Free Republic

Lost emails, destroyed hard drives, foot dragging, stonewalling, and a smirking, sneering IRS commissioner doing his best to obscure the truth -- this has largely been the response by the Internal Revenue Service to investigations by Congress and FOIA requests from conservative groups trying to discover the truth about the IRS targeting scandal. But one federal judge appears to be just as curious as the rest of us about what exactly the IRS was up to when it targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny in approving their tax-exempt status. Washington Examiner: Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court...

An attorney for Trump, Jay Sekulow said Wednesday on his radio show that the FBI did an unprecedented reversal of the FOIA request of the Clinton-Lynch tarmac docs only because they were caught in a lie. snip The corruption in the FBI is astounding. It will take a very long time to restore the public’s confidence in this once well respected agency thanks to James Comey and other Obama cronies.

The FBI has "reopened" its consideration of a request for records on the infamous 2016 tarmac meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton, the group behind that request told Fox News. American Center for Law and Justice President Jay Sekulow called the development a “positive sign,” in an interview Wednesday on “Fox & Friends.” Sekulow said the FBI sent him a letter saying it had reopened his Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the June 2016 meeting. At first, the FBI and DOJ said they did not have documents detailing the tarmac meet-up,...

Former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin used her personal email account to transmit classified documents and coordinate favors for Clinton donors, according to emails obtained Wednesday by the watchdog group Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch obtained the documents as part of a lawsuit filed after the State Department failed to respond to a March 2015 Freedom of Information Act request. The newly obtained documents include 91 email exchanges involving Clinton when she was secretary of state that were not turned over to the State Department, the group said.

A federal judge is ordering the State Department to try again to find emails top Hillary Clinton aides wrote about the Benghazi attack. U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the State Department had not done enough to try to track down emails in the official government accounts for Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Jacob Sullivan related the 2012 terror attack that left four Americans dead. ... Mehta ruled that the State Department must now search through its own internal records, which it previously neglected to do. ... He said it was obvious, however, that the State Department was...

Our federal lawsuit against the DOJ bureaucracy over the secret meeting between former Attorney General Lynch and former President Clinton has already unearthed documents proving the FBI lied that it had “no” documents, that the media was colluding with the Obama DOJ to bury the story, and that AG Lynch (AKA Elizabeth Carlisle) was using a secret email address to conduct official business. Now we’ve uncovered that the White House was involved. On the afternoon of June 29, 2016, two days after the Clinton-Lynch meeting, senior DOJ officials forwarded an email containing a transcript of AG Lynch’s press availability where...

A federal judge has ordered the State Department to search the “state.gov” email accounts of Hillary Clinton aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Jacob Sullivan for records related to Benghazi, as part of a watchdog’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Amit Mehta made the call Tuesday, describing the FOIA lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch in March 2015 as “a far cry from a typical FOIA case.” He noted that “Secretary Clinton used a private e-mail server located in her home, to transmit and receive work-related communications during her tenure as Secretary of...

A Department of Veterans Affairs official has taken the novel step of filing a Freedom of Information Act request against her own VA department in order to learn what a whistleblower has been saying about her. The whistleblower is Scott Davis, a well-known VA official who has testified in Congress and has made several TV appearances about the troubled VA. He told the Washington Examiner on Monday that he was stripped of some of his final duties in his Atlanta job, weeks after warning that retaliation against whistleblowers is on the rise at the VA. The other VA official is...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced that the National Security Council (NSC) on May 23, 2017, informed it by letter that the materials regarding the unmasking by Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice of “the identities of any U.S. citizens associated with the Trump presidential campaign or transition team” have been removed to the Obama Library. The NSC will not fulfill an April 4 Judicial Watch request for records regarding information relating to people “who were identified pursuant to intelligence collection activities.” The agency also informed Judicial Watch that it would not turn over communications with any Intelligence Community...

Not only is the latest Freedom of Information (FOI) Act response I received from the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) two and a half years late—a response was required under the law in about 30 days—it’s also woefully inadequate.In 2014, I filed a complaint asking the DOJ IG to investigate the unauthorized intrusions into my computers.My employer at the time, CBS would not let the DOJ IG inspect the primary computer at issue: my work laptop. However, I provided investigators my personal Apple computer, which two independent forensics exams had found was also subject to the remote intrusions. Since...

An iconic photograph of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton using her BlackBerry while wearing sunglasses on a military plane in 2011 prompted a recordkeeping official in her office to inquire about whether Clinton had been assigned a State.gov email address, the State Department disclosed this week.Clarence Finney, who oversaw an office responsible for Freedom of Information Act searches, raised the question about an official account after seeing the photo in the media, according to testimony at a deposition held Wednesday and released Thursday. The image went viral on social media in 2012, prompting a "Texts from Hillary" meme."When Mrs. Clinton's...

A federal judge on Thursday ordered that the videotape of Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff giving a deposition later this week be sealed so it can’t be used in political attacks against the former secretary of state and likely Democratic presidential nominee. Judge Emmett G. Sullivan said the transcript will be made public, so the public will know what Cheryl Mills says. He said it was “unnecessary” to have the video released. He extended that order to all of the depositions being taken in the open-records case, which also applies to Mrs. Clinton’s closest personal aide, Huma Abedin. Neither...

'We should ... set up a stand-alone PC in the Secretary's office, connected to the internet (but not through our system) to enable her to check her emails from her desk' (Washington, DC) - Judicial Watch announced today that it recently received records from the Department of State disclosing plans by senior State Department officials to set up a "stand-alone PC" so that Clinton could check her emails in an office "across the hall" through a separate, non-State Department computer network system. Referencing the special Clinton computer system, Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, writes Clinton Chief of...

The Justice Department was sued Wednesday by a privacy group seeking information on the FBI recruitment of Best Buy employees to search consumer computers for child pornography during repairs — a practice that came to light in court documents in a recent case in Santa Ana, California. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Trump administration’s Justice Department, demanding access to records about any FBI training and payment to Geek Squad workers to search customer computers without a court warrant. At issue isn’t the criminality of child pornography or efforts to stop the...

JW Seeks Docs on Obama White House Spying Scandal Mueller Helped Purge Anti-Terrorism Training Material Offensive to Muslims The Seth Rich Controversy Honoring the Fallen Warriors on Memorial Day JW Seeks Docs on Obama White House Spying Scandal With the news this week of the unprecedented spying on Americans by the National Security Agency under President Obama’s direction, it has become even more critical that we get to the truth about any Obama administration surveillance of Donald Trump and his campaign and the subsequent illegal leaking of classified information in an effort to undermine the Trump administration. We filed...

The U.S. government spends billions of dollars to “resettle” foreign nationals and transparency on how the money is spent depends on the agency involved. Judicial Watch has been investigating it for years, specifically the huge amount of taxpayer dollars that go to “voluntary agencies”, known as VOLAGs, to provide a wide range of services for the new arrivals. Throughout the ongoing probe Judicial Watch has found a striking difference on how government lawyers use an exemption, officially known as (b)(4), to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to withhold records. All the cases involve public funds being used to resettle...

Obama Final Travel Tally: Nearly $100 Million JW Sues for FBI Records –and Payments – Relating to ‘Trump Dossier’ Government Yanks Report Blasting DHS for Catching Less than 1% of Visa Overstays We Probe Obama White House Influence Over FCC Attempt to Regulate Internet Obama Final Travel Tally: Nearly $100 Million There may be no better way to keep on eye on our leaders’ penchant for pretending to royalty than to tally the cost of their travel and accommodations. Our nation has granted its presidents exquisite transport because we need for our leaders to be efficient and safe. However,...

Note: I know this article is a little older, but it is breaking news because of the new developments going on in his case. The Federal Judge, that is very strict against Pro Se filers that don't have an Attorney, has granted Brian's requests in his complaint and seems to be working towards Brian possibly being able to prove in Federal Court that the U.S. Attorney Office has engaged in possibly criminal behavior of obstruction of justice.WASHINGTON - April 27, 2017 - PRLog -- Brian D. Hill, formerly of USWGO Alternative News, has decided to sue the U.S. Department of...

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch is suing the Justice Department for emails that could reveal what former acting Attorney General Sally Yates knew about alleged connections between Russia and the Trump administration. Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit Friday under the Freedom of Information Act, Politico reported, when Yates already was scheduled to testify Monday before the Senate on alleged connections between President Donald Trump’s campaign and transition team and Russia.

Judicial Watch today announced a court hearing will be held on Monday, May 1, 2017, regarding Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking emails “relating to official United States Government business sent to or from” former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and three other top Homeland Security officials who used “non-‘.gov’” email addresses