Free Republic

The timing is not merely suspicious, it is damning. [T]he alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner's hard drive—and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS—has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered. There's plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to? I'm omitting all of the...

We have been told Lois Lerner lost 2 years worth of emails due to a crash of her hard drive. We were told the disc had bad sectors and the data could not be recovered.  According to documents provided by the IRS, Lerner was archiving her e-mails on her local hard drive, which developed fatal problems (bad sectors) in the middle of June 2011. The data proved unrecoverable despite heroic efforts on the part of the IT staff.  Let's delve into this a little deeper. Exactly what is a hard disc sector? In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of...

Top GOP officials are concerned that missing among the IRS’s internal emails are communications with Sen. Mark Udall and a dozen other Democrats who received campaign contributions from the federal agency’s union. The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) first issued Freedom of Information Act requests to the IRS last year seeking all electronic and written documents between top officials there and the Democrats who received the campaign funding, but the attempts have been repeatedly stonewalled. Udall has accepted $13,000 in donations from the National Treasury Employees Union that represents IRS employees ... This is just another instance of Mark Udall...

The unfolding sectarian violence in Iraq is just the latest crisis where the Obama administration seemingly has been caught off guard. From the Veterans Affairs scandal to Russia's swift annexation of Crimea, news of the world somehow keeps taking the commander-in-chief and his team by surprise. The following is a refresher of major domestic and foreign policy developments that, apparently, were news to the White House. 1. Islamist militants gaining in Iraq. 2. Russia's intervention in Ukraine. 3. NSA spying on foreign leaders. 4. VA waiting list scandal. 5. IRS targeting scandal. 6. HealthCare.gov failing. 7. DOJ obtaining AP phone...

A statement released from the office of Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, says what’s good for the government should be good for taxpayers. So there might come a time in the future when a letter starting out, “Dear IRS, The dog ate my tax receipts,” would be a perfectly acceptable response to a government inquiry about those “health cost” deductions for a hot tub and the trips to the Bahamas. The word came from Stockman’s office on Friday after a contentious hearing in Congress where the chief of the IRS said there was no apology due for the agency’s loss of...

Americans' approval falls eight percentage points since August by Justin McCarthy WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' approval of President Barack Obama's handling of immigration has dropped to 31%, one of the lowest readings since 2010, when Gallup began polling on his handling of the issue. Meanwhile, two in three Americans (65%) disapprove of his handling of immigration. These data are from a June 5-8 Gallup poll. Disapproval of the president's handling of immigration has climbed 10 points since August 2013, when more than half of Americans (55%) disapproved.

When the Internal Revenue Service announced late Friday that, somehow, it lost two years worth of emails to and from Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the agency’s unfair placement of Tea Party and other conservative groups on its secret “Be on the Lookout List,” our thoughts turned to, well, “Saturday Night Live.” We imagined IRS commissioner John Koskinen explaining to the Church Lady, a character played by the actor Dana Carvey, that a computer crash caused the emails to disappear. That almost certainly would prompt the Church Lady to reply, skeptically, “Well, isn’t that convenient,”...

‘Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea-party controversy.” That’s the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS’s claim that it lost an unknown number of e-mails over two years relating to the agency’s alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president. But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators — Republican lawmakers — are outraged. Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn’t be the...

The embattled Phoenix branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs apparently has paid out $10 million in bonuses during the past three years, far more than previously reported. The Arizona Republic obtained and published the bonus records after seeking them from the VA for months. The documents showed 4,188 bonuses were paid in that period to more than 2,150 employees.

I’ve been trying to get to this story for a couple of days now, but there are so many tentacles to it I’ve had trouble making the time to put it together. In short, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the alleged ‘Coptic Christian’ who made the infamous Muhammad video that the Obama administration blamed the Benghazi attack on — well it turns out Nakoula is really a Muslim, not a Coptic Christian. And that’s been confirmed. It also turns out that the official terms of Nakoula’s parole in 2009 was bogus, and that the administration used his parole as leverage to help...

President Obama is embroiled in two Veterans Affairs scandals: 1) fabricated documents and secret waiting lists for health care, with dozens of veterans dying while waiting for appointments; and 2) waiting lists for disability benefits. The former is now the subject of a criminal investigation opened by the Phoenix office of the FBI just days after the release of a bipartisan letter from 21 U.S. senators to the Department of Justice calling for a criminal investigation. “Evidence of secret waiting times, falsification of records, destruction of documents, and other potential criminal wrongdoing has appalled and angered the nation, and imperiled

The terrorists who attacked the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 used cell phones, seized from State Department personnel during the attacks, and U.S. spy agencies overheard them contacting more senior terrorist leaders to report on the success of the operation, multiple sources confirmed to Fox News. The disclosure is important because it adds to the body of evidence establishing that senior U.S. officials in the Obama administration knew early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and not a spontaneous protest over an anti-Islam video that had gone awry, as the administration claimed for...

As the Senate voted overwhelmingly to pass legislation designed to fix problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the amount of new spending in the measure began to clarify. And the price tag could be a gut-check when it comes to understanding what it really costs to fulfill sacred obligations to America’s veterans. The cost of the measure could be astronomical. That’s according to preliminary numbers circulated by the Congressional Budget Office Wednesday afternoon. The bill would give veterans new opportunities to seek care outside of the health care system provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs. CBO said in...

Still wondering why Lois Lerner took the Fifth or if there is indeed a “smidgen” of corruption in the IRS targeting scandal? It now appears that the IRS was not only engaged in an illegal witch hunt of conservatives applying for tax-exempt status, but that it was actively pushing criminal investigation of already approved groups. The latest revelations from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s investigation of the IRS are that Lois Lerner sent the Obama Administration’s FBI a 1.1 million document file of then-current 501(c)(4) organizations. This file, given to the FBI just weeks before the 2010 elections,...

Kenneth Timmerman, writing in The New York Post, breaks open another shocking chapter in the Benghazi scandal. The Obama administration isn’t only giving the Taliban back its commanders — it’s giving them weapons... Miliary records and sources reveal that on July 25, 2012, Taliban fighters in Kunar province successfully targeted a US Army CH-47 helicopter with a new generation Stinger missile. The helicopter and all aboard survived the attack as it was able to crash land. But what had hit the Chinook?

<p>The White House allowed the parents of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl to take part in a series of secure video conferences with State Department and intelligence officials and senior military commanders, according to a published report.</p>

"I’m not young enough to know everything," Peter Pan’s creator, J.M. Barrie, observed, as if reflecting on the Great Commencement Speaker Flap of 2014. Even so, Jimi Hendrix was young when he reputedly offered advice heeded by too few students today – "knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens." Aware that wisdom comes from asking the right questions, not identifying the wrong answers, Professor Allan Bloom blasted American universities in 1987 for exacerbating youthful indiscretion. In his seminal book, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Student, Bloom argued that students...

This week, we learned that the President of the United States made an unprecedented and illegal decision to retrieve one soldier held captive as a POW, who most have dubbed a deserter, for five high-ranking Taliban Guantanamo prisoners, as some have pejoratively labeled the “Dream Team.” In a reckless and what can only be labeled a political move, the President violated the law by allowing the release of Guantanamo prisoners without notifying Congress thirty days in advance, as per the law that Obama, in fact, signed. This is an unconscionable act, which has grave consequences for our nation, since we...

32 American members of the far left Code Pink activist group joined a Pakistani march in October 2012 against US drone attacks.

The Taliban prisoner swap for Bowe Bergdahl might do some good, but fear and anger are getting in the way of a realistic appraisal.Richard Hofstadter opened his 1968 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," with this line: "American politics has often been an arena for angry minds." He continues, "Behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." One wonders...