Free Republic

As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments -------------- Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it’s here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they’re private corporations, not government agencies.

It took 18 months for Judicial Watch to unearth the emails on Benghazi that led Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday to say he’s forming a special committee to look into the issue. “This material was not voluntarily disclosed,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told The Hill during a phone interview. The emails have given new life to Republican attacks on Benghazi. They include a key email from White House official Ben Rhodes outlining “goals” for the talk-show appearances of Susan Rice, who was serving as ambassador to the United Nations at the time. After the emails, Rice appeared on...

Unpublished research by university scientists is exempt from the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday, rejecting an attempt by skeptics of global warming to view the work of a prominent climate researcher during his years at the University of Virginia. The ruling is the latest turn in the FOIA request filed in 2011 by Del. Robert Marshall (R-Prince William) and the American Tradition Institute to obtain research and e-mails of former U-Va. professor Michael Mann.

Grand Rapids city officials gave detailed information about a tax dispute involving the Acton Institute to a select reporter, but not to the nonprofit fighting to prove it is a charitable organization, according to documents received through a Freedom of Information Act request. In fact, an Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty official complained that the organization was struggling to get information about the appeal of its rejection of an application for tax exemption just two business days before a scheduled hearing. Acton Institute Director of Finance Tom Vogt sent an email to City Commissioner Dave Shaffer...

April 15, 2014RNC Sues IRS for Illegal Stonewalling WASHINGTON – Today the Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for withholding records sought by the RNC’s 2013 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. In the initial request on May 21, 2013, the RNC sought to review documents and correspondence related to criteria used for reviewing and approving 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organizations. This request followed revelations that the IRS had been targeting conservative organizations, and the RNC sought to shed light on who had ordered actions to be taken against those groups and why.Over the course...

The aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower was finally in sight. The pilot of the F/A-18 Super Hornet hurriedly flipped switches and pushed levers. The aviator in the backseat leaned forward, straining to see the flight deck floating in the distance. The jet’s right engine had locked up, its landing gear jammed, the main fuel tank almost empty.(snip) The pilot made some quick calculations. He had 15,500 pounds of fuel in his tanks, enough to return to the Eisenhower and make six passes at the ship. Landing in nearby Kandahar was a more prudent option, but that would likely have meant...

That’s right, the Obama White House has quietly rewritten a portion of the Freedom Of Information Act to exclude what it calls “White House equities” from being released without a White House review. The rewrite was inspired by a 2009 memo by then White House counsel, Greg Craig: The Greg memo is described in detail in a new study made public today by Cause of Action, a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog group that monitors government transparency and accountability.How serious an attack on the public’s right to know is the Obama administration’s invention of the “White House equities” exception?“FOIA is designed to...

It's Sunshine Week, so perhaps some enterprising White House reporter will ask press secretary Jay Carney why President Obama rewrote the Freedom of Information Act without telling the rest of America. The rewrite came in an April 15, 2009, memo from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig instructing the executive branch to let White House officials review any documents sought by FOIA requestors that involved "White House equities." That phrase is nowhere to be found in the FOIA, yet the Obama White House effectively amended the law to create a new exception to justify keeping public documents locked away from the...

Can you believe it? It’s “Sunshine” Week again! Hard to believe it’s been a year already: how time flies when you’re busy being transparent. This year, even the Administration’s most loyal supporters (MSM) have filed a few complaints about the most transparent administration evah! The findings have never been great for the current administration, which promised to be the most transparent in history on the day President Obama took office. In recent years, most agencies have not fully complied with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requirements. (snip) NSA document, redacted The administration has also cited more legal exceptions to justify...

More often than ever, the administration censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, cited more legal exceptions it said justified withholding materials and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press. Most agencies also took longer to answer records requests. The government's own figures from 99 federal agencies covering six years show that halfway through its second term, the administration has made few meaningful improvements in the way it...

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Are autopsies medical records or public records? South Carolina's Supreme Court will begin grappling with that question Wednesday, when it hears a lawsuit by a Sumter County newspaper against the county's coroner. The Item newspaper wants the high court to toss out a lower court's ruling that said autopsies do not have to be made public because they do not fall under the state's Freedom of Information Act.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was in frequent contact with President Obama and senior White House aides before the disastrous launch of the federal ObamaCare exchange last year. While Sebelius has said the president was not aware of HealthCare.gov’s problems, more than 750 pages of documents obtained by The Hill through a Freedom of Information Act request show she made scores of visits to the White House. The documents reveal that Sebelius met with or attended calls and events with Obama at least 18 times between Oct. 27, 2012, and Oct. 6, 2013, including at least seven instances...

Among Washington's most important but rarely covered realities is the daily close coordination among Democratic politicians, executive branch bureaucrats and the left side of the non-profit activism community. Emails obtained recently through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute exposed a slice of that coordination in the campaign to stop construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The emails show, according to Fox News correspondent John Roberts, "senior policy officials at the EPA working closely with environmental groups in what appears to be an effort to kill the pipeline."...

Or any inspections at all for that matter. Not when Hillary Clinton is in the State Department. A U.S. official familiar with immigration procedures told the IPT in 2012 that the exemption for the Brotherhood delegation was “extraordinary.” The records, marked “sensitive but unclassified,” were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. They offer few details. The State Department released a one-page document labeled “Compiled References to MB Delegation Arrival and Departure”. “In the coming days, we’re going to write down a list of procedures for dealing with MB visits to the United States,” an April 16, 2012 entry...

Internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emails show extensive collaboration between top agency officials and leading environmentalist groups, including overt efforts to coordinate messaging and pressure the fossil fuel industry. The emails, obtained by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (EELI) through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, could fuel an ongoing controversy over EPA policies that critics say are biased against traditional sources of energy. Emails show EPA used official events to help environmentalist groups gather signatures for petitions on agency rulemaking, incorporated advance copies of letters drafted by those groups into official statements, and worked with environmentalists to publicly...

From The Washington Free Beacon, Lachlan Markay. Press release follows. Internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emails show extensive collaboration between top agency officials and leading environmentalist groups, including overt efforts to coordinate messaging and pressure the fossil fuel industry.

A few wealthy, anonymous donors funded a liberal activist group working on the failed recall of Wisconsin’s governor, Watchdog.org has learned. Nearly 75 percent of the money funneled into the Center for Media and Democracy during 2011 and 2012 came from just a few donors whose names have been redacted from tax forms obtained by Watchdog. CMD has said, “Most of CMD’s supporters are individual donors who give $5 or more a year to help support the Center’s general operations.” Those “operations” included contributing to the unsuccessful but expensive effort by liberals and labor unions to unseat GOP Gov. Scott...

A district court judge ruled that President Obama can’t lawfully keep hidden a foreign aid order he tried to shield via a claim of executive privilege, characterizing the move as a “cavalier” dodge of the Freedom of Information Act. The Justice Department had argued that a foreign-aid directive that Mr. Obama signed in 2010 should remain secret, because it was part of the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development and fell under the umbrella of executive privilege — despite its unclassified status, Politico reported. But U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle ruled in favor of plaintiffs — the Center for...

Virtual Reading Room Documents Search Results Benghazi returned – 57 results

A federal judge is demanding to see a copy of a government-wide foreign-aid-policy order President Barack Obama issued three years ago which administration lawyers have argued is protected by executive privilege. The Obama administration acknowledges that the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development the president signed in 2010 is unclassified, but officials have steadfastly refused to make any portion of it public, even after a watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the document earlier this year. (The White House has released a fact sheet about the order.) On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle ordered...