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Lawsuit Forces Los Angeles County To Remove 1.2 Million Ineligible Voters From Rolls


BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 27, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/27/lawsuit-forces-los-angeles-county-to-remove-1-2-million-ineligible-voters-from-rolls/

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Los Angeles County, California confirmed it had removed 1.2 million ineligible voters from its rolls thanks to a settlement with the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch, the group announced Friday. Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in 2017 on behalf of itself and four registered voters in Los Angeles County. Election Integrity Project California, Inc., another public interest group, was also a part of the lawsuit.

Under the agreement, Los Angeles had to send 1.6 million address confirmation notices to voters listed “inactive” on its voter rolls. According to the National Voter Registration Act — which requires states to maintain accurate voter rolls — states and counties must remove from their voting rolls voters who do not respond to such mailers and do not vote in the next two federal elections.

In its most recent progress report for complying with the settlement, Los Angeles told Judicial Watch it had removed a total of 1.2 million ineligible voters from its rolls. Last year, the county revealed that 634,000 of its inactive voters hadn’t voted in the past 10 years.

Back in 2017 when Judicial Watch first filed its lawsuit, it argued Los Angeles County had more registered voters than residents eligible to register and the “highest number of inactive registrations of any single county in the country.” According to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission at that time, voter registration for the county was 112 percent of its adult citizen population.

“This long overdue voter roll clean-up of 1.2 million registrations in Los Angeles County is a historic victory and means California elections are less at risk for fraud,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement. “Building on this success, Judicial Watch will continue its lawsuits and activism to clean up voter rolls and to promote and protect cleaner elections.”

This isn’t the first lawsuit of its kind by Judicial Watch. New York City recently removed 441,083 ineligible voters from its voter rolls after reaching a settlement with the conservative advocacy group. North Carolina also removed more than 430,000 ineligible registrants from its rolls due to a similar lawsuit, and Kentucky agreed to do the same in response to a lawsuit.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation is another good government group that has filed lawsuits to compel states including Michigan and Pennsylvania to clean their voter rolls to guard against potential election fraud.

Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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Watchdog Group Sues Biden’s DHS For Records on Alleged Coordination to Censor Americans


By: ALEXA SCHWERHA, CONTRIBUTOR | November 30, 2022

Read more at https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/30/dhs-sued-social-media-censorship-americans/

President Biden Meets With Business And Labor Leaders At The White House
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Nov. 22 after it failed to complete a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into communication records regarding alleged online censorship during the 2020 presidential election.

The watchdog group was seeking communications between the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA), a DHS subdivision, and the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), an “information exchange” between researchers, election officials and government agencies established in 2020 to identify and research online misinformation leading up to elections that flagged social media posts for platforms to address. Judicial Watch demanded that the Washington D.C. District Court order the DHS to acknowledge the Oct. 5 FOIA request and “produce… non-exempt records responsive to the requests,” according to the lawsuit.

“We’ve had these disclosures essentially over the last year that federal agencies, especially DHS, hav been working to censor Americans… either directly or indirectly,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Through the EIP, multiple groups, including CISA and liberal groups such as the Democratic National Committee and the NAACP, could file “tickets” reporting potential election misinformation, which EIP would then forward on to social media platforms after an investigation into the claims. The EIP released a 2021 report detailing its efforts to address misinformation in the 2020 election in which it acknowledged it had shared hundreds of posts with online platforms, with “35% of the URLs we shared with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube […] either labeled, removed, or soft blocked.”

“This lawsuit’s designed to get into that. There’s these federal frauds that colluded to come up with a system of censorship for social media, and it looks like this [Department of Homeland Security] agency participated in it and we want to figure out what was going on,” Fitton said.

Judicial Watch also requested records between CISA and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Stanford Internet Observatory, both of which were part of the EIP. The request specifically asked for communication about the 2020 election and “online misinformation and disinformation.” However, DHS allegedly failed to adhere to the Nov. 3 FOIA deadline, according to the lawsuit.

“When an agency unlawfully refuses to comply with FOIA, we have the option of suing the federal court, which is what we did,” Fitton told the DCNF.

House Republicans also launched an investigation into Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook about their role in online censorship. Amazon, Apple, TikTok and Microsoft are also under investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, The Washington Times reported.

Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina reportedly made a request for all communication between the Biden administration and social media corporations pertaining to “digital censorship.”

“This is a threat to the first Amendment like we’ve never seen in modern history,” Fitton said.

The White House, DHS, CISA, the EIP, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public and the Stanford Internet Observatory did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

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Judicial Watch: Emails Suggest Obama FBI Knew McCain Leaked Trump Dossier


April 22, 2020

URL of the originating web site: https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-emails-suggest-obama-fbi-knew-mccain-leaked-trump-dossier/

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received 138 pages of emails between former FBI official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page. The records include an email dated January 10, 2017, in which Strzok said that the version of the dossier published by BuzzFeed was “identical” to the version given to the FBI by McCain and had “differences” from the dossier provided to the FBI by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and Mother Jones reporter David Corn. January 10, 2017, is the same day BuzzFeed published the anti-Trump dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele, The emails also show Strzok and other FBI agents mocking President Trump a few weeks before he was inaugurated. In addition, the emails reveal that Strzok communicated with then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe about the “leak investigation” tied to the Clinton Foundation (the very leak in which McCabe was later implicated).

The records were produced to Judicial Watch in a January 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a December 2017 request for all communications between Strzok and Page (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)).

The FBI has only processed the records at a rate of 500 pages per month and has refused to process text messages. At this rate, the production of these communications would not be completed until at least late 2021. The FBI is now using the coronavirus as an excuse to shut down the production of any further records.

On January 10, 2017, Strzok, under the subject “RE: Buzzfeed published some of the reports,” writes: “Our internet system is blocking the site. I have the pdf via iPhone, but it’s 25.6MB. Comparing now. The set is only identical to what [Sen. John] McCain had (it has differences from what was given to us by Corn and Simpson).”

Strzok sent the email to Page and several top-ranking FBI officials, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Assistant Director for the Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap, Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Jon Moffa, Assistant Director for Public Affairs Michael Kortan, General Counsel James Baker, and Director James Comey’s Chief of Staff James Rybicki.

Earlier, on January 10, 2017, BuzzFeed published a version of the dossier that Strzok said was “identical” to what McCain’s office had turned over to the FBI. Strzok sent the BuzzFeed-related email at 7:48 PM. At 8:23 PM on the same day, Strzok forwards to Page and several FBI officials an article by the UK outlet The Guardian titled “FBI chief given dossier by John McCain alleging secret Trump-Russia contacts.”

David Corn was one of Steele’s media contacts. Fusion GPS paid Steele, via funds from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, to write the dossier. In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2017, Simpson said he was not aware of any version of the Steele dossier being given to the FBI.

While acknowledging he had given the dossier to the FBI, McCain had denied being the source of the BuzzFeed dossier report. But court filings which were unsealed in March 2019 show the Arizona Republican senator and an associate had shared the dossier with several media outlets.

Former State Department official and McCain associate David Kramer said in a December 13, 2017, deposition that the dossier was given to him by Steele and he then provided it to journalists at outlets including CNN, BuzzFeed and The Washington Post. The details were first reported by The Daily Caller.

The new production of records also includes a December 22, 2016, email in which Strzok asks then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe if the FBI had opened a “leak investigation” into Clinton Foundation media reports. Strzok writes: “I received word via Jen that tomorrow morning Mike S [presumably Executive Assistant Director Michael Steinbach] wants to talk about whether we have opened a leak investigation into the publicity surrounding the C Foundation. He said he’d like to discuss, as the D [Director James Comey] ‘would like to do something.’ I need guidance as to how/if you’d like me to detail the media pull we conducted. As you may recall, we have not detailed that activity other than to you and Bill.” McCabe’s reply to Strzok is redacted.

McCabe was fired from the FBI in March 2018 for leaking to the media and lacking “candor.” A February 2018 DOJ inspector general report concluded “that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation … violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.” McCabe was referred for prosecution but the Justice Department declined.

The documents also include several emails in which Strzok forwards Russiagate-related news articles to Page and other FBI officials. On January 1, 2017, Strzok forwarded to Moffa and another unidentified official a New York Times article titled “Trump Promises Revelation on Hacking”. The article discusses President-elect Donald Trump’s skepticism about U.S. intelligence assessments of Russian hacking relating to the 2016 election. Strzok cut-and-pasted a quote from the article in which Trump said, “I don’t care what they say, no computer is safe. I have a boy who’s 10 years old; he can do anything with a computer. You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.” The article mentions that Trump said new information would be coming out the following Tuesday. Strzok then says in his cover note, “I think the Tuesday surprise is all the stuff [redacted] told him during the CI [counterintelligence] briefing. He DID mention the stuff about his son and the computer password …” A redacted FBI agent replies to Strzok, but the reply is also redacted. Another FBI agent then responds, “To be accurate he called it a code word not a password. Ha!” Strzok replies, “Funnies.”

On December 15, 2016, Strzok forwards to Page an article from the Daily Mail which states that a former British diplomat, Craig Murray, claimed to have received emails that were stolen from the DNC and John Podesta. Murray said he received the emails near the grounds of American University in Washington, DC. The article says the emails were from an inside DNC source, not Russians. Strzok writes in his cover note to Page, “Shaddy sh*t at AU…;)”.

On December 21, 2016, Strzok forwards to Page a link to a Defense One article about Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. Strzok cut-and-pasted a quote from former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell in which Morell says, “To me, and this is to me not an overstatement, this is the political equivalent of 9/11.”

On December 26, 2016, Strzok forwards to Moffa and an unidentified Washington Field Office agent a Bloomberg article titled “Trump Aide Partnered with Firm Run by Man with Alleged KGB Ties.” The article reports that Trump adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, having partnered in 2016 with Subu Kota, a man who pleaded guilty in 1996 to selling stolen biotech material to an FBI agent posing as a Russian spy. Strzok forwarded the article to Page, saying, “See, look, I’m sharing… ;)”

On January 4, 2017, Strzok forwards to Page a 14-page white paper by the Capital Research Center entitled “Conducting Foreign Relations Without Authority: The Logan Act.” He had previously sent the same file to Office of General Counsel attorney Trisha Anderson and to Priestap.

In a January 4, 2017, email thread a redacted official in the FBI’s Operational Technology Division emails Strzok and Page: “The AD [Assistant Director] of Cyber is apparently bringing up the idea of [redacted]. [Redacted] just messaged me after being pinged by SF [likely the FBI’s San Francisco office]. He asked why this was coming up again, and he wants to talk to me about it next week. Any recommendation on how to deal with this?” Pages replies, “Why don’t you let Pete or Bill or I reach out to the AD of Cyber to let him know how we got here [redacted]. It might then be worth [redacted].” The official responds, “Perfect. That works for me and you can mention that OTD brought it to you. My initial recommendation was for the AD to reach out to you two, but I can only assume that message did not reach him.”

On January 9, 2017, in an email with the subject line “USIC report,” [U.S. Intelligence Community] Strzok tells Page and a redacted official “Per D’s request on Friday, NYO received a single copy of the influence report from ODNI’s [redacted]; it is being maintained in the CD SAC’s safe for PEOTUS [president-elect of the United States]/senior staff.”

On January 10, 2017, Strzok emails Page, Moffa, Priestap and Jennifer Boone to say, “Per Rich [presumably Richard Quinn, formerly with the public affairs office], CNN to publish C material today between 4 and 5. Page replies: “We have lots of details from kortan [Asst Dir Michael Kortan of public affairs]. He will brief at the 3:45.” Strzok responds: “Can I maybe get a read out vis a vis relationship with Brits etc?”

“These new emails show that Strzok and his Obama FBI colleagues knew almost immediately that McCain likely leaked the infamous dossier,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The emails also show that senior FBI officials had contempt for President Trump and gossiped about its counterintelligence briefing to him. The FBI under Comey and McCabe was a train wreck and, given the ongoing cover-up of these docs, the agency hasn’t improved much.”

In February 2020, Judicial Watch uncovered an August 2016 email in which Strzok says that Clinton, in her interview with the FBI about her email controversy, apologized for “the work and effort” it caused the bureau and she said she chose to use it “out of convenience” and that “it proved to be anything but.” Strzok said Clinton’s apology and the “convenience” discussion were “not in” the FBI 302 report that summarized the interview.

Also in February, Judicial Watch made public Strzok-Page emails showing their direct involvement in the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the bureau’s investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The records also show additional “confirmed classified emails” were found on Clinton’s unsecure non-state.gov email server “beyond the number presented” in then-FBI Director James Comey’s statements; Strzok and Page questioning the access the DOJ was granting Clinton’s lawyers; and Page revealing that the DOJ was making edits to FBI 302 reports related to the Clinton Midyear Exam investigation. The emails detail a discussion about “squashing” an issue related to the Seth Rich controversy.

In January 2020, Judicial Watch uncovered Strzok-Page emails that detail special accommodations given to the lawyers of Clinton and her aides during the FBI investigation of the Clinton email controversy.

In November 2019, Judicial Watch revealed Strzok-Page emails that show the attorney representing three of Clinton’s aides were given meetings with senior FBI officials.

Also in November, Judicial Watch uncovered emails revealing that after Clinton’s statement denying the transmission of classified information over her unsecure email system, Strzok sent an email to FBI officials citing “three [Clinton email] chains” containing (C) [classified] portion marks in front of paragraphs.”

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New Cache of 339 Emails Shows Fusion GPS Emailing Anti-Trump Intel Directly to Obama’s DOJ: Report


Reported By Benjamin Arie | Published May 2, 2019 at 3:55pm

It’s no secret that liberals across the country have tried desperately to stop Donald Trump since he became a candidate, but their efforts to undermine him may now be coming back at themselves like a boomerang.

A scandal which began before the 2016 election was even held has just exploded, at least if a bombshell report from the watchdog group Judicial Watch is accurate. The organization has been diligently unraveling the facts around Fusion GPS, and what they recently found is jaw-dropping.

Fusion GPS, of course, is the “opposition research” firm which was contracted by the DNC to dig up dirt on Trump in the run-up to the election. The company is linked to the infamous dossier containing scandalous — and thoroughly debunked — claims about the president, but the controversy is much wider than just those papers.

It now appears that someone working for Fusion GPS was purposely and frequently collaborating with a deputy attorney general within the Obama administration, sending anti-Trump material in a way that was certainly unethical if not completely illegal.

The Obama-era official is Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and the anti-Trump figure working for Fusion GPS was his wife.

TRENDING: Ukrainians Say Obama WH Tried Getting Them To Do Hillary’s Dirty Work in Jan. 2016

“[A] series of ‘Hi Honey’ emails from Nellie Ohr to her high-ranking federal prosecutor husband and his colleagues raise the prospect that Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research was being funneled into the Justice Department during the 2016 election through a back-door marital channel,” explained veteran investigative journalist John Solomon for The Hill.

“Ohr has admitted to Congress that, during the 2016 presidential election, she worked for Fusion GPS — the firm hired by Democratic nominee Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to perform political opposition research,” the journalist said.

That kind of research is often used by political campaigns against their opponents, and is not by itself off limits. But Judicial Watch uncovered 339 emails which reveal that Nellie Ohr likely crossed the line by using her marriage as a political tool, and sending pages of anti-Trump research directly to official Department of Justice email accounts.

“They clearly show that Ohr sent reams of open-source intelligence to her husband, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and on some occasions to at least three DOJ prosecutors: Lisa Holtyn, Ivana Nizich and Joseph Wheatley,” Solomon said.

“Such overt political content flowing into the email accounts of a DOJ charged with the nonpartisan mission of prosecuting crimes is jarring enough. It raises additional questions about potential conflicts of interest when it is being injected by a spouse working as a Democratic contractor trying to defeat Trump,” he continued.

But the scandal is deeper than just emails. Nellie and Bruce Ohr apparently had key roles in pushing the debunked Trump dossier and the false narrative that the future president was colluding with Russia.

“For instance, just 24 days after the anti-Trump screed was emailed, both Ohrs met in Washington with British intelligence operative Christopher Steele,” Solomon said. “She said she learned that Steele had concerns that he hoped the DOJ or FBI would investigate, with help from her husband.”

And that appears to be exactly what happened.

“The next day, Bruce Ohr used his official DOJ position to go to then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe with Steele’s allegations (later to become known as the Steele dossier), and the bureau opened its first investigation into Russia collusion,” he said.

There are obvious parallels to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI officials who were also having an affair all while texting back and forth about how Trump should be stopped. More and more, it looks like partisan politics and anti-Trump collaboration was widespread within agencies which are supposed to be unbiased.

That is the real scandal here: Not that liberals tried to uncover dirt on a candidate, but that official government personnel within our own government eagerly participated in the partisan witch hunt.

It looks like there was collusion, but not by Trump.

Instead, the real collusion took place between Obama-era government officials and activists who saw nothing as off limits in order to install Hillary Clinton as president — and that should alarm every American, no matter their party.

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Benjamin Arie
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Benjamin Arie is an independent journalist and writer. He has personally covered everything ranging from local crime to the U.S. president as a reporter in Michigan, before focusing on national politics. Ben frequently travels to Latin America and has spent years living in Mexico. Follow Benjamin on Facebook

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Rigged for Democrats? Voters Purged from Rolls Will Get Ballots Counted Anyway


Reported By Kara Pendleton | November 1, 2018 at 2:21pm

One of the wonderful things about the United States is the right to vote. Because people move and die, voter rolls need to be purged from time to time to help keep things honest and accurate. In some places, to help with this, voters who haven’t been to the polls in a number of years will be purged from the voter rolls. But a federal court ruling just made that more difficult.

According to The Associated Press, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court on Wednesday ordered election officials in the crucial swing state of Ohio to accept provisional ballots from those purged from the voting rolls between 2011 and 2015 if they show up to cast a ballot for this year’s midterms — either as part of early voting or on Election Day itself.

The voters were purged only after failing to vote for six years, and failing to respond to a notice informing them they would be taken off the rolls for inactivity if they didn’t answer.

However, the AP reported, the appeals court agreed with advocacy groups challenging the purge on the grounds that the letters informing voters about it “were too vague on letting recipients know the consequences of not responding.”

According to the Washington Examiner, “the ruling will allow provisional ballots submitted by voters purged from the rolls between 2011 and 2015 to be taken into account in the state’s early voting — as long as they still live in the same county of their last registration and have not been disqualified from voting due to felony conviction, mental incapacity, or death.”

It’s nice to know death is still a disqualifier from voting. Still, the ruling means that, despite the fact they had made no effort to respond to the letter or vote in six years, voters who were purged from the rolls now can vote anyway. Rules don’t matter. It might not come as a surprise to know that, according to the Washington Examiner, the groups challenging the purge included liberal outfits like the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the progressive “public policy organization” Demos.

With that kind of context, it’s not hard to guess which party is likely to benefit the most from low-information, low-engagement voters suddenly deciding to take an interest in the political life of their country. The ruling is a win for Democrats.

In essence, the liberals’ appeal was pushing the narrative that voters who were purged lacked the intelligence to understand the letters that were sent out or to inquire about them. This is the same kind of argument liberals have pushed about voter ID laws: That some groups are too low-I.Q. to know how to do what everyone else does, which is to get identification to function in modern American society.

So what is the big deal if purged voters can now vote? Tom Fitton, president of legal watchdog group Judicial Watch weighed in on the other aspect of the Ohio process that the 6th Circuit’s ruling did approve of — the basic principle that voter rolls need to be purged for accuracy.

His statement answers that question.

“Great news: another federal court turned aside a leftist attempt to dirty up the voting rolls and undermine clean elections,” Fitton stated. “Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections.

“We will keep pushing in the courts to make sure other states take reasonable steps to make sure the names of dead people and people who have moved away are removed from election rolls. After comparing national census data to voter roll information, Judicial Watch estimates that there are 3.5 million more names on state voter rolls than there are citizens of voting age.”

Even though the court ruled that the purge itself was not the problem, you’d never know that based on a statement from the Demos, which claimed Ohio voters who were purged from the rolls had been “unlawfully disenfranchised.”

So if voting in prior elections, a rule that has been upheld as constitutional, suddenly doesn’t matter, and if failing to respond to a notice that states you may be removed from the voting rolls if you don’t vote or respond also doesn’t matter, what exactly is the criterion for voters in the mind of Democrats? Breathing? Apparently, following the rules everyone else can follow isn’t a requirement.

The elephant in the room, of course, is that the left fighting this hard to get around the rules may indicate a belief on their part that the voters who were purged would vote Democrat. By getting those ballots accepted regardless of the rules, this ruling opens the door for the kind of “dirty election” the voter purge rules were meant to prevent.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kara Pendleton
Contributor, Commentary
Specializing in news, politics and human interest stories, Kara Pendleton has been a professional writer and author since 2002. One of her proudest professional moments was landing an interview that even mainstream media couldn’t get.

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Perverse House Dem Threatens Trump. Says It’s Illegal for Trump to Stop Illegals by Hurting Home Countries


Reported By Lisa Payne-Naeger | October 23, 2018 at 3:32pm

This is one of the best examples of the left’s seriously messed up set of priorities you may ever see, and probably one of the best reasons anyone would need to vote Republican in the November elections. 

Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel of New York’s 16th Congressional District has really gone out on a limb to help the left shake things up before Election Day.

The president has said he would cut off foreign aid to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras if they aided or failed to curtail the caravan of illegal migrants headed toward the United States.

Engel apparently believes the commander in chief lacks the authority to make that decision and has vowed to rally the liberal troops in Congress to stop him.

According to Engel, “Trump lacks the authority to make those decisions unilaterally due to a law called the Impoundment Control Act,” reported The Washington Examiner.

“Fortunately, Congress — not the president — has the power of the purse, and my colleagues and I will not stand idly by as this administration ignores congressional intent,” Engel said, according to the Examiner.

Meanwhile, the caravan keeps moving north:

It’s true that the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse. But it’s also true that the same Constitution makes the president in charge of American foreign policy. Democrats like Engel can preen about their pretend fidelity to the Constitution (which is a joke for that party) and if they win either the House or the Senate or both, they can make the next two years of Trump’s first term complicated.

But Trump has made it clear that he is making American aid contingent on the cooperation of foreign governments in controlling the flow of illegal immigration. It might take a Supreme Court ruling to decide the issue, but in the meantime, American voters are getting a clearer picture of Democrat priorities:

Democrats not only don’t want to stop illegal immigration into the United States, they want to keep pouring American taxpayer money into the very countries that are the source of the illegal immigration problem.

Let’s see how popular that polls.

Trump, meanwhile, is concerned with stopping terrorists and criminals from entering the U.S.

He tweeted:

Among the duties of the president is to protect our national security. Clearly the president is focused on that. However, it doesn’t appear Engel has the same priorities. And do we really have to remind Engel and the rest of the left that potential terrorists do enter the U.S. from our southern border?

In September, the conservative watchdog grouop Judicial Watch reported:

“Yet another group of migrants from a terrorist nation managed to infiltrate the United States through Mexico this week. Thankfully, the Border Patrol apprehended them, though it’s becoming a crisis largely ignored by the mainstream media. The men are from Bangladesh, a south Asian Islamic country that’s well known as a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS). Earlier this year Judicial Watch reported on the epidemic of Bangladeshi nationals getting smuggled into the country via the porous southern border, especially through Texas, which is where this week’s group got nabbed.”

Engel has a twisted view of how to secure our borders and stop illegal immigration, if he’s even concerned with stopping it at all. His solution is to keep dumping taxpayer money into already troubled areas.

According to the Examiner, Engel said: “El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala are plagued by violence and poverty. The best way to keep Central Americans from migrating to the United States is to continue investing in their communities so that they are not forced to make the dangerous trek north. Yet again, President Trump’s policy toward Latin America will only make things worse.”

Sure, because bribing Central American governments by “investing” American taxpayer dollars in more foreign aid to be squandered has worked out so well in the past.

It’s interesting to note that Engel is unopposed in his re-election bid in November, according to USA Today. While he may not be worried about losing his seat in 2018, he’s certainly doing a fine job of exposing the Democratic Party’s real position on national security when it comes to illegal immigration.

It’s a sad day when the safety of the American people takes a back seat to politics. But it’s a good day when American voters get the information they need just before a crucial midterm election.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Lisa Payne-Naeger
Contributor, Commentary
An enthusiastic grassroots Tea Party activist, Lisa Payne-Naeger has spent the better part of the last decade lobbying for educational and family issues in her state legislature, and as a keyboard warrior hoping to help along the revolution that empowers the people to retake control of their, out-of-control, government.

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Emails: Huma Abedin Intervened To Help Clinton Foundation Donor With Dispute Over Multimillionaire’s Will


waving flagAuthored by Chuck Ross, Reporter,  09/01/2016

URL of the original posting site: http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/01/emails-abedin-intervened-to-help-clinton-foundation-donor-with-dispute-over-will/#ixzz4J3e9JN9F

Former President Bill Clinton (L) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (C) watch their daughter and Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation Chelsea Clinton. (Reuters/Samantha Sais) / Reuters

Former President Bill Clinton (L) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (C) watch their daughter and Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation Chelsea Clinton. (Reuters/Samantha Sais) / Reuters

Newly released emails show that a Clinton Foundation adviser asked one of Hillary Clinton’s top State Department aides to provide “‘air’ support” for a Clinton Foundation donor who sought to set up a meeting with the U.S. ambassador to Panama to help with a legal dispute.

Emails released on Thursday by Judicial Watch show that Clinton Foundation adviser Doug Band forwarded an email to Hillary Clinton deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin from Christopher Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, a conservative online publication.

Despite his ideological bent, Ruddy has been a supporter of the Clintons. Through Newsmax, he has donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, the organization’s website shows.

In the Aug. 17, 2009 email, Ruddy asked Band to put Otto Reich, a former Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administration official, in touch with Barbara Stephenson, who then served as U.S. ambassador to Panama.

Ruddy appears to have wanted Reich to get in touch with Stephenson to discuss a legal battle brewing in Panama over the estate of Wilson Lucom, a multimillionaire who had died in 2006.

Lucom was the founder of the conservative watchdog group, Accuracy in Media, and a friend of Ruddy’s. Ruddy was a co-executor of Lucom’s estate before being replaced by Lucom’s attorney after his death.

To help settle the affair, Ruddy leaned on his Clinton Foundation connections to ask the State Department to intervene.

“Otto Reich is arriving in Panama tonight on the matter I discussed,” Ruddy wrote to Band.

He said that Reich had reached out to Stephenson earlier that week but had not heard back from her.

“Any ‘air’ support you can give for this meeting would be helpful,” Ruddy wrote.

Abedin moved to help Band fulfill Ruddy’s request, noting that the staffers who would normally handle such matters were out on vacation but that she would have a “junior”-level official help out.

“I can ask someone junior to deal with this?” she asked in the email, which was sent from her personal account.

“Sure,” replied Band, who has worked for the Clintons in multiple overlapping roles. He once worked as Bill Clinton’s “body man.” He now runs Teneo Strategies, a consulting firm which has paid Clinton millions as an honorary chairman.

It is unclear why Reich was involved in the matter. But he does have experience in Central American affairs. He served as ambassador to Venezuela in the first Bush’s administration and operates a firm called Otto Reich & Associates, an international lobbying and consultancy firm.

Reich was recently listed as an adviser to The Langley Intelligence Group Network (LIGNET), a Washington, D.C.-based intelligence and forecasting service operated by Ruddy.

One document from 2014 lists Reich as a member of LIGNET’s advisory board. Reich appears to have started commenting for interviews conducted through LIGNET in 2011. Ruddy’s and Reich’s relationship prior to that is unclear.

Band followed up on his request to Abedin in a Sept. 3 email.

“Need to follow up on that chris ruddy panama request and just have him connect with someone,” he wrote.

“Let me check in,” Abedin replied.

The next day, Roberta Jacobson, the deputy assistant secretary for the bureau of western hemisphere affairs, responded to Ruddy.

“Your inquiry about the Lucom case has been passed to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs here at State. I apologize for not getting you a response on our position last evening, but we will get back to you as soon as possible today,” wrote Jacobson.

Ruddy forwarded that response to Band who in turn sent it to Abedin.

The new Judicial Watch release comes on the heels of a string of explosive emails that the watchdog group released last month showing possible pay-to-play involving Abedin and Band.

One email shows Band asking Abedin to help him put Nigerian-Lebanese billionaire Gilbert Chagoury in touch with someone working on Lebanese issues at the State Department. Chagoury has donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. He also partnered with the Clinton Global Initiative on a $1 billion project in 2009. (RELATED: Clinton Foundation Official Asked Huma Abedin For Favors For Donors, Associates)

Chagoury is a controversial figure. His business success is in large part due to his relationship in the mid-1990s with Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. Chagoury attended a White House holiday party in December 1996 after he donated $460,000 to a liberal voter registration group.

He was convicted by a Swiss court in 2000 for laundering money on behalf of Abacha.

He was also denied a visa to visit the U.S. last year because he has helped finance a Lebanese organization allied with Hezbollah, the terrorist group.

Other emails released last month show that Band asked Abedin in a June 23, 2009 email to help set up a meeting for Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the crown prince of Bahrain. (RELATED: Bahrain’s Prince Got Audience With Clinton After Donating $32 Million To Her Foundation)

The meeting eventually took place.

More bombshells are likely to surface in Abedin’s emails. The State Department has only started releasing the emails she sent from her personal email accounts. Abedin worked for Clinton at State from Jan. 2009 through Feb. 2013, when Clinton stepped down. (RELATED: Many More Huma Abedin Email Bombshells Likely To Come)

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State Department to release all of Clinton’s deleted emails


waving flagBy Julian Hattem – 08/16/16

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The State Department will release all of the work-related emails that the FBI recovered from Hillary Clinton private system, the department confirmed in a recent court filing, eliminating the possibility that the messages will remain secret.or a liar

However, it remains unsettled whether the full set of emails will be out before the presidential election on Nov. 8.

The thousands of messages will be released to Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that has filed numerous legal complaints over the former secretary of State’s email setup while in office, the department said. Judicial Watch, which routinely releases documents it obtains via open-records lawsuits, is expected to make the emails public.

“State has voluntarily agreed to produce non-exempt agency records responsive to plaintiff’s [Freedom of Information Act] request,” the department said in a short filing on Friday.

The State Department has declined to set a timeline for releasing the emails, and a court conference to discuss the matter has been scheduled for Aug. 22. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has urged the department to release the emails before the November elections.

The State Department had been expected to release the emails, which are the subject of multiple open-records lawsuits, but the new confirmation assures that the full docket of emails will be handed over. The lawsuit seeks “any and all emails sent or received” by Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, while she served as the nation’s top diplomat.

“The American people will now see more of the emails Hillary Clinton tried to hide from them,” Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch’s president, said in a statement. “Simply put, our lawsuits have unraveled Hillary Clinton’s email cover-up.”

In 2014, Clinton gave the State Department roughly 30,000 emails from her private server, which she claimed were work-related. Another similar batch of emails was purely personal, she claimed at the time, and was deleted. However, the FBI managed to recover some of those deleted emails during the course of its yearlong investigation into Clinton’s system and discovered “several thousand” that were work-related and ought to have been handed over to the State Department for record-keeping purposes. Three of those emails contained information that was classified, FBI Director James Comey told reporters last month.

The FBI finished transferring those messages back to the State Department this month.

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Read the Absurd Presentation the U.S. Army is Pushing About “White Privilege”


waving flagWritten by Philip Hodges, Mar 9, 2016

URL of the original posting site: http://constitution.com/read-the-absurd-presentation-the-u-s-army-is-pushing-about-white-privilege

Propaganda Alert

Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Judicial Watch obtained training materials used by the U.S. Army in teaching soldiers about white privilege, as well as male, heterosexual privilege. The documents pertained to an Equal Opportunity briefing on April 2, 2015, to the 67th Signal Battalion at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Here are some of the topics covered using a PowerPoint presentation in the briefing at Fort Gordon, reported by Judicial Watch:

  • Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because of the groupsDeath of a nation they belong to, rather than because of anything they’ve done or failed to do.
  • Privilege has become one of those loaded words we need to reclaim so that we can use it to name and illuminate the truth
  • Race privilege gives whites little reason to pay a lot of attention to African Americans or to how white privilege affects them. “To be white in American [sic] means not having to think about it” [Quotation not attributed]
  • Our society attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual regardless of your social class. [Emphasis added]
  • Imagine a school or a workplace where all kinds of people feel comfortable showing up. [sic] valued, accepted, supported, appreciated, respected, belonging. [sic] Something very powerful keeps this from us.
  • The truth of this powerful forces [sic] is everywhere, but we don’t know how to talk about it and so we act as though it doesn’t exist
  • The trouble we’re in privileges [sic] some groups at the expense of others.
  • It creates a yawning divide in levels of income, wealth, dignity, safety, health and quality of life.
  • It promotes fear, suspicion, discrimination, harassment, and violence.
  • Consider the “black woman” in Africa who has not experienced white racism and does not identify herself as a “black woman”.  African, a woman, but not black.
  • She only became “black” when she came to the U.S. where privilege is organized according to race, where she is assigned to a social category that bears that name and she is treated differently as a result. [Emphasis added]
  • The trouble we’re in can’t be solved unless the “privileged” make the problem of privilege their problem and do something about it.
  • The fact that it’s so easy for me and other people in dominant groups not to do this is the single most powerful barrier to change.Alinsky affect

A few years ago, Judicial Watch had obtained a 133-page document used by the U.S. Air Force, which included a “student guide” to extremist groups and hate groups. According to the student guide, “Nowadays, instead of dressing in sheets or publically espousing hate messages, many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.”of domenstic terrorist

Regarding “extremist ideologies,” the document listed two historical examples: one, “the colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule”; and two, “the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states.”

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New Clinton Email Shows Pentagon Had Forces Ready To Respond To Benghazi Attack


waving flagWritten by Mark Tapscott, 12/08/2015

URL of the original posting site: http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/08/new-clinton-email-shows-pentagon-had-forces-ready-during-benghazi-attack/#ixzz3tm9wiM7A

hillary-prison-or-potus

American military forces were available for a rescue operation not long after the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, came under attack by terrorists Sept. 11, 2012, according to an email to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest aides.

The Sept. 11, 2012, email was sent at 7:19 p.m. EST by then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash. The text reads:

“I just tried you on the phone but you were all in with S [an apparent reference to Clinton]

“Assuming Principals agree to deploy these elements, we will ask State to procure the approval from host nation. Please advise how you wish to convey that approval to us [REDACTED].”

Among the recipients of Bash’s email are Jacob Sullivan, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, and Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides.

The first assault on the U.S. facility’s main compound began at approximately 9:40 pm Libya time, which was 3:40 p.m. EDT in Washington, DC.  The second attack on a related CIA annex 1.2 miles away began three hours later, at about 12 am local time the following morning or 6 p.m. EST.

Judicial Watch, the non-profit government watchdog, obtained the email from the Department of State after suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act in September 2014.

A spokesman for the House Select Committee on Benghazi told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the panel is dealing with an un-redacted version of the Bash email in its upcoming final report.

“The Select Committee has obtained and reviewed tens of thousands of documents in the course of its thorough, fact-centered investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attacks, and this information will be detailed in the final report the Committee hopes to release within the next few months,” said Matt Wolking, the panel’s spokesman.

“While the Committee does not rush to release or comment on every document it uncovers, I can confirm that we obtained the unredacted version of this email last year, in addition to Jake Sullivan’s response. This email chain helped inform the committee’s interview of Sullivan in September, and will help inform the Committee’s upcoming interviews with Thomas Nides and others,” Wolking told The DCNF.

Release of the Bash email is certain to reignite debate about why the U.S. failed to respond militarily to the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Forces Committee in 2013 that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”Bull

Judicial Watch points to congressional testimony by Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission for the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, who says the four Americans might have been saved “if we had been able to scramble a fighter or aircraft or two over Benghazi as quickly as possible after the attack commenced, I believe there would not have been a mortar attack on the annex in the morning because I believe the Libyans would have split. They would have been scared to death that we would have gotten a laser on them and killed them.”

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FBI Seizes Four State Department Servers in Clinton Email Probe


waving flagBY:  October 7, 2015

URL of the original posting site: http://freebeacon.com/politics/fbi-seizes-four-state-department-servers-in-clinton-email

Hillary Rodham Clinton

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The four servers, which were located at the State Department’s headquarters building, were seized by the FBI several weeks ago. They are being checked by technical forensic analysts charged with determining how Top Secret material was sent to Clinton’s private email by State Department aides during her tenure as secretary from 2009 to 2013, said two people familiar with the probe. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because it is an ongoing investigation.

State Department spokesman John Kirby referred questions about the computer servers to the FBI. An FBI spokeswoman, Carol Cratty, declined to comment. No other details about the servers, including whether they are part of the department’s classified system, or used for unclassified information networks, could be learned. A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not respond to an email request for comment.

Clinton has offered varying explanations for her use of a private email server, initially claiming she had done nothing wrong. Then, under pressure from critics, she said she was sorry people were confused by the practice, later admitting in early September that her use of a private email system had been a mistake.

The State Department uses two separate networks, one for classified information and one for unclassified information. The two networks are kept separate for security reasons. Most classified networks are equipped with audit systems that allow security managers to check who has accessed intelligence or foreign policy secrets.

The FBI is trying to determine the origin of the highly classified information that was found in Clinton emails. However, the task is said to be complicated because those with authority to create classified information have broad authority to label information in one of three categories: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret.

The FBI is primarily concerned with trying to determine how Top Secret information made its way on to the private server.

Chris Farrell, an investigator with the public interest legal group Judicial Watch, said the State Department has been reluctant to describe the nature of its computer networks as some of the 16 Freedom of Information Act lawsuits the group has filed make their way through the courts.

Farrell said in an interview that the department also has been unwilling to say whether the private email system, used by Clinton and close aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, should be considered an official State Department network covered by FOIA laws.

Farrell said the seizure of the four State Department servers is likely part of the forensic investigation underway by the FBI into hardware used by Clinton and her aides to send email to the private server.

“In the midst of what I believe to be a forensic examination of the hardware that [Clinton lawyer David] Kendall surrendered on behalf of Mrs. Clinton, any serious national security investigation would seek to track all emails inbound and outbound,” Farrell said. “If they are doing that tracking of email since she was secretary of state, then they would be looking at any email that could have crossed into a State server.”

The servers were part of the State Department bureau of information resource management. The bureau helps the department “to successfully carry out its foreign policy mission by applying modern IT tools, approaches, systems, and information products.”

In addition to improving efforts of “transparent, interconnected diplomacy,” the bureau is “focused on enhancing security for the department’s computer and communications systems.”

The FBI probe of State Department servers is the latest disclosure on the criminal investigation into the private Clinton email server that has embroiled the leading Democratic presidential candidate for several months. The FBI took possession of Clinton’s private email server last summer after classified information was found in some of the more than 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department. The investigation began after I. Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general, reported to Congress Aug. 11 that Clinton’s private emails included some highly classified information labeled “Top Secret//SI/TK//Noforn.” Information classified at that level is deemed by the government to be very sensitive, requiring strong security protections because its compromise would cause grave damage to U.S. national security.

The politics surrounding the probe prompted FBI Director James Comey to tell reporters last week that the bureau will not be influenced by politics. “One of the main reasons I have a 10-year term is to make sure that this organization stays outside of politics, and if you know my folks, you know that they don’t give a whit about politics,” Comey said, adding that the FBI has devoted sufficient resources and personnel so that the Clinton email probe can be completed in a timely way. Those remarks were the first official confirmation of the investigation.

The State Department contacted Clinton’s lawyer, David E. Kendall, seeking additional emails that were not part of the more than 30,000 emails provided to the department earlier, the Washington Times reported on Tuesday.

The private email server was discovered by the legal public interest group Judicial Watch in late 2014 after the State Department informed the group that it had discovered a new tranche of records. Judicial Watch currently has at least 16 lawsuits related to State Department and other government records.nThe email server material then became the focus of House investigators looking into Clinton’s handling of the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012.

The House investigation of the Benghazi attack was attacked by Clinton this week after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), the frontrunner to be the next House speaker, said the Benghazi probe was part of a political effort to diminish Clinton’s presidential prospects. Clinton seized on the comments in a New Hampshire town hall meeting this week.

Asked if she would have investigated a member of a Republican administration amid charges of improperly using a personal email account and server, Clinton said, “I would never have done that.”Lies Lies and More Lies

“Look at the situation they chose to exploit to go after me for political reasons, the death of four Americans in Benghazi,” she continued.hillary-prison-or-potus

In a sign of increasing worries about the probe at the Clinton campaign, the New York Post reported that an unidentified legal aide to Clinton has advised her to hire a criminal defense lawyer.

The number of communications regarded as classified is about 400, according to the latest State Department release of emails. Three of the new emails released last month were marked secret, including emails relating to Iranian nuclear talks. Security analysts have voiced concerns that foreign hackers may have breached the private email server.

One theory is that Clinton aides who were cleared for access to national security secrets first read classified reports on State Department information system and then “gisted” the material into private emails for Clinton. Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told the New York Times that none of the candidate’s aides had mishandled classified information. “She and her team took the handling of classified information very seriously, and at home and abroad she communicated with others via secure phone, cable, and in meetings in secure settings,” Merrill said.

The State Department has confirmed to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) in a related development that Clinton currently holds a security clearance for Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information, the highest-level security clearance. The department said Clinton’s clearance was “revalidated” after she left office in 2013 and was done so as part of a standard practice allowing former high-ranking officials to be granted access to secrets.

Critics in Congress have called for Clinton’s clearance to be revoked based on the compromises involved in her use of the private email system.

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State Department Asked Hillary to Delete Classified Benghazi E-mail


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By Joel Gehrke — September 17, 2015

URL of the original posting site: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424217/state-department-hillary-clinton-delete-benghazi-email
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A top State Department official instructed Hillary Clinton to permanently delete a classified e-mail related to the Benghazi terrorist attack, but her lawyer refused because a congressional investigation into her use of a private e-mail server was already underway.

In a May 22 letter to Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy notified the Clinton team that a November 8, 2012 e-mail about a “report of arrests — possible Benghazi connection” was deemed classified and should be deleted. “Once you have made the electronic copy of the documents for the Department, please locate any electronic copies of the above-referenced classified document in your possession,” wrote Kennedy, who served under Clinton at the State Department. “If you locate any electronic copies, please delete them. Additionally, once you have done that, please empty your ‘Deleted Items’ folder.”Partyof Deceit Spin and Lies

Alinsky affectJudicial Watch, the conservative watchdog group that released the correspondence, said that the order to delete the e-mail smacks of a cover-up. “Why on Earth would John Kerry’s State Department tell Mrs. Clinton to delete classified Benghazi records before finding out where and how this material had been disclosed?” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That the State Department asked Clinton’s lawyer to destroy federal records shows a level of disdain for the rule of law that goes beyond the pale.”

In any event, Kendall declined Kennedy’s entreaty, citing requests from two inspectors general and the House panel investigating the Benghazi attacks that he preserve the records. “I therefore do not believe it would be prudent to delete, as you request, the above-referenced e-mail from the master copies or the PST file that we are preserving,” he wrote to Kennedy. “Once the document preservation requests referenced above expire, we will proceed to make the requested deletions.”

— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.

 

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Newly recovered Lois Lerner email shows IRS tried to cover up tea party targeting


waving flagBy Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Tuesday, July 28, 2015

URL of the original posting site: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/28/new-irs-lerner-emails-show-block-congress-scrutiny

lerner-obama-lost-emails-300x204The IRS sent one of its intrusive scrutiny letters to a nonprofit group in order to throw up a smokescreen and prevent the group from complaining to Congress about poor treatment, according to one of Lois G. Lerner’s apparently lost emails, which were recovered by auditors and released by an interest group Tuesday.

Judicial Watch, which sued to force the production of the Lerner emails, said the emails confirm that Ms. Lerner, the central figure in the targeting probe, and her colleagues were aware of the sensitive nature of the cases but appeared to hide details of the massive backlog they were amassing as they held up hundreds of tea party and conservative group applications for nonprofit status.

Obamas IRS GestapoThe IRS turned over 906 pages of emails July 15 to Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm, ahead of a Wednesday court hearing. Judicial Watch concluded that the emails were part of the messages Ms. Lerner lost in a computer malfunction, and released them Tuesday. “This material shows that the IRS’ cover-up began years ago,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “We now have smoking-gun proof that top officials in the Obama IRS unlawfully harassed taxpayers just to keep them from complaining to Congress about IRS’ targeting and abuse. No wonder the Obama IRS has had such little interest in preserving or finding Lois Lerner’s emails.”

The Lerner emails have become almost as big a scandal as the initial targeting. Ms. Lerner, who was head of the division that scrutinized the tea party applications until she retired while under investigation in 2013, suffered a computer hard drive crash that cost potentially thousands of emails that should have been part of the record. The IRS took routine steps to try to recover the emails but reported that it was unable to do so.IRS-corruption

But the agency’s independent inspector general said it was able to find the messages easily on backup tapes stored at remote locations — and that the IRS never bothered to look for those tapes, even as it was telling Congress that all possible routes for message recovery had been exhausted.

According to the new emails, Ms. Lerner and her colleagues were aware of the growing outcry among nonprofit groups that they were being delayed. In one Nov. 3, 2011, exchange between Ms. Lerner and Cindy Thomas, a program manager in the Cincinnati office that was handling the cases and was involved in a back-and-forth with Washington, the IRS admitted to having hundreds of cases stacked up and awaiting action. Afraid of congressional pressure, Ms. Thomas ordered one of the inquiry letters to be sent, just to prevent one of the organizations being held up from complaining. “Just today, I instructed one of my managers to get an additional information letter out to one of these organizations — if nothing else to buy time so he didn’t contact his Congressional Office,” she wrote in the email released by Judicial Watch. Ms. Thomas said she feared a judge would get involved soon and order the IRS to move the applications more quickly.Hold Lois Lerner in Contempt.

That email exchange did confirm that IRS employees in Washington were deeply involved in making decisions about the nonprofit groups’ cases. The IRS initially blamed the Cincinnati office for the glitch.

President Obama last week blamed the targeting scandal not on poor management but on “crummy” legislation he said Congress passed that gave his employees confusing instructions, and on funding cuts. He said the IRS wasn’t able to do its best work as a result. “Congress has passed a crummy law that didn’t give people guidance in terms of what they were trying to do. They did it poorly and stupidly,” Mr. Obama told “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart.culture of deciet

A number of the 906 pages of emails released to Judicial Watch are redacted, with the agency citing the “b5” exemption under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows the government to withhold information deemed to be part of the agency deliberative process. The IRS claimed other pages that were withheld contained sensitive taxpayer information — including what appear to be published news articles.

On Monday, Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform called Mr. Obama to oust Ms. Lerner’s successor, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, for obstructing the targeting investigation.

Chairman Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, said Mr. Koskinen gave assurances that the IRS would save email that was key to the investigation at the same time the emails were being destroyed. “The reality is what he said was false. He repeatedly made false statements,” Mr. Chaffetz said at a Capitol Hill press conference, where he was joined by more than a dozen fellow Republicans from the committee. “Mr. Koskinen should no longer be the IRS commissioner,” said Mr. Chaffetz. “Mr. Koskinen failed in his duty to preserve and produce documentation to this committee.”

The IRS defended Mr. Koskinen. “The record is clear that the IRS and Commissioner Koskinen have been cooperative and truthful with the numerous investigations underway. The agency has produced more than one million pages of documents in support of the investigations, provided 52 current and former employees for interviews and participated in more than 30 Congressional hearings on these issues,” the agency said in a statement.Party of Deciet and lies

The IRS inspector general has concluded that the agency did in fact target conservative and tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny, and the Justice Department is still conducting a criminal investigation into the targeting.

Mr. Chaffetz noted that 24,000 potential emails were destroyed after the materials were under subpoena and after the agency’s chief technology officer issued a preservation notice ordering employees not to destroy anything. The chief technology officer later told the committee that he was “blown away” that backup tapes were destroyed 10 months after his preservation notice.

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Judicial Watch: Federal Court Issues Ruling Compelling IRS to Provide Answers on Lerner IRS Emails


waving flagJUNE 08, 2015

tyrants(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced that Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted a Judicial Watch request to issue an order requiring the IRS to provide answers by June 12, 2015, on the status of the Lois Lerner emails the IRS had previously declared lost.  Judicial Watch raised questions about the IRS’ handling of the missing emails issue in a court filing on June 2, 2015, demanding answers about Lois Lerner’s emails, which had been recovered from backup tapes.  Judge Sullivan issued the court order on June 4, 2015.

Judicial Watch has argued that the IRS misled the court and Judicial Watch by withholding the truth about the existence and content of the backup tapes.  In response to Judicial Watch’s litigation and pressure from Congress, some of Lerner’s emails had been recovered by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) despite testimony from the IRS Commissioner and representations to Judge Sullivan that Lerner’s emails had been irretrievably lost and destroyed. In its June 2 filing, Judicial Watch detailed:

Because the emails recovered from the backup tapes are responsive to [Judicial Watch’s] FOIA request, [Judicial Watch] respectfully requests that the Court order the IRS to submit to the Court a report by June 12, 2015 addressing the status of the emails recovered by TIGTA.  The report should include:

(a) clarification as to whether all emails that have been recovered by TIGTA have now been turned over to the IRS for review and processing in response to Plaintiff’s request, the volume of those emails, and the time frame in which the IRS anticipates completing its review and production of responsive emails, and

(b) clarification as to whether the processing is complete for all 1,268 backup tapes to determine what emails are recoverable, and if not, when the processing is expected to be complete.obama-and-IRS

Two days after Judicial Watch’s filing, Judge Sullivan issued the following order:

The IRS is directed to respond to [Judicial Watch’s] notice by no later than June 12, 2015.

Judicial Watch is seeking Lerner’s emails as part of its Freedom of Information litigation over the Obama IRS’s targeting  conservative political groups and citizens in the months leading up to President Obama’s reelection bid in 2012 (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:13-cv-01559))

On February 26, 2015, TIGTA officials testified to House Government Oversight and Reform Committee that the oversight agency had received 744 backup tapes containing emails sent and received by Lerner. These tapes had been obtained one day after TIGTA requested that the IRS provide any backup tapes that contained records from Lerner’s email account. The IRS subsequently produced 424 additional backup tapes in February 2015. More than 32,000 emails from Lerner’s account were recovered from the initial 744 tapes; Judicial Watch is still seeking information regarding the contents of the additional 424 tapes.

Judicial Watch outlined the continuing IRS cover-up to Judge Sullivan:

The aforementioned testimony is uncontested that the recovered emails are from the email accounts of IRS officials, including Ms. Lerner, and cover the time period of (Judicial Watch’s) request. The testimony also is unequivocal that the IRS reported publicly that any backup tapes had been recycled and were no longer available without asking its technicians whether the tapes existed. [TIGTA Deputy Inspector General] Camus also testified that hard drives previously reported by the IRS to have been destroyed had not, in fact, been destroyed.Obamas IRS Gestapo

However, the IRS has yet to provide answers to Judicial Watch regarding the content of tapes it turned over to TIGTA, specifically “whether the emails are from all or only a subset of the 1,268 backup tapes located since July 1, 2014,” or whether additional emails remain to be recovered.

As the Obama State Department has argued with respect with Hillary Clinton’s hidden emails, the IRS has now argued that Lerner’s emails are no longer “IRS” records and it has no legal obligation to request them:

Agency counsel responded that the IRS is under no obligation to request copies of the emails recovered by TIGTA because they are allegedly not agency records. The IRS’s position is extraordinary considering that, not only are the backup tapes and emails obviously IRS records, but the Court went to great lengths to address the issue of the “missing” emails, including holding a status conference, ordering a meet and confer before a magistrate judge, and ordering the IRS to submit multiple declarations about its efforts to recover or locate the emails.Obama's IRS Gestapo

“The Obama IRS obstructed and lied to a federal judge and Judicial Watch in an effort to hide the truth about Lois Lerner’s emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The IRS, including its top political appointees IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and General Counsel William J. Wilkins, has much to answer for over its contempt of court and of Congress.  And the Department of Justice officials enabling this cover-up in court need to be held accountable, as well.  The IRS is out of control and Judicial Watch is happy that Judge Sullivan has taken this key step to remind the agency that it is accountable to the rule of law and the American people.”Party of Deciet and lies  freedom combo 2

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JW Gets Map of Military Fleet Positions During Benghazi Attack


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http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/02/jw-gets-map-of-military-fleet-positions-during-benghazi-attack/

February 12, 2014

The U.S. military had a multitude of forces in the region surrounding Libya when terrorists attacked the Special Mission in Benghazi and murdered four Americans, according to an unclassified Navy map obtained by Judicial Watch this week.

The map features the Navy fleet positions in the North Africa Area of Responsibility (AOR) on September 11, 2012, the day Islamic jihadists raided the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the first diplomat to be killed overseas in decades, and three other Americans were murdered in the violent ambush.

Dozens of vessels were stationed in the region on that day, including two aircraft carriers (Dwight D. Eisenhower and Enterprise), four amphibious ships, 13 destroyers, three cruisers and more than a dozen other smaller Navy boats as well as a command ship. Carriers are warships, the powerhouse of the naval fleet with a full-length flight deck for aircraft operations. During the Benghazi attack, two carriers were based to the east in the Arabian Sea, the Navy map shows.

Two amphibious assault ships (Iwo Jima and Gunston Hill) were situated to the east in the Gulf of Oman and one (New York) was in the Gulf of Aden, the map shows. A fourth (Fort McHenry) was located on the west side of the African continent in the Atlantic Ocean. Amphibious ships resemble small aircraft carriers and have air-craft strips for vertical and short take-offs and landings. The destroyers are scattered throughout the region, but the closest appear to be four (Cole, Forrest Sherman, Jason Dunham and Aboon) in the Mediterranean Sea north of Libya. The rest of the fleet includes cruisers, minesweepers, patrols and a command ship.

The map was provided to Judicial Watch by retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Randall R. Schmidt, who is investigating how the military responded to the Benghazi attack. Schmidt flew jet fighters during his active duty and says there’s no reason the military could not have efficiently responded in Benghazi. Schmidt got the map after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Navy asking it to identify the location of all its assets in the region on September 11, 2012.

In a letter attached to the map, the Navy writes that the Iwo Jima was the closest large amphibious ship to Benghazi on that day, but fails to mention the exact distance. The letter does mention that the USS Enterprise, the aircraft carrier that appears on the map to be the closest to Libya, was located approximately 3,350 nautical miles from Benghazi. “Assuming a 20 knot transit speed and no Suez Canal delays, the transit would take approximately 168 hours or seven days,” the Navy says in the letter to Schmidt. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower “would require additional transit time from its position in the Arabian Gulf,” the letter further states.

“Destroyers could have responded to the attack,” Schmidt said adding that the military also has “rapid reaction forces” in the region as well as “armed predators.” Air craft could have also been deployed, according to Schmidt, but the Department of Defense (DOD) has refused his requests for records involving the air fleet on that day. “The point is there were enough forces to respond,” Schmidt says.

Coincidentally, a congressional report released this week explores the DOD reaction to the attack. Published by the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, the report says that the military’s response was “severely degraded because of the location and readiness posture of U.S. forces…” The panel also attributes the weak military response to a “lack of clarity about how the terrorist action was unfolding.”

Nevertheless the committee blasts military commanders for not taking “all possible steps to prepare for a more extended operation.” It also chastises White House officials for ignoring the “dramatically deteriorating security situation in Libya and the growing threat to U.S. interests in the region.” As a result U.S. personnel in Benghazi were woefully vulnerable because the Obama administration didn’t “direct a change in military force posture,” the new report states.

Judicial Watch has been a leader in investigating the Benghazi terrorist attack and has published two in-depth reports on the deadly raid. Read them here and here. JW has a number of pending lawsuits and public-records requests related to the incident and it was JW that obtained the first photos depicting the devastating aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. diplomatic and CIA facilities in Benghazi as well as details of the inexperienced foreign company hired to protect the American compound. The State Department paid the virtually unknown British firm $794,264 for nearly 50,000 guard hours, according to the records obtained in the course of JW’s ongoing Benghazi probe.

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