Issa subpoenas IRS commissioner over missing Lerner e-mails

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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

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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.

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

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Source from: hotair

Kerry:Fine,Republicans,I’llcomplywithyourBenghazi

Kerry: Fine, Republicans, I’ll comply with your Benghazi subpoena

posted at 8:11 pm on May 6, 2014 by Allahpundit

Actually, the money line here is “I look forward to complying with whatever responsibilities we have,” which subtly raises the possibility of claiming executive privilege. If, constitutionally, they’re not required to comply then they don’t have any such responsibility. Does this sound like a man who’s eager to turn stuff over?

The secretary appeared to preemptively dismiss the questions raised about why an email from deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, not previously released but obtained by FOIA request and lawsuit by the conservative group Judicial Watch, had not been made public earlier. The White House has said that this email, which included talking points about violence linked to an anti-Islamic video, was not included in previous releases because Rhodes himself was not covered by the subpoenas.

“The fact is that documents require a legal process,” Kerry said.

Realistically, though, is there any way to claim privilege at this point without it looking impossibly shady? Kerry’s whole point is that they have nothing to hide, the proof of which is that they’ve already turned over thousands of documents and provided testimony, including some from Hillary Clinton. Hammering that point is key to their argument that this is another time-wasting Republican fishing expedition. If they suddenly clam up once a select committee gavels into session, it’ll have the appearance of a suspect demanding a lawyer just as the questions in his interrogation get tough. Why would you do that if you’re trying to convince the public that this is the mother of all nothingburgers? In fact, Kerry ended up saying, “I’ve guaranteed that we would cooperate in every single way. We have and we will.” That’s the smart play, provided there’s no smoking-gun document buried in the archives. The Benghazi saga is sufficiently convoluted by now that most low-information voters will zone out from the select committee, I suspect. No reason for the White House to risk waking them up by putting up an ostentatious fight over which documents it’s legally entitled to suppress.

How does “we’ll comply” fit with the idea of House Democrats possibly boycotting the committee, though? If it’s a kangaroo court that no one should take seriously, illegitimate to the point that Dems won’t even dignify it by participating, then why wouldn’t Kerry resist turning over documents? He might lose in court and it might backfire by looking suspiciously defensive, but if Democrats are serious about “controversializing” this process, they might as well go the whole nine yards.

Update: Pelosi’s demand for equal representation on the committee is denied.

House Republicans have decided the select committee to investigate the Benghazi terror attack will include seven Republicans and five Democrats, according to two senior House GOP leadership aides…

Earlier Tuesday, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi demanded it be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.

Now that the committee’s structure has been decided, it’s unclear whether Democrats will participate.

Tags: Benghazi, comply, issa, kerry, oversight, subpoena

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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

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Source from: hotair

Uh oh: Fired Port Authority exec claims Christie knew of lane closings; Update Christie denies

Uhoh:FiredPortAuthorityexecclaims

Uh oh: Fired Port Authority exec claims Christie knew of lane closings

Uhoh:FiredPortAuthorityexecclaims

Formerofficial:Adminrefusedtobringinoutside

Former official: Admin refused to bring in outside help for ObamaCare website for fear GOP would subpoena them; Update: Ten-year-old technology? Update: No improvement in week two; Update: Wasn’t tested until days before launch?

posted at 4:41 pm on October 17, 2013 by Allahpundit

Via Lachlan Markay and Ace, who calls it “Nixonian.” This is the rare Hot Air item that might actually make liberals angrier at the White House than conservatives. If you’d staked your party’s credibility on realizing the utopian dream of universal health care only to have Obama deliver this fartburger, you’d be furious. Why anyone on either side still wants Sebelius in charge, I have no idea.

Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Very important to understand: Between this and the fact that HHS deliberately hid the price of insurance behind a reg wall on Healthcare.gov to reduce “rate shock,” the grand takeaway about the website’s failure is that O and his team made it much worse than it needed to be because they were terrified of transparency. And the reason they were terrified of transparency, both in the case of hiding the cost of the premiums from web users and hiding the site’s architectural problems from contractors who might be hauled before Congress, is because they know they’ve delivered a bad product. Put the premiums on the front page and the public, expecting “affordable care,” would recoil at the truth. Put the contractors at the witness table before Issa’s committee and the public, expecting that the government would “fix” health care, would recoil upon discovering that they can’t even build a website with three years’ lead time.

I don’t know what’s more amazing, that they’d place their own political comfort above creating a smoother user experience for the uninsured or that they somehow didn’t realize that a botched rollout on October 1 would be far more embarrassing than contractors talking to Republicans under oath. Or … would it? What was HHS so worried that outside contractors would tell the GOP that they preferred to risk total chaos on the exchanges during launch month instead?

Apropos of nothing, Reuters is now reporting that the budget for the site exploded earlier this year as the Hopenchange brain trust realized they were way, way, way off course. And by “exploded,” I mean “tripled”:

How and why the system failed, and how long it will take to fix, remains unclear. But evidence of a last-minute surge in spending suggests the needs of the project were growing well beyond the initial expectations of the contractor and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Why this went from a ceiling of $93.7 million to $292 million is hard to fathom,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group that analyzes government contracting.

“Something changed. It suggests they ran into problems and knew last spring that they couldn’t do it for $93.7 million. They just blew through the original ceiling. Where was the contract oversight?”…

The Obama administration was issuing regulations and changing policy regarding how the reform should be implemented late into this summer. Many required significant changes to the IT running Healthcare.gov, which kept contractors scrambling.

We’ll need congressional hearings to find out which regulations forced the IT team to scramble at the eleventh hour to rework the site, but this could be another example of the White House’s desire to hide the uglier parts of this boondoggle creating problems for the website architecture. Remember, it was only this past summer that HHS suddenly decided to eliminate income verification for subsidies for the first year. Applicants will be placed on the “honor system” in reporting their wages, which is basically an invitation to commit fraud — but which serves the end of making those subsidies nice and robust for anyone willing to lie, which encourages enrollment. Could be that they built the site with the income verification tech integrated and then had to tear it out quickly and haphazardly once HHS changed its mind, leading to bugs. Like I say, this is what congressional hearings are for.

Nancy Pelosi, by the way, thinks there’s no reason at all to delay ObamaCare if the exchanges are still a disaster come December, which also happens to be the deadline for enrollment if you want your coverage to begin in January. I’d be surprised if there’s a single manager anywhere in the insurance industry who agrees with her, given the Thunderdome-levels of chaos Glitchapalooza will be causing them next year if this persists much longer.

Update: Merry Christmas, Barack.

The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY…

Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer’s cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. With those changes, it took one hour to navigate the HealthCare.gov enrollment process Wednesday.

Those steps shouldn’t be necessary, experts said.

“I have never seen a website — in the last five years — require you to delete the cache in an effort to resolve errors,” said Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a health care group by former Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt. “This is a very early Web 1.0 type of fix.”

You’ll have to read the rest to find out how clearing your cache might actually cause new errors.

Update: Icing on the cake from health-industry consultant Bob Laszewski, who says the system’s scarcely improved after another week of frantic HHS triage:

At the end of week two of the Obamacare launch, health plans were generally seeing no more enrollments per day then they saw in the first week.

As troubling, the backroom issues plaguing the connection between health insurers and the federal government had not been resolved and there is no indication from the feds when they will have these things cleared up.

My sense is that the feds, based upon the number of enrollments they have sent to the insurance companies, enrolled about 10,000 people in the first week (about 5,000 single and family contracts) and another 10,000 people in the second week in the 36 states using the federal exchange.

I guesstimated that the feds were up to 95,000 or so enrollments in my earlier post, less than 20 percent of HHS’s target for October. Laszewski thinks even that number is wildly optimistic. If he’s right and they’re only at 20,000 enrollments total, they’re at less than five percent of their goal.

Update: No one’s getting fired, huh?

The root cause of the problems was a pivotal decision by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials to act as systems integrator, the central coordinator for the entire program. Usually this role is reserved for the prime information technology contractor.

As a result, full testing of the site was delayed until four to six days before the fateful Oct. 1 launch of the health care exchanges, the individual said…

“Normally a system this size would need 4-6 months of testing and performance tuning, not 4-6 days,” the individual said.

The source said there were “ever-changing, conflicting and exceedingly late project directions. The actual system requirements for Oct. 1 were changing up until the week before,” the individual said.

How could they have done a worse job?

Tags: Budget, contractors, Department of Health and Human Services, healthcare.gov, obama, ObamaCare, republican, sebelius, subpoena, White House

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Source from: hotair

Formerofficial:Adminrefusedtobringinoutside

Former official: Admin refused to bring in outside help for ObamaCare website for fear GOP would subpoena them; Update: Ten-year-old technology? Update: No improvement in week two

posted at 4:41 pm on October 17, 2013 by Allahpundit

Via Lachlan Markay and Ace, who calls it “Nixonian.” This is the rare Hot Air item that might actually make liberals angrier at the White House than conservatives. If you’d staked your party’s credibility on realizing the utopian dream of universal health care only to have Obama deliver this fartburger, you’d be furious. Why anyone on either side still wants Sebelius in charge, I have no idea.

Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Very important to understand: Between this and the fact that HHS deliberately hid the price of insurance behind a reg wall on Healthcare.gov to reduce “rate shock,” the grand takeaway about the website’s failure is that O and his team made it much worse than it needed to be because they were terrified of transparency. And the reason they were terrified of transparency, both in the case of hiding the cost of the premiums from web users and hiding the site’s architectural problems from contractors who might be hauled before Congress, is because they know they’ve delivered a bad product. Put the premiums on the front page and the public, expecting “affordable care,” would recoil at the truth. Put the contractors at the witness table before Issa’s committee and the public, expecting that the government would “fix” health care, would recoil upon discovering that they can’t even build a website with three years’ lead time.

I don’t know what’s more amazing, that they’d place their own political comfort above creating a smoother user experience for the uninsured or that they somehow didn’t realize that a botched rollout on October 1 would be far more embarrassing than contractors talking to Republicans under oath. Or … would it? What was HHS so worried that outside contractors would tell the GOP that they preferred to risk total chaos on the exchanges during launch month instead?

Apropos of nothing, Reuters is now reporting that the budget for the site exploded earlier this year as the Hopenchange brain trust realized they were way, way, way off course. And by “exploded,” I mean “tripled”:

How and why the system failed, and how long it will take to fix, remains unclear. But evidence of a last-minute surge in spending suggests the needs of the project were growing well beyond the initial expectations of the contractor and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Why this went from a ceiling of $93.7 million to $292 million is hard to fathom,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group that analyzes government contracting.

“Something changed. It suggests they ran into problems and knew last spring that they couldn’t do it for $93.7 million. They just blew through the original ceiling. Where was the contract oversight?”…

The Obama administration was issuing regulations and changing policy regarding how the reform should be implemented late into this summer. Many required significant changes to the IT running Healthcare.gov, which kept contractors scrambling.

We’ll need congressional hearings to find out which regulations forced the IT team to scramble at the eleventh hour to rework the site, but this could be another example of the White House’s desire to hide the uglier parts of this boondoggle creating problems for the website architecture. Remember, it was only this past summer that HHS suddenly decided to eliminate income verification for subsidies for the first year. Applicants will be placed on the “honor system” in reporting their wages, which is basically an invitation to commit fraud — but which serves the end of making those subsidies nice and robust for anyone willing to lie, which encourages enrollment. Could be that they built the site with the income verification tech integrated and then had to tear it out quickly and haphazardly once HHS changed its mind, leading to bugs. Like I say, this is what congressional hearings are for.

Nancy Pelosi, by the way, thinks there’s no reason at all to delay ObamaCare if the exchanges are still a disaster come December, which also happens to be the deadline for enrollment if you want your coverage to begin in January. I’d be surprised if there’s a single manager anywhere in the insurance industry who agrees with her, given the Thunderdome-levels of chaos Glitchapalooza will be causing them next year if this persists much longer.

Update: Merry Christmas, Barack.

The federal health care exchange was built using 10-year-old technology that may require constant fixes and updates for the next six months and the eventual overhaul of the entire system, technology experts told USA TODAY…

Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer’s cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message. With those changes, it took one hour to navigate the HealthCare.gov enrollment process Wednesday.

Those steps shouldn’t be necessary, experts said.

“I have never seen a website — in the last five years — require you to delete the cache in an effort to resolve errors,” said Dan Schuyler, a director at Leavitt Partners, a health care group by former Health and Human Services secretary Mike Leavitt. “This is a very early Web 1.0 type of fix.”

You’ll have to read the rest to find out how clearing your cache might actually cause new errors.

Update: Icing on the cake from health-industry consultant Bob Laszewski, who says the system’s scarcely improved after another week of frantic HHS triage:

At the end of week two of the Obamacare launch, health plans were generally seeing no more enrollments per day then they saw in the first week.

As troubling, the backroom issues plaguing the connection between health insurers and the federal government had not been resolved and there is no indication from the feds when they will have these things cleared up.

My sense is that the feds, based upon the number of enrollments they have sent to the insurance companies, enrolled about 10,000 people in the first week (about 5,000 single and family contracts) and another 10,000 people in the second week in the 36 states using the federal exchange.

I guesstimated that the feds were up to 95,000 or so enrollments in my earlier post, less than 20 percent of HHS’s target for October. Laszewski thinks even that number is wildly optimistic. If he’s right and they’re only at 20,000 enrollments total, they’re at less than five percent of their goal.

Tags: Budget, contractors, Department of Health and Human Services, healthcare.gov, obama, ObamaCare, republican, sebelius, subpoena, White House

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Source from: hotair