The war on the rule of law; the Deep State

[DougMacG]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/16/judge-finds-obama-amnesty-unconstitutional/

Looking for a more serious source's coverage of this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/16/district-court-declares-obama-immigration-action-unconstitutional/

[G M]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/16/judge-finds-obama-amnesty-unconstitutional/

Looking for a more serious source's coverage of this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/16/district-court-declares-obama-immigration-action-unconstitutional/

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/16/federal-judge-obamas-executive-amnesty-is-unconstitutional/comment-page-1/#comments

[objectivist1]

Senators Vow to Halt Obama’s Castro Odyssey

Posted By Matthew Vadum On December 19, 2014

Lawmakers opposed to President Obama’s sudden move to cozy up to Communist Cuba are vowing a full-court press to prevent official diplomatic recognition of the tropical prison republic from going forward.

But it is far from clear if lawmakers will be able to do much about Obama’s Cuban escapades. Presidents typically enjoy great latitude in foreign policy, especially concerning recognition of foreign governments. Lawmakers are probably on stronger ground in resisting repeal of the trade embargo that has been in place since the 1960s. On the other hand, Obama has a pen and a phone, as he likes to say, a reference to his brazen contempt for the rule of law and the strictures of the Constitution.

Obama’s dramatic actions are setting off a feeding frenzy as American companies salivate at the prospect of doing business in Cuba. Little do they realize that Cuba, a dilapidated Stalinist state that, thanks to the absence of good paying jobs, serves largely as a seedy sex tourism destination for Europeans and hardly has an economy at all. Some business restrictions were already eased by the U.S. around 2000. Some companies are allowed to sell medical equipment to the Cuban government. There is not much money to be made, at least not initially.

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who are both of Cuban ancestry, have made strong statements about their intentions.

Rubio said it mattered not a whit to him if “99 percent of people in polls” disagreed with his position. “Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naivete during his final two years in office.”

Rubio said he reserved the right “to do everything within the rules of the Senate to prevent that sort of individual from ever even coming up for a vote,” a reference to confirmation proceedings for a prospective U.S. ambassador to Cuba.

Menendez said he was “deeply disappointed” and that it was “a fallacy to believe that Cuba will reform because an American president opens his hands and the Castro brothers will suddenly unclench their fists.”

The chill in relations between the two countries has its roots in the Cold War.

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose forces overthrew the comparatively mild authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista, tried to start a nuclear war with the United States and in 1963 openly called for the assassination of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, the U.S. attorney general. War was only narrowly averted after the Soviet Union turned around ships that were carrying nuclear weapons to Cuba. A short time later one of Castro’s followers, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Cuba is a longtime state sponsor of terrorism and has meddled militarily and otherwise in the affairs of its neighbors and in faraway countries such as Angola. President Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada after its Marxist dictatorship grew too close to Cuba and he struggled heroically to aid the anticommunist contras in their war against the Cuban-backed Communist regime in Nicaragua.

Many conservatives in Congress and elsewhere are saying Obama is a weak leader.

For example, former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said on the Fox News Channel on Wednesday that Obama’s moves on Cuba constitute “appeasement” and are a “very, very bad signal of weakness and lack of resolve by the president of the United States.”

Bolton and others are correct in terms of how the U.S. is perceived abroad under Obama but this does not reflect weak leadership on Obama’s part. This president knows what he is doing and when given the opportunity to do the right thing reliably chooses to do the wrong thing. Obama is taking the country’s foreign policy in exactly the right direction in terms of his sinister ideology. Obama does not mean well. He does not, unlike traditional U.S. presidents, think of himself as the leader of the free world. He wants to fundamentally transform America inside and out and is quite content to enfeeble the nation by crippling its military, betraying its allies, and embracing its enemies.

All of this excitement follows the sudden release Wednesday of Alan Gross, a U.S. development worker held in a Cuban prison. (An intelligence operative loyal to the U.S. was also released as part of the deal. Details about that individual are scarce.) Gross is a garden-variety leftist who is being used by President Obama to justify establishing diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba.

Obama is repaying a debt to his Marxist friends and allies. Just as President Bill Clinton rewarded his neo-communist supporters by pardoning Marxist Puerto Rican terrorists, Obama is rewarding his Castro-admiring base by freeing Communist spies working for a hostile foreign power.

Gross was reportedly a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is frequently a home for meddling left-wing activists. He reportedly worked on a program aimed at improving Internet access for Cuban Jews. Why the Obama administration would knowingly send an American into Cuba to perform services they had to have known were considered illegal by Cuban authorities is not clear. The free flow of information is a threat to any totalitarian regime, so a Cuban court convicted Gross of crimes against the state in 2011, sentencing him to a 15-year prison term.

Under a deal that Pope Francis, among others, helped to facilitate, Gross was exchanged for the remaining three members of the so-called Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino — who had been held in U.S. prisons.  All five Cuban nationals were convicted of spying in 2001. They gathered information on Cuban exiles in the U.S. in order to lay the ground for violent action against them in the future. Hernández was also convicted of conspiring to commit murder.

As Gross prepared for his press conference Wednesday, there was a portrait of  Communist mass murderer Che Guevara clearly visible in the Washington, D.C. office of Gross’s lawyer, high-profile attorney Scott D. Gilbert of Gilbert LLP. The bloodthirsty Guevara was minister of industry and president of the Cuban National Bank. He also administered kangaroo courts that condemned enemies of Fidel Castro’s regime to death. In other words, as Gross prepared his statement about being freed from a Cuban jail, an iconic photograph honoring Cuba’s most infamous jailer stared down at him.

Guevara, incidentally, wanted to annihilate the United States.

“If the nuclear missiles [from the missile crisis] had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City,” he said. “The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”

In the press conference Gross maligned the U.S., pulling a cowardly pox-on-both-your-houses stunt. Gross drew a moral equivalency between the U.S. and the ruthless authoritarian regime he just escaped:

I also feel compelled to share with you my utmost respect for and fondness of the people of Cuba. In no way are they responsible for the ordeal to which my family and I have been subjected. To me cubanos, or at least most of them, are incredibly kind, generous and talented. It pains me to see them treated so unjustly as a consequence of two governments’ mutually belligerent policies.  Five and a half decades of history show us such belligerence inhibits better judgment. Two wrongs never make a right. I truly hope that we can now get beyond these mutually belligerent policies and I was very happy to hear what the president had to say today. It was particularly cool to be sitting next to the secretary of state as he was hearing about his job description for the next couple of months. In all seriousness, this is a game-changer, which I fully support. [Emphasis added.]

Who condemns his own countrymen as imperialist warmongers after they cut a deal to get him repatriated from the clutches of a dictatorship? And why would he use his opportunity in the spotlight to praise President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with the regime that he believes unjustly imprisoned him?

The whole thing doesn’t smell right. Clearly it was in the works for a long time.

Interestingly enough, Gross thanked Jill Zuckman of left-wing PR firm SKDKnickerbocker for helping to free him. SKDKnickerbocker also employs former resident Maoist in the Obama White House, Anita Dunn, and Democrat operative Hilary Rosen. Gross also thanked Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Communist-friendly lawmakers Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) for freeing him.

Those who follow President Obama’s policy initiatives already know that he delights in trading Americans who hate America for foreign terrorists and murderers who also hate America. Not so long ago there was the swap of U.S Army deserter and Taliban collaborator Bowe Bergdahl for five members of the Taliban’s high command.  Not exactly a good deal for America.

What’s next for Obama, who is hellbent to knock America down a few pegs?

Diplomatic recognition for Iran? At first glance such a development might seem unlikely, but Obama does harbor deep affection for hardline Islamic states. He aided Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and during anti-government unrest that began in Iran in 2009, Obama effectively propped up the Islamist regime there by doing nothing to oppose it.

Anything could happen with Obama in his final two years in the White House.

[Crafty_Dog]

Obj:  That would go better on the Cuba thread I'm thinking , , ,

Doug, GM:  Thanks for the follow up.  It would appear that though the judge is correct, his words are but dicta on a question not truly before him.

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/12/21/4745/?singlepage=true

[DDF]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/12/21/4745/?singlepage=true

Good read. There is a fundamental issue one key point of it though. No one will ever get everyone to "stand in awe" and to fear the armed forces. That just won't happen. Mexico is a wonderful example in that. It's certainly made an impression on me.

[G M]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/21/rolling-stone-university-of-virginia-rape-story-sp/

[DougMacG]

"Every society has some people who don't respect the law. But, when it is the people in charge of the law — like the President of the United States and his Attorney General — who don't respect it, that is when we are in big trouble."  - Thomas Sowell  12/30/2104
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell123014.php3#etijXTP4TP8HK3XJ.99

[Crafty_Dog]

While the following article does not acknowledge the relevant alternative points, there is much here worth considering:

http://conservativetribune.com/obama-crime-of-the-century/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.ijreview.com/2015/01/237540-arrest-record-nbc-news-star-shows-double-standard-celebrity-gun-owners/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=organic&utm_content=conservativedaily&utm_campaign=Guns

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/29/senate-gop-to-obama-turn-over-communications-irs/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/29/federal-judge-blasts-doj-lawyers-in-case-fast-furious-whistleblower/?intcmp=latestnews

Federal judge blasts DOJ lawyers in case of ATF whistle-blower
William La Jeunesse

By William La Jeunesse, Maxim Lott
Published January 29, 2015
FoxNews.com


Jay Dobyns is suing the Department of Justice, claiming it retaliated against him and damaged his reputation after he blew the whistle on the ATF's treatment of agents. (Fox Business News)

A federal judge angrily accused Justice Department attorneys in newly unsealed documents of "fraud upon the court" by intimidating a witness in a case involving a former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who alleges the agency trashed his reputation.

Judge Francis Allegra, who was appointed to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in 1998 by President Bill Clinton, is presiding over a suit brought by former ATF agent Jay Dobyns against the government agency, which he claims retaliated against him and damaged his reputation. Dobyns infiltrated Hell's Angels and worked on cases involving the Aryan Brotherhood and MS-13 during his law enforcement career.

, In a newly unsealed, Dec. 1, 2014, court ruling that legal experts said was highly unusual, Allegra accused seven Justice Department lawyers of "fraud upon the court, banned them from making any further filings in the case and took the unusual step of directly notifying Attorney General Eric Holder.

“In 40 years of legal practice, government and private, I've never seen that done,” said David Hardy, a constitutional law expert who formerly worked in the U.S. Solicitor General’s Office.

    " ... a federal judge is basically questioning your candor with your court -- it’s exceedingly serious.”

    - Thomas Dupree, former DOJ official

Allegra said the government attorneys may have intimidated a witness and charged that seven of them may have kept illegal behavior secret from the court.

The controversy began after someone burned down the home of Dobyns. Dobyns claimed the ATF failed to protect his family, but the agency claimed Dobyns burned down his own home, a charge he denied. Dobyns then sued the ATF in U.S. Federal Claims Court for damaging his reputation and retaliation.

That’s when Justice Department lawyers got involved. In the ruling from last month, Allegra found a key witness in the trial said he was threatened by another ATF agent – and that ATF lawyers told the threatened agent not to tell the judge about it.

US Court of Federal Claims Judge Francis Allegra basted Justice Department lawyers in a recently unsealed ruling made last month.

“[ATF lawyers] ordered the agent in question not to communicate the threat to the court and stated that there would be repercussions if the agent did not follow counsel’s instructions,” Judge Allegra said in his ruling.

The judge also noted that a tape recording indicates that multiple DOJ lawyers knew about misconduct and did not inform the judge.

“It’s a huge issue. Look, a lawyer’s stock and trade is his or her integrity, and to have a situation where a federal judge is basically questioning your candor with your court -- it’s exceedingly serious,” Thomas Dupree, a partner at the prestigious law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and a former DOJ official from 2007 to 2009, told FoxNews.com.

Allegra’s ruling also documents other alleged wrongdoing. When Tom Atteberry, new ATF Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office, tried to reopen Dobyns’ arson case, Justice Department attorney Valerie Baker told him not to because it would damage her defense against Dobyns. Atteberry was a witnesses in the case, but the judge didn't hear about the DOJ effort to silence him until trial. Allegra ruled that the DOJ action may amount to ‘fraud upon the court.”

“It's very, very serious,” said Dupree. “Judges don’t make allegations like this cavalierly. It's only after they have looked at the evidence and they have deep concerns that something that is not quite right. This is not by any means a run-of-the-mill, routine order.”

Last summer, Judge Allegra awarded Dobyns $173,000 in damages and rebuked the ATF for failing to adequately protect Dobyns and his family. The Justice Department appealed that ruling, but in another highly unusual move, Allegra successfully had the case remanded to his court, so he can pursue the seven government lawyers for concealing evidence. Recently unsealed documents obtained by FoxNews.com show that the DOJ disagrees with Allegra’s decision to keep the lawyers out of his court.

“[The order] limits the attorney general’s authority to select counsel to represent the United States,” a legal filing by Acting Assistant Attorney General Joyce R. Branda from Jan. 5 reads.

She added: “We are prepared to move forward with the… proceedings at the Court’s convenience.”

Related Image
holder_ercch_020212.jpgExpand / Contract

The judge took the unusual step of writing Attorney General Eric Holder directly. (AP)

The judge also sent evidence of the alleged malpractice to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which initially opened an investigation. However, legal filings show that the agency soon suspended its investigation, saying it would wait to hear what Judge Allegra finds.

Dobyns’ lawyer said that seemed odd given that Judge Allegra had specifically asked DOJ to investigate.

“He asked OPR to investigate these matters,” James Reed, Dobyns’ attorney, told FoxNews.com. “In nearly a quarter-century practicing law I’ve never come close to seeing anything like this,” he said.

Others, such as former ATF agents, said they were not surprised given their experience with the agency.

“It is atrocious. If they can do this to a highly decorated federal agent, imagine what they can do to the average Joe,” said Vince Cefalu, a former agent who helped expose the Operation Fast and Furious scandal and who successfully sued the ATF for retaliating against him.

The ATF declined to comment on the case. Fox News also asked Attorney General Eric Holder if the lawyers involved had been disciplined. The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Blogger David Codrea, one of the first to discover the unsealed documents, said it shows “a pattern of institutional corruption and arrogance that gets its tone set from the top.”

Maxim Lott is a Fox News Channel producer and can be reached at maximlott.com or maxim.lott@foxnews.com

[G M]

Dobyns is a heroic guy, and the Conduct by the ATF is appalling.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.gopusa.com/news/2015/02/02/doj-dilemma-so-many-illegal-aliens-the-courts-cant-handle-them/

[G M]

http://www.gopusa.com/news/2015/02/02/doj-dilemma-so-many-illegal-aliens-the-courts-cant-handle-them/

Cloward-Piven the system.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02/02/obama-has-handed-out-millions-of-work-permits-to-people-not-authorized-to-work/

[G M]

http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/02/executive-amnesty-comes-with-a-tax-bonus-loophole/

[Crafty_Dog]

Bureaucrats Tampering with Choke Point Witnesses

Last month the U.S. Consumer Coalition revealed audio tapes proving what small business owners have been reporting for years: the Obama administration is throwing around threats of regulation to try to squeeze out of existence industries the bureaucrats don’t like.

As I wrote last month, in an Obama administration initiative known as “Operation Choke Point,” regulators from the CFPB, FDIC and the Justice Department collaborate to threaten banks, payment processors, and other financial institutions with regulatory consequences unless they cut off service to businesses in any of 30 industries on the administration’s target list.

That list, revealed in a 2011 document from the FDIC, includes gun and ammunition dealers, coin dealers, payday lenders, and sellers of “racist materials,” among other categories of perfectly legal (if not necessarily beloved) businesses. The result is that companies operating in these industries have found it increasingly difficult to do business, because the financial services they rely on for their day-to-day transactions are increasingly dropping them as clients.

Many of the banks and payment processors have told the people they’ve dropped that the decision didn’t reflect their behavior as clients. Instead, business owners have
reported, banks and payment processors say the feds are forcing them to drop clients in targeted industries.

In one typical notice, obtained by the Washington Post, a banker wrote a business that “based on your performance, there’s no way we shouldn’t be a credit provider. Our only issue is, and it has always been, the space in which you operate. It is the scrutiny that you, and now that we, are under.”

The USCC tapes, provided by Wisconsin firearms dealer Mike Schuetz, were even more explicit about the administration’s abuse. As Breitbart reports:

“[Federal] examiners…came in and looked at our accounts…looked at our books,” one official of Heritage Credit Union is heard telling Schuetz on one of the tapes. “Here’s some accounts that we feel that we’re going to regulate you on…and kinda put the screws to us as far as what we could and couldn’t do. The regulatory and compliance issues that we said earlier are true. We never used to have to do that stuff…and our hands are tied by it.”

Other audio recordings are equally chilling. “You wouldn’t believe the regulations we have and when they came in and nailed us on that [accounts] there were about a dozen of them crawling around the building,” a Heritage Credit Union official is heard on the tapes telling Schuetz.

This is pretty chilling behavior when you consider that these regulators are targeting small, legal businesses like Mike’s firearms dealership in Wisconsin.

And those bureaucrats evidently don’t appreciate their tactics being exposed so publicly. Following the disclosure of the tapes, the CFPB distributed a bulletin last week, telling financial services companies they aren’t allowed to talk to “third parties” about federal “supervisory” activities. The bulletin, which was obtained the by Daily Caller, states:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] issues this compliance bulletin as a reminder that, with limited exceptions, persons in possession of confidential information, including confidential supervisory information [CSI], may not disclose such information to third parties...

‘Confidential information’ means ‘confidential consumer complaint information, confidential investigative information, and confidential supervisory information, as well as any other CFPB information that may be exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act pursuant.

In other words, the feds are telling the banks and payment processors to shut up about Operation Choke Point. They don’t want them disclosing to businesses like Mike’s that federal regulators ordered the service terminations. So they’re offering a “reminder” that regulators “may not” release that information to “third parties”--the affected businesses.

This is a bureaucracy behaving more like the Soviet dictatorship than like a group of civil servants. The administration’s veiled threat is tantamount to witness tampering.
Operation Choke Point--and the bureaucratic attempt to cover up its existence--are a sobering reminder of the dangers of centralized power. It’s a genuine threat to freedom when federal bureaucrats have it in their power to ruin the lives and destroy the livelihoods of ordinary, law-abiding Americans.

Your Friend,
Newt

[Crafty_Dog]

http://conservativetribune.com/gowdy-drops-bombshell-coverup/

[DougMacG]

The most transparent administration ever.  Unite, not divide us.  Everyone deserves a fair shake under the law.  That is, unless you dare to disagree with us.

Wasn't mis-use of the IRS the straw that broke Nixon's back?  Good to see a non-conservative source pissed off over this.

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/232249-feds-wont-release-irs-targeting-documents

The Obama administration is refusing to publicly release more than 500 documents on the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups.

Twenty months after the IRS scandal broke, there are still many unanswered questions about who was spearheading the agency’s scrutiny of conservative-leaning organizations.

The Hill sought access to government documents that might provide a glimpse of the decision-making through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The Hill asked for 2013 emails and other correspondence between the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The request specifically sought emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner and Treasury officials, including Secretary Jack Lew, while the inspector general was working on its explosive May 2013 report that the IRS used “inappropriate criteria” to review the political activities of tax-exempt groups.

TIGTA opted not to release any of the 512 documents covered by the request...

[Crafty_Dog]

Obama Immigration Policy Halted by Federal Judge in Texas
A federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt, at least temporarily, to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, siding with Texas and 25 other states that filed a lawsuit opposing the initiatives.
In an order filed on Monday, the judge, Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, prohibited the Obama administration from carrying out programs the president announced in November that would offer protection from deportation and work permits to as many as five million undocumented immigrants. The first of those programs was scheduled to start receiving applications on Wednesday.
Judge Hanen, an outspoken critic of the administration on immigration policy, found that the states had satisfied the minimum legal requirements to bring their lawsuit. He said the Obama administration had failed to comply with basic administrative procedures for putting such a sweeping program into effect.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/us/obama-immigration-policy-halted-by-federal-judge-in-texas.html?emc=edit_na_20150217

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/02/chickens-come-home-to-roost-jeremiah-wrights-daughter-is-sent-to-prison/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/26/irs-watchdog-reveals-lois-lerner-missing-emails-no/?page=all

[Crafty_Dog]

http://bearingarms.com/atf-claims-publishing-mistake-m855-ban-2014-atf-regulations-guide-goes-viral/

[ccp]

I am not sure how I started receiving Hillsdale imprimis but it has great articles (of course I agree with the vast majority of them   

This could go under the immigration thread too.   

But we need not fear.   The elite Republicans are trying to elect a grown-up who will handle this.

http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/

[G M]

http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2015/04/05/liberals-may-regret-their-new-rules-n1980933/page/full

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/7/obama-motion-immediately-restart-amnesty-rejected-/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/10/eric-holder-tells-doj-employees-no-more-prostitutes/

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-rising-insurrection-against-obama/2015/04/03/d00e39f6-d94f-11e4-ba28-f2a685dc7f89_story.html

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/there-is-no-more-doubt-i-have-the-proof-that-ties-obama-and-the-democratic-party-to-the-irs-scandal/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%205-5-15%20Build-TUES

[G M]

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/050615-751347-us-shows-all-the-symptoms-of-a-civilization-in-collapse.htm?p=2

[Crafty_Dog]

 By
Kimberley A. Strassel
May 7, 2015 7:13 p.m. ET
199 COMMENTS

We’re about a year out from the uproar over Department of Veterans Affairs patient waiting lists, and a few months into a new VA scandal. The new scandal is that we don’t know what other scandals there are.

Congress is trying to find out, teeing up an unprecedented battle between the Senate and an investigator who in theory exists to help the Senate: the VA’s inspector general. At issue are thousands of pages of documents that may well reveal significant new areas of department dysfunction, but which the current acting inspector general is point-blank refusing to turn over to congressional overseers. The moment ought to be inspiring a debate over President Obama’s willful obstruction of rigorous IG oversight.

This saga begins in 2011, when the Veterans Affairs’ IG was alerted by members of Congress and whistleblowers to the potential of dangerous overprescription of opiates at the VA’s Tomah facility in Wisconsin. The IG’s office commenced a plodding, three-year investigation. Today’s acting IG, Richard J. Griffin (who took over in 2013), closed that investigation in March 2014, but he did not alert Congress to the fact or make the report public. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who runs the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, didn’t even find out about the existence of the report until this January, and only to discover it was a mere 11 pages and said claims of wrongdoing could not be substantiated.

This finding was mind-boggling given an account in January from the Center for Investigative Reporting showing that the number of Tomah opiate prescriptions had quintupled over eight years, despite fewer patients. Veterans refer to the facility as “Candyland.” Mr. Johnson at a field hearing in March heard from Marvin Simcakoski, whose 35-year-old son died of an overdose there in August 2014. The hearing revealed three additional deaths and included testimony by Tomah employees who had been fired after raising concerns about—or refusing to fill—narcotics prescriptions. One psychologist committed suicide after being terminated.

Even the VA was more critical of itself than was the IG. The department released its own internal investigation of Tomah in March, finding opiate prescription rates 2.5 times the national average, higher average doses, “unsafe clinical practices” and “patient harm” as the result of overprescription.

Mr. Johnson, determined to get to the bottom of Tomah, asked the IG in February to turn over its broader investigative file. The IG’s office has to this day refused to do so, initially (and belligerently) claiming Congress has no “legitimate oversight purpose” for the file, and throwing up all kinds of excuses about statutory bars (including privacy laws) to its release. This is all nonsense, given that inspectors general exist to aid Congress in oversight and that the laws in question therefore have express exemptions for disclosing information to legislators.

Then again, nondisclosure seems to be a habit with this IG office—ranging across years and different officials. USA Today reported in March that the office has conducted 140 health investigations since 2006 that had never been made public. Under growing pressure, the IG finally released them late last week, and the newspaper ran a follow-up noting that the cases ranged from “missed diagnoses” to “failures during surgery” to “misuse of funds” to “personnel issues” to yet more facilities that may be giving “questionable amounts or combinations of narcotics.” In many cases, said the newspaper, “the department’s chief watchdog trusted the VA to correct problems on its own.” Really?

The devotion to secrecy suggests a jarring problem in the entire culture of the Veterans Affairs’ IG office, one that is a little too cozy with the object of its investigative mandate. The whole point of an IG is to blow the whistle on executive-branch failings. Most inspectors general border on fanatic in their oversight, are big into transparency, and have strong working relationships with congressional investigators. By contrast, Mr. Johnson last week was forced to take the extraordinary (and potentially unprecedented) step of issuing a subpoena for IG documents.

The episode is also raising questions about whether President Obama perhaps likes it this way. Mr. Griffin has been the supposedly temporary acting IG at Veterans for more than two years, an uncertainty that may in itself be feeding into office problems. He’s still there because Mr. Obama has failed to appoint a permanent head. In March, all 16 members of Mr. Johnson’s committee—Republicans and Democrats—wrote to Mr. Obama noting that there were 10 IG vacancies, including for such not-so-minor posts as Interior, the CIA and Export-Import Bank. They noted that there were nominations pending for only two of the 10, and requested he move quickly to fill the rest.

Then again, if you are the president, wracked by scandals and mismanagement in your administration, it might be convenient to put IG nominations on the back burner. The conduct of the VA is one of those big scandals, and the cursory evidence suggests the department could still harbor a lot of secrets.

The next time Democrats complain that a GOP Senate isn’t acting on an Obama nomination, Republicans might point out the more important nominations that they are still waiting for.

Write to kim@wsj.com
Popular on WSJ



   

[Crafty_Dog]

Republicans Join Legal Fight Over Obama's Amnesty
By Dan Gilmore · May 12, 2015
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Congressional Republicans have thrown their weight against the Obama administration in the case deciding the legality of the executive branch’s executive actions on immigration. On Monday, 113 GOP lawmakers filed an amicus brief with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that Barack Obama violated Congress' constitutional role and disrupted the “delicate balance of powers.” The brief said Congress has the responsibility to decide an alien’s rights to be in this country — as clarified by the Supreme Court. Sure, when Congress is silent on an issue, the president can go ahead and do his or her part to fix the problem. But Congress already provided guidance on immigration. “Critically,” the brief reads, “Congress’s refusal to enact President Obama’s preferred policy is not ‘silence’; it represents the constitutional system working as intended. Congress has enacted extensive immigration laws — they are simply not enacted in the manner President Obama prefers. Differing policy preferences do not provide license to, as President Obama said, ‘change the law.’”

Republicans are confident that Judge Andrew Hanen will ultimately strike down Obama’s executive action. After all, the federal government has treated his orders with distain. Turns out, after Hanen ordered a stop to the implementation of Obama’s immigration plans, the government went ahead and continued implementing them anyway. This case may very well be a damning judgment on Obama’s power to execute executive orders. More…

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418575/conservative-group-uncovers-new-roots-irs-scandal-eliana-johnson

[Crafty_Dog]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/county-sheriff-has-used-stingray-over-300-times-with-no-warrant/

[G M]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/county-sheriff-has-used-stingray-over-300-times-with-no-warrant/

http://www.aele.org/law/2011all02/460FSupp2d448.pdf

The headline and article are not accurate.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/appeals-court-keeps-block-of-obama-immigration-plan-1432665888

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/09/obama-fisa-court-surveillance-phone-records

[Crafty_Dog]

June 15, 2015 7:16 p.m. ET
79 COMMENTS

For every angry taxpayer who wondered in 2008 how the government could take over one of the world’s largest insurance companies, a federal judge has now provided the answer: It couldn’t, at least not within the bounds of the law.

On Monday Judge Thomas Wheeler of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s seizure of a controlling stake in AIG during the financial crisis was “an illegal exaction under the Fifth Amendment.” The judge explains that the New York Fed, the Treasury and their outside counsel at the Davis Polk law firm “carefully orchestrated the AIG takeover so that shareholders would be excluded from the process. These entities avoided at all cost the opportunity for any shareholder vote.”

The Fed and its regional banks can lend in an emergency. But they lack the authority to seize ownership of private companies. Did government officials realize at the time that they were violating the Constitution? If so, they probably figured they could get away with it. In a Sept. 17, 2008 email, a Davis Polk lawyer wrote that “the [government] is on thin ice and they know it. But who’s going to challenge them on this ground?”

The man who did challenge them is former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg, who now leads Starr International, which brought the case on behalf of AIG shareholders. Monday’s decision is vindication for Mr. Greenberg, who has argued for years that AIG was treated much more harshly than the giant banks and was used as a vehicle to rescue those banks.

Judge Wheeler agrees. “Since most of the other financial institutions experiencing a liquidity crisis were counterparties to AIG transactions, the Government was able to minimize the ripple effect of an AIG failure by using AIG’s assets to make sure the counterparties were paid in full on these transactions,” he writes.

The feds charged AIG much more than it charged the banks to borrow money, and it demanded 79.9% ownership in AIG for the privilege. “With the exception of AIG, the Government has never demanded equity ownership from a borrower in the 75-year history of Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act,” he writes. The feds later sold the shares for a $22.7 billion profit.

This is all a significant rebuke to the main government actors at the time: Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, chief of the New York Fed Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Though Mr. Greenberg won the legal argument and a moral victory, he lost on his claim that AIG would have been better off in bankruptcy and thus should be compensated for the seizure. Judge Wheeler ruled that AIG shareholders would likely have been wiped out in a bankruptcy, so they can’t claim to have suffered harm. But the judge nonetheless adds that “a troubling feature of this outcome is that the Government is able to avoid any damages notwithstanding its plain violations of the Federal Reserve Act.”

Both sides are reviewing the decision and won’t say whether they plan to appeal, but the mixed verdict may be the best in a bad situation. Taxpayers will not be required to pay a damage amount that would be highly speculative. But the judicial branch of government has forcefully reminded the executive of its legal limits, even in a crisis.

Fed officials are upset that Congress wants to rein in their emergency and regulatory powers. Congress might have less cause to act if the Fed showed more respect for the law.

[G M]

http://m.thenation.com/article/208593-you-can-be-prosecuted-clearing-your-browser-history

Unless you are Hillary Clinton.

[objectivist1]

FBI Files Document Communism in Valerie Jarrett’s Family

JUNE 22, 2015

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.

Jarrett’s dad, pathologist and geneticist Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows. In 1950 Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage. Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students. After his discharge from the Army Medical Corps in 1955, Bowman moved to Iran to work, the FBI records show.

According to Bowman’s government file the Association of Internes and Medical Students is an organization that “has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line” and engages in un-American activities. Bowman was born in Washington D.C. and had deep ties to Chicago, where he often collaborated with fellow Communists. JW also obtained documents on Bowman from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) showing that the FBI was brought into investigate him for his membership in a group that “follows the communist party line.” The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett’s maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.

Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was also another big-time Chicago Communist, according to separate FBI files obtained by JW as part of a probe into the Jarrett family’s Communist ties. For a period of time Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would “disseminate the Communist Party line among…the middle class.”

It’s been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Jarrett and her family also had strong ties to Frank Marshal Davis, a big Obama mentor and Communist Party member with an extensive FBI file.

JW has exposed Valerie Jarrett’s many transgressions over the years, including her role in covering up a scandalous gun-running operation carried out by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Last fall JW obtained public records that show Jarrett was a key player in the effort to cover up that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress about the Fast and Furious, a disastrous experiment in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed guns from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels. Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of hundreds of weapons which have been used in an unknown number of crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

In 2008 JW got documents linking Valerie Jarrett, who also served as co-chairman of Obama’s presidential transition team, to a series of real estate scandals, including several housing projects operated by convicted felon and Obama fundraiser/friend Antoin “Tony” Rezko. According to the documents obtained from the Illinois Secretary of State, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago slum projects operated by Rezko.

[G M]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420406/john-roberts-decision-kevin-d-williamson

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/1/state-dept-admits-dozens-hillary-clintons-emails-c/

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/07/07/new-docs-reveal-doj-irs-and-fbi-colluding-to-prosecute-obama-opponents/#undefined

Depressing

[objectivist1]

But not at all surprising.  This President is a de facto dictator.  As Mark Levin has repeatedly pointed out, we are now completely unmoored from the Constitution.  The law is whatever this administration decides it is, since neither the Congress nor the courts are willing to oppose it.

[G M]

http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/09/contempt-for-the-law-americas-biggest-threat/

[G M]

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/police-officer-brags-about-circumventing-due-process-in-sexual-assault-cases/article/2567949

[G M]

http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2015/07/13/its-time-for-conservatives-to-play-by-the-new-rules-n2023689/page/full

Adapt.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421274/wisconsin-john-doe-investigations-halted-supreme-court?8EIXImfzJf1DU3tC.01

[Crafty_Dog]

 ENLARGE
Photo: Getty Images
July 16, 2015 6:55 p.m. ET
26 COMMENTS

Excerpts from the July 16 majority opinion by Justice Michael Gableman in Two Unnamed Petitioners v. Peterson and Schmitz, in which the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 4-2 against prosecutors pursuing a secret John Doe probe against conservative groups for violations of campaign-finance law. A related editorial appears nearby:

According to the special prosecutor, the purpose of the John Doe investigation is to root out allegedly illegal campaign coordination between certain issue advocacy groups and a candidate for elective office. To further the investigation, the special prosecutor sought, and received, wide-ranging subpoenas and search warrants for 29 organizations and individuals, seeking millions of documents that had been created over a period of several years. Various targets (collectively “the Unnamed Movants”) moved the John Doe judge to quash the subpoenas and search warrants and to return any property seized by the special prosecutor. . . .

The breadth of the documents gathered pursuant to subpoenas and seized pursuant to search warrants is amazing. Millions of documents, both in digital and paper copy, were subpoenaed and/or seized. Deputies seized business papers, computer equipment, phones, and other devices, while their targets were restrained under police supervision and denied the ability to contact their attorneys. The special prosecutor obtained virtually every document possessed by the Unnamed Movants relating to every aspect of their lives, both personal and professional, over a five-year span (from 2009 to 2013). Such documents were subpoenaed and/or seized without regard to content or relevance to the alleged violations of Ch. 11. As part of this dragnet, the special prosecutor also had seized wholly irrelevant information, such as retirement income statements, personal financial account information, personal letters, and family photos. . . .

The special prosecutor alleges that the Unnamed Movants engaged in illegally coordinated issue advocacy. However, the basis for his theory has evolved over the course of the various legal challenges to his investigation, and he appears unable to decide just how the Unnamed Movants have broken the law.

Today, the special prosecutor alleges two theories of illegal coordination: (1) that the coordination between the Unnamed Movants is so extensive that the supposedly independent groups became subcommittees for the candidate’s campaign under Wis. Stat. § 11.10(4); and (2) that the coordinated issue advocacy amounts to an in-kind contribution under Wis. Admin. Code § GAB 1.20. The special prosecutor’s theories, if adopted as law, would require an individual to surrender his political rights to the government and retain campaign finance attorneys before discussing salient political issues. . . .

The lack of clarity in Ch. 11, which the special prosecutor relies upon, leads us to the unsettling conclusion that it is left to government bureaucrats and/or individual prosecutors to determine how much coordination between campaign committees and independent groups is “too much” coordination. In essence, under his theory, every candidate, in every campaign in which an issue advocacy group participates, would get their own John Doe proceeding and their own special prosecutor to determine the extent of any coordination. This is not, and cannot, be the law in a democracy. . . .

It is utterly clear that the special prosecutor has employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing. In other words, the special prosecutor was the instigator of a “perfect storm” of wrongs that was visited upon the innocent Unnamed Movants and those who dared to associate with them. It is fortunate, indeed, for every other citizen of this great State who is interested in the protection of fundamental liberties that the special prosecutor chose as his targets innocent citizens who had both the will and the means to fight the unlimited resources of an unjust prosecution. Further, these brave individuals played a crucial role in presenting this court with an opportunity to re-endorse its commitment to upholding the fundamental right of each and every citizen to engage in lawful political activity and to do so free from the fear of the tyrannical retribution of arbitrary or capricious governmental prosecution. Let one point be clear: our conclusion today ends this unconstitutional John Doe investigation.