As Katie wrote earlier, the President Obama's Department of Justice secretly monitored the e-mails, phone calls and even physical movements of Fox News reporter James Rosen, even going so far as to suggest that Rosen broke the law.
Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker posted the full 44-page search warrant that details the allegations against both James Rosen former State Department employee Stephne Jin-Woo Kim. It's chilling - perhaps none more so than page 26, which details the innocuous relationship between Rosen and Kim:
Particularly part (b) here, where the Justice Department somehow sees malice in a reporter "employing flattery and playing to Mr. Kim's vanity and ego." In other words, any investigative reporter who plays nice with a potential source might be subject to getting their records searched by the Department of Justice.
Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit wrote of top Democrats getting fed up with Eric Holder's scandal-plagued Department of Justice:
[S]capegoating Holder for Obama’s anti-leak practices might help liberal O-bots resolve the cognitive dissonance between their idealized view of the Unicorn Prince as a champion of good government and the unpleasant daily reality. Blame Holder, boot him out, and then they can gaze once again at O as the fantasy president they wished he was.
Press Secretary Jay Carney had nothing to say in today's White House press briefing, refusing to answer any question that he deemed even tangentially related to these new allegations of the Department of Justice that were brought to light. It's been his standard practice when dealing with scandal, but today's was a stunning display of obfuscation. The daily press briefings are becoming must-watch affairs, with even the mainstream media increasingly fed up with the Obama Administration.
The Associated Press' summary led with "Obama budget cuts deficits by $1.1 trillion" but, as Nick Gillespie points out, delving down into the actual numbers yields some worrying results. The short-term deficit is larger than the CBO's baseline, and the long-term budget only cuts the deficit relative to the baseline by - you guessed it - massive tax hikes.
Chiefly because of spending increases his budget proposes, Obama's fiscal plan would make next year's deficit $115 billion higher than the $560 billion shortfall that the budget office estimates for 2014 without the president's policies. Republicans criticized that and contrasted the $542 billion deficit Obama's budget would leave in 2023 with the spending plan approved by the GOP-run House, which relies on deep spending cuts to achieve balance by that year.The congressional report said to achieve his $1.1 trillion in savings over the next decade, Obama relies on $974 billion in higher revenue and $172 billion in spending cuts. That is nearly a 6-1 ratio.
Obama's major revenue-raising proposals include limiting some deductions and exclusions for some higher-earning taxpayers, raising $493 billion over the decade; boosting tobacco taxes by $83 billion; and raising estate and gift taxes by $77 billion, the budget office said.
Moreover, the largest spending cut in President Obama's budget comes from winding down overseas contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A quirk of the federal budget causes the CBO to assume that OCOs would never cease. So President Obama uses the over $600 billion in budget "savings" from winding down overseas wars and puts it towards more spending programs. In total, as the AP reported, there's $172 billion in spending cuts - which means that most of that war draw-down "savings" are put towards more spending.
President Obama's budget is pretty typical for what we know about his economic philosophy. He's a Keynesian, which means the short-term deficit reduction makes sense. He also doesn't think that America's long-term entitlement problems are actually problems that need addressing - so his failure to address them, and then allow budget deficits and debt to rise in the medium- and long-term, also makes sense. While you may have read that President Obama's budget gets the deficit under control, it's mostly a one-time occasion that is predicated by an economic recovery and President Obama's tax hikes.
More information seeps out, and the "official" story changes again. Knock me over with a feather:
Even MSNBC can't fully turn a blind eye to how things seem to keep "evolving" in the briefing room these days. So we're clear, Carney's new version of events is that top-level White House officials knew about the Inspector General's investigation into the IRS for some time, but chose not to inform the president about it. He claims that President Obama's chief of staff, top lawyer, and Treasury Secretary all knew this political megabomb was about to detonate, but decided their boss didn't need to know about it. I'm...struggling to believe that, but at least it's spawned an amusing Twitter hashtag, #WhatArentTheyTellingObama. Just to keep the "who knew what?" inquiries straight, there are two basic questions pertaining to White House knowledge of the IRS scandal that remain unresolved, both of which have inched closer to the president's door in recent days. The first involves when Team Obama -- within the administration or at the campaign -- first knew about the practice of IRS targeting. Carney and the president were both a bit cagey on this point last week, then numerous media outlets reported on Friday that high-ranking administration officials at Treasury found out about the targeting scheme in June of 2012. That would be roughly six months before the election, in case that wasn't clear. Did Treasury brass fail to impart that knowledge to anyone else? Really? The second question is when, specifically, the president himself knew about the Inspector General's report (and therefore, the scandal).
Obama has intimated that his first whiff of the entire scandal came in the form of media reports two Fridays ago. Even if Obama wasn't aware of the scheme before the election (I'm not fully convinced of this), doesn't it seem suspicious that virtually everyone around him did know about the impending IG findings, yet he was scrupulously frozen out of the loop? Carney acknowledged that Obama has repeatedly met with in-the-know subordinates over the last month, insisting that none of them breathed a word about it (and for or another interesting wrinkle about Obama's appointment schedule and the IRS scandal, read this). If that's the case, it looks like the White House has been working awfully hard to insulate the president from some real nastiness -- which begs the question posed in the above hashtag. Cloistered aloofness doesn't look great on any president; it's possible that the White House has concluded it's still the least damaging posture for him to adopt.
You decide. Jeffrey Lord, at the American Spectator, examined White House visitor logs and found a very interesting fact:
In short: the very day after the president of the quite publicly anti-Tea Party labor union — the union for IRS employees — met with President Obama, the manager of the IRS “Determinations Unit Program agreed” to open a “Sensitive Case report on the Tea party cases.” As stated by the IG report.
Coincidence? It would be interesting to know, with the union president who visited President Obama -- Colleen Kelly -- under oath. Read the whole story here.
Earlier today the Washington Post reported that Fox News' James Rosen had been secretly monitored by the Department of Justice. DOJ monitored his work and personal emails, read his work and personal emails, monitored his phones, monitored his movements and even named him as a criminal conspirator. Now, we know Rosen wasn't the only Fox News reporter targeted. Reporter William LaJeunesse, who extensively covered Operation Fast and Furious and national-security senior producer Mike Levine.
Fox News executive Michael Clemente is vowing to stand by reporters and slammed the administration for their intimidation tactics and assault on the First Amendment.
“We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter. In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney refused to comment on the secret monitoring of Fox News reporters and continued to say President Obama believes in a balance between free speech and national security during his press briefing Monday.
"I can't address an ongoing criminal investigation," Carney said. "The president believes strongly in the need for reporters to pursue investigative journalism."
The Department of Justice is justifying its actions and saying the Department followed the law and all regulations in relation to tapping communications of the press.
Monday the Department of Justice Inspector General [IG] confirmed what Townhall and other media outlets have been reporting for more than a year now: DOJ officials smeared Fast and Furious whistleblower and ATF Agent John Dodson. As a reminder, Dodson was the first whistleblower to expose Operation Fast and Furious. He revealed the operation's connection to the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on to CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson on March 3, 2011.
The IG report confirms that former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke, who has a long personal and professional relationship with now Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, in fact leaked information to smear Dodson after he went to Congress and CBS to reveal ATF, under direction of DOJ, had illegally trafficked thousands of AK-47 style rifles to Mexican cartels operating in Mexico. Two of those weapons were found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on December 15, 2010 in the Arizona. Before resigning in August 2011, Burke admitted to leaking information.
From the report:
We also concluded that Burke’s disclosure of the Dodson memorandum to Levine was likely motivated by a desire to undermine Dodson’s public criticisms of Operation Fast and Furious. Although Burke denied to congressional investigators that he had any retaliatory motive for his actions, we found substantial evidence to the contrary.
In sum, we found that Burke violated Department policy when he provided the Dodson memorandum to Fox News reporter Levine without Department approval, and that his explanations for why he did not believe his actions were improper were not credible. We believe this misconduct to be particularly egregious because of Burke’s apparent effort to undermine the credibility of Dodson’s significant public disclosures about the failures in Operation Fast and Furious.
We found Burke’s conduct in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to be inappropriate for a Department employee and wholly unbefitting a U.S. Attorney. We are referring to OPR our finding that Burke violated Department policy in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to a member of the media for a determination of whether Burke’s conduct violated the Rules of Professional Conduct for the state bars in which Burke is a member.
In the report, Burke described Dodson's decisions to speak with Congress and CBS about Fast and Furious, "Unbelievable."
As a refresher, Burke served as Janet Napolitano's chief of staff during her time as Arizona governor (for seven years), served as Napolitano's Homeland Security advisor until September 2009 (when Fast and Furious started), was appointed by President Obama as U.S. Attorney in Arizona in September 2009 and served on Attorney General Eric Holder's Attorney General's Advisor Board until his resignation in August 2011.
Attorney General Eric Holder "relied heavily" on Burke for advice.
Attorney General Eric Holder today announced the appointment of nine new U.S. Attorneys to serve two-year terms on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys (AGAC). The new appointees include: U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara; U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona Dennis Burke; U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington Jenny Durkan; U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Paul J. Fishman; U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Patrick J. Fitzgerald; U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Neil H. MacBride; U.S. Attorney for the District of Rhode Island Peter F. Neronha; U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama Joyce White Vance; and Acting U.S. Attorney, ex officio, for the District of Columbia Channing D. Phillips. John S. Davis, Criminal Chief for the Eastern District of Virginia, was also appointed to the committee to represent the voice of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys in the field.
"This is a critical and exciting time for the Department of Justice and I will rely heavily on these U.S. Attorneys as we work to further the Department’s efforts to reduce violent crime and gang violence, promote civil rights, ensure fairness in the marketplace and above all, preserve our national security," said Attorney General Holder.
You may have seen Heather's piece on this story yesterday, but it merits a second spin. The White House and the vast bureaucracy of the federal government are laboring through a fundamental crisis of credibility. Scandals swirl. The powerful Internal Revenue Service has been caught abusing its power to target and harass the ruling party's opposition. The Department of Justice has launched an unprecedented affront against press freedom. The Department of State manipulated intelligence about a terrorist attack to mask their negligence and stave off political blame. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is unethically (and possibly illegally) coercing the industry over which she wields sweeping regulatory authority. And against that backdrop of power and partisanship run amok, the Senate Majority Leader is reportedly preparing to kneecap long-standing, bipartisan rights of the minority party -- and he's doing so with the president's blessing. Impeccable timing:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is increasingly focused on the month of July as the time to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” and revisit filibuster reform, and he has privately told top advisers that he’s all but certain to take action if the Senate GOP blocks three upcoming key nominations, a senior Senate Democratic aide familiar with his thinking tells me. Reid has privately consulted with President Obama on the need to revisit filibuster reform, and the President has told the Majority Leader that he will support the exercising of the nuclear option if Reid opts for it, the aide says, adding that senior Democrats expect the President to publicly push for it as well. “If Senator Reid decides to do something on nominations, the president has said he’ll be there to support him,” the aide says. Reid is eyeing a change to the rules that would do away with the 60-vote threshold on all judicial and executive branch nominations, the aide says, on the theory that this is a good way to immediately break an important logjam in Washington — without changing the rules when it comes to legislation.
Both Obama and Reid objected strenuously to this exact idea when Republicans proposed it in 2005, natch, as did pretty much every Democrat within shouting distance of a microphone:
The Bush-era "nuclear" Senate stand-off was defused by the 'Gang of 14,' which remains intact today -- on judicial nominations, at least. Republicans have only mounted filibusters against a tiny handful of the president's most radical judge selections. Democrats are also looking to wipe out filibusters against executive appointments, as the GOP has stifled a number of extreme nominees Obama has put forward to groups like the NRLB. The White House sought to circumvent Congress on this score by making a series of "recess" appointments while Congress was...not in recess. In doing so, they undercut a practice Democrats pioneered to thwart would-be Bush recess appointments. Several federal courts have since dealt legal blows to these non-recess "recess" gambit,s which may explain Reid's new-found sense of urgency. I reached out to Mitch McConnell's office for comment, but they declined to wade into this until they get a better handle on whether they're dealing with a real threat or more bluster from Reid. One thing is very clear, based on multiple discussions with senior Republican Senate aides: Given how poisonous the political climate already is, a move by Democrats to change the Senate rules would push the chamber into full partisan meltdown.
By now you know the IRS has been targeting conservative groups, but one group in particular has been put through hell by the Department of Justice. I've written about True the Vote's efforts to promote fair and clean elections free of voter fraud for more than a year now. The group is based in Houston, Texas and headed by President and Founder Catherine Engelbrecht. True the Vote strongly supports voter identifications laws, which have been proven not only to produce higher voter turn out, but also preserve the intergrity of our elections.
Attorney General Eric Holder, who of course heads the Justice Department, has done everything in his power to prevent voter identification laws from being implemented. As a result, True the Vote has been a top target for Holder and his goons. Holder's DOJ has been tormenting Engelbrecht and her organization since the beginning. Not only has she been bullied by the IRS, but the FBI and ATF too. More from Breitbart:
True the Vote, a Houston-based nonprofit which focuses on election integrity issues, was formed by Catherine Engelbrecht and her King Street Patriots Tea Party group. True the Vote applied to the IRS for their 501(c3) non-profit status in July 2010, and almost immediately their problems began.
Within two years, multiple federal agencies, along with an EPA-affiliated Texas state agency, began auditing True the Vote and its founders, visiting their group, their businesses, and asking questions of people who knew them. The IRS was not the only governmental agency involved.
True the Vote’s experiences with the IRS’s abuse of power were recently discussed by Catherine Engelbrecht in a previous interview with Breitbart News. She said:
We applied for nonprofit C-3 status early in 2010. Since that time the IRS has run us through a gauntlet of analysts and hundreds of questions over and over again. They’ve requested to see each and every tweet I’ve ever tweeted or Facebook post I’ve ever posted. They also asked to know every place I’ve ever spoken since our inception and to whom, and everywhere I intend to speak in the future.
Engelbrecht’s application with the IRS for non-profit status allegedly triggered aggressive audits of one of her family’s personal businesses as well. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) began a series of inquiries about her and her group; the BATF (Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms) began demanding to see her family's firearms in surprise audits of her and her husband’s small gun dealership--which had done less than $200 in sales; OSHA (Occupational Safety Hazards Administration) began a surprise audit of their small family manufacturing business; and the EPA-affiliated TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environment Quality) did a surprise visit and audit due to “a complaint being called in.”
The Democratic Party of Texas filed a lawsuit against her, as did an ACORN affiliated group. Both the FBI and the BATF continued to poke around her life, the lives of people in her Tea Party group, and her businesses.
And did Engelbrecht do anything wrong? Nope.
Ultimately, the IRS determined that it actually owed a refund to Engelbrecht; the BATF found nothing wrong in any of its repeated visits and audits; OSHA’s fine-toothed comb found reason to demand $25,000 from Engelbrecht’s family business; and TCEQ demanded the Engelbrechts spend $42,000 on additional storage sheds.
“This is what the beginning of tyranny looks like," Engelbrecht said. "My family and I have lived with great concern that we would be subject to even greater government abuses if we were vocal about what they were doing to us because of our political views and our efforts to increase governmental accountability.
Over the weekend, Engelbrecht spoke extensively on Fox News about her experiences.
As many have already said, Obama has created a culture of intimidation and it isn't just within the IRS. We're just getting started.
Amazingly, the Obama administration is seeking to punish the practice of investigative journalism. To the excellent post by Katie below, I'd add this quote from the WaPo story:
[In court documents, FBI agent Reginald] Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target.
In other words, the administration is alleging that Rosen somehow broke the law simply by soliciting information for publication. What this means is that every investigative journalist could be in legal peril every time s/he sought information that turned out, in an administration's view, to threaten national security. Imagine the creative and selective enforcement an administration could employ to deter investigation of tis doings. This is what the First Amendment was designed to guard against, a point even the Post article concedes:
[I]t remains an open question whether it’s ever illegal, given the First Amendment’s protection of press freedom, for a reporter to solicit information. No reporter, including Rosen, has been prosecuted for doing so.
There is a good reason these sorts of accusations and prosecutions aren't thrown around often. A free press (and the Second Amendment) are a free people's only defenses against government tyranny. What's more, it isn't illegal to publish classified information (a protection for which the ObamaPhiles at The New York Times had reason to be grateful during the Bush administration -- but note that the Bush administration never went so far as to try to criminalize journalistic activity).
Oh, and keep in mind that this spying on and prosecution of Rosen was happening in 2009, at the same time that the White House was waging war on Fox News. Coincidence? You decide.
It turns out President Obama's Department of Justice wasn't just targeting Associated Press reporters. The Washington Post has revealed DOJ specifically targeted Fox News' Reporter James Rosen, who covers the State Department. DOJ not only monitored Rosen's phone calls, but his movements.
When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.
They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.
The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.
At a time when President Obama’s administration is under renewed scrutiny for an unprecedented number of leak investigations, the Kim case provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one such probe.
Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.
“Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” said First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin, who has represented the Associated Press, but not in the current case. “That’s a very dangerous road to go down.”
Last week during testimony on Capitol Hill, Attorney General Eric Holder denied any involvement in the secret monitoring of AP reporters and said he recused himself from the case. Holder said his Deputy Attorney General James Cole signed off on the subpoenas allowing for the secret monitoring of personal and work phones of AP editors and reporters. So, who exactly signed off on the creepy monitoring of Rosen? Was it Holder? Or did he "recuse" himself from that case too? The law requires the Attorney General to sign off on intrusive monitoring of the press.
The big question after the revelations of the AP being monitored came out nearly two weeks ago was, "How far does this go? What other media outlets were monitored?" It turns out, this wasn't just an overreach into the Associated Press, but an overreach into the press in general. You can bet this isn't the end of this thing.
