Free Republic

Half the federal agents who were investigated for allegedly attending sex parties with prostitutes in Colombia received financial bonuses during the investigation or afterward, according to a new internal review of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s handling of the scandal. Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz issued a report on Thursday analyzing the aftermath of the internal probes of DEA agents in Colombia for allegedly patronizing prostitutes. The allegations were originally investigated in 2010, but the issue created a firestorm earlier this year when the details became public…. DEA policy prohibits employees from receiving promotions, awards or other favorable personnel actions...

A Veterans Affairs hospital in West Virginia switched out patients’ prescribed medications with older drugs to cut costs, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) announced in a letter to Congress and the White House Wednesday. . . . The investigation also found that hospital’s pharmacy and therapeutics committee was chaired by a non-physician, another departure from VA policy.

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Michele Leonhart said she is "offended by the behavior" of DEA agents who engaged in prostitution and sex parties while working on the taxpayers' dime. But Leonhart told the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday there's nothing she can do about it except to write memos stating that "these kinds of behaviors require significant discipline." If you can't fire the agents or even recommend that they be fired, "What the hell do you get to do?!" an exasperated Rep. Trey Gowdy asked her.

MIAMI (CNN) - Inside a plane at Miami International Airport, baggage handlers are going on a shopping spree with passengers' bags. What they don't know is that they are being recorded on a hidden camera. The Miami-Dade Police Department set up the camera as part of an ongoing police investigation into luggage thefts by the very airport workers who are supposed to get bags safely onto planes. "It's a problem we all face," said police Lt. Pete Estis. "We will continue to be proactive until we can see that the claims of pilfering through luggage will actually decrease."And these insider...

I have said it before -- the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service is institutionally incapable of self-correction. And, now it is even clearer that the Obama administration’s Department of Justice is incapable of holding accountable those responsible for a massive illegal targeting scheme. Even worse, its own involvement in the scandal not only means that it can’t properly investigate the IRS, it should instead be investigated for cooperating with the IRS in its campaign of censorship and oppression. The latest troubling development comes as the Justice Department announced it will not pursue criminal contempt charges against former top IRS official...

The latest from investigative filmmaker James O’Keefe is just unreal. A Project Veritas undercover reporter visited Cornell University under the guise of “Ali,” a student from Morocco who was thinking about attending the school and he wanted a little information on how Cornell would react if he wanted to start on new club on campus. A club to support terrorist organizations like Hamas and ISIS:

Sen Chuck Grassley has written two letter to the State Dept. concerning a special arrangement for Huma Abedin, Hillary’s closest adviser. At the same time Abedin worked for the State Dept, she also worked for a company called Teneo. For those of you who don’t know it, Teneo bills itself as an expert in helping your company get government contracts. Can you see the obvious conflict of interest here? The Senate is trying to find out if Teneo’s clients received government grants and if they did, was Abedin and or Hillary involved? Abedin also had a private email account that...

The Army’s Fort Hood Disgrace No one who supervised the shooter has been held to account, but the victims are denied pay and benefits. By Kathy Platoni March 19, 2015 7:08 p.m. ET 257 COMMENTS It was more than five years ago that the gunshots rang out, but those of us who survived can still hear their echoes. On Nov. 5, 2009, an Army psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan—an American radicalized by extremist Islamic beliefs—opened fire on his fellow soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas, killing 14 people, including an unborn child, and wounding 32. I was there. A beloved friend, Capt....

The American nonprofit OneVoice Movement – under scrutiny by a U.S. Senate panel over possible links to a campaign to oust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – quietly filed paperwork that would allow it to engage in political activism after two leading Republican lawmakers questioned its use of government funds, FoxNews.com has learned.

It’s a curious time for people who believe in transparency and openness in government. They say they are for transparency. In 2013, President Obama boasted, “This is the most transparent administration in history.” But watch what his administration does. Today, it will issue new rules exempting a key administrative office that handles issues such as request for access to government email records from the Freedom of Information Act. That law is specifically designed to allow private parties to look at government documents that aren't privileged or involve national security. Ironically, the nation celebrated FOIA just yesterday with National Freedom of...

When Dr. Roy Spencer looked up summer temperature data for the U.S. Corn Belt, it showed no warming trend for over a century. But that was before temperatures were “adjusted” by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate scientists — now the same data shows a significant warming trend.Spencer, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that the National Climatic Data Center made large adjustments to past summer temperatures for the U.S. Corn Belt, lowering past temperatures to make them cooler. Adjusting past temperatures downward creates a significant warming trend in the data that didn’t exist before....

Over the years, we have been struck repeatedly by how often President Obama is wrong. Not how often we disagree with him, but how often he is just plain wrong, on matters of history, science and so on. Obama has a blithe willingness to assert false propositions of fact, apparently without fear of correction. I suppose that is because the Democratic press has little incentive to point out his errors. Let’s note two instances from a single town hall appearance in South Carolina yesterday. The first related to climate. Obama, while defending his Keystone veto, said: The pattern overall is...

Scandal: The email plot thickens with news that Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff also used a private email account on the Clintons' server to conduct government business. Watchdog group Judicial Watch, which doesn't like being lied to or jerked around any more than the House Benghazi Select Committee does, has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of State seeking all communications, including emails, between Secretary of State Clinton and Huma Abedin with Nagla Mahmoud, wife of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi between Jan. 21, 2009, and Jan. 21, 2013. The lawsuit — which also seeks...

Ever wonder why multiple investigations of the Benghazi attack failed to turn up much from Hillary Clinton’s e-mails? So did the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the facility and the failures that led to it. To their surprise, the Secretary of State had conducted all of her e-mail on a private account rather than an official State Department account — and her aides had carefully culled only the e-mails they wanted investigators to see. The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt dropped that bombshell earlier this evening: Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government...

A top aide to Gov. Peter Shumlin is defending the administration's handling of a contract with Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist Jonathan Gruber, after criticisms were lodged by the state auditor. Administration Secretary Justin Johnson made public his reply to Auditor Doug Hoffer, in which Johnson says officials in the state office of health care reform kept a close eye on work done by Gruber. Hoffer says the evidence suggests that Gruber overstated the hours worked by a $100-per-hour research assistant, and that top state health care officials ignored the obvious signs that something was amiss. The state rewrote...

“Be gone, Brian Williams, from our TV screens,” Major Gen. Paul E. Vallely, US Army (ret), tells MRCTV in an exclusive interview regarding NBC’s Brian Williams scandal, in which the news anchor admitted to having fabricated his oft-repeated claim of having been in a U.S. military plane that was shot down. Major Gen. Vallely retired in 1991 from the US Army as Deputy Commanding General, US Army, Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii after serving a distinguishing career of 32 years. He is currently chairman of Stand Up America, an organization dedicated to “recovering and preserving our Constitution and Representative Republic.” In...

Obama’s phraseology is an exercise in denial that Islam had anything to do with it. By referring to ISIS as “this organization” and using a clunky circumlocution like “whatever ideology they are operating off of,” he has made it clear he believes that Islam has nothing to do with terror. The cruel burning of the man was the action of a bankrupt “whatever.” This of course is absurd. ISIS is Islam 101. Islam has a 14-century history of using terror to impose itself, starting with Muhammad, the creator of Islam. Usually it was just matter of cutting throats, lopping off...

We’re all too familiar with the pattern by now: His exultancy, the maximum Dear leader Obama the second, ruler of all and master of no responsibility will decree some outrageous and illegal act. This will be followed by the surrender monkeys of the GOPe almost getting into fist fights in a mad dash to be first to solemnly announce that once again, Impeachment is ‘off the table’. And just as with any other rule breaking, the psychological science of operant conditioning applies. The result is an increase of a behavior that is rewarded and less for which is punished. Were...

Just days after the Obama White House accused House Speaker John Boehner of “breaking protocol” by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, a team of up to five Obama campaign operatives has reportedly arrived in Israel to lead a campaign to defeat the Israeli Prime Minister in upcoming national elections scheduled for March 17. The anti-Netanyahu, left wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports a group called “One Voice,” reportedly funded by American donors, is paying for the Obama campaign team. That group is reportedly being lead by Obama’s 2012 field director Jeremy Bird. As...

Former President Bill Clinton took a romantic jaunt in 2002 to convicted pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein’s “orgy island” with “two young girls” from New York, according to a shocking new interview. Virginia Roberts, who’s accused Epstein of turning her into a “sex slave” at age 17 and forcing her to sleep with his powerful friends, claimed Clinton stayed in one of the many villas on Epstein’s US Virgin Islands estate — where group sex was a “regular occurrence.”“I remember asking Jeffrey, ‘What’s Bill Clinton doing here?’ kind of thing, and he laughed it off and said, ‘Well, he owes me...