Free Republic

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) sought to absolve President Obama from any blame in the burgeoning plume of scandals surrounding his Administration by forcefully asserting that “he doesn’t necessarily know anything about any agency of the federal government.” The Congresswoman brushed off reports that IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman visited the Obama White House 118 times over a two year period during which conservative groups were targeted as indicative of anything. “The White House is a big place,” Pelosi said. “Just because Mr. Shulman and President Obama were in the building doesn’t necessarily mean that they met. And even if...

Shocking Obama Admin admission: The government is too big to manage!! Well, yes it is. And this is a self-evident truth. Too big, too corrupt, too abusive, out of control, unmanageable, unconstitutional. And this is a primary reason the Founders established the constitution restricting the size and scope of the central government. They did not want, and we the people did not want an all powerful central government. Another self-evident truth is that MOST of the programs currently installed by our federal government are NOT authorized by the constitution. There are actually very few functions enumerated and delegated to the...

The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release May 23, 2013 Remarks of President Barack Obama It’s an honor to return to the National Defense University. Here, at Fort McNair, Americans have served in uniform since 1791– standing guard in the early days of the Republic, and contemplating the future of warfare here in the 21st century. For over two centuries, the United States has been bound together by founding documents that defined who we are as Americans, and served as our compass through every type of change. Matters of war and peace are no different. Americans...

The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release May 23, 2013 Background Briefing by Senior Administration Officials on the President's Speech on Counterterrorism Via Conference Call 12:03 P.M. EDT MS. HAYDEN: Hi, guys. Thanks for joining, and apologies for a slight delay. We're here talking today about the speech the President is about to give at 2:00 p.m. at National Defense University on counterterrorism. This call is on background, attributable to senior administration officials. This call is embargoed until 2:00 p.m. when the President speaks. We actually don't have a lot of time so we'll go ahead...

Every day brings new revelations about who knew what about the IRS targeting conservative groups during President Obama's re-election campaign, but the overall impression is of a vast federal bureaucracy run amok. While the White House continues to peddle the story of a driverless train wreck, taxpayers are being treated to a demonstration of the dangers of an unwieldy and unaccountable administrative state. Look, Ma, no hands! In his press events, Mr. Obama has said that while he learned about the Cincinnati rogues on the news, he plans to "hold accountable those who have taken these outrageous actions." But the...

Keep your eye on the mission, which is to save us from an ambitious tyranny. We cannot accomplish this life-and-death task if we turn it over to the lawyers. It’s a political mission, not a law enforcement roundup. We need to know, in detail, what happened. We have to know the details, which will, if we are good, enable us to dismantle an enormously ambitious attempt to change America in precisely the way Alexis de Tocqueville predicted. As I wrote four years ago, American tyranny would not resemble those of the past. It would consist of a series of rules...

This administration’s management of the Obama Internal Revenue Service scandal so far consists of a slow-walking, rolling disclosure of facts; equal parts equivocation, amnesia and indignation from IRS witnesses; deer-in-the-headlights non-responses by the White House press secretary; parsed, lawyerly statements from the president himself; and now one of the central key players is taking the Fifth. And all this comes from what the president claimed would be the “most transparent administration ever…” If we give the president the benefit of the doubt and assume he knows the truth is going to come out, the question remains: Does the administration appoint...

Obama spends a lot of time saying that he knew or he didn’t know about various government activities that turn out badly. The president knew nothing of the IRS misconduct until it was announced in the news The president knew nothing of Holder’s Fast and Furious sting operation The president knew of Benghazi from the beginning and followed each development (per Jay Carney news conference, May 20, 2013). At issue is whether to believe the presidential claims and also at issue is whether it is important. It’s important because if the president was involved in activities that turn out to...

An AP report via Fox Nation via claims that although the FBI has identified five men believed to have been behind the September 11 Benghazi attacks, those men remain free because President Barack Obama will not allow the military to seize them. According to the report, the FBI says it has evidence sufficient to support seizing the men as "suspected terrorists." Yet because such an action would have to be carried out by the military, Obama appears unwilling to authorize it. Therefore, for the time being, the men are free while the FBI seeks enough additional evidence to clear a...

by Roger L Simon PJM EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Diplomats Report New Benghazi Whistleblowers with Info Devastating to Clinton and Obama May 21st, 2013 - 12:05 am More whistleblowers will emerge shortly in the escalating Benghazi scandal, according to two former U.S. diplomats who spoke with PJ Media Monday afternoon. These whistleblowers, colleagues of the former diplomats, are currently securing legal counsel because they work in areas not fully protected by the Whistleblower law. According to the diplomats, what these whistleblowers will say will be at least as explosive as what we have already learned about the scandal, including details about what really...

Nothing there? The hope is gone? Bring in Biden? Tell us what you think.

More whistleblowers will emerge shortly in the escalating Benghazi scandal, according to two former U.S. diplomats who spoke with PJ Media Monday afternoon. These whistleblowers, colleagues of the former diplomats, are currently securing legal counsel because they work in areas not fully protected by the Whistleblower law. According to the diplomats, what these whistleblowers will say will be at least as explosive as what we have already learned about the scandal, including details about what really transpired in Benghazi that are potentially devastating to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. snip... Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to...

The scandals of the Obama administration seem to be hurting not just the White House but MSNBC as well while Fox News Channel scored its second-best week of the year. After double-digit gains during last year’s presidential election, May 13-17 saw the progressive-aligned “Lean Forward” news network hit new lows as the IRS scandal erupted and revelations that the Justice Department secretly obtained AP records became public. With 350,000 viewers on average and 94,000 among the adults 25-54 demo, MSNBC had its least-watched and lowest-rated total-day results of the year last week. That was also the lowest total-day demo result...

Liz Trotta on the Obama Scandals -- 5-19-2013

As gratifying as it was to see the “news” media actually do its job last week when the IRS scandal broke, it was also odd that the coverage focused exclusively on abuses of power relating to various Tea Party and anti-abortion groups. A much scarier IRS story has been virtually ignored by the establishment press. On Wednesday, it was reported that a class-action lawsuit had been filed against a group of IRS agents who, according to the complaint filed by “John Doe Company” in the Southern District of California, “stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans,...

Move on to What? By Chris Stirewalt Published May 20, 2013 | FoxNews.com “Already, officials that would normally talk to us, and people we talk to in the normal course of newsgathering are already saying to us that they’re a little reluctant to talk to us. They fear that they will be monitored by the government…It’s not hypothetical, we’re actually seeing impact already.” -- Gary Pruitt, president of the Associated Press, on “Face the Nation.” How does an administration move on from scandals that are still unfolding? The answer: Not very effectively. President Obama and his team tried last week...

Pfeiffer appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation and told Bob Schieffer that is was “largely irrelevant” who edited the talking points which the Obama administration pushed on the American people following the attacks in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Scheiffer asked, “That was just a PR plan, to send out somebody who didn’t know anything about what had happened. Why did you do that? Why didn’t the Secretary of State come and tell us what they knew, and if they knew nothing, say ‘We don’t know yet?’ …. Why are you here today? Why isn’t the White House Chief of...

A story in the Washington Post yesterday about the Internal Revenue ServiceÂ’s Cincinnati office, which does most of the agencyÂ’s nonprofit auditing, clearly contradicted earlier reports that the agencyÂ’s targeting of Tea Party groups was the result of rogue agents. The Post story anonymously quoted a staffer in Cincinnati as saying they only operate on directives from headquarters: As could be expected, the folks in the determinations unit on Main Street have had trouble concentrating this week. Number crunchers, whose work is nonpolitical, donÂ’t necessarily enjoy the spotlight, especially when the media and the public assume theyÂ’re engaged in partisan...

Presidential adviser David Axelrod sought to deflect blame for the scandals swirling around President Obama by pointing out that “as it stands today, government is unmanageably big. The responsibilities and scope of action are so enormous that no human being or even team of humans could possibly govern effectively.” Axelrod hastened to clarify that “I’m not joining the ranks of the ‘smaller government’ crowd. That would be irresponsible. Government has a moral obligation to meet the needs of the people. It can’t shirk this obligation just because its attainment is impossible.” The very impossibility of the task was held to...

After running an errand at the Courthouse, I decided to pop into the Barrister Bar and Bistro for a quick bite. The place was packed and Charlie, the maitre d', shrugged his shoulders apologetically. "There's a huge party here this afternoon, but I can seat you at the bar if you don't mind." I didn't mind and was happy to see that my favorite bartender, Joe, was at work, I pulled out USA Today and read until he was free: "After February 2010, the IRS didn't approve a single Tea Party tax-exempt application until spring 2012, although it approved dozens...

When in doubt, pull it out. Pull what out, you ask? Why, the Race Card, of course. It always comes in handy whenever Our President comes under attack. And so it is for such a time as this that the Race Card was created. For this has been a very rough week or so for Dear Leader. I mean, the Benghazi scandal, which just won't go away, now has been joined by the IRS targeting scandal and the AP record-seizing scandal. Oy! Time for the Big Guy to take a golfing vacation somewhere, I guess, to get a little...

President Obama's Press Secretary Jay Carney bristled at the suggestion the Administration is embroiled in three major scandals. “What scandals?” Carney demanded to know. “The President has been giving his utmost to this country and now people are trying to package a run of bad luck into a series of scandals? It's unfair.” The “run of bad luck,” as Carney sees it, is “a media that is paying undue attention to relatively minor screw-ups by low level employees. Rather than being lauded for his efforts to employ a broader range of the 'differently- abled,' the President is now pilloried for...

The true source of the hellishly-hot-mess of a government America currently finds herself saddled with ultimately has to be the willfully uninformed Americans that voted for him... especially the ones not on welfare that pulled the lever for Obama twice. It's these supporters that are really what's wrong with this country.  Why try to blame a statist ruling class living like kings on our dime- unprincipled people usually take care of themselves first. But they wouldn't be there if not for millions of voters who handed it to them on a platter. People like John Kerry, Hillary, Obama... they're...

Keeping straight all the scandals, cover-ups, obfuscations and excuses for massive DOJ document seizures that are occurring during the watch of the administration that replaced the Bush era with unprecedented levels of transparency and rule of law does tend to be confusing. However, if these guys aren’t careful, at some point they might accidentally start talking about a scandal that the public doesn’t yet know about: At Rep. Steny Hoyer’s weekly meeting with reporters on Tuesday, the Maryland Democrat was asked if he was concerned about the DOJ seizing phone records from Associated Press journalists working in the House press...

President Obama, as usual, is blameless for any misfeasance and malfeasance of the Government he allegedly leads. Let's make it easier for him by making it simpler and smaller. Due to the complexity and multiplicity of scandals increasingly enveloping the Obama Administration, I became too bogged down with constantly emerging new stuff to write about it. Sadly, President Obama also has to rely on media reports, so I can easily understand his problems. Indeed, even this little bit about the Justice Department almost escaped me: WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department failed to provide the names of some terrorists in the...

President Barack Obama—exasperated by scandals, a seemingly stalled domestic agenda and armchair chiefs of staff in the media—wants to tell you what he really thinks, Washington. Really let you have it. In fact, he’s so frustrated with all of the inside-the-Beltway BS that he might hire an assassin to target him in a couple of days, but not before he’s really ripped politicians (especially Democrats), denounced the outsized weight of money in elections and used “socialism” as a rallying cry against health insurance companies. Wait, what? The New York Times reported on Thursday that Obama "has talked longingly of ‘going...

Wednesday morning, Glenn Beck asked his radio audience for possible names for the basket of scandals facing the Obama administration (Benghazi, IRS Intimidation, AP Phone Records). Beck requested that Twitter users post their suggestions on the social media site using the hashtag #oscandalnames. The hashtag started trending worldwide almost immediately. Obamas Scandals Need A Soundtrack Heres Our List Several good names were posted online, but no official scandal name has been selected by Beck and his crew. That idea sparked some on TheBlaze edit staff to wonder about a soundtrack for the scandals. A list of pop hits from the...

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that he believes President Barack Obama owes the American public explanations for both the seizure of Associated Press phone records by the Department of Justice and the IRS targeting of conservative groups. “I don’t think anyone truly believes that the president has given us a sufficient answer for America, much less the press,” Rangel said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I think this is just the beginning and the whole idea of comparing this with Nixon, I really think is just, it doesn’t make much sense. But the president has to come forward and share...

Last Friday, after the Associated Press learned about the Justice Department's sweeping seizure of its phone records, AP CEO Gary Pruitt said "there can be no possible justification" for the action. No doubt that's true. But there also seems to be no possible justification for the many other scandals now swamping the Obama administration — from Benghazi, to the IRS scandal to the White House's attempt to shake down health companies for ObamaCare money. Except that they all stem from a common root — President Obama's callous disregard for the rule of law.

For more than a year, PJ Media has been reporting on the corrupt press shop inside the Department of Justice. The unit is headed byPress Harpy Tracy Schmaler. We broke a story in July about this relationship after a PJ Media public records request revealed communications between Media Matters’ Matt Gertz and Schmaler about Fast and Furious. (More on the corrupt DOJ press shop: “ Tracy Schmaler’s (and Eric Holder’s) Trip to the Tropics ,” “ DOJ Leaks to TPM Muckraker Florida Will Be Sued Over Voter Rolls ,” “Tracy Schmaler – DOJ Shrieker in Chief.“) Tracy Schmaler Today,...

Internal Department of Justice emails obtained by The Daily Caller show Attorney General Eric Holder’s communications staff has collaborated with the left-wing advocacy group Media Matters for America in an attempt to quell news stories about scandals plaguing Holder and America’s top law enforcement agency. Dozens of pages of emails between DOJ Office of Public Affairs Director Tracy Schmaler and Media Matters staffers show Schmaler, Holder’s top press defender, working with Media Matters to attack reporters covering DOJ scandals. TheDC obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. (RELATED: TheDC’s complete coverage of Media Matters) Emails sent in...

Ineffective management at the Internal Revenue Service led to certain groups being singled out for more than 18 months based on their names or mission statements, according to an Inspector General report obtained by ABC News. IRS officials told IG investigators that their actions were not influenced by any outside officials or agencies. The use of inappropriate criteria to screen applicants resulted in significant delays for groups applying for tax exempt status, and also allowed unnecessary requests for information, the report found. Among the criteria that IRS employees used to flag groups for extra scrutiny was having words like "tea...

From spinning Benghazi to politicizing the IRS to spying on the AP, a raft of embarrassing revelations is crippling the president President Obama has had a tough week, and it's about to get a lot worse. The past few days have seen a cascade of evidence that the administration not only feigned transparency, but may have covered up the politicization of the IRS and the response to the terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate. Whistle-blowers on the Benghazi response moved that story back into the headlines, but not for long. Because on Friday, the IRS admitted that it had targeted...

"Certain elements may try to stretch the Watergate burglary beyond what it is." – Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, 1972, referring to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. @ http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2013/05/scandals-cover-ups-irs-intimidation.htmlGov't obtains wide AP phone records in probe "The president is aware of what is going on in Southeast Asia. That is not to say that there is anything going on in Southeast Asia." – Ron Ziegler, 1971.Meanwhile, Jay Carney continues to morph into Baghdad Bob with stories like this appearing in the previously reliable Pravda-on-the-Potomac: "IRS officials in Washington were involved in targeting of conservative groups." Ooopsie! Carney...

President Obama used British Prime Minister David Cameron as a human shield as he ranted on about how he and his administration had honestly portrayed the Benghazi terrorist attack. Obama’s remarks at the press conference with Cameron were a tidy 928 words that covered the relationship between Britain and the United States. Following the remarks of Obama and Cameron, the first two questions asked by a reporter concerned the current IRS and Benghazi scandals. Obama launched into a defense of 1,192 words, Well, let me take the IRS situation first. I first learned about it from the same news reports...

President Obama’s second-term campaign slogan was “Forward,” but instead we’ve got cover-ups, congressional investigations and the government persecution of political opponents and reporters. That sounds like “backward” to me. All the way to, say, 1972. Who would have guessed that just a few months into his second term, President Obama would be compared to Tricky Dick. And by a liberal Massachusetts Democrat — U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano. Republicans could not even have scripted this one. The agency most hated by voters, the Internal Revenue Service, admits to going on a Nixonian witch hunt against Tea Party and conservative groups during...

Scandal politics are sweeping Capitol Hill. Just days after news broke that the IRS targeted conservative nonprofits, Speaker John Boehner’s House committees will morph into mock courtrooms where the White House will be the defendant in what amounts to a number of high-stakes political trials.The most recent scandal to grip the Obama administration came Monday evening, when The Associated Press disclosed that the Justice Department sought its reporters’ phone records — including those of correspondents who sit in the Capitol. Within hours, House Republicans vowed to investigate. To make things worse for President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder

After enduring the longest weekend of his previously unchallenged presidency, Barack Hussein Obama Monday covertly solicited advice from two of his most publicly criticized political adversaries, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Obama requested the meeting with Bush and Romney when his gaggle of hand picked aides failed to provide sound counsel after recent scandals with Benghazi and the IRS were forced into the liberal main stream media portraying the President as an emperor who was suddenly found to be wearing no clothes. “President Obama was blindsided by his friends in the left wing news media, and felt betrayed by...

Fox news and CBS’ Sharyl Attkisson have been busy keeping the Benghazi story alive. They must have earned a special place on the Obama’s administrations enemies list. This week the American People found out that John Kerry and the State Department are busy trying to silence Benghazi whistleblowers. The State Department, CIA and the Defense Department have been asked to permit attorneys representing witnesses with knowledge of the Benghazi attacks access to classified information. In the manner of all Democrat regimes they are dragging their feet in hopes the American people will forget about this “incident.” Barack Obama’s only priority...

A rare, salacious lawsuit against the elite DC private school drags high-profile Washingtonians into unwanted limelight and airs graphic e-mails from the psychologist who taught sex ed at the Obama daughters’ school. By Mary Yarrison, Harry Jaffe Comments (110) | Published April 9, 2013 The exceedingly messy lawsuit between Arthur “Terry” Newmyer and Sidwell Friends School is headed for trial—and the circle of high-profile Washingtonians wrapped up in the case is expanding. At a hearing last week, DC Superior Court judge Michael Rankin set a trial date of November 18, 2013. Newmyer first filed suit against Sidwell and its former...

(Reuters) - Pope Francis, who has said he wants the Catholic Church to be a model of austerity and honesty, could restructure or even close the Vatican's scandal-ridden bank as part of a broad review of its troubled bureaucracy, Vatican sources say.

"Report confirms what well-placed sources have been saying"TEL AVIV – Has the White House been misleading the public by repeatedly denying it was coordinating arms shipments to the rebels in Syria, insurgents known to consist in large part of al-Qaida and other jihadist groups? Other top U.S. officials and former officials, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have implied in congressional testimony that they didn’t know about any U.S. involvement in procuring weapons for the rebels. Now, a starkly different picture is emerging, one that threatens the longstanding White House narrative that claims the Obama administration has only supplied...

When minority Democrats are caught in a corruption net they can’t slip out of they will usually play the race card. “Oh woe is me, here I am a poor brown skinned boy (or girl) from the bad side of town trying to pull myself up by the bootstraps and the evil racist right wing is lying about me trying to keep me down,” or something close, can be heard as a panicky, knee jerk response to having been caught after the commission of a crime. It can often signal that the final act of the drama is not far...

At a Black History Month event held at a Trenton, N.J. church on Sunday, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez blamed conservatives for his ethics scandals, framing them as a racial attack on him because of his Hispanic heritage. “I have felt the sting of discrimination,” he told approximately 300 worshipers, according to the Bergen Record. ”It has never been easy.” “Now we face anonymous, faceless, nameless individuals from right-wing sources seeking to destroy a lifetime of work,” Menendez said at Shiloh Baptist Church.

Cardinal Peter Turkson made the comments to an American journalist He said similar sex scandals would not happen in African churches Cardinal Turkson is second favourite to take over as PopeThe African cardinal widely tipped to be the first black pope in modern history faced a firestorm of criticism last night after he laid the blame for clerical sex abuse crises at the feet of gay priests. Cardinal Peter Turkson, who comes from Ghana, told an American journalist that similar sex scandals would never convulse churches in Africa because the culture was inimical to homosexuality. ‘African traditional systems kind of...

University of Texas offensive coordinator Major Applewhite and the school's athletic director released a joint statement on Friday night acknowledging that Applewhite had an "inappropriate" relationship with a student during the team's trip to the 2009 Fiesta Bowl. Beyond the cheating on his wife while she was apparently nine months pregnant*, the timing of this announcement raises a lot of questions for the University of Texas and how it handled the affair.

At the start of the new year, things looked bright for U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, Hudson County's federal legislator by way of Union City, Hoboken and North Bergen. He won re-election in November and he is in line to take over as chairman of the ultra-powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Now the committee is a punchline. Menendez has suddenly become the media's Lindsey Lohan of the Capital Beltway. I've known the senator since he was a teen aide for his mentor, the late state powertician Bill Musto, who was mayor of Union City and a highly influential New Jersey state...

Ben Affleck has been off the radar for a while, coming out of his married-with-kidslife only for bigger films (and maybe to cheat!). We all thought he was taking time off to prepare for his political career, but he’s reportedly nixed it amidst fear of all his scandals which would be stirred up in the campaign process! The father of three has a dark past, which he isn’t eager to put back on the radar! An insider reported his decision to National Enquirer, print edition January 21, 2013. “The real reason he’s decided not to run for US Senate” is...

Republic of Korea: For the record. Pak Ku'n-hye (Park Geun-hye) of the New Frontier Party won South Korea's presidential election on 19 December, media reported. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee and the first woman elected to be president of the Republic of Korea. That should confound the North! North Korea-Iran: According to a Japanese news service, an Iranian lawmaker told the service that North Korea informed Iran in October of its plan to launch a satellite. The head of an Iranian parliamentary delegation to North Korea, Hamid Reza Taraghi, revealed talks took place mid-October with the North's delegates...