Did Eric Holder lie in Congressional testimony last week?
That’s the question asked by Katie Pavlich and Jim Hoft after the revelation that Attorney General Eric Holder personally approved the application for a warrant on Fox News’ James Rosen as a potential co-conspirator in espionage. Last week, under relatively friendly questioning from Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) about the Department of Justice seizure of Associated Press phone records, Johnson asked about the potential to prosecute reporters under the Espionage Act of 1917. ”You’ve got a long way to go to try to prosecute the press for publication of material,” Holder responded. Later, though, he returned to the topic unbidden, emphasis mine:In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material. This is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.As it turns out, Holder not only heard of it, he personally approved it. The warrant in the Rosen case specified that he was considered a potential suspect in the leak of classified material, the reason that the DoJ didn’t bother to follow the existing Watergate-era statute in coordinating the records request with Fox News. And note that Holder’s testimony in this case wasn’t produced by some sophisticated perjury trap sprung by a Republican, but as a freely-offered representation to no particular question during the question period of a Democrat.
There is no other way to view this except as a lie. Even if Holder wasn’t under oath, that would constitute a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. It certainly should produce at least a resignation, and almost assuredly would require the appointment of a special prosecutor, especially since the next person down in the organization, James Cole, is suspected of doing the same thing with reporters.
Update: Looks like a wide bipartisan consensus has formed for Holder’s resignation. The Huffington Post wants him gone, as does Esquire. A resignation at this point is probably not enough, either, if the House decides that further action is required after this false representation on a key issue.
Update: According to Guy Benson and Gabriel Malor, Holder was under oath:
EdMorrissey @EdMorrissey Was Holder under oath? It's unusual to ask Cabinet members to take an oath at Cong hearings. Still a felony either way.
@edmorrissey @guypbenson The committee specifically said it was suspending the "no oath" courtesy.
.@gabrielmalor @edmorrissey Here's a photo of Holder raising his right hand prior to that testimony: http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/rtxznq8.jpg?w=720&h=480&crop=1 …
I couldn’t recall this when I wrote the post, even though I watched most of that hearing. That, of course, puts a charge of perjury on the table.
Update: Jennifer Rubin independently reached the same conclusion, and notes the specificity in the warrant application of Rosen’s status as a suspect:
First, the affidavit (paragraph 45) asserts that DOJ exhausted all means available to get the material from Rosen’s e-mails and phone, and “because of [Rosen's] own potential criminal liability in this matter,” asking for the documents voluntarily would compromise the integrity of the investigation. Moreover, the affidavit asserts that the “targets” of the investigation (including Rosen) were a risk to “mask their identity and activity, flee or otherwise obstruct this investigation.” It is highly questionable whether Holder believed any of that to be true. (Really, he imagined a Fox News reporter would flee the country? He thought Rosen would don a disguise?) Was the affidavit a sort of ruse to get Rosen’s records (or later to pressure his cooperation)? Did Holder intentionally mislead a judge when he signed off on the affidavit? That is worth exploring.Indeed, along with the question of perjury in Congressional testimony.
Update: The Right Sphere‘s RB makes a good point:
I’m sure Holder and his allies will say that they never intended to prosecute Rosen, but that’s 1) not the point and 2) even worse. If that’s their defense, they knowingly lied to the judge who would, hopefully, reject the request if they admitted it was just a fishing expedition for information.I hadn’t thought about that, but RB is right. Either Holder misrepresented the DoJ in a court filing, or he lied to Congress, and arguably he did both. Either one should get Holder disbarred, at the least.
They’re stuck. Either he (by signing the request for the records) lied to the judge or Holder lied directly to Congress.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/24/did-eric-holder-lie-in-congressional-testimony-last-week/
Lois Lerner Directly Involved in IRS Targeting, Letters Show
A series of letters suggests that senior IRS official Lois Lerner was directly involved in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups as recently as April 2012, more than nine months after she first learned of the activity.
Lerner, the director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Washington, D.C., signed cover letters to 15 conservative organizations currently represented by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) between in March and April of 2012. The letters, such as this one sent to the Ohio Liberty Council on March 16, 2012, informed the groups applying for tax-exempt status that the IRS was “unable to make a final determination on your exempt status without additional information,” and included a list of detailed questions of the kind that a Treasury inspector general’s audit found to be inappropriate. Some of the groups to which Lerner sent letters are still awaiting approval.
Lerner has denied involvement in the targeting, which she has blamed on a few “front-line people” in the agency’s Cincinnati field office. “I have not done anything wrong,” she told members of the House oversight committee on Wednesday. However, she then refused to answer any questions, citing protection under the Fifth Amendment. She has since been placed on (paid) administrative leave, and the committee may call her to testify again.
“One thing is clear: this correspondence shows [Lerner’s] direct involvement in the scheme,” wrote Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the ACLJ. “Further, sending a letter from the top person in the IRS Exempt Organization division to a small Tea Party group also underscores the intimidation used in this targeting ploy.”
The letters coincide with former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman’s March 2012 testimony before Congress, in which he said there was “absolutely no targeting” of conservative groups at the agency. Months later, an internal IRS investigation concluded that the agency had engaged in such targeting. Obama-administration officials have insisted the targeting stopped in May 2012, although a number of ACLJ clients have received similar requests for information from the IRS within the past year, according to chief counsel Jay Sekulow.
http://nationalreview.com/corner/349212/%5Btitle-raw%5D
PK'S NOTE: Unbelievable. Denial. No, they know what is going on. This is lying to save their jobs and, sadly, low information Americans will believe it.
House Democrats Dismiss Existence Of Obama Scandals
“This is not some major scandal in the order of magnitude like Watergate. That’s absurd” says Rep. Gerry Connolly. Republicans promise to keep the pressure on the Obama Administration.Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly refuses to use the word “scandal.”
After two weeks of brutal news cycles — with frenzied Republicans and a hyped up press corps aggressively covering every inch of three controversies surrounding the Obama administration — Connolly insists this too, shall pass.
“I think when the media repeats the word ‘scandals’ you are repeating partisan lines. They are issues that have occurred that have to be addressed. I don’t think they rise to the level of a scandal,” he said. “We had a bunch of idiots at IRS in Cincinnati who didn’t know how to aggregate a flood of tax-exempt applications … but this is not some major scandal in the order of magnitude like Watergate. That’s absurd.”
Connolly was also critical of the way Republicans have investigated the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans. “Don’t get me wrong, Benghazi was a tragedy, but it has no traction. They can continue to talk about it to feed their base, they forget we have a base too. Everytime they do that they are firing up our base too and alienating moderate and swing voters.”
It’s a tack many of his Democratic colleagues in Congress are taking, shrugging off — or downplaying — the recent slate of scandal. If there was any fear that the continual hammering of the administration from House Republicans would hurt Democrats, the party’s members answered with a resounding no.
“I don’t think there is any long-term political impact on House Democrats for any of this stuff,” said Rep. Jim McGovern. “There clearly needs to be more accountability at the IRS and I think that will be taken care of. I think the administration has been handling it correctly.
“And yet you’ve got some coo coo clucks here calling for impeachment, I mean it’s so absurd they are overplaying their hand,” he said of Republicans. “If anything there may be a political backlash on them.”
Speaker John Boehner and Republican leadership have promised to keep the political heat on the administration, and the GOP’s House campaign arm — the National Republican Campaign Committee— is more than ready to make the scandals an issue for Democrats heading into 2014.
One Democratic member close to leadership said Democrats were equally confounded and angry at IRS and DOJ officials. The member added there was some concern for vulnerable members, so taking the scandals seriously was important.
“I think when you saw a lot of us in those hearings you saw how angry we were. It’s hard for Republicans to argue that we don’t care, we do,” the member said. “We just aren’t going to go on a wild goose chase. And if they do, it makes it easier for us to say they aren’t paying attention to jobs and the economy.”
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the ranking member on the House intelligence committee, said the best thing the administration could do was to get all of the information out at once. He referenced the terrorist attack last year in Benghazi, where Republicans have argued the administration has tried to cover up all the facts, as a situation where the White House could have avoided a year-plus long investigation.
“What you have to do is get all the facts on the table as soon as possible. If you don’t, the media will pick up dribs and drabs everyday and it’ll keep the issue alive. Benghazi is an example of that: let’s get to the bottom line, let’s get to the facts, let’s get everything out there,” Ruppersberger said. “My recommendation to them is when there is a scandal, and I think the president did this with the IRS, it to get it out right away, lets gets it right.”
Freshman Rep. Joaquin Castro said the scandals in Washington concerned him, but they had not made their way to his home district.
“I’m getting asked if I’m getting asked back home about the AP story or about Benghazi and those are important things but back home people are talking about the economy and jobs. My sense is that other Democratic members feel the same way,” he said.
“Drip, drip, drip. Everyday there is something new,” Boehner said of the investigation into the IRS and the improper targeting of conservative groups. “We don’t know how deep this extends into the Administration and that’s why our committees are going to continue to investigate this.”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/katenocera/house-democrats-dismiss-existence-of-obama-scandals
Headlines:
Obama: No 'Large Scale' Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Since I Became President
Pelosi: Obama 'Doesn’t Know About Everything That Is Going on in Every Agency of Gov't’
Cues from Above: The White House and the IRSThe scandal might not go all the way up, but the climate of intolerance does.
By Charles Krauthammer‘Horrible customer service.” That’s what the newly fired IRS commissioner averred was the agency’s only sin in singling out conservative political groups for discriminatory treatment.
In such grim proceedings one should be grateful for unintended humor. Horrible customer service is when every patron in a restaurant finds a fly in his soup. But when the maitre d’ screens patrons for their politics and only conservatives find flies paddle-wheeling through their consommé, the problem is not poor service. It is harassment and invidious discrimination.
And yet both the acting and the previous IRS commissioners insisted that the singling out of groups according to their politics was in no way politically motivated. More hilarity. It’s definitional: If you discriminate according to politics, your discrimination is political. It’s a tautology, for God’s sake.
The
IRS responds that this classification was for efficiency, to cut down
on overwork. Ridiculous. How does demanding answers to endless intrusive
and irrelevant questions, creating mountains of unnecessary paperwork
for both applicant and the IRS, reduce the workload?
We are further asked to believe that a cadre of Cincinnati GS-11s is a hotbed of radical-left activism in America. Is anyone stupid enough to believe that?
That’s why the IRS scandal has legs. And because pulling the myriad loose ends of this improbable tale will be the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Democrat Max Baucus. So much for any reflexive administration charge of a partisan witch hunt.
On Wednesday, however, the issue was in the hands of the House Oversight Committee. It allowed Lois Lerner, the IRS official who had already apologized for targeting tea-party groups, to read an opening statement claiming total innocence: “I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” She then refused, on grounds of self-incrimination, to answer any questions.
Perhaps not wanting to appear overbearing, Chairman Darrell Issa gave her a pass, pending legal advice on whether she had forfeited her Fifth Amendment shield by making a statement. Then again, Lerner’s performance may not have endeared her to the average viewer. Her arrogance reminded anyone who needed reminding why the IRS is so unloved. Try saying what she said — I deny, I deny, I deny, and I refuse to answer any of your questions — when you’re next called in for an IRS audit.
Does the IRS scandal go all the way up to the top? As of now, it’s doubtful. It’s nearly inconceivable that anyone would be stupid enough to have given such a politically fatal directive from the White House (although admittedly the bar is rapidly falling).
But when some bureaucrat is looking for cues from above, it matters when the president of the United States denounces the Supreme Court decision that allowed the proliferation of 501(c)(4)s and specifically calls the resulting “special interest groups” running ads to help Republicans “not just a threat to Democrats” but “a threat to our democracy.” That’s especially telling when it comes amid letters from Democratic senators to the IRS urging aggressive scrutiny of 501(c)(4) applications.
A White House can powerfully shape other perceptions as well. For years the administration has conducted a concerted campaign to demonize Fox News, delegitimizing it as a news organization and even urging its ostracism. Then (surprise!) its own Justice Department takes the unprecedented step of naming a Fox reporter a co-conspirator in a leak case — when no reporter has ever been prosecuted for merely soliciting information — in order to invade his and Fox’s private and journalistic communications.
No one goes to jail for creating such climates of intolerance. Nor is it a crime to incessantly claim that those who offer this president opposition and push back – i.e., Republicans, tea partiers, Fox News, whoever dares resist the sycophantic thrill-up-my-leg media adulation — do so only for “politics,” power, and pure partisanship, while the Dear Leader devotes himself exclusively to the nation, the middle class, the good, and the just.
It’s not unlawful to run an ad hominem presidency. It’s merely shameful. The great rhetorical specialty of this president has been his unrelenting attribution of bad faith to those who disagree with him. He acts on principle; they from the basest of instincts.
Well then, why not harass them? Why not ask the content of their prayers? Why not read their e-mails? Why not give them especially horrible customer service?
Waiter! There’s a fly . . .
http://nationalreview.com/article/349190/cues-above-white-house-and-irs-charles-krauthammer
"I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter."
These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it.
So what did we learn the past week, and what are the essentials to keep in mind?
We learned the people who ran and run the IRS are not going to help Congress find out what happened in the IRS. We know we haven't gotten near the bottom of the political corruption of that agency. We do not know who ordered the targeting of conservative groups and individuals, or why, or exactly when it began. We don't know who executed the orders or directives. We do not know the full scope or extent of the scandal. We don't know, for instance, how many applicants for tax-exempt status were abused.
We know the IRS commissioner wasn't telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: "There's absolutely no targeting." We have learned the Lois Lerner lied when she claimed she had spontaneously admitted the targeting in a Q-and-A at a Washington meeting. It was part of a spin operation in which she'd planted the question with a friend. We know the tax-exempt bureau Ms. Lerner ran did not simply make mistakes because it was overwhelmed with requests—the targeting began before a surge in applications. And Ms. Lerner did not learn about the targeting in 2012—the IRS audit timeline shows she was briefed in June 2011. She said the targeting was the work of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office. But the Washington Post spoke to an IRS worker there, who said: "Everything comes from the top."
We know that Lois Lerner this week announced she'd done nothing wrong, and then took the Fifth.
And we know Jay Leno, grown interestingly fearless, said of the new IRS commissioner, "They're called 'acting commissioner' because you have to act like the scandal doesn't involve the White House."
But the most important IRS story came not from the hearings but from Mike Huckabee's program on Fox News Channel. He interviewed and told the story of Catherine Engelbrecht—a nice woman, a citizen, an American. She and her husband live in Richmond, Texas. They have a small manufacturing business. In the past few years she became interested in public policy and founded two groups, King Street Patriots, and True the Vote.
In July 2010 she sent applications to the IRS for tax-exempt status. What followed was not the harassment, intrusiveness and delay we're now used to hearing of. The US government came down on her with full force.
In December 2010 the FBI came to ask about a
person who'd attended a King Street Patriots function. In January 2011
the FBI had more questions. The same month the IRS audited her business
tax returns. In May 2011 the FBI called again for a general inquiry
about King Street Patriots. In June 2011 Engelbrecht's personal tax
returns were audited and the FBI called again. In October 2011 a round
of questions on True the Vote. In November 2011 another call from the
FBI. The next month, more questions from the FBI. In February 2012 a
third round of IRS questions on True the Vote. In February 2012 a first
round of questions on King Street Patriots. The same month the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms did an unscheduled audit of her business.
(It had a license to make firearms but didn't make them.) In July 2012
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration did an unscheduled
audit. In November 2012 more IRS questions on True the Vote. In March
2013, more questions. In April 2013 a second ATF audit.
All this because she requested tax-exempt status for a local conservative group and for one that registers voters and tries to get dead people off the rolls. Her attorney, Cleta Mitchell, who provided the timeline above, told me: "These people, they are just regular Americans. They try to get dead people off the voter rolls, you would think that they are serial killers."
This week Ms. Engelbrecht, who still hasn't received her exemptions, sued the IRS.
With all the talk and the hearings and the news reports, it is important to keep the essentials of this story in mind.
First, only conservative groups were targeted in this scandal by the IRS. Liberal or progressive groups were not targeted. The IRS leaked conservative groups' confidential applications and donor lists to liberal groups, never the other way around.
This was a political operation. If it had not been, then the statistics tell us left-wing groups would have been harassed and abused, and seen their applications leaked to the press. There would be a left-wing equivalent to Catherine Engelbrecht.
And all of this apparently took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. Meaning that before that election, groups that were anti-Obamacare, or pro-life, or pro-Second Amendment or constitutionalist, or had words like 'tea party' or 'patriot' in their name—groups that is that would support Republicans, not Democrats—were suppressed, thwarted, kept from raising money and therefore kept from fully operating.
That is some kind of coincidence. That is some kind of strangely political, strangely partisan, and strangely ideological "poor customer service."
IRS officials have complained that the law is murky, it's difficult to define what the tax exemption law really means. But they don't have any problem defining it. They defined it with a vengeance.
Second, it is important to remember that there has never been an investigation of what happened in the IRS. There was an internal IRS audit, not an investigation, carried out by an inspector general, who was careful this week to note to the House what he'd done was not an investigation. He was tasked to come to conclusions on whether there had been wrongdoing at the agency. It was not his job to find out exactly why it happened, how and when the scandal began, who was involved, and how they operated.
A dead serious investigation is needed. The IRS has colorfully demonstrated that it cannot investigate itself. The Obama administration wants the FBI—which answers to Eric Holder's Justice Department—to investigate, but that would not be credible. The investigators of the IRS must be independent of the administration, or their conclusions will not be trustworthy.
An independent counsel, with all the powers of that office, is what we need.
Again, if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken. The American people will never again be able to have the slightest confidence in the revenue-gathering arm of their government. And that, actually, would be tragic.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578501581991103070.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_opinion
“Let’s be clear about this — she is the government,” he said. “There’s no reason why anyone — if she is still employed
by the IRS, which is a branch of the United States Treasury, which is a
branch of the United States government — then she is not speaking as an
individual. She is speaking as the government, the government. And she
has still got her job. In effect, the United States government has just
pleaded the fifth. That’s absolutely ridiculous.”
On Aug. 21, 2008, the conservative American Issues Project ran an ad highlighting ties between candidate Obama and Bill Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground. The Obama campaign and supporters were furious, and they pressured TV stations to pull the ad—a common-enough tactic in such ad spats.
What came next was not common. Bob Bauer, general counsel for the campaign (and later general counsel for the White House), on the same day wrote to the criminal division of the Justice Department, demanding an investigation into AIP, "its officers and directors," and its "anonymous donors." Mr. Bauer claimed that the nonprofit, as a 501(c)(4), was committing a "knowing and willful violation" of election law, and wanted "action to enforce against criminal violations."
AIP gave Justice a full explanation as to why it was not in violation. It said that it operated exactly as liberal groups like Naral Pro-Choice did. It noted that it had disclosed its donor, Texas businessman Harold Simmons. Mr. Bauer's response was a second letter to Justice calling for the prosecution of Mr. Simmons. He sent a third letter on Sept. 8, again smearing the "sham" AIP's "illegal electoral purpose."
Also on Sept. 8, Mr. Bauer complained to the Federal Election Commission about AIP and Mr. Simmons. He demanded that AIP turn over certain tax documents to his campaign (his right under IRS law), then sent a letter to AIP further hounding it for confidential information (to which he had no legal right).
The Bauer onslaught was a big part of a new liberal strategy to thwart the rise of conservative groups. In early August 2008, the New York Times trumpeted the creation of a left-wing group (a 501(c)4) called Accountable America. Founded by Obama supporter and liberal activist Tom Mattzie, the group—as the story explained—would start by sending "warning" letters to 10,000 GOP donors, "hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions." The letters would alert "right-wing groups to a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives." As Mr. Mattzie told Mother Jones: "We're going to put them at risk."
The Bauer letters were the Obama campaign's high-profile contribution to this effort—though earlier, in the spring of 2008, Mr. Bauer filed a complaint with the FEC against the American Leadership Project, a group backing Hillary Clinton in the primary. "There's going to be a reckoning here," he had warned publicly. "It's going to be rough—it's going to be rough on the officers, it's going to be rough on the employees, it's going to be rough on the donors. . . Whether it's at the FEC or in a broader criminal inquiry, those donors will be asked questions." The campaign similarly attacked a group supporting John Edwards.
American Leadership head (and Democrat) Jason Kinney would rail that Mr. Bauer had gone from "credible legal authority" to "political hatchet man"—but the damage was done. As Politico reported in August 2008, Mr. Bauer's words had "the effect of scaring [Clinton and Edwards] donors and consultants," even if they hadn't yet "result[ed] in any prosecution."
As general counsel to the Obama re-election campaign, Mr. Bauer used the same tactics on pro-Romney groups. The Obama campaign targeted private citizens who had donated to Romney groups. Democratic senators demanded that the IRS investigate these organizations.
None of this proves that Mr. Obama was involved in the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits. But it does help explain how we got an environment in which the IRS thought this was acceptable.
The rise of conservative organizations (to match liberal groups that had long played in politics), and their effectiveness in the 2004 election (derided broadly by liberals as "swift boating"), led to a new and organized campaign in 2008 to chill conservative donors and groups via the threat of government investigation and prosecution. The tone in any organization—a charity, a corporation, the U.S. government—is set at the top.
This history also casts light on White House claims that it was clueless about the IRS's targeting. As Huffington Post's Howard Fineman wrote this week: "With two winning presidential campaigns built on successful grassroots fundraising, with a former White House counsel (in 2010-11) who is one of the Democrats' leading experts on campaign law (Bob Bauer), with former top campaign officials having been ensconced as staffers in the White House . . . it's hard to imagine that the Obama inner circle was oblivious to the issue of what the IRS was doing in Cincinnati." More like inconceivable.
And this history exposes the left's hollow claim that the IRS mess rests on Citizens United. The left was targeting conservative groups and donors well before the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling on independent political expenditures by corporations.
If the country wants to get to the bottom of the IRS scandal, it must first remember the context for this abuse. That context leads to this White House.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324659404578501411510635312.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
There are many other examples that one can add to Strassel's analysis. One that I remember with particular bitterness is from September 2008, when the Democratic National Committee and several Obama-aligned organizations pressured the Jewish community to un-invite Sarah Palin from a rally against Iran at the UN.
What happened was that a group of Jewish non-profit organizations had organized the rally and invited both Gov. Palin and Sen. Hillary Clinton. Clinton initially agreed to attend, but the Obama campaign was terrified at the prospect of her sharing a stage with Palin and sending a signal that Democrat women left frustrated by Clinton's loss might switch parties. So they pressured Clinton to withdraw--and then pressured the Jewish groups to deny Palin a platform, claiming that the rally was now "partisan." Jewish members of the Democratic National Committee reportedly made threats to challenge the groups' IRS non-profit status.
J Street, which had only recently started up as an organization devoted to promoting criticism of Israel and Obama's Middle East policy, joined in the pressure campaign, circulating a petition addressed to Jewish leader and rally organizer Malcolm Hoenlein. When Palin was un-invited, J Street celebrated its role in that deplorable display of thuggish intimidation of free speech and assembly: "We Won!" it boasted. (So did Iran, that day.)
The Obama campaign's tactics weren't confined to non-profit groups. Indeed, its present practice of trying to intimidate journalists emerged at the same time. In late August 2008, the Obama campaign organized an effort to shut down a radio interview between Chicago journalist Milt Rosenberg and conservative author Stanley Kurtz, who had just done the definitive research exposing the ties between Ayers and Obama. (The campaign declined an invitation to appear on the show itself.) The producer of the show later wrote: "It’s interesting to see what lengths the Obama campaign is willing to reach to stifle dissenting voices."
Those of us who protested the Obama campaign's tactics at the time were ignored, as were most who noted what the Obama administration later did to the Tea Party and conservatives. Strassel adds that Bauer came back for the Obama re-election campaign in 2012 and used the same tactics against Romney donors.
"None of this proves that Mr. Obama was involved in the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits," she writes. "But it does help explain how we got an environment in which the IRS thought this was acceptable."
The important point is that the Obama administration's behavior in the Benghazi scandal (intimidating whistleblowers), the IRS scandal (targeting conservative nonprofits and donors), and the AP and Rosen scandals (hounding individual journalists and news agencies) is a feature of Obama's character and leadership, not a bug. He may know well enough to keep himself at arm's length, to retain the façade of "plausible deniability." But the pattern of behavior is becoming undeniable, as is Obama's ultimate responsibility.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/24/Strassel-IRS-Scandal-Roots-in-Obama-s-2008-Campaign
Gird your loins, America. President Obama intends to empty out Guantanamo Bay and send scores of suspected Muslim terror operatives back to their jihadist-coddling native countries. Goaded by anti-war activists and soft-on-terror attorneys (including those from Attorney General Eric Holder's former private law firm), Obama announced Thursday that he'll lift a ban on sending up to 90 Yemeni detainees home and will initiate other stalled transfers out of the compound.
This radical appeasement of Obama's left flank is a surefire recipe for more Benghazis, more U.S.S. Coles and more innocent lives at risk.
A little more than three years ago, the White House assured Americans that it would not release Yemeni detainees back to their al-Qaida-infested land. In January 2010, international press outlets reported that at least a dozen former Guantanamo Bay prisoners had rejoined al-Qaida to fight in Yemen. Yemen was also the terror training ground of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the jihadist who attempted to bomb Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day in 2009.
Abdulmutallab reportedly told the FBI there were countless al-Qaida trainees like him in Yemen. The CIA knew of Abdulmutallab four months before his bombing attempt and was aware of him meeting with terrorists in Yemen a month before his arrest. British media also reported that counterterrorism and intelligence officers were "aware of several British nationals and British residents who had trained at camps in Yemen's 'ungoverned spaces.'"
From the very first days of Obama's presidency, Americans in Yemen have been endangered. In late January 2009, the U.S. Embassy in Yemen came under gunfire. American diplomatic staff had been warned of a pending attack. That same month, two former Yemeni Gitmo detainees, Said Ali al-Shihri and Abu Hareth Muhammad al-Awfi, released a video flipping America the bird.
They publicly recommitted to "aid the religion," "establish the rightly guided caliphate" and "fight against our enemies" after undergoing terrorism "rehab" in Saudi Arabia. Charlie Sheen's rehab worked better than that of the Sauds.
Military review panels indicated that al-Shihri had traveled to Afghanistan two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, trained and funded jihadists outside Kabul, and coordinated travel for al-Qaida before being captured and held at Gitmo. After his release by the Bush administration, intel officials say he was involved in the deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana'a, in September 2008.
Al-Shihri has reportedly been killed in drone attacks at least three times and may or may not have met the same fate as fellow Yemeni jihad leader and drone strike victim Anwar al-Awlaki. But this much is clear: Embassy staffers in Yemen have targets on their back, Benghazi-style. The warning flags are crimson red.
Yemen also produced Jamal Ahmed Mohammad al-Badawi, the convicted mastermind of the U.S.S. Cole bombing that took the lives of 17 American sailors in October 2000. As I've reported previously on the Yemen jihad revolving door: Despite being sentenced to the death penalty, escaping twice from jail and being indicted in the U.S. on terrorism charges, the Yemeni government freed al-Badawi in 2007 in exchange for a promise that he renounce his old murdering ways.
Al-Badawi remains at large and is on the FBI Most Wanted fugitive terrorist list.
As he did with the families of the Benghazi victims, Obama had promised the families of the U.S.S. Cole bombing victims "swift justice." Instead, the administration initially dropped the death penalty case against a key Cole plotter being held at Gitmo -- former Persian Gulf Operations Chief for al-Qaida Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian national of Yemeni descent -- and has dragged its feet on reinstating and pursuing the trial for four long years.
Which side are Obama and his lawyers on, anyway? As I reported in "Culture of Corruption," Covington and Burling, the former private law firm of Close Gitmo crusader and Attorney General Eric Holder, has provided dozens of Yemeni Gitmo detainees hundreds of hours of pro bono legal representation and sob-story media relations campaigns.
While these bleeding-heart lawyers dismiss the perils of Gitmo recidivism, the numbers don't lie. I repeat: The office of the Director of National Intelligence reports that 27.9 percent of the 599 former detainees released from Guantanamo were either confirmed or suspected of later engaging in jihadist attacks. __One of those Gitmo recidivists still on the loose is Ansar al-Sharia leader Sufyan Ben Qumu a.k.a. Abu Sufian bin Qumu, the suspected plotter of the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack.
How much more American blood and treasure will this reckless, feckless game of jihadi catch-and-release cost?
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/05/24/obamas-bloody-recipe-for-more-benghazis-n1605204/page/full
This would be great news if it were true.
The reality is that as U.S. and NATO troops are withdrawing and transitioning security to the Afghan lead, al Qaeda and its affiliates are making a comeback in eastern parts of the country.
On Tuesday, the governor of Nuristan Province, Tamim Nuristani, warned that the province would change into a “second Waziristan” as foreign fighters, including Arab and Lashkar-e Taiba militants, are using it as a passage to reach other northern and northeastern provinces. The killing of a senior al Qaeda commander, Abu Sulaiman Yemeni, in Nuristan earlier this month was another indication that the terrorist group is trying to reestablish itself in areas vacated by foreign troops. During another raid in Nuristan on May 15, Afghan and coalition special operations forces targeted a senior Taliban leader who facilitated the movement of al Qaeda fighters into Afghanistan.
Nuristan tribal elders say 70 percent of the province is now in effect under the rule of the Taliban and foreign militants, who have waged an aggressive campaign to intimidate the population and assassinate government officials. On May 11, the Taliban killed Nuristan’s deputy intelligence chief Mohammad Faiz in a bomb attack. Foreign troops have vacated Nuristan and transitioned security to the Afghans. But local officials say they do not have sufficient number of troops to deal with growing militancy there. The situation in neighboring Kunar and Badakhshan provinces is similar.
President Obama is right that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) have made significant progress in the past three years. The ANSF is leading about 90 percent of all military operations and is set to assume responsibility for security of the entire Afghan population this summer. But the success of ANSF heavily hinges upon the support it receives from the coalition – especially in terms of air power, medevac, intelligence, reconnaissance, and logistics. Without coalition support, ANSF’s operational capacity will decline significantly.
And if the administration withdraws the remaining 60,000 troops precipitously and does not leave a significant residual force post-2014 to assist the ANSF and conduct counterterrorism operations along the Afghan-Pakistani border, al Qaeda and its affiliates will reemerge in southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan – from where they could try to topple the Kabul government and plot attacks against the U.S. and its allies abroad. Moreover, the CIA-led drone strikes targeting al Qaeda in Pakistan will either cease or become mostly ineffective.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/05/obamas-speech-an-exercise-in-wishful-thinking/
Victoria Nuland — the State Department spokeswoman who famously altered the talking points regarding the Sept. 11, 2012 attack — will become assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs if the nomination clears the Senate.
It’s a toxic nomination for the president to put forward, particularly as congressional Republicans hammer the administration for failures in readiness and response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Nuland is a central character in those criticisms, having expressed “serious concerns” about any mention of terrorism.
Four Americans died in the terror attack, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.
Those confirmation hearings could get testy. Nuland's contributions to the now-infamous talking points email chain provide the closest thing to smoking-gun evidence of a cover up. She demanded that (accurate) assessments of terrorist involvement be scrubbed, along with references to (accurate) intelligence warnings leading up to the attack about the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi. Here's how ABC News described her insistence on misleading edits a few weeks ago:
We are further asked to believe that a cadre of Cincinnati GS-11s is a hotbed of radical-left activism in America. Is anyone stupid enough to believe that?
That’s why the IRS scandal has legs. And because pulling the myriad loose ends of this improbable tale will be the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Democrat Max Baucus. So much for any reflexive administration charge of a partisan witch hunt.
On Wednesday, however, the issue was in the hands of the House Oversight Committee. It allowed Lois Lerner, the IRS official who had already apologized for targeting tea-party groups, to read an opening statement claiming total innocence: “I have not done anything wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” She then refused, on grounds of self-incrimination, to answer any questions.
Perhaps not wanting to appear overbearing, Chairman Darrell Issa gave her a pass, pending legal advice on whether she had forfeited her Fifth Amendment shield by making a statement. Then again, Lerner’s performance may not have endeared her to the average viewer. Her arrogance reminded anyone who needed reminding why the IRS is so unloved. Try saying what she said — I deny, I deny, I deny, and I refuse to answer any of your questions — when you’re next called in for an IRS audit.
Does the IRS scandal go all the way up to the top? As of now, it’s doubtful. It’s nearly inconceivable that anyone would be stupid enough to have given such a politically fatal directive from the White House (although admittedly the bar is rapidly falling).
But when some bureaucrat is looking for cues from above, it matters when the president of the United States denounces the Supreme Court decision that allowed the proliferation of 501(c)(4)s and specifically calls the resulting “special interest groups” running ads to help Republicans “not just a threat to Democrats” but “a threat to our democracy.” That’s especially telling when it comes amid letters from Democratic senators to the IRS urging aggressive scrutiny of 501(c)(4) applications.
A White House can powerfully shape other perceptions as well. For years the administration has conducted a concerted campaign to demonize Fox News, delegitimizing it as a news organization and even urging its ostracism. Then (surprise!) its own Justice Department takes the unprecedented step of naming a Fox reporter a co-conspirator in a leak case — when no reporter has ever been prosecuted for merely soliciting information — in order to invade his and Fox’s private and journalistic communications.
No one goes to jail for creating such climates of intolerance. Nor is it a crime to incessantly claim that those who offer this president opposition and push back – i.e., Republicans, tea partiers, Fox News, whoever dares resist the sycophantic thrill-up-my-leg media adulation — do so only for “politics,” power, and pure partisanship, while the Dear Leader devotes himself exclusively to the nation, the middle class, the good, and the just.
It’s not unlawful to run an ad hominem presidency. It’s merely shameful. The great rhetorical specialty of this president has been his unrelenting attribution of bad faith to those who disagree with him. He acts on principle; they from the basest of instincts.
Well then, why not harass them? Why not ask the content of their prayers? Why not read their e-mails? Why not give them especially horrible customer service?
Waiter! There’s a fly . . .
http://nationalreview.com/article/349190/cues-above-white-house-and-irs-charles-krauthammer
Noonan: A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall
The IRS's leaders refuse to account for the agency's corruption and abuse.
By Peggy Noonan"I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter."
These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it.
So what did we learn the past week, and what are the essentials to keep in mind?
We learned the people who ran and run the IRS are not going to help Congress find out what happened in the IRS. We know we haven't gotten near the bottom of the political corruption of that agency. We do not know who ordered the targeting of conservative groups and individuals, or why, or exactly when it began. We don't know who executed the orders or directives. We do not know the full scope or extent of the scandal. We don't know, for instance, how many applicants for tax-exempt status were abused.
We know the IRS commissioner wasn't telling the truth in March 2012, when he testified: "There's absolutely no targeting." We have learned the Lois Lerner lied when she claimed she had spontaneously admitted the targeting in a Q-and-A at a Washington meeting. It was part of a spin operation in which she'd planted the question with a friend. We know the tax-exempt bureau Ms. Lerner ran did not simply make mistakes because it was overwhelmed with requests—the targeting began before a surge in applications. And Ms. Lerner did not learn about the targeting in 2012—the IRS audit timeline shows she was briefed in June 2011. She said the targeting was the work of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office. But the Washington Post spoke to an IRS worker there, who said: "Everything comes from the top."
We know that Lois Lerner this week announced she'd done nothing wrong, and then took the Fifth.
And we know Jay Leno, grown interestingly fearless, said of the new IRS commissioner, "They're called 'acting commissioner' because you have to act like the scandal doesn't involve the White House."
But the most important IRS story came not from the hearings but from Mike Huckabee's program on Fox News Channel. He interviewed and told the story of Catherine Engelbrecht—a nice woman, a citizen, an American. She and her husband live in Richmond, Texas. They have a small manufacturing business. In the past few years she became interested in public policy and founded two groups, King Street Patriots, and True the Vote.
In July 2010 she sent applications to the IRS for tax-exempt status. What followed was not the harassment, intrusiveness and delay we're now used to hearing of. The US government came down on her with full force.
All this because she requested tax-exempt status for a local conservative group and for one that registers voters and tries to get dead people off the rolls. Her attorney, Cleta Mitchell, who provided the timeline above, told me: "These people, they are just regular Americans. They try to get dead people off the voter rolls, you would think that they are serial killers."
This week Ms. Engelbrecht, who still hasn't received her exemptions, sued the IRS.
With all the talk and the hearings and the news reports, it is important to keep the essentials of this story in mind.
First, only conservative groups were targeted in this scandal by the IRS. Liberal or progressive groups were not targeted. The IRS leaked conservative groups' confidential applications and donor lists to liberal groups, never the other way around.
This was a political operation. If it had not been, then the statistics tell us left-wing groups would have been harassed and abused, and seen their applications leaked to the press. There would be a left-wing equivalent to Catherine Engelbrecht.
And all of this apparently took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. Meaning that before that election, groups that were anti-Obamacare, or pro-life, or pro-Second Amendment or constitutionalist, or had words like 'tea party' or 'patriot' in their name—groups that is that would support Republicans, not Democrats—were suppressed, thwarted, kept from raising money and therefore kept from fully operating.
That is some kind of coincidence. That is some kind of strangely political, strangely partisan, and strangely ideological "poor customer service."
IRS officials have complained that the law is murky, it's difficult to define what the tax exemption law really means. But they don't have any problem defining it. They defined it with a vengeance.
Second, it is important to remember that there has never been an investigation of what happened in the IRS. There was an internal IRS audit, not an investigation, carried out by an inspector general, who was careful this week to note to the House what he'd done was not an investigation. He was tasked to come to conclusions on whether there had been wrongdoing at the agency. It was not his job to find out exactly why it happened, how and when the scandal began, who was involved, and how they operated.
A dead serious investigation is needed. The IRS has colorfully demonstrated that it cannot investigate itself. The Obama administration wants the FBI—which answers to Eric Holder's Justice Department—to investigate, but that would not be credible. The investigators of the IRS must be independent of the administration, or their conclusions will not be trustworthy.
An independent counsel, with all the powers of that office, is what we need.
Again, if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken. The American people will never again be able to have the slightest confidence in the revenue-gathering arm of their government. And that, actually, would be tragic.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578501581991103070.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_opinion
Mark Steyn on IRS hearings:
According to the National Review columnist Mark Steyn, Lerner’s decision to not participate in the congressional inquiry represented the federal government’s position.“Let’s be clear about this — she is the government,” he said. “There’s no reason why anyone — if she is still employed
by the IRS, which is a branch of the United States Treasury, which is a
branch of the United States government — then she is not speaking as an
individual. She is speaking as the government, the government. And she
has still got her job. In effect, the United States government has just
pleaded the fifth. That’s absolutely ridiculous.”Strassel: Conservatives Became Targets in 2008
The Obama campaign played a big role in a liberal onslaught that far pre-dated Citizens United.
The White House insists President Obama is "outraged" by the "inappropriate" targeting and harassment of conservative groups. If true, it's a remarkable turnaround for a man who helped pioneer those tactics.On Aug. 21, 2008, the conservative American Issues Project ran an ad highlighting ties between candidate Obama and Bill Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground. The Obama campaign and supporters were furious, and they pressured TV stations to pull the ad—a common-enough tactic in such ad spats.
What came next was not common. Bob Bauer, general counsel for the campaign (and later general counsel for the White House), on the same day wrote to the criminal division of the Justice Department, demanding an investigation into AIP, "its officers and directors," and its "anonymous donors." Mr. Bauer claimed that the nonprofit, as a 501(c)(4), was committing a "knowing and willful violation" of election law, and wanted "action to enforce against criminal violations."
AIP gave Justice a full explanation as to why it was not in violation. It said that it operated exactly as liberal groups like Naral Pro-Choice did. It noted that it had disclosed its donor, Texas businessman Harold Simmons. Mr. Bauer's response was a second letter to Justice calling for the prosecution of Mr. Simmons. He sent a third letter on Sept. 8, again smearing the "sham" AIP's "illegal electoral purpose."
Also on Sept. 8, Mr. Bauer complained to the Federal Election Commission about AIP and Mr. Simmons. He demanded that AIP turn over certain tax documents to his campaign (his right under IRS law), then sent a letter to AIP further hounding it for confidential information (to which he had no legal right).
The Bauer onslaught was a big part of a new liberal strategy to thwart the rise of conservative groups. In early August 2008, the New York Times trumpeted the creation of a left-wing group (a 501(c)4) called Accountable America. Founded by Obama supporter and liberal activist Tom Mattzie, the group—as the story explained—would start by sending "warning" letters to 10,000 GOP donors, "hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions." The letters would alert "right-wing groups to a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives." As Mr. Mattzie told Mother Jones: "We're going to put them at risk."
The Bauer letters were the Obama campaign's high-profile contribution to this effort—though earlier, in the spring of 2008, Mr. Bauer filed a complaint with the FEC against the American Leadership Project, a group backing Hillary Clinton in the primary. "There's going to be a reckoning here," he had warned publicly. "It's going to be rough—it's going to be rough on the officers, it's going to be rough on the employees, it's going to be rough on the donors. . . Whether it's at the FEC or in a broader criminal inquiry, those donors will be asked questions." The campaign similarly attacked a group supporting John Edwards.
American Leadership head (and Democrat) Jason Kinney would rail that Mr. Bauer had gone from "credible legal authority" to "political hatchet man"—but the damage was done. As Politico reported in August 2008, Mr. Bauer's words had "the effect of scaring [Clinton and Edwards] donors and consultants," even if they hadn't yet "result[ed] in any prosecution."
As general counsel to the Obama re-election campaign, Mr. Bauer used the same tactics on pro-Romney groups. The Obama campaign targeted private citizens who had donated to Romney groups. Democratic senators demanded that the IRS investigate these organizations.
None of this proves that Mr. Obama was involved in the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits. But it does help explain how we got an environment in which the IRS thought this was acceptable.
The rise of conservative organizations (to match liberal groups that had long played in politics), and their effectiveness in the 2004 election (derided broadly by liberals as "swift boating"), led to a new and organized campaign in 2008 to chill conservative donors and groups via the threat of government investigation and prosecution. The tone in any organization—a charity, a corporation, the U.S. government—is set at the top.
This history also casts light on White House claims that it was clueless about the IRS's targeting. As Huffington Post's Howard Fineman wrote this week: "With two winning presidential campaigns built on successful grassroots fundraising, with a former White House counsel (in 2010-11) who is one of the Democrats' leading experts on campaign law (Bob Bauer), with former top campaign officials having been ensconced as staffers in the White House . . . it's hard to imagine that the Obama inner circle was oblivious to the issue of what the IRS was doing in Cincinnati." More like inconceivable.
And this history exposes the left's hollow claim that the IRS mess rests on Citizens United. The left was targeting conservative groups and donors well before the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling on independent political expenditures by corporations.
If the country wants to get to the bottom of the IRS scandal, it must first remember the context for this abuse. That context leads to this White House.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324659404578501411510635312.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
IRS Scandal's Roots in Obama's 2008 Campaign; Attacked Clinton, Edwards, Too
...There are many other examples that one can add to Strassel's analysis. One that I remember with particular bitterness is from September 2008, when the Democratic National Committee and several Obama-aligned organizations pressured the Jewish community to un-invite Sarah Palin from a rally against Iran at the UN.
What happened was that a group of Jewish non-profit organizations had organized the rally and invited both Gov. Palin and Sen. Hillary Clinton. Clinton initially agreed to attend, but the Obama campaign was terrified at the prospect of her sharing a stage with Palin and sending a signal that Democrat women left frustrated by Clinton's loss might switch parties. So they pressured Clinton to withdraw--and then pressured the Jewish groups to deny Palin a platform, claiming that the rally was now "partisan." Jewish members of the Democratic National Committee reportedly made threats to challenge the groups' IRS non-profit status.
J Street, which had only recently started up as an organization devoted to promoting criticism of Israel and Obama's Middle East policy, joined in the pressure campaign, circulating a petition addressed to Jewish leader and rally organizer Malcolm Hoenlein. When Palin was un-invited, J Street celebrated its role in that deplorable display of thuggish intimidation of free speech and assembly: "We Won!" it boasted. (So did Iran, that day.)
The Obama campaign's tactics weren't confined to non-profit groups. Indeed, its present practice of trying to intimidate journalists emerged at the same time. In late August 2008, the Obama campaign organized an effort to shut down a radio interview between Chicago journalist Milt Rosenberg and conservative author Stanley Kurtz, who had just done the definitive research exposing the ties between Ayers and Obama. (The campaign declined an invitation to appear on the show itself.) The producer of the show later wrote: "It’s interesting to see what lengths the Obama campaign is willing to reach to stifle dissenting voices."
Those of us who protested the Obama campaign's tactics at the time were ignored, as were most who noted what the Obama administration later did to the Tea Party and conservatives. Strassel adds that Bauer came back for the Obama re-election campaign in 2012 and used the same tactics against Romney donors.
"None of this proves that Mr. Obama was involved in the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits," she writes. "But it does help explain how we got an environment in which the IRS thought this was acceptable."
The important point is that the Obama administration's behavior in the Benghazi scandal (intimidating whistleblowers), the IRS scandal (targeting conservative nonprofits and donors), and the AP and Rosen scandals (hounding individual journalists and news agencies) is a feature of Obama's character and leadership, not a bug. He may know well enough to keep himself at arm's length, to retain the façade of "plausible deniability." But the pattern of behavior is becoming undeniable, as is Obama's ultimate responsibility.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/05/24/Strassel-IRS-Scandal-Roots-in-Obama-s-2008-Campaign
Obama's Bloody Recipe for More Benghazis
By Michelle MalkinGird your loins, America. President Obama intends to empty out Guantanamo Bay and send scores of suspected Muslim terror operatives back to their jihadist-coddling native countries. Goaded by anti-war activists and soft-on-terror attorneys (including those from Attorney General Eric Holder's former private law firm), Obama announced Thursday that he'll lift a ban on sending up to 90 Yemeni detainees home and will initiate other stalled transfers out of the compound.
This radical appeasement of Obama's left flank is a surefire recipe for more Benghazis, more U.S.S. Coles and more innocent lives at risk.
A little more than three years ago, the White House assured Americans that it would not release Yemeni detainees back to their al-Qaida-infested land. In January 2010, international press outlets reported that at least a dozen former Guantanamo Bay prisoners had rejoined al-Qaida to fight in Yemen. Yemen was also the terror training ground of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the jihadist who attempted to bomb Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day in 2009.
Abdulmutallab reportedly told the FBI there were countless al-Qaida trainees like him in Yemen. The CIA knew of Abdulmutallab four months before his bombing attempt and was aware of him meeting with terrorists in Yemen a month before his arrest. British media also reported that counterterrorism and intelligence officers were "aware of several British nationals and British residents who had trained at camps in Yemen's 'ungoverned spaces.'"
From the very first days of Obama's presidency, Americans in Yemen have been endangered. In late January 2009, the U.S. Embassy in Yemen came under gunfire. American diplomatic staff had been warned of a pending attack. That same month, two former Yemeni Gitmo detainees, Said Ali al-Shihri and Abu Hareth Muhammad al-Awfi, released a video flipping America the bird.
They publicly recommitted to "aid the religion," "establish the rightly guided caliphate" and "fight against our enemies" after undergoing terrorism "rehab" in Saudi Arabia. Charlie Sheen's rehab worked better than that of the Sauds.
Military review panels indicated that al-Shihri had traveled to Afghanistan two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, trained and funded jihadists outside Kabul, and coordinated travel for al-Qaida before being captured and held at Gitmo. After his release by the Bush administration, intel officials say he was involved in the deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana'a, in September 2008.
Al-Shihri has reportedly been killed in drone attacks at least three times and may or may not have met the same fate as fellow Yemeni jihad leader and drone strike victim Anwar al-Awlaki. But this much is clear: Embassy staffers in Yemen have targets on their back, Benghazi-style. The warning flags are crimson red.
Yemen also produced Jamal Ahmed Mohammad al-Badawi, the convicted mastermind of the U.S.S. Cole bombing that took the lives of 17 American sailors in October 2000. As I've reported previously on the Yemen jihad revolving door: Despite being sentenced to the death penalty, escaping twice from jail and being indicted in the U.S. on terrorism charges, the Yemeni government freed al-Badawi in 2007 in exchange for a promise that he renounce his old murdering ways.
Al-Badawi remains at large and is on the FBI Most Wanted fugitive terrorist list.
As he did with the families of the Benghazi victims, Obama had promised the families of the U.S.S. Cole bombing victims "swift justice." Instead, the administration initially dropped the death penalty case against a key Cole plotter being held at Gitmo -- former Persian Gulf Operations Chief for al-Qaida Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian national of Yemeni descent -- and has dragged its feet on reinstating and pursuing the trial for four long years.
Which side are Obama and his lawyers on, anyway? As I reported in "Culture of Corruption," Covington and Burling, the former private law firm of Close Gitmo crusader and Attorney General Eric Holder, has provided dozens of Yemeni Gitmo detainees hundreds of hours of pro bono legal representation and sob-story media relations campaigns.
While these bleeding-heart lawyers dismiss the perils of Gitmo recidivism, the numbers don't lie. I repeat: The office of the Director of National Intelligence reports that 27.9 percent of the 599 former detainees released from Guantanamo were either confirmed or suspected of later engaging in jihadist attacks. __One of those Gitmo recidivists still on the loose is Ansar al-Sharia leader Sufyan Ben Qumu a.k.a. Abu Sufian bin Qumu, the suspected plotter of the 9/11/12 Benghazi attack.
How much more American blood and treasure will this reckless, feckless game of jihadi catch-and-release cost?
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/05/24/obamas-bloody-recipe-for-more-benghazis-n1605204/page/full
Obama’s speech an exercise in wishful thinking
“The Afghan War is coming to an end,” President Obama said this afternoon in a speech about the future of U.S. counterterrorism policy. “Today, the core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on a path to defeat. Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us,” he added.This would be great news if it were true.
The reality is that as U.S. and NATO troops are withdrawing and transitioning security to the Afghan lead, al Qaeda and its affiliates are making a comeback in eastern parts of the country.
On Tuesday, the governor of Nuristan Province, Tamim Nuristani, warned that the province would change into a “second Waziristan” as foreign fighters, including Arab and Lashkar-e Taiba militants, are using it as a passage to reach other northern and northeastern provinces. The killing of a senior al Qaeda commander, Abu Sulaiman Yemeni, in Nuristan earlier this month was another indication that the terrorist group is trying to reestablish itself in areas vacated by foreign troops. During another raid in Nuristan on May 15, Afghan and coalition special operations forces targeted a senior Taliban leader who facilitated the movement of al Qaeda fighters into Afghanistan.
Nuristan tribal elders say 70 percent of the province is now in effect under the rule of the Taliban and foreign militants, who have waged an aggressive campaign to intimidate the population and assassinate government officials. On May 11, the Taliban killed Nuristan’s deputy intelligence chief Mohammad Faiz in a bomb attack. Foreign troops have vacated Nuristan and transitioned security to the Afghans. But local officials say they do not have sufficient number of troops to deal with growing militancy there. The situation in neighboring Kunar and Badakhshan provinces is similar.
President Obama is right that the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) have made significant progress in the past three years. The ANSF is leading about 90 percent of all military operations and is set to assume responsibility for security of the entire Afghan population this summer. But the success of ANSF heavily hinges upon the support it receives from the coalition – especially in terms of air power, medevac, intelligence, reconnaissance, and logistics. Without coalition support, ANSF’s operational capacity will decline significantly.
And if the administration withdraws the remaining 60,000 troops precipitously and does not leave a significant residual force post-2014 to assist the ANSF and conduct counterterrorism operations along the Afghan-Pakistani border, al Qaeda and its affiliates will reemerge in southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan – from where they could try to topple the Kabul government and plot attacks against the U.S. and its allies abroad. Moreover, the CIA-led drone strikes targeting al Qaeda in Pakistan will either cease or become mostly ineffective.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/05/obamas-speech-an-exercise-in-wishful-thinking/
Obama promotes Benghazi talking points editor to assistant secretary of state
The woman responsible for completely removing references to terrorism from the Benghazi talking points has been nominated by President Obama to become an assistant secretary of state.Victoria Nuland — the State Department spokeswoman who famously altered the talking points regarding the Sept. 11, 2012 attack — will become assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs if the nomination clears the Senate.
It’s a toxic nomination for the president to put forward, particularly as congressional Republicans hammer the administration for failures in readiness and response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Nuland is a central character in those criticisms, having expressed “serious concerns” about any mention of terrorism.
Four Americans died in the terror attack, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.
The State Department spokeswoman who earlier this month found herself in the middle of the controversy surrounding key revisions to the Benghazi talking points appears to be in line for a promotion. The White House announced Thursday that President Barack Obama intends to nominate Victoria Nuland as assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs, a position that requires Senate confirmation...Nuland, who has served as the State Department spokesperson from 2011 until earlier this spring, came under fire from Obama administration critics last week after leaked e-mails revealed she raised concerns with the CIA-prepared talking points on the deadly terror attack last September 11. Specifically, Nuland asked that references to al Qaeda and previous CIA warnings about threats posed to U.S. diplomats in Libya be scrubbed from the document that was used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on news talk shows to explain the administration's understanding of events in Libya.
Those confirmation hearings could get testy. Nuland's contributions to the now-infamous talking points email chain provide the closest thing to smoking-gun evidence of a cover up. She demanded that (accurate) assessments of terrorist involvement be scrubbed, along with references to (accurate) intelligence warnings leading up to the attack about the deteriorating security situation in Benghazi. Here's how ABC News described her insistence on misleading edits a few weeks ago:
In one email, previously reported by ABC News, Nuland said that including the CIA warnings "could be used by Members [of Congress] to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings so why do we want to feed that? Concerned …" After some changes were made, Nuland was still not satisfied. "These [changes] don't resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership," Nuland wrote.These two quotes alone demonstrate how Nuland was primarily concerned about denying Congress (accurate) ammunition to ask why State Department leadership had been derelict and negligent in advance of the deadly terrorist attacks. "Why do we want to feed that?" she asked, apparently unconcerned with, you know, the truth. She also specified that early rounds of alterations to the talking points were insufficiently bowdlerized, which was unacceptable to both her and her "building leadership." To whom might she have been referring, I wonder? Now, Obama would like to elevate Nuland to be among that building leadership.
Loyal soldiers must be rewarded for protecting the
castle, after all. This move extends another middle finger to House
investigators and the families of the Benghazi dead. The message is
clear: The president could not care less about what other people think
about Benghazi. It's such a non-scandal to the White House that they're
conspicuously promoting its key players. The arrogance and "you can't
touch me" attitude speaks for itself. This administration is out of
control.
Besides the top office headed by the woman in the middle of the IRS-Tea Party scandal, there are seven others and a special enforcement team that make up an organization chart that mirrors the organization of the IRS itself, according to a Treasury Inspector General's report.
The June report focused on concerns that the IRS, which is filling the Obamacare offices with 2,137 agents and officials to make sure citizens and companies comply with the new health law or pay a fine, isn't clear on its new role and how many new workers it will actually need. For example, the IRS will be in charge of analyzing hospital "community benefit activities," which it has never done before.
But in that report was the organizational chart revealing the series of Obamacare offices. They are led by a steering committee that coordinates Obamacare implementation across the IRS. It is led by the agency's deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, the office linked to the IRS scandal. Ousted acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller recently had that job.
Other branches include three program management offices, four services and enforcement offices, and services and enforcement exchange working teams.
From the IG report:
Appropriate Plans Have Been Developed to Implement Most Tax-Related Provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
To begin the major task of implementing the tax-related provisions of the ACA, the IRS created the following Executive Steering Committees, Offices, and Teams.
-- The ACA Executive Steering Committee (ESC) is responsible for overall program coordination and implementation of the ACA across the IRS. This committee is co-chaired by the Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement and the Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support. It also includes the IRS Chief of Staff and other IRS executives, including the business operating division commissioners, et al.
-- Three program management offices (PMO): 1) Services and Enforcement; 2) Modernization and Information Technology Services (MITS);5 and 3) Health Care Council. These PMOs are accountable to the ESC for ACA implementation and work with the IRS business operating divisions to ensure efforts are successfully coordinated.
-- Four functional ESCs, each led by an executive chair, have responsibility for specific provisions in the ACA that directly affect the four business operating divisions (Wage and Investment, Small Business/Self-Employed, Large Business and International, and Tax Exempt/Government Entities).
-- The Services and Enforcement Exchange Working Teams are responsible for planning the implementation of the exchange provisions scheduled for 2014.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/giant-octopus-irs-has-8-offices-to-enforce-obamacare/article/2530200
Last year, when First Solar was taking a beating from congressional Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised Antelope Valley in his testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees. Earlier, Caperton and Steve Spinner— a top Obama fundraiser who left his job at the Energy Department monitoring the issuance of loan guarantees and became a CAP senior fellow—had written an article cross-posted on CAP’s website and its Think Progress blog, stating that Antelope Valley represented “the cutting edge of the clean energy economy.”
Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power- house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing.
CAP is a strong proponent of alternative energy, so there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of its advocacy. But the fact that CAP has received financial support from First Solar while touting its virtues to Washington policy-makers points to a conflict of interest that, critics argue, ought to be disclosed to the public. CAP’s promotion of the company’s interests has supplemented First Solar’s aggressive Washington lobbying efforts, on which it spent more than $800,000 during 2011 and 2012.
“The only thing more damaging than disclosing your donors and having questions raised about the independence of your work is not disclosing them and have the information come to light and undermine your work,” says Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “The best practice, whether required by the IRS or not, is to disclose contributions.”
Nowadays, many Washington think tanks effectively serve as unregistered lobbyists for corporate donors, and companies strategically contribute to them just as they hire a PR or lobby shop or make campaign donations. And unlike lobbyists and elected officials, think tanks are not subject to financial disclosure requirements, so they reveal their donors only if they choose to. That makes it impossible for the public and lawmakers to know if a think tank is putting out an impartial study or one that’s been shaped by a donor’s political agenda. “If you’re a lobbyist, whatever you say is heavily discounted,” says Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert on political ethics. “If a think tank is saying it, it obviously sounds a lot better. Maybe think tanks aren’t aware of how useful that makes them to private interests. On the other hand, maybe it’s part of their revenue model.”
It was an interesting story, but it obscured a key point: Newt’s “hybrid” was a particularly straightforward form of pay-to-play, but its basic features are common at Washington think tanks. Like Newt’s Center for Health Transformation, many lure big donors with a package of benefits, including personalized policy briefings, the right to directly underwrite and shape research projects, and general support for the donor’s political needs.
Most think tanks are nonprofit organizations, so a donor can even get a nice tax break for contributing. But it’s their reputation for impartiality and their web of contacts that makes them especially useful as policy advocates. “Think tanks can always draw a big audience to your event, including government folks,” a Washington lobbyist who has worked with several told me. “And people generally don’t think they would twist anything, or wonder about where they get their money.”
While think tanks portray themselves as altruistic scholarly institutions, they emphasize their political influence when courting donors. “If you have a particular area of policy interest, you can support a specific research effort under way,” the Brookings Institution says in one pitch for cash. Those interested in ”a deeper engagement”—read: ready to fork over especially large sums of money—get personal briefings from resident experts and can work directly with senior Brookings officials to draw up a research agenda that will “maximize impact on policymaking.”
The Center for Strategic and International Studies advertises itself as being “in the unique position to bring together leaders of both the public and private sectors in small, often off-the-record meetings to build consensus around important policy issues.” It allows top-tier donors to directly sponsor reports, events and speaker series.
Because most think tanks don’t fully disclose their donors, it’s not always easy to see what sort of benefits money can buy. But during Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearings, the Atlantic Council, where he’d been chairman before moving to the Pentagon, released a list of its foreign donors. One of them turned out to be the oil-rich government of Kazakhstan, headed by dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev. Last year, the council hosted a conference on Kazakhstan that was paid for by the Nazarbayev regime and Chevron, which has vast oil interests in the country and is also a major donor to the council. Keynote speakers included Kazakhstan’s former ambassador to the United States and Kenneth Derr, a former Chevron CEO and now Kazakhstan’s honorary consul in San Francisco.
CAP has emerged as perhaps the most influential of all think tanks during the Obama era, and there’s been a rapidly revolving door between it and the administration. CAP is also among the most secretive of all think tanks concerning its donors. Most major think tanks prepare an annual report containing at least some financial and donor information and make it available on their websites. According to CAP spokeswoman Andrea Purse, the center doesn’t even publish one.
Purse told me that CAP “follows all financial disclosure requirements with regard to donors…. We don’t use corporate funds to pay for research or reports.” But she flatly refused to discuss specific donors or to provide an on-the-record explanation for why CAP won’t disclose them.
After growing rapidly in its first few years, tax records show, CAP’s total assets fell in 2006 for the first time, from $23.6 million to $20.4 million. Assets started growing again in 2007 when CAP founded the Business Alliance, a membership rewards program for corporate contributors, and then exploded when Obama was elected in 2008. According to its most recent nonprofit tax filing, CAP’s total assets now top $44 million, and its Action Fund treasury holds $6 million more.
A confidential CAP donor pitch I obtained describes the Business Alliance as “a channel for engagement with the corporate community” that provides “the opportunity to…collaborate on common interests.” It offers three membership levels, with the perks to top donors ($100,000 and up) including private meetings with CAP experts and executives, round-table discussions with “Hill and national leaders,” and briefings on CAP reports “relevant to your unique interests.”
click to enlarge [1]
CAP doesn’t publicly disclose the members of its Business Alliance, but I obtained multiple internal lists from 2011 showing that dozens of major corporations had joined. The lists were prepared by Chris Belisle, who at the time served as the alliance’s senior manager after having been recruited from his prior position as manager of corporate relations at the US Chamber of Commerce. According to these lists, CAP’s donors included Comcast, Walmart, General Motors, Pacific Gas and Electric, General Electric, Boeing and Lockheed. Though it doesn’t appear on the lists, the University of Phoenix was also a donor.
Incidentally, Scott Lilly, a Hill veteran who joined CAP in 2004 as a senior fellow covering national security, simultaneously served as a registered lobbyist for Lockheed between 2005 and 2011. Rudy deLeon, CAP’s senior vice president for national security and international policy, was a Boeing executive and directed the company’s lobbying operations between 2001 and 2006, before joining the think tank the following year.
Of the CAP donors mentioned in this story, I contacted Lockheed, which refused to confirm or deny its membership in the Business Alliance, and First Solar and Boeing, both of which confirmed that they had been members but wouldn’t say how much they gave or when. “Our work with think tanks is not political, but is more educational in nature,” Tim Neale of Boeing told me. “We want to learn from and share ideas with scholars across the political spectrum, and we like to get a wide range of viewpoints and ideas rather than focus solely on a particular political bent.”
Several CAP insiders, who asked to speak off the record, told me that when Podesta left, there was a fear that contributions would dry up. Raising money had always been important, they said, but Tanden ratcheted up the efforts to openly court donors, which has impacted CAP’s work. Staffers were very clearly instructed to check with the think tank’s development team before writing anything that might upset contributors, I was told.
I obtained a March 2012 e-mail from Belisle to Podesta and CAP’s communications and legal teams, which was also copied to Tanden. The e-mail noted a Think Progress item featuring a New York Times op-ed by former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith, who called the company’s environment “toxic and destructive.” At the time, the firm was under heavy fire for deceiving investors and for its larger role in driving the speculation in toxic securities that unwound the economy. Belisle said he was “flagging” the item for Tanden since she had recently met with Michael Paese, director of Goldman’s Washington lobbying office. Two sources told me that Goldman Sachs subsequently became a donor. Purse and Paese declined comment.
In 2010, CAP issued a report, “Ties That Bind: U.S.-Taiwan Relations and Peace and Prosperity in East Asia,” which warned that the partnership between the two countries had stagnated and suggested that the United States maintain arms sales to Taiwan, increase economic and diplomatic cooperation, and otherwise “seek ways to deepen their relationship.” That same year, CAP’s Scott Lilly gave an address at the American Institute in Taiwan, in which he hailed the ties between the two nations as “one of the more important bilateral relationships in the world” before calling for additional arms sales to Taiwan. Lockheed, whom Lilly lobbied for at the time, is a leading arms merchant to Taiwan.
With help from TUSKON, CAP also makes an annual fact-finding trip to Turkey, the most recent being in February of this year. The CAP delegation met with US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone and senior Turkish government officials. A former CAP staffer told me that TUSKON had “amazing access” and “could call anyone in the government and get us a meeting or interview.” As a result of the Turkish group’s support, CAP was “totally in the tank for them,” this source said.
CAP also presses for closer ties between the US and Turkish
governments, just as Ankara’s lobbyists do. Last year, CAP hosted an
event featuring Commerce Secretary John Bryson, who spoke on his “vision
for deepening even further the US-Turkish commercial relationship.” Two
years earlier, Podesta gave the keynote address at a TUSKON conference
in Istanbul. In his speech—titled “The Unique Importance of the
Turkish-American Relationship”—he praised CAP senior fellow Michael Werz
for his work on “strengthening the US-Turkey relationship.” He also
pointedly noted that Werz’s predecessor as CAP’s Turkey expert, Spencer
Boyer, had left the think tank to become the Obama administration’s
deputy assistant secretary for European affairs.
“Our policy work is independent and driven by solutions that we believe will create a more equitable and just country,” Purse told me. It would be easier to believe that statement, let alone evaluate it, if CAP was more transparent about its funding. The same holds true for think tanks in general—which, unlike other powerful Washington institutions, have the luxury of telling the public and policy-makers only what they choose about their funders.
Giant octopus: IRS has 8 offices to enforce Obamacare
The Internal Revenue Service, charged with implementing the biggest change in tax laws in 20 years due to Obamacare, has created eight offices and special "teams" to handle the chore, way more than initially revealed.Besides the top office headed by the woman in the middle of the IRS-Tea Party scandal, there are seven others and a special enforcement team that make up an organization chart that mirrors the organization of the IRS itself, according to a Treasury Inspector General's report.
The June report focused on concerns that the IRS, which is filling the Obamacare offices with 2,137 agents and officials to make sure citizens and companies comply with the new health law or pay a fine, isn't clear on its new role and how many new workers it will actually need. For example, the IRS will be in charge of analyzing hospital "community benefit activities," which it has never done before.
But in that report was the organizational chart revealing the series of Obamacare offices. They are led by a steering committee that coordinates Obamacare implementation across the IRS. It is led by the agency's deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, the office linked to the IRS scandal. Ousted acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller recently had that job.
Other branches include three program management offices, four services and enforcement offices, and services and enforcement exchange working teams.
From the IG report:
Appropriate Plans Have Been Developed to Implement Most Tax-Related Provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
To begin the major task of implementing the tax-related provisions of the ACA, the IRS created the following Executive Steering Committees, Offices, and Teams.
-- The ACA Executive Steering Committee (ESC) is responsible for overall program coordination and implementation of the ACA across the IRS. This committee is co-chaired by the Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement and the Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support. It also includes the IRS Chief of Staff and other IRS executives, including the business operating division commissioners, et al.
-- Three program management offices (PMO): 1) Services and Enforcement; 2) Modernization and Information Technology Services (MITS);5 and 3) Health Care Council. These PMOs are accountable to the ESC for ACA implementation and work with the IRS business operating divisions to ensure efforts are successfully coordinated.
-- Four functional ESCs, each led by an executive chair, have responsibility for specific provisions in the ACA that directly affect the four business operating divisions (Wage and Investment, Small Business/Self-Employed, Large Business and International, and Tax Exempt/Government Entities).
-- The Services and Enforcement Exchange Working Teams are responsible for planning the implementation of the exchange provisions scheduled for 2014.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/giant-octopus-irs-has-8-offices-to-enforce-obamacare/article/2530200
The Secret Donors Behind the Center for American Progress and Other Think Tanks
The Center for American Progress, Washington’s leading liberal think tank, has been a big backer of the Energy Department’s $25 billion loan guarantee program for renewable energy projects. CAP has specifically praised First Solar, a firm that received $3.73 billion under the program, and its Antelope Valley project in California.Last year, when First Solar was taking a beating from congressional Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised Antelope Valley in his testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees. Earlier, Caperton and Steve Spinner— a top Obama fundraiser who left his job at the Energy Department monitoring the issuance of loan guarantees and became a CAP senior fellow—had written an article cross-posted on CAP’s website and its Think Progress blog, stating that Antelope Valley represented “the cutting edge of the clean energy economy.”
Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power- house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing.
CAP is a strong proponent of alternative energy, so there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of its advocacy. But the fact that CAP has received financial support from First Solar while touting its virtues to Washington policy-makers points to a conflict of interest that, critics argue, ought to be disclosed to the public. CAP’s promotion of the company’s interests has supplemented First Solar’s aggressive Washington lobbying efforts, on which it spent more than $800,000 during 2011 and 2012.
“The only thing more damaging than disclosing your donors and having questions raised about the independence of your work is not disclosing them and have the information come to light and undermine your work,” says Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. “The best practice, whether required by the IRS or not, is to disclose contributions.”
Nowadays, many Washington think tanks effectively serve as unregistered lobbyists for corporate donors, and companies strategically contribute to them just as they hire a PR or lobby shop or make campaign donations. And unlike lobbyists and elected officials, think tanks are not subject to financial disclosure requirements, so they reveal their donors only if they choose to. That makes it impossible for the public and lawmakers to know if a think tank is putting out an impartial study or one that’s been shaped by a donor’s political agenda. “If you’re a lobbyist, whatever you say is heavily discounted,” says Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert on political ethics. “If a think tank is saying it, it obviously sounds a lot better. Maybe think tanks aren’t aware of how useful that makes them to private interests. On the other hand, maybe it’s part of their revenue model.”
* * *
When Newt Gingrich was running for president, The Washington Post
ran a story about the Center for Health Transformation, which it
described as his “hybrid” single-issue think tank. The center, which
subsequently went bankrupt and was bought by WellStar, published reports
and advocated on behalf of donors—including lobbyists and industry
groups that donated millions to support its work—in addition to offering
perks like “direct Newt interaction.” While the center did disclose
some of its donors, it didn’t reveal how much money they had
contributed.It was an interesting story, but it obscured a key point: Newt’s “hybrid” was a particularly straightforward form of pay-to-play, but its basic features are common at Washington think tanks. Like Newt’s Center for Health Transformation, many lure big donors with a package of benefits, including personalized policy briefings, the right to directly underwrite and shape research projects, and general support for the donor’s political needs.
Most think tanks are nonprofit organizations, so a donor can even get a nice tax break for contributing. But it’s their reputation for impartiality and their web of contacts that makes them especially useful as policy advocates. “Think tanks can always draw a big audience to your event, including government folks,” a Washington lobbyist who has worked with several told me. “And people generally don’t think they would twist anything, or wonder about where they get their money.”
While think tanks portray themselves as altruistic scholarly institutions, they emphasize their political influence when courting donors. “If you have a particular area of policy interest, you can support a specific research effort under way,” the Brookings Institution says in one pitch for cash. Those interested in ”a deeper engagement”—read: ready to fork over especially large sums of money—get personal briefings from resident experts and can work directly with senior Brookings officials to draw up a research agenda that will “maximize impact on policymaking.”
The Center for Strategic and International Studies advertises itself as being “in the unique position to bring together leaders of both the public and private sectors in small, often off-the-record meetings to build consensus around important policy issues.” It allows top-tier donors to directly sponsor reports, events and speaker series.
Because most think tanks don’t fully disclose their donors, it’s not always easy to see what sort of benefits money can buy. But during Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearings, the Atlantic Council, where he’d been chairman before moving to the Pentagon, released a list of its foreign donors. One of them turned out to be the oil-rich government of Kazakhstan, headed by dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev. Last year, the council hosted a conference on Kazakhstan that was paid for by the Nazarbayev regime and Chevron, which has vast oil interests in the country and is also a major donor to the council. Keynote speakers included Kazakhstan’s former ambassador to the United States and Kenneth Derr, a former Chevron CEO and now Kazakhstan’s honorary consul in San Francisco.
* * *
John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and the
head of Obama’s first transition team, founded the Center for American
Progress in 2003. Last year, Podesta stepped down as CAP’s president—he
remains its chair and counselor—and was replaced by Neera Tanden, who
served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations. Former Virginia
Congressman Tom Perriello heads the CAP Action Fund, an advocacy unit,
which operates out of the same offices and shares personnel.CAP has emerged as perhaps the most influential of all think tanks during the Obama era, and there’s been a rapidly revolving door between it and the administration. CAP is also among the most secretive of all think tanks concerning its donors. Most major think tanks prepare an annual report containing at least some financial and donor information and make it available on their websites. According to CAP spokeswoman Andrea Purse, the center doesn’t even publish one.
Purse told me that CAP “follows all financial disclosure requirements with regard to donors…. We don’t use corporate funds to pay for research or reports.” But she flatly refused to discuss specific donors or to provide an on-the-record explanation for why CAP won’t disclose them.
After growing rapidly in its first few years, tax records show, CAP’s total assets fell in 2006 for the first time, from $23.6 million to $20.4 million. Assets started growing again in 2007 when CAP founded the Business Alliance, a membership rewards program for corporate contributors, and then exploded when Obama was elected in 2008. According to its most recent nonprofit tax filing, CAP’s total assets now top $44 million, and its Action Fund treasury holds $6 million more.
A confidential CAP donor pitch I obtained describes the Business Alliance as “a channel for engagement with the corporate community” that provides “the opportunity to…collaborate on common interests.” It offers three membership levels, with the perks to top donors ($100,000 and up) including private meetings with CAP experts and executives, round-table discussions with “Hill and national leaders,” and briefings on CAP reports “relevant to your unique interests.”
click to enlarge [1]
CAP doesn’t publicly disclose the members of its Business Alliance, but I obtained multiple internal lists from 2011 showing that dozens of major corporations had joined. The lists were prepared by Chris Belisle, who at the time served as the alliance’s senior manager after having been recruited from his prior position as manager of corporate relations at the US Chamber of Commerce. According to these lists, CAP’s donors included Comcast, Walmart, General Motors, Pacific Gas and Electric, General Electric, Boeing and Lockheed. Though it doesn’t appear on the lists, the University of Phoenix was also a donor.
Incidentally, Scott Lilly, a Hill veteran who joined CAP in 2004 as a senior fellow covering national security, simultaneously served as a registered lobbyist for Lockheed between 2005 and 2011. Rudy deLeon, CAP’s senior vice president for national security and international policy, was a Boeing executive and directed the company’s lobbying operations between 2001 and 2006, before joining the think tank the following year.
Of the CAP donors mentioned in this story, I contacted Lockheed, which refused to confirm or deny its membership in the Business Alliance, and First Solar and Boeing, both of which confirmed that they had been members but wouldn’t say how much they gave or when. “Our work with think tanks is not political, but is more educational in nature,” Tim Neale of Boeing told me. “We want to learn from and share ideas with scholars across the political spectrum, and we like to get a wide range of viewpoints and ideas rather than focus solely on a particular political bent.”
Several CAP insiders, who asked to speak off the record, told me that when Podesta left, there was a fear that contributions would dry up. Raising money had always been important, they said, but Tanden ratcheted up the efforts to openly court donors, which has impacted CAP’s work. Staffers were very clearly instructed to check with the think tank’s development team before writing anything that might upset contributors, I was told.
I obtained a March 2012 e-mail from Belisle to Podesta and CAP’s communications and legal teams, which was also copied to Tanden. The e-mail noted a Think Progress item featuring a New York Times op-ed by former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith, who called the company’s environment “toxic and destructive.” At the time, the firm was under heavy fire for deceiving investors and for its larger role in driving the speculation in toxic securities that unwound the economy. Belisle said he was “flagging” the item for Tanden since she had recently met with Michael Paese, director of Goldman’s Washington lobbying office. Two sources told me that Goldman Sachs subsequently became a donor. Purse and Paese declined comment.
* * *
Foreign governments and business entities can also join the Business
Alliance, whose membership list includes the Taipei Economic and
Cultural Representative Office—which functions as Taiwan’s embassy in
Washington and retains many lobbyists, including former Oklahoma
Republican Senator Don Nickles and former Missouri Democratic
Representative Richard Gephardt—and the Confederation of Businessmen and
Industrialists of Turkey (TUSKON).In 2010, CAP issued a report, “Ties That Bind: U.S.-Taiwan Relations and Peace and Prosperity in East Asia,” which warned that the partnership between the two countries had stagnated and suggested that the United States maintain arms sales to Taiwan, increase economic and diplomatic cooperation, and otherwise “seek ways to deepen their relationship.” That same year, CAP’s Scott Lilly gave an address at the American Institute in Taiwan, in which he hailed the ties between the two nations as “one of the more important bilateral relationships in the world” before calling for additional arms sales to Taiwan. Lockheed, whom Lilly lobbied for at the time, is a leading arms merchant to Taiwan.
With help from TUSKON, CAP also makes an annual fact-finding trip to Turkey, the most recent being in February of this year. The CAP delegation met with US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone and senior Turkish government officials. A former CAP staffer told me that TUSKON had “amazing access” and “could call anyone in the government and get us a meeting or interview.” As a result of the Turkish group’s support, CAP was “totally in the tank for them,” this source said.
“Our policy work is independent and driven by solutions that we believe will create a more equitable and just country,” Purse told me. It would be easier to believe that statement, let alone evaluate it, if CAP was more transparent about its funding. The same holds true for think tanks in general—which, unlike other powerful Washington institutions, have the luxury of telling the public and policy-makers only what they choose about their funders.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/174437/secret-donors-behind-center-american-progress-and-other-think-tanks
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What a fantastic talent liberals possess, the ability to talk out of
both sides of their mouths. One side utters platitudes about campaign
finance reform and the nefarious influence of money in politics, while
the other whispers in the ears of oligarchs and plutocrats. One side
slanders Republicans as the tools of corporate interests, while the
other solicits donations from some of the largest corporations in the
world. The next journalist to examine influence peddling on K Street
need only walk two blocks south, to H Street. There he’ll find one heck
of a story.
H Street is the home of the Center for American Progress (CAP), founded by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta in the fall of 2003. Originally conceived as a think tank to match the conservative Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, CAP quickly dropped the thinking and became, simply, a tank. Its objective was to overpower conservatives and Republicans, to devastate them with a fusillade of government activism, to pulverize their fortifications with ammunition loaded into the progressive echo chamber.
Good weapons don’t come cheap. CAP requires considerable stimulus to acquire, track, and destroy its targets. Podesta’s fundraising methods, as one might expect from a Clintonite, were ingenious. He incorporated two entities: The Center for American Progress as a tax-deductible nonprofit 501(c)(3), and the Center for American Progress Action Fund as a tax-exempt 501(c)(4). Donations would not be disclosed, allowing contributors the protection of anonymity even as CAP called for transparency in political giving and government regulation of political speech.
CAP and CAP Action shared office space, and employees of one entity often wrote for the other, but Podesta’s media flacks always were careful to distinguish between them. CAP, for instance, is where you find the high-toned stuff, the demographic determinism of Ruy Teixeira and the collected ravings of Larry Former Reagan Official Korb.
CAP Action is of a lower brow. It publishes the ThinkProgress blog, where for a time you could read, among other critics of the “lobby,” the foreign policy analysis of one Zaid Jilani, who described his opponents on Twitter as “Israel-firsters”; the creative misspellings of amateur philosopher and terrorist impersonator Matthew Yglesias; and the factually half-baked conspiracy theories of Lee Fang. Think of them as the greats.
Like other greats, all three young men have since left the building, moving on to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (Jilani), Slate (Yglesias), and the Nation (Fang). Funny enough, it was another Nation writer, Ken Silverstein, who published the bombshell report last week on the finances of his colleague’s former employer, exposing for the first time the identities of corporate donors to the Center for American Progress.
Silverstein’s work, like other reporting from the Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones and the WFB, explores the numerous ditches and culverts irrigated by the river of left-wing dark money that flows through American politics. Essential reading, his piece reveals the extent to which liberal groups benefit from the business community’s desire to get right with the mandarins who have the power to sue and investigate and boycott and demonize. For immunity, and for favor, companies are willing to pay a pretty penny.
Silverstein describes how CAP, in just a few years, grew from seed money provided by the secretive Democracy Alliance of progressive donors to obtain assets of more than $20 million. Its finances took a hit in 2006 despite the Democratic victory in that year’s midterm elections. The following year, CAP management created the Business Alliance, “a membership rewards program for corporate contributors.”
Money came in. And when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the alliance grew. “CAP’s total assets now top $44 million,” Silverstein reports, “and its Action Fund treasury holds $6 million more.” CAP’s ability to reflect and influence the opinion of liberal elites, however, is priceless.
Silverstein obtained a document CAP used in 2011 to pitch possible members of the Business Alliance. Slog past the barely literate sentences—“Recognizing the importance of the private sector perspective in the issues debate, the Business Alliance program has proven to be a successful way to keep CAP and its experts connected with and cognizant of business perspectives on the issues of highest priority on our work”—and one arrives finally at the nitty-gritty.
Three levels of membership are described. A $25,000 annual contribution gains one’s corporation entry to “regularly scheduled roundtable discussions with CAP experts, business, Hill, and national leaders”; “two opportunities to engage CAP experts in private meetings”; “invitation to VIP events with leaders from government, business, and academia”; and “updates on new CAP reports and products from Business Alliance staff relevant to your unique interests.”
For a $50,000 annual contribution, one’s corporation enjoys all of those benefits, as well as “two additional opportunities to engage CAP experts in private meetings”; an “exclusive Business Alliance overview meeting offering analyses of issues on Capitol Hill”; and a “private session with American Progress communications and outreach staff.”
And for those special interests that just can’t meet and engage and attend sessions enough, a $100,000 contribution gets one’s corporation all of those benefits, as well as a “membership in Green Energy Economy Council (GEEC)”; a “membership in International Business Council pilot program”; an “invitation to participate in Global Progress Summit”; and a “private meeting with a member of the American Progress Executive Committee.” Only in Obama’s America does it cost $100k to be called a GEEC.
Not stated directly, of course, is that what all of the briefings and interactions and councils get you is entry into the corridors of a think tank with close ties to the presidency. Podesta, whose brother is one of the most influential lobbyists in town, oversaw the transition team that staffed the Obama administration. As American Progress chairman, he watches over his empire. The current head of CAP is Neera Tanden, who has worked for Obama and Hillary Clinton. Tom Perriello, a former liberal Democratic congressman who was one of the president’s favorites, runs CAP Action. These are influential people.
So influential are they, that the Department of Energy loan program that gave us Solyndra and First Solar was largely designed in CAP’s offices. Silverstein tells the appalling story of how a CAP representative praised First Solar in congressional testimony, and promoted it in CAP publications, without revealing that the solar manufacturer was a member of the Business Alliance, and that one of CAP’s board members was also on the board of First Solar. (He left the First Solar board in 2012.)
“CAP’s promotion of the company’s interests has supplemented First Solar’s aggressive Washington lobbying efforts, on which it spent more than $800,000 during 2011 and 2012,” Silverstein writes. The investment returned dividends. Such lobbying has allowed First Solar to enjoy hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-backed loans and subsidies.
“CAP is a strong proponent of alternative energy, so there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of its advocacy,” Silverstein observes. No reason at all. Yet I wonder if Silverstein would have been so charitable if the organization he was describing was, say, Americans for Prosperity, and the donors Charles and David Koch.
We know already that as long as the companies belong to politically correct institutions and back politically correct causes, they are indulged and given the benefit of the doubt. But this street goes in only one direction. Travel with the wrong fellows, support the wrong causes, and you will be picketed, boycotted, tarred, feathered, and dragged through the media mud.
What First Solar and other members of the Business Alliance such as Pacific Gas and Electric, General Electric, Boeing, Lockheed, the University of Phoenix, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, the Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists of Turkey, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, and Comcast are really buying, then, is not so much access but insurance. They are contributing to the Center for American Progress so that they, too, can benefit from the liberal ability to speak from both sides of the mouth. They can reap the benefits of the market, and even of government privilege, so long as they express concern, real or fake, over global warming or abortion rights or affirmative action or whatever the liberal cause of the day happens to be.
They are not participating in an intellectual project or a political movement or a trade association but a shakedown, a scam, a caper—a compelling and labyrinthine detective story that is only beginning to be unraveled.
The H Street Project
Column: Anatomy of a liberal shakedown
H Street is the home of the Center for American Progress (CAP), founded by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta in the fall of 2003. Originally conceived as a think tank to match the conservative Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, CAP quickly dropped the thinking and became, simply, a tank. Its objective was to overpower conservatives and Republicans, to devastate them with a fusillade of government activism, to pulverize their fortifications with ammunition loaded into the progressive echo chamber.
Good weapons don’t come cheap. CAP requires considerable stimulus to acquire, track, and destroy its targets. Podesta’s fundraising methods, as one might expect from a Clintonite, were ingenious. He incorporated two entities: The Center for American Progress as a tax-deductible nonprofit 501(c)(3), and the Center for American Progress Action Fund as a tax-exempt 501(c)(4). Donations would not be disclosed, allowing contributors the protection of anonymity even as CAP called for transparency in political giving and government regulation of political speech.
CAP and CAP Action shared office space, and employees of one entity often wrote for the other, but Podesta’s media flacks always were careful to distinguish between them. CAP, for instance, is where you find the high-toned stuff, the demographic determinism of Ruy Teixeira and the collected ravings of Larry Former Reagan Official Korb.
CAP Action is of a lower brow. It publishes the ThinkProgress blog, where for a time you could read, among other critics of the “lobby,” the foreign policy analysis of one Zaid Jilani, who described his opponents on Twitter as “Israel-firsters”; the creative misspellings of amateur philosopher and terrorist impersonator Matthew Yglesias; and the factually half-baked conspiracy theories of Lee Fang. Think of them as the greats.
Like other greats, all three young men have since left the building, moving on to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (Jilani), Slate (Yglesias), and the Nation (Fang). Funny enough, it was another Nation writer, Ken Silverstein, who published the bombshell report last week on the finances of his colleague’s former employer, exposing for the first time the identities of corporate donors to the Center for American Progress.
Silverstein’s work, like other reporting from the Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones and the WFB, explores the numerous ditches and culverts irrigated by the river of left-wing dark money that flows through American politics. Essential reading, his piece reveals the extent to which liberal groups benefit from the business community’s desire to get right with the mandarins who have the power to sue and investigate and boycott and demonize. For immunity, and for favor, companies are willing to pay a pretty penny.
Silverstein describes how CAP, in just a few years, grew from seed money provided by the secretive Democracy Alliance of progressive donors to obtain assets of more than $20 million. Its finances took a hit in 2006 despite the Democratic victory in that year’s midterm elections. The following year, CAP management created the Business Alliance, “a membership rewards program for corporate contributors.”
Money came in. And when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the alliance grew. “CAP’s total assets now top $44 million,” Silverstein reports, “and its Action Fund treasury holds $6 million more.” CAP’s ability to reflect and influence the opinion of liberal elites, however, is priceless.
Silverstein obtained a document CAP used in 2011 to pitch possible members of the Business Alliance. Slog past the barely literate sentences—“Recognizing the importance of the private sector perspective in the issues debate, the Business Alliance program has proven to be a successful way to keep CAP and its experts connected with and cognizant of business perspectives on the issues of highest priority on our work”—and one arrives finally at the nitty-gritty.
Three levels of membership are described. A $25,000 annual contribution gains one’s corporation entry to “regularly scheduled roundtable discussions with CAP experts, business, Hill, and national leaders”; “two opportunities to engage CAP experts in private meetings”; “invitation to VIP events with leaders from government, business, and academia”; and “updates on new CAP reports and products from Business Alliance staff relevant to your unique interests.”
For a $50,000 annual contribution, one’s corporation enjoys all of those benefits, as well as “two additional opportunities to engage CAP experts in private meetings”; an “exclusive Business Alliance overview meeting offering analyses of issues on Capitol Hill”; and a “private session with American Progress communications and outreach staff.”
And for those special interests that just can’t meet and engage and attend sessions enough, a $100,000 contribution gets one’s corporation all of those benefits, as well as a “membership in Green Energy Economy Council (GEEC)”; a “membership in International Business Council pilot program”; an “invitation to participate in Global Progress Summit”; and a “private meeting with a member of the American Progress Executive Committee.” Only in Obama’s America does it cost $100k to be called a GEEC.
Not stated directly, of course, is that what all of the briefings and interactions and councils get you is entry into the corridors of a think tank with close ties to the presidency. Podesta, whose brother is one of the most influential lobbyists in town, oversaw the transition team that staffed the Obama administration. As American Progress chairman, he watches over his empire. The current head of CAP is Neera Tanden, who has worked for Obama and Hillary Clinton. Tom Perriello, a former liberal Democratic congressman who was one of the president’s favorites, runs CAP Action. These are influential people.
So influential are they, that the Department of Energy loan program that gave us Solyndra and First Solar was largely designed in CAP’s offices. Silverstein tells the appalling story of how a CAP representative praised First Solar in congressional testimony, and promoted it in CAP publications, without revealing that the solar manufacturer was a member of the Business Alliance, and that one of CAP’s board members was also on the board of First Solar. (He left the First Solar board in 2012.)
“CAP’s promotion of the company’s interests has supplemented First Solar’s aggressive Washington lobbying efforts, on which it spent more than $800,000 during 2011 and 2012,” Silverstein writes. The investment returned dividends. Such lobbying has allowed First Solar to enjoy hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-backed loans and subsidies.
“CAP is a strong proponent of alternative energy, so there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of its advocacy,” Silverstein observes. No reason at all. Yet I wonder if Silverstein would have been so charitable if the organization he was describing was, say, Americans for Prosperity, and the donors Charles and David Koch.
We know already that as long as the companies belong to politically correct institutions and back politically correct causes, they are indulged and given the benefit of the doubt. But this street goes in only one direction. Travel with the wrong fellows, support the wrong causes, and you will be picketed, boycotted, tarred, feathered, and dragged through the media mud.
What First Solar and other members of the Business Alliance such as Pacific Gas and Electric, General Electric, Boeing, Lockheed, the University of Phoenix, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, the Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists of Turkey, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, and Comcast are really buying, then, is not so much access but insurance. They are contributing to the Center for American Progress so that they, too, can benefit from the liberal ability to speak from both sides of the mouth. They can reap the benefits of the market, and even of government privilege, so long as they express concern, real or fake, over global warming or abortion rights or affirmative action or whatever the liberal cause of the day happens to be.
They are not participating in an intellectual project or a political movement or a trade association but a shakedown, a scam, a caper—a compelling and labyrinthine detective story that is only beginning to be unraveled.
http://freebeacon.com/the-h-street-project/
Video: Baltimore schools spend stimulus dollars on … makeovers?
A year ago, this would have qualified as a scandal. This month, it’s
more of a palate cleanser. Baltimore schools got millions in federal
stimulus money to improve education, as the local CBS affiliate reports, but is that where the money went? Only if we’re preparing Baltimore schoolkids for beauty school and the Love Boat:
Meanwhile, this is hardly a confidence-builder:
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/24/video-baltimore-schools-spend-stimulus-dollars-on-makeovers/
The audit shows federal stimulus, Title I dollars, went to dinner cruises, makeovers and meals and now, state lawmakers and parents want answers from the school district.
The report shows stimulus dollars intended to improve education at Baltimore City Schools didn’t go directly to the classroom. …
The U.S. Department of Education is reviewing expenses from 2009 and 2010 that showed more than $4300 were used on dinner cruises, more than $2400 for PTA meals at a meeting to discuss the budget, $1300 to attend a theater performance and $500 on a mother/daughter makeover.
“We’re talking $15 million out of $112 million, and what we see are school events to engage parents, but when the auditors came to look at it they said, ‘Wait a second. This should have been paid out of general funds, rather than Title I,” said Alonso.Er, run that by us again? The school district’s general funds should go to a mother-daughter makeover and dinner cruises? Perhaps Baltimore needs fewer federal stimulus dollars and a lot more accountability on the uses of local funding in order to improve schools.
Meanwhile, this is hardly a confidence-builder:
“Anytime there’s an audit of Title I dollars, you’re going to see errors at the school level because schools spend money for what they need, and then sometimes they worry about if it fits the parameter of the grant later,” said Baltimore City Schools CEO Andres Alonso.If audits routinely turn up misuse of stimulus funding, why do we continue to provide it? And if Title I dollars routinely get diverted to dinner cruises and Mommy-daughter makeovers, that’s a good place to turn off the federal spigot and make states accountable for their own schools — as should have been the case all along.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/24/video-baltimore-schools-spend-stimulus-dollars-on-makeovers/
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