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Jack Lew, the White House Chief of Staff can't answer basic questions about the attack on Benghazi (February 13, 2013).

No matter how Jack Lew performs at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, his nomination to be Treasury Secretary has already produced one big winner: the Cayman Islands. The Caribbean low-tax haven is getting a political rehabilitation thanks to Mr. Lew's participation in a Cayman-based fund he invested in while working at Citigroup C +0.16% from 2006-2008. For years Democrats have denounced the Caymans, which has no corporate income tax, as a refuge for tax cheats. In 2012 President Obama ripped Mitt Romney for investments based there. But now an Obama spokesman suggests that Mr. Lew's Caymans investment, a Citigroup...

In a brutal campaign ad last year, Barack Obama showed Mitt Romney warbling “America the Beautiful” while pictures of a sandy beach appeared and the ad declared: “He had millions in a Swiss bank account . . . tax havens like Bermuda … and the Cayman Islands.” It concluded: “Mitt Romney’s not the solution. He’s the problem.” Well, apparently someone else is part of the “problem”: Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, Jack Lew. --snip-- Investing in the Cayman Islands does not make Lew unfit to be Treasury secretary. But it does make him unfit to be Obama’s Treasury secretary.

As recently as 2010, Jack Lew, President Obama‘s nominee to be the next secretary of the Treasury, had $56,000 invested in a CitiGroup venture capital fund based in the Cayman Islands’ notorious Ugland House, a building whose mailboxes are home to nearly 19,000 corporate entities, many of them tax shelters.The investment has been in public documents for years and drew no attention when Mr. Lew was confirmed to be deputy secretary of state in 2009 and director of the White House Office of Management and Budget in 2010.But the fund is coming to light as Mr. Obama and Congressional...

An investment Jack Lew made in the Cayman Islands has been flagged as an issue in the Treasury secretary nominee’s vetting by the Senate Finance Committee, according to multiple sources close to the confirmation process. The White House says the investment was previously disclosed and is already a public matter. Republican staff “have told us that there are concerns,” said Sean Neary, a spokesman for Finance Committee Democrats. “This came out through the vetting process in prior confirmations. Once it was looked into deeper, it was determined that it was not an issue. Lew has been completely transparent and forthcoming...

Senate Republicans are sending a letter Monday to the White House budget office arguing that President Obama’s nominee to be treasury secretary, Jacob “Jack” Lew, was complicit in breaking a Medicare budget law. The letter comes the same day that Mr. Obama officially missed another deadline in the budget law by failing to submit his blueprint on the first Monday in February. The president has only met that deadline once in his tenure. On the Medicare funding issue, federal law requires that if the program’s funding becomes imbalanced, its trustees are required to issue a warning, and the president is...

Hagel, Brennan, Kerry ... and now Denis McDonough. President Barack Obama plans to name Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough as his next chief of staff, a Democratic source briefed on the plans tells POLITICO. McDonough would replace Jack Lew, the communist Obama nominated to be his new Treasury secretary. Denis McDonough, Deputy National Security Advisor and a former senior fellow at the uber far left Center for American Progress, is the man most responsible for orchestrating the Benghazi jihad cover-up. McDonough rewrote the CIA talking points on Benghazi, misrepresenting the video, when the true motive behind the terrorist attack...

With the hysteria brewing over the upcoming debt ceiling crisis and the uproar over gun control, people are concentrating on what the right hand of government is doing.  They are paying scant attention to the left hand which is feverishly nominating people to positions of power that we know very little about. The media is virtually burying the stories on most of Obama’s choices for his second term.  Those we already know like Janet Napolitano and John Kerry are really not worth the effort to talk about.  We know what we are getting with them, the book has been opened...

Last week, Politico profiled freshman Congressman Tom Cotton (R-AK) to give their readers a sneak peak at “the ‘hell no’ caucus.” According to the reporters, the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who holds a pair of Harvard degrees is “neither a hick, nor a blowhard.” However, they said, “To much of the country, Cotton is nothing more than a straight, Southern, white, male, ‘radical’ conservative — a befuddling relic of a fading slice of politics.” Yes, that actually appeared in print; and, it is a caricature the elite media in Washington and New York City are all too willing to blindly...

The worst part of the Jack Lew nomination for treasury secretary is not simply that he has no qualifications, standing or experience in the financial world or international sphere (think G20 and European debt crisis). Nor is it simply that he doesn't have any seasoned currency opinions (under Obama, the greenback has dropped 10 percent, while gold has doubled). Yes, these are big disqualifiers. But the real problem is that Lew is a left-liberal Obama spear-carrier, whose very appointment signals a sharp confrontation with the Republican House over key issues such as the debt ceiling, the spending sequester, next year's...

A key Republican has vowed to block the expected promotion of White House Chief of Staff Jacob "Jack" Lew, saying he "must never be secretary of Treasury." [snip] A strongly worded statement by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. -- prepared in anticipation of that nomination and obtained by Fox News -- signals the bumpy ride Lew could face during the Senate confirmation process. Sessions, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, says Lew misled Congress about the White House's budget proposals and argues that should disqualify him from being put in charge of the government's finances. "Lew, as the president's...

WASHINGTON - President Obama's decision to name Jacob Lew, his chief of staff and former budget director, to be his Treasury secretary sent a depressing signal that the economy and jobs won't be his highest priority in a second term. With unemployment remaining stubbornly high in the fifth year of his presidency, the job of Treasury secretary cries out for a hard- driving, corporate chief executive with strong economic credentials. Instead, Obama intends to pick Lew who has reigned over his big spending budgets (and five consecutive trillion dollar deficits), and more recently has run the West Wing operation as...

Hey, folks, remember the good old days when candidate Barack Obama at least pretended to be bipartisan and conciliatory? Now it's as if he's on a mission to prove he was faking it. Obama is behaving like a bitter ex-spouse who knows all our hot buttons and delights in pushing them. He is governing by crisis, fear, alienation, cronyism and anti-constitutional fiat. He is openly flaunting his militant radicalism, as if he's trying to provoke us -- and his second term hasn't even begun. He is horrifying all Americans who have the slightest concern about our deficits and debt, refusing...

Barack Obama is sending a pointed message to Republicans by nominating Jack Lew as Treasury Secretary: I'm not backing down from this budget fight. This is certainly a blow to any hope that Republicans might have had that Obama would flinch from his pledge not to negotiate over the debt ceiling. The president has said he will demand a clean bill raising the debt ceiling, unattached to any conditions or spending cuts. To call Lew's relationship with Capitol Hill Republicans strained would be an understatement. According to some on the Hill, there just is no relationship anymore. ... If Obama...

In the wake of the financial meltdown, President Barack Obama derided Wall Street bonuses as “obscene,” calling them examples of “fat cats who are getting awarded for their failure.” But now, Mr. Obama has announced that he will nominate as his next Treasury secretary Jack Lew, a man who in 2009 bagged a $950,000 bonus after his bank, Citigroup, received billions in a taxpayer-funded bailout. Mr. Lew is the former chief operating officer of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments unit—a group that bet billions against homeowners paying their mortgages.

On Laura Ingraham’s radio on Thursday, CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow explained why President Barack Obama’s nomination of Jack Lew as the Timothy Geithner’s replacement to head the Treasury Department was a “nutty appointment.” The White House has not decided whether it will submit a budget before Feb. 4 as legally required, and Kudlow pointed to Lew as part of the problem. Kudlow cited Lew’s lack of qualifications as another reason that Obama’s appointment was “completely irresponsible.” “You know, this whole thing is kind of centered around the Senate, which hasn’t done a budget in 1,351 days — so whatever that...

President Obama will nominate current White House chief of staff Jack Lew on Thursday to replace outgoing Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, according to several news reports. Republicans familiar with Lew, who was a key player in the debt-ceiling negotiations of 2011 as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), say his nomination makes progress on tax and entitlement reform all the more unlikely in Obama’s second term. “We’ve always viewed him as a classic big-government liberal, someone who has consistently stood in the way of efforts to deal with our debt and deficit,” a senior House GOP aide...

The top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee will oppose Jack Lew's nomination to be Treasury secretary. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has prepared a statement saying "Jack Lew must never be Secretary of Treasury." He is not saying yet whether he will filibuster the nomination, however, which sources say President Obama will announce Thursday. Sessions expects that the Lew nomination will fail in the Senate, an aide said. The senator says Lew misrepresented Obama's 2012 budget by claiming that it did not add to the debt. "His testimony before the Senate Budget Committee less than two years ago was so...

Jack Lew, President Obama's reported pick to replace outgoing Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, is known as a no-nonsense backroom negotiator with wonkish tendencies, who is admired on the left and grumbled about on the right. A lesser-known but extremely pertinent fact about Lew is that he has the world's worst signature. And pretty soon, that signature could be on every single one of your dollar bills.

President Barack Obama may choose White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner as soon as this week, according to two people familiar with the matter.