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A report commissioned in mid-1999 by Rep. Curt Weldon (R) looks into possible Chinese front companies in the US seeking technology for the Chinese military. Dr. Eileen Preisser and Michael Maloof are commissioned to make the report. Dr. Preisser, who runs the Information Dominance Center at the US Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) and will later become closely tied to Able Danger, uses LIWA's data mining capabilities to search unclassified information. According to Maloof, their results show Chinese front companies in the US posing as US corporations that acquire technology from US defense contractors. When the study is completed...

In 2008 Michael B. Froman, then Citigroup executive, sends John Podesta a list of cabinet members. The email is dated Oct. 6, 2008 and bears the subject line “Lists.” It went to Podesta a month before he was named chairman of President-Elect Obama’s transition team. Froman’s list proved remarkably prescient. As it proposed, Robert Gates, a Bush holdover, became secretary of Defense; Eric Holder became attorney general; Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security; Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff; Susan Rice, United Nations ambassador; Arne Duncan, secretary of Education; Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services; Peter Orszag,...

The VA Inspector has been investigating the deaths for months and has now shared draft of his findings with Top Officials. The new VA Secretary McDonald said: "It is important to note" that while the report documents deficiencies in quality and substantial delays in care, OIG was unable to conclusively assert that the absence of quality or care directly caused the death of any these victims. This May, the inspector found that 1,700 veterans, waiting for primary care appointments at the Phoenix VA, did not show up on the wait list. An additional 1,800 will have to wait at three...

President Obama touted the newly passed Veterans Affairs reform bill Thursday as he signed the measure into law and lamented the scandal that triggered it. But a review of records by Fox News shows the president – despite the urgency he placed publicly on the crisis – only met one-on-one with then-VA Secretary Eric Shinseki once during the scandal. The records, provided through a Freedom of Information Act request, showed they met on May 30, the day Shinseki resigned.

A new VA internal audit found wait-list fraud at almost two-thirds of all VA facilities, and that 13% of schedulers had been trained to commit fraud as part of their work. This new audit, which is separate from the Inspector General probe of the Phoenix facility, provided the final straw that forced VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to offer his resignation yesterday: AppointmentsÂ’ wait times were manipulated at more than 60 percent of the Department of Veterans Affairs health facilities investigated as part of a new internal audit. The White House-ordered audit found that schedulers faced pressure to manipulate the system...

This was not in the Barack Obama playbook. The resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki on Friday did not follow the usual arc of a crisis in the Obama administration. Obama prefers to not get sucked into a drama and cede in the heat of the moment. He’d rather send in fixers and have the bloodletting occur in due course. Shinseki, however, tendered his resignation at the height of a political clamor for his departure and as revelations of systemic delays in veterans’ patient care mounted daily. Shinseki left even before the review Obama had ordered of the department’s...

The President’s official Press-mouth and surrogate whiner, having grown as much as he could in this job, has left his post to pursue more lucrative opportunities.He’ll be replaced by a Press-mouth with an even more impossibly perfect Press-mouth name: “Josh Earnest.” Tell me this guy wasn’t born with a silver-tongued destiny in his mouth. Since Josh has been serving the WON since 2007, you can expect a smooth transition. Mr. Earnest, surrendered his personal integrity in 2007 and never looked backMaybe he can at least see to it that Big Guy gets important news prior to reading about it in...

Jay Carney is stepping down as White House Press Secretary over ´strain´ on his family life, he announced today. But the decision to leave the Obama administration came weeks ago, multiple sources including one in the West Wing told MailOnline. ´He first started talking about it in late April,´ the White House insider said Friday after the decision was made final. [Snip] ´To be honest, the move was more about how to deflect attention away from Eric Shinseki´s resignation, and less about giving Jay a thoughtful send-off,´ the White House official said. And a in insider close to Carney confirmed

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President Barack Obama today accepted the resignation of embattled VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. It was an unfortunate end to a remarkable career of public service that lasted roughly half a century. Shinseki’s departure comes amid widespread charges of corruption and ineptitude at VA hospitals across the country. And it leaves a glaring question — who is next to lead the VA? There’s no doubt the VA needs help, so who could take the reigns from Shinseki and provide the organization with the leadership it needs to serve the nation’s veterans? We compiled a shortlist: 1. Jim Webb The Marine and...

Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned Friday, after more than a month of battling criticism about access to care and tampering with official wait lists at VA health centers. At a meeting with President Barack Obama, during which Mr. Shinseki presented the VA's internal findings of improper scheduling procedures and long wait times across the VA health system, the retired general offered to resign to give a new VA leader the chance to fix the systemic problems at the department. His resignation marks his second departure from public service since his career began in the military in the...

Trying to get details

Seven vulnerable Democrats are now calling for Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki’s resignation after a preliminary Inspector General’s report confirmed allegations of a scandal in the agency.

Via the Standard, I need to correct the record. Yesterday I predicted that Pryor would join the mob of red-state Democrats frantically pushing Shinseki under the bus to protect themselves. I wrongly assumed that leaving 1,700 vets in Phoenix to twist in the wind on a secret wait list — a scheduling problem the IG explicitly said was “systemic” — would qualify as a firing offense, especially considering Shinseki had five years to right this ship. Not to Pryor, apparently. He needs to see more before his conscience is sufficiently troubled to pull the plug. Update: Via new Hot Air...

The White House offered tepid support on Thursday for embattled Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, skirting questions on whether he’ll soon be fired. White House press secretary Jay Carney repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether Shinseki retained the confidence of the president. Carney said the president believed Shinseki had “performed overall well” and “put his heart and soul” into providing care for veterans. But he also emphasized that the president was waiting to see the results of an internal investigation led by White House deputy chief of staff Rob Nabors. “When it comes to the current situation, the inquiries and...

The House's No. 2 Democrat accused Republicans of exploiting the scandal that has enveloped the Veterans Affairs Department for political gain and said he is worried that civil servants could be swept up unfairly in a witch hunt. "I don't think there's any doubt about it … that is essentially the tactic that Republicans are trying to employ," Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters Wednesday. "In some cases there are huge fishing expeditions which are going on for millions of documents that goes beyond the realm of oversight and politicizes the issue very greatly." The Republican National Committee...

Barack Obama is on record as being “furious” over the needless deaths in Veteran’s Administration hospitals. He’s not “furious” because he loves veterans, to the contrary, Barack Obama is “furious” at being been caught in yet another lie. By his own admission Obama knew there were problems in the VA in 2007. In 2008 even before he first took office, Obama was made aware of the problems in the VA hospital system. His response was to appoint Eric Shinseki whose only qualification was that he is “America’s first Asian American four star general,” as the new head of the Veteran’s...

The family of a 65 year-old veteran claims that VA police stomped on the veterans head and neck, causing him to suffer a stroke and die several weeks later, a new lawsuit alleges.

“Obama Hates America,” reads a comment on The Hill about veterans’ groups slamming a Commander in Chief who is in charge of a 267% increase in military deaths since taking office in 2009. (1) A second comment provides stats which show 1,681 (military) deaths in the 62 months between February 2009 and 2014, an absolutely obscene mortality rate for a “non hot” war. And a third comment sums it all up: “When are you people going to realize that Obama hates the Military?” I learned long ago that when I couldn’t figure out what was going on at the college...

On the eve of Memorial Day, and against the backdrop of the rapidly growing Veterans Affairs hospital scandal, do illegal aliens get better treatment than US military veterans? Sarah Palin seems to think so. On Wednesday, President Obama broke his silence on the Veterans Affairs scandal, vowing to hold the military hospitals that falsified records accountable but also claiming that VA problems are anomalies. The president’s remarks come as revelations have emerged in the media about long wait times for veterans seeking medical treatment, and vets who have died while waiting for doctor’s appointments at the military facilities. Originally the...