Free Republic

It's Sunshine Week, so perhaps some enterprising White House reporter will ask press secretary Jay Carney why President Obama rewrote the Freedom of Information Act without telling the rest of America. The rewrite came in an April 15, 2009, memo from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig instructing the executive branch to let White House officials review any documents sought by FOIA requestors that involved "White House equities." That phrase is nowhere to be found in the FOIA, yet the Obama White House effectively amended the law to create a new exception to justify keeping public documents locked away from the...

Can you believe it? It’s “Sunshine” Week again! Hard to believe it’s been a year already: how time flies when you’re busy being transparent. This year, even the Administration’s most loyal supporters (MSM) have filed a few complaints about the most transparent administration evah! The findings have never been great for the current administration, which promised to be the most transparent in history on the day President Obama took office. In recent years, most agencies have not fully complied with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requirements. (snip) NSA document, redacted The administration has also cited more legal exceptions to justify...

More often than ever, the administration censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, cited more legal exceptions it said justified withholding materials and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press. Most agencies also took longer to answer records requests. The government's own figures from 99 federal agencies covering six years show that halfway through its second term, the administration has made few meaningful improvements in the way it...

A House committee report claims Lois Lerner, who oversaw the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status, lied to Congress about her involvement in the targeting scandal. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report Tuesday concluding that Lerner “created unprecedented roadblocks for Tea Party organizations” and “worked surreptitiously to advance new Obama administration regulations that curtail the activities of existing 501(c)(4) organizations.” […] The emails paint a picture of IRS officials being aware of the potential political consequences of their actions and the increasing attention on the issue. On several occasions, Lerner received...

We knew last year the diversionary activity around the Miami-Dade School Police Department (M-DSPD), which was coordinated, sanctioned and authorized by Miami-Dade School Superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, was illegal. Now, however – the entire School Board might be legally responsible for engaging in unlawful conspiracy which resulted from the internal investigation within the M-DSPD and the School Boards’ “willful blindness” to the actual finding(s). The District Public Information Officer, Rolando Martin, has admitted to us the current Records Request delay is a consequence of School Board Legal Counsel evaluating our latest FOIA request. [M-DSPD] officers within the department admitted, under oath,...

On Wednesday, we found out the Big Reveal on whether or not Lois Lerner would be emptying the bag for Darrell Issa. Nope. So many perfectly good conspiracy theories flushed down the tubes after I went through two pots of coffee dreaming them up. It looked like a big, fat nothingburger and another dead end. But now, seemingly out of nowhere, the IRS seems to have had a change of heart. The powerful House Ways and Means Committee will get everything from disgraced former IRS official Lois Lerner’s email account since a few weeks before Barack Obama became president. And...

This week's episode:  Spending enormous resources on a program to reduce X, and then not tracking (or even putting in place a mechanism to track) whether X was reduced as promised.   James Taranto quoting the National Journal quoting Administration officials: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the health care law will reduce the number of uninsured people by about 24 million over the next few years, and that about 6 million previously uninsured people will gain coverage through the law's exchanges this year. So, is enrollment on track to meet that goal? Overall enrollment is looking pretty decent, but...

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Wednesday ordered the cancellation of a plan by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to develop a national license-plate tracking system after privacy advocates raised concern about the initiative. The order came just days after ICE solicited proposals from companies to compile a database of license-plate information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers. Officials said the database was intended to help apprehend fugitive illegal immigrants, but the plan raised concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

Over the past 2 decades, Republican and Democrat Administrations have joined forces to require the use by physicians and hospitals of government-certified, interoperable electronic medical records systems, or EMRs. These online record keeping systems will send personal patient information collected by all participating providers directly to the centralized Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, a newly created government agency whose job is making the medical records of the American people “inter-operable–” that is, instantly accessible to any “qualified” agency or agent. For example, if the patient of a New Jersey physician should become the victim of a...

FEBRUARY 6, 2014 3:00 PM The IRS Secret Police? Proposed rules seek to curb the free speech of Obama’s political opponents. By L. Brent Bozell III The Internal Revenue Service was already an organization rightly looked on with scorn and fear by most Americans, heightened by the recent arrival of our W-2 forms. Since the early years of our country, when Chief Justice John Marshall in the Supreme Court’s landmark case McCulloch v. Maryland wrote that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” countless Americans have felt the heavy hand of the IRS.Then came Barack Obama. Today, the...

**SNIP** Eight months later, the probe has shown few public signs of progress, and many of the tea party victims say they still haven’t heard from the FBI or Justice Department lawyers. House Republicans said they were concerned about the direction of the probe, and Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and a subcommittee chairman on the House oversight committee, asked Ms. Bosserman to testify at a hearing next week. The GOP has identified her as the lead lawyer on the investigation, and they have questioned her role, given her history as a significant political donor to President Obama’s 2008 and...

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A transgender candidate has announced she will run against an openly gay state senator in Montgomery County in the Democratic primary. Dana Beyer, who is the executive director of Gender Rights Maryland, made the announcement Thursday. Beyer says Maryland residents have waited too long for economic fairness and equal opportunity. Beyer is running against Sen. Richard Madaleno, who has been in the state Senate since 2007. He served in the House of Delegates from 2003 to 2007. Madaleno has been an advocate for gay and transgender rights in Maryland

Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday pushed Attorney General Eric Holder for answers about the investigation into the IRS, with the Texas Republican saying he finds what has transpired in the last eight months of the probe “astonishing.” Cruz called on Holder, who was appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, to address why so little had been done since the inspector general report concluded that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups, tea party groups, pro-Israel groups and pro-life groups. “In the 280 days since that inspector general report, nobody has been indicted,” Cruz said. “Not a single person. In the...

Nothing makes us want to get drunk on a casual Tuesday night more than the annual State of the Union address, and nothing passes the time through an epically boring, 90-minute speech than a good, old-fashioned drinking game. Follow along with The Daily Caller’s 2014 SOTU drinking game during President Obama’s speech and you’re guaranteed to be drunker than John Boehner at an open bar.

The Obama administration’s testy relationship with the press is nothing new for Washington, but it’s now extended to Colorado and has touched off a firestorm after Interior Department officials booted local reporters from a public meeting earlier this week. Journalists with Colorado's Craig Daily Press and at least two other media outlets were barred from a Tuesday question-and-answer session with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, despite the fact that members of the public were allowed to attend. “What happened would be in complete alignment with the administration’s policies. We were promised the most transparent administration ever and instead we’ve gotten the...

New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson says that President Obama's White House is the "most secretive White House" that she's covered during her long tenure as a political journalist. "I would say it is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering, and that includes — I spent 22 years of my career in Washington and covered presidents from President Reagan on up through now, and I was Washington bureau chief of the Times during George W. Bush's first term," Abramson told Al Jazeera America in an interview that will air on Sunday. "I...

Another reporter is joining the Obama administration. Emily Pierce, the deputy editor of Roll Call, will be joining the office of public affairs at the Department of Justice, the federal agency headed by Attorney General Eric Holder. Pierce was welcomed to her new position by Brian Fallon, who works in that DOJ office and who used to be Chuck Schumer's spokesman in the Senate. "Can't wait to welcome @emilyprollcall to @TheJusticeDept Office of Public Affairs later this month. She is a true pro," Fallon said on Twitter.

Last Friday, President Barack Obama delivered his long-awaited speech addressing recent revelations that the federal government, especially the National Security Agency (NSA), has been engaged in a massive program surveilling the communications of virtually every American who uses a cell phone or other internet-based device. Obama, who claims to head the most “transparent” presidency ever, spoke glowingly and eloquently how his Administration will move actively to rein in the domestic spying program and strike the proper balance with civil liberties; unfortunately, he did neither. On cue, of course, the Washington Post -- one of Obama’s most fervent enablers in the...

It's not easy to enforce discipline on successful, wealthy, and famous people used to having their own way. But the White House apparently did not want to see photos of the first lady's glittery gala circulating around the Internet. So it imposed a strict rule: No cellphones. "Guests were told not to bring cellphones with them, and there was a cellphone check-in area for those who did," reported the Chicago Tribune

The Obama administration plans to overhaul the nation’s security clearance system to prevent future intelligence leaks like the one by former defense contractor Edward Snowden. The changes, part of a package of reforms President Obama is expected to announce Friday during a speech at the Justice Department, will include more stringent — and more frequent  — vetting of security clearances, according to sources familiar with the administration’s plans.  The president is embracing some of the proposals offered by an advisory panel he appointed. The panel recommended security clearances become more highly differentiated and that a new clearance level be created...