Free Republic

The White House is refusing to confirm whether President Barack Obama followed up on his pledge to take a five percent pay cut due to sequestration last year. Obama promised last April to take a 5 percent pay cut in “solidarity” with federal employees who were furloughed as a result of the automatic budget cuts, known as the sequester. The cut was meant to equate to the level of spending cuts imposed on nondefense federal agencies.

A Bay Area federal judge says the Obama administration can keep secret a memo spelling out the legal rationale for a 2011 drone attack in Yemen that killed a U.S. citizen and alleged terrorist mastermind. The ruling dismissed a suit by the First Amendment Coalition, an open-government advocacy group in San Rafael. The organization sued after a September 2011 drone strike in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Muslim cleric whom authorities suspected of organizing an attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009. Another U.S. citizen was also killed in the drone attack, and Awlaki's U.S.-born, 16-year-old...

It's Sunshine Week, so perhaps some enterprising White House reporter will ask press secretary Jay Carney why President Obama rewrote the Freedom of Information Act without telling the rest of America. The rewrite came in an April 15, 2009, memo from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig instructing the executive branch to let White House officials review any documents sought by FOIA requestors that involved "White House equities." That phrase is nowhere to be found in the FOIA, yet the Obama White House effectively amended the law to create a new exception to justify keeping public documents locked away from the...

Republicans clashed with the Internal Revenue Service's new commissioner Wednesday in a Capitol Hill hearing that featured the unveiling a document indicating that the agency planned as early as 2012 to change its rules in a way that justified singling out tea party groups for special scrutiny. The document, an email from Treasury Department tax policy attorney Ruth Madrigal to a group of IRS officials including the disgraced Lois Lerner. 'Don’t know who in your organizations is keeping tabs on c4s,' Madrigal wrote, quoting an election law blog and referring to the 501(c)(4) tax-exempt groups that were the subject of...

The Obama administration’s testy relationship with the press is nothing new for Washington, but it’s now extended to Colorado and has touched off a firestorm after Interior Department officials booted local reporters from a public meeting earlier this week. Journalists with Colorado's Craig Daily Press and at least two other media outlets were barred from a Tuesday question-and-answer session with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, despite the fact that members of the public were allowed to attend. “What happened would be in complete alignment with the administration’s policies. We were promised the most transparent administration ever and instead we’ve gotten the...

New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson says that President Obama's White House is the "most secretive White House" that she's covered during her long tenure as a political journalist. "I would say it is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering, and that includes — I spent 22 years of my career in Washington and covered presidents from President Reagan on up through now, and I was Washington bureau chief of the Times during George W. Bush's first term," Abramson told Al Jazeera America in an interview that will air on Sunday. "I...

The journalist Jonathan Cohn, an ardent supporter of Obamacare, recently wrote in The New Republic that problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act should be "an opportunity to have a serious conversation about the law's tradeoffs — the one that should have happened a while ago." Cohn is right that there was no serious conversation about those tradeoffs back when Congress was considering the law's passage in 2009 and 2010. But why was that? It was because President Obama and his Democratic allies could not speak seriously — and honestly — about those tradeoffs and still pass their...

Editors of The Associated Press condemned the White House’s refusal to give photojournalists real access to President Obama, who prefers to circulate press release-style pictures taken by his own paid photographers.These official photographs are little more than propaganda, according to AP director of photography Santiago Lyon.The AP has only been permitted to photograph the president in the Oval Office on two occasions. Both were during his first term. All other pictures of Obama in his office were taken by White House photographers and distributed to the press.Previous administrations were less strict about photos, undermining Obama’s frequent claim that he strives...

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material. In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then...

President Obama and his successors in the Oval Office are not obligated to make public the names of individuals visiting the White House, according to a decision of the federal Circuit Court for the District of Columbia made public Friday. The case was brought by Judicial Watch, the government watchdog nonprofit that has been fighting a long legal battle seeking to force release of the White House visitor logs as public records under the Freedom of Information Act. But in a decision that is drawing intense criticism from across the ideological spectrum, the circuit court said the president has a...

Daryll Issa's people put this together. Vid at link

Richard Windsor may be the most famous Environmental Protection Agency employee. Oddly, he does not exist. “Windsor” is the e-mail alias that Lisa Jackson, former head of the EPA and now an environmental adviser to Apple, used to correspond with environmental activists and senior Obama-administration officials, among others. Windsor, we have learned, was also an employee of significant achievement. Documents released by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that, for three years, the EPA certified Windsor as a “scholar of ethical behavior.” The agency also documented the nonexistent Windsor’s completion of training courses in...

Tuesday afternoon a bombshell was dropped into the already explosive IRS scandal when it was reported that Lois Lerner, a top IRS official in the non-profit division that paralyzed Tea Party groups with ongoing harassment, would invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions during Congressional testimony schedule before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. The LA Times reports that Lerner will refuse to answer any questions about what she knows about the targeting of conservative groups. She will also refuse to explain why she is refusing to answer questions. Lerner has retained defense attorney William W. Taylor 3rd,...

The late columnist William Safire once said that a good clue that someone in Washington was engaged in “an artful dodge,” i.e., a cover-up, was that they used the phrase “mistakes were made.” Safire defined it as a “passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.” The phrase became infamous when both Richard Nixon and Ron Ziegler, his press secretary, deployed it to explain away Watergate without explaining who did what and when or whether any ill motive was involved. AdvertisementAstonishingly, the Internal Revenue Service resurrected the Nixonian expression within hours of its clumsy revelation...

The White House held an off-the-record briefing with reporters on Friday afternoon to discuss recent revelations about the Benghazi investigation, sources familiar with the meeting tell POLITICO.

LOS ANGELES — A California law that created an agency to oversee national health care reforms granted it broad authority to conceal spending on the contractors that will perform most of its functions, potentially shielding the public from seeing how hundreds of millions of dollars are spent. The degree of secrecy afforded Covered California appears unique among states attempting to establish their own health insurance exchanges under President Barack Obama's signature health law. An Associated Press review of the 16 other states that have opted for state-run marketplaces shows the California agency was given powers that are the most restrictive...

It was a little much when President Barack Obama said that he was "offended" by the suggestion that his administration would try to deceive the public about what happened in Benghazi. What has this man not deceived the public about? Remember his pledge to cut the deficit in half in his first term in office? This was followed by the first trillion dollar deficit ever, under any President of the United States -- followed by trillion dollar deficits in every year of the Obama administration. Remember his pledge to have a "transparent" government that would post its legislative proposals on...

Robert Gibbs says on "Fox News Sunday" that Obama has been transparent, since he took a question one time (August 19, 2012).

Add the National Republican Congressional Committee to the list of conservative groups capitalizing on former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina’s secret meetings with lobbyists at a Caribou Coffee near the White House. President Obama has repeatedly promised that his would be “the most transparent administration in history,” but the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a report yesterday showing that high-ranking Obama staffers, including Messina, used private email addresses to bypass these rules and meet with industry lobbyists. “I will roll Pelosi to get the 4 billion,” Messina wrote Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America lobbyist Jeffrey...

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner gets very angry at the suggestion that he conduct the bank bailouts in a transparent manner, according to Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general for the Treasury Department. “Neil, I have been the most f–king transparent secretary of the Treasury in this country’s entire f–king history!” Geithner shouted at Barofsky in 2009, the former inspector general writes in his new book Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. Geithner’s anger stemmed from Barofsky saying, “Mr. Secretary,