HHS:Hey,someofoure-mailsCongresswants

HHS: Hey, some of our e-mails Congress wants are missing too

posted at 10:41 am on August 8, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

It’s an epidemic! Or so it seems in the most transparent administration ever, anyway. Congress has been probing the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare, to find out exactly how the Department of Health and Human Services could have botched the job with three and a half years and nearly a billion dollars to spend. Once again, key records that are required to be retained have been deleted before investigators could see them:

A top U.S. healthcare official involved in the botched rollout of the website HealthCare.gov may have deleted some emails that were later sought by Republican congressional investigators, administration officials said on Thursday.

The emails were from a public email account maintained by Marilyn Tavenner, who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agency chiefly responsible for implementing President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law.

What excuse did the Obama administration give? The same excuse as with the IRS:

The letter made no reference to any evidence that Tavenner intentionally hid or destroyed the emails. An administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, attributed the potential loss to “sloppy record keeping”.

Tavenner is no low-level employee from an office in Cincinnati. She ran the agency responsible for the creation of Healthcare.gov and for the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars in its failure. Despite the failure of Healthcare.gov and the disaster of the rollout of the Obama administration’s central policy project, Tavenner still inexplicably remains head of CMS — and perhaps her “sloppy record keeping” might be one reason why.

This isn’t merely inconvenient. It’s a violation of federal records retention law. As a high-ranking politically-appointed official, it’s even more incumbent on Tavenner to abide by these statutes and provide a clear record of her professional communications. Congress has the authority to oversee those operations, and the e-mail record is in the final analysis owned by taxpayers, not Tavenner. She had no business deleting e-mails relating to her job, and Tavenner cannot have been ignorant of those requirements at her level. Deletion of e-mails relating to the failures of ObamaCare has to be presumed to have been deceptive.

Katie Pavlich reports on the response from House Oversight chair Darrell Issa:

“Today’s news that a senior HHS executive destroyed emails relevant to a congressional investigation means that the Obama Administration has lost or destroyed emails for more than 20 witnesses, and in each case, the loss wasn’t disclosed to the National Archives or Congress for months or years, in violation of federal law,” Issa said in response. “It defies logic that so many senior Administration officials were found to have ignored federal record keeping requirements only after Congress asked to see their emails. Just this week, my staff followed up with HHS, who has failed to comply with a subpoena from ten months ago. Even at that point, the administration did not inform us that there was a problem with Ms. Tavenner’s email history. Yet again, we discover that this Administration will not be forthright with the American people unless cornered.”

What does this tell us? It tells us that Congress needs to keep looking into these issues. Bureaucrats don’t keep losing records unless they have a reason to make sure those records have to be kept out of sight.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: cms, Darrell Issa, Department of Health and Human Services, House Oversight Committee, Marilyn Tavenner, ObamaCare

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

IRS:Hey,maybewedohaveoure-mail

IRS: Hey, maybe we do have our e-mail backups

posted at 8:01 am on July 22, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Does the IRS actually have their backups for e-mail from the period when Lois Lerner and her group targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny on tax-exempt applications? The agency claimed a month ago that it overwrote the tapes every six months, in one of the most notorious (and unsuccessful) Friday afternoon document dumps ever. New testimony from one of the IRS’ top lawyers released last night by the House Oversight Committee casts doubt on that story (via Instapundit):

The IRS might not have lost the backups of former agency administrator Lois Lerner’s emails after all, according to a top IRS official.

In testimony released Monday, Thomas Kane, the IRS’s deputy associate chief counsel, told House Oversight investigators last week that the agency was examining whether all the back-up tapes which held the emails have been recycled.

The IRS told lawmakers in June that the tapes had been recycled, one of the reasons that an untold number of Lerner’s emails were missing. Since then, the IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, has repeatedly stood by those statements in congressional testimony.

But Kane, the top IRS official in charge of producing documents for Congress, said on Thursday that: “I don’t know if there is a backup tape with information on it or there isn’t. I know that there’s an issue out there about it.” …

In the transcript released by Issa, Kane also insists that the IRS believed that the tapes had been recycled when it told Congress more than a month ago that it couldn’t recover all of Lerner’s emails. He doesn’t say why that might not be the case anymore.

At some point, this begins to look like trolling. We have them! We don’t have them! We may have them, but … er … we don’t know!

This is the IRS — the one agency that intimidates every American into keeping every receipt they have for a rolling seven years. They’ve had more than a year to locate and secure these communication records, and they just spent the last month taking a very public beating over the loss of their backups and the mysterious epidemic of hard-drive failures. After all of that, the IRS still hasn’t figured out whether they have the data or not?

This is one of the best arguments for the flat-tax system ever.

Speaking of Koskinen, ranking Oversight member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) believes the IRS Commissioner to be the sympathetic character in this little drama of incompetence and corruption. Despite the fact that Oversight can’t get a straight answer that sticks out of the IRS and hard drives are failing at a high rate among Lerner associates, Cummings wants the committee to stop picking on Mr. No Apologies:

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., sent a letter Monday to ChairmanDarrell Issa, R-Calif., objecting to a decision to call Commissioner John Koskinen to testify at a hearing on Wednesday. It would be the third time Koskinen appeared before the panel in the past month, Cummings noted.

“Requiring Commissioner Koskinen to testify again this week not only takes him away from the day-to-day duties of operating an agency with 90,000 employees, but it also diverts our Committee from conducting responsible oversight on many key areas that traditionally have been part of our jurisdiction,” Cummings said in the letter. …

An Issa spokesman said Cummings has wanted to end the probe into the IRS targeting for a year, despite evidence suggesting wrongdoing by the agency.

”Despite efforts by the Ranking Member to obstruct fact-based oversight, Commissioner Koskinen actually informed the subcommittee that he would be available to testify on this date back on July 3,” the spokesman said. “On July 9, he even appeared in front of another Oversight subcommittee despite the fact that the Commissioner – and not the Committee – had asked if he could testify.”

Koskinen’s earlier testimony has been at least partially rebutted, and it appears that either Koskinen didn’t tell the truth or is ignorant about what is going on in his own organization — despite the high priority Congress has placed on this inquiry. That is certainly worth another trip to Capitol Hill for Koskinen, as well as providing answers on basic questions such as these on the hard-drive-failure epidemic sweeping the IRS. Cummings’ attempt to turn Koskinen into a victim is just the latest joke in the Democratic pratfall of attempted obstruction in this investigation.

Wonder when the first GOP ad hitting Democrats for rushing to defend the IRS will hit the airwaves? Or has it already?

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: backups, corruption, Darrell Issa, e-mails, Elijah Cummings, House Oversight Committee, IRS, John Koskinen, scandal

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

HildaSolis,Obama’sformerlaborsecretary,mightbe

Hilda Solis, Obama’s former labor secretary, might be in deep trouble

posted at 4:01 pm on July 18, 2014 by Noah Rothman

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

When Hilda Solis, President Barack Obama’s first Secretary of Labor, resigned in early 2013 before the president had taken the oath of office for his second term, it came as a shock.

Then, in February of the following year, allegations surfaced that Solis had attempted to hide the fact that she had provided people close to the leader of the International Union of Operating Engineers with free private jet travel. It is a crime to not disclose what were considered in-kind contributions – disclosures which Solis never made.

Hews Media Group-Community News has obtained a lawsuit filed in the California Central US District Court claiming that former US Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, a current candidate for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, was provided thousands of dollars’ worth of free private jet travel without declaring the trips on the federal government required forms, paid for by the powerful International Union of Operating Engineers based in Pasadena during the same period she was undergoing confirmation hearings to become part of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet.
…
Sources close to the case tell HMG-CN that Solis was given transportation on IUOE Local 12′s Cessna Citation XL Jet and that Solis failed to report the in-kind gift to the Federal Election Commission as required under law.

Ed Morrissey noted at the time that the investigation into Solis’ conduct resulted from her decision to run for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, a race she won on June 3. Solis is expected to take office in December, but a few new questions about her past conduct have come up in recent days which may hinder her future political aspirations.

The L.A. Times reported:

Rep. Darrell Issa released a recording Wednesday that his office said supported allegations of illegal fundraising activity by Los Angeles County Supervisor-elect Hilda Solis when she served as U.S. Secretary of Labor.

Issa (R-Vista), whose House Oversight and Government Reform Committee obtained the audio as part of an ongoing probe of political activities by Obama administration employees, played the recording during a hearing in Washington.

That recording is the following tape of Solis appearing to solicit a colleague to help organize an Obama campaign fundraiser. Some have suggested that this represents a potential violation of the Hatch Act.

“Hi — this is Hilda Solis calling, um, just calling you off the record here,” she said. “Wanted to ask you if you could, um, help us get folks organized to come to a fundraiser that we’re doing for Organizing for America for Obama campaign on Friday at La Fonda at 6 p.m.”

White House Press Sec. Josh Earnest confirmed on Wednesday that the tape was released as part of an “ongoing law enforcement investigation.”

The Washington Examiner’s Susan Crabtree suggested that Solis’ position in the administration exempts her from having to answer for Hatch Act violations.

A complaint sent to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that investigates allegations of administrative violations of fundraising rules by federal officials, triggered an inquiry. It alleged that Solis left a voicemail message on a subordinate employee’s government-issued Blackberry in which she asked the employee to contribute toward and assist with organizing others to attend a fundraiser for Obama’s re-election campaign.

The Hatch Act prohibits employees in the executive branch of the federal government, except the president, vice president and other high-level officials, from engaging in partisan political activity, and specifically bars employees below the policy-making level in the executive branch from engaging in “any active part” in political campaigns.

While Solis would be exempt from the Act, her subordinates most likely would not be.

Cabinet members are, however, prohibited from participating in certain campaign activities including using their positions to raise money for candidates. “They may not solicit campaign contributions,” the Center for Public Integrity’s Michael Beckel wrote in 2012, “but that doesn’t prohibit them from appearing at political fundraisers.”

Helping to organize a fundraiser, however, may fall into a bit of a grey area. Regardless of the outcome of this investigation, the LA County Board of Supervisors can’t be thrilled about the baggage their newest colleague will bring to the office.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Barack Obama, Darrell Issa, Hatch Act, Hilda Solis

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

WHdefiesOversightsubpoenatopoliticaldirector

WH defies Oversight subpoena to political director

posted at 9:21 am on July 16, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Peter Allen once sang, “Everything old is new again,” and that’s never more true than in Washington. Congress has taken an interest in White House political activities and demands testimony from the president’s political director to see whether actions in the West Wing cross the Hatch Act line, and the White House claims executive privilege. Is the witness Harriet Miers, or David Simas? Welcome to DC déja vu:

The White House said Tuesday night that it would refuse to allow its director of political strategy to testify Wednesday before a Republican-led House committee investigating whether the administration had illegally conducted political activity in the West Wing.

In a letter to Representative Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the president’s top lawyer said that as a member of the executive branch the political director, David Simas, had immunity from being compelled to testify before Congress.

Mr. Issa’s committee subpoenaed Mr. Simas last week, contending that the White House should not have opened the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach this year. Mr. Issa told the White House in May that “the American people have a right to know if their tax dollars are being spent to support congressional campaigns during the 2014 midterm elections in violation of federal law.”

The White House response called this a fishing expedition, challenging Issa to come up with any evidence of the law being broken at all. Issa, undaunted, plans to hold the hearings anyway, and rebutted the executive privilege claim with the precedent set by Democrats during the Bush administration:

In a statement issued Tuesday night, Issa said he would proceed with the hearing to find out whether “President Obama actually intends to assert executive privilege.”

The California Republican said a federal court had “already rejected” the notion senior presidential advisers were exempt from congressional subpoena. He pointed to a 2008 ruling in which a federal court ruled that Bush advisers Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton must obey congressional subpoenas.

“Flouting a federal judge’s opinion about our system of checks and balances is yet another attack on our Nation’s Constitution by this President,” Issa said.

“Assertions that this Administration’s taxpayer-funded political efforts should be above Congressional oversight are absurd,” he added.

Issa is investigating the relaunch of the White House Office of Political Strategy and Outreach earlier this year. The Republican lawmaker says he’s concerned the White House has used staffers for partisan campaign activities, which are prohibited under the Hatch Act.

Let’s just say that the executive privilege claim is a little murkier than it normally would be, thanks to the Miers precedent. Democrats insisted that the demands for resignations from several US Attorneys — who are presidential appointees, serving at the pleasure of the President — was a scandal, and began Congressional investigations into the terminations. The Bush administration’s offer of private, off-the-record interviews with both Miers and Josh Bolten was rejected by Nancy Pelosi, and the House voted both in contempt for refusing to appear — even though there was nothing illegal about asking for resignations from political appointees and both officials were in the circle of advisers normally covered by a privilege claim. As noted, a federal judge sided with Congress, although the Supreme Court never weighed in on the question. And in the end, nothing came of the so-called scandal.

Pelosi’s actions established a carte blanche for this kind of aggressive demand, and it’s doubtful that then-Senator Obama had much objection to it. Issa may or may not be conducting a fishing expedition, but Obama and his fellow Democrats have certainly fished out a petard. This investigation into the political activities of the current administration probably won’t produce anything memorable either, except the hypocrisy of hiding behind claims of executive privilege and a lack of evidence of any wrongdoing. That wasn’t the Democratic standard in 2007-8.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Darrell Issa, David Simas, executive privilege, Harriet Miers, House Oversight Committee, White House

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

“Recycled”harddriveattheFECtoo?

“Recycled” hard drive at the FEC too?

posted at 8:41 am on July 15, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

The lesson of Watergate has not gone unheeded in the federal bureaucracy even more than forty years later. At the time, many wondered why Richard Nixon didn’t burn the tapes as investigators circled the White House. These days, the trick is to burn the e-mails, and it’s not just happening at the IRS. A probe into Hatch Act violations at the Federal Election Commission ran aground when the electronic communications of the suspect — a former colleague of Lois Lerner — had her computer hard drive “recycled.”

Sound familiar?

The Federal Election Commission recycled the computer hard drive of April Sands — a former co-worker of Lois Lerner’s — hindering an investigation into Sands’ partisan political activities, according to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Sands resigned from the Federal Election Commission in April after she admitted to violating the Hatch Act, which bars executive branch employees from engaging in partisan political activities on federal time and at federal facilities.

The twist is that Sands also worked under Lois Lerner when the ex-IRS agent — who is currently embroiled in a scandal over the targeting of conservative political groups — worked at the FEC’s enforcement division.

The FEC has a far-reaching mandate into the operations of elections, which means that partisanship in that agency is particularly corrosive. The Hatch Act requires strict neutrality of all federal employees while on duty, and one would expect that to be particularly observed in the FEC. Instead, Sands tweeted partisan messages from her office in 2012; sent out fundraising pleas for Obama’s re-election campaign, called Republicans her “enemy,” and said they should shut up and “stand down.”

When the Inspector General came knocking, however, the evidence had vanished. The FEC “recycled” her hard drive, which meant that criminal charges could not be pursued. How exactly could this have happened? Sands was under suspicion of a crime under a statute which would be updated later that year, in a bill signed by Barack Obama himself. Shouldn’t the FEC have taken steps to secure evidence rather than destroy it?

House Oversight chair Darrell Issa also notes in his letter to FEC chair Lee Goodman that the destruction of evidence may have impacted his committee’s probe into the IRS, noting Lerner’s penchant for keeping in touch with former staffers such as Sands at the FEC, where Lerner worked before moving to the IRS. Given the political nature of Lerner’s work and Sands’ flagrant flaunting of the Hatch Act, there may at least have been the possibility of some coordination between Lerner and Sands, which thanks to the epidemic of hard-drive destruction in the Obama administration will now be lost.

Issa now wants Goodman to produce all of the data surrounding the destruction of evidence at the FEC, and wants it by July 28th. How many more hard drives will get “recycled” at the FEC between then and now? The sky’s the limit in the Obama administration.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: corruption, Darrell Issa, Federal Election Commission, hard drive, IRS

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Lois Lerner’s attorney backtracks: Okay, maybe she printed out ‘some’ emails

LoisLerner’sattorneybacktracks:Okay,maybesheprinted

IRScancelede-mailback-upservice–weeksafter

IRS canceled e-mail back-up service – weeks after Lerner hard drive crash

posted at 9:21 am on June 23, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

The coincidences just keep on a-rolling in the IRS targeting scandal. It turns out that the IRS didn’t just pay some low-level schlep to recycle backup server tapes on a six-month basis to maintain their e-mail records. They paid an outside firm, Sonasoft, to archive that data for long-term retrieval — or at least they did. That contract got canceled just weeks after Lois Lerner’s hard-drive failure, the Daily Caller learned:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

Oddly, this doesn’t appear to have come up in testimony from officials at the IRS. John Koskinen’s opening statement at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing of how hard the IRS worked to retrieve that data didn’t include any effort to restore a Sonasoft backup from the servers, or mention any outside contractor at all. The existence of this contract appears to have been a better-kept secret than NSA snooping through Internet service providers.

Perhaps the contractor’s relationship with the IRS and Koskinen’s slow fan-dance of transparency will come up in this week’s hearings on the IRS scandal. Koskinen has House Oversight Committee appearances scheduled for tonight and tomorrow, and Darrell Issa gave the IRS Commissioner more than 50 questions to answer. And in the #5 position, Issa wants specifics about outside contractors:

5. Please identify all vendors and outside contractors used by the IRS for the following purposes:

q. To develop, service, or maintain the IRS’s e-mail systems.

r. To develop, service, or maintain the IRS’s e-mail exchange servers.

s. To recycle or destroy IRS hard drives.

t. To provide mobile phone and data services.

The answers to these might end up forcing Koskinen to apologize — but don’t bet on it.

By the way, the White House insists that no special prosecutor is necessary for the IRS probe:

The White House rejected calls on Friday for a special prosecutor to look into lost IRS emails and the inappropriate targeting of conservative groups, saying Republican investigations have failed to find a smoking gun.

Both the Internal Revenue Service and the administration have already demonstrated “extensive cooperation” with Republicans in Congress, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said, adding there have been 750,000 pages of documents provided, as well as 64,000 e-mails from then-IRS division chief Lois Lerner.

“Our willingness to cooperate with this investigation is evident from the numbers,” Earnest said, charging that a “a large number of claims and conspiracy theories that have been floated about this process by Republicans just have not panned out, frankly.”

Earnest also said that there’s “zero evidence” to show malfeasance, which is a handy way of saying that all of the hard drives at the IRS have been destroyed. I wonder if that’s also true at Sonasoft.

Update: J.E. Dyer has lots more about Sonasoft at Liberty Unyielding:

Whatever Sonasoft’s obligations after the contract was terminated, it’s clear that the company had a relevant contractual obligation to the IRS at the time of the supposed email loss.  There seems to be no question that Sonasoft’s knowledge of the email “catastrophe” needs to be investigated.

But there’s more to this drama – and it’s (go figure) political.  Sonasoft is a small company, founded and run in Silicon Valley by a Mr. Nand (Andy) Khanna.  It isn’t clear whether Andy Khanna is any relation to Rohit (Ro) Khanna, a Pennsylvania-born attorney who served as an Obama appointee in the U.S. Department of Commerce, and is now a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives in the 17th district of California (in Silicon Valley).  But what is clear is that the two other members of Sonasoft’s board of directors – the members other than Andy Khanna – are both working hard to get Ro Khanna elected.

Here are the players.  On the Sonasoft board of directors, Dr. Romesh K. Japra, M.D., is the chairman of the board.  The board director is Mr. Romi Randhawa, whose day job is president and CEO of HPM Networks, another Silicon Valley IT company.

And then there’s Ro Khanna.  Khanna has connections to Obama that go way back, to Obama’s first run for the Illinois state senate, when Khanna was at the University of Chicago as an undergrad.   Will Burns, a Chicago Democratic political operative, recruited Khanna to walk precincts with Obama during the campaign, and Khanna was reportedly star-struck …

Be sure to read the rest, as it’s too lengthy and complicated to excerpt.

• Share on Facebook 1
• 1 SHARES

Tags: Darrell Issa, e-mails, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, IRS scandal, John Koskinen, Lois Lerner, Sonasoft

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

Issa subpoenas IRS commissioner over missing Lerner e-mails

IssasubpoenasIRScommissionerovermissingLernere-mails

Uh oh: Looks like the IRS violated federal tax law

Uhoh:LooksliketheIRSviolatedfederal

StatetellsHouseOversightCommitteetofinda

State tells House Oversight Committee to find a “more appropriate witness” than Kerry on Benghazi

posted at 12:41 pm on May 13, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

•  Share on Facebook

If Darrell Issa expected John Kerry to abide by a subpoena in the issue of e-mails withheld by the White House on Benghazi, the State Department wants to temper those expectations. Earlier today, spokesperson Jen Psaki offered a suggestion to the House Oversight Committee — find someone “more appropriate” for such testimony:

The State Department is doubling down on its opposition to Secretary of State John Kerry testifying on the deadly Benghazi attack, saying in a statement overnight that a congressional committee should find “a more appropriate witness.”

Kerry will be on a previously scheduled official trip to Mexico on May 21, the day the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoenaed him to testify, State spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in the statement.

Psaki said State Department officials had been in touch with the committee to “determine how to resolve their subpoena,” but she stopped short of confirming that Kerry would ever appear at a hearing related to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack, which predated his time in office.

The militant attack on a U.S. consulate and nearby CIA annex killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American personnel. An independent review panel found that the State Department had ignored requests for more guards and security upgrades and had become too reliant on local militias for security. The State Department has since participated in several congressional hearings and released thousands of documents in response to queries about its response that night.

“Given the pressing foreign affairs issues that the secretary is actively engaged on and the committee’s focus on document production issues, we would like to explore whether there are better means of addressing the committee’s interests, including through a more appropriate witness,” Psaki’s statement said.

That’s diplomatic speak for: Enough already. Find somebody else to testify.

Good luck with that. The reason why Oversight subpoenaed Kerry was that the Obama administration has been hiding documents related to Benghazi, a fact that emerged a couple of weeks ago. That obstruction apparently includes State, which has supplied “thousands of documents,” but with significant redactions and now clearly some gaps in their compliance. Kerry has responsibility for State, and Congress has legitimate responsibilities for oversight and accountability.

Still, the obvious question can’t be avoided. What difference at this point does this make? Once the Select Committee takes over the investigation, Oversight will have to move on to other issues — probably the IRS scandal. That’s why this little snub from Psaki makes little sense, politically speaking, except momentary self-satisfaction by the Obama administration. State could have just played out the string and waited for Trey Gowdy to start his probe, and then moot the entire controversy by providing full disclosure of documents withheld or redacted in earlier investigations.

Until now, State has played it cool. With Leon Panetta and Mike Morell weighing in with support for the select committee, maybe they should have stuck with that strategy.

•  Share on Facebook

Tags: Benghazi, Darrell Issa, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Jen Psaki, John Kerry, select committee, subpoena

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

KerryduckingHouseOversightsubpoenaonBenghazi?

Kerry ducking House Oversight subpoena on Benghazi?

posted at 8:41 am on May 6, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

One would think that Secretary of State John Kerry would welcome an opportunity to talk about anything else other than his own failures, but apparently he’s not keen to talk about those of his predecessor, either. The State Department announced last night that Kerry will not comply with a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee, which demanded an explanation for the failure to produce documentation under a prior subpoena to State. Kerry will be on the road at the time specified, but State offered to make other arrangements (via Drudge):

The State Department said Monday that Secretary of State John Kerry would not appear before the House Oversight Committee on May 21 to talk about Benghazi — as demanded in a subpoena from the panel’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Kerry planned to travel to Mexico at that time and officials would discuss alternative options with the committee.

“We are committed to working with the committee to find a resolution to this that is acceptable to both sides. We were surprised when they didn’t reach out to us before issuing a subpoena for exactly that reason,” Harf said. “And as I’ve noted here, there have been a number of Republicans who themselves, under the previous administration, said a secretary of state should not be subpoenaed.”

State could end up regretting this as an opportunity passed up. Issa has every right to issue a subpoena and expect Kerry to comply, but Issa may have jumped the gun a little, too, by skipping over the niceties of at least inviting Kerry to testify first before going to the big gun of the subpoena. That’s the State gripe in this reply, and the offer to cooperate is an easy play against it. The knock on Oversight is that its focus has been both split between several investigations into the Obama administration and too overtly political for the same reason. This episode adds to the perception.

So why might State regret this response? Kerry might not be anxious to testify before Congress, but he’d do better against Issa than he will against Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor. Gowdy will head the select committee on Benghazi, which will relieve Oversight of the probe in the near future. Democrats will still claim that the select committee is politicized and talk about “phony scandals,” but this committee will be focused on one task alone — and the panel members will become experts at it. If Democrats don’t participate, then Kerry will eventually be forced to endure nothing but direct interrogation on State’s failure to produce documentation to Congress, as will his subordinates at State. They will find that experience under Gowdy’s governance to be considerably less pleasant than even an Oversight hearing, and potentially a lot more dangerous in the legal sense.

Kerry will be small potatoes in this probe, anyway. The select committee wants to expose the cover-up, but Kerry’s role in that (if any at all) will be minor and ex post facto. This probe aims at the White House and Kerry’s predecessor, and their attempts to cleanse themselves of responsibility just weeks ahead of a national election through fraud and lies.

Tags: Darrell Issa, Hillary Clinton, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, John Kerry, subpoena, Trey Gowdy

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

CummingsaccusesIssaof“McCarthyism”justbeforeIssa

Cummings accuses Issa of “McCarthyism” just before Issa accuses Cummings of possible collusion with the IRS

posted at 6:01 pm on April 9, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Darrell Issa and Elijah Cummings, House Oversight Committee chairman and ranking Democrat, respectively, aren’t exactly known for their intra-party camaraderie, especially seeing as how Cummings has continually derided the ongoing investigation into the IRS’s scandalous targeting of conservative groups as nothing more than a hyper-partisan fishing expedition — but this just got real.

Funnily enough, just this morning Cummings’ office released a report that seems to focus mainly on comparing Issa’s investigative activities to those of the late Sen. Joe McCarthy as a similarly “disgraceful stain on our nation’s history”:

As Issa, a California Republican and the Oversight chairman, pushes for former IRS official Lois Lerner to be held in contempt for invoking her Fifth Amendment rights not to testify before the committee, Cummings’s office is releasing research Wednesday showing the majority of the previous times Congress took such a step were during McCarthy’s investigations.

“We oppose Chairman Issa’s efforts to recreate the Oversight Committee in Joe McCarthy’s image, and we reject his attempts to drag us back to that shameful era in which Congress tried to strip away the constitutional rights of American citizens under the bright lights of hearings that had nothing to do with responsible oversight and everything to do with the most dishonorable kind of partisan politics,” said the report for committee Democrats, which was released early to POLITICO Pro Tax.

Yes, most original. This afternoon, however, Issa sent a letter over to Cummings’ office containing some distinct questions about emails revealing Cummings’ past communications with the IRS, raising “concerns that that the IRS improperly shared protected taxpayer information with [Cummings'] staff” which “surreptitiously” coordinated with the agency to request that information, specifically about conservative organization True the Vote. Issa’s letter makes for some well-timelined and skim-able reading, and here’s NRO‘s summary:

E-mails unearthed in the course of Issa’s investigation into the IRS’ inappropriate targeting of right-leaning groups show that in August 2012, a member of Cummings’s staff contacted the IRS asking for any publicly available information on True the Vote. The matter was discussed by IRS officials including Lois Lerner, the former exempt organizations chief who retired in the wake of the targeting scandal. and one of Lerner’s deputies, Holly Paz, subsequently sent the organization’s 990 forms to Cummings and his staff. The correspondence does not indicate, however, whether the action the IRS took with relation to True the Vote was prompted by the request from Cummings’s office.

Nonetheless, Engelbrecht’s True the Vote received a letter from the IRS with inquiries that agency officials have testified were unprecedented in its scope. Cummings’s letter contained questions that closely mirrored those posed by the IRS, and Issa details them in his letter, strongly implying that one was modeled on the other.

Oh, snap. As Issa noted in his letter, Cummings has previously denied that his office “made any inquiries to the IRS” that “may have led to additional scrutiny,” and Issa just extended a very public invitation for Cummings to explain himself. In the meantime, the Lerner contempt vote is scheduled for tomorrow.

Tags: Darrell Issa, Elijah Cummings, House Oversight Committee, Internal Revenue Service

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

DarrellIssasubpoenastheATFovertheirstonewalling

Darrell Issa subpoenas the ATF over their stonewalling on rogue storefront tactics

posted at 6:01 pm on March 20, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Hey, remember Operation Fast & Furious — the hyper-shady Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives gunwalking operation in which federal agents deliberately pressed American gun store owners into selling untraceable guns to known Mexican drug cartel middlemen, the best possible explanation for which could only have been gross negligence and widespread incompetence? The only thing “botched,” as the media so often titles it, about that episode was that the Obama administration got caught, but the both the ATF and the head honchos at the Justice Department dismissed the whole thing as a poorly coordinated mistake and assured us that such a thing would never happen again.

Which I guess means House Oversight Chairman is just being a crazed partisan blowhard again, am I right? Nothing to see here, people.

Rep. Darrell Issa has subpoenaed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for information about what he calls a “dangerously mismanaged” program, which originally was launched to get crime guns off the street.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which Issa chairs, has been looking into complaints about the program for months. Under the operation, ATF agents set up storefronts in multiple cities to try and entice criminals to sell their crime guns, unwittingly, to the government so they could be traced. But their tactics and missteps, including using mentally disabled people, drew criticism.

Issa, R-Calif., claimed this week that the ATF has stonewalled him by withholding documents and shown a “complete lack of cooperation.”

“I have no choice today but to issue the enclosed subpoena,” he wrote to ATF Director B. Todd Jones. “… The time for hollow promises is over.”

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has been investigating this story and it garnered national attention back in December; the conspicuously weird gist of it is that the ATF has been opening small stores in poor communities across the country, ostensibly a fronts to try and get criminals with guns and drugs off of the streets, but in at least four cities they ended up baiting locals into committing crimes in the process and then arresting them for it — some of whom were mentally disabled.

ATF Deputy Director Tom Brandon insists that, “putting this into context, there were deficiencies with the storefront operations, but there have been many successes and it still remains a viable technique when managed well” — which doesn’t explain why they haven’t been fully cooperative with Congress’s attempted investigation. Why are the implications of the operation supposedly so very dire that you can’t even let Congress in on what the real deal is? If there’s no smoking gun here, why don’t you just prove it? Why, why, why is the Obama administration constantly, aggressively insisting that they absolutely have nothing to hide, but then turning around and acting like they very much do?

Tags: ATF, Darrell Issa, firearms, House Oversight Committee, Obama administration, Operation Fast and Furious

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair

IssareleasesscathingreportonLerner posted

Issa releases scathing report on Lerner

posted at 10:41 am on March 12, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

One of the enduring mysteries of the IRS scandal — at least if one listens to MSNBC and other media outlets who think of it as a “phony scandal” — is why Lois Lerner took the Fifth twice when called to testify to it. People invoke the Fifth Amendment to keep from incriminating themselves through their own testimony, which is a basic human right recognized by the Constitution. The use of it by a high-ranking government official when questioned by Congress about activities conducted during official duties does, however, strongly suggest that something illegal was going on, even if the invocation of the right itself cannot be used as evidence in trial. After all, if the scandal has no basis in fact and the IRS was just doing its job, then Lerner should have no problem testifying on how she performed her duties — information which Congress is entitled to demand.

House Oversight chair Darrell Issa issued a 141-page report yesterday which clarified why Lerner was so keen to avoid testifying. In what the Washington Post called a “scathing” account of her actions, the majority report from Oversight accuses Lerner of obstruction and misleading Congress, while attacking conservative groups and attempting to hide her activities from scrutiny:

Rep. Darrell Issa issued scathing conclusions Tuesday about Lois Lerner’s involvement in the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of advocacy groups.

The California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a 141-page report saying Lerner “led efforts to scrutinize conservative groups while working to maintain a veneer of objective enforcement.” He also accused her of obstructing the oversight committee’s investigation and misleading Congress. …

Issa’s report said Lerner was trying to undermine the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

“The Supreme Court dealt a huge blow, overturning a 100-year-old precedent that basically corporations couldn’t give directly to political campaigns, and everyone is up in arms because they don’t like it,” Lerner said at a Duke University forum in 2010. “The Federal Election Commission can’t do anything about it. They want the IRS to fix it.”

Issa said Lerner made “false or misleading statements” to the panel by denying in February 2012 that the IRS changed its screening criteria and by saying the agency’s review methods did not exceed its usual standards.

The IG’s audit found that Ler­ner ordered her division to alter the screening criteria in June 2011 because they focused too much on groups’ policy positions. It also determined that the agency overreached in seeking donor information from nonprofit groups.

Other IRS officials told the panel they could not remember such previous donor requests.

The report itself pulls no punches about Lerner’s activities:

When Congress asked Lerner about a shift in criteria, she flatly denied it along with allegations about disparate treatment.15 Even as targeting continued, Lerner engaged in a surreptitious discussion about an “off-plan” effort to restrict the right of existing 501(c)(4) applicants to participate in the political process through new regulations made outside established protocols for disclosing new regulatory action.16 E-mails obtained by the Committee show she and other seemingly like-minded IRS employees even discussed how, if an aggrieved Tea Party applicant were to file suit, the IRS might get the chance to showcase the scrutiny it had applied to conservative applicants.17 IRS officials seemed to envision a potential lawsuit as an expedient vehicle for bypassing federal laws that protect the anonymity of applicants denied tax exempt status.18 Lerner surmised that Tea Party groups would indeed opt for litigation because, in her mind, they were “itching for a Constitutional challenge.”19

Through e-mails, documents, and the testimony of other IRS officials, the Committee has learned a great deal about Lois Lerner’s role in the IRS targeting scandal since the Committee first issued a subpoena for her testimony. She was keenly aware of acute political pressure to crack down on conservative-leaning organizations. Not only did she seek to convey her agreement with this sentiment publicly, she went so far as to engage in a wholly inappropriate effort to circumvent federal prohibitions in order to publicize her efforts to crack down on a particular Tea Party applicant. She created unprecedented roadblocks for Tea Party organizations, worked surreptitiously to advance new Obama Administration regulations that curtail the activities of existing 501(c)(4) organizations – all the while attempting to maintain an appearance that her efforts did not appear, in her own words, “per se political.”

Lerner’s testimony remains critical to the Committee’s investigation. E-mails dated shortly before the public disclosure of the targeting scandal show Lerner engaging with higher ranking officials behind the scenes in an attempt to spin the imminent release of the TIGTA report.20 Documents and testimony provided by the IRS point to her as the instigator of the IRS’s efforts to crack down on 501(c)(4) organizations and the singularly most relevant official in the IRS targeting scandal. Her unwillingness to testify deprives Congress the opportunity to have her explain her conduct, hear her response to personal criticisms levied by her IRS coworkers, and provide vital context regarding the actions of other IRS officials. In a recent interview, President Obama broadly asserted that there is not even a “smidgeon of corruption” in the IRS targeting scandal.21

If this is true, Lois Lerner should be willing to return to Congress to testify about her actions. The public needs a full accounting of what occurred and who was involved. Through its investigation, the Committee seeks to ensure that government officials are never in a position to abuse the public trust by depriving Americans of their Constitutional right to participate in our democracy, regardless of their political beliefs. This is the only way to restore confidence in the IRS.

John McKinnon writes at the Wall Street Journal that this looks like a proposal for a contempt charge against Lerner.  It also notes that Lerner took a particular interest in a Democrat bête noire:

The report also appears aimed at building a case for seeking to hold Ms. Lerner in contempt of Congress. She has declined to answer congressional questions, citing her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

Newly disclosed emails show Ms. Lerner also took an interest in the application for tax-exempt status by Crossroads GPS, a big conservative player in the 2012 election that was co-founded by Karl Rove.

“Can you please send me a copy of the Crossroads [GPS] application? Lois wants Judy to take a look at it so she can summarize the issues for Lois,” says an IRS email from mid-2011 that is quoted in the report.

Paul Mirengoff wrote yesterday that the report shows that “[t]here can be little doubt that if Lerner were to answer Committee questions under oath, she would incriminate herself. And if she answered truthfully, she would also incriminate the administration she faithfully served.” Meanwhile, Scott Johnson points out a rather predictable gap in the coverage of the report. Be sure to catch up with Power Line’s better coverage.

Tags: Darrell Issa, IRS, Lois Lerner, phony scandals, scandal

Related Posts:

Source from: hotair