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The State Department is insisting that secretary of state John Kerry’s decision to reinstate four employees put on administrative leave in the wake of of last year’s Benghazi attack was the right call. A spokeswoman said that Kerry, after revewing the Accountability Review Board’s report on the attack and the “totality of the careers” of the four employees, determined that the the action taken against them was “not warranted.” “These are people with real lives, real careers,” deputy press secretary Marie Harf told reporters on Tuesday?. Asked who should be held accountable for the attack that resulted in the deaths...

The U.S. Justice Department’s long-awaited report finding excessive use of force by Miami police officers might not be a criminal indictment, but it reads like one. The findings, released last week after a 20-month investigation, depict a dysfunctional department with poor firearms training, tactics and supervision — along with sloppy internal investigations of police-involved shootings that often drag on for years with no discipline or accountability. Justice’s civil rights division, prodded into action by seven fatal police shootings of African-American men, found that the Miami Police Department had fully investigated only 24 of 33 shooting incidents from 2008 to 2011,...

As the Department of Labor (DOL) celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act this year, the department is sponsoring a Smartphone app contest to help consumers identify businesses who treat "their workers fairly and lawfully." The DOL requests [emphasis added] that contestants: develop a smartphone application that will transform the way the public is able to use departmental enforcement data. By providing consumers with information at their fingertips about which businesses have treated their workers fairly and lawfully, the creator of this application will help empower consumers to make informed choices about where to bring their business....

State Dept. spokeswoman Jen Psaki, the paid liar from the Obama campaign, refused to answer the question of whether the higher-ups in the State Dept. stopped the investigation into one of their ambassadors regarding prostitution:

JERUSALEM – Did the State Department scrub information about a dramatic incident the night of the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack in which U.S. Embassy staff 400 miles away in Tripoli evacuated their residential compound under possible terror threat? The threat was taken so seriously that, according to a key embassy staffer, communications equipment was dismantled and hard drives were smashed with an ax. The scene was first brought to light in congressional testimony last week by Gregory Hicks, the former U.S. deputy chief of mission in Libya, but it remains largely unreported by news media. The incident also was...

As the congressional investigation into the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, continues to heat up, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told reporters on Monday that the administration is allowing survivors of the attack and other Department employees to come forward and tell the truth about what happened. “We have always encouraged any State Department employee who wants to share their story and tell the truth,” Ventrell said on Monday, according to the Washington Post. But a letter the State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Thomas Gibbons sent to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the...

Working for the public good has also worked well for one California county administrator’s bank account. According to reports by several newspapers, Alameda County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, is paying its County Administrator Susan Muranishi, north of $400,000—for life. This includes a generous base salary of $301,000, plus taxpayer-funded deferred pension plans paid for by the county. The pension accounts are set by a formula that multiplies years of service by 2 to 3 percent of the top salary to calculate the benefit, the San Jose Mercury News reports. With 38 years of service under her belt, the...

Deep ideological divisions within the Justice Department’s voting rights section fueled disputes harmful to its operation and often evolved into the harassment of its employees and managers, but there was “insufficient evidence” to show that either the Bush or the Obama administration used the enforcement of voting laws to seek improper partisan advantage, the agency’s inspector general said Tuesday. The long-awaited report, spawned by the New Black Panther Party voter harassment investigation, was released as Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, who oversees the section, is being considered

Miké @ThePantau Samira Ibrahim's name has been removed from the State Dept.'s website. https://twitter.com/ThePantau/status/309766504084291584 … || https://twitter.com/ThePantau/status/309766552834682880 … 8:49 PM - 07 Mar 13 He’s right. The above page used to list 10 honorees, including terrorism supporter Samira Ibrahim. Now Ibrahim’s name is gone and only 9 women are listed.

A controversial author and longtime critic of the U.S.-Israel alliance lectured at the State Department Friday on the eve of the AIPAC policy conference, Washington’s largest annual pro-Israel gathering. Stephen Walt, coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and professor of international affairs at Harvard University, was the featured speaker at the Secretary’s Open Forum on Friday afternoon. His topic: “Top reasons American foreign policy fails,” according to a copy of the event flyer posted in the hallways of Foggy Bottom. It is unclear how high the U.S.-Israel relationship ranked on Walt’s list. One State Department insider provided...

During Tuesday night's State of the Union address, Barack Obama boasted that he and NATO are planning to leave Afghanistan at the end of 2014 and leave the security of the country to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). There’s one problem: the ANSF isn’t ready. The ANSF was supposed to meet determined standards of effectiveness before the U.S. would withdraw its forces, but now the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is admitting that those standards were lowered so that coalition forces could get out. The desired ranking for the ANSF was previously “independent,” which meant they could function alone. Those...

Environmentalists have cheered the decision by the Obama administration to tap Recreational Equipment Inc. CEO Sally Jewell as secretary of the interior, a position to be vacated by Ken Salazar. “In Jewell, President Obama chose a leader with a demonstrated commitment to preserving the higher purposes public lands hold for all Americans – recreation, adventure, and enjoyment,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement. “Jewell’s unique experience and her love of America’s outdoors will be invaluable to the stewardship of the waters, lands and wildlife we’ve been entrusted to protect for our children,” said Frances Beinecke, president...

The State Department on Tuesday slammed John Bolton, George W. Bush's controversial ambassador to the United Nations, after he accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of faking an illness to avoid testifying this week about the Benghazi attack. Bolton implied on Fox News on Monday night that Clinton lied about her illness to avoid saying anything potentially embarrassing that could come back to haunt her should she choose to run for president in 2016. The State Department put out a statement over the weekend from doctors at Mount Kisco Medical Group and George Washington University saying that Clinton “developed a...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Three State Department officials resigned under pressure Wednesday, less than a day after a damning report blamed management failures for a lack of security at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, where militants killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans on Sept. 11. An administration official said Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for embassy security, and an unnamed official with the Bureau of Near East Affairs, had stepped down. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss personnel...

The House and Senate foreign relations committees have already announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify on Benghazi next week, but the State Department said today that´s not a done deal. Moreover, the State Department may not even share the report of its own internal review on Benghazi with Congress, a top State Department official said today. Congress expects Clinton to testify Dec. 20 about the results of the Accountability Review Board, State´s internal review on the events leading up to and during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi

(CNSNews.com) – Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb refused to use the word “terrorist” during her testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday, saying she is not in the position to make “any judgments on my own.” Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) pressed Lamb, who appeared as a witness on Capitol Hill on the security breaches surrounding the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi last month, following her testimony: “Today as I listen to people, and you, Ms. Lamb, have said you’ve described these attackers in a number of ways, but you don’t mention terrorist...

This is a potential blockbuster given that our ambassador and his three staffers, 2 of which were former Navy SEALs, were all murdered. Drudge has the siren up for this and is headlining it as “America ‘was warned of embassy attack but did nothing”. It’s just one paragraph in a piece from The Independent called “Revealed: inside story of US envoy’s assassination”:

For the first time, federal officials revealed Monday that murdered Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and an elite squad of federal agents first fired bean bags -- not bullets -- at a heavily armed drug cartel crew in the mountains south of Tucson in December 2011. The announcement came as the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging five individuals allegedly involved in Terry's death. A sixth suspect has also been charged in a related incident. The U.S. is also offering a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to the arrest of four outstanding suspects believed to...

The Justice Department’s inspector general is investigating the FBI’s contacts with the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The investigation comes amid increased pressure from Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf to end formal and informal contacts between FBI officials and CAIR. The White House, however, is prodding federal agencies to meet with CAIR, which has close ties to Islamist groups, such as HAMAS. “There is hundreds of examples of departments and agencies that meet with CAIR on a range of issues,” George Selim, the White House’s new director for community partnerships, told The Daily Caller June 7. “I was was shocked, but...

The Department of Justice told Republican House leadership in a Tuesday letter that it hopes to reach an agreement with congressional overseers on how much information about Operation Fast and Furious it is required to hand over. Congressional Republicans have threatened to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for not fully complying with a 22-part subpoena served last October. The letter comes amid reports that House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa has obtained evidence proving that senior Justice Department officials approved Operation Fast and Furious gunwalking tactics. The Justice Department letter was in response to a...