Free Republic

A government watchdog says the IRS has taken significant steps to stop agents from targeting political groups based on their names and policy positions. The agency’s inspector general says the IRS is doing a better job processing applications for tax-exempt status. In a report issued Thursday, he says the IRS has eliminated intrusive, unnecessary questions, and is processing applications faster. …

Secretary of State John Kerry sent a letter to the State Department’s Inspector General requesting a review of email and records management, the State Department said today. The timing of Kerry’s request has many asking if this push for reform is connected to former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s recent scandal involving her use of a private email server, rather than a State Department account. State Department Spokesman Jeff Rathke denied this had anything to do with Clinton, citing instead the State Department’s need to better manage the overwhelming number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and requests for information from...

Many of the allegations made by former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson regarding alleged computer intrusions by the U.S. government are disputed in a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general. “The OIG’s investigation was not able to substantiate the allegations that Attkisson’s computers were subject to remote intrusion by the FBI, other government personnel, or otherwise,” reads the inspector general’s report. In her book “Stonewalled,” Attkisson had issued a wide-ranging set of claims — that her CBS News work computers and her personal computer had been hacked, that a strange wire was found hanging from the cable TV/broadband box

Staffers from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division will monitor polling places in 28 jurisdictions in 18 states today, to make sure there’s no attempt to prevent minorities, the disabled, the illiterate and non-English-speakers from voting. In the general election in 2012, federal monitors watched the polls in 51 jurisdictions in 23 states; and in the 2010 midterm, federal observers fanned out to 30 jurisdictions in 18 states. Although state and local governments administer elections, the Civil Rights Division is charged with enforcing the federal voting rights laws that protect the rights of all eligible citizens to cast ballots on...

Attorney General Eric Holder has a "lot of sleepless nights," reported ABC News this morning. Chief among his concerns? The threat of "homegrown violent extremists."

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans in Congress aren't buying the contention by the head of the Internal Revenue Service that he has seen no evidence anyone committed a crime when the agency lost emails that might shed light on the targeting of tea party and other political groups before the 2010 and 2012 elections. On Tuesday, a House panel will hear from a White House official who once worked at the IRS. Jennifer O'Connor worked at the IRS from May to November 2013, helping the agency gather documents related to the congressional investigations, said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the...

The vice-president of Fifa has called on the organisation “to fully investigate” match-fixing after an investigation found that the president of Ghana’s football association agreed that the national team would take part in games others were prepared to rig. Jim Boyce said that anyone involved in football match-fixing should be given heavy jail sentences and barred from the game for life. His comments came as Fifa announced that it was “evaluating the matter” and said that Ghana had reported the investigation by The Daily Telegraph and Channel Four’s Dispatches programme to the governing body. The World Cup organiser said it...

The lawyer who led an investigation that determined Gov. Chris Christie was not involved in the bridge closure scandal told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly Thursday there is not a “shred of evidence” Christie knew anything. Randy Mastro, a former federal prosecutor, released a report on his team’s investigation Thursday. The report relied on interviews with officials in the Christie administration, including the governor, and 250,000 documents. Mastro said on “The Kelly File” his investigation was exhaustive and thorough, and in the end completely exonerated Christie. “There is not a shred of evidence that Governor Christie knew anything about this lane...

The European Commission said yesterday (3 February) that its first anti-corruption handbook for the 28 member states showed that there were “no corruption-free zones”, but officials declined to name and shame individual countries. The Commission published yesterday (3 February) its much awaited 40-page anti-corruption report covering the overall situation in the 28-country bloc, coupled with individual chapters on each country, of approximately a dozen pages each. The package is supplemented by a 230-page special Eurobarometer survey on corruption. The EU executive said that its rather modest ambition was to launch a debate on the corruption and identify ways in which...

Members of a delegation from the European Union Parliament say they will look into a claim by the director of the National Security Agency that European countries helped it collect phone records in Europe. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander told Congress the U.S. was given data by NATO partners as part of a program to protect military interests. …

Stung by public unease about new details of spying by the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama selected a panel of advisers he described as independent experts to scrutinize the NSA’s surveillance programs to be sure they weren’t violating civil liberties and to restore Americans’ trust. But with just weeks remaining before its first deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts.The panel’s advisers work in offices on loan from the...