Free Republic

From Bare Naked Islam: Barack Hussein Obama together with Hillary Clinton decided to aid and abet al-Qaeda terrorists and Libyan Muslim Brotherhood jihadists to overthrow U.S. ally Muammar Ghaddafi and replace all the secular leaders in the Middle East with sharia-compliant Muslim Brotherhood governments. Former CIA Operations and Intelligence Analyist, Officer, Clare Lozez, says that “America has switched sides in the war on terror under Barack Obama.” She said the global war on terror had been an effort to “stay free of Sharia,” or repressive Islamic law, until the Obama administration began siding with such jihadist groups as the Muslim...

I have said it before -- the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service is institutionally incapable of self-correction. And, now it is even clearer that the Obama administration’s Department of Justice is incapable of holding accountable those responsible for a massive illegal targeting scheme. Even worse, its own involvement in the scandal not only means that it can’t properly investigate the IRS, it should instead be investigated for cooperating with the IRS in its campaign of censorship and oppression. The latest troubling development comes as the Justice Department announced it will not pursue criminal contempt charges against former top IRS official...

When Dr. Roy Spencer looked up summer temperature data for the U.S. Corn Belt, it showed no warming trend for over a century. But that was before temperatures were “adjusted” by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate scientists — now the same data shows a significant warming trend.Spencer, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that the National Climatic Data Center made large adjustments to past summer temperatures for the U.S. Corn Belt, lowering past temperatures to make them cooler. Adjusting past temperatures downward creates a significant warming trend in the data that didn’t exist before....

An IRS employee tasked with trying to restore and obtain emails on Lois Lerner’s IRS computer’s hard drive was legally blind. Stephen Manning, the deputy chief information officer for strategy and modernization at the IRS, submitted an affidavit in the True the Vote vs. IRS litigation regarding the persons and procedures used to attempt to recover Lois Lerner’s hard drive containing emails pertaining to Tea Party targeting. The affidavit can be read here. Paragraph 14 describes the educational background of the person searching for data on Lois Lerner’s hard drive: “According to the Specialist, prior to joining the Internal Revenue...

The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed. Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation. “There is potential criminal...

Thursday night Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and Deputy Inspector General for Investigations will update the House Oversight Committee on the status of former IRS official Lois Lerner's "missing" emails. As a reminder, last year IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said two years of Lerner's emails, between 2010 and 2012, had been "lost" in a hard drive crash. A few months later, some of those emails were recovered after Koskinen said under oath they had been lost forever. Since the announcement of the missing emails, Congress has asked Inspectors General from different departments to look into their recovery. The emails...

MONTPELIER (AP) >> Vermont is applying a fresh round of scrutiny to its contract with Jonathan Gruber, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who got into hot water for talking about what he called "the stupidity of the American voter." Vermont State Auditor Doug Hoffer has been reviewing the contract under which Gruber got paid $500 an hour and his assistants got $100 per hour. Hoffer said Friday Gruber provided insufficient documentation to support his invoices to the state. Hoffer said officials in Gov. Peter Shumlin's administration had been in close touch with Gruber throughout his work, but that...

Ever wonder how lowly paid lawmakers leave office filthy rich? Sen. Dianne Feinstein is showing how it’s done. The US Postal Service plans to sell 56 buildings — so it can lease space more expensively — and the real estate company of the California senator’s husband, Richard Blum, is set to pocket about $1 billion in commissions.

There’s a common cause that bonds the black United States attorney with the black criminal.” These words, according to Department of Justice whistleblower J. Christian Adams, were uttered by none other than Attorney General Eric Holder. And now another former government official is blowing the whistle — and blowing off some righteous steam — in Holder’s direction. He is ex-FBI Special Agent K. Dee McCown, currently director of Global Security and Loss Prevention at W.W. Grainger, Inc. He has written a damning open letter to the attorney general, confirmed as authentic by Snopes. It’s a long missive, but worth the...

A consultant considered an architect to the federal health care law who said a “lack of transparency” and “stupidity of the American voter” were critical to getting it passed reportedly received $481,050 from the state of Michigan, and a recently elected state representative said he wants an investigation. Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who created an econometric model intended to project health care spending and costs under different assumptions, along with his team, was granted a $481,050 contract by the state of Michigan, according to the Washington Post. He was paid that to help set up state...

The son of a former Virginia state senator has told federal investigators that U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner discussed the possibility of several jobs, including a federal judgeship, for the senator’s daughter in an effort to dissuade him from quitting the evenly divided state Senate.

Previously unpublished data from the last big election in Burlington, Vt., reveals a significant number of votes were cast by individuals whose names were not on the statewide checklist. In the 2012 presidential election, 17,383 votes were cast in Burlington, according to city-published data. According to data not published by the city, but made available to a reporter, 639 of those votes, or 3.7 percent, came from election day walk-in voters whose names were not on the voter rolls and whose registration status was unknown. As previously reported, votes by individuals whose names don’t appear on the checklist count whether...

While strong cases can be made for both Benghazi and Fast and Furious, most voters consider Barack Obama’s misuse of the IRS to be his administration’s worst scandal so far. But, as we wrote last year, targeting of conservative non-profits for harassment is not the only dimension of the IRS scandal. In addition, there is strong reason to believe that one or more White House political appointees have illegally accessed private taxpayer information and used it for political gain.Austan Goolsbee directed Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and later chaired his Council of Economic Advisers. In August 2010, Goolsbee conducted...

Washington, DC – Despite early refusals to make available IT professionals who worked on Lois Lerner’s computer, Ways and Means Committee investigators have now learned from interviews that the hard drive of former IRS Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner was “scratched,” but data was recoverable. In fact, in-house professionals at the IRS recommended the Agency seek outside assistance in recovering the data. That information conflicts with a July 18, 2014 court filing by the Agency, which stated the data on the hard drive was unrecoverable – including multiple years’ worth of missing emails. “It is unbelievable that we cannot get...

A devastating new Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General report released on Tuesday reveals that the Obama administration has yet to determine whether 1,295,571 of the over 8 million Obamacare enrollees are U.S. citizens lawfully in the country. The finding, located on page 11 of the report, states that 44% of the remaining 2,611,780 application "inconsistencies" are related to verifying "Citizenship/national status/lawful presence." Another 960,492 application inconsistencies were related to verifying whether subsidy applicants provided accurate income information.

"If a judge is told by a party to decide his cases in a certain way, or one party can threaten the judge’s job if the case is not decided in that party’s favor, then this central pillar of our democratic society is corroded,” Petersen said at a recent hearing called by the Senate Law and Justice Committee.

According to a report published late last night in POLITICO, the hard drive belonging to Lois Lerner where the IRS claims her emails to outside agencies and groups like the White House, Department of Justice, FEC, Democrat members of Congress, etc. were stored has been...destroyed. Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightening rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources. “We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the...

The IRS’ inability to locate a trove of emails belonging to Lois Lerner, the former agency official at the center of the department’s targeting scandal is “mind-boggling,” according to an expert in electronic discovery. Bruce Webster, who has served as a consulting and IT expert in more than 80 civil lawsuits, is astonished by the fact that the IRS could lose two years’ worth of emails. “It is very well known in both legal and IT circles that as soon as litigation and/or criminal investigation is likely -- not actually initiated, but merely likely -- it is imperative to preserve...

If there is one thing I learned in the 2012 election cycle, it was about voter fraud. My conservative warrior associate, Katherine Engelbrecht, and her organization, True the Vote, took up the mantle against the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections, Gertrude Walker, who admitted to sending “questionable” results to the Florida Secretary of State. It was somewhat disheartening that the Florida Secretary of State and Attorney General sat back, watched the news reports, and did nothing. With that background, I’d like to share a story written by Gregg Prentice: “Voter Fraud? If they’re not catching the easy stuff, what...

RICHMOND, Va. – A crosscheck of voter rolls in Virginia and Maryland turned up 44,000 people registered in both states, a vote-integrity group reported Wednesday. And that’s just the beginning. “The Virginia Voters Alliance is investigating how to identify voters who are registered and vote in Virginia but live in the states that surround us,” Alliance President Reagan George told the State Board of Elections. George acknowledged that the number of voters who actually cast multiple ballots is relatively small. In the case of Maryland and Virginia, he revealed that 164 people voted in both states during the 2012 election....