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More Hope and ChangeÂ… A key congressional committee accused the Obama Department of Homeland Security of non-cooperation, witness tampering and even attempted theft of committee documents. The report claims that DHS Attorney Reid Alan Cox attempted to leave a committee hearing room with the CommitteeÂ’s exhibits in his bag. FOX News reported A key congressional committee on oversight is accusing the Department of Homeland Security of non-cooperation, witness tampering and even attempted theft of committee documents. The 152-page report comes on the eve of hearings on transparency about DHS by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The accusations were...

...Update 2:55 p.m. from Amie Parnes of the Hill: Travel pool was separated for about 20 minutes from the motorcade en route to the next stop at a private residence. This separation resulted in a high speed, wild goose chase weaving through the streets of San Antonio. Led by a police escort, your pool was led up wrong way streets, driving on the shoulder of highways, and so on. Finally, after cars were literally pushed off the highway by the police escort and the three White House pool vans, we had interstate 10 ourselves at a speed of about 85...

Complete Title: The Soros Summit - Free Beacon exclusive: Inside the secret Miami meeting of George Soros’s liberal conspiracy ### A secretive network of left-wing billionaires and their political operatives descended on the luxurious Biltmore Hotel in Miami over the weekend to discuss strategy for the coming elections. The location of the conference had been kept a closely guarded secret by the members and guests of Democracy Alliance (DA), a collection of ultra-wealthy liberal donors formed in 2005, and is reported here in a Washington Free Beacon exclusive. Attendees roamed the grounds at the 150-acre tropical resort on their way...

For more than two years, a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee have warned that the government is secretly interpreting its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming if the public — or even others in Congress — knew about it.

So this is how it ends, a career that was once glistening and unassailable, collapses under the weight of an unimaginable scandal? We all, those of us who observed Joe Paterno and his program over many years, felt that it would end badly for him but none of us could have concocted such a horrific denouement. Maybe he would let his anger get the best of him and he’d physically assault an official or a member of the media. Or maybe he would say something so egregious or ill-considered that he couldn’t undo it. But no one would have, could...

The Justice Department of the Obama Administration, the self-proclaimed "most transparent administration ever Proposes Letting Government to Respond to Freedom of Information Requests Denying Existence of the Documents. A longtime internal policy that allowed Justice Department officials to deny the existence of sensitive information could become the law of the land -- in effect a license to lie -- if a newly proposed rule becomes federal regulation in the coming weeks. The proposed rule directs federal law enforcement agencies, after personnel have determined that documents are too delicate to be released, to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests "as...

According to Judicial Watch, Rep. Edolphous Towns (D-NY) has introduced the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2011. That bill would do with Obama’s presidential records what Obama has already done to his personal and collegiate records: Seal them up. In an obvious effort to protect President Barack Obama, a group of congressional Democrats has introduced legislation to create an official process that will allow the commander-in-chief to keep presidential records secret after he leaves office. Ironically, Obama revoked a similar George W. Bush order in one of his first official acts as president. In 2001 Bush penned an executive order...

In an embarrassing defeat for the Obama administration, a federal court ruled on Wednesday that Secret Service White House visitor logs are agency records that are subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act! U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell issued the decision in Judicial Watch v. Secret Service, (No. 09-2312). Here’s the bottom line: The Obama administration will now have to release all records of all visitors to the White House – or explain why White House visits should be kept secret under law.

The Arizona town that's become a YouTube sensation for its police department hauling away a woman speaking at a town-hall meeting declared a state of emergency this afternoon, leaving many local residents in fear of what officers dressed in full riot gear might do. Jennifer "Jade" Jones, 45, the woman forcibly removed by police from a recent public meeting in Quartzsite, Ariz., despite the vocal objections of the mayor, says an illegal secret meeting was held today with the public locked out of the building. "About noon today, the town council, at the request of the police chief, declared an...

Maintaining the entrenched secrecy of the California Legislature, leaders in the state Senate and Assembly have rejected a joint request by the Bay Area News Group, The Associated Press and the First Amendment Coalition to open the appointment calendars of lawmakers and their key staffers to public view. The denial, received late last week, reveals that activities remain thickly shrouded inside the state Capitol, where a 2010 series in this newspaper documented just how beholden legislators are to lobbyists and the agendas pushed by campaign contributors. Responding to multiple requests from the news organizations, the rules committees in both houses...

PROTECTING STATE secrets and safeguarding national security are paramount.

#2011-009 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY COMPTROLLER OF THE CURRENCY In the Matter of: Zions First National Bank Salt Lake City, Utah AA-EC-11-04 CONSENT ORDER The Comptroller of the Currency of the United States of America ("Comptroller"), through his national bank examiners and other staff of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ("OCC"), conducted an examination of Zions First National Bank, Salt Lake City, Utah ("Bank"), specifically of the Bank's former foreign correspondent business, including its transactions with Casa de Cambio ("CDC") money service business customers located in Mexico. The OCC identified deficiencies in the...

Last year, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet and her senior staff secretly met with a select group of Muslim, Arab, and Sikh organizations. Among the mix were three organizations directly associated with an outlawed terrorist entity — the Muslim Brotherhood, who are involved in the current uprising in Egypt. Walid Phares, director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, criticized the partnership concept: “Through the so-called ‘partnership’ between the Jihadi-sympathizer networks and U.S. bureaucracies, the U.S. government is invaded by militant groups.” Just recently, a Washington, DC-based legal group uncovered documents from the Department of...

Reader Advisory: Sexual Content Obama's mother, the oddly named Stanley Ann, died of cancer about fifteen years ago. There's little known about Stanley Ann, aside from the details provided by Obama and his handlers. Of course, the truth about Obama's past is shrouded in secrecy. But what can be pieced together about Obama's mom from the information at hand? For one, Stanley Ann was given her strange name by her strange father, Stanley Dunham, who desired a boy instead. Dunham was a volatile, hard-drinking man, who was expelled from high school for punching his principal. Mental illness may have run...

Finally, today, we get at least an attempt at an explanation of President Obama’s dead-of-night decision on December 16 to grant Interpol — the international police force — immunity from American law. (See here and here.) Unfortunately, in the habit to which we’ve grown accustomed, the Obama administration itself didn’t provide the explanation. It comes from Interpol’s secretary general, Ron Noble, via an informative report by Valerie Richardson at Human Events. (Ms. Richardson, who quotes from my posts in her story, was good enough to call me for comment; I regret that, because of the press of other business, I...

The keywords for today are “Secrecy” and “Transparency.” There are good secrets and bad secrets. Things to be concealed and things to be revealed. Some people want to know, others want to hide. Secrecy is an valuable commodity. From universities that want to protect professors’ academic freedom by keeping their controversial viewpoints from public criticism to the Central Intelligence Agency’s protection of international sources, secrecy and confidentiality allows organizations and governments to effectively achieve their goals with a degree of freedom and flexibility. On the other hand, transparency is also valuable. For instance, without whistle blowers, the American people would...

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters Thursday afternoon that the Wikileaks data breach is the result of “a system that provided too many points of access” created in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and that the Obama Administration is working to keep the full scope of the breach from congressional oversight by the intelligence committee. (Snip) Hoekstra said that in past national security breaches, the intelligence committee is historically the first panel in Congress informed about the contents of a breach. But so far, according to Hoekstra,

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's go back, audio sound bite-wise, to me on my program, this program. This is March 12th of this year... RUSH ARCHIVE: The TARP money was not used for its original purpose. There's something else out there, Jordan, you need to know. The Federal Reserve, before the TARP bailout, made loans totaling $2 trillion and they will not tell us to whom. We don't know who got the money. Whether the Fed loans it or the government prints it, it's our money. So you can talk about the $700 billion TARP. You can talk about the $787...

It was Wednesday when a coast guard officer dropped a bombshell on his skipper and sparked a national sensation. The 43-year-old chief navigator of the patrol ship Uranami, stationed in Kobe, reportedly admitted he posted video clips on the Internet showing a Chinese trawler ramming Japanese patrol craft off the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, shaking the Cabinet to the core. The leak of the videos of the Sept. 7 collisions has raised two critical questions for the government and investigators: should he be punished for leaking what the government believes is " secret," and how can the...

John Montgomery's explanation for the withdrawal of The News' endorsement of Tracey Mann for Congress demonstrates that there aren't any real journalists on The News editorial board. Mann's advice to President Barack Obama about making his birth certificate public is the same basic advice journalists gave to former President Bill Clinton after discovery of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The best way for a president to defuse a controversy is to make the relevant documents public immediately. Stonewalling like President Richard Nixon did during Watergate only prolongs the situation and encourages people to believe the worst. I don't know where...