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Carney: Obama Didn’t Ask Why He Didn’t Know about IRS Before News Reports By Andrew Johnson May 21, 2013 4:12 PM Comments 21 Jay Carney told reporters that President Obama did not ask his senior staff why he was learning about the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups for the first time through news reports two weeks ago, rather than from his staff. The administration has admitted that White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was informed in late April of the inspector general report detailing the targeting and that she shared the information with members of the the president’s senior staff. The...

How is this any different than Islamic law in, say, Turkey (Obama's favorite and most trusted ally)? In October, 43-year-old Fazil Say went on trial in Turkey for "denigrating" Islam for a series of tweets earlier that year. In one of his messages he had retweeted a verse from a poem by Omar Khayyám, in which the 11th-century Persian poet attacks pious hypocrisy. This is the same thing. If the DoJ pursued the vicious, offensive, racist, antisemitic tweets directed at me (and others) by Muslims and leftists, they would be pursuing little else. But they wouldn't and they shouldn't. Note...

President Barack Obama wants Russia to be friends. Since he and former president Dmitry Medvedev, now the country’s Prime Minister, discussed a “reset” of relations, the Cold War’s Punch & Judy have been more like frenemies than friends.

Hillary Clinton continued sending classified information even after leaving the State Department, The Post has exclusively learned. On May 28, 2013, months after stepping down as secretary of state, Clinton sent an email to a group of diplomats and top aides about the “123 Deal” with the United Arab Emirates.

Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.

California congressman David Nunes made the claim yesterday that the Justice Department wiretapped telephones in the House of Representative's Cloak Room, an exclusive part of the Capitol where members are able to privately interact with one another. Nunes made the claim on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. "I don’t trust the Department of Justice on this," said Hewitt, referring to the subpoenas the Justice Department to obtain the Associated Press's phone records. "Do you, Congressman Nunes?" "No, I absolutely do not, especially after this wiretapping incident, essentially, of the House of Representative. I don’t think people are focusing on the right...

The widow of a scientist who killed himself in fear he was about to lose his job at troubled bio-tech start-up Theranos has told of the company's paranoid culture. Ian Gibbons, the head scientist at the blood test company, died after taking an overdose of painkillers in May 2013 within hours of being summoned for a meeting. According to his widow, Rochelle, he had found faults in machines the company claimed would 'change the world' by being able to diagnose diseases from a single pinprick of a patient's blood. Having recently been diagnosed with cancer, he stopped going to work...

Sharyl Attkisson, the Emmy-award winning CBS News investigative reporter, says that her personal and work computers have been compromised and are under investigation. "I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months but I'm not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I've been patient and methodical about this matter," Attkisson told POLITICO on Tuesday. "I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get their recommendations on info we make public."

Days after a deadly suicide attack at a French-run uranium mine in Niger, a FRANCE 24 team that was given access to the high security site found evidence that the assailants had meticulously studied their target and likely received inside help. The explosives-packed car that rammed a grinding unit at a uranium mine in Arlit, a remote town in northern Niger, last week is in tatters. The shell of the car’s transmission system stands upright in the rubble, while the twisted frame was flung about ten meters away. Days after suicide bombers attacked a uranium mine in this West African...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Benghazi scandal might have taken on yet another dimension. Facts uncovered concerning the firing of Gen. David Petraeus indicate that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have played a role in exposing Petraeus’ extramarital affair with biographer Paula Broadwell. Publication of this affair ultimately forced Petraeus to resign as CIA director. If a link is proven between Clinton and the Petraeus sex scandal, it could be viewed as consistent with other allegations of retaliation by the Obama administration against the three “whistleblowers” that testified before Congress on May 8. Petraeus, who clashed with Clinton's State...

... On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation." But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department. It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation." Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an email written by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland. The Republican version quotes Nuland...

The lawmaker leading the charge to investigate the Benghazi terror attack on Friday subpoenaed the co-author of a report that slammed the State Department but didn´t interview Hillary Clinton. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) formally demanded that retired ambassador Thomas Pickering submit to being deposed by the committee next Thursday. The subpoena comes in the wake of a series of acrimonious public exchanges this week between the two men. Issa didn´t issue a subpoena to former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen, who co-authored the Benghazi report with Pickering.

The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email has now expanded to include obtaining data from a second tech company, which is fully cooperating with the FBI probe that has threatened Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Fox News has learned. A source familiar with the investigation told Fox that the FBI contacted Connecticut-based Datto, Inc. in September and asked them to preserve all data they had which may be connected to Clinton. Datto was hired to help back up data in May 2013 by Platte River Networks, the Colorado-based tech company that managed Clinton’s server and has already been...

Reflexively distrustful, eager to make powerful enemies, the young journalist whose Mercedes exploded in Los Angeles one night couldn’t possibly have died accidentally, could he? A t the end of his life, Michael Hastings, like many of the progressive journalists he counted among his friends, felt besieged by an overreaching government. Hastings was living in Los Angeles, and at a Beverly Hills theater in April, he took part in a panel discussion about the documentary War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. Interviewed in May on The Young Turks, a talk show on Current TV, Hastings railed...

On The Daily Show, President Obama blamed Republicans for the IRS scandal: “You’ve got this back office, and they’re going after the Tea Party. Well, it turned out, no, Congress had passed a crummy law that didn’t give people guidance in terms of what it was they were trying to do. They did it poorly and stupidly. The truth of the matter is that there was not some big conspiracy there. They were trying to sort out these conflicting demands. You don’t want all this money pouring through non-for- profits, but you also want to make sure everybody is being...

WASHINGTON (AP) — IRS employees erased computer backup tapes a month after officials discovered that thousands of emails related to the tax agency's tea party scandal had been lost, according to government investigators. The investigators, however, concluded that employees erased the tapes by mistake, not as part of an attempt to destroy evidence. As many as 24,000 emails were lost because 422 backup tapes were erased, according to J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The revelation is likely to fuel conspiracy theories among conservatives who say the IRS has obstructed congressional investigations into the scandal. George...

The FBI said Monday that no one has been arrested after last week’s discovery of a pair of letters containing the deadly poison ricin in Spokane, but the agency remained tight-lipped about the investigation and a weekend raid at a downtown apartment building. … The letters were postmarked last Tuesday in Spokane and addressed to the downtown post office and the adjacent federal building. They were intercepted by the Postal Service, and no one was injured. … Witnesses have said a man was escorted from the building by law enforcement officers Saturday morning. Sandalo Dietrich declined to say if anyone...

(CNN) -- A Texas actress in a troubled marriage was arrested and charged Friday in connection with ricin-tainted letters that were mailed last month to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, authorities said. Shannon Richardson, 35, also known as Shannon Rogers and Shannon Guess, initially told the FBI that her husband, Nathaniel, sent the ricin-laced letters, but a polygraph exam found her to be "deceptive" on the matter, court papers said. Investigators found that her computer storage devices contained the text of threatening letters sent to the president, but the couple's computer records show her husband...

The Islamist government of Turkey is building a 15-acre, $100 million mega-mosque in Lanham, Maryland. Prime Minister Erdogan visited the site on May 15 in a ceremony that was attended by the leaders of two groups linked to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. Also present was the Maryland Secretary of State, representing Maryland Governor and likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, Martin O’Malley. The mega-mosque is called the Turkish American Culture and Civilization Center and, according to the Muslim Link, it “will likely become the largest and most striking examples of Islamic architecture in the western hemisphere” when it is finished...

President Obama is being accused of selectively quoting Usama bin Laden, by using a snippet of an anti-America screed to make it sound like Al Qaeda was breaking under the weight of the U.S. drone program. snip Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argued that bin Laden's full quote has a far different meaning than that conveyed by the excerpt Obama cited last week. "When you look at the context of the whole statement, it doesn't support their story," he told FoxNews.com.