Free Republic

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...

WASHINGTON (AP) — An Internal Revenue Service employee took home personal information on about 20,000 IRS workers, former workers and contractors, putting the data at risk for public release, the agency said Tuesday. The employee took home a computer thumb drive containing names, Social Security numbers and addresses of the workers, and plugged the drive into an unsecure home network, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in an email to employees.

OPINION IRS doubles down on lawbreaking with regulation to kill free speech MARK J. FITZGIBBONS • | MARCH 17, 2014 AT 6:08 PM Proposed regulations from the IRS for 501(c)(4) "social welfare organizations" would censor speech such as legislative scorecards, voter registrations and get-out-the-vote projects. They also would eliminate communications before elections that name candidates, even if done in a neutral fashion. The IRS claims its proposed regulations are designed to create “a more uniform set of rules” for social welfare organizations, notwithstanding the long precedent of these types of communications. Censorship is now deemed appropriate tax policy. Coming after...

The Center for Competitive Politics created this working timeline of events surrounding the IRS scandal. A PDF version of the working timeline is here.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest defended President Obama’s weekend vacation in Key Largo, despite the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, arguing Obama would be able to monitor events from Florida. “What the president will be doing this weekend in Florida is essentially what the president would be doing back at the White House. It’s just that the weather will be a little warmer,” Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One. -snip- Hey, at least he’s being frugal about it. The rooms are only $2500 per night. There is at least one critic of the idea that a president should be taking...

WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents revealing the agency’s surveillance operations, said he raised his concerns to more than 10 officials, “none of whom took any action to address them,” before he decided to give the documents to journalists. Mr. Snowden’s comments, in written answers to questions by members of the European Parliament that were released on Friday, amplified previous assertions that he initially tried to raise concerns internally about surveillance collection he believed went too far. An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment, but the agency has previously said...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official who apologized for targeting conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny is married to an attorney whose firm hosted a voter registration organizing event for the Obama presidential campaign, praised President Obama’s policy work, and had one of its partners appointed by Obama to a key ambassadorship. IRS Exempt Organizations Division director Lois G. Lerner, who has been described as “apolitical” in mainstream press coverage of the IRS scandal, is married to tax attorney Michael R. Miles, a partner at the law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. The firm is based in Atlanta but has...

… Until he read the breaking news of President Obama’s earth-shattering interview with Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have anticipated that Monday’s meeting was going to be one of his less confrontational and unpleasant sessions of frank, allied diplomacy with his good friend Barack. […] For one thing is certain, the president’s resort to a newspaper interview on the eve of their talks to issue near-apocalyptic warnings about the disaster Netanyahu risks bringing upon Israel is just about the last thing likely to bolster the prime minister’s confidence in their alliance, and just about the...

On this day in 1788, Federalist Paper No. 65 is published. Publius discusses the Senate’s role in impeachment/conviction of executive officers. Why do I suspect just a few of you are interested in this paper?! Publius notes the inherent difficulties in prosecuting the “misconduct of public men” or the “abuse or violation of some public trust.” Finding a “well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments” is difficult, to say the least! The “passions of the whole community” are stirred. People take sides, and these sides may align with pre-existing political parties. “[I]n such cases,” Publius concludes, “there will always be...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, this clash that took place on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform with Issa and Elijah Cummings, exactly what I feared and predicted and mentioned at the time has indeed happened. Here is the Washington Post and their headline, and they're just enraged here. This is the Lois Lerner hearing. Lois Lerner was supposed to show up and answer specific questions about why she had, in e-mails, referred to the Tea Party and Tea Party activities in such disparaging and critical ways. The IRS is not supposed to single out groups for punishment. The...

While IRS officials were targeting Tea Party groups for special scrutiny of their 501(c)3 tax exempt applications, the IRS also hired a policeman who had been prosecuted by the Justice Department — and convicted in federal court — of using his access to the FBI’s NCIC system to tip off a terror suspect about the bureau’s surveillance. The leak wrecked a major terror investigation.He is still at the IRS. Weiss Russell (he has changed his name from “Weiss Rasool,” the name under which he was convicted), is currently employed as a financial management analyst in the IRS Deputy Chief...

Darrell Issa seen plowing ahead with IRS probe amid new evidence By JOHN BRESNAHAN and LAUREN FRENCH | 3/7/14 2:00 PM EST Updated: 3/7/14 3:53 PM EST Not even a trove of new evidence will stop Darrell Issa from going after Lois Lerner’s testimony. The House Oversight Committee Chairman is plowing forward with plans to hold the former IRS official in contempt of Congress - possibly as early as next week - despite word from the tax agency that it plans to hand over a broad set of documents spanning Lerner’s entire career at the IRS. Republicans have long sought...

Free-trade talks between the United States and the European Union are in danger of being derailed by populist groups opposing everything from globalization to multinationals, EU ministers and business leaders said on Friday. The rise of anti-EU parties, reports of U.S. spying in Europe and accusations that a trade pact would pander to big companies have combined to erode public support for a deal that proponents say would dramatically increase economic growth. "We have an uphill battle to make the argument that this EU-U.S. free-trade agreement is a good one," he said in remarks that were broadcast to reporters.

Barack Obama reached his tipping point today. I don't see him recovering from this confluence of events. Today we know for a fact that there is only one avenue left to salvage the rule of law in this country. Impeachment. Today Barack Obama reached a new low in the polls: President Obama’s job approval rating hits a record low this week, as a majority of Americans say his administration has mostly failed at growing the economy, creating jobs, improving health care and the country’s image. That’s according to a Fox News poll released Wednesday. For the first time in a...

VIDEO: 4 minutes - Rep. Marcia Fudge's oral presentation of the privileged resolution on House floor. The chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus is calling House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to be stripped of his gavel for his behavior at a contentious IRS hearing on Wednesday. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) told Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday that Issa’s conduct in the hearing — which included cutting off the microphone of Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat — amounted to “an affront to the expectations of the American people.” Fudge also said Issa should apologize on the House...

A judge has granted a temporary protective injunction against U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, after his wife filed paperwork accusing the Orlando congressman of shoving and injuring her during an incident this weekend. Lolita Grayson's petition for the injunction, dated Monday, says her husband pushed her against a door, causing her to fall to the ground, during a confrontation Saturday at their home on Oak Park Road, near Windermere. /snip After she refused, retrieved his mail and asked him to leave, Alan Grayson "then deliberately and with force pushed [Lolita Grayson] very hard against the front door, causing [her] to fall...

RUSH: Salon.com. This is a huge piece here. This prints out to six pages. "Why You're Wrong About Communism: 7 Huge Misconceptions About It (and Capitalism) -- Most of what Americans think they know about capitalism and communism is total nonsense," and as I read through this... I'm not gonna read the whole thing to you, but we will link to it at RushLimbaugh.com. As you read through this, if you take the time to do it, this could very easily be the kind of gobbledygook that's being taught in college. "As the commentary around the recent deaths of Nelson...

Citizens who flout the Internal Revenue Service face the prospect of jail, but when the IRS flouts the law, it’s business as usual. The case of Christine O’Donnell, former Delaware candidate for U.S. senator, highlights the continuing abuses by the sprawling agency charged with collecting our taxes. Before running, O’Donnell had heard that if she chose to run in 2010 for the U.S. Senate against former Delaware governor Mike Castle, the IRS and others would “F— with her head,” in the words of a top Delaware political insider. In short order, someone accessed O’Donnell’s tax return information containing private financial...

Today, the Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP) is launching a grassroots efforts to push for the impeachment of Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, saying the radical leftist should be impeached over “repeated lawlessness.” Rev. Bill Owens, CAAP Founder and President said in a statement that Eric Holder has no legal authority to pick and choose which laws he’s going to enforce: “The Attorney General of the United States should be impeached over his repeated lawlessness in attempting to impose same-sex marriage throughout the nation. It’s one thing to make a political argument that gay marriage should be the law,...

In the midst of the Obama Administration's efforts to “reform” IRS regulations, the Senate Democratic majority rejected language proposed by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that would have blocked the IRS from acting to penalize dissent against government policies and programs. The specific text of Senator Cruz's proposed language would have made it unlawful for the IRS to “willfully act with the intent to injure, oppress, threaten, intimidate, or single out and subject to undue scrutiny any person or organization in any state.” As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) explained, “whether intent is malicious or scrutiny is undue is a...