Monthly Archives: May 2013

05.19.13
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The Washington Times: AP CEO calls Justice Department’s records seizure unconstitutional

The president and chief executive  officer of The Associated Press on Sunday  called the government’s secret  seizure of two months of reporters’ phone  records “unconstitutional”  and said the news cooperative had not ruled out  legal action against the  Justice  Department.

Gary Pruitt, in his first television   interviews since it was revealed the Justice Department subpoenaed phone   records of AP reporters and editors, said the move already has had a  chilling  effect on journalism. Mr. Pruitt said the  seizure has made sources  less willing to talk to AP journalists and, in the  long term, could  limit Americans’ information from all news outlets.

Mr. Pruitt told CBS‘ “Face the  Nation” that the government has no business monitoring the AP’s  newsgathering activities.

“And  if they restrict that apparatus … the people of the United States  will  only know what the government wants them to know, and that’s not  what the  framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote the  First Amendment,” he said.

In a separate interview with the AP, Mr.  Pruitt said the news cooperative had not decided  its next move but had  not ruled out legal action against the government.

“It’s too early  to know if we’ll take legal action, but I can tell you we  are positively  displeased and we do feel that our constitutional rights have  been  violated,” he said.

“They’ve been secretive; they’ve been  overbroad and abusive — so much so  that taken together, they are  unconstitutional because they violate our First  Amendment rights,” he  added.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch  McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said the government needs to stop leaks by  whatever means necessary.

“This  is an investigation that needs to happen because national security   leaks, of course, can get our agents overseas killed,” he said.

Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican and a  member of the Judiciary Committee,  said the  government should focus on those who leak sensitive national security   matters and not on journalists who report on them. Mr.  Cornyn  said his committee should hold hearings on how the Justice  Department  obtained phone records from AP reporters and editors.

“What  confuses me is the focus on the press, who have a constitutional right  here, and we depend on the press to get to the bottom of so many issues  that  we, as individuals, cannot,” Mr. Cornyn  said.

Mr. Cornyn said the  Justice  Department’s actions were part of a pattern for President Obama’s  administration to quiet its critics.

“It’s a culture of cover-ups and intimidation that is giving the administration  so much trouble,” Mr. Cornyn said.

He  also renewed his call for Attorney General Eric  H. Holder Jr. to resign,  citing the contempt citation the House  of Representatives voted against  him last year for refusing to turn over  documents in a failed government  gun-smuggling sting.

White House senior adviser Dan  Pfeiffer said  the president “has complete faith in Attorney General Holder.” He also  insisted the White  House was not involved in the decision to seek AP  phone records.

“A cardinal rule is we don’t get involved in independent investigations — and  this is one of those,” Mr. Pfeiffer  said.

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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/19/ap-ceo-calls-justice-departments-records-seizure-u/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

 

05.18.13
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Dallas Voice: Judge says lesbian mom’s partner must go; Enforces ‘morality clause’

Page Price and Carolyn Compton have been together for almost three years, but a Collin County judge is forcing them apart.

Judge John Roach Jr., a Republican who presides over the 296th District Court, enforced the “morality clause” in Compton’s divorce papers on Tuesday, May 7. Under the clause, someone who has a “dating or intimate relationship” with the person or is not related “by blood or marriage” is not allowed after 9 p.m. when the children are present. Price was given 30 days to move out of the home because the children live with the couple.

Price posted about the judge’s ruling on Facebook last week, writing that the judge placed the clause in the divorce papers because he didn’t like Compton’s “lifestyle.”

“Our children are all happy and well adjusted. By his enforcement, being that we cannot marry in this state, I have been ordered to move out of my home,” Price wrote.

Price also mentions that Compton’s ex-husband rarely sees their two children and was once charged with stalking Compton. She said he also hired a private investigator in order to bring the case before the judge. Court records show the ex-husband, Joshua Compton, was charged with third-degree felony stalking in 2011 but pleaded to a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespassing.

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http://www.dallasvoice.com/judge-lesbian-moms-partner-10147997.html

05.18.13
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Reason.com: The IRS Abuse Scandal Keeps Growing; An audit of the agency’s behavior unearths disturbing new information.

Reading the highly critical report by the Internal Revenue Service’s auditor, you get the sense that rogue, lower-level agents ran amok, writing up watch lists, targeting conservative agencies, and stalling their applications for tax-exempt status.

At least IRS management has painted a picture of misguided underlings who acted “inappropriately,” finally offering a mea culpa a couple years after claims that Tea Party groups being hung up, even harassed, by tax agents began filtering in.

Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’ exempt organizations unit, apologized a week ago for front-line employees who inappropriately flagged for further review organizations with the descriptors, “tea party” or “patriot.”

“We had a shortcut in the process. It wasn’t appropriate.  We learned about it and we fixed it,” Lerner said, emphatically denying that the segregation of applications and the lengthy delays in processing them merely based on conservative-sounding names had absolutely nothing to do with partisan politics.

But a report released late Tuesday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the independent overseer of the IRS, points to lax management and at least ignorance of federal code governing tax-exemption review. And while TIGTA may not employ the term “targeted” in its scathing review, the auditor blasts the IRS for singling out conservative groups, asking them a host of unnecessary questions and, in many cases, grinding the application process to a halt.

More than anything, the IRS’ “inappropriate” measures threaten public confidence, the report notes.

“The mission of the IRS is to provide America’s taxpayers top quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and by applying the tax law with integrity and fairness to all.  According to IRS Policy Statement 1-1, IRS employees accomplish this mission by being impartial and handling tax matters in a manner that will promote public confidence,” the audit states.

“However, the criteria developed by the (IRS) Determinations Unit gives the appearance that the IRS is not impartial in conducting its mission.  The criteria focused narrowly on the names and policy positions of organizations instead of tax-exempt laws and Treasury Regulations.”

BOLO List

The audit depicts agents in 2010, earlier than IRS brass previously had stated, pulling out 501(c)(4) applications with “Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in the organizations name,” as well as “political-sounding names.” In May 2010, the Determinations Unit began developing a spreadsheet that would become known as the “Be On the Look Out” list, according to the audit. By August, the unit began distributing the first formal BOLO list.

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http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/18/the-irs-abuse-scandal-keeps-growing
05.17.13
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Reuters: White House fights and loses battle to withhold Benghazi records

President Barack Obama’s White House fought and lost a battle to avoid making public what it claimed were confidential records of internal deliberations over the attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya last September.

Obama administration officials portray their unsuccessful effort to avoid disclosing the records as the end result of a process of “accommodation” which the government’s executive branch routinely uses to respond to frequent requests and subpoenas by Congress for sensitive materials.

But some politicians and legal experts say the administration’s decision to not release the records sooner may have backfired, prolonging the controversy and deepening the determination of critics in Congress to keep the story alive.

“I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who accused the administration of trying to “stonewall Congress at every turn.”

The administration at first refused to show copies of the Benghazi records, including emails and drafts of what proved to be inaccurate public “talking points” about the attack, to anyone outside the executive branch.

In the face of escalating congressional demands for the materials, the administration then offered closed-door briefings on these, officials said.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/17/us-usa-benghazi-legal-idUSBRE94G0VZ20130517

05.16.13
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The Daily Beast: Is Obama Worse For Press Freedom Than Nixon?

Is Obama Worse Than Nixon?

President Barack H. Obama’s outrageous seizure of the Associated Press’s phone records, allegedly to discover sources of leaks, should surprise no one. Obama has relentlessly pursued leakers ever since he became president. He is fast becoming the worst national security press president ever, and it may not get any better.

It is believed that Obama’s Justice Department sought AP’s records to find the source of a leak that informed an AP story about a failed terrorist attack. What makes this action particularly egregious is that Justice didn’t tell AP what it was doing until two months after it obtained the records. This not only violates Justice Department guidelines for subpoenas of this sort, but also common sense, decency, and the First Amendment.

 

Under the guidelines, subpoenas concerning the press cannot be issued without the express approval of the Attorney General. Further, before a subpoena is issued, the government is honor bound to negotiate with the party to which it is directed.

 

While Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. may have approved the subpoena, he apparently never told AP about it. In the meantime, the Justice Department for two months has had all the details of AP’s newsgathering. AP could bring a lawsuit to declare its First Amendment rights have been violated and seek a return of its records. Gary Pruitt, President of AP, has already made a demand for them.

 

While this legal action by AP is possible, the government has picked the one federal jurisdiction most favorable to it for obtaining the source of leaks, namely, the federal court in the District of Columbia. Its subpoenas were directed to telephone companies located in D.C.

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The Liberty Report Take:  While Neocons, GOP Establishment, and general Conservative folks would all probably say Obama is the worst President not just for Freedom but overall, he probably has a ways to go before reaching the level of his predecessor W. or Richard Nixon.  After all, Nixon was the man who enhanced a Big Brother Government, got us off the gold standard, and started the unconstitutional war on drugs.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/14/is-obama-worse-for-press-freedom-than-nixon.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29

 

05.16.13
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NY Times: Early E-Mails on Benghazi Show Internal Divisions

E-mails released by the White House on Wednesday revealed a fierce internal jostling over the government’s official talking points in the aftermath of last September’s attack in Benghazi, Libya, not only between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, but at the highest levels of the C.I.A.

The 100 pages of e-mails showed a disagreement between David H. Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., and his deputy, Michael J. Morell, over how much to disclose in the talking points, which were used by Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances days after the attack.

Mr. Morell, administration officials said, deleted a reference in the draft version of the talking points to C.I.A. warnings of extremist threats in Libya, which State Department officials objected to because they feared it would reflect badly on them.

Mr. Morell, officials said, acted on his own and not in response to pressure from the State Department. But when the final draft of the talking points was sent to Mr. Petraeus, he dismissed them, saying “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this,” adding that the heavily scrubbed account would not satisfy the House Democrat who had requested it.

“This is certainly not what Vice Chairman Ruppersberger was hoping to get,” Mr. Petraeus wrote, referring to Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which had asked Mr. Petraeus for talking points to use with reporters in discussing the attack on Benghazi.

The White House released the e-mails to reporters after Republicans seized on snippets of the correspondence that became public on Friday to suggest that President Obama’s national security staff had been complicit in trying to alter the talking points for political reasons.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/us/politics/e-mails-show-jostling-over-benghazi-talking-points.html?_r=0

05.16.13
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CNN: ‘Angry’ Obama announces IRS leader’s ouster after conservatives targeted

President Barack Obama vowed Wednesday to hold accountable those at the Internal Revenue Service involved in the targeting of conservative groups applying for federal tax-exempt status, beginning with the resignation of the agency’s acting commissioner who was aware of the practice.

In a brief statement delivered to reporters in the East Room of the White House, the president announced that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had requested — and accepted — the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller.

The president said the “misconduct” detailed in the IRS Inspector General’s report released Tuesday over the singling out of conservative groups is “inexcusable

“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” Obama said.

“It should not matter what political stripe you’re from. The fact of the matter is, the IRS has to operate with absolute integrity.”

Miller was made aware of the agency’s targeting of conservative groups in May 2012, according to the IRS, while serving as deputy IRS commissioner. He did not tell Congress about it when he testified before an oversight committee in July despite being questioned on the issue. Miller was named acting IRS commissioner in November.

Obama pledged to work “hand in hand” with Congress as it investigates, and he vowed new safeguards will be put in place at the IRS so that “this doesn’t happen again.”

In an internal message to IRS employees obtained by CNN, Miller said he would be stepping down as commissioner in early June.

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http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/15/politics/irs-conservative-targeting/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

05.15.13
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Reason.com: On Benghazi, “What Difference, At This Point, Does It Make?” A lot.

animated

It was one of Hillary Clinton’s most infamous utterances during her tenure as secretary of state: “What difference, at this point, does it make?” The comment came at a Senate committee hearing on the attack in Benghazi, and it encapsulated the attitude that Barack Obama’s self-described “most transparent administration in history” has taken to actual transparency.

At issue was who knew what and when about the nature of the Benghazi incident. Was it a preplanned attack by terrorists or a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video on YouTube? The question didn’t seem to matter to Clinton, who pushed the YouTube narrative, leading the way in placing blame for the violence on an American’s exercise of free speech. A little later in the same answer, she offered these thoughts about accountablity: “it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime.”

When the attack was fresh, the story of a mob killing on a whim was embraced both by officials and their boosters in the media. (“It’s all about the video,” Chris Matthews told a Romney supporter last October. “Read a newspaper.”) Yet just three days after the assault, a report in The Independent suggested senior officials were becoming “increasingly convinced” the assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi had been “planned.” Last week’s hearingshelped drive home the fact that the YouTube video had nothing to do with the violence. A New York Timeseditorial published just last week managed to miss the point, denouncing the“Republican obsession” over Benghazi while neglecting to mention the deliberately misleading statements government officials had made about the nature of the attack.

The Sunday after the Benghazi assault, UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on the political talk-show circuit to push the narrative of a spontaneous protest. It’s now been revealed that the talking points she relied on had been edited several times to excise all reference to any terrorist connection. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney deflected concern about that by pointing out that Republicans knew about the process. But that’s not relevant. The issue is that the government decided to mislead the American people. Whether the revisions came from the CIA or the State Department, they sought to conceal facts from the public. And government officials didn’t lean on any supposed national security concern for that deception, merely the understanding that what the American people were informed of is what they ought to know.

This “move along, nothing to see” attitude is hardly new to the Obama administration. But this president and his apologists have wrapped themselves in “the truth” in a way few of his predecessors have, even while acting in a relentlessly untransparent manner. Obama promised his would be “the most transparent administration in history,” yet his administration has brought up more cases against leakers (six) than all his predecessors combined, a fact that came up in reporting on the government seizing two months’ worth of phone records from the Associated Press.

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