Free Republic

Employers won’t hire her. She’s been berated with epithets like “dirty Jew.” Federal agents have guarded her house because of death threats. And she’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending herself against accusations she orchestrated a coverup in a scandal that has come to represent everything Americans hate about the IRS. Lois Lerner is toxic — and she knows it. But she refuses to recede into anonymity or beg for forgiveness for her role in the IRS tea party-targeting scandal. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lerner said in her first press interview since the scandal broke 16 months ago....

The CIA’s ongoing defiance of congressional authority continued during a closed-door meeting last week after Director John Brennan refused to tell lawmakers who authorized the illegal surveillance of Senate Intelligence Committee computers, which were used to compile a report on the agency’s interrogation practices.

The Department of Labor coordinated with the White House on whether or not to release hidden portions of former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’ schedule as Solis battled an FBI investigation into her illegal fundraising for President Obama. New emails provided to The Daily Caller from the nonprofit legal research firm Cause of Action show the White House thanking the Department of Labor for “flagging” a public information request for “withheld” portions of Solis’ schedule. (SEE THE EMAIL CHAIN). The White House then asked for the name of the conservative group making the request — information that Labor officials were eager...

TribLIVE | Opinion/The Review A misdialed number suggests a criminal conspiracy in the IRS scandal By The Tribune-Review Friday, Sept. 12, 2014, 8:57 p.m. Had Brian Fallon, Attorney General Eric Holder's communications director, just said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hung up a week ago Friday, his apparent attempt to coordinate a document leak with staff for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, wouldn't be the IRS targeting scandal's latest twist. But Mr. Fallon didn't realize he had actually called staff for the committee's Republican majority before saying he wanted to leak documents...

A senior communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder seemingly called House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa's staff by accident and asked for their help spinning new revelations about the IRS scandal, Issa said in a September 8 letter to Holder. The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes...

“This is the most transparent administration in history” said President Obama in February, 2013. When I bought my first convertible, the rear view mirror was clear and perfect at day one. It was made of plastic so that it could fold into the back of the car when I put the top down. By the time I sold that car six years later, the rear window was a disaster; one could barely see light through the window. The past six years have proven to be a perfect simile to my first convertible. There may have been transparency at the beginning...

resident Obama claims to be running “the most transparent administration in history.” But even those who knew he was exaggerating must have been surprised when dozens of his own inspectors general revealed what a laughably hollow claim this is. Earlier this month, 47 of the federal government’s 73 watchdogs filed a formal complaint about the “serious limitations” the Obama administration places on their ability to uncover waste, fraud and abuse. It’s an unprecedented charge. “I’ve never seen a letter like this,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said. “And my folks have checked. There has never been a letter...

Lois Lerner’s Blackberry was intentionally destroyed after Congress had begun its probe into IRS targeting of conservative groups, a senior IRS lawyer acknowledged in a sworn declaration. Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in the declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that the Blackberry was "removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012." That date - June 2012 - is significant because by that time, ex-IRS official Lerner had already been summoned before congressional staffers who interviewed her about...

Shannon Bream ?@ShannonBream · 8s BREAKING: #TomFitton of @JudicialWatch just told us on @FoxNews DOJ atty told JW atty that IRS/Lerner emails DO EXIST in backup somewhere

A watchdog group on Monday sued the U.S. government, accusing the Obama White House of interfering in and thwarting the release of public documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the group Cause of Action (CoA) names 12 federal agencies that delayed the release of documents so officials could consult with White House under a new process established in spring 2009. The process, which gave White House officials review authority over documents that federal agencies wanted to release that mentioned the White House or presidential aides,...

FERGUSON, Mo. — Unrest returned to the streets of this St. Louis suburb early Saturday as hundreds of demonstrators, angered by the shooting death of an unarmed African-American teenager by a police officer, engaged in a standoff with the police that was punctuated by threats and a new round of denunciations of law enforcement practices. The confrontation, the first serious one since the Missouri State Highway Patrol on Thursday assumed responsibility for security operations here, ended at about 4 a.m. when the authorities, prompted by the gradual dispersal of demonstrators, pulled back to their nearby command post. The Associated Press...

A key official overseeing the ObamaCare launch last fall asked a subordinate to “delete” an email exchange on the matter, according to newly released records, fueling Republican concerns that the administration may be hiding internal discussions from Congress. “Time and again, the self-proclaimed 'most transparent administration' has been anything but,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said in a statement. “And now we know that when HealthCare.gov was crashing, those in charge were hitting the delete button behind the scenes.” Upton and other GOP committee leaders on Friday released an email exchange from Oct. 5, 2013, shortly...

Majority of the Inspectors General find themselves unable to perform their duties to audit the federal government Inspectors General (yes, that’s the plural) are considered watchdogs for the government. Their jobs primarily focus on “uncovering waste, fraud, and mismanagement”, which is an important function to keep government programs and agencies in check. A serious breach of trust is evident, therefore, when 47 of 73 Inspectors General pen a letter to Congress describing “serious limitations on access to records.” That’s 64% of the total watchdogs who express such concerns.

Anne Glover, the EU’s Chief Scientific Advisor, has said that her opinions to the European Commission should remain independent from politics and therefore “not transparent” and immune from public scrutiny. The incoming Commission chief, Jean-Claude Juncker, is considering to maintain her position after Barroso leaves, EurActiv understands. […] “Why is it not transparent? Because if it is transparent, then everybody will try to defend their position. And I’m not interested in that, I’m interested in getting the best evidence possible.” …

The White House budget office launched USASpending.gov in 2007 to track federal spending after scores of lawmakers, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, successfully pushed through a bipartisan bill to ensure greater transparency with the funding. At last check, less than 8 percent of the site’s spending information was accurate, and federal agencies had failed to report nearly $620 billion in grants, loans and other forms of assistance awards, according to a recent report from Congress’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, angrily sputtered during a congressional hearing Friday that the White House should not be held up to scrutiny, saying that there was no right to know what it was doing behind closed doors. "You don't have a right to know everything in a separation-of-powers government, my friend. That is the difference between a parliamentary government and a separation-of-powers government," Norton said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. It was, to put mildly, a significant departure from the more traditional liberal stance that openness and transparency...

"Oversight Dems to America: “You Don’t Have the Right to Know” about White House Spending Taxpayer Dollars on Political Activity" Committee votes to reject White House claim that head of political office has absolute immunity from Congress Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved a resolution to reject White House assertions of “absolute immunity” for political affairs office head, David Simas, who has failed to appear before the Committee twice. This morning, the White House declined Chairman’s further accommodation to allow Mr. Simas to comply with his obligations under the subpoena. Yesterday, Chairman Issa offered White House Counsel Neil...

SAN FRANCISCO — President Barack Obama went to the West Coast to meet donors from two top Democratic super PACs, but the press wasn’t invited. Tuesday, the reporters and photographers traveling with the president on Air Force One and in his motorcade were left on the gravel path not even within sight of former Costco CEO Jim Sinegal’s house in the Seattle suburbs where Obama sat for a Senate Majority PAC fundraiser with a $25,000 entrance fee. Wednesday morning, when he met with big donors for the House Majority PAC at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown San Francisco, they...

(CNSNews.com) - Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Wednesday called out the IRS on holding back information regarding lost emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner, telling the IRS Commissioner John Koskinen at a House Subcommittee for Economic Growth, Job Creation, and Regulatory Affairs on Capitol Hill, “You guys were never going to tell us until we caught you.” At the hearing titled, “An Update on the IRS Response to its Targeting Scandal,” Jordan explained the timeline of events in the ongoing IRS investigation, citing how Koskinen knew about the missing emails in April yet waited until June 13, 2014 to...

Goal is 'greater accountability' ... for foreign nations' governments...[C]hanges to government transparency are in the works with a plan to spend up to $600 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money to launch programs to “foster greater accountability of institutions and leaders to citizens.” However, Obama’s plan won’t benefit the U.S. taxpayers, who will be on the hook for the changes. His plan is to help make foreign governments more accountabile to their citizens. The Democratic, Responsive, and Accountable GOverNance, or DRAGON, project is to develop strategies to encourage citizens “to participate actively in governance,” according to a “concept paper” that WND...