Free Republic

Every day brings new revelations about who knew what about the IRS targeting conservative groups during President Obama's re-election campaign, but the overall impression is of a vast federal bureaucracy run amok. While the White House continues to peddle the story of a driverless train wreck, taxpayers are being treated to a demonstration of the dangers of an unwieldy and unaccountable administrative state. Look, Ma, no hands! In his press events, Mr. Obama has said that while he learned about the Cincinnati rogues on the news, he plans to "hold accountable those who have taken these outrageous actions." But the...

Not that I go there much, but: Anyone else see that the IRS and Benghazi and AP scandal stories are always absent from Google News headlines? More "backward watchdog" press behavior--the Google News dog protecting its elite masters from potentially meddlesome little people.

A “secret” Facebook group of foreign correspondents and human rights activists quickly devolved into an anti-Israel hate-fest on Tuesday following the release of a new Israeli government report that cleared the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of wrongdoing in the 2000 death of a Palestinian boy. The Israeli government report contests the claim that the IDF killed a Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Durrah, in a famous 2000 incident in Gaza that helped ignite the Second Intifada. Journalists and activists mocked the report, attacked the IDF, and claimed pro-Israel lobbyists were influencing the media coverage, in a private Facebook group for foreign correspondents...

A couple of weeks ago, President Obama warned college grads about crazy people (like John Adams, for example) who warn about the constant threat of tyranny in government... He might have to give that speech to a few more groups, because a new poll suggests that Americans are going with John Adams:

Remember Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor’s fictional Minnesota town where “all the children are above average?” Well, too many members of Congress inhabit a Lake Wobegon government, where every government program is also above average — not just successful, but essential. Here is just one example: Among the many outrages that congressional Democrats have assigned to the sequester is that it could reduce the available slots in the Head Start program by as many as 70,000 children. This was repeatedly hammered home last month when the Democratic leadership complained that Congress was giving additional flexibility to the FAA to avoid furloughs...

special prosecutor n. an attorney from outside of the government selected by the Attorney General or Congress to investigate and possibly prosecute a federal government official for wrongdoing in office. The theory behind appointing a special prosecutor is that there is a built-in conflict of interest between the Department of Justice and officials who may have political or governmental connections with that department. The most famous special prosecutor was law professor Archibald Cox, originally chosen to investigate White House (and President Richard Nixon's) involvement in the Watergate scandal. President Nixon demanded that Attorney General Elliot Richardson fire Cox who was...

Yesterday’s and today’s press conferences by White House press secretary Jay Carney provide ammunition to the thesis proposed this week even by a few mainstream journalists. By Carney’s account, Obama knows little or nothing about several really awful things happening in his own administration. He is (as Carney claimed) deliberately kept in the dark by senior staff regarding matters you’d expect a president would really want to know about, such as a major scandal about to erupt regarding the IRS targeting Tea Party groups, which began just as his health care bill was running into difficulty. The long and the...

Over / under Appropriate / inappropriate: 30 Any reference to investigations: 50 Ask somebody else: 25Odds “Mistakes were made” 200:1 Carney is confronted on his bald faced lies about WH role in sanitizing Benghazi talking points: 10:1Benghazi Emails Directly Contradict White House Claims WH Live Stream

The Syrian army destroyed an Israeli armoured vehicle that violated the country's border, Syrian agency SANA reported on Tuesday with reference to the Armed Forces Command.

The Justice Department’s secret subpoena for AP phone records included the seizure of records for five reporters' cellphones and three home phones as well as two fax lines, a lawyer for the news organization tells NBC News. David Schulz, the chief lawyer for the AP, said the subpoenas also covered the records for 21 phone lines in five AP office lines -- including one for a dead phone line at office in Washington that had been shut down six years ago. The phone lines at four other offices – where 100 reporters worked — were also covered by the subpoenas,...

"In two weeks the naysayers will find out just how wrong they have been" - Mike Zullo

It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined - in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week's controversy over the DOJ's pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general.

I mentioned the other day that the Justice Department's secretive snooping on AP reporters was not just a personal violation of privacy, but in fact a threat to their ability to do their jobs and a threat to everyone's ability to report on the Obama administration. Gary Pruitt, AP's CEO confirmed on CBS Face the Nation Sunday that in fact, his organization is already finding government sources are more reluctant to talk to them now because of what happened.

The president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press on Sunday called the government's secret seizure of two months of reporters' phone records "unconstitutional" and said the news cooperative had not ruled out legal action against the Justice Department. Gary Pruitt, in his first television interviews since it was revealed the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records of AP reporters and editors, said the move already has had a chilling effect on journalism. Pruitt said the seizure has made sources less willing to talk to AP journalists and, in the long term, could limit Americans' information from all news outlets.

Associated Press President Gary Pruitt said Sunday the Justice Department sent a strong – and negative -- message to future sources that the government would go after them if they spoke to the press. It’s a move Pruitt called not only unconstitutional, but damaging to the ideal of a free press in the country. “It will hurt,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “We’re already seeing some impact. Officials are saying they’re reluctant to talk.” The Justice Department sought phone records for a two-month period from more than 20 phone lines in four bureaus,including Washington and New York. "Their...

The Talk Shows May 19th, 2013 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Pfeiffer, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Rep. David Camp, R-Mich.; Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif.; former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. FACE THE NATION (CBS): Pfeiffer, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas; Sen. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah; Associated Press President and CEO Gary Pruitt.THIS WEEK (ABC): Pfeiffer; Sen. Robert Menendez, D- N.J.; Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio; Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga.; Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.STATE OF THE UNION (CNN): Pfeiffer, Sen. Rand...

Plenty of people rightly mocked the news a few years ago that the Associated Press was working on a plan to "DRM the news." The idea was to put some sort of licensing mechanism together to get news aggregators to pay to promote their news. This seemed incredibly dumb for a whole host of reasons. It added no value. Its only purpose was to limit the value for everyone in the system by putting a tollbooth where none needed to exist. When it finally launched last year to great fanfare in the newspaper world, under the name "NewsRight," we pointed...

Former Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican party's presidential nominee in 2012, received large applause as he was introduced on Friday's broadcast of The Tonight Show by host Jay Leno in his first appearance on the late night show since he lost to President Barack Obama in November. Leno asked Romney about the Obama administration's scandal-plagued week and gave him ample time to address the AP, IRS and Benghazi investigations. After making it clear he was done in politics, Romney was given nearly ten minutes to slam Obama's handling of Benghazi and his administration's involvement in other scandals. While discussing the...

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day. The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday. AP balked and proceeded to...

(Reuters) - Senior White House officials responsible for navigating the administration through a trio of scandals met on Thursday with outside Democratic strategists for advice on how to get past the controversies and back on track advancing the president's agenda. The White House is trying to regain the upper hand after being knocked on the defensive over its response to deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the seizure of journalists' phone records in a Justice Department leak investigation, and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups for special scrutiny. Now, President Barack Obama's closest advisers want to find a way...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Thursday he makes "no apologies" for his concern about leaks to the media that could compromise U.S. national security or put American military and intelligence officers at risk. Obama expressed complete confidence in Attorney General Eric Holder and declined to comment on the Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press phone records, part of a probe into media leaks about a Yemen-based plot to bomb a U.S. airliner. "Leaks related to national security can put people at risk," Obama said at a news conference.

BENGHAZI DOT ONE, WHY THE VIDEO AND WHY AP This began as a response to a question posed by 'just a hairy ape' on a previous thread. To fully understand Benghazi, I have to go back and break this down into parts. There was more than one reason and we need to understand them all which isn't easy,(and even less easy to explain,) because there are details long forgotten as if each 'thing' was in a box of its own separate from each other 'thing'. In reality, they are connected in a myriad of ways. So this is going to...

I visited the Soviet Union twice back in the eighties. Fascinating place. … And, because I was on cultural exchanges, I met brilliant people like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and a dozen or so other well known Soviet writers and filmmakers. Funnily enough, most of them would eventually take me aside and ask me if I could help them get out of there. I couldn’t, unfortunately, but I could well understand why they wanted to leave. At the end of both of my trips of about two weeks each, I desperately wanted to get the Hell out myself. I hated the place....

By the Editors It says something about the kind of fortnight the president has been having that the controversies facing his administration can be divided into tiers. The Benghazi debacle and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups are, as it were, “tier one” scandals: the former because it involves obfuscation and cynical political calculation in the matter of the murder of four Americans by jihadists, the latter because it comprises systematic governmental discrimination against conservatives for exercising the core right to political speech.

A fine line exists between satire and bad taste. Mel Brooks danced up to that line with his “Springtime for Hitler and Germany” in “The Producers.” And, every night, comedian pundits like Jon Stewart (www.thedailyshow.com) and Stephen Colbert (www.colbertnation.com) use the politics of comedy and the comedy of politics as they laugh all the way to the bank. I make my living off the evening news, as the song says, in a newsroom where it helps to have the maturity level of a 14-year-old boy. I say this to give context to the following train of thought from earlier in...

That’s the revelation made by California Congressman Devin Nunes, who sits on the House Ways And Means Committee on Hugh Hewitt’s Show Wednesday night. Here’s the key part of that transcript: HH: The idea that this might be a Geithner-Axelrod plan, and by that, the sort of intimation, Henry II style, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest, will no one rid me of these turbulent Tea Parties, that might have just been a hint, a shift of an eyebrow, a change in the tone of voice. That’s going to take a long time to get to. I...

Richard Nixon made a major mistake in the commission of his crimes against the people, he left a trail of incrimination. Some of us have doubts concerning the intellect of Obama, but it can't be denied, he has the cunning of a street wise criminal. At least he knows how to cover his ass, even if it implies poor leadership and management skills, and that is the major difference between America's most infamous and ignoble, narcissistic, presidential failures. Obama unleashed his political whores by letting it be known, that the most flagrant and egregious political crimes would not be prosecuted...

Was the DOJ right to secretly obtain phone records from the AP? Absolutely not. This was a massive overreach, and chilling to a free press DOJ had the right, but the record request was simply too broad Yes, this was part of a serious leak investigation

Media Matters has weighed in on the news that the Justice Department secretly seized extensive phone records from the Associated Press, and the left-wing advocacy group is siding with the government. “The AP revealed yesterday that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of reporter and editor phone records from 2012, likely as part of an investigation into leaks around a counterterrorist operation in the Arabian Peninsula,” reads a Tuesday afternoon post on the Media Matters Action Network website. “If the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should...

Washington - U.S. lawmakers accused the Obama administration on Wednesday of trampling on free speech rights and evading questions about the Justice Department's secret seizure of Associated Press telephone records. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, testifying before a House of Representatives panel, provided limited responses on the issue, noting he had been recused from the probe into a government leak that led to the records seizure.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: It's clear that that the press has turned. I'm not sure how permanent it will be but this is surely different than what we've seen over the four years being acolytes and cheerleaders and really supine. And the reason I think, a, is the accumulate of scandals all at once and the remarkable coincidence that the president was speaking early on about conspiracies and don't worry about government, tyranny, you know. The IRS scandal, which is the second most powerful agency in government as an agent suppression of political speech is almost a definition of tyranny. But that...

As predicted, Wednesday afternoon's testimony by Attorney General Eric Holder focused heavily on revelations that the Department of Justice subpoenaed phone records from the Associated Press following their publishing leaked information about a terror attack. The House Judiciary Committee had the wrong guy at the witness table, though, since Holder, who'd recused himself from the matter couldn't offer much new information. This left the committee members to fill the time by attacking their opponents, and allowed for a dispute that resulted in Holder calling a Congressmember's behavior "unacceptable and shameful." At the start, it seemed as though the focus might...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, I've had people say, "Rush, how do we handle this? What's the best way to deal with all this?" See if you agree with this. Dr. Krauthammer on Fox News Special Report during the All-Star Panel last night, Bret Baier said, "Charles Krauthammer, when the president says there's no 'there' there, it almost seemed that he was challenging reporters to say, 'No, really, there's no "there" there.'" KRAUTHAMMER: The one advice I'd give to Republicans is stop calling it a huge scandal. Stop saying it's a Watergate. Stop saying it's Iran-Contra. Let the facts speak for...

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that he believes President Barack Obama owes the American public explanations for both the seizure of Associated Press phone records by the Department of Justice and the IRS targeting of conservative groups. “I don’t think anyone truly believes that the president has given us a sufficient answer for America, much less the press,” Rangel said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I think this is just the beginning and the whole idea of comparing this with Nixon, I really think is just, it doesn’t make much sense. But the president has to come forward and share...

Okay. We’ve finally had time to read the IRS Inspector General’s 54 page report on the targeting of conservative groups for tighter scrutiny. Here is the essence of Big Guy’s statement:   "I have now had the opportunity to review the Treasury Department watchdog's report on its investigation of IRS personnel who improperly targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. "And the report's findings are intolerable and inexcusable. (SNIP) In other words, he’s shocked – shocked - to find that there’s targeting going on in this administration. Shocked, I tell you! (SNIP) "But regardless of how this conduct was allowed to...

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that he isn’t sure how many times he’s seized reporters’ records. “I’m not sure how many of those cases … I have actually signed off on,” Holder said in an interview with NPR’s Carrie Johnson. “I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few [and] pushed a few back for modifications.” Holder’s answer serves as confirmation that the Justice Department’s secret seizure of The Associated Press’s phone records is not an isolated incident. Though the decision to subpoena information from media organizations normally falls to Holder, he insists...

Politico reported earlier today that Washington DC has begun to turn against Barack Obama and his administration. Thanks to Obama’s own arrogance, write Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, he has little good will inside the Beltway anyway, and that leaves him with few passionate defenders in the latest scandal cascade: The town is turning on President Obama — and this is very bad news for this White House.Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of...

The Associated Press is far from satisfied by the Department of Justice's initial response regarding the government grabbing months of phone records from the wire service. Gary Pruitt, president and CEO of The Associated Press, sent a sternly worded follow-up letter to the Department of Justice today, one which said its attempt at explaining what happened hardly proved reassuring and appeared dubious at face value. "The scope of the subpoena was overbroad under the law, given that it involved seizing records from a broad range of telephones across AP’s newsgathering operation. More than 100 journalists work in the locations served...

Media Matters is an organization dedicated to finding conservative media bias — which means it’s an overstaffed, over-funded group with little to do but quibble over details and interpretations and engage the most conspiratorial-minded and least influential conservatives in America. But they’ve really done it this time. As it turns out, a free press matters a lot less than President Obama matters.

The first question for White House spokesman Jay Carney at Tuesday's press briefing went right to the heart of the growing crisis facing President Obama: In the matters of the Benghazi terror attack, the IRS targeting conservative groups, the Justice Department going after AP phone records, “…doesn’t responsibility for setting tone, setting direction ultimately rest with the president?” That question of “where the buck stops” harkens back to another Democrat who occupied the Oval Office some 60 years ago, “Give ‘em Hell” Harry Truman but the answer is as relevant today. Benghazi may not be "Obama's Watergate," as Sen. Lindsay...

President Obama is a "strong defender" of the First Amendment and a "firm believer" that the press should not be blocked in its reporting, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday, but the Justice Department must also be able to investigate criminal activity.

I hadn't seen this posted yet.

The Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press — a body that includes a number of prominent journalists — has sent a scathing letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy AG James Cole regarding the Justice Department’s secret seizure of AP employees’ office, home and cell phone records during a leak investigation.

Robert Greenwald was not terribly surprised to hear that the U.S. Department of Justice had secretly obtained two months of telephone records from Associated Press reporters and editors. "It is consistent with a national security state," Greenwald, a documentary filmmaker whose recently-released "War on Whistleblowers" focuses on the White House assault on press freedom, told Yahoo News. "This is a result of a series of policies put in place by this administration. It is systemic. It is not a one-off. It is not an accident. It is an effort to keep whistleblowers silent. And it's unfortunate." In a letter to...

Today at a Department Of Justice press conference Attorney General Eric Holder said he has no problem without letting the Associate Press answer the charges of a leak endangering national security.

Ineffective management at the Internal Revenue Service led to certain groups being singled out for more than 18 months based on their names or mission statements, according to an Inspector General report obtained by ABC News. IRS officials told IG investigators that their actions were not influenced by any outside officials or agencies. The use of inappropriate criteria to screen applicants resulted in significant delays for groups applying for tax exempt status, and also allowed unnecessary requests for information, the report found. Among the criteria that IRS employees used to flag groups for extra scrutiny was having words like "tea...

It’s really too bad it had to come to this, but thanks to a gross violation (at least in spirit) of the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution, we finally got a bit of skepticism about Obama from the mainstream press.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The Associated Press: The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a ‘massive and unprecedented intrusion’ into how news organizations gather the news.” The Obama administration is spying on state-controlled reporters from the Associated Press. Don't they know that the AP would have given him this information if he just asked for it? “The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in...

USBC News Wire- Another scandal has hit the already affair-ridden Obama administration. This scandal has come to light the heels of the shocking scandal in which the IRS was used to target US citizens, but in this case it is the Department of Justice (DOJ) which was used in an intimidating way against people who may have not agreed with the Democratic administration. While only now coming to light, the DOJ reportedly seized phone records of at least 20 AP journalists over an extended period of time without proper procedures. While Obama has continued to deny that he knew anything...

Full Title - "Carney: White House notified of IRS targeting tea party ‘several weeks ago;’ Obama: I found out Friday [VIDEO]" White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a press conference Tuesday that the White House was notified about the IRS targeting tea party groups “several weeks ago.” This comes a day after President Obama said he found out about it from news reports on Friday of last week. During a press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday, President Obama was asked about the IRS scandal. He responded, ”I first learned about it from the same...