello. CALLER:  Hey, Rush, I'm honored.  I think this is a great segue, I hope.  I'm grateful for Mr. O'Keefe.  I'm 53 years old and single. I'm self-employed. I've got a big footprint. I've got six kids that I've raised here in Gainesville, Florida, and the only ability that I feel like I have is my vote, and I wanted to ask you about the birth of the Tea Party. RUSH:  Yeah? CALLER:  I think it...

BERLIN -- IN May 2010, I received a brown envelope. It was a CD with an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of metadata contained 35,83o records. That's 35,830 times my phone company knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or texting... The metadata of 80 million Germans was being stored, without any concrete suspicions and without cause... In the end, the Constitutional Court [of Germany] ruled that the implementation of the European directive [allowing this] was, in fact, unconstitutional... Given our...

We are two-thirds of the way into the most incompetent presidency in our history. People everywhere are fed up. Even many of the so-called liberals who propelled Barack Obama into office have stopped defending him in the face of an unprecedented number of scandals coming at us one after the other like hideous monsters in some non-stop computer game. And now looming is the monster of monsters, ObamaCare, the healthcare reform almost no one wanted and fewer understood. It will be administered by the Internal Revenue Service, an organization that has been revealed to be a kind of post-modern American...

<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An IRS official effectively waived her right not to testify about the tax agency's targeting of conservative groups, a Republican-led congressional committee concluded on Friday in a vote that cleared the way for Congress to hold her in contempt.</p>

Republicans on a House committee rejected strenuous Democratic objections in voting Friday that Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner waived her constitutional right against self-incrimination at a prior hearing. The resolution was the first step in an effort by Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the GOP chairman of the House Oversight Committee, to force Lerner to return to answer questions about targeting of conservative groups by the unit she headed. It passed on a 22-17 vote, with every Republican in favor and every Democrat opposed, following an unusually vitriolic hearing. ... Under subpoena to testify before Issa's panel on May...

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 22-17 on Friday that embattled IRS official Lois Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights during a hearing last month on the agency's tea party targeting scandal. The party-line vote paves the way for the committee to bring Lerner back to Congress and force her to answer questions from lawmakers...

Let's see. Six progressive groups were flagged for extra scrutiny by the IRS, while out of 292 tea party groups that applied for special tax-exempt status ALL 292 groups were flagged. Naw....nothing to see here. Move along. Inspector General Russell George: “Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill. The inspector general also stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra...

Refuting Democratic suggestions that progressive groups were also swept up in the IRS probe of the tax status of Tea Party organizations, the Treasury Department's inspector general has revealed that just six progressive groups were targeted compared to 292 conservative groups. In a letter to congressional Democrats, the inspector general also said that 100 percent of Tea Party groups seeking special tax status were put under IRS review, while only 30 percent of the progressive groups felt the same pressure. The Wednesday letter to the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee punched a huge hole in Democratic...

Please see video at the link.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal heated up today when Greg Roseman, Washington D.C. Metro Area Contracting Officer and Deputy Director of the IRS, invoked his constitutional Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid answering questions in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to determine if he fraudulently steered $500 million in IRS computer contracts to a $250,000 a year company fronting for IBM.

Democratic aide: US House Democrats to get classified members-only briefing from NSA director regarding FISA, Patriot Act collection activities - @NBCNews

WASHINGTON (AP) — Poor oversight by the Internal Revenue Service allowed workers to use agency credit cards to buy wine for an expensive luncheon, dorky swag for managers' meetings and, for one employee, romance novels and diet pills, an agency watchdog said Tuesday. Two IRS credit cards were used to buy online pornography, though the employees said the cards were stolen. One of the workers reported five agency credit cards lost or stolen. IRS employees used agency credit cards to make more than 273,000 purchases totaling nearly $108 million in 2010 and 2011, according to the report by the Treasury...

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.

Under President Obama, the United States is “a nation governed by fear,” the American Civil Liberties Union says in an open letter that echoes the criticisms Obama has made of George W. Bush’s national security policies. “[W]e say as Americans that we are tired of seeing liberty sacrificed on the altar of security and having a handful of lawmakers decide what we should and should not know,” the ACLU writes in a statement circulated to grassroots supporters and addressed to Obama. “We are tired of living in a nation governed by fear instead of the principles of freedom and liberty...

"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.

The Guardian has done it once again, this time presenting two July 2009 documents signed by none other than Eric Holder which lay out under what conditions the NSA is allowed to make use of information "inadvertently" collected from domestic US communications without a warrant. The documents detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target "non-US persons" under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance. "The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign...

Does it? Should we believe the OMB's numbers that legalizing 15 million illegals will add $179 billion dollars to the U.S. economy over the next 10 years, and $700 billion over the next 10 years after that? Should we believe Menendez? How accurate was the Office of Management and Budget on what OBAMACARE would cost? I would like to see how much faith Rubio, McCain, Graham and others - be they conservative hosts on television or on talk radio - put in the numbers that the OMB supplied concerning legalizing 15 million illegals. Should they believe Menendez? The New York...

General Carter Ham is scheduled to testify to the House Armed Services Committee on June 26 at a classified briefing about his knowledge of events that took place when the attack on the U.S. Consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya happened last September, reports Fox News' Greta Van Susteren: Below is from my FNC colleague Justin Fishel: Subject: Fox First: General Carter Ham to testify on Benghazi for first time next week Fox News has learned that the House Armed Services Committee will hold a classified briefing next Weds June 26 at 9:00 on Benghazi. Briefers will include: Gen....

The Obama Internal Revenue Service targeted several Christian groups including a 180 year-old Baptist paper. The Obama IRS targeted Christian groups including Franklin Graham and the 180 year-old Biblical Recorder. The Obama IRS implemented a program to infiltrate and target conservative, evangelical Christian churches. ... The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, an international relief organization, were both targeted by the Obama IRS.

I’m beginning to realize that we are performing a major injustice when we call all of the events of the past year “scandals”. Scandals are what soap operas base their story lines off of. Scandals are actions of a President and his intern in the Oval Office. I will even admit that breaking into a private office to search for dirt on your opponent can be considered a scandal. However, what we are talking about with this administration is the infringement of American's constitutional rights, the use of the government to target our own citizens, and most importantly, the death...

The country’s top investigator seemed to be in the dark Thursday when pressed to provide details of the IRS investigation into the tax agency’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, seemed to rattle FBI Director Robert Mueller for not knowing the specifics surrounding the IRS probe. “You’ve had a month now to investigate,” Jordan said. “This has been the biggest story in the country and you can’t even tell me who the lead investigator is. You can’t tell me the actions the inspector general took which are not typically how investigations are done. You can’t...

Ralph Nader last week had some harsh words for the current President of the United States. Appearing on Democracy Now!, Nader asked host Amy Goodman, "Has there been a bigger con man in the White House than Barack Obama?" (video follows with transcript and commentary): Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/06/13/ralph-nader-has-there-been-bigger-con-man-white-house-barack-obama#ixzz2W75lmHgi

Nine senators, congressman follow pattern of S&L scandal: contributions and intervention. So here’s the formula. An independent agency of the U.S. government. United States Senators. A powerful campaign contributor to said United States Senators. A powerful campaign contributor who wants something from said independent agency. Add it all together and what you get is — The Keating Five. And the IRS Ten. Let’s start, by way of illustrating how the game worked, with The Keating Five.

WASHINGTON (AP) — As a candidate, Barack Obama vowed to bring a different, better kind of leadership to the dysfunctional capital. He'd make government more efficient, accountable and transparent. He'd rise above the "small-ball" nature of doing business. And he'd work with Republicans to break Washington paralysis. You can trust me, Obama said back in 2008. And — for a while, at least — a good piece of the country did. But with big promises often come big failures — and the potential for big hits to the one thing that can make or break a presidency: credibility. A series...

HONG KONG (AP) — The journalist who exposed classified U.S. surveillance programs leaked by an American defense contractor said Tuesday that there will be more 'significant revelations' to come from the documents.

I guess Barack Obama wasn’t kidding when he spoke to the graduating class of Ohio State University May 5, just over a months ago. Many didn’t notice the ominous remark he made in that speech. That was, of course, just before the nation learned that his administration’s Internal Revenue Service had been selectively harassing organizations and individuals based on their political leanings. That was, of course, before the nation learned that his administration’s Justice Department had been monitoring the phone records of news organizations including the Associated Press and Fox News. That was, of course, before the nation learned that...