Emails Show Lois Lerner Fed Confidential Tax Information, Database to FBI For Investigation Ahead of 2010 Midterms
By Katie Pavlich....Now according to a release from House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, Lerner had a database of tax exempt organizations sent to the FBI just before the 2010 midterm elections. That database included legally protected taxpayer information. Emails show Lerner and DOJ Election Crimes Branch official Richard Pilger discussing what format the FBI prefers when it comes to receiving information for their investigation.
“Thanks Lois – FBI says Raw format is best because they can put it into their systems like excel,” Pilger wrote in an October 6, 2010 email to Lerner.
Issa and Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan have sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen demanding more information about the database, which included 21 disks and 1.1 million pages of information about tax exempt groups.
“We were astonished to learn days ago from the Justice Department that these 21 disks contained confidential taxpayer information protected by federal law. We ask that you immediately produce all material explaining how these disks were prepared and transmitted to the FBI," the letter states. “The IRS’s transmittal of this information to the FBI shows that the IRS took affirmative steps to provide sensitive evidentiary material to law-enforcement officials about the political speech of nonprofits. At the very least, this information suggests that the IRS considered the political speech activities of nonprofits to be worthy of investigation by federal law-enforcement officials. The IRS apparently considered political speech by nonprofit groups to be so troublesome that it illegally assisted federal law-enforcement officials in assembling a massive database of the lawful political speech of thousands of American citizens, weeks before the 2010 midterm elections, using confidential taxpayer information.”
The IRS has been withholding information about the IRS working with the FBI in this particular way from Congress, despite multiple requests for transparency.
“Despite two Committee subpoenas, the IRS has not produced material relating to these 21 disks and all associated information… The subpoena [to the IRS] created a legal requirement on you, as the Commissioner of the IRS, to identify and produce all subpoenaed material in an expeditious manner," The letter to Commissioner Koskinen states. "Your choice to withhold this highly relevant material obstructs the Committee’s ongoing oversight obligations – especially when this information implicates violations of federal law.”
Koskinen has been asked to respond to previously issued subpoenas about the database and has been asked to provide additional information about the communication between Lerner and the Election Crimes Division at DOJ.
The Prisoner Swap Deal
By Thomas SowellPeople are arguing about what the United States got out of the deal that swapped five top level terrorist leaders for one American soldier who was, at best, absent from his post in a war zone. Soldiers who served in the same unit with him call him a deserter. The key to this deal, however, is less likely to be what the United States got out of the deal than it is about what Barack Obama got out of the deal. If nothing else, it instantly got the veterans' hospitals scandals off the front pages of newspapers and pushed these scandals aside on television news programs.
It was a clear winner for Barack Obama. And that may be all that matters to Barack Obama.
People who are questioning the president's competence seem not to want to believe that any President of the United States would knowingly damage this country's interests.
One of the problems of many fundamentally decent people is that they find it hard to understand people who are not fundamentally decent, or whose moral compass points in a different direction from theirs.
Many people who are painfully disappointed with President Obama have no real reason to be. The man's whole previous history, from childhood on, was shaped by a whole series of people, beginning with his mother, whose vision of America was very much like that of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose church Barack Obama belonged to for 20 long years.
Obama is not a stupid man. There is no way that he could have sat in that church all that time without knowing how Jeremiah Wright hated America, and how his vision of the world was one in which "white folks' greed runs a world in need."
Even if the Reverend Wright had been the only such person in Barack Obama's life -- and he was not -- it should have been enough to keep him out of the White House.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a good rule in a court of law, which has the power to deprive a defendant of liberty or life. But it is mindless and dangerous nonsense to apply that standard outside that context -- especially when choosing a President of the United States, who holds in his hands the liberty and lives of millions of Americans.
People who are disappointed with Barack Obama have no right to be. It is they whom others have a right to be disappointed with. Instead of taking their role as citizens seriously, they chose to vote on the basis of racial symbolism, glib rhetoric and wishful thinking.
Moreover, many are already talking about choosing the next President of the United States on the basis of demographic symbolism -- to have "the first woman president." And if she is elected on that basis, will any criticism of what she does in the White House be denounced as based on anti-woman bias, as criticisms of President Obama have been repeatedly denounced as racism?
And what if we have the first Hispanic president or the first Jewish president? Will any criticism of their actions in the White House be silenced by accusations of prejudice?
We may yet become the first nation to die from a terminal case of frivolity. Other great nations in history have been threatened by barbarians at the gates. We may be the first to be threatened by self-indulgent silliness inside the gates.
As for Barack Obama, you cannot judge any President's competence by the results of his policies, without first knowing what he was trying to achieve.
Many wise and decent people assume automatically that President Obama was trying to serve the interests of America. From that standpoint, he has failed abysmally, both at home and abroad. And that should legitimately call his competence into question.
But what if his vision of the world is one in which the wealth and power of those at the top, whether at home or internationally, are deeply resented, and have been throughout his life, under the tutelage of a whole series of resenters? And what if his goal is to redress that imbalance?
Who can say that he has failed, when the fundamental institutions of this country have been successfully and perhaps irretrievably undermined, and when the positions of America and its allies on the world stage have been similarly, and even more dangerously, undermined around the world?
It looks like Obama has found his Bergdahl deal patsy
By Thomas LifsonEvery cover up needs a fall guy, and according to Rep. Buck Mckeon’s comments after last night’s Congressional briefing on the Bergdahl deal, the Obama administration seems to be floating the name of their patsy. The Weekly Standard reports:
The last question asked at Monday night's closed-door briefing of members of the House of Representatives was a simple one: Who made the decision to transfer five top Taliban officials held at Guantanamo Bay to Qatar in exchange for the return of the Taliban's lone American POW, Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl?Very interesting, indeed. Will Hagel, a nominal Republican, be a stand-up guy and take the fall? Given his on-the-record statement about the president, and given the declining trust the American people place in the current occupant of the White House, this might be a difficult story to sell.
According to Buck McKeon, the chairman of the House Armed Services committee, the Obama administration's briefers told he gathered House members that the person responsible for the decision to make the deal was not President Obama but Chuck Hagel, the secretary of defense.
"Now wait a minute, are you saying it was Secretary Hagel that made this decision, or was this the president of the United States?" McKeon, a California Republican, said to reporters. "It was the president of the United States that came out with the Bergdahls and took all the credit. And now that there's been a little pushback, he's moving away from it?"
The administration's claim that Hagel, not Obama, made the decision is at odds with what Hagel himself said on Meet the Press on June 1. "I signed off on the decision," Hagel said. "The president made the ultimate decision."
If Hagel refuses to take the fall, and if he decides to spill his guts, what then?
Marco Rubio just made Hillary’s Benghazi problem worse
By Noah Rothman....When asked if there was anything she could have personally done to ensure that those over whom she had responsibility could have been offered better protection, she said that there was not. “I’m not equipped to sit and look at blueprints, to determine where the blast walls need to be or where the reinforcements need to be,” Clinton said. “That’s why we hire people who have that expertise.”
Asked to respond to those comments on Tuesday on CBS News’ This Morning, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) exploited the obvious opening that Clinton’s strategy has created. Coldly, soberly, dispassionately, Rubio charged Clinton with an insufficient concern about threats to American national security.
“The State Department had at its disposal a steady stream of reporting about how dangerous – how much danger that facility in Benghazi was in,” Rubio began. “It is a fact they did not take sufficient security measures, and it is a fact that perhaps it shouldn’t have even been there, and it is a fact it should not have been there and it is a fact they did not have an extraction plan in place that was sufficient.”
“If she thinks it’s something we shouldn’t focus on, then perhaps that gives insight as to why it happened in the first place,” Rubio added, delivering the coup de grâce.
He concluded by noting that “no one has been held responsible,” a factor possibly accounting for the fact that a majority of Americans believe the attack should be investigated further.
Clinton’s remarks on Benghazi were not the only comments she made on Monday which caused a stir. In what one must assume was an effort to recast herself in a populist mold, Clinton asserted that her and her ex-president husband were “dead broke” and “suffered” after leaving the White House. This comment prompted political reporters to assert that Clinton had committed the first gaffe of the 2016 cycle.
“Let me just clarify that I fully appreciate how hard life is for so many Americans today,” Clinton said on Tuesday on ABC’s Good Morning America. Asked if she understood why her comments raised so many eyebrows, she said she could but “everything in life has to be put into context.”
You’re not winning when you are explaining, and appealing to context is the modern equivalent of the scoundrel’s last refuge. Clinton’s comments about her finances required immediate damage control. As Rubio ably demonstrated on Tuesday, it will be Clinton’s comments about Benghazi that she will have to put into their proper “context” next.
Hillary Clinton: Obama and I Restored America's Leadership in the World
By Charlie SpieringFormer Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that although she had disagreements with President Obama during her time at the State Department, she was largely proud of her career.
“[I]n many areas he and I worked together and I think we saw positive results, I’m very proud of what we did during the time I was there,” she said. “I think we restored America;s leadership at a time when it was in quite dire straights.”
Major Factual Error About Benghazi In Hillary’s New Book
By Tristyn BloomHillary Clinton’s new book Hard Choices got basic information about security measures
in Libya before the Benghazi attack totally wrong, CNN reports.In a chapter defending military readiness at the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Clinton wrote that while there were no Marines stationed there, there were Marines at the American embassy in Tripoli, “where nearly all of our diplomats worked and which had the capability to process classified material.” This is untrue, according to Congressional testimony delivered by General Carter Ham, who was Commander of US Africa Command during the attack. His testimony was delivered in June 2013–a year before the book was published.
Marines weren’t sent to the embassy until after the attack, a fact the chapter seems to be trying to obscure.
The Obama administration has repeatedly come under fire for ignoring pleas for increased security
measures before the attack, with officials trying to downplay security failures and even trying to block a Congressional investigation–which later found the administration culpable.The report, released in February 2014, found that “White House officials failed to comprehend or ignored the dramatically deteriorating security situation in Libya and the growing threat to U.S. interests in the region.”
Clintons Were 'Dead Broke' but Spent Millions on Homes in D.C. and New York
By Charlie SpieringHillary Clinton explained that her family was “dead broke” by the time that her husband, President Bill Clinton, left the White House, but the couple still spent millions on expensive homes in Washington, D.C. and New York.
“We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” Clinton told ABC's Diane Sawyer, adding that “it was not easy” for the Clintons financially.
Prior to departing the White House, the Clintons purchased a $1.7 million home in Chappaqua, New York in September of 1999, according to the Washington Post at the time.
The home, an 11-room, five-bedroom, 100-year-old Dutch colonial house, was one of Hillary Clinton’s first steps to establish residency in the state so that she could run for the Senate.
In December of 2000, the Clintons also purchased a home in Washington, D.C., after Hillary was elected senator of New York.
The five-bedroom, brick colonial-style was purchased by the Clintons for $2.85 million, and is currently assessed for over $5 million, according to District of Columbia records.
Obama's Solution to Border Crisis? Lie Harder
By Conn CarrollWaves of young migrants are flooding the southwest border of the United States causing a "unprecedented" "humanitarian crisis" that President Obama's administration is completely unprepared for.
But Obama should have been prepared because it is his own immigration policies that caused this crisis.
Specifically, his June 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, which granted "temporary" legal status to illegal immigrants under the age of 31 who first entered the country before they turned 16.
Everything about the policy was a brazen political lie from the beginning. Why was it only available to people under 31? Why was it only available to those who entered the country before June 15th, 2012? Why was it only good for two years?
The answer to all those questions was that Obama needed to do something to motivate Latino voters to go to the polls after Obama completely failed to make good on his 2008 promise to pass immigration reform in his first year as president.
Obama calculated that if he could grant legal status to just this narrow sliver of illegal immigrants, Latinos here in America would believe he cared about them, but Latinos throughout Central and South America would not figure out that Obama had no intention of deporting anyone.
But Central and South Americans quickly figured out Obama was lying. If he had the power not to deport DACA eligibles illegal immigrants, he has the power to not deport anyone. So families started swarming to the U.S. The number of unaccompanied minors who cross the border illegally doubled the year Obama announced DACA and is set to quadruple this year.
Asked yesterday how they plan to address the crisis, Obama's new spokesman Josh Earnest said the administration planned to stress to migrants that they were not technically eligible for DACA.
“I think one thing that we can do is to be as clear as possible about the law and about what the consequences are for making a decision like that,” Earnest said. “Those individuals are not eligible for the deferred action, executive action that was announced a couple years ago,” Earnest said.
But when asked if Obama would deport those children arriving today, Earnest equivocated. “The law does require that we render assistance to those children and that is a process that begins with DHS when they are detained,” he said. “And then they go through a process to determine whether they are going to be sent back to another country, how they’ll be sent back to another country, or how that process is otherwise resolved.”
In other words, "Keep on coming, Obama will let you stay."
The barrage of illegal immigrant minors entering the U.S. through Mexico in recent weeks has created an out-of-control disaster with jam-packed holding centers, rampant diseases and sexually active teenagers at a Nogales facility, according to information obtained by Judicial Watch from a Homeland Security source.
The Obama administration blames the sudden influx on persistent violence in Central America, but a veteran Border Patrol agent who heads the agency’s Tucson sector union, says rumors of amnesty are responsible for the unforeseen bombardment. When agents ask the illegal border crossers what drove them, “we are hearing a lot of amnistía (amnesty),” said Art Del Cueto, the Tucson Border Patrol Union president. There are almost 1,000 minors at the Nogales facility, according to Del Cueto.
The Obama administration is scrambling to open up shelters that can accommodate the storm of mostly Central American minors that are said to be fleeing violence in their homeland. At an informational White House press call monitored by Judicial Watch today senior administration officials insisted the situation, which President Obama says is a humanitarian crisis, is under control. The officials also assured that all of the illegal alien minors will be put in removal proceedings and that none qualify for the president’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which grants amnesty to those who came to the U.S. as children “through no fault of their own.”
But the tens of thousands of Central American youths will likely never be deported and many will be released in the U.S. while they are being “processed.” American taxpayers will fund their stay in specially created shelters and military facilities. The Obama administration has also launched a special program called Justice AmeriCorps to give them free legal help. The administration has asked Congress for more than $2 billion, the senior administration officials revealed at today’s press call. The minors are coming mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador and some may have criminal backgrounds.
“They’re not all little kids,” Del Cueto, points out. “Some are 17 years old and they have possible ties to gang members yet they will be relocated in the U.S. with family.” A U.S. Senator who sits on the powerful Judiciary Committee says an unprecedented crisis is unfolding at the border. “This crisis is a direct and predictable result of the President’s sustained and deliberate campaign to dismantle immigration enforcement,” Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions says, adding that the administration has announced to the world that immigration laws won’t be enforced and, in particular, won’t be applied to foreign youth.
...The Homeland Security source cited earlier in this piece says “it’s all over the news in Central America that if you bring your kids north you have a free pass.” Most are entering the U.S. through the Rio Grande region in Texas. “The entire thing can be pinned squarely on the Obama administration and its policies,” the DHS source said. “It’s going to get much worse.” That’s probably accurate considering the news in these Central American countries. For instance, El Salvador’s largest newspaper reported just a few days ago that DHS officials confirmed that the amnesty offered to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors under DACA could be extended two more years. The article quotes DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson saying that everyone agrees that a minor who crossed the border illegally in search of a parent or a better life is not breaking our laws.
Stanley Kurtz: Common Core 'Gross Abuse of Democracy'
By Dr. Susan Berry....Kurtz is responding to the Washington Post’s “devastating” report of its interview with Bill Gates, the primary source of private funding for the Common Core standards. The interview was, according to the Post’s Lyndsey Layton, conducted in March, but reported on June 7, perhaps due to the fact, as Mercedes Schneider suggests, that in March, “39 states and DC were in legislative session – a session that was particularly stormy for ‘state led’ CCSS. By Saturday, June 7, that number dropped to 11 and DC, with 6 and DC having no session end to anticipate.”
Suspecting bias, Schneider surmises, “Hold the story until the first Saturday in June, when most legislatures are no longer in session. Quite the standards-rescuing coincidence, n’est-ce pas?”
Nevertheless, Kurtz determines, “When the story of the Common Core is finally told, it’s going to be ugly.”
He continues:
It’s going to show how the Obama administration pressed a completely untested reform on the states, evading public debate at both the federal and state levels. It’s going to show how a deliberative process that ought to have taken years was compressed into a matter of months. It’s going to show how legitimate philanthropic funding for an experimental education reform morphed into a gross abuse of democracy. It’s going to show how the Obama Education Department intentionally obscured the full extent of its pressure on the states, even as it effectively federalized the nation’s education system. It’s going to show how Common Core is turning the choice of private — especially Catholic — education into no choice at all.
Kurtz also reminds his readers, “This is the story that opponents of the Common Core have been telling for some time, only to see it dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory.”
As Breitbart News reported on June 8, Gates told Layton that he donated millions of dollars for both the development and promotion of the Common Core because he believed “the country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get…”
“What Gates doesn’t say is that Common Core tries to overcome inequality by dumbing down all state standards to a mediocre national mean,” writes Kurtz. In essence, Gates’ social engineering project, however, is “misguided,” he continues, because when “tough tests and high standards create ‘disparities’ between students, a false quality is sought via dumbing down.”
....Conservative Kurtz states that though he does not always agree with liberal education historian Diane Ravitch, he supports her notion of a congressional investigation into the extraordinary intertwining of the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Education Department in their imposition of the Common Core standards on the states.
“Several laws prohibit the federal Department of Education from directing, supervising, or controlling programs of instruction in state or local school systems,” Kurtz concludes. “By coordinating with the Gates Foundation, and by other means as well, the Obama department of education appears to have violated that prohibition.”
Aussies To Form Alliance to Thwart Obama’s Climate Goals
By Michael BastaschAustralia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott is seeking out “like-minded” countries to form an alliance to thwart climate policies being pushed by President Obama and other world leaders.
Abbott announced his intention to stymie efforts to push climate policies on unwilling countries as he met with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Monday. Abbott said he seeks to build a conservative alliance with Canada, Britain, India and New Zealand.
All are Commonwealth countries that were formerly part of the British Empire and are led by center-right governments, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
President Obama’s recently announced regulations on power plants have gained international recognition from the United Nations and some European countries. The White House hopes its new regulations will give the U.S. leverage when negotiating a new international climate deal in 2015.
But Abbott’s planned coalition aims to counter Obama’s push to get the international community to adopt climate policies, like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes.
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