Free Republic

Are you already familiar with OpenTheBooks.com? It’s a nonpartisan private group dedicated to transparency in government spending. For the past six years, they have been requesting and publishing the spending records of all fifty states so taxpayers can be made aware of where their money is going. Well… make that 49 states. The lone holdout is California which has consistently failed to turn over the records. Their excuse? Apparently, the Golden State isn’t sure where all the money goes. (Free Beacon) California is the only state in the country that has refused to reveal public spending records to a...

Remarks by President Trump at Signing of Executive Orders on Transparency in Federal Guidance and Enforcement Issued on: October 9, 2019 Roosevelt Room 3:38 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you very much. IÂ’ll start by saying I just spoke with Boris Johnson, and we had a good talk about a number of subjects, and weÂ’ll maybe talk about it a little bit later. But we had an extended conversation and some pretty good ideas, I think. They want to see if we can do a couple of things, and theyÂ’ll be doing certain things for us. I want to...

After predicting that the closed-door testimony of former U.S. envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker before the House Intelligence Committee would "prove President Trump has committed high crimes" Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) has, so far, released only selected excerpts of this testimony. Republican members of the Committee are clamoring for the release of the full transcript. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) said "there's a reason why Adam Schiff released cherry-picked text messages and not the transcript of the Volker interview. It's because the actual interview directly undermined Democrats' impeachment effort." Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asserted that "When the American people get...

SALEM — Oregon’s first-ever public records advocate is resigning from her post Oct. 11. Ginger McCall, appointed by Gov. Kate Brown in early 2018 to boost transparency and openness in state and local government, said she was stepping down after what she called “meaningful pressure” from the governor’s office to represent its interests in her role on the state’s public records advisory council. Willamette Week first reported McCall’s resignation. McCall sent two resignation letters: one to the advisory council, and a second to Brown. In her letter to Brown, McCall wrote that she believed she and the governor’s office had...

Investigate journalist John Solomon of The Hill released another breaking report in his appearance on Hannity on Wednesday night. According to Solomon the Trump Administration is creating an “Office of Transparency” to expedite the release of DOJ documents that have been stalled by Deep State operatives. This comes after months of waiting for subpoenaed documents from the FBI and Director Christopher Wray who has done all he can to stall and protect Hillary Clinton and the Deep State cabal.

More than a year in the making, the new website embodies the very essence of what Judicial Watch is all about: Simply (yet, we hope at times somewhat sublimely) it provides compelling information about what JW has done… what it is now doing… and what – with the help of its supporters – it intends to do in the future to fight government corruption and help assure full transparency.

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order demanding the upfront disclosure by hospitals of the actual prices for common tests and procedures. Trump's order also requires that patients be told ahead of time what their out-of-pocket costs like deductibles and copays will be for many procedures. “This landmark initiative continues our work to put American patients first,” Trump said at the White House. “We are fundamentally changing the nature of the health care marketplace.”

In the last hours of the Obama administration’s time in office, staffers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed hundreds of speeches and testimonies dating back to 2004 from the agency’s website, according to a watchdog group. The transcripts contained “prepared remarks submitted to congressional committees, often on controversial topics like the standard of medical treatment for detainees, treatment of unaccompanied children, sanctuary cities, drug trafficking, and E-Verify,” according to the Sunlight Foundation’s Web Integrity Project. The group says they were removed between the early afternoon of January 18 and late evening of January 19 in 2017, mere hours before the...

Acting in the interests of transparency and justice, President Trump took exactly the right action Thursday night when he gave Attorney General William Barr new authority to disclose information dealing with what Barr has called “spying” on the Trump election campaign in 2016. The president issued a memorandum authorizing Barr to “declassify, downgrade, or direct the declassification or downgrading” of any information relevant to “intelligence activities” connected to the “2016 Presidential election.” President Trump’s action is long overdue and should be welcomed by everyone who advocates more government disclosure about its activities – including journalists, who are always seeking such...

Last night, President Trump gave Attorney General Bill Barr the authority to declassify information and documents related to the FBI's spying during the 2016 presidential election. He's asked for a number of government agencies to cooperate with Barr's inquiry, including the State Department, Treasury, Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, CIA and the Director of National Intelligence. "Today, at the request and recommendation of the Attorney General of the United States, President Donald J. Trump directed the intelligence community to quickly and fully cooperate with the Attorney GeneralÂ’s investigation into surveillance activities during the 2016 Presidential election," the White House released in...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that a senior FBI official admitted, in writing and under oath, that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President. The FBI also admitted nearly 49,000 Clinton server emails were reviewed as result of a search warrant for her material on the laptop of Anthony Weiner. E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, made the disclosure to Judicial Watch as part of court-ordered discovery into the Clinton email issue. U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State...

Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has finished his report on Russia’s inference in our 2016 presidential election, Democratic congressional leaders have done something remarkable. In a dramatic flip-flop from their embrace of secrecy during the Obama administration, they now say: “Release the full report.” I never thought I would hear those words cross the lips of the same Democrats who took the polar opposite position when I and other Republicans in Congress made quite reasonable and legitimate requests for information during the term of Democratic President Obama. Yet on Friday, when Mueller submitted his report to Attorney General William...

[Catholic Caucus] Seminary Board Blasts Cupich for Lack of Transparency Board Letter: 'While talk about transparency and accountability is a noble goal, here there was neither' CHICAGO (ChurchMilitant.com) - The advisory board of St. Joseph College Seminary is advocating to keep the undergraduate seminary open. In January, Cdl. Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, shocked Chicagoans by announcing he was closing the newly renovated St. Joseph College Seminary on the campus of Loyola University. Cupich cited the low enrollment numbers as the cause and said seminarians wishing to continue their studies could transfer to St. John Vianney College Seminary at the University of...

President Trump's new acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney isn't giving up his old job as White House budget director, meaning he can be forced to testify before Congress when Democrats retake the House of Representatives next month. White House chiefs of staff generally are off-limits to congressional subpoenas, but Mulvaney's decision to be both acting chief of staff and director of the Office of Management and Budget sets up potentially ugly fights over his testimony. "I think this is a huge mistake for Mulvaney and for the president because it creates a real possibility for separation of...

Plausible Deniability: Frustrated by the lack of progress on holding guilty parties involved in the dubious Obama-era “Spygate” scandal accountable, outgoing House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said there should be an “Office of Transparency” connected to the White House that is responsible for deciding which documents can be declassified and released to the public. “Our investigation is essentially over. We have everything that we need. What we’re lacking now is that we’re lacking the declassification by the president,” Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News of his panel’s look into the handling of the “Russia” inquiry by the Justice Department and...

For the first time since the 2018-midterm elections, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with President Trump at the White House Tuesday. Their meeting was originally supposed to be closed press, but that all changed when the White House press pool was invited into the Oval Office to broadcast their remarks. President Trump started the meeting by thanking Pelosi and Schumer for showing up and made his case for additional border security. "I am proud to shut down the government over border security," Trump said. "I will take the mantle." "They're pouring into our...

ANALYSIS ROME, September 18, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — Have the jocular images and low-key statements of US Bishops following their meeting with Pope Francis last week set back their attempts to address the grave situation in the Church, especially the handling of sexual abuse cases by bishops? The details that have been revealed of the bishops’ meeting with Francis last Thursday give no indication that they addressed the extent of the McCarrick coverup or the need for an investigation into the troubling allegations against the Pope contained in Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s testimony.  Given Viganò’s widely accepted character and credibility,...

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...