Free Republic

SHANGHAI—As social media helped topple regimes in the Middle East and northern Africa, a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army publicly warned that an Internet dominated by the U.S. threatened to overthrow China’s Communist Party. Ye Zheng and a Chinese researcher, writing in the state-run China Youth Daily, said the Internet represented a new form of global control, and the U.S. was a “shadow” present during some of those popular uprisings. Beijing had better pay attention. Four years after they sounded that alarm, China is paying a lot of attention. Its government is pushing to rewrite the rules of...

The IRS used a “wholly separate” instant messaging system that automatically deleted office communications, according to documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. The system appears to have been purposefully used by agency officials responsible for the targeting of conservative non-profits, in order to evade public scrutiny. The system, known as “Office Communication Server” or OCS was used by IRS officials, including many in the Exempt Organizations (EO) Unit, which was headed by Lois Lerner. As the Oversight Committee report states, the instant messaging system did not archive any communications, so it is not possible to know what...

The IRS failed to search five of six possible sources of electronic media for Lois Lerner’s emails, according to a documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.

The IRS failed to search five of six possible sources of electronic media for Lois Lerner’s emails, according to a documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. Over the course of investigations into the Lois Lerner targeting scandal, Commissioner John Koskinen repeatedly assured Congress that he would provide all of Lois Lerner’s emails. But based on testimony from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), this did not occur. The agency’s ineptness -- or corruption -- resulted in 24,000 Lerner emails being lost when they were “accidently” destroyed. According to TIGTA official Timothy Camus, the IRS had...

Even the normally restrained if not downright tepid National Review has reached the obvious conclusion — Obama must be impeached for facilitating the acquisition of nuclear weapons by America’s worst enemy. Andrew McCarthy notes that in the time of the Founding Fathers, it was regarded as an impeachable offense for a president to withhold information from Congress regarding a treaty, or to use unscrupulous tactics to acquire Senate approval. Compare that to what Obama has done:

During the July 21 airing of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart told President Barack Obama he needs to act quickly if he’s going to “take away Americans’ guns and declare martial law.” Obama walked out to sit beside Stewart amid rousing rounds of applause. The two exchanged niceties amid laughter, with Stewart pointing out Obama has “about a year” left in office and Obama responded by saying he is going to issue an executive order forbidding Stewart from leaving The Daily Show. (Stewart previously announced he is leaving the show in August.) According to Deadline, Stewart then...

President Obama defended the IRS Tuesday in an interview with “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, saying the tea party-targeting scandal was actually Congress’ fault for passing “a crummy law” and that the real problem is the agency doesn’t have enough money. Mr. Obama, who has overseen a series of scandals at the IRS, the Veterans Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and now the Office of Personnel Management, was asked why government didn’t seem to be working on his watch. But the president said he’s not to blame, using the IRS as an example of how what...

....Obama took a victory lap on Stewart’s show, ticking off a list of achievements on health care, foreign policy and more. “The VA works better than when I came into office. Government works better than when I came into office. The economy is better than when I came into office,” Obama boasted.

In a classic and cynical attempt to never accept blame...

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.” Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.” Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites. This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already...

So the Obama IRS wasn’t just persecuting right-leaning nonprofits — it was out to prosecute them, too. And with the help of the Obama Department of Justice and FBI. Via Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, the watchdog group Judicial Watch just got evidence of the plot. A “DOJ Recap” on an Oct. 8, 2010, meeting tells how officials from the three agencies discussed “several possible theories to bring criminal charges under FEC law” against groups “posing” as tax-exempt nonprofits. As part of the project, the IRS handed the FBI 21 computer disks with 1.23 million pages of confidential IRS returns...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released new Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents that include an official “DOJ Recap” report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity. The newly obtained records also reveal that the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress. Records also detail how the Obama IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks, containing...

Catherine Duval, the attorney in charge of the Internal Revenue Service’s email production to Congress, has changed jobs: She now manages the State Department’s email production to Congress, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) told a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday, June 25. Both the IRS and State Department have come under congressional scrutiny over their email production amid suspicions that critical documents may have been withheld or destroyed. Word that Catherine Duval – also known as Kate Duval -- has worked at both the IRS and the State Department came last Thursday, when Gowdy questioned...

Cue the backlash!Following this morning's history-making Supreme Court Decision on marriage equality, Vikings cornerback Josh Robinson took to Twitter to condemn gay marriage in a series of homophobic tweets. He event compared marriage equality to incest and pedophilia."Love is love? So what will we say when the 30yr old loves YOUR 10 year old. When the dad loves HIS 6 year old? It's different? Yea okay!" the 24-year-old football star wrote Friday. "The day one person makes that stand, some may support, but many will say that's sick! That day I will say ‘hypocrites.'""When did we start defining a word...

Agency destroyed e-mails after telling Congress they couldn’t be found. House Republicans investigating the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups are seriously considering an effort to impeach IRS commissioner John Koskinen or other agency employees for “culpable misdemeanors” pertaining to the destruction of e-mails written by Lois Lerner, the former official at the heart of the scandal. “We’ve briefed the leadership’s counsel, and I think that they’re open to it, but it’s the type of thing where this town is like, ‘oh, that’s not how we do things, it’s not really been used lately,’” a Republican member of the House Oversight...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Investigators are blaming mistakes by IRS employees — not a criminal conspiracy — for the loss of thousands of emails related to the tax agency's tea party scandal. IRS workers erased 422 computer backup tapes that "most likely" contained as many as 24,000 emails to and from former IRS official Lois Lerner, who has emerged as a central figure in congressional investigations, according to IRS's inspector general. The workers erased the tapes a month after IRS officials discovered that an untold number of Lerner's emails were lost. The IG says the workers were unaware of a year-old...

By de-judaizing the victims, who were targets only because they were Jews, Obama denied the uniqueness of the threat jihadist Islam and its adherents pose to Jews. US President Barack Obama is mainstreaming anti-Semitism in America. This week, apropos of seemingly nothing, in an interview with Mathew Yglesias from the Vox.com website, Obama was asked about terrorism. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated. And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made. Moving from the general to the specific, Obama referred to the jihadists who committed last month’s massacres in Paris as “a...

The map of the Middle East displayed in an Obama administration video released days before President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel shows the Jewish state dispossessed of substantial parts of its current territory, including its capital. The map of Israel, displayed repeatedly during the video, shows the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, northern Israel, and areas surrounding what is currently the West Bank as non-Israeli territory. The Golan Heights is shown as part of Syria; Jerusalem is shown as part of the West Bank; and northern Israel is shown as part of Lebanon. The itinerary on the White House website also implies...

President Barack Obama is about to make a "dreadful mistake" by cutting a deal with Iran on its nuclear program without approval from Congress, which not only puts the United States in danger but the whole world, renowned legal expert Alan Dershowitz tells Newsmax TV. "This is a very serious crisis about separation of powers — the president mistakenly believes that the executive has the authority to make this deal with Iran without any input from Congress," Dershowitz, professor emeritus from Harvard Law School, told J.D. Hayworth on "America's Forum" on Friday. "He's wrong constitutionally, he's wrong historically, he's wrong...