Free Republic

A measure aimed at assuring that government entities can’t use artificially inflated costs to stifle the public’s ability to obtain information is buried in a Senate committee. It is believed that if House Bill 4001 were to be voted on by the full Senate, it would stand a good chance of passing, but with only a few session days remaining in 2014, time is running out. HB4001 would prohibit public bodies from charging excessive fees for Freedom of Information Act request materials. After being passed by the House with an overwhelming 102-8 vote on March 20, the bill was assigned...

Health officials are refusing to answer growing questions about their response to the first Ebola case in the United States. Under intense questioning from reporters, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Texas health department and the City of Dallas repeatedly declined Thursday to provide details about the steps being taken to prevent an outbreak. Texas Health Commissioner David Lakey, who participated in one press call Thursday, would not identify or describe the four individuals who have been quarantined due to possible exposure to Ebola. They were later referred to as "family members" at a separate...

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson will face questions about how an armed intruder jumped the White House fence and made it as far as the East Room when she testifies before a House committee on Tuesday. Sources confirmed to Fox News on Monday that 42-year-old Omar Gonzalez overpowered a Secret Service officer in the Sept. 19 incident -- this led to a struggle and "wrestling" inside the executive mansion as he darted through. Gonzalez was eventually tackled by a counter-assault agent in the East Room after he reached the doorway to the Green Room, a parlor overlooking the South Lawn....

U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates has denied a request from the Department of Justice to delay the release of a list of Operation Fast and Furious documents being protected under President Obama's assertion of executive privilege. The list, better known as a Vaughn index, was requested through a June 2012 FOIA filing by government watchdog Judicial Watch. When DOJ didn't respond to the FOIA request in the time required by law, Judicial Watch sued in September 2012, seeking all documents DOJ and the White House are withholding from Congress under executive privilege claims. President Obama made the assertion...

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...