Free Republic

After more than a year of resisting the calls of a vast majority of his conference, Speaker John Boehner is relenting and forming a special committee to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya and resulting scandal. “The administration's withholding of documents – emails showing greater White House involvement in misleading the American people – is a flagrant violation of trust and undermines the basic principles of oversight upon which our system of government is built. And it forces us to ask the question, what else about Benghazi is the Obama administration still hiding from the American...

MRC president Brent Bozell appeared on “The Kelly File” with substitute host Martha MacCallum to discuss new e-mails about Benghazi and Fox News coverage of Benghazi. The e-mails are between State Department PR operative Victoria Nuland and friendly Associated Press reporter Matt Lee, discussing the alleged “BS” on Fox during “The O’Reilly Factor” on September 13, 2012, two days after the consulate attacks. Bozell thought the Obama publicist and the AP reporter sounded way too much like each other. (Video, transcript below)

The CBS Evening News on Wednesday ignored one of the day’s top news stories: the revelation that White House aide Ben Rhodes — brother of CBS president David Rhodes — instructed Susan Rice to emphasize a false talking point about the 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya. In a White House email chain recently obtained through a lawsuit by Judicial Watch, Ben Rhodes urged Rice “[t]o underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy” ahead of her infamous appearance on several Sunday shows. The decision by CBS to ignore the story...

April 30, 2014, 02:39 pm Carney: Email was not about Benghazi By Justin Sink Press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that a newly-revealed email showing a White House official preparing then-U.S. ambassador Susan Rice for television interviews was not explicitly in reference to the terror attack in Benghazi. "The email and the talking points were not about Benghazi," Carney said. "They were about the general situation in the Muslim world." A set of documents obtained by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request included an email from deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes to...

Newly released emails on the Benghazi terror attack suggest a senior White House aide played a central role in preparing former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice for her controversial Sunday show appearances -- where she wrongly blamed protests over an Internet video. More than 100 pages of documents were released to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Among them was a Sept. 14, 2012, email from Ben Rhodes, an assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. The Rhodes email, with the subject line: "RE: PREP Call with...

WASHINGTON — A House committee is voting on whether to hold a former Internal Revenue Service official in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions at a pair of hearings.

US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a "back door" in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications. The NSA's collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans' details within the databases. Now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed for the first time the use of this legal authority to search for data related to “US persons”.

The Disturbing Truth Behind Your Next Income Tax Return By Jeffrey Tucker, Executive Editor, Laissez Faire Books The least of the problems with income tax is that it takes your money. The really big problem is that the income tax takes your life. It gives the government direct access to the things you own and sets up the political-bureaucratic sector to be the final arbiter of what you can and cannot consider to be yours. Illustrating this point is the bitter news that the IRS has considered it completely legal to demand access to your email archive whenever it wants....

After a contentious Wednesday hearing with IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, South Carolina Republican congressman Trey Gowdy threatened to hold the top tax official in contempt of Congress unless he produces disgraced IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails by the end of this week. Gowdy spoke with Fox News’ Greta van Susteren about Wednesday’s hearing, where a slew of GOP congressmen tore into Koskinen’s claim that responding to the Oversight committee’s subpoena for Lerner’s emails could take years. “All we want are the emails to or from Lois Lerner — I’m not talking about private taxpayer information. That’s 6103, that’s confidential, that’s...

New emails have been released about whether Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall pressured a state agency to change its estimate of Obamacare cancellations. Udall wanted the state Department of Insurance to downgrade its estimate of Obamacare-related insurance cancellations from 250,000 to just 73,000, because some Colorado residents were offered replacement plans. After releasing his own estimate in November, Udall plunged the state government into a media storm involving Gov. John Hickenlooper’s communications director and the insurance commissioner, according to the newly released emails. “Udall is broad brushing and assuming that because Anthem and Kaiser offered early renewals, the people who...

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Senior Internal Revenue Service officials—including one at the heart of the IRS “targeting” scandal—violated agency policies and possibly federal records laws by using private email to send confidential taxpayer information, the GOP-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in a letter. In a Sept. 30 letter to IRS Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel obtained by the Free Beacon, Oversight Chairman Darrel Issa (R., Calif.) said an investigation revealed a “troubling pattern” of at least four top IRS officials using their private email addresses to relay confidential tax information. “This not only raises the prospect of violations of the Federal...

Down in South Texas, health care providers are reporting an unusual problem with the federal marketplace: Many patients don’t have email addresses and, therefore, can’t sign up online. The Brownsville Community Health Center had 50 people show up on Tuesday ready to sign up for health coverage -- many even brought pay stubs and income documentation -- but not a single one of them had an email address. "If you don’t include an email address, they won’t let you through," said Christela Gomez, the special projects coordinator and lead certification application counselor at the center. Although the center considered helping...

With the federal government nearing shutdown, House Speaker John Boehner stood on the House floor Monday and called on his colleagues to vote for a bill banning a “so-called exemption” that lawmakers and staffers receive for their health insurance. “Why don’t we make sure that every American is treated just like we are?” Boehner asked, seeking to prohibit members of Congress and Capitol Hill aides from getting thousands of dollars in subsidies for their health insurance as they join Obamacare-mandated insurance exchanges. Yet behind-the-scenes, Boehner and his aides worked for months with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Minority...

A series of leaked emails from House Speaker John Boehner’s chief of staff, Mike Sommers, show that the Speaker may have coordinated with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) to exempt Congress from Obamacare. The emails were leaked Tuesday by David Krone, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s chief of staff, who actually has a history of this sort of thing. The leaks, which are a major taboo in Washington, show Rep. Boehner (R-Ohio) worked behind the scenes earlier this year to address confusion over a provision in the Affordable Care Act that would force members of Congress and their aides...

Lois Lerner, The center of the Internal Revenue agency scandal over special scrutiny of conservative groups, specifically targeted tea party applications and directed that they be held up in 2011 in order to come up with an agency policy, according to several of her emails.

Newly released emails show that Lois G. Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRS scandal over special scrutiny of conservative groups’ applications for tax-exempt status, specifically targeted tea party applications and directed they be held up in 2011 in order to come up with an agency policy. The email, released by a House committee investigating the IRS, seems to counter Democrats’ arguments that tea party groups weren’t specifically targeted. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SPECIAL COVERAGE: Tea Party Voices -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Tea Party Matter very dangerous,” Ms. Lerner said in the 2011 email, saying that those applications could end up being the “vehicle...

In a sign her troubles have undergone a significant expansion, the Washington Free Beaconreported last week that formerEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has hired a lawyer as new details of her use of private email accounts to conduct official government business were revealed. The agency and its previous head have still breathed easy despite months of inquiries andFreedom of Information Act requests fromChris Horner of theCompetitive Enterprise Institute and American Tradition Institute. Jackson and enviro-crats have been shielded by colleagues’ efforts to block access to records, delay their delivery, or conceal damning information with redactions. Nevertheless the indefatigable Horner has continued...

The National Security Agency unlawfully gathered as many as tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-discontinued collection program, according to a 2011 secret court opinion. The 86-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials Wednesday, explains why the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled the collection method unconstitutional. The judge, John D. Bates, found that the government had “advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe.”

A key figure in the State Department’s Benghazi attack response team has become the central target in an email probe launched by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.). Issa on Thursday demanded that Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s former spokeswoman and current assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, hand over every email she sent between Sept. 11, 2012 and Sept. 16, 2012. Nuland played a key role in crafting the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi, Libya attacks that killed four Americans. Congressional critics such as Issa believe that Nuland helped the White House obfuscate...