Free Republic

Disclosure: House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes said Sunday he is likely to release the panel’s documents regarding its probe of all things POTUS Donald Trump and Russia before the midterm elections. That would include transcripts of witness testimony and other documents and materials, the California Republican told Fox Business‘ Maria Bartiromo on “Fox Sunday Futures.” “We believe that the depositions that we took, I think nearly about 70 people, those need to be published, and they need to be published I think before the election,” he said.

On Cardinal Sodano and the meaning of ‘accountability’ In News AnalysisJohn L. Allen Jr.Aug 12, 2018 EDITORPope Francis, left, greets Cardinal Angelo Sodano at the Vatican, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2017. (Credit: L'Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP.)Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano may not be guilty of a crime or a cover-up on the Church's abuse scandals, but his record has raised questions about whether the system is serious about "zero tolerance." News Analysis ROME - In the mounting conversation about accountability amid the Church’s sexual abuse scandals, one question that often doesn’t get as much attention as it should is what, exactly,...

You may recall our recent discussion about a new EPA policy which will require all scientific studies used in considering new regulations to make not only their findings but their methodology and underlying data available for public scrutiny and comparative analysis. What’s not to like, right? These are investigations being done by the government and funded by the taxpayer, so the information used to reach any conclusions should be freely available. Everyone’s a big fan of transparency when it comes to those sneaks in Washington so this should roll through smoothly. Not even close. It turns out that a previous...

In Florida, the Broward County Sheriff's office and Broward County school district are fighting to keep exterior surveillance video from the day of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School hidden from view. As journalists and citizens who've waged uphill battles against secrecy well know, government agencies too often invoke broad disclosure exemptions in the name of protecting public safety when they're really just trying to protect their own jobs. Feckless Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel and media-luvin' school Superintendent Robert Runcie are defendants in an open records lawsuit filed Tuesday by the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the...

The White House made good on plans to reopen its online petition site by the end of January, relaunching the platform minutes before midnight Wednesday. Many doubted the administration would stick to quick turnaround plans for the site, which was taken offline “for maintenance” in December as part of a vendor change projected to save $1.3 million annually. The petition platform — hosted at petitions.whitehouse.gov — relaunched under its original name, “We the People,” with all 17 Trump-era petitions that cleared a 100,000-signature threshold for an official response restored.

DNC Unity Reform Commission Member, TYT's Nomiki Konst (https://Twitter.com/NomikiKonst), gives her thoughts on the DNC's budget resources and transparency during the Unity Reform Commission meeting.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struck a deal with the State Department while serving in the Obama administration that allowed her to take ownership of records she did not want made public, according to recently released reports. Clinton and her then-deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin were permitted to remove electronic and physical records under a claim they were "personal" materials and "unclassified, non-record materials." Judicial Watch made the revelation after filing a FOIA request with the State Department and obtaining a record of the agreement. The newly released documents show the deal allowed Clinton and Abedin to remove...

Governor Cuomo? The gentlemen don’t have an appointment but said you’d want to see them...”Over a year ago I wrote about the discovery of a curious aspect of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s staffing situation. Nearly half (roughly 40%) of the people working directly for Cuomo were paid by other government departments rather than falling under the payroll umbrella of the executive branch. While not technically illegal in the view of most legal analysts at the time, it was yet another indicator of a general lack of transparency in the state capitol. But as it turned out, that practice continued...

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is a man who gets things done. Despite resistance from within his own agency and an environment lobby bent on stopping him, he’s doing his part to drain the swamp and return government to the people. He’s bringing what citizens demand of a federal agency: Transparency and reasoned, fact-based decision-making resting on sound statutory footing. Take the contentious issue of global warming. Pruitt called for a reasoned debate. But his critics mocked the suggestion, claiming it would be an outrage to place “fringe” views on an even platform with “established, peer-reviewed research.” But it is tyrants...

Ask Matt Labash, who says the GOP should have called its tax reform measure the "Robbing Peter to Pay Apple Act." Dear Matt, Republicans have called their tax bill “The Tax Cut and Jobs Act.” President Trump wanted to call it “The Cut, Cut, Cut Act” (And here we thought his specialty was branding.) What would you have named it? H.R. Block I’d be fine with calling it “The Republicans Pissing Down Your Leg While Telling You That You’re Bathing In A Warm Mineral Spring Act.” Or maybe “The Robbing Peter to Pay Apple Act.” (In this scenario, you,...

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is calling on the Justice Department to release transcripts of any intercepted communications he may have had with foreigners. Manafort, a longtime Republican political consultant, also called on the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate the leak of details of secret surveillance warrants obtained by U.S. investigators. “Mr. Manafort requests that the Department of Justice release any intercepts involving him and any non-Americans so interested parties can come to the same conclusion as the DOJ — there is nothing there,” Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement. On Monday, CNN reported that investigators...

US court records are not copyrighted, but the US court system operates a paywall called "PACER" that is supposed to recoup the costs of serving text files on the internet; charging $0.10/page for access to the public domain, and illegally profiting to the tune of $80,000,000/year. The response to PACER is RECAP, a browser plugin that captures all the pages anyone pays for in PACER and puts them in a free repository mirrored on the Internet Archvie that anyone can access for free. Among other things, RECAP revealed that the courts were failing in their duty to remove sensitive personal...

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday praised his son, Donald Trump Jr., after he released the “entire email chain” of the conversations in which he set up a meeting with a Russian attorney shortly after his father had won the Republican nomination. “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency,” Trump said in a brief statement, which White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders read to reporters during an off-camera briefing and was quoted by The Hill. Sanders acknowledged that, “the president is, I would say, frustrated with the process of the fact that this continues to be...

Washington (CNN)Attorney General Jeff Sessions will testify at a public hearing of the Senate intelligence committee Tuesday afternoon, the committee said in a statement.

WASHINGTON – Attorney General Jeff Sessions will testify Tuesday afternoon in public, rather than behind closed doors. The Senate Intelligence Committee announced Sessions will appear at 2:30 pm to talk about the Russia investigation.

A federal judge is demanding to see a copy of a government-wide foreign-aid-policy order President Barack Obama issued three years ago which administration lawyers have argued is protected by executive privilege. The Obama administration acknowledges that the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development the president signed in 2010 is unclassified, but officials have steadfastly refused to make any portion of it public, even after a watchdog group filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the document earlier this year. (The White House has released a fact sheet about the order.) On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle ordered...

An iconic photograph of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton using her BlackBerry while wearing sunglasses on a military plane in 2011 prompted a recordkeeping official in her office to inquire about whether Clinton had been assigned a State.gov email address, the State Department disclosed this week.Clarence Finney, who oversaw an office responsible for Freedom of Information Act searches, raised the question about an official account after seeing the photo in the media, according to testimony at a deposition held Wednesday and released Thursday. The image went viral on social media in 2012, prompting a "Texts from Hillary" meme."When Mrs. Clinton's...

'We should ... set up a stand-alone PC in the Secretary's office, connected to the internet (but not through our system) to enable her to check her emails from her desk' (Washington, DC) - Judicial Watch announced today that it recently received records from the Department of State disclosing plans by senior State Department officials to set up a "stand-alone PC" so that Clinton could check her emails in an office "across the hall" through a separate, non-State Department computer network system. Referencing the special Clinton computer system, Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, writes Clinton Chief of...

Politico reports that James O’Keefe has been sued for an undercover video sting he released last year: O’Keefe and his organization posted some of the videos online last October, purporting to show efforts by Democrats to provoke violence at Donald Trump’s campaign rallies and events. The recordings led two Democratic operatives, Robert Creamer and Scott Foval, to leave their posts even as they decried O’Keefe’s tactics. In the new civil lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington Thursday, Creamer, his Strategic Consulting Group and a related firm called Democracy Partners accuse O’Keefe and several colleagues of conspiring to violate...

Former President Barack Obama lied to the American people about the infamous prisoner swap that was part of the Iran deal in 2016, and released fugitives who were considered major national security threats, according to an investigative report by Politico. “Obama, the senior official and other administration representatives weren’t telling the whole story on Jan. 17, 2016, in their highly choreographed rollout of the prisoner swap and simultaneous implementation of the six-party nuclear deal,” Politico’s Josh Meyer reports. The seven men released on that day as a “humanitarian” gesture were deeply tied to Iran’s nuclear arms efforts, and one was connected with...