JudgeordersIRStocomeupwithbetter

Judge orders IRS to come up with better explanation of missing Lerner e-mails

posted at 1:21 pm on August 15, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

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The dog-ate-my-homework – er, excuse me, hard-drive-ate-our-emails excuse did just about as well in federal court as it would during an IRS audit. Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected the IRS’ response to the Judicial Watch complaint about missing e-mails from Lois Lerner and other IRS employees involved in the targeting scandal yesterday. Sullivan in effect took steps to conduct his own independent probe, issuing an order demanding specific answers — and demanding them by one week from today:

A federal judge asked the U.S. Internal Revenue Service for more information on efforts it made to recover missing e-mail from the computer of an agency official at the heart of a quarrel between Congress and the Obama administration over scrutiny of Tea Party organizations.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan’s order today giving the IRS until Aug. 22 to come up with further details on what it did to retrieve e-mail from the malfunctioning computer of Lois Lerner signals his dissatisfaction with the agency’s earlier explanation, contained in an Aug. 11 filing.

The order comes in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the activist group Judicial Watch. The complaint seeks Lerner’s e-mail and other communications concerning the processing of applications for tax-exempt status.

“Asked” is a bit too generous. Legal Insurrection has the actual document from Sullivan, in which “asked” is replaced by “ORDERED” — caps in the original, although Bill Jacobson has added other emphasis and formatting:

MINUTE ORDER. In light of [26] the Declarations filed by the IRS, the IRS is hereby ORDERED to file a sworn Declaration, by an official with the authority to speak under oath for the Agency, by no later than August 22, 2014.

In this Declaration, the IRS must:

(1) provide information about its efforts, if any, to recover missing Lois Lerner emails from alternate sources (i.e., Blackberry, iPhone, iPad);

(2) provide additional information explaining the IRS’s policy of tracking inventory through use of bar code property tags, including whether component parts, such as hard drives, receive a bar code tag when serviced. If individual components do not receive a bar code tag, provide information on how the IRS tracks component parts, such as hard drives, when being serviced;

(3) provide information about the IRS’s policy to degauss hard drives, including whether the IRS records whose hard drive is degaussed, either by tracking the employee’s name or the particular machine with which the hard drive was associated; and

(4) provide information about the outside vendor who can verify the IRS’s destruction policies concerning hard drives.

“ORDERED.” “Must.” “Speak under oath.” These are not really requests, and the time frame isn’t an expression of curiosity, either. Giving the IRS a single week to meet these demands after months of wrangling over Judicial Watch’s challenge implies that (a) Sullivan’s pretty convinced the IRS has these answers, which then suggests that  (b) Sullivan’s getting angry over the IRS’ intransigence and opacity in dealing with the court. Either Judge Sullivan has run out of patience, or he wants the IRS to think he has.

Needless to say, this makes Judicial Watch pretty happy:

In an extraordinary step, U. S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan has launched an independent inquiry into the issue of the missing emails associated with former IRS official Lois Lerner.

Previously, Judge Sullivan ordered the IRS to produce sworn declarations about the IRS email issue by August 11. Today’s order confirms Judicial Watch’s read of this week’s IRS’ filings that treated as a joke Judge Sullivan’s order.

Judge Sullivan, in his earlier ruling, appointed Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola to manage and assist in discussions between Judicial Watch and the IRS about how to obtain any missing records from other sources. Magistrate Facciola is an expert in e-discovery, and authorized Judicial Watch to submit a request for limited discovery into the missing IRS records after September 10.

The demand to produce testimony under oath in court sets up an interesting moment, too. The IRS has provided conflicting answers to Congress about the status of e-mail and the ongoing efforts to retrieve the records of Lerner and others. At different times, the IRS has told the House Ways and Means and Oversight committees that they had the records, that the records were lost, that some of the records may still be retrievable, and that they never knew Lerner had a Blackberry — even though some of her extant communications showed clearly that she used it for e-mail. How will the IRS resolve all of those contradictions in sworn testimony, under penalty of perjury?

We’ll have to wait until at least next week to see. Whatever they come up with is likely to differ yet again from what’s come before it, and it’s doubtful that will make Judge Sullivan any happier than he is at the moment.

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Tags: e-mails, federal court, House Oversight Committee, House Ways and Means Committee, IRS, Judicial Watch, Lois Lerner, perjury

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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

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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.

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

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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

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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?

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

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WHdefiesOversightsubpoenatopoliticaldirector

WH defies Oversight subpoena to political director

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

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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.

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

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HowtogetapaycheckfromtheEPA

How to get a paycheck from the EPA without really trying: Telework without working, or go to the office and watch porn

posted at 1:21 pm on May 7, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

If you can read this addendum to yesterday’s EPA post without slamming your head onto your desk, I salute you.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that inspectors general are up in arms over the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Homeland Security operating as a “rogue law enforcement agency” and agency employees actively blocking their investigations into employee misconduct. The House Oversight Committee held a hearing on these alleged improprieties this morning, and according to the prepared testimony of Deputy Assistant Inspector General for Investigations Allan Williams, last year’s case of former employee John C. Beale defrauding taxpayers of nearly a million dollars while pretending to be a CIA operative was just the beginning of the waste/fraud/abuse.

An employee at the Environmental Protection Agency downloaded more than 7,000 pornographic files onto a government computer and viewed them for two to six hours a day, according to the agency’s independent watchdog.

The worker, who wasn’t identified, was watching pornography when a special agent showed up at his work space, Allan Williams, the EPA’s deputy assistant inspector general for investigations, told lawmakers today.

“True deterrence of employee misconduct at the EPA ultimately rests with agency executives and managers to set a tone that ensures such behavior will not be condoned,” Williams told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. …

The employee caught viewing pornography is still on the payroll, earning about $120,000 a year, and the case has been referred to the Justice Department for prosecution, Williams said.

Not only did that employee earn six figures — he earned, ahem, “performance rewards.” Via the WFB:

Rep. John Mica (R., Fla) questioned Allan Williams, the deputy assistant inspector general for investigations at the House Oversight Committee over the employees’ “work activities.”

“So this guy is making $120,000, spending two to six hours a day looking at porno. Then this information I have is he received performance awards during the time period?” Mica asked Williams.

Williams responded, “Uh, he possibly did. Yes, sir.”

In an entirely separate instance, another manager allowed an employee to collect full pay and benefits without reporting to work. It reportedly started out as a work-from-home accommodation for a medical condition, except that the employee wasn’t actually doing any work either — and yet managed to collect a casual $500,000 or so over several years, as well as cash bonuses based on excellent performance appraisals. Astounding.

As Chairman Issa put it in the hearing this morning, the EPA is “running an organization from which no one can get fired.” Who wants to make bets about this kind of waste, fraud, incompetence, negligence, and lack of oversight being unique to the 16,000 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency?

Tags: big government, bureaucracy, Environmental Protection Agency, fraud, House Oversight Committee, investigation, waste

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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

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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

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DNCchief:IssacuttingoffCummingstodaywas

DNC chief: Issa cutting off Cummings today was kinda’ like what’s happening in Ukraine and Venezuela, or something

posted at 8:41 pm on March 5, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Are we really putting the utter lawlessness, corruption, and suppression of the Venezuelan socialist regime in the same context as the House Oversight Chairman trying to adjourn a hearing that obviously wasn’t going to take place after Lois Lerner pleaded the 5th? Does that not seem… hyperbolic, perhaps? The, ahem, “inimitable” DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz evidently thinks not, at around the 9:30 mark:

In the last couple of weeks, in which we have been, on both sides of the aisle, standing up for the rights of the oppressed, trying to make sure that in Venezuela, that dictators there aren’t shutting down the opposition, the same thing in the Ukraine. At the same time, you have a chairman of the Government Oversight Committee literally electronically cutting off the mic of the opposition to prevent him from having any say or participation in the hearing that was focused on an investigation that has been resolved and that they are purely… proving that what they are doing here is just trying to continue to politicize this issue.

Honesty, I can see why the Democrats are irked with Issa’s brusqueness there, but the hearing wasn’t gonna’ happen, and if we’re really so concerned about governmental forces trying to “shut down the opposition” on par with what’s happening in Ukraine and Venezuela, then what about showing a little concern for, oh, I don’t know — an administration using a government agency to stifle groups of a certain political stripe? A.k.a., the actual story from that hearing today?

I might also point out that the rest of that segment was dedicated to ridiculing the Republicans for their — count ‘em! — 50th ObamaCare “repeal” vote, which was actually a measure to delay tax penalties for failing to buy health insurance this year, on which 27 Democrats voted with them. This vote happened at about the same time that the White House declared their unilateral intention to further alleviate their “if you like it, you can keep it” fraud by delaying the date by which non-ObamaCare-compliant insurance plans had to be canceled until October of 2016. But, hey — stupid Republicans, right? Actually doing things through legislation instead of turn-on-a-dime extralegal executive actions? Laaaaaame.

Tags: corruption, Darrell Issa, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Elijah Cummings, House Oversight Committee, Internal Revenue Service, Lois Lerner

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DNC chief: Issa cutting off Cummings today was kinda’ like what’s htappening in Ukraine and Venezuela, or somehing

DNCchief:IssacuttingoffCummingstodaywas

DNC chief: Issa cutting off Cummings today was kinda’ like what’s happening in Ukraine and Venezuela, or something

posted at 8:41 pm on March 5, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Are we really putting the utter lawlessness, corruption, and suppression of the Venezuelan socialist regime in the same context as the House Oversight Chairman trying to adjourn a hearing that obviously wasn’t going to take place after Lois Lerner pleaded the 5th? Does that not seem… hyperbolic, perhaps? The, ahem, “inimitable” DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz evidently thinks not, at around the 9:30 mark:

In the last couple of weeks, in which we have been, on both sides of the aisle, standing up for the rights of the oppressed, trying to make sure that in Venezuela, that dictators there aren’t shutting down the opposition, the same thing in the Ukraine. At the same time, you have a chairman of the Government Oversight Committee literally electronically cutting off the mic of the opposition to prevent him from having any say or participation in the hearing that was focused on an investigation that has been resolved and that they are purely… proving that what they are doing here is just trying to continue to politicize this issue.

Honesty, I can see why the Democrats are irked with Issa’s brusqueness there, but the hearing wasn’t gonna’ happen, and if we’re really so concerned about governmental forces trying to “shut down the opposition” on par with what’s happening in Ukraine and Venezuela, then what about showing a little concern for, oh, I don’t know — an administration using a government agency to stifle groups of a certain political stripe? A.k.a., the actual story from that hearing today?

I might also point out that the rest of that segment was dedicated to ridiculing the Republicans for their — count ‘em! — 50th ObamaCare “repeal” vote, which was actually a measure to delay tax penalties for failing to buy health insurance this year, on which 27 Democrats voted with them. This vote happened at about the same time that the White House declared their unilateral intention to further alleviate their “if you like it, you can keep it” fraud by delaying the date by which non-ObamaCare-compliant insurance plans had to be canceled until October of 2016. But, hey — stupid Republicans, right? Actually doing things through legislation instead of turn-on-a-dime extralegal executive actions? Laaaaaame.

Tags: corruption, Darrell Issa, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Elijah Cummings, House Oversight Committee, Internal Revenue Service, Lois Lerner

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WhiteHouse:TheseGOPattacksonnavigatorsare

White House: These GOP attacks on navigators are just another effort to sabotage ObamaCare, you know

posted at 7:11 pm on December 16, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

In advance of another of the ObamaCare-related field hearings that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have been holding around the country throughout the past few weeks — this time on the thousands of “navigators” designated to help people sign up — the committee released a report detailing their concerns about the episodes of inefficiency, mismanagement, and possible fraud stemming from the program. Chairman Darrell Issa and Rep. Pete Sessions explained further in an op-ed they penned for the Dallas Morning News on Monday:

To help the American people navigate the onerous and confusing requirements of signing up for Obamacare exchanges, the administration spent millions of taxpayer dollars to create the navigator program. Disturbingly, news reports from the last four weeks have highlighted numerous examples of fraudulent activity related to health navigators in Texas. So — who are these navigators and what is their role in Obamacare?

To help answer that question, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is holding a field hearing Monday at the Charles Eisemann Center in Richardson. Implementation of the program — much like the rest of the law — is off to a rocky start. This hearing follows eight months of Oversight Committee investigation and will address concerns that Obamacare’s navigator program lacks basic federal guidelines to protect Americans’ private information, reports of fraud and what officials in Texas are doing about it.

Funded by grants of taxpayer dollars to nongovernment groups, navigators are allowed to ask Americans for confidential financial and personally identifiable information. This is concerning for a number of reasons.

Among those reasons, write Sessions and Issa, are the fact that the law neither bars convicted felons from being navigator nor even requires screening for them; that the training navigators receive after hiring is grossly inadequate, with only a five- to twenty-hour training course and a followup quiz being the standard procedure; and that the lack of federal oversight of the navigator program has already led to reports of improper and illegal behavior.

And yet, apparently, the real fault here belongs to the GOP here for drawing attention to all of these inconvenient facts, and for trying to “stifle, intimidate, and impugn” navigators — according to HHS Secretary Sebelius in her competing op-ed, anyway:

Millions of Texans don’t have the security of health coverage. In fact, Texas has the highest rate of uninsured in the nation. Yet there are some who will seemingly stop at nothing to deter Texans — and those who assist them — from obtaining coverage or even learning about their new options under the Affordable Care Act.

What opponents of the new law could not do legislatively, at the ballot box, or even by shutting down the federal government, they’re now trying to do through other means. Case in point is Monday’s congressional hearing in Dallas, designed to stifle, intimidate and impugn the reputation of people who have been working hard to help their fellow Texans get covered.

Just who are these people working to assist their fellow Texans? Those I’ve met are dedicated, civic-minded Americans who have opened their hearts to their neighbors, because they want to help

Which, predictably, was just about the same tone White House Press Secretary Jay Carney struck when asked about the hearing delving into the navigators issue during today’s briefing, via Mediaite:

With an exasperated pause, Carney replied “This is just one more data point in the Republican obsession with sabotaging Obamacare,” adding that “All health care navigators must complete about 20 hours of training, including training on privacy issues,” and receive “regular refresher training.”

Carney read the navigator requirements in further detail, then turned his attention to the Republicans. “Let’s pull back here for a minute,” Carney said. “When Republicans attack navigators, they’re attacking folks like the University of Arkansas, the Epilepsy Foundation of Florida, the Visiting Nurse Services of Iowa, Ascension Health, Ohio Association of Food Banks, and the National Urban League. These are just a few of the organizations that actually hire and supervise these navigators.”

Huh. Here I was thinking that the Oversight Committee was simply doing its precise job by conscientiously acting as a check upon the Obama administration in orchestrating what has clearly been the rushed and forcible makeover of the entire healthcare sector, with so many millions’ of Americans deeply sensitive personal and financial information on the line — especially with all of the rampant ObamaCare-related examples of incompetence and gross negligence we now have on the books. Go figure.

Tags: Darrell Issa, House Oversight Committee, Kathleen Sebelius, navigators, ObamaCare, White House

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Source from: hotair