Can you say the fleecing of America? This would be unfathomable if it weren’t laid out in a lengthy article published this week by one of the nation’s largest newspapers. The official, a lawyer named Richard J. Danzig, saved his struggling Maryland-based biotech startup, Human Genome Sciences Inc., by raking in $334 million selling the government a drug it doesn’t need and will likely never use.

He did it by somehow convincing a number of government officials—under both Democrat and Republican administrations—that terrorists would engineer a devastating killer germ, a form of anthrax that could create a major threat to national security. The germ is resistant to common antibiotics, according to Danzig, thus the need for a new and highly specialized drug called raxibacumab. There is nothing like it on the market, it costs an astounding $5,100 per dose and Uncle Sam is the only idiot that has bought it.

U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has created this sort of anthrax-like weapon. In fact, credible scientists that specialize in biodefense have also practically ruled this potentially lethal power germ out, according to sources cited in the news story.

Nevertheless the government has stockpiled a new type of drug to defend against a nonexistent germ, never bothering to consider that the guy pushing it stood to make a chunk of change. Federal law actually prohibits U.S. officials, including consultants like Danzig, from advising on matters in which they may have a financial interest.

All the high-ranking officials quoted in the story claim to be shocked at the connection between Danzig and the company that sold the government a drug that will sit on shelves until it expires. One of them, an Army major general who served as a biodefense official under George W. Bush and attended Danzig’s bioterrorism seminars said:  “Holy smoke—that was a horrible conflict of interest.”

A top Homeland Security official in both the Bush and Obama administrations, John Vitko Jr., also says he had no clue about Danzig’s ties to the biotech startup even though the men served on a special Homeland Security biodefense panel for seven years. “I’m surprised I didn’t,” Vitko says in the newspaper story. “I’m not aware of it.” A number of other powerful government officials tell the same story, that they knew nothing of Danzig’s involvement with Human Genome.

This is incredibly difficult to believe, a rather monstrous pill to swallow considering the power Danzig, a Yale Law School grad, has held over the years under several administrations. He served as a Pentagon appointee under Jimmy Carter and Navy Secretary under Bill Clinton before working under Bush. During the 2008 presidential campaign Danzig advised Obama on national security and bioterrorism then was named to the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

Danzig has received the Department of Defense (DOD) Distinguished Public Service Award, the Pentagon’s highest civilian honors three times. When the startup biotech firm named him to its board in 2001, the company’s top dog rightfully proclaimed that Danzig’s high-level federal experience would benefit the company. What a vision! The once-struggling startup was sold for a whopping $3.6 billion in August thanks to the deal Danzig orchestrated with the government.

This particular crisis exploded after an investigation by the Treasury Inspector General revealed what many conservative groups have known and alleged for years; that the IRS is used by the administration as a political tool to go after its enemies. Though illegal this was rampant at the highest levels of the agency, as the inspector general’s scorching report indicates.

The IRS singles out groups with conservative-sounding phrases such as patriot and Tea Party in their titles when applying for tax-exempt status, the IG says. The probe determined that for more than 18 months the IRS “used inappropriate criteria” that singled out conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt status. This has ignited outrage among lawmakers—both Democrat and Republican—as well as President Obama who called it “intolerable and inexcusable.”

At a congressional hearing this week, IRS chief Steven Miller apologized for the way his agency has treated conservative groups but he had the audacity to say that partisanship did not serve as a motivation. Rather he attributed his agency’s actions to “foolish mistakes” made by employees attempting to be “more efficient in their workload selection.” He must think Americans are really dumb.

“Partisanship or the perception of politics has no place in the IRS,” Miller assured members of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is investigating the scandal. If that’s true, then it’s just a big coincidence that liberal groups aren’t targeted by the agency. In fact, liberal groups are spared scrutiny and one news report reveals that a foundation operated by President Obama’s half-brother got fast-tracked to become tax-exempt.

This appears to be the icing on the cake for an agency that’s made plenty of headlines over the years for its transgressions. One of the things the IRS is well known for is giving incarcerated criminals who prepare fraudulent returns tens of millions of dollars in refunds they’re not entitled to. The figure increases annually and at last count the IRS doled out north of $35 million to criminals, according to a federal audit.

A few years ago the IRS came under fire for allowing 1 million foreigners—many in the U.S. illegally— to improperly claim close to $9 billion in tax credits even though they did not provide valid Social Security numbers on their return.  Not long after that, the tax agency got in trouble for handing out $33 million in bogus electric car credits.

Just last month, on the heels of “Tax Day,” two dozen IRS employees got charged with stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in government benefits, including food stamps, welfare and housing vouchers. The scheme fleeced U.S. taxpayers out of at least a quarter of a million dollars, according to federal prosecutors.

Sebelius should have been dismissed for last year’s transgression, according to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which issued a scathing report outlining how the Health Secretary violated the Hatch Act by participating in political campaigning in her official capacity. Sebelius publicly endorsed President Obama’s reelection during a taxpayer-funded public event and the Hatch Act specifically prohibits federal employees from using their official authority or influence to affect the outcome of an election.  

Shamefully, Sebelius became the first member of a president’s cabinet to be found guilty of violating the Hatch Act, earning a spot on Judicial Watch’s 2012 Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians list. Now JW is investigating her recent lapse, which involves hitting healthcare companies up for cash to fund Obamacare after Congress repeatedly rejected the administration’s requests for additional funds. JW has filed public records requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain documents related to the scandal.

The mainstream newspaper that broke the story earlier this month calls it an “unusual fundraising push” in which Sebelius has asked health industry officials to “make large financial donations to help with the effort to implement President Obama’s landmark healthcare law.” Federal regulations don’t allow department officials like the nation’s Health Secretary to fundraise in their official capacity but they do allow cabinet members to solicit donations as private citizens if it doesn’t involve a subordinate or a company seeking business with the agency they head.

A growing number of lawmakers are expressing outrage, claiming that Sebelius is essentially pressuring private companies to support the president’s hostile takeover of the nation’s healthcare system. This week several members of the House requested a congressional probe, saying that “the Secretary’s actions show an apparent disregard for constitutional principles and may violate the Antideficiency Act, the prohibition against augmenting congressional appropriations, and executive branch ethics laws.”

The ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate committee that oversees health policy, Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, compares this to Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal in which an administration official raised private funds to support Nicaraguan rebels after Congress had refused to appropriate money for the cause. Additionally, Sebelius’s “fundraising activities may violate federal laws prohibiting raising private funds from those she regulates,” Senator Alexander says.

This crazy story comes via the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which is giving several academic institutions the cash to support research, education and other activities associated with climate solutions in agriculture. The goal is to uncover the impacts of climate variability and change on dairy and beef cattle, according to an agency announcement released this week.

“We have seen the impact that variable climate patterns have had on production agriculture for the past several years,” according to Obama’s USDA Secretary, Tom Vilsack. “These projects will deliver the best tools available to accurately measure and respond to the effects of climate on beef and dairy production.” This is the same guy who heads President Obama’s special White House Rural Council that among other things is supposed to expand “ecosystem markets” and develop “renewable energy projects.”

Vilsack has also overseen the distribution of billions of reparation dollars to minority farmers that claim they were discriminated by the government and under his leadership the USDA spends a record $80.4 billion annually on food stamps. Like his boss, Vilsack is dedicated to combatting global warming and has dedicated tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to a variety of green energy projects. Among them is a $30 million initiative to advance “biofuels, bioenergy and high-value biobased products” and a $12.2 million experiment to “accelerate bioenergy crop production.”

This month’s $19.5 million allocation aims to develop methods that will “increase the resiliency of dairy production systems while reducing greenhouse gas emissions” and “better understand vulnerability and resilience of Southern Great Plains beef in an environment of increased climate variability.” The academic teams will also develop an agricultural education curriculum with an “urban foods focus.”

In an apparent effort to justify spending large sums of taxpayer dollars on these experiments the government has published a variety of alarming reports over the years exposing the ills of climate change. One claims global warming is the “most visible environmental concerns of the 21st century” and could lead to a worldwide increase in mental illness and cancer. Others have determined that climate change will threaten the world’s food and water supplies and another asserts that it will destroy the Washington D.C. area and surrounding government infrastructure.

Other taxpayer-funded studies have claimed that global warming is a threat to national security because it will spread disease among people and animals and that it’s destroying infrastructure, crops and shorelines. Just a few days ago several members of Congress sponsored a resolution asserting that climate change will actually drive millions of poor women into prostitution!

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.  

This cost American taxpayers an astounding $2 billion last year, according to figures released by the government agency—the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—that distributes the benefit. The information was originally obtained by a conservative news website that reports up to 25% of the $2 billion is untraceable because it’s distributed in cash and there’s no way to verify that the funds are actually spent on food.

The USDA does confirm, however, that an average of 1.37 million people received food stamps in Puerto Rico each month in fiscal year 2012. The island, which is a U.S. territory, has a population of 3.7 million, which means that 37% of Puerto Ricans get food stamps from Uncle Sam. Though the figure of 47.7 million in the U.S. shatters records, it still marks only 15.2% of the nation’s population of 313 million.

Nevertheless, the food stamp rolls continue to rise under President Obama who is committed to eradicating what he believes is a national epidemic of “food insecure” households. In 2012 the government spent an unprecedented $80.4 billion on the program, marking an unbelievable $2.7 billion increase from the previous year. The figure doesn’t even include other taxpayer-funded food programs for low-income populations like “Child Nutrition Programs” that received an additional $18.3 billion last year.

As is typical with these types of bloated government programs, fraud and corruption has tainted the USDA’s grocery giveaway. Just a few weeks ago Judicial Watch obtained documents from the USDA detailing how the agency is working with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal aliens in the U.S. food stamp program. The effort includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA ensuring that Mexicans in the U.S. don’t need to declare their immigration status to get financial assistance from Uncle Sam.

It turns out that illegal aliens have received food stamps by the vanload for decades, according to a former certification case worker who contacted J W after reading the documents. The retired assistant case manager, Craig McNees, was in charge of vetting food-stamp applicants in north Florida and Indiana in the ’80s and says the program was infested with fraud and corruption that was perpetually ignored by management. “Illegals would come in by the vanload and we were told to give them their stuff,” McNees said. “Management knew very well they were illegal. It was so rampant that some employees would tell their illegal relatives to come get food stamps.”

Previous to that JW has reported extensively on the fraud that has plagued the food-stamp program even as the Obama administration continues to promote it. For instance last spring the USDA Inspector General revealed that many food-stamp recipients use their welfare benefit to buy drugs, weapons and other contraband from unscrupulous vendors. Some trade food stamps for reduced amounts of cash. The fraud cost taxpayers nearly $200 million, according to the USDA watchdog, which provided various examples during testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

A separate federal audit revealed last year that many who don’t even qualify for food stamps receive them under a special “broad-based” eligibility program that disregards income and asset requirements. This is sticking American taxpayers with a multi-million-dollar tab to feed hundreds of thousands of people who can well afford to feed themselves.

The news comes just weeks after a separate company that got nearly $200 million from the government to develop hybrid vehicles folded. That fly-by-night company, Fisker Automotive, had been heavily touted by the administration as an innovator that would develop two lines of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that could run up to 300 miles on a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery. Before doling out the cash, Obama’s Energy Secretary assured the cars “will save hundreds of millions of gallons of gasoline and offset millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2016.”

Instead the southern California startup manufactured a measly 2,700 vehicles, sold a laughable 2,000 and failed to build one for nearly a year before laying off three quarters of its employees. That’s after getting $192 million from Uncle Sam. Highly unlikely that any of the money will ever be recovered since Fisker is almost certainly headed for bankruptcy. Last year Judicial Watch sued the Obama administration for documents related to the Fisker scandal but there appears to be a cover up of epic proportions. Check out the mostly blacked out document the administration provided as part of the lawsuit.  

This week’s green-energy fleecing du jour is like a pathetic sequel to the Fisker scandal, except the hemorrhaging got plugged sooner, after only $50 million. It involves another startup called Vehicle Production Group (VPG) that makes special vans for the disabled that run on compressed natural gas. Here’s how the Obama administration justified funding this experiment with public dollars: “This project invests in a socially and environmentally responsible product that will create new jobs, promote the use of alternative fuels, and help the U.S. maintain its competitive edge in the automotive industry.”

Instead VPG has ceased operations and fired almost all of its employees, according to a news report. The same story quotes a Republican congressman saying that VPG’s closing is another sign the clean-car program is a failure and a burden on taxpayers. No kidding! Instead of filling the ozone with hot air, why not do something about it? “We don’t have a good record and it needs to stop,” said the congressman, Jeff Flake of Arizona, who not surprisingly failed to offer any concrete solutions.

It’s a sure bet that Obama’s green ventures will continue swindling taxpayers because the administration has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars for a number of projects. The painful consequences extend beyond the car industry. Remember Solyndra, the northern California solar panel company—bankrolled by Obama fundraiser George Kaiser—that folded after getting $529 million from the government?

Despite the “serious concerns” of U.S. Treasury officials about the risky infusion, a federal audit exposed how the controversial deal was suspiciously rushed through for a politically-connected entrepreneur that had raised large sums for Obama. Judicial Watch is investigating the Solyndra scandal and has sued the administration for records related to the shady deal.

The retired assistant case manager, Craig McNees, was in charge of vetting food-stamp applicants in north Florida and Indiana in the ’80s and says the program was infested with fraud and corruption that was perpetually ignored by management. “Illegals would come in by the vanload and we were told to give them their stuff,” McNees said. “Management knew very well they were illegal. It was so rampant that some employees would tell their illegal relatives to come get food stamps.”

McNees contacted Judicial Watch after reading documents obtained by JW from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) detailing how the agency is working with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal aliens in the U.S. food stamp program. The effort includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA ensuring that Mexicans in the U.S. don’t need to declare their immigration status to get financial assistance from Uncle Sam.

The documents ignited outrage considering the nation’s food stamp program has exploded under President Obama, who claims there are too many “food insecure households” in America. To correct the problem the administration has spent millions on ad campaigns promoting food stamps and has rewarded states with multi-million-dollar bonuses for signing up recipients. It’s been quite effective because American taxpayers spent an astounding $80.4 billion on the program in 2012 and a record number of people—46 million and growing—get free groceries from Uncle Sam.

The retired case worker who contacted JW says in the three years he worked in a Sarasota food-stamp office, he found more than 500 cases of fraud but management ignored them all instead pushing a yearly quota. “They just said that if we don’t give out as many as last year, we don’t get our money,” McNees said. “It was crazy, like a three-ring circus; like the inmates were running the asylum.”

Decades later it seems little has changed as Obama promotes the program like there’s no tomorrow. In fact, last summer a federal audit revealed that many who don’t qualify for food stamps receive them under a special “broad-based” eligibility program that disregards income and asset requirements. That means American taxpayers are getting stuck with a multi-million-dollar tab to feed hundreds of thousands who can well afford to feed themselves.

Adding insult to injury, last spring the USDA Inspector General revealed that many food-stamp recipients use their welfare benefit to buy drugs, weapons and other contraband from unscrupulous vendors. Some trade food stamps for reduced amounts of cash, the USDA watchdog told Congress, disclosing that the fraud has cost taxpayers nearly $200 million. None of this surprises McNees, who claims he witnessed so much fraud as a food-stamp case worker that he “could write a book.”

Yet in a lengthy piece the paper trashes the administration’s multi-billion-dollar reparation initiative to make amends to minority farmers who claim to be victims of government discrimination. It started with a historic $1.2 billion settlement with black farmers who say they were cheated out of federal aid because of their race. President Obama called it “another important step forward in addressing an unfortunate chapter in USDA’s civil rights history.”

Hispanic and women farmers quickly joined the bandwagon. Most of their discrimination claims were defeated in court, but Obama’s political appointees secretly “engineered” a generous reparation fund to compensate all minority farmers who fill out an online application claiming to be the victim of government discrimination. So the White House created a generous package for women and Hispanics that includes $1.33 billion in “compensation” and $160 million in “farm debt relief.”

To get the word out the feds launched an aggressive bilingual advertising and public relations campaign that includes national outreach tours by top USDA officials as well as Justice Department bigwigs because that agency is sort of overseeing it. The goal is to ensure that any Hispanic or woman farmer or rancher who alleges discrimination is aware of the money pot, according to the USDA official in charge of the program.

Predictably, the program has been rife with fraud and corruption and will end up costing American taxpayers an astounding $4.4 billion, according to the newspaper article. That’s because more than 90,000 people have filed claims and law firms stand to gain north of $130 million in fees. “From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie,” the article states. Why? “Because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm.”

It goes on to reveal that reviewers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the lead agency running the program, found “reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination.” Incredibly, those concerns were played down as the compensation effort actually grew!

One former USDA loan manager, a black man who reviewed thousands of claims over six years, said it was so easy to get cash from the government under this program that “I probably could have got paid.” He went on: ”You knew it was wrong, but what could you do?  Who is going to listen to you?” Here is another claim reviewer’s take on the scandal-plagued reparation fund:  ”Basically, it was a rip-off of the American taxpayers.”

In short, the true dimensions of the problem are impossible to gauge. Don’t expect any answers from the Obama administration, which promotes itself as the most transparent in history. Officially it had no comment for the article and those quoted in the story could only do so on the condition that they remained anonymous. The Justice Department official who supervised the cases, Acting Associate Attorney General Tony West, canceled an interview for the story and Attorney General Eric Holder declined to comment.

When the administration was making its case to invest taxpayer dollars in the southern California startup company, Fisker Automotive, it assured that thousands of much-needed jobs would be created in the region which has been hit hard by unemployment. It also touted Fisker’s innovative plans to develop two lines of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles that could run up to 300 miles on a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery.

So when the Department of Energy (DOE) announced in 2010 that it would give Fisker $528.7 million for its experiment, Vice President Joe Biden—well known for his many gaffes—put the company on a pedestal, saying “the story of Fisker is a story of ingenuity of an American company, a commitment to innovation by the U.S. government and the perseverance of the American auto industry.” Then he credited the “real dedication by this administration” for helping “America’s auto industry reclaim its top position in the global market.”

He wasn’t the only one to put his foot in his mouth. Pushing for the multi-million-dollar allocation a year earlier, Obama’s Energy Secretary (Steven Chu) guaranteed Fisker would develop two lines of plug-in hybrids that “will save hundreds of millions of gallons of gasoline and offset millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2016.” Furthermore, Secretary Chu said approximately 5,000 jobs would be created or saved. “This investment will create thousands of new American jobs and is another critical step in making sure we are positioned to compete for the clean energy jobs of the future,” Chu said.

Turns out that, after taking $192 million from Uncle Sam, Fisker has laid off three quarters of its employees and the feds have finally acknowledged that it’s likely on the verge of bankruptcy. One California newspaper reports that Fisker failed to make a $10 million first payment on the $192 million government “loan.” The company has manufactured only 2,700 vehicles, sold a laughable 2,000 and hasn’t built one since July, according to the story.

This week the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing (“Green Energy Oversight: Examining the Department of Energy’s Bad Bet on Fisker Automotive”) to address the administration’s “bad bet” on the startup company. One committee member, a congressman from Ohio, says the Obama administration owes American taxpayers an explanation as to why this deal was made in the first place and what action will be taken to minimize the loss that taxpayers face.

Undoubtedly taxpayers will take a huge hit. This already happened with Solyndra, the northern California solar panel company—bankrolled by Obama fundraiser George Kaiser—that folded after getting $529 million from the government. Despite the “serious concerns” of U.S. Treasury officials about the risky infusion, a federal audit exposed how the controversial deal was suspiciously rushed through for a politically-connected entrepreneur that had raised large sums for Obama. Judicial Watch is investigating the Solyndra scandal and has sued the administration for records related to the shady deal.