For a period of two months, the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) secretly obtained the phone records of reporters and editors at one of the nation’s largest news organizations, the Associated Press (AP), in an apparent effort to pin down the source of a leak. This includes records for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters and editors as well as general office numbers for the news organization in several states.

It constituted a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather news, according to the AP’s president. In a letter to Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, the AP’s top executive blasts the DOJ saying “there can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of telephone communications” and that the communications disclose information about the AP’s operations that the “government has no conceivable right to know.”

No one ever imagined that Big Brother would watch this closely. Even the president’s staunchest supporters, like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has colluded with the DOJ on a variety of matters, chastised the administration. In a statement posted on its website the famously liberal civil rights group reminds that the media’s purpose is to keep the public informed and it should be free to do so without the threat of unwarranted surveillance.

“The Attorney General must explain the Justice Department’s actions to the public so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again,” said Laura Murphy, the director of the ACLU’s Washington D.C. branch. The head of the group’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, Ben Wizner, called the DOJ’s violation “an unacceptable abuse of power,” pointing out that freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy.   

Indeed the Obama administration’s actions “shock the American conscience and violate the critical freedom of the press protected by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” according to the Newspaper Association of America, the nonprofit that represents thousands of publications in the U.S. and Canada. “Americans demand a full accounting,” the group’s president says.

Here are a few excerpts from newspaper editorials—big and small—across the nation; The Dallas Morning News writes that the DOJ broke political, legal and ethical rules and wonders if Attorney General Holder signed off on the tactic.  The Connecticut Register Citizen writes that the administration attacked the “basic First Amendment right to a free press” and the San Francisco Chronicle accuses the DOJ of a “serious overreach of government power and a genuine threat to independent journalism in the United States.”

Ironically, President Obama loves to celebrate World Press Freedom Day by calling on governments around the globe to protect the ability of journalists, bloggers and dissidents to write and speak freely without retribution. In fact, around the time that his Justice Department was violating—rather than protecting—those rights the commander-in-chief issued a statement chastising governments that commit any indirect forms of censorship to suppress the exercise of the media’s “universal rights.” After all, Obama believes a free press plays a huge role in “creating sustainable democracies and prosperous societies.” At least that’s what he says during World Press Freedom Day celebrations.  

It actually gets better; when the feds finally got a clue the spy, Marta Rita Velazquez, fled to a northern European country that doesn’t extradite citizens accused of espionage so she’s over there flipping the finger at Uncle Sam. Nevertheless, Velazquez got charged nearly a decade ago with conspiracy to commit espionage and this week the Department of Justice (DOJ) finally unsealed the indictment.

It’s essentially a worthless piece of paper, but it reveals embarrassing details of how the U.S. government let a foreign spy, who collaborated with a fellow spy that’s currently in prison, get away. A graduate of a prestigious Ivy League university, the Puerto Rican-born Velazquez worked at several government agencies, earned top secret security clearance and represented the U.S. at embassies in two Central American countries.

The feds say she started spying for Cuba, which for years has appeared on the State Department’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, around 1983. Velazquez conspired with others to transmit to the Cuban government and its agents documents and information relating to U.S. national defense, with the intent that they would be used to injure the United States, according to the indictment.

Though she ran this operation for decades, the FBI only heard about Velazquez in 2002 because her partner in crime, Ana Belen Montes, a former Defense Department analyst, pleaded guilty to spying for Cuba for 17 years. Montes, who’s serving a 25-year prison sentence, ratted out her buddy. Both women spied for the Cuban Intelligence Service.

When Velazquez discovered she was being investigated, she took off to Stockholm because she obviously knew that a treaty between the U.S. and Sweden prohibits extradition for spying. If she were tried and convicted, she could face life in prison. It’s unlikely that will ever happen because the U.S. let her get away. And you wonder why our “intelligence” agencies can’t keep track of domestic terrorists, even when a foreign government spoon-feeds us valuable information?

The figure doesn’t even factor in all of the bloated agency’s extracurricular conferences because it excludes those that cost less than $20,000. One could argue that $58 million is a drop in the bucket for an agency with an annual budget of $28 billion, but these are hard times and the government is supposed to be cutting back on spending, especially for unnecessary things like conferences.

Why bother when it’s not your money? Besides, DOJ brass is likely patting itself on the back for slashing conference spending by tens of millions compared to the previous two years. The agency actually reduced its conference budget by $33 million in the last two years and that includes a $7 million cut in conference spending from last year. How big of them!

These alarming figures were recently made public by the DOJ’s inspector general (Michael Horowitz), who this month presented a congressional committee with the many ways the agency wastes tax dollars. The DOJ watchdog put it quite diplomatically when he told the panel that the agency needs to do a better job scrutinizing conference spending as it attempts to reduce waste and inefficiency in a tight budget climate.

“We believe that the current budgetary environment demands that the Department search for adequate alternatives to conferences, such as video conferencing, and that it strongly consider restricting its conference spending even further,” Horowitz told lawmakers from the House Committee on Judiciary  and Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations.

His probe also uncovered other areas in which the DOJ is wasting public money and identified more than “$250 million in taxpayer funds that could be put to better use” by the agency. Among them is the inefficient way the DOJ runs federal prisons, duplicative programs that could be combined to save money and an out-of-control division that’s awarded approximately $15 billion in grants and $27 billion in contracts in the last few years.

This is crazy stuff for an agency that was firmly ordered to buckle down on frivolous spending as the country suffers through a never-ending financial crisis. “Avoiding wasteful and ineffective spending is a fundamental responsibility of federal agencies in any budgetary environment,” the DOJ watchdog reminds. “But when times are tight, as they are today, the government must redouble its efforts to make the most of every taxpayer dollar.” Hint, hint Mr. President.

Squandering hefty sums on exorbitant work conferences is nothing new at the DOJ and in fact has been a serious problem for some time. A few years ago the DOJ’s IG published a scathing audit revealing that the agency spent $120 million to host law enforcement conferences that featured “extravagant and wasteful” costs for food, beverages and event planning. Examples listed in the report include $16 muffins for breakfast, $76 lunches, $10 cookies and candy bars that cost more than $7 each.

Those who get their news from the mainstream media would never know it, though the scandalous details have been reported in several aerospace trade publications as well as Washington D.C.’s conservative newspaper. Read about this unbelievable occurrence—and the administration’s apparent cover-up—at the nation’s space agency (National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA) here, here and here.

The story involves a large-scale federal probe into unauthorized foreign nationals, including Chinese engineers, getting access to protected U.S. space weapons technology that’s crucial to homeland security.  The secretive technology, handled at a San Francisco California NASA facility, is reportedly capable of operating from space to defend the country against international ballistic missile attacks.

Among the technologies that are believed to have been leaked are designs for high-performance rocket engines, fuel and oxidizer tanks from an “ASAT” (anti-satellite weapon), guidance and terrain-mapping systems from the Tomahawk cruise missile and a radar altimeter from the F-35. The information comes from a whistleblower quoted in one of the aerospace publications monitoring the case.

After a lengthy FBI probe, federal prosecutors in the northern California district handling the matter sought indictments. This clearly indicates that there was sufficient evidence to criminally charge the parties involved in the breach. Instead, the federal prosecutor in charge of the case, assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Fry, was abruptly transferred and powerful forces at the Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly ordered the case closed.

Fortunately, two senior members of Congress that serve on the committee that oversees and funds NASA have launched an investigation of their own. They’re pushing the Obama administration for answers and have formally requested that the DOJ Inspector General launch a probe, asserting that “political pressure” may have been a factor in dropping the charges.

In a letter to its watchdog the congressmen write that the DOJ denied the northern California U.S. Attorney’s request for permission to proceed with indictments. This happened “without explanation” and “despite the backing of both the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office,” the letter says. The lawmakers also express concern that security safeguards have been ignored for years while “large numbers of foreign nationals” worked at the San Francisco NASA facility.

Judicial Watch was on the ground in Miami federal court monitoring the trial, which lasted two months and received only sporadic coverage from local media despite the magnitude of the crimes. The defendant, Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan, is a Pakistani national with U.S. citizenship who served as the Muslim leader of the Flagler Mosque in Miami.

Last summer the feds charged the imam and several members of his family with providing material support to the Pakistani Taliban, which is associated with Al-Qaeda and has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks against American interests, including a 2009 suicide bombing at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. Read the indictment.

Khan founded an Islamic school that supports the Taliban’s jihad while living in Pakistan and continued controlling and funding it as an imam in Miami, according to the indictment. He used the school to provide shelter and support for Taliban soldiers and to train children how to kill Americans in Afghanistan, the indictment says. The rest of the family helped create a network that flowed money from the U.S. to Pakistan to purchase guns for the Taliban, according to the feds.

Khan, who is 77, took the stand in his own defense. He appeared quite animated and confident during his four days of testimony, but was visibly dejected after the verdict was read. He faces up to 15 years in prison. The 12 jurors who convicted him deliberated for a week and refused to comment after delivering the verdict.  

“Despite being an Imam, or spiritual leader, Hafiz Khan was by no means a man of peace,” said the area’s top federal prosecutor, Wilfredo Ferrer, in a statement. “Instead, he acted with others to support terrorists to further acts of murder, kidnapping and maiming. But for law enforcement intervention, these defendants would have continued to transfer funds to Pakistan to finance the Pakistani Taliban, including its purchase of guns.”

Not surprisingly, the statement fails to address why the Department of Justice (DOJ) abruptly dropped terrorism charges against Khan’s 39-year-old son (Irfan Khan) last summer nearly a year after arresting him. A DOJ spokeswoman delivered this statement to the local south Florida newspaper covering the story: “We are unable to comment on the internal deliberations that led to our decision. However, the charges against his co-defendants remain in place and trial is pending for those defendants in U.S. custody.” Federal prosecutors have also failed to explain the status of three other defendants in this case, all fugitives believed to be in Pakistan.

The national media lost interest in this story after widespread coverage of how the FBI raided the Khan mosque in a manner that assured cultural sensitivity towards Islam. Federal agents actually waited for prayer service to end before moving in out of respect for Muslims and they took their shoes off prior to entering the mosque as per Islamic tradition. It made for “kindlier, gentler arrests,” under the Obama Administration’s new rules of engagement to assure more sensitivity toward religious practices.

It’s a question worth asking considering the secrecy surrounding the high-profile murder case of Chandra Levy, a 24-year-old intern at the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C., who mysteriously vanished in 2001. Levy’s remains were found a year later in a Washington D.C. park and her boyfriend, California Congressman Gary Condit, was a key suspect. The scandal cost him reelection a year later but he was never charged.

For nearly a decade the case remained Washington’s most famous unsolved crime, according to local sources. The Washington Post even published a special series that reads like a fiction novel with a dozen chapters and lots of photos. The series reveals that police and prosecutors immediately suspected Condit, 52 at the time, was responsible. He eventually fessed up about the affair, but denied involvement in the murder and for more than seven years the investigation went cold.

Suddenly, in 2010 an illegal immigrant gangbanger (Ingmar Guandique) from El Salvador got convicted for murdering Levy and was sentenced to three decades in jail. The government’s star witness was Guandique’s former cellmate, who told a jury that Guandique admitted killing Levy. Guandique’s attorneys have requested a new trial based on evidence involving one of the government’s key witnesses.

Prosecutors from the Department of Justice (DOJ) have requested—without explanation—that details of the new information and the witness remain under seal though various media outlets are legally challenging it. The presiding DC Superior Court judge, Gerald Fisher, has granted all of the government’s unusual secrecy requests and this week private hearings are being held without any media or public scrutiny. This sets a dangerous precedent for what’s supposed to be a transparent judicial system in the U.S.

Judge Fisher has so far refused to offer a valid explanation for granting all of the government’s wishes, instead ordering the proceedings closed because of unspecified “safety concerns.” A national newswire describes the case like this: “Closed hearings, disappearing documents, sealed transcripts, the mystery only deepens in the Chandra Levy murder case, which dates back more than a decade.”

A mainstream newspaper that reports the deepening secrecy that continues to shroud the high-profile murder case offered a different quote from the judge but, still, no reasonable explanation for his ruling. “I do find that closure is essential,” Judge Fisher said following a brief hearing this week. “I take no satisfaction doing this. I don’t particularly enjoy sealing proceedings.”

The story comes out of South Carolina, one of more than two dozen states that have enacted laws requiring voters to show some type of official photo identification to vote. The idea is to prevent election fraud, but the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) claims that requiring a photo ID at the polls discriminates against minorities because many are too poor to obtain them. The Florida congresswoman who chairs the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, says voter ID laws are a “full-scale-assault” on minority voters designed to “rig” elections for Republicans.

The U.S. Supreme Court has disagreed with this assessment, upholding Indiana’s voter ID law in a 2008 ruling that says the state’s interest in protecting the integrity of the voting process outweighed the insufficiently proven burdens the law may impose on voters. “There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters,” the nation’s highest court said in its decision.

Last spring the notoriously liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an Arizona requirement that voters show photo identification before casting a ballot. A renowned Latino rights group claimed the measure, approved by voters in 2004 to stop illegal immigrants from voting, discriminates against Hispanics because it creates a barrier for minorities that’s tantamount to a poll tax. If true, that would violate equal protection rights within the Constitution.

The rulings haven’t stopped the bloated civil rights division at Obama’s DOJ from wasting resources to legally challenge voter ID laws across the nation, most recently in Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Last week a federal court ordered the DOJ to pay South Carolina’s legal costs involving the multi-million-dollar challenge to a 2011 law requiring voters to show a photo ID before casting a ballot.

The DOJ tried blocking the measure, claiming that it disenfranchises hundreds of thousands of minority voters who don’t have a photo ID. A federal court disagreed and recently ordered the feds to pay a yet-to-be-determined portion of South Carolina’s $3.5 million legal tab over the “unnecessary” voter ID litigation. The DOJ is responsible for the high cost of the case, according to a South Carolina Attorney General rep quoted in a local newspaper story. For example, the DOJ delayed the case by 120 days and filed numerous frivolous motions.  

It’s an unprecedented move by any administration that’s outraged even the powerful leftist civil rights groups that usually support the president. The public was kept in the dark as the controversial measure was quietly enacted by Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this year without input or discussion from legislators under the auspice of fighting terrorism.

Details were uncovered by a mainstream newspaper that pieced together how the attorney general helped counterterrorism officials who wanted to create a government dragnet by sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens, even those not suspected of any crimes. Some top officials opposed the idea of this unprecedented government surveillance of U.S. citizens, according to the story, but Holder signed the changes into effect anyways.

The measure grants the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) the power to store dossiers on ordinary citizens, including flight records, casino-employee lists, those hosting foreign exchange students and other personal data for up to five years. There need not be any suspicion that the person presents any sort of danger or has committed any crimes. The idea is to study for “suspicious patterns of behavior.”

Under the changes the NCTC can also give foreign governments information on American civilians so that they can conduct analysis of their own on our citizens. One former senior Obama White House official calls it “breathtaking” in its scope. A top Homeland Security official who fought the changes says “this is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public.”

Though little is known about the NCTC, it does appear to serve a purpose by keeping a database, known as Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), of more than 500,000 people suspected of terrorist activities or having terrorist ties. Under the new rules the government has the green light to gather and store anything it wants on any U.S. citizen, including everything from in health records to financial forms.

This seems to be in direct conflict with a law passed by Congress in the mid 70s specifically to prevent federal agents from rummaging through government files indiscriminately. The measure prohibits government agencies from sharing data with each other for purposes that aren’t “compatible” with the reason the data were originally collected.

Not surprisingly, the administration’s campaign to combat mosque intolerance is being heavily promoted while the shocking imam terrorist story gets swept under the rug. We only know about it because a central Florida reporter took the time to dig around and uncover the Orlando-area imam’s disturbing ties to an extremist group behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The imam’s real name is Marcus Robertson but he goes by Abu Taubah and he preaches the Quran at the Masjid Al-Ihsaan Mosque in East Orange County. He also has an extensive criminal record, according to the news report. Imam Tubah is actually a convicted felon who has murdered people, attempted assassinations, taken hostages and tried to kill police officers. Last year, on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he planned an attack on U.S. military personnel overseas, according to prosecutors.

Authorities say Imam Taubah has deep ties to Islamic terrorists and that he was a bodyguard to Omar Abdel Rahman, the blink sheik behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The Egyptian-born militant Islamist was convicted after the ’93 attack of plotting to bomb several New York City landmarks and is currently in prison.

Hundreds of miles away in Miami last year, the feds raided a mosque with terrorist ties albeit under Obama’s new rules of engagement to assure cultural sensitivity towards Islam. A Pakistani imam named Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan and his relatives were charged with providing financial and material support to the Pakistani Taliban, which is associated with Al-Qaeda and has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks against American interests. Khan founded an Islamic school that supports the Taliban’s jihad while living in Pakistan and continued controlling and funding it as an imam in Miami, according to the federal indictment.

Considering these cases and others around the U.S., is it any wonder why some Americans may seem suspicious that a number of new mosques are popping up all over the country? The Obama Administration claims they are suffering unwarranted intolerance from what one top Department of Justice (DOJ) official calls “islamophobes.” In fact, a day after the Orlando terrorist imam story broke, the assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s bloated civil rights division damned Muslim prejudice at the opening of a new mosque in Tennessee.

Addressing worshipers at the grand opening of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said, “without question we are seeing real challenges to the civil rights of Muslim Americans,” especially in mosques. He referred to the offenders as “islamophobes” and assured that his agency is taking action, investigating over 800 incidents involving threats targeting Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs and south Asians. The DOJ is also working with state and local prosecutors in “numerous non-federal criminal prosecutions,” Perez said.

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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) ran the once-secret program known as Operation Fast and Furious that allowed thousands of 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.

The lost guns have been linked to violence on both sides of the border, including the murder of a federal agent (Brian Terry) in Peck Canyon Arizona. In that case, the guns—assault weapons known as AK-47s—were traced through their serial numbers to a Glendale, Arizona dealer that led to a Phoenix man the feds repeatedly allowed to smuggle firearms into Mexico.

While this illegal government operation spiraled out of control, high-ranking officials at the DOJ were “absentee managers” who failed to provide leadership, according to congressional investigators. In a lengthy report made public this week, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee outlines a shameful management breakdown at the DOJ, which is responsible for supervising the ATF. “In fact, Fast and Furious had many enablers among the senior levels of the Justice Department,” the report says.

Making things worse, high-ranking DOJ officials with inside knowledge of the flawed gun-running scheme have refused to provide Terry’s family with accurate information. “Brian Terry’s family is still seeking answers 21 months after his death,” the report says, yet “two senior officials very close to the Attorney General who each had detailed knowledge of Fast and Furious, have been unable and unwilling to provide the Terry family any answers.”

Specifically, the report names Attorney General Eric Holder’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Monty Wilkinson, Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler and Associate Deputy Attorney General Ed Siskel as well as U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, Dennis Burke. On dozens of occasions they repeated these lines when asked about the gun-running operation: “Did not recall” or “did not know.”

Last month the DOJ Inspector General issued its own 512-page report finding that four high-ranking agency officials, including Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein, knew about Fast and Furious yet took no action. Weinstein quickly resigned after the IG’s report was released, but Breuer remains in his office.

During testimony before a congressional panel, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz said that the Obama White House obstructed his investigation into the botched gun-running sting by, among other things, refusing to provide internal communications crucial to the probe. Horowitz also blasted senior leadership at both the DOJ and ATF for doing “little in the immediate aftermath of Agent Terry’s shooting to try to learn how two weapons that had been purchased 11 months earlier by a previously identified subject of Operation Fast and Furious ended up at the murder scene.”

Judicial Watch launched an investigation into Operation Fast and Furious last summer and this month JW sued the DOJ and ATF for records requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) back in mid-July, 2011. Last fall JW obtained internal government documents that show the number of crimes connected to the gun-running experiment is significantly higher than the administration has chosen to disclose.