Free Republic

The White House’s new rules exempting an administrative office from being subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have raised eyebrows among transparency advocates. The FOIA allows citizens to obtain government documents from federal agencies. In a Federal Register notice scheduled to publish on Tuesday morning, the action to exempt the Office of Administration is listed as a final rule, implying there will be no opportunity for public comment. The notice highlights that the Executive Office of the President, Office of Administration, is removing regulations from the Code of Federal Regulations related to the status of records created and...

Lies, lies, and nothing but lies. The lies end now. As reported moments ago, the White House is voiding a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA (incidentally the same act that discovered none of Hillary Clinton's "personal" government-business emails since they were not even stored on government property!) which as USA Today explains, makes "official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office." And just like that the lie of Obama's transparency is over, and it couldn't come at a worse time for...

WASHINGTON, March 16 (UPI) -- The White House Office of Administration on Monday announced it's deleting regulations subjecting it to the Freedom of Information Act seven years after a federal judge ruled the office doesn't have to comply with the law. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled in June 2008 the Office of Administration was not subject to FOIA regulations because it doesn't employ "the type of substantial independent authority that the D.C. Circuit has found sufficient to make an (executive office of the president) component an agency under the FOIA." The Office of Administration provides administrative support and business...

US Secretary of State, John Kerry, warned that public talks on the formulating nuclear deal with Iran will make it exceedingly difficult for the US to prevent Ian from developing nuclear abilities. Kerry stated that he is concerned by reports that details of the nuclear talks will be exposed in the next few days. .....

White House is declining to say whether President Barack Obama has a private email account like one used by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that has sparked a political furor. White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Tuesday aboard Air Force One en route with Obama to Atlanta that the White House doesn't discuss Obama’s email account publicly to guard the security of the president’s communications. He said, however, that anything Obama sends or receives is preserved, including his emails with Clinton. …

Hillary Clinton is not the first official in the Obama administration to have been caught using private email accounts. And likely she will not be the last. Promising the most transparent administration in the history of the universe, I’m starting to get the idea that perhaps the administration might have a whole bunch of officials – inside and outside the White House -- who are trying to skirt Freedom of Information requirements by claiming their private email addresses are privileged. You might remember Lisa Jackson, the former head of the EPA. She got bounced in part because she cultivated various...

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that President Obama exchanged email with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her time in office and therefore through her personal email account. “The president was referring specifically to the arrangement associated with Secretary Clinton’s email,” Earnest said. “Yes, the president was aware of her email address; he traded emails with her. That shouldn’t be a surprise, that the president of the United States is going to trade emails with the secretary of sta

The South Carolina Republican and potential 2016 presidential contender offered to share everything he's ever sent with NBC's "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd -- but said there's not really much to turn over. "You can have every email I've ever sent -- I've never sent one," he said. "I don't know what that makes me."

The Associated Press has uncovered what may become a vast new scandal for the Obama administration: the possibly widespread use of covert email accounts by political appointees, enabling evasion of sunshine laws designed to protect the public. Jack Gillium of AP reports: Some of President Barack Obama's political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press. The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery:...

Stage 2 of the Hillary email scandal has been achieved, as yesterday’s “confused old lady who didn’t understand how email works” defense utterly collapsed with the Associated Press’ discovery that Clinton’s mail server was located in her house (her estate in Chappaqua, to be exact — the one she had to settle for because she was “dead broke” after Bill left office) and was registered under the name of a man who does not appear to exist.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is facing a new set of questions about ethics and transparency - the sort that have dogged her and husband Bill for decades. The latest disclosure, that Clinton used a personal email account while serving as secretary of state, comes on the cusp of her likely second bid for president. Combined with recent news about her family foundation raising money from foreign governments while she was at the State Department, it added fresh fuel Tuesday to the longstanding charge the Clintons play by their own rules. "Does she believe that leadership means acting outside the law?" said...

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

The new rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission are a win for smaller Internet-based companies. Internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile now must act in the "public interest" when providing a mobile connection to your home or phone, under rules approved Thursday by a divided Federal Communications Commission. The plan, which puts the Internet in the same regulatory camp as the telephone and bans business practices that are "unjust or unreasonable," represents the biggest regulatory shakeup to the industry in almost two decades. The goal is to prevent providers from slowing or blocking web traffic,...

<p>Why won't they release the rules?!?!</p> <p>It's been less than 24 hours since the Federal Communications Commission voted to approve strict new regulations on Internet providers, but that's the leading question coming from its critics.</p> <p>Conservatives are demanding that the FCC release a full copy of the regulations that it's planning to impose on companies such as Comcast and Verizon — and taking the agency's silence as evidence of a cover-up. Readers of an FCC blog post  have suspiciously mused that "these new regulations should have been published by now." It's much the same over on Twitter.</p>

Sen. Rand Paul isn't happy that the Federal Reserve is mobilizing against his legislation that would subject the central bank's monetary policy decisions to an audit. "It is alarming that the Federal Reserve, which was granted Monopoly money-making power, is now specifically trying to stop my legislation," the Kentucky Republican wrote in a column published by the conservative publication Breitbart Tuesday. "The Fed, with unlimited ability to print money, now prints that money to lobby against congressional oversight," Paul added. "It is a disgrace and every citizen in the land should rise up and say: We the people are in...

Jeb Bush, a rumored 2016 Republican presidential candidate, just decided to publish hundreds of thousands of emails sent to him during his time as governor of Florida. On its face it seems like a great idea in the name of transparency, but there's one huge problem: neither Bush nor those who facilitated the publication of the records, including the state government, decided to redact potentially sensitive personal information from them. "In the spirit of transparency, I am posting the emails of my governorship here," a note on Bush's website says. "Some are funny; some are serious; some I wrote in...

The White House has still refused to name the “American Muslim leaders” with whom President Obama met to “discuss a range of domestic and foreign policy issues.” According to a White House statement on the President’s meeting, the domestic issues discussed were the “Affordable Care Act, anti-Muslim violence and discrimination, the 21st Century Policing Task Force, and the upcoming White House Summit on Countering Violence Extremism.” On the foreign policy front, “the President discussed the need to continue countering ISIL and other groups that commit horrific acts of violence, purportedly in the name of Islam,” while also congratulating Muslims on...

The Federal Reserve is lashing out at Sen. Rand Paul’s plan to give Congress more oversight over the central bank, a proposal that could gain traction in the new Republican-led Congress. The Kentucky Republican reintroduced his “Audit the Fed” legislation last month with 30 co-sponsors, including other potential 2016 GOP hopefuls, Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Marco Rubio (Fla.). [snip] On Wednesday, Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester criticized the legislation as “misguided” during public remarks in Columbus, Ohio. “They really are about allowing political considerations to influence monetary policy decisions,” Mester said in her speech. “This would be a tremendous...

President Obama met with American Muslim leaders this afternoon, according to the White House schedule, but so far the administration is unwilling to reveal who attended the meeting, which was closed to the press. The White House released a readout of the meeting explaining that Obama discussed “a range of domestic and foreign policy issues” including Obamacare, police fairness, anti-Muslim discrimination, and the upcoming Summit on Countering Violence Extremism. “The President discussed the need to continue countering ISIL and other groups that commit horrific acts of violence, purportedly in the name of Islam,” the readout continued. White House Press Secretary...

When Mike LaFaive visited the Michigan Liquor Control Commission's Lansing office in the course of research he was doing, he asked an employee for copies of a spreadsheet and some other public records. The staffer responded that the information could be provided that day if he had a flash drive. Circumstances did not permit this, so LaFaive, the fiscal policy director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, later submitted a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request asking for the records. The state agency then told him that if he wanted the information, he would have to pay $1,500 to cover...