This week the “Gang of Eight’s” immigration reform bill, which provides instant amnesty and a path to citizenship for tens of millions of illegal aliens, passed a procedural hurdle in the United States Senate.

Per Fox News:

The Senate passed preliminary but key votes Tuesday in its march to approval of sweeping, bipartisan immigration reform, but final passage remained uncertain as Republicans pushed for tighter border-security provisions and tougher rules for those seeking legal status.

The two procedural votes effectively put the bill formally before the Senate and open for amendments. Both drew more than 80 votes, reflecting a bipartisan desire to have the debate that now is expected to last three weeks.

Earlier in the day Tuesday, President Obama continued to push for passage of the mammoth illegal immigration reform bill, saying the “moment is now” to put in place a plan to provide amnesty to illegals: “Referring to the 11 million currently in the country unlawfully, he said, ‘Yes, they broke the rules; they didn’t wait their turn. They shouldn’t be let off easy.  They shouldn’t be allowed to game the system. But at the same time, the vast majority of these individuals aren’t looking for any trouble. They’re just looking to provide for their families, contribute to their communities.’”

Allow me to read between the lines. The president is effectively saying that because most illegal aliens are nice people (his estimate) we should overlook the fact that they broke the law. And since they can’t be allowed to “game the system,” instead we’ll change the system to accommodate their law-breaking and give them the privileges of legal residency, taxpayer-subsidized benefits and then citizenship.

And let’s not let the president’s wild claim that illegal aliens are only here to contribute to society go uncontested. We’ve heard this before, as a justification for the Obama administration’s “prioritized deportation scheme,” which supposedly only allowed peace-loving illegal aliens to escape deportation.

Here’s the problem. JW was able to prove through documented evidence that the Obama administration abandoned deportation proceedings against illegal aliens convicted of serious and sometimes violent crimes. Time and time again, we’ve seen these illegal alien criminals harming American citizens after law enforcement authorities, following sanctuary policies, sent them back onto the streets. (In fact, as JW previously disclosed, one of the Boston bombers should have been deported in accordance with the law.)

Moreover, the Obama administration has no idea how dangerous some of these illegal aliens are because, according to documents we recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) stopped doing background checks late last year!

Instead, the agency adopted costly “lean and lite” procedures in an effort to keep up with the flood of amnesty applications spurred by President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) directive, which grants illegal aliens a two-year deferment from deportation.  This DACA program is one of Obama’s lawless amnesty programs through which he unilaterally is ignoring the law to let these illegal aliens avoid deportation.

Here’s how we got hold of these documents. Acting on a tip from a whistleblower at a federal law enforcement agency, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request with DHS, for “all communications, memoranda, emails, policy guidance, directives, initiatives, and any other correspondence respecting the scope and extent of background checks to be performed (or not) on aliens applying to the Obama administration’s DACA program.”

JW filed the FOIA on October 26, 2012. The Immigration and National Security Act (INA) mandates a “coordinated, uniform, and efficient,” system of background checks. Instead, the FOIA documents reveal a costly, haphazard process, with only cursory review for the backgrounds of illegal aliens seeking “deferred status.”

Here are some of the highlights from the records:

• In a series of agency memos beginning in September 14, 2012, field offices were told to expect the National Benefits Center (which collects all DACA applications) to conduct only “lean & lite” background checks on illegal alien applicants, and that, henceforth, “NBC will not perform full TECS checks or any evidence review on these cases before we ship to the field.” An October 14 memo reiterated that under the new “lean and lite” policy, “Hits will be sent to the field without resolution.” On October 25, the St. Paul Field Director conceded to staffers that the new “lean & lite” procedures were for an indefinite period of time, saying, “I just can’t tell you when things will revert back to the way they used to be.”

• An email chain from September 5 and through November 14 indicates managerial pressure not to turn any illegal alien applicant away for lack of ID, including the explicit directive in an October 3 memo, “Biometric processing should not be refused solely because an applicant does not present an acceptable ID.” In an October 1 memo further restricting independent action by agency personnel, they were instructed, “Every two weeks field offices will report the number of DACA requestors who appear for biometrics collection at an ASC during the previous two week period, but were turned away without fingerprints or photographs being taken. Field offices will also need to provide the reason why the DACA requestor was turned away by the ASC ISO.”

• The documents suggest added taxpayer costs for the new deportation deferral program.  On June 28, 2012, all Regional Service Managers were informed that they were to “come up with the number of guards that would be required and a dollar amount” in order to meet the new DACA processing requirements.  On July 31, 2012, the agency announced, “In support of the President’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative, USCIS is procuring 40 additional biometrics workstations.”

• On November 9, 2012, just three days after Obama was reelected, in an “!!! IMPORTANT DACA MESSAGE!!! The agency was directed to: “Please put all DACA work on hold until further notice.”  There are no later-dated documents in the production to indicate how or when USCIS resumed DACA background checks or application processing.

The documents also reveal that, contrary to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s claim that DACA applied only to minors who came to this country illegally “through no fault of their own,” the directive actually created a new avenue of chain migration, whereby immediate relatives of DACA requesters could be approved for amnesty. As a result, according to a June 18, 2012, agency memo from District 15 Director, David Douglas, “some of the districts closer to the U.S./Mexico border have been inundated.”

These smoking gun documents show that the Obama administration seems to be throwing public safety and national security out the door in implementing its illicit and unilateral amnesty program for illegal aliens.  Whatever happens in Congress, we must confront Barack Obama’s scheme to enact illegal alien amnesty via executive fiat. It’s wrong, unconstitutional, and it’s dangerous.

And as it relates specifically to the Gang of Eight amnesty in the Senate, the costs and security lapses of this program show that this administration can’t be trusted to implement any of the new security measures, weak as they are, in the amnesty bill in the Senate.

So we have two issues before us.  The current crisis caused by Obama’s unilateral actions, contrary to law and the Constitution, to suspend enforcement of our immigration laws.  And the second crisis is the current legislation in the U.S. Senate that both fails to address Obama’s lawlessness and further undermines the law by rewarding lawbreakers with amnesty, citizenship, and taxpayer cash.

Judicial Watch is doing its part to address these attacks on the rule of the law through its investigations and litigation.  And all of this work educates the American people about the importance of enforcing the law in immigration matters.

I encourage you to let your views be heard in Congress.  Right now, you should call your Senators.  You can reach them at 202-224-3121.

Suppressed OIG Report Confirms Panetta Leaked Classified Information to Zero Dark Thirty Filmmakers

This week another scandal exploded into the news, when Edward Snowden, a former tech contractor and CIA employee, admitted last Sunday night that he leaked classified details about a National Security Agency spy program. Codenamed PRISM, this program involved, in part, the “broad monitoring” and collection of phone records and other data from the American people.

Why kind of data? Video and voice chats, videos, photos, voice over IP conversations, file transfers, login notifications and social networking details – all were collected and analyzed.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things…I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under,” Snowden explained in an interview with The Guardian.  My initial view on these matters is that, whether or not the intelligence activity is illegal or unconstitutional, we must carefully examine what the Obama administration is up to.  Why?  Because the Obama gang too often lies and violates the public trust on national security matters.

Now Mr. Snowden, who is reportedly hiding away in Hong Kong, faces criminal prosecution and the Obama administration is wasting no time in pursuing accountability. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Justice Department…said it had started a criminal investigation ‘into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by an individual with authorized access.’”

This is the same DOJ that seized the records of Associated Press reporters in a DOD leak investigation, a decision AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion”. The DOJ also obtained the records of FOX News based on the absurd claims, signed off on by Attorney General Holder, that Fox News reporter James Rosen was involved in some type of espionage conspiracy.

The Obama administration lately has demonstrated no patience for leaks – at least leaks that make it look bad.

Just contrast the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of justice against Snowden with the preferential treatment given to those involved in the leak of classified details about the bin Laden raid to the filmmakers behind Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal.

Last week, courtesy of the Project on Government Oversight, we learned that the Obama administration has been “sitting on a report” by the Office of Inspector General which concludes that the former CIA director and defense Secretary Leon Panetta leaked classified details to Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter Mark Boal.

Per Politico:

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed the name of the Navy SEAL unit that carried out the Osama bin Laden raid and named the unit’s ground commander at a 2011 ceremony attended by “Zero Dark Thirty” filmmaker Mark Boal.

Panetta also discussed classified information designated as “top secret” and “secret” during his presentation at the awards ceremony, according to a draft Pentagon inspector general’s report published Wednesday by the Project on Government Oversight.

A source close to Panetta said Wednesday evening that he was unaware anyone without the proper security clearances was present at the event, which included both CIA and military personnel.

Does this not also represent an “unauthorized disclosure of classified information by an individual with authorized access?”

It would certainly seem so.

And in terms of whether or not this information could be harmful to our national security, the Obama administration is already on the record in the affirmative.  In our related FOIA lawsuit in the matter, Obama administration lawyers disclosed in sworn court documents that sensitive information released to the filmmakers for Zero Dark Thirty, could cause an “unnecessary security and counterintelligence risk” if released to the public.

If you’d like some more background on JW’s bin Laden leaks investigation, click here. JW previously obtained records from the DOD and the CIA regarding meetings and communications between the government agencies and the filmmakers in preparation for the film. We demonstrated that the Obama administration was actively seeking to have high visibility in bin Laden related projects ostensibly to help the president’s approval ratings in an election year.

And our work on the bin Laden raid leaks led to a criminal referral to the DOJ against Undersecretary Mike Vickers (who also disclosed the name of one of the Navy SEALS) that went nowhere, as far as I can tell.

So let’s review.

One the one hand, Obama administration officials release classified details they admit could be harmful to national security to filmmakers making a blockbuster movie that portrays Obama as a “gutsy” Commander-in-Chief. It appears the then-CIA director himself is implicated in the leaks. The government conducts an investigation (at the request of the Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King) and then stonewalls the completion and release of the report (like the IRS report on the targeting of conservatives, well past the November elections).  So far there has been zero action taken by the administration to hold the leakers to account.

On the other hand, a contractor leaks information about an intelligence program that almost everyone in Washington assumed was in place and this low-level leaker is subject to almost immediate prosecution.

Politico hits the nail on the head: “Word that Panetta, a key member of Obama’s national security team, might have been responsible for improper disclosures without encountering any known repercussions comes as the administration faces questions over the fairness of the aggressive anti-leak investigations and prosecutions being mounted by the Justice Department.”

And what does the administration have to say for itself?

White House spokesman Jay Carney had no response. He claimed to be unaware of the report, but said he’d look into it. In 2011, Carney exercised no such discretion, blindly labeling Rep. King’s suggestion that the administration leaked classified details to the filmmakers as “ridiculous” and “simply false.”

“We don’t discuss classified information,” he said.

Wrong again, Mr. Carney. You leak when the information suits your purposes and you stonewall when it does not. And that is the sort of selective transparency that has completely undermined the people’s trust in you, the president and his administration.

Documents Obtained by JW Reveal FBI Training Curricula Purged of Material Deemed “Offensive” to Muslims

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Political correctness is dangerous, even deadly, especially when it is practiced by one of the nation’s most important law enforcement agencies.

Judicial Watch recently released hundreds of pages of FBI memos and other documents revealing that, in 2012, the agency purged its anti-terrorism training curricula of material determined by an undisclosed group of “Subject Matter Experts” (SME) to be “offensive” to Muslims. The excised material included references linking the Muslim Brotherhood to terrorism, tying al Qaeda to the 1993 World Trade Center and Khobar Towers bombings, and suggesting that “young male immigrants of Middle Eastern appearance … may fit the terrorist profile best.”

These discoveries all stem from our investigation of a February 8, 2012, meeting between FBI Director Robert Mueller and various Islamic organizations. During the meeting, Mueller reportedly assured the Islamic groups in attendance that the agency had ordered the removal of presentations and curricula on Islam from FBI offices around the country that were deemed “offensive.”

As reported by NPR: “The FBI has completed a review of offensive training material and has purged 876 pages and 392 presentations, according to a briefing provided to lawmakers.”

To get the full story on the FBI’s attempts to placate Muslims, perhaps to the detriment of our national security, we filed a FOIA request on March 7, 2012. Specifically, we sought access to records detailing the meeting as well as “any and all records setting criteria or guidelines for FBI curricula on Islam or records identifying potentially offensive material within the FBI curricula on Islam.” We also asked for records detailing the directives to withdraw FBI presentations and curricula on Islam.

Predictably, the agency stonewalled, forcing JW to file a lawsuit on July 18, 2012. Six months later, January 15, 2013 we received our first batch of documents, followed by a second grouping on April 16, 2013. And here’s what we discovered regarding the reasons given by the FBI’s SME for purging “offensive” training documents:

• “Article is highly inflammatory and inaccurately argues the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization.”

• “Page 13 inaccurately states that AQ [al Qaeda] is responsible for the bombing of the Khobar Towers and that AQ is ‘clearly linked’ to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.”

• “The overall tenor of the presentation is too informal in the current political context.”

• “The Qur’an is not the teachings of the Prophet, but the revealed word of God.”

• “Remove references to mosques specifically as a radicalization incubator.”

• “Remove sweeping generality of ‘Those who fit the terrorist profile best (for the present at least) are young male immigrants of Middle Eastern appearance’”

•  “author seems to conflate ‘Islamic militancy’ with ‘terrorism’ and needs to define the difference and use it in their analysis”

In its May 22, 2013, article on some of the Judicial Watch revelations, The Washington Examiner reported, “While the Muslim Brotherhood is not on the U.S. State Department’s official list of international terrorist organizations, some of its offshoots, including the Palestinian group Hamas, are.” Ironically, FBI Director Mueller, who ordered the purge of “offensive” material – including the exoneration of the Muslim Brotherhood – has described the organization as a group that supports terrorism in the US and overseas.

Here’s the bottom line: The FBI is rewriting history in order to help al Qaeda. And this clearly shows that the law enforcement agency is in need of serious top-to-bottom reform.

As we recently learned from the Boston Marathon terrorist attack, the country is less safe when we allow radical Muslim organizations to tell the FBI how to train its agents and do its job. The FBI’s purge of so called “offensive” material is political correctness run amok, and it puts the nation at risk. The Obama administration needs to stop putting the tender sensibilities of radical Islamists above the safety of the American people.

Lastly, for next week, Judicial Watch will have two major events going on. Beginning on Monday June 17^th, at 8 ET, Judicial Watch’s hard-hitting documentary District of Corruption will have its national television broadcast premiere on AXS TV. Then on Thursday June 20^th, Judicial Watch will host an panel discussion on the continuing Obama IRS scandal. Be sure to catch both of these exciting events!

Until next week…

I cannot remember a time quite like this. Approximately one-third of congressional committees are investigating Obama corruption; every day brings with it a new scandal, each just as serious as the last.

There just is no other way to put it. The District of Columbia is drowning in a cesspool of corruption. From new scandals, such as the IRS attacks on conservative groups and Benghazi-gate to unresolved outrages from Obama’s first term, including Fast and Furious and Obamacare, the Obama administration is out of control.

And to make matters worse, the president who promised to make transparency and the rule of law the “touchstones” of his presidency has employed every trick in the book to avoid coming clean on any of these scandals.

Just this week, we learned of a new scheme employed by federal officials that allows them to continue to operate in secrecy and beyond the prying eyes of investigators. Per The Associated Press: 

Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees are using internal government email accounts that are separate from their external accounts to conduct official business, The Associated Press found.

The practice could complicate agencies’ legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails under public records requests and congressional inquiries…

White House spokesman Jay Carney on Tuesday acknowledged the practice and said it made eminent sense for Cabinet secretaries and other high-profile officials to have what he called alternative email accounts that wouldn’t fill with unwanted messages….

“There’s nothing secret,” Carney said.

No one is buying what Carney is selling on that point. Carney also noted that these accounts are innocent. Federal employees need them, he explained, to conduct business because their other email addresses are deluged with emails. Whether cluttered in-boxes are a problem inside our federal agencies or not, certainly establishing shadow email accounts is not an appropriate (or ethical) answer.

Here’s why: These secret email accounts allow federal officials to skirt open records laws. And this is a particularly sensitive issue for Judicial Watch, which is the nation’s most aggressive organization using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to force the release of government documents.

We are forced to scratch and claw to gain access to every scrap of information, every detail. And to learn that the government can use secret email accounts to further obstruct these efforts is not only frustrating, it is deeply disturbing.

The AP explains the problem further:

Having separate accounts could put an agency in a difficult spot when it is compelled to search for and release emails as part of congressional or internal investigations, civil lawsuits and public records requests. That’s because employees assigned to compile such responses would necessarily need to know about the accounts to search them. Secret accounts also drive perceptions that government officials try to hide actions or decisions.

The size and scope of the problem appears systemic. While the AP says it is still waiting for responses from as many as ten federal agencies regarding their email addresses, Town Hall’s Katie Pavlich has a nice summary of what is publicly known about the agencies involved in these shadow email accounts as of now:

• The Environmental Protection Agency? Check. Lisa Jackson, former head of the EPA reportedly used an alias (Richard Windsor) to conduct official government business and “sidestep disclosure rules.” When AP reporters learned of this secret account, they dug a little deeper, and down the rabbit hole they went, implicating some other federal agencies.

• The Department of Justice?  Yep. In fact, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the Thomas Perez (of Black Panther scandal fame) reportedly used a private email account on 1,200 occasions. He used this account to “leak information about official business,” concluded the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

• The Obama Labor Department? Seems a good bet, given that Labor reportedly ordered the AP to pay $1 million to gain access to its email addresses, which seems a clear attempt to dissuade the AP from continuing its probe.

• And then there’s Health and Human Services. The HHS response to the AP’s request was suspicious from the start. The agency did, in fact, turn over email addresses, but curiously failed to disclose any addresses for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. And then when the AP objected to the obfuscation, the agency reluctantly handed over three email addresses for the secretary, one of which they deemed “secret.”

HHS cautioned the AP against disclosing the shadow account, but it fell on deaf ears. The not-so-secret-anymore email address is KGS2@hhs.gov.

The dirty little secret is that the Obama administration typically redacts (blacks out) the email addresses on most documents, making it difficult to decipher who sent or received a particular email or document.  And as I told Brietbart.com:

Unless we know about the alias accounts, we can’t accurately analyze Freedom of Information responses. This revelation could impact dozens of our Freedom of Information lawsuits. If we know an email has the address of a senior official, we will look at it carefully. If we don’t, it might be overlooked or, more importantly, we might not go to court over it. With this administration, transparency is a game of “catch me if you can” — even with the courts.

Judicial Watch has filed over 1,100 FOIA requests with the Obama administration and over 100 FOIA lawsuits against it, making it the top public interest FOIA requestor and litigator in the country.

Of course the response from the agencies to these secret email accounts (as exemplified by Carney’s “nothing to see here” defense) is “don’t worry, just trust us.” But how can we? Consider new revelations about yet another Obama appointee scandal/abuse of office.

As reported by Fox News: “House Republicans are expanding their investigation into Health [Health and Human Services] Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ campaign to solicit support for a pro-Obamacare group, after she acknowledged reaching out to companies her agency regulates as part of that effort.”

The Obamacare propaganda group is Enroll America. And the three companies referenced above are Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente and Ascension Health. Sebelius said she did not troll for checks from these companies, but this assertion remains an open question. She did admit to fundraising from other companies not regulated by her agency.

As you now, JW has been all over the improper efforts by the Obama administration to brainwash the American people into accepting the president’s socialist healthcare overhaul. Whether we are talking about the Obama administration’s taxpayer funded ads featuring television star Andy Griffith, or large chunks of cash paid to expensive public relations firms to persuade the American people to buy Obamacare, the blurred lines between administration policy and outright propaganda are wholly inappropriate.  We’re pushing hard to find the full truth on the thoroughly corrupt Sebelius (who made our list of Washington’s “Top Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” in 2012).

Of course, what we know about these efforts is bad enough. But it is what we don’t know – the kind of information likely hiding in secret email accounts within the bowels of the Obama administration – that could do serious and irreparable harm to our institutions of government. That’s what makes these shadow email accounts so dangerous.

Obama Taps Benghazi-Tainted Rice for National Security Advisor

In a shockingly arrogant and irresponsible move, President Obama has nominated Benghazi-tainted UN Ambassador Susan Rice to serve as his National Security Advisor, replacing the outgoing Tom Donilon.

Per The Associated Press:

President Barack Obama’s top national security adviser Tom Donilon is resigning and will be replaced by U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, marking a significant shakeup to the White House foreign policy team…

…Rice, a close Obama confidante, came under withering criticism from Republicans as part of the investigations into the deadly attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. Rice, relying on talking points from the intelligence community, said in television interviews that the attacks were likely spontaneous, which was later proven incorrect.

“Proven incorrect,” does not come close to capturing it.  Congressional testimony by Benghazi whistleblowers has shown the Obama administration’s response to the attacks to be “a deadly combination of ineptitude, political calculations, and outright lying.”

Remember all of those morning shows, where Rice peddled tall tales about the nature of the Benghazi attacks? Rice (and Clinton) falsely blamed the attack, which led to the death of a U.S. Ambassador and three others, on a rudimentary Internet video mocking Muslims. Not true. We now know this was a terrorist attack pure and simple.

We also know that intelligence officials (including former CIA Director General Petraeus) had noted a link to terrorism in their initial assessments just hours after the attacks. This connection to terrorism was purposely scrubbed from the talking points. Why? I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this was done to protect President Obama, who was then locked in a tight re-election battle.

A major push of the Obama reelection campaign had been that, under President Obama’s policies, al Qaeda was in decline (“GM is alive and bin Laden is dead” was an Obama campaign slogan.).  This was a fair, however debatable, talking point for Obama.  But what is not appropriate is lying to the American people about a terrorist attack because it might conflict with this president’s reelection campaign narrative.

Did Rice know the “video explanation” was complete bunk when she took to the morning talk shows? We don’t know for certain. The Obama administration continues to stand in the way of the truth. But whether she knowingly lied or was just a patsy for others in Obama’s inner circle, Rice is most certainly compromised. Who on earth could trust a word out of Rice’s mouth when we know for a fact she peddled a fabricated explanation for the Benghazi attacks?

And now our national security policy is in her hands.

Of course, there is a political angle to the Rice appointment as well. Former Clinton campaign hack James Carville characterized this as an “in your face appointment,” noting that Rice is “not confirmable.” The president initially wanted to have Rice serve as Secretary of State, but Republicans in Congress scuttled those plans. This was payback.

We’ve seen this tactic before with Obama’s czars, right? When President Obama wants to get his “unconfirmable” friends past Congress, he simply installs them. In this case, the appointment does not require Senate confirmation, and Obama is technically within his right to appoint Rice to this post. But it doesn’t make the move smart – or good government.

The liberal press is doing its part to avoid dealing with the controversial nature of this appointment. As media watchdog site NewsBusters points out, The Washington Post played “hide the Benghazi” in its story on the Rice appointment. Readers had to wait until paragraph 20 to see the “B” word, writes NewsButers’ Tim Graham.

How Benghazi gets “paragraph 20” treatment is beyond me. This is one of the most serious scandals in a generation.

And for this reason, Judicial Watch has made it a priority to fight the Obama administration for the full truth on Benghazi.  We have multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests pending and three lawsuits trying to get hold of attack videos, information on the fraudulent talking points, and details about a foreign security firm hired to “protect” the consulate and the ambassador.

I guarantee you this:  Congress will move on and the media will, too.  But your Judicial Watch is in it for the long haul and won’t let this “worse than Watergate” scandal fall by the wayside.

A New Scandal at the IRS

It seems evident that the behemoth Obama administration is setting some new records for wasting taxpayer dollars on ridiculous programs. (Remember the racist “cultural diversity” workshops that required federal employees to chant that our Founding Fathers were illegal aliens?)

And it is particularly offensive when the agency responsible for draining every last cent out of American taxpayers is the very same agency engaging in shameful waste.

Fresh off a “scandal for the ages,” where the Obama IRS abused Tea Party and conservative organizations seeking tax exempt status and subjected conservative donors to retaliatory audits, new details emerged this week about more embarrassing and corrupt activities inside the agency. USA Today had the story:

A division of the Internal Revenue Service spent $4.1 million on a conference in 2010 in Anaheim, Calif., that included “questionable expenses” for keynote speakers, video production and gifts for IRS employees, according to an audit released Tuesday by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

The audit found that the IRS held 225 conferences from fiscal years 2010 to 2012 at a cost of $49 million. The Anaheim conference, attended by 2,600 IRS employees, was the driving focus of the audit because it was the most costly during the three-year period of review. The IRS says it has changed spending practices to prevent a recurrence of these incidents.

Now, as is often the case, the devil is in the details here. So let’s take a look at what happened to these public funds.  (You can access the TIGTA report here.)

How about $50,187 dollars to craft a Star Trek parody on video? Seem like a wise use of funds to you? How about another video of IRS division managers dancing on stage? Or $44,500 for two speakers, one of whom was paid to create paintings on stage of Michael Jordan and Albert Einstein, among other cultural icons.

Can someone please explain how watching someone paint a picture of a former NBA basketball player contributes to the efficient and proper functioning of a federal agency!

Also among the charges on this trip was a tab of $64,000 to buy gifts (such as plastic squirting fish toys) for IRS employees, two of whom are now no longer with the agency.

Per Fox News:

The IRS placed two employees on administrative leave for accepting hundreds of dollars’ worth of food and gifts at a party in 2010, on the heels of a scathing watchdog report that said the agency blew more than $4 million on the conference where that party was held.

Evidently, the IRS believes it can avoid accountability for its corrupt activities with tepid promises to “do better” and by releasing two low-level employees from their roster.  By the way, the Washington Examiner picked up on the fact that this conference was supposed to help “train” new IRS employees hired to implement Obamacare!  So this IRS spending scandal is, in reality, an Obamacare scandal!

As you might imagine, there is little sympathy for the IRS in Congress or around the country.

The New York Times reported Thursday morning that the majority of Americans believe the IRS campaign to attack conservative groups was wrong. But check out how the Times reported this data: “Three-fifths of the public think the I.R.S. actions were wrong, but they are evenly divided over whether the targeted inquiries rose to the level of illegality or were just unethical.”  Don’t you love the phrase “just unethical?”

The Times also points out that there is an even division as to whether the IRS in Cincinnati acted alone or if the Obama administration was involved. And this week we learned some new details on this question courtesy of The Wall Street Journal via Fox News:

Two IRS employees have provided more details to congressional investigators about how targeting of Tea Party groups in 2010 came from agency officials in Washington, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Transcripts of interviews with the two employees seem to contradict previous claims by top IRS officials blaming lower-level workers in Cincinnati, The Wall Street Journal reported. While the transcripts don’t suggest Obama administration officials knew of or were involved in the flagging of the groups, questions regarding who ordered the targeting still linger.

Whether President Obama is explicitly or directly to blame for this scandal is still an open question. But as has been pointed out by many, his persistent attempts to defame and undermine the Tea Party movement set the tone for the inappropriate targeting of conservatives on a number of different levels. As President, he is responsible.

Judicial Watch has a number of active Freedom of Information Act investigations into these various matters, and our legal and investigative staff has been appropriately mobilized.  I’ll also give you an early heads-up on a panel discussion on June 20 aiming to get more of the truth out about the IRS scandals.

Until next week…

When Barack Obama first nominated Eric Holder for the position of Attorney General, Judicial Watch was outspoken in its criticism. In fact, take a look at a letter we sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing the nomination at the time.

Mr. Holder’s record demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons. On his watch at the Clinton Justice Department, the pardon process was upended and corrupted by a “pay to play” mentality. This undermined, in the least, the appearance of the fair administration of justice by the Justice Department. Mr. Holder is the wrong person to head the Department of Justice.

I wish I could tell you we were wrong. But, after four years of some of the most egregious scandals in the history of the country – many of them originating from within the nation’s highest law enforcement agency – our words have proven prophetic. From Fast and Furious to the Black Panthers to encouraging voter fraud this has been the most corrupt Department of Justice (DOJ) in modern U.S. history.

And now, in the wake of a scandal in which the DOJ collected the private email correspondence of reporters, seized their phone records and tracked their movements as part of an investigation of leaks, Eric Holder has lost his biggest defender – the press itself.

Last week you will recall that President Obama directed Eric Holder to meet with the Washington, D.C., bureau chiefs of major news outlets to discuss the administration’s subpoena policies. The move was a clear attempt by Obama to change a narrative that had done significant damage to the White House.

But when the administration announced those discussions would be “off the record,” the wheels came off the wagon. Per CNN:

Attorney General Eric Holder’s plans to sit down with media representatives to discuss guidelines for handling investigations into leaks to the news media have run into trouble.

The Associated Press issued a statement Wednesday objecting to plans for the meetings to be off the record. “If it is not on the record, AP will not attend and instead will offer our views on how the regulations should be updated in an open letter,” said Erin Madigan White, The AP’s media relations manager.

The New York Times is taking the same position. “It isn’t appropriate for us to attend an off-the-record meeting with the attorney general,” executive editor Jill Abramson said in a statement.

CNN announced in the article that it would also decline, along with The Huffington Post. As of this writing only Politico signaled its intent to participate.

Making matters worse for Holder, news of the press revolt came at a time when House Republicans sent a letter to the attorney general “expressing ‘great concern’ about the possibility that Holder lied under oath during his testimony earlier this month on the DOJ’s seizing of journalists’ records.”

According to CBS News:

On May 15, Holder told the committee he wasn’t involved in “the potential prosecution” of a member of the press under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information. “This is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy,” he said

Shortly thereafter, reports began to surface that the Justice Department, in addition to seizing telephone and email records of Associated Press reporters, had seized the emails and phone records of Fox News correspondent James Rosen. While Holder had recused himself from the AP proceedings, the Washington Post reported that the attorney general had personally signed off on the search warrant for Rosen’s records.

In the search warrant, the FBI called Rosen a “criminal co-conspirator” and suggested there’s probable cause that he violated federal law. Rosen was not charged with any crime.  I don’t see how one could reasonably parse Holder’s statement as accurate or forthcoming.

The Daily Caller reported this week that Attorney General Eric Holder felt “a creeping sense of personal remorse,” aides say, after it was revealed that the DOJ had seized Rosen’s emails.

I wonder if Barack Obama has experienced a “creeping sense of personal remorse” for installing Holder in office.

As I say, this is not the first time Holder has been accused of lying, or best case scenario, “artfully testifying” before Congress.

On March 1, 2011, Holder testified to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies: “The decisions made in the New Black Panther Party case were made by career attorneys in the department. And beyond that, you know, if we’re going to look at the record, let’s look at it in its totality.”

Not true. In a July 23 ruling, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in response to Judicial Watch’s effort to obtain attorneys’ fees from the DOJ for stonewalling the release of documents pertaining to the NBPP scandal:

The documents reveal that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that case, which would appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in that decision. Surely the public has an interest in documents that cast doubt on the accuracy of government officials’ representations regarding the possible politicization of agency decisionmaking.

Holder has a demonstrated record of dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law.  He is the poster child for Obama corruption.  Judicial Watch has been pushing an effort to “Dump Holder” for some time now.  I suggest you support this effort and echo it with your elected representatives, your personal networks, and the media.  We, in the meantime, will continue to battle Holder’s DOJ lawyers in court to get information on the details of lawlessness in order to hold him accountable.

These are troubled times for the country. With approximately one-third of congressional committees investigating scandals inside the Obama administration, Judicial Watch’s work is more important now than ever. And that is why I am pleased to report a bit of good news as we seek to expose the truth about Washington corruption – which did not begin (and will not end) with the Obama administration. Read on…

JW’s Hard-Hitting Documentary District of Corruption to Broadcast Nationally on June 17, 2013 on AXS TV

This morning I was on Fox and Friends to announce a wonderful development for Judicial Watch’s public education mission. In just a few weeks, we are going to take another major leap forward in exposing the truth about Obama corruption – and DC corruption generally – to the American people.

On June 17, 2013, our hard-hitting feature documentary film District of Corruption will receive its national television premiere at 8:00 p.m. ET, with an encore performance at 11:00 p.m., on the AXS TV network, reaching 41 million households. Additionally, HDNet Movies will air the documentary this fall.

Our film, you may recall, is written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon, the writer/director of Occupy Unmasked and the Sarah Palin film The Undefeated. It is produced in association with Constant Motion Entertainment and co-produced by Dan Fleuette.

(District of Corruption is a companion piece to my New York Times best-selling book, The Corruption Chronicles, Obama’s Big Secrecy, Big Corruption, and Big Government, which was released in July 2012 by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions.)

As I say, the film’s television premiere comes at a time of increased public attention to corruption scandals inside the Obama administration.

Benghazi-gate, the Department of Justice and IRS scandals are grabbing the headlines. They represent the latest examples of the D.C. corruption crisis. But anyone who wants to truly understand the truth about this and more must look behind today’s headlines. And that is why our film is so important.

District of Corruption is the most sweeping attempt to date to examine political corruption – in both political parties. And make no mistake; this film is as factual and compelling a film on this out-of-control Obama administration as you will see. We are grateful to our partners at AXS TV for providing a platform to reach and educate millions of Americans.

AXS TV Chairman Mark Cuban, for his part, believes the film will certainly be a conversation starter: “There is an enormous amount of public interest in the subject of political corruption, so I’m confident that District of Corruption will find an audience on our network.  The film is dynamic and unsparing of politicians all across the board.  District of Corruption is bound to get Americans talking.”

The film chronicles Judicial Watch’s epic battles against corruption through three presidential administrations (Clinton, Bush, Obama), focusing most intensely on the current administration’s scandals, including: Operation Fast and Furious; crony capitalism; Solyndra and other “green energy” projects; federal bailouts and earmarks; ACORN and voter fraud; illegal alien amnesty; and threats to the integrity of the 2012 elections; as well as new attacks on government transparency and accountability.

The film traces the arc of government corruption and secrecy from the Clinton administration through the Bush years to the current corruption and transparency crises of the Obama years.

“We decided from the outset that we could not and would not pull a single punch in making this film,” said District of Corruption Director Stephen K. Bannon. “To play favorites or to avoid naming names would have completely undermined our objective. This film goes far beyond high-adrenaline, emotionally compelling entertainment. This is about saving our institutions of government from the corruption and cronyism that threatens their existence. We intend to initiate a seismic shift in the public policy and cultural landscape.

I will be sure to keep you up to date on the broadcast days and times for District of Corruption as best I can in this space. But be sure to check the film website frequently for updates (www.DistrictOfCorruptionMovie.com). And to see the latest trailer, click here.

Amnesty:  Politics Before the Public’s Safety

It started as a dirty little secret several years ago. Frustrated by opposition to amnesty legislation, the Obama administration bypassed Congress and enacted a backdoor scheme to bypass Congress and enact illegal alien amnesty via executive fiat. That’s when phrases such as, “selective deportation,” entered the administration’s lexicon.

But that was before Barack Obama sailed back into the White House catching a mighty tailwind from minority voters, especially Hispanics.

Now there is no need to bypass Congress. The so-called “Gang of Eight” in the U.S. Senate, including four Republicans, has given birth to the most sweeping amnesty bill in three decades – reform that will certainly worsen the illegal immigration crisis.

Does the immigration “reform” bill provide amnesty for illegal aliens? For certain. It may be clothed in the now-common euphemistic phrase “path to citizenship,” but the bottom line here is that the 11 million+ illegal aliens in the country can first (and perhaps most importantly) become “legalized” and, then, after 13 years, citizens without ever leaving the country.

“Essentially, [the immigration reform bill] is the most breathtaking, outrageous form of amnesty that’s been seriously considered by the United States Congress, House or Senate in any time that I’m aware of throughout history,” Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King told Newsmax.

Are there loopholes in the mammoth 844-page bill? Yes, and you can drive a truck through them. For example, as currently constructed, the bill would allow those who came to the U.S. illegally “to collect cash assistance, food stamps and health care benefits long before they earn a green card and a pathway to citizenship,” notes The Washington Examiner. Given the state of our sorry economy, such policies are terribly unwise.

And what about border security?  Legalization comes before border security. The timing of border security measures has been left “to the subjective, amorphous discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano,” according to Texas Senator Ted Cruz.  So amnesty first, and border security perhaps never.

Despite its deficiencies, the amnesty bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee without significant changes. It is now set for debate on the Senate floor. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) says he has the votes.

Per The Daily Caller:

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid believes he has the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster and pass the Senate immigration reform bill.

In an interview Tuesday with the Nevada public affairs program “To the Point,” Reid explained that marshaling enough support to pass the legislation, which came out of committee last week, would be “pretty easy.”

Reid then did the math. He has 52 Democrats and four Republicans in his camp, needing only four more votes for passage, which he predicts he will “easily” acquire.

Now even if Reid is correct, there is still the matter of the House of Representatives. House Republicans have said the Senate bill would not stand a chance in their chamber. Instead, they say, the House will craft a bill of its own addressing many of the failings of the Senate version.

“While we applaud the progress made by our Senate colleagues, there are numerous ways in which the House will approach the issue differently,” the Republican leaders said in their statement. “The House remains committed to fixing our broken immigration system, but we will not simply take up and accept the bill that is emerging in the Senate if it passes. Rather, through regular order, the House will work its will and produce its own legislation.”

But I ask you this: How confident are you that the Republican Party will demonstrate the courage necessary to do the right thing? Haven’t we seen Republicans cave before on key issues in the name of political expediency? To hear talk of voter demographics within Republican circles as a justification for granting amnesty to illegal aliens is extremely disturbing.

This is the time to make your voice heard. The U.S. Senate will consider the bill in the next few weeks.  The phone number for the Capitol Hill switchboard is 202-224-3121.  And here’s a link to a site where you can find the contact information for every U.S. Senator.

Of course, Judicial Watch will persevere no matter what happens on Capitol Hill.  We have a number of active lawsuits over sanctuary policies that aid and abet illegal immigration.  Our investigations in this area are legion (see this link for an overview of our efforts on this crucial issue).  Our nation’s illegal immigration crisis won’t be resolved by Washington politicians.  It will be resolved by citizens, acting individually and through groups like Judicial Watch, that demand that laws be followed.

Until next week…

The Obama administration has perfected the art of “selective transparency.” It releases documents when it serves them and keeps them secret when it does not.

We’ve seen this happen time and time again. When the Obama administration wanted to undermine enhanced interrogation techniques, it selectively released certain top-secret Department of Defense memos that supported the administration’s agenda, while conveniently leaving out those documents supporting the effectiveness of the techniques. (JW was ultimately able to force the release of these records.)

The Obama White House also makes a show of posting some of the Secret Service’s White House visitor log entries, while withholding thousands of others and opposing the logs’ full release in court.

But nowhere has this utter hypocrisy been more evident than in the Obama administration’s approach to the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

When the administration wanted to project an image of President Obama as a courageous Commander-in-Chief during an election season, they gave the filmmakers of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” unprecedented access to classified details regarding the raid. But when JW sought to obtain photos and videos documenting the raid and burial of bin Laden on behalf of the American people, the Obama administration stonewalled.

And unfortunately, an appellate court endorsed this unprecedented secrecy earlier this week.

On Tuesday, a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed a U.S. District Court decision allowing the Defense Department and CIA to withhold 59 images from the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound and the terrorist mastermind’s burial at sea.

Here’s the statement I offered to the press in response:

The opinion is craven, absurd, and undermines the rule of law. The court seems to acknowledge that the images were improperly classified but gives the Obama administration a pass. The court’s interpretation would allow terrorists to dictate our laws. Americans’ fundamental right to access government information and, frankly, the First Amendment are implicated in this ruling.

As one of the judges on this panel suggested that the Benghazi attack was caused by an Internet video, this decision is perhaps unsurprising. The courts need to stop rubberstamping this administration’s improper secrecy. There is no provision of the Freedom of Information Act that allows documents to be kept secret because their release might offend our terrorist enemies. Our lawyers are considering our next legal steps.

The Appeals Court decision upheld an April 26, 2012, ruling by the District Court denying a FOIA request by JW seeking “all photographs and/or video recordings of Osama (Usama) bin Laden taken during and/or after the U.S. Military operation in Pakistan on or about May 1, 2011.”

To be clear: We did not seek any information that would compromise the national security of the country. (Certainly no details even approaching those provided to the “Zero Dark Thirty” filmmakers.) And yet, the Obama administration withheld the release of these images under the president’s bogus “spiking the football” doctrine, which claims any information that might offend terrorists must be kept secret.

Can you imagine the court endorsing such a policy? A policy that subjects our open records laws to the whims of radical Muslim terrorists?

While ruling against Judicial Watch, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg had conceded, “Indeed, it makes sense that the more significant an event is to our nation – and the end of bin Laden’s reign of terror certainly ranks high – the more need the public has for full disclosure.”

I couldn’t agree more, which is why the judge’s ruling – and the subsequent appellate court ruling – are an affront not only to Freedom of Information Act law but to the public’s right to know what the government is up to.

As I said in my statement, JW attorneys are reviewing our options and I’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date. Justice was not served by this decision.

More Secrets and Lies in the Obama IRS Scandal                         

In the last installment of the Weekly Update, I said the IRS scandal was “one for the ages” and nothing that has transpired since then has changed my opinion.

As you likely know by now, we learned last week that the Obama IRS targeted Tea Party and conservative organizations seeking tax exempt status and subjected conservative donors to painful and unnecessary audits – an unprecedented level of politicization inside the supposedly non-political federal agency. (Click here to read last week’s Update for the full details.)

This systemic attack on these organizations had a singular effect: to suppress the Tea Party and other critics of the Obama administration during Obama’s reelection 2012 campaign.

This week there have been some major developments as Congress held hearings to get to the truth in this matter, a task made more difficult when the head of the key IRS agency invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer any questions. As reported by The Washington Post:

The head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, faced with allegations of improper targeting of conservative groups, told a House committee Wednesday that she has done nothing wrong but declined to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Lois G. Lerner told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in an opening statement that members of the panel have already accused her of providing false information to Congress…

“I have not done anything wrong,” she said. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations. And I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” But on the advice of counsel, she said, she would not answer questions or testify before the committee.

But here’s the problem for Ms. Lerner with that impassioned statement in self-defense. She just may have forfeited her right to invoke the Fifth Amendment.

Many legal analysts (along with members of Congress) have said that Lerner cannot have it both ways. She can’t issue a statement before Congress professing her innocence in the scandal, even referring to her past testimony, and then clam up and refuse to answer questions.  Consider what the Supreme Court has said on the invocation of the Fifth:  “It has long been held that a defendant who takes the stand in his own behalf cannot then claim the privilege against cross-examination on matters reasonably related to the subject matter of his direct examination…”

It certainly appears that Ms. Lerner, in effect, “took the stand” by issuing her statement. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, for his part, plans to bring her back:  “We are obligated to bring Lerner back because she did not properly take the Fifth [Amendment],” Issa said according to Reuters. “She clearly chose to make her statements and then not open herself up to even any questioning as to the statement she made.”   I’m not confident that much can be done about it legally, but it sure confirms that, practically speaking, the Obama administration has something to hide.

In other developments regarding the question of who knew what and when, this week we also learned that the IRS had conducted its own investigation one year before the Treasury Department Inspector General released the results of its probe. Both investigations came to the same conclusion regarding improprieties, prompting Rep. Issa to chastise the IRS for the crime and the cover-up:

Tempers flared in a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday, with members on both sides of the aisle castigating the Internal Revenue Service for targeting conservative groups with special scrutiny, and then hiding the practice from Congress…

“Just yesterday the committee interviewed Holly Paz, the director of exempt organizations, rulings and agreements, division of the IRS,” Issa said. “While a tremendous amount of attention is centered about the Inspector General’s report, or investigation, the committee has learned from Ms. Paz that she in fact participated in an IRS internal investigation that concluded in May of 2012 – May 3 of 2012 – and found essentially the same thing that Mr. George found more than a year later.”

What this means is that it was a well-known fact within the Obama administration that IRS officials were illicitly targeting constitutional government groups six months before the 2012 elections. And yet, IRS officials did not bother to tell Congress, and may have even falsely testified on the matter.

But here’s the million dollar question: Did they tell the president? House Majority Leader Boehner says almost certainly: “It’s pretty inconceivable to me that the president wouldn’t know,” he said on Greta van Susteren’s Fox News program that aired late Wednesday. “I just put myself in his shoes: I deal with my senior staff every day, and if the White House had known about this, which now it appears they’ve known about it for about a year, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t have come up in some conversation.”

It turns out that the former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had at least 129 visits to the Obama White House, including over 90 meetings with Obama’s Obamacare Czar Nancy DeParl.  Even apart from the IRS scandal, in what world would the head of the IRS visiting the White House so many times be considered appropriate!  Obama says he is outraged by the IRS scandal, but his White House advisers are meeting with old Clinton scandal hands in order to devise a public relations strategy to handle the corruption scandal.

Now, while the IRS scandal took center stage in Congress, another scandal also erupted in as we learned the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) seized phone records from at least five Fox News reporters as part of a supposed criminal probe into leaks inside the Defense Department. As reported by Fox News:

Newly uncovered court documents reveal the Justice Department seized records of several Fox News phone lines as part of a leak investigation – even listing a number that, according to one source, matches the home phone number of a reporter’s parents.

The seizure was ordered in addition to a court-approved search warrant for Fox News correspondent James Rosen’s personal emails. In the affidavit seeking that warrant, an FBI agent called Rosen a likely criminal “co-conspirator,” citing a wartime law called the Espionage Act.

Rosen was not charged, but his movements and conversations were tracked. A source close to the leak investigation confirmed to Fox News that the government obtained phone records for several numbers that match Fox News numbers out of the Washington bureau.

This latest development follows on the heels of news last week that the DOJ seized the records of Associated Press reporters in a DOD leak investigation, a decision AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion”. (The “leaks” in question relate to an AP story last year regarding a CIA operation in Yemen to stop a potential terrorist attack.)

President Obama moved quickly to defend the attack on the First Amendment in the name of national security and then expressed “complete confidence” in embattled Attorney General Eric Holder. He then said in a major defense policy speech that Holder was on top of the issue and would spearhead an initiative to make certain that DOJ activities do not chill the First Amendment.

And then this news hit, courtesy of NBC News:

Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News on Thursday.

The disclosure of the attorney general’s role came as President Barack Obama, in a major speech on his counterterrorism policy, said Holder had agreed to review Justice Department guidelines governing investigations that involve journalists.

This led ABC News reported Jonathan Karl to quip that Holder will now be put in the position of investigating Holder! Holder is personally responsible for this dishonest investigation into Fox News and each and every one of the news organization’s sources (or at least the ones that call on the phone).

The attack on Fox News is no surprise to us.  We exposed how the Obama White House tried to ban Fox News and then lied about it.  Barack Obama hates Fox News so it is no surprise that his corrupt attorney general would personally sign off on a warrant against Fox that is without precedent in the modern era.

Of course, Judicial Watch has been shouting from the rooftop for five years about rampant corruption inside the Obama administration. And while it’s nice to now see that the media is finally paying attention, it will mean nothing if these developments are not accompanied by real accountability, which is Judicial Watch’s mission.

Happy Memorial Day

On behalf of all the staff of Judicial Watch, which includes no small number of veterans, I wish all of you a wonderful Memorial Day holiday.  As we honor the fallen, who fought and died so that we can remain free, I thought it appropriate to reprint a portion of the May 5, 1868, Memorial Day proclamation (General Orders No. 11) by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic:

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation’s gratitude, the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.

Until next week…

In my experience, the term “BOLO” is a law enforcement term short for “be on the lookout” for criminals and suspects on the run.  But for the Obama IRS, BOLO meant, literally, “be on the lookout” for citizen groups who might be opposed to the Obama agenda.

Here are the facts as we know them today.

First, we know that the “independent” IRS purposely stonewalled the approval of non-profit applications from “Tea Party” and other conservative groups that were seeking tax exempt status. As reported by CNN:

Among the criteria used by IRS officials to flag applications was a “Be On the Look Out” list, or a BOLO, which was discontinued in 2012, according to the report. The criteria on the BOLO included:

• Whether “Tea Party,” “Patriots” or “9/12 Project” was referenced in the case file.

• Whether the issues outlined in the application included government spending, government debt or taxes.

• Whether there was advocating or lobbying to “make America a better place to live.”

• Whether a statement in the case file criticized how the country is being run.

• Whether it advocated education about the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

And how bad was the stonewalling? Epic. Over the course of 27 months, not a single Tea Party type organization received tax exempt status. This was no political witch hunt, says the IRS. So why is it that liberal groups had their applications approved in as little as nine months?

And it was not simply a matter of lengthy bureaucratic delays. Conservative groups were subjected to an unprecedented amount of scrutiny, draining both time and resources. Politico explains:

The Internal Revenue Service asked tea party groups to see donor rolls.

It asked for printouts of Facebook posts.

And it asked what books people were reading.

A POLITICO review of documents from 11 tea party and conservative groups that the IRS scrutinized in 2012 shows the agency wanted to know everything — in some cases, it even seemed curious what members were thinking. The review included interviews with groups or their representatives from Hawaii, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere.

They were asking for a “U-Haul truck’s worth of information,” one conservative organization the Waco Tea Party told Politico.

We also know that the IRS targeted conservative donors with painful audits. For example, consider the case of Frank VanderSloot, who made a sizable donation to a Romney-connected organization. Shortly thereafter, after an opposition research firm dug through Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records, the IRS subjected the conservative donor to three audits in four months. Mr. VanderSloot had never been audited previously and now faces $80,000 in legal fees.

The IRS also reportedly “leaked” confidential tax information on conservative benefactors, such as Charles and David Koch, of Koch Industries, who are important donors to a number of constitutional government groups. And they did the same to conservative organizations as well.  For example, as reported by Breitbart.com, one of Obama’s campaign co-chairmen leaked the tax records of our pro-traditional marriage friends at the National Organization of Marriage to a homosexual activist who also happened to be an Obama campaign supporter.  There were also illegal leaks of taxpayer information (of conservatives) to the leftist publication Pro Publica.

And what was the purpose of this all-out assault? Was this simply a case of retribution against enemies? No, this was much bigger than political payback. This was a systemic, and concerted effort to squash the Tea Party movement, the most organic and powerful political movement in recent memory, during election season. This was about campaign politics.

This is a scandal for the ages.  Reports are that nearly 500 groups were targeted.  The Obama IRS jihad against conservatives had the effect of suppressing the First Amendment-protected activity of virtually the entire Tea Party movement as Obama was seeking reelection.  If you want to know how an election is stolen in plain sight, this is how.

Of course, per usual, the finger pointing has begun. But there is no question in my mind that all fingers should be pointing to the top of the White House food chain. As the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel points out: “Mr. Obama didn’t need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.”

The president took to the airwaves this week to feign angry indignation about the IRS targeting his enemies, while denying any knowledge whatsoever of what his administration had been up to.  I am not surprised that Obama is pretending, in careful language, not to know about the worst abuse of power by a presidential administration in a generation.  Let’s call it Obama’s Nixonian “I’m not a crook” moment.

Why do I believe that Obama knew exactly what his Internal Revenue Service was up to (besides it being in the news for the last two years)?  Because of the record of Steven T. Miller – the man Obama first hired and has now pretended to fire as acting commissioner of the IRS.

Make no mistake about it. When Obama appointed Miller head of the IRS, the president should have known what he was getting. Before becoming acting commissioner, he had been the commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division of the IRS, where, according to the IRS faux folksy website, “Steve oversaw the administration of tax law relating to employee plans, tax-exempt organizations and various government entities.”

Perhaps the description should more accurately have read “oversaw and undermined the administration of tax law relating to … tax exempt organizations.” At Judicial Watch we know this well because, very early on, we were one of the many conservative organizations and Clinton critics that Miller’s tax exempt branch subjected to politically-inspired audits.

As the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard reported in his “Washington Secrets” column, “Steven T. Miller, the acting IRS commissioner who managed the division that has admitted targeting anti-Obama Tea Party groups, was one of several agents who investigated anti-Clinton organizations including Judicial Watch during that Democrat’s administration, according to court documents and interviews.”

As I relate in my book, The Corruption Chronicles, when Judicial Watch complained about the audit and its political nature, an IRS official told us, “What do you expect when you sue the President?”

Miller was one of the IRS officials who oversaw the invasive audit of Judicial Watch even while conceding that the audit “had created at least the appearance of a problem.” It seemed every time we complained about the audit, Miller’s bureaucrats expanded its scope until it covered seven years’ worth of records!

So, now we find that Miller, despite this record of being a top official partly responsible for the last wave of IRS abuse during the Clinton years, was rewarded by Barack Obama with the top position at the IRS. Given our well-publicized experience with him, it is no surprise to me that Miller was content to allow this illegal IRS harassment of Obama’s hit list – and the subsequent cover-up.

As I say, Obama pretended to “fire” Miller this week, an empty gesture considering the fact that Miller had already planned to leave – and, in fact, will be running the IRS for several more weeks. It was an attempt by the president to show command of a situation that continues to spiral out of control.

In fact, Thursday night we learn courtesy of ABC News that the woman in charge of the IRS office during the Tea Party attacks is now running the Obamacare IRS office!

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

These IRS abuses are one more example of how the Obama administration is off the rails and out of control.  Judicial Watch is your watchdog in Washington and is mobilizing its investigative and legal resources to protect the American people from the crisis caused by Obama’s corrupted IRS.

Stay tuned as news is breaking by the moment. As Democratic Senator Max Baucus said during an interview with Bloomberg’s Capital Gain, “I have a hunch that a lot more is going to come out.”

This is true – especially if we have anything to do with it.

Big Media Gets Pass from Criminal Accountability?

If there is one lesson I have learned over my decade and a half at Judicial Watch, it is this: you must never overestimate the hypocrisy of the Left – especially in covering for their own. Lest you have even the slightest doubt, cast an eye to the outrageous behavior of District of Columbia Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan when he allowed NBC-TV’s David Gregory to walk away scot free for a firearm offense, even while openly acknowledging “the clarity of the violation of the law.”

We don’t know for certain what prompted Nathan to decline to prosecute Gregory. We do know that, according to the Washington Post, until the Republican sweep in 2010, he had been the House Democrats’ top lawyer. We also know that he was appointed attorney general by D.C. Democrat Mayor Vincent Gray. And we know that some legal experts have questioned why Nathan did not recuse himself from the case when it was discovered that he had a personal relationship with David Gregory’s wife. Clearly more information was required.

On January 14, 2013, William A. Jacobson, founder and author of the outstanding blog website, Legal Insurrection, submitted a District of Columbia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and Office of the Attorney General (OAG) seeking access to the following records:

1.  The January 9, 2013 letter from Lee Levine on behalf of David Gregory,referenced in the letter dated January 11, 2013 from Attorney General Irvin B.Nathan to Mr. Levine which was publicly disclosed on that date.

2.  All communications between the District of Columbia Office of Attorney General and/or Metropolitan Police Department, on the one hand, and legal counsel for David Gregory and/or NBC News, on the other hand, with regard to the incident  involving the display on television by Mr. Gregory of an alleged high-capacity ammunition clip (the “Gregory incident”).

3.  All documents in the possession of the MPD and OAG regarding the Gregory Incident, to the extent not exempted from disclosure under applicable law, including but not limited to witness statements, evidence review and possession                records, interview notes, and forensic testing.

On February 20, 2013, OAG informed Jacobson that it was withholding certain requested records, including the January 9, 2013, letter from NBC attorney Lee Levine, as well as responsive emails between OAG and MPD. (We just learned the letter from Levine was made available to the media, but is being withheld from us!)

The OAG also withheld in their entirety an affidavit and a warrant responsive to the Jacobson FOIA request. On April 17, 2013, MPD informed Jacobson that it was withholding responsive records as well. This past week, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA lawsuit on Jacobson’s behalf asking that the Court to declare OAG and MDP in violation of the law and to order them to produce the records without further delay.

The known facts in the Gregory case are simple. On Sunday December 23, 2012, the “Meet the Press” host interviewed the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre concerning firearms policy in the United States. During the course of the interview, Gregory exhibited a high-capacity ammunition clip.  The possession of such an ammunition clip is in violation of the law of the District of Columbia.

Gregory displayed the ammunition clip despite the fact that, according to the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, “NBC was clearly and timely advised by an MPD (Metropolitan Police Department) employee that its plans to exhibit on the broadcast a high capacity magazine would violate D.C. law, and there was no contrary advice from any other federal official.”

Some argued that, in accordance with D.C. law, Gregory should have been charged with a weapons violation and taken into custody, as other alleged offenders have been. The MPD failed to do so, however, and in early January announced that it had completed its two-week investigation and presented the case to the OAG “for a determination of the prosecutorial merit of the case.”

On January 11, 2013, after just two days of deliberation, Attorney General Nathan sent a letter to NBC saying that his office would not prosecute Gregory, “despite the clarity of the violation of this important law.” The Attorney General added, “There is no doubt of the gravity of the illegal conduct in this matter…”

Yet, in what surely must be one of the most glaring non sequiturs I’ve seen, Nathan then refused to prosecute Gregory. And the Washington Times’ outstanding editorialist Emily Miller well summed up the absurdity of the situation when Gregory first committed his violation:

The District came up with its overly restrictive laws in response to the Supreme Court overturning the capital city’s 30-year gun ban. The statutes shouldn’t apply just to regular people but to the rich and powerful as well. The District should either repeal its over-the-top restrictions or send a squad car to take David Gregory into custody.

The way Gregory’s prosecution decision was handled undermines confidence in the fair administration of justice.  If Gregory shouldn’t be prosecuted then no one should be – and the law should be rescinded.  Our client Prof. Jacobsen also is seeking justice in the public interest:

“The documents being withheld will help shed light on the details of this highly publicized non-prosecution, which raised issues as to whether well-connected and famous D.C. insiders were treated as any other citizen in a similar situation.  I appreciate Judicial Watch assisting in this search for the truth.”

Let’s hope the courts put an end to this cover-up.

Judicial Watch Sues U.S. Secret Service for Obama’s Hawaiian Vacation Documents

With approximately one-third of congressional committees preoccupied with investigating Obama corruption – from Benghazi-gate, to the IRS scandal, to Obamacare propaganda – the First Family might be tempted to escape to some far away location for vacation.

As Judicial Watch knows all too well, this is something the Obamas have done with some frequency since taking office in 2009, and largely on the taxpayers’ dime.  JW has been the leading investigative force on the Obama’s taxpayer-funded luxury trips, using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get ahold of records about the costs of this abuse of the perks of the presidency.

Our feeling is that, especially considering the massive budget crisis in Washington, the president must be completely transparent to the American people regarding the cost of these vacations. Instead, however, all we’ve received is more stonewalling. The pattern, by now, should be familiar to you. We file a FOIA. The Obama administration ignores it. We sue to get the records. And often we are successful.

JW was back at it again on May 6, when we were forced to file a FOIA lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the U.S. Secret Service in order to obtain records concerning use of U.S. Government funds to provide “security and/or any other services to President Obama and any companions on their January 1 and 2, 2013, trip to Honolulu, Hawaii.”

On January 2, 2013, Judicial Watch filed its original FOIA request about taxpayer funds used to pay for President Obama and his entourage to travel to Hawaii, seeking access to:  All records concerning use of U.S. Government funds to provide security and/or other services to President Obama and any companions on their January 1 and 2, 2013 trip to Honolulu, Hawaii.

Per usual, we are getting the runaround. By a letter dated January 31, 2013, the Secret Service acknowledged that they received the request. By law the agency was required to determine whether to comply with the FOIA request within 20 days and provide Judicial Watch with the requisite notifications by February 11, 2013 at the latest.  But as of May 6, the Secret Service had yet to produce a single record.

So now onto step three: file a lawsuit.

Veteran White House reporter Keith Koffler provided the public with important information about these Hawaiian trips when he wrote on January 4, 2013, that the “total cost to taxpayers of Obama’s vacations to Hawaii since becoming president is likely in excess of $20 million, and possibly much, much more.”  Evidently, this is based on estimates for the trips taken by the Obama family during the Christmas holiday season in four consecutive years.

“According to a detailed breakdown by the Hawaii Reporter, the annual excursions in 2009, 2010, and 2011 cost about $4 million, much of it attributable to the expense of taking Air Force One, at an hour rate of about $180,000, on an eighteen-hour roundtrip journey to Honolulu and back,” Koffler writes.

These trips to Hawaii are just one example of the Obamas jet-setting lifestyle. According to records obtained by Judicial Watch, First Family vacations since Obama took office have come at great costs to taxpayers. Those costs have included:

• In August 2010, when Michelle Obama traveled to Spain with multiple friends and one of her daughters, the total cost to taxpayers was at least $467,555.

• From June 21 – 27, 2011, when Michelle Obama along with her daughters and staff traveled to South Africa and Botswana, charges to the taxpayers for the aircraft and crew alone were $424,142.

• During President’s Day weekend of February 2012, when Michelle Obama and her two daughters vacationed in Aspen, Colorado, charges to the taxpayers were $83,182.99.

As I say, the Obamas’ opulent vacation lifestyle is particularly objectionable during a time when government debt is out of control. President Obama is not king and his administration should stop ignoring the FOIA open records law and account to the American people for the spending on his luxury vacations.

These vacations may seem but a drop in the bucket when compared to other examples of Obama’s spending-gone-wild, but waste is waste. And these trips are adding up.

Until next week…

If you are a regular reader of the Weekly Update, you know that Judicial Watch has been the leading force in uncovering the unethical and dangerous connections between the Obama administration and a wide swath of radical leftwing special interest groups.  These groups are helping to create and to advance in secret illicit government policies ranging from stealth amnesty to reverse discrimination to attacks on election integrity.

On April 30, 2013, we continued our effort to expose these unholy alliances when we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) for “all records of communications” between the DOJ and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) relating to a 2012 lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of the Mi Familia Vota Education Fund.

Not surprisingly, the ACLU/Mi Familia Vota lawsuit was aimed at preventing the state of Florida from taking some reasonable steps to remove ineligible voters from registration lists. That’s right: Florida wanted to clean up its voter registration lists – and the ACLU wanted to keep them dirty.

Please understand, there is no doubt about ACLU/DOJ collusion in the matter of corrupting voter integrity. As far back as June 20, 2011, the ACLU, acting in conjunction with Project Vote, sent a letter to the DOJ complaining about a new Florida election integrity law that sought to avoid the massive voter registration fraud caused by Project Vote and its partner ACORN in 2008. Now Judicial Watch wants to know just how how far the DOJ has gone in its collusion with the ACLU.

On June 14, 2012, we submitted a FOIA request to the DOJ requesting the following information:

All records of communications between the Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) concerning, regarding, or relating to Mi Familia Vota Education Fund v. Detzner, 12-cv-1294, U.S. District Court, Middle District of Florida (Tampa)

By a letter dated June 18, 2012, the DOJ acknowledged receiving the Judicial Watch FOIA request and was required by law to respond by July 17, 2012. It failed to do so.

Our lawsuit asks the District Court to order the Obama DOJ to “conduct a search for any and all responsive records” and to “produce, by a certain date, any and all non-exempt records,” along with an index of any records the department continues to declare exempt.

To most Americans, it would seem to go without saying that the role of the DOJ should be to protect voter integrity, not join with radical leftwing groups in trying to undermine it. But, remember, this is the Obama Justice Department, with Eric Holder as its chief – a man so disdainful of basic security measures and legal protection to ensure free and fair elections that he has become a regular on Judicial Watch’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” list.

The effort by the state of Florida to clean its registration lists of ineligible voters came in response to a February 2012 letter of inquiry sent by Judicial Watch to Florida election officials. Judicial Watch alerted the State of Florida that failure to maintain clean voter registration lists violates Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

In response to Florida’s resulting efforts to comply with the NVRA, the ACLU, on behalf of the Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, on June 8, 2012, filed its suit against the state. The DOJ then followed with its own lawsuit on June 12, 2012, asking a federal court to enjoin the state from taking steps to inquire about the presence of non-eligible aliens on voting rolls.

Judicial Watch moved to intervene in the case to defend Florida’s voter list maintenance efforts; the court subsequently sided with Florida and Judicial Watch and denied the DOJ’s attempt to stop Florida from removing non-citizens from the voter rolls.

This latest FOIA lawsuit is not the first time Judicial Watch has filed suit against the Obama DOJ to obtain information about its relationship with the ACLU. On June 1, 2012, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA lawsuit against the DOJ to obtain records detailing the agency’s communications with the ACLU involving Pennsylvania House Bill 934, commonly referred to as Pennsylvania’s voter ID law. Judicial Watch previously obtained documents from the DOJ showing that the agency worked with the ACLU to mount their respective legal challenges to SB 1070, Arizona’s illegal immigration enforcement law.

When we added Eric Holder to JW’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” list, we noted, “Every day that Eric Holder remains at the helm, the Department of Justice sinks further into the abyss of cronyism, corruption, and deceit.” Now you have another one of the reasons why.

JW Continues to Press Benghazi Lawsuits against Obama Administration in Wake of Stunning Whistleblower Testimony

If there was any remaining doubt about the systematic effort by the Obama administration to keep the American people from learning the full truth about the tragedy that unfolded in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, it was thoroughly removed at this past Wednesday’s House committee hearings.

Perhaps, FrontPage Magazine summed it up best in its lead article the following morning:

Wednesday on Capitol Hill, three impeccable witnesses offered the clearest evidence to date that the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi before, during and after the terrorist attack that claimed the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, State Department employee Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen A. Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods, was a deadly combination of ineptitude, political calculations, and outright lying.

The testimony – by whistleblowers Eric Nordstrom (a former regional security officer of the U.S. Mission to Libya), Mark Thompson (the acting deputy assistant secretary of state for counterterrorism), and Gregory Hicks (the second in command in Libya during the fatal attack) – was as revealing as it was riveting. In the end, it painted a grim picture of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton first blocking the efforts by courageous soldiers to come to the aid of their fellow Americans under fire, and then weaving a deliberate web of outrageous lies to cover not only their own trail, but that of Islamic terrorists as well.

This is where Judicial Watch is focusing its attention.  JW has filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests – and three lawsuits as well – against the Obama State Department to gain access to records that could shed light on what really happened in Benghazi, who responded, and how.  All three of the lawsuits are still active, and we will continue to press each one to help the American people get to the bottom of this deadly cover-up. Let me give you an update on where we stand in each suit.

Benghazi Lawsuit No. 1: JW Seeks U.S. Consulate Videos at Time of Attack

On February 25, 2013, Judicial Watch sued the State Department seeking “all videos and photographs” depicting the Benghazi, Libya Consulate between September 10 and September 13, 2012, the period leading up to, during, and immediately following the deadly attack.

Specifically, Judicial Watch seeks the following records pursuant to its December 19, 2012, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request:

“Any and all videos and photographs depicting U.S. Consulate facilities in Benghazi, Libya (including the Special Mission Compound and the Annex) between September 10, 2012, and September 13, 2012, that were provided to the Accountability Review Board (ARB) for Benghazi and/or to any individual member of the ARB.”

The State Department acknowledged receiving the Judicial Watch FOIA request on January 4, 2013, and was required by law to respond by February 4, 2013.  Now, more than three months later, no documents have been produced. The Obama administration cannot claim it came up empty in trying to locate the records.  The records exist for certain because they are referenced by the Accountability Review Board (ARB), convened by then – Secretary of State Clinton last December, in its final report.

In fact, according to ARB Chairman Ambassador Tom Pickering, the Board “reviewed thousands of documents and watched hours of video” (emphasis added) during the course of its investigation. Pickering, it should be noted, refused to testify in the House Benghazi hearings. The Obama administration also reportedly shared Benghazi video with certain members of Congress. The State Department, however, has refused to comply with JW’s FOIA seeking access to these materials on behalf of the American people.

I said at the time we filed our fist FOIA lawsuit, “It’s an easy guess as to why the Obama administration is refusing to turn these records over. Any video or photos will tell us more about Benghazi – in contrast to the lies and spin coming out of Obama administration officials.” With Wednesday’s whistleblower revelations, that statement is proving to be more accurate than ever.

Benghazi Lawsuit Number 2: JW Seeks Details Regarding Contract with Foreign Security Company

In a second FOIA lawsuit against the Obama State Department, Judicial Watch seeks access to records concerning a contract totaling nearly $400,000 that was awarded to a foreign firm for “Security Guards and Patrol Services” at the Benghazi Consulate prior to the Benghazi attacks. This contract was signed on February 17, 2012, and May 3, 2012, and at the time was identified only as “Award ID SAQMMA12COO92.”  Judicial Watch filed its lawsuit on February 25, 2013.

Specifically, Judicial Watch seeks the following pursuant to a November 7, 2012, FOIA request:

Any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to the $387,413.68 contract awarded by the Department of State to an unidentified foreign awardee for “Security Guards and Patrol Services.”  According to the record of this expenditure on USASpending.gov, the contract was signed on February 17, 2012, and May 3, 2012, and is identified by Award ID SAQMMA12COO92.

The State Department acknowledged receiving the November 7, 2012, Judicial Watch FOIA request on November 12, 2012, and was required by law to respond by December 20, 2012, at the latest.  Yet again, as of the date of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, JW has not received a meaningful response.

And what is suspicious about this contract?

According to Breitbart.com, when first questioned about foreign Benghazi security guards on Friday, September 14, 2012, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland emphatically denied that State had hired any private firm to provide security at the American mission in Benghazi:

QUESTION: (Inaudible) the claim was made yesterday that a company that is a spinoff of Blackwater, in fact, proposed or contracted the United States Government for this particular kind of eventuality, and it was caught up in some sort of bureaucratic –

MS. NULAND: Completely untrue with regard to Libya.  I checked that this morning.  At no time did we plan to hire a private security company for Libya.

QUESTION: Toria [stet], I just want to make sure I understood that, because I didn’t understand your first question. You said – your first answer.  You said that at no time did you have contracts with private security companies in Libya?

MS. NULAND: Correct.

However, on September 17, 2012, WIRED magazine broke the story that Nuland had provided false information in her September 14 press conference, saying:  “Contrary to Friday’s claim by State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland that ‘at no time did we contract with a private security firm in Libya,’ the department inked a contract for ‘security guards and patrol services’ on May 3, 2012, for $387,413.68.  An extension option brought the tab for protecting the consulate to $783,000.  The contract lists only ‘foreign security awardees’ as its recipient.”

In her daily press briefing on Tuesday, September 18, 2012, Nuland admitted that she had made an “error” concerning the State Department’s hiring of foreign security firms in Benghazi. “There was a group called Blue Mountain Group, which is a private security company with permits to operate in Libya,” Nuland said.  “They were hired to provide local Libyan guards who operated inside the gate doing things like operating the security access equipment, screening cars, that kind of thing.”

Nuland’s belated admission that Blue Mountain was chosen by the Clinton State Department because it hired “local Libyan guards” takes on a new, sinister meaning in view of Nordstrom’s House committee testimony that, “Benghazi and Tripoli were not located in a country where the Department of State could count on effective support or response from the host nation — a fact that was clearly and repeatedly reported to policy makers in Washington, DC.”

Add to that the Breitbart.com report that Blue Mountain was specifically selected for the Benghazi security operation because it was willing to sign the State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya prohibiting guards from carrying weapons with live ammunition, and it becomes all the more obvious why the Obama administration is stonewalling JW’s second Benghazi FOIA. And why we will not let them get away with it.

Benghazi Lawsuit Number 3: JW Seeks “Doctored” Talking Points Memo

Judicial Watch filed a FOIA lawsuit on February 14, 2013, against the Obama Administration’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence seeking access to a controversial “speaking points” memo that seems to suggest that intelligence officials believed from the outset that al Qaeda was behind the attack despite public statements to the contrary issued by Obama administration officials, including UN Ambassador Susan Rice and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

JW’s FOIA skepticism about the “speaking points” was confirmed in early May, when an explosive story in the Weekly Standard revealed that, contrary to the Obama administration’s denials, the State Department’s own internal emails explicitly pointed to al Qaeda involvement in the deadly attack:

Within hours of the initial attack on the U.S. facility, the State Department Operations Center sent out two alerts. The first, at 4:05 p.m. (all times are Eastern Daylight Time), indicated that the compound was under attack; the second, at 6:08 p.m., indicated that Ansar al Sharia, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group operating in Libya, had claimed credit for the attack. According to the House report, these alerts were circulated widely inside the government, including at the highest levels. The fighting in Benghazi continued for another several hours, so top Obama administration officials were told even as the fighting was taking place that U.S. diplomats and intelligence operatives were likely being attacked by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists

As reported by the New York Post, the need for the JW FOIA was further backed up by Gregory Hicks in his House committee testimony:

Gregory Hicks, the first person to testify to Congress who was on the ground in Libya during the fateful night of the Sept. 11, 2012 siege, told a House committee that he was incredulous just five days later when UN Ambassador Susan Rice said on Sunday talk shows that the assault was not a terrorist attack.

“My jaw dropped,” Hicks said. “I was embarrassed.”

Specifically, the Judicial Watch FOIA seeks:

Any and all memoranda, assessments, analyses, and/or talking points regarding the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya and/or the killing of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence between September 11, 2012, and September 20, 2012.  This request includes, but is not limited to, the “speaking points” memorandum referred to by Senator Dianne Feinstein during a televised interview on October 17, 2012….

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged receiving JW’s request on October 19, 2012, and was required by law to respond by November 26, 2012.  However, as of the date of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, the agency failed to produce any records responsive to the request, indicate when any responsive records will be produced, or demonstrated that responsive records are exempt from production.

In mid-November 2012, former CIA Director General David Petraeus reportedly testified before Congress that the initial speaking points produced by the CIA indicated the attack was an act of terrorism committed by al Qaeda-linked militants and suggested the terrorism reference was removed sometime during an interagency review process. In the days and weeks following the Benghazi attacks, the Obama administration blamed the incident on a rudimentary Internet video deemed offensive to Muslims.  This false claim was repeated by both Ambassador Rice and Secretary Clinton in multiple public statements and press interviews.

At a September 14, 2012, event honoring the four victims of the Benghazi attack, then-Secretary of State Clinton made the following statement:  “We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men.  We’ve seen the rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful video that we had nothing to do with.”

Did Hillary Clinton know this was a lie when she said it?  She certainly was in no mood to talk about it during her testimony before Congress on January 23, 2013.  When asked about the alleged discrepancy between the intelligence community’s assessment and the Obama administration’s public statements during congressional testimony, Ms. Clinton shouted, “What difference does it make at this point? … I personally was not focused on talking points.”

According to Investor.com, at the House committee testimony on May 8, Eric Nordstrom answered Ms. Clinton’s question succinctly and emotionally:

What difference at this point does the truth about Benghazi make? In an emotional opening statement at Wednesday’s hearing of the House Oversight Committee, Eric Nordstrom, a regional security officer of the U.S. Mission to Libya from September 2011 to July 2012, answered that question with voice cracking and a simple declarative sentence:

“It matters to the friends and family of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, who were murdered on September 11th, 2012.”

Separately, I was struck by the failure of the hearings to get into the security issues raised by Judicial Watch’s independent interim report on Benghazi, “The Benghazi Attack of September 11, 2012: Analysis and Further Questions from a Diplomatic Security Service Regional Security Officer and Special Agent.”  We prepared this special report relying on the expertise of Mr. Raymond Fournier, a recently retired Diplomatic Security Service Special Agent with more than 30 years of extraordinary experience managing security for a host U.S. Embassies, including our posts in Israel and Afghanistan.

Our report has questions that remain unanswered to this day:

Who at the State Department was responsible for opening up and continuing the operation of the “Special Mission Compound” in the unstable environment of Benghazi, overriding physical security standards for diplomatic facilities?

According to Fournier, “The Department’s unexplained decision to create a new category of diplomatic structure, i.e. the ‘Special Mission Compound,’” for the purpose of “skirting the established physical security standards” for embassies and consulates was the “critical error” leading to the deadly attack.

Did the Director of Diplomatic Security or his immediate subordinates have authority to countermand the Department’s desire to open “SMC Benghazi?”

In the Judicial Watch report, Fournier cautions that, “Frequently, security policy and standards are set aside as inconvenient, restraining, time consuming or simply less important relative to loftier goals foreign policy goals prosecuted by the Department’s elite. One need go no further than Benghazi to see an example of the aforementioned managerial arrogance with the Department.”

Why did Ambassador Stevens travel to Benghazi, so close to the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks?

The Judicial Watch Special Report reveals State Department warnings in July, August, and September of 2012 advising against travel to the Mideast in general and Benghazi in particular.

Why were two unmanned aerial vehicles requested to record the deadly events as they unfolded in Benghazi while more lethal air support options were not on station?

We have over a dozen FOIA requests and three lawsuits to get at the truth.  I can tell you that the Obama administration has failed to respond substantively to any of our inquiries.  This level of stonewalling is unprecedented in my 15 years at Judicial Watch.  But we intend to keep pressing its Benghazi FOIA’s with goal of every American knowing the full truth about what really went on – in Libya and at the Obama White House – on September 11, 2012.

Menendez: What Happens When the Lawbreakers are also the Lawmakers

New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez may not be the most corrupt member of the United States Senate – after all, the competition is pretty stiff – but, if he isn’t, it’s not for a lack of trying. He made Judicial Watch’s list of “Washington’s Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” last year for good reason.

Senator Menendez has been investigated for steering lobbying business to his former chief of staff (and girlfriend). He helped sneak through an $8 million federal giveaway for a luxury condominiums complex that benefitted campaign donors and a former senior aide. Late last year he was alleged to have patronized underage prostitutes and to have employed an illegal alien sex offender on his staff.

On this last point, in response to a January 15, 2013, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Judicial Watch has obtained documents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealing that Menendez may have been the chief beneficiary of a decision by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to delay the deportation of an illegal alien intern working for U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) until after the 2012 elections, despite the intern’s violation of probation stemming from an aggravated sexual assault conviction.

The 18-year-old illegal alien, Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, was allowed to work in the senator’s office even though he had an expired visa and a previous conviction for repeatedly sexually assaulting an 8-year-old boy.

Records obtained through the JW FOIA request reveal that, in addition to working for the Senator, Sanchez Zavaleta volunteered at an organization where he worked with minors in violation of the terms of his probation. Hudson County prosecutors declined to act on these breaches after learning that Sanchez Zavaleta worked for Menendez. Immigration officials also delayed their ordinary deportation efforts in this case, reportedly deciding to delay action until after the November 2012 elections.

According to a December Associated Press (AP) news report that exposed the Menendez-Zavaleta story, “The Homeland Security Department instructed federal agents not to arrest him until after Election Day, a U.S. official involved in the case told the AP.” At the time, a DHS spokesman termed the story “categorically false.”

In January, however, the AP published a follow-up story citing documents obtained from the office of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) confirming its earlier report. According to the follow-up article: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Newark had arranged to arrest Sanchez at the local prosecutor’s office on Oct. 25. That was fewer than two weeks before the election. Noting that Sanchez was a volunteer in Menendez’s Senate office, ICE officials in New Jersey advised that the arrest ‘had the possibility of garnering significant congressional and media interest’ and were ‘advised to postpone the arrest’ until officials in Washington gave approval.”

Ultimately, following the re-elections of both President Obama and Robert Menendez, authorities finally arrested Sanchez on December 6, 2012. He is now scheduled for deportation.

In its January, 15, 2013, FOIA request to DHS concerning amnesty fraud committed by Sanchez Zavaleta while interning for Menendez, Judicial Watch requested the following:

1. Any and all records concerning or relating to the delayed arrest of Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, an intern with Senator Bob Menendez.

2. Any and all records of communication concerning or relating to the delayed arrest of Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta between ICE and the following entities:

a. The White House
b. The Executive Office of the President
c. The Office of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
d. The Office of Senator Bob Menendez
e. The Office of the Senate Majority Leader
f. The Office of Senator Harry Reid
g. The Office of Senator Patty Murray

The time frame specified in the request was October 1, 2012, to December 31, 2012. According to the documents provided Judicial Watch by ICE, the agency located 334 pages of information, but released only 302 in response to the FOIA.

The scandal around Sanchez-Zavaleta should come as no surprise. His track record for supporting illegal aliens speaks for itself. In 2007, he voted against denying legal status to illegal aliens convicted of domestic violence, crimes against children, and crimes relating to the illegal purchase or sale of firearms. He voted for giving federal funds to “sanctuary cities” harboring illegal aliens. He voted against building a fence along the Mexican border. And he voted for allowing illegal immigrants to participate in the Social Security program.

Nor is Menendez new to scandals involving his offshore ventures. Late last year, he was alleged to have patronized underage prostitutes. The Senate Ethics Committee is continuing to investigate two trips he took on the private jet of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a major campaign contributor, to the doctor’s “seaside mansion” in the Dominican Republic, trips Menendez failed to disclose properly in his Senate Financial Disclosure forms. And recently, Univision reported that Menendez used his connections and authority as a federal lawmaker to retaliate against an adviser to former Dominican President Hipólito Mejía because the advisor helped an ex-lover of Melgen’s.

And all the while, Senator Menendez, now the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, continues to take the lead as part of the “Gang of Eight” pushing President Obama’s mass amnesty through Congress. This helps to place into context why our system is so badly broken. And why Judicial Watch is so badly needed to expose and end the corruption of the politicians writing our laws.

Until next week…

The Obama administration tends to take a “see no evil, hear no evil” approach to the problem of Islamic radicalism and terrorism.

In November 2009, when  Maj. Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded dozens of others in a Fort Hood shooting spree, while repeatedly shouting “Allahu akbar,” most Americans realized at once that the faithful follower of the extremist imam Anwar al-Awlaki (the spiritual leader of a number of the 9/11 hijackers) was a radical Muslim. But not Barack Obama – whose administration misleadingly mislabeled the assault “workplace violence,” thereby depriving the victims of benefits commensurate with combat injuries.

On September 11, 2012, when al Qaeda terrorists stormed the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the Obama administration covered for the Islamic terrorists by blaming the incident on spontaneous reactions to a rudimentary Internet video critical of Islam. This false claim was repeated by both Ambassador Rice and Secretary Clinton in multiple public statements.

Weeks later, the lie was fully exposed when former CIA Director General David Petraeus reportedly testified before Congress that the initial “speaking points” produced by the CIA “stated there were indications the attack was linked to al Qaeda,” and suggested the terrorism reference was removed sometime during an interagency review process. Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against Obama’s Director of National Intelligence seeking access to records detailing the attack, including the speaking points Petraeus says were scrubbed. We’ll keep you posted.

More recently, on April 15, 2013, when Islamic terrorists attacked the Boston Marathon, killing three and maiming nearly 200 others, Obama refused to acknowledge their Muslim ties, instead admonishing the American people not to “rush to judgment — not about the motivations of these individuals.” Even after evidence gathered by the FBI proved conclusively that the Tsarnaev brothers were radical Islamists, Obama steadfastly refused to admit what was brutally obvious to the rest of the world.

None of this clear-cut evidence of the Obama administration’s dishonesty about Islamic terrorism will come as a surprise to supporters of Judicial Watch. In fact, however, as it turns out, it may be only the tip of the iceberg – the depths of which reach all the way down into this administration’s actual collusion with known Islamic terrorist fronts.

Many Weekly Update readers will recall that in late January, we sounded the alarm about a top Obama State Department official, Mark Ward, participating in a December 2012, conference sponsored by two groups — the Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) – both with chillingly close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is known as the parent organization of Hamas and al Qaeda.

At the conference, Ward conducted a seminar focused on career opportunities for Muslim youth. Here is how the event was billed: “Besides being a citizenship duty, there are benefits that Muslims can add to the American Muslim community and the global Muslim world by joining the US Foreign Services. This session will shed light on the different career opportunities for Muslim youth in the US Foreign Services Department. It will also clear any concerns that many people have feared about pursuing in this career.”

Ward was joined at the Chicago, Illinois, by a number of speakers well known for advocating violent jihad.  Among them was Kifah Mustapha, a fundraiser for the terrorist group the Holy Land Foundation (HLF).  In November 2008, HLF was convicted on 108 counts of supporting international terrorism. The charges included funneling more than $12 million to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, providing material support to a foreign terrorist, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Also at the podium with Ward was MAS co-founder Jamal Badawi , who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case against the HLF and who praised the jihad of Gaza terrorists during a speech titled “Understanding Jihad and Martyrdom.” With Ward and Badawi were Ayman Hammous and Oussama Jammal.  Hammous is the Executive Director of the New York chapter of MAS and Jammal is the president of the Mosque Foundation, an extremist Islamist mosque in Bridgeview, Illinois, that gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the HLF and other Islamic charities accused of financing terrorism.

As Deputy Special Coordinator of the State Department’s Middle East Transition office Ward apparently heads a secretive campaign, discovered in the course of a Judicial Watch investigation, to add Muslims to its foreign service roster. It appears to be part of the administration’s Muslim outreach effort, which includes a variety of controversial moves.

Among the moves are Department of Homeland Security (DHS) meetings with extremist Islamic organizations; sending mosque leader Feisal Abdul Rauf, who blames U.S. foreign policy for the 9/11 attacks, on a Middle Eastern outreach mission; and revamping the way federal agents are trained to combat terrorism by eliminating all materials that shed a negative light on Muslims.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even signed a special order to allow the reentry of two radical Islamic academics whose terrorist ties long banned them from the U.S.

So, it turns out that not only is the Obama administration providing cover, it is also working with known terrorists front groups to help them recruit their followers for key State Department positions. Judicial Watch is determined to get to the bottom of this unholy alliance. This past week, we filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking all records relating to a speech given by Ward, as well as all records of communication between any State Department employee and any representative of the Muslim American Society and/or the Islamic Council of North America regarding the Muslim recruitment conference.  The administration is in full stonewall on this issue and once again we have to go to court to get “the most transparent administration in history” to obey the federal government’s main transparency law, the Freedom of Information Act.

Again, we will keep you posted as events unfold.

From Benghazi to Beyoncé, the Obama Cover-ups Continue

As we reported to you in a recent edition of the Corruption Chronicles, in late January, Judicial Watch launched an investigation into the Beyoncé presidential inauguration ceremony lip-sync “scandal.” The superstar delivered a powerful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, but reports quickly surfaced that she was actually faking it on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. A military spokeswoman subsequently confirmed that the United States Marine Band played live for every song except Beyoncé’s national anthem. So, since the bash had likely cost the taxpayers well over $100 million, Judicial Watch decided to find out the truth behind the petty lies.

In the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we subsequently sent to the Pentagon, we asked for all recordings made in preparation for the 2013 Presidential Inauguration Ceremony, including those by Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson and James Taylor as well as the Marine Band. The request also asked for all documents relating to the use of recordings during the ceremony, including contingency plans for any of the singers to lip sync their performance. It was simple and to the point, no skullduggery or sleight of hand – except by the Obama administration.

Even with something as simple as a singing star’s lip-synching, Obama’s lieutenants couldn’t bring themselves to just tell the truth. It wasn’t a matter of national security and covert operations. It was simply a matter of technical issues and a sound track. Right? Wrong! To the “most open and transparent administration in history,” it was a matter of misdirection and obfuscation – beginning with the cover letter from the Department of Navy:

You will see that some information has been redacted. Specifically, names, telephone numbers, email address, and other personal data have been withheld pursuant to FOIA exemption (b)(6), which prohibits disclosure of personal information when an individual’s privacy interest in it outweighs any public interest.

To say that “some information has been redacted” is, perhaps, the understatement of the millennium. In the 172 pages of emails provided to Judicial Watch, there are approximately 10 to 20 redactions per page, bringing the grand total to well over 2,000 redactions in all, including absurd redactions of Beyoncé’s name!  You’re not going to believe this but we were told that the Pentagon consulted with Beyoncé’s lawyers about the documents before it released them to Judicial Watch.  So the government is now telling us that they can’t release the track recorded by the government by Beyoncé because it is not owned by the government!

The documents also show that members of the Marine Band were told to clam up if asked about the lip synch issue and that they were planning to lip synch weeks before Inauguration Day.  So the idea that it was a last minute thing is complete fiction.

Simply put, this is ridiculous. This Obama administration can’t help but play games on the minutest of issues. The cover-ups now go all the way from the deaths in Benghazi to the depths of Beyoncé.

Case Worker: Illegal Aliens Got Food Stamps by the “Vanload”

Please Note: We are reprinting the following article from our Corruption Chronicles blog as a timely update to the growing food stamp controversy ignited by Judicial Watch’s recent disclosure of documents documenting the Obama administration’s working with the Mexican government to promote food stamps for illegal aliens. The blog post, by Judicial Watch’s Irene Garcia, gained even more headlines about corruption in the food stamp program, which has been corrupted for decades:

For decades the U.S. government has knowingly given illegal immigrants food stamps, according to a former certification case worker who denounced the costly practice back in the 1980s but was essentially ordered to keep a lid on it.

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.”

Until next week…

From the beginning, the Obama administration has made the claim that the “selective deportation” scheme it initiated did not apply to dangerous criminals. Only peace-loving, law abiding illegal aliens would be allowed a “stay” of deportation proceedings, they explained. Just the good guys.

But how is this permissive deportation policy working “on the ground” in municipalities across the country? Let’s consider Cook County, Illinois.

JW this week filed a lawsuit in the Cook County Circuit Court challenging Sheriff Tom Dart’s refusal to honor ICE immigration detainers or cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in identifying deportable criminal aliens. Cook County jails have released as many as 1,000 criminal aliens sought by ICE in the past 18 months alone!

And are any of these individuals dangerous? You bet.

We filed our lawsuit, in partnership with Illinois counsel Christine Svenson, on behalf of lifetime Cook County resident Brian McCann, whose brother William “Denny” McCann, was run over and killed in June 2011 by an unlawfully present criminal alien who had just completed a two-year term of probation for a 2009 DUI conviction.

The illegal alien, Saul Chavez, was charged with felony aggravated driving under the influence, but was released by Dart from a Cook County jail in November 2011 despite an ICE immigration detainer. (ICE issues detainers when it learns that criminal aliens are being held by state or local law enforcement officials. The detainers require that criminal aliens be held for an additional 48 hours to enable ICE to take custody of them before they are released.)

But Chavez was not detained and turned over to authorities as instructed by law. He was instead released, and is believed to have fled to Mexico.

Federal and state laws are clear. They require Dart to honor immigration detainers and cooperate with ICE investigators. So how did this happen? Evidently, Dart, instead of following federal and state laws, chose to abide by a September 2011, Cook County ordinance directing him to refuse ICE detainers. He also denied federal agents access to Cook County facilities for investigative interviews.

You read that correctly. A county ordinance instructed Dart to ignore federal immigration laws, a move so egregious, even ICE Director John Morton, the “father” of selective deportation, was shocked to hear it!

In a January 2012 letter to Cook County Board of Commissioners President Toni Preckwinkle, ICE Director John Morton wrote, “Of great concern is the serious impediment the ordinance poses to ICE’s ability to promote public safety through the identification of criminal aliens.”

Too little, too late to save the life of Mr. McCann. But there is still an opportunity to hold Dart accountable, to make certain this sanctuary policy is stopped and to help protect other families from criminal aliens.

Our lawsuit argues that Dart’s “failure to carry out his legal duties under both federal and state law is not authorized, excused, or justified by the ordinance because that ordinance is preempted by federal law.”

(To see a sample of the significant news coverage of our Chicago press conference announcing the lawsuit, click here.)

Now, as I mentioned, the release of Chavez is one of more than 1,000 instances cited by Judicial Watch where Dart has “regularly and routinely refused to honor immigration detainers issued by ICE, citing the provisions of the Ordinance.” Here are some other details on this unlawful practice:

• “At a public hearing on February 9, 2012 before the Board of Commissioners of Cook County, Defendant testified that, in the five month period between the enactment of the Ordinance on September 7, 2011 and February 9, 2012, Defendant released 346 prisoners in his custody who were the subjects of immigration detainers issued by ICE, and 11 of these persons subsequently committed new offenses.”

• “By April 24, 2012 ICE had issued 432 immigration detainers to Defendant since the enactment of the Ordinance, but Defendant failed to honor any of the detainers.  According to a letter from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to [then-]U.S. Senator John Kyl on that date, Defendant’s failure to honor ICE’s immigration detainers had “prevented ICE from considering removal proceedings against all but 38 of these individuals whom ICE had to locate independently and arrest following their release into the community.”

• “Between April 24, 2012 and March 1, 2013, Defendant received approximately 503 additional immigration detainers issued by ICE, and, on information and belief, has declined to honor any of them, resulting in the release into the community of hundreds of additional prisoners sought by ICE.”

And there’s more.

The lawsuit also alleges that, despite Dart’s refusal to honor ICE immigration detainers or cooperate with ICE investigators, Cook County applied for and received nearly $2.3 million in State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) funds from the federal government in 2011 and over $1.7 million in SCAAP funds in 2012. Over the five-year period from 2008 to 2012, Cook County reportedly applied for and received nearly $15 million in SCAAP funds from the federal government. SCAPP funds are designed to fund the costs that state and local governments incur for holding criminal illegal aliens.

So, in other words, they got the funding specifically targeted for detaining illegal aliens, and then released 1,000 of them onto the streets. So what happened to the money?

In the lawsuit, McCann asks the Circuit Court to compel Dart to comply with his legal duties to honor ICE detainers and to cooperate with federal immigration officials.  It also asks the Circuit Court to declare the Cook County ordinance to be preempted by federal law.

The federal government has determined that certain criminal aliens should not be let loose into the community and that releasing them undermines public safety. And there is no question Dart is thumbing his nose at the federal government and replacing federal immigration priorities with Cook County’s own immigration policy.  Releasing these criminal aliens before they can be taken into custody by ICE endangers the public and Dart is not above the law.

But while it would be tempting to lay all of the blame for this situation at Dart’s feet, the Obama administration must share it. First off, Obama administration officials have failed to sue Dart in the president’s backyard, leaving it to concerned citizens like Brian to bravely step up to the plate to protect the public.

And then there is this: Where in the world would a county Sheriff get the idea that it is permissible to ignore federal immigration laws and allow criminal illegal aliens back onto the streets?

Back in 2010, when the Obama administration’s “selective deportation” scheme first exploded into the news, it was reported that ICE Director Morton had authorized ICE attorneys via an internal memo to block deportation proceedings for illegal aliens who were deemed “low-risk.”

Of course, this turned out to be a lie. A spreadsheet obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) listed the specific violent crimes that immigration officials were prepared to overlook. They included: sexual assault, solicitation of murder, aggravated assault, assaulting a police officer, and kidnapping, as well as numerous drug charges.

The Obama administration set the example. And now the American people are paying for it, with their very lives – in Cook County and in other cities and counties across the country.  Politicians pushing amnesty here in Washington would rather avoid talking about how the sanctuary policies that they are promoting are threats to the public safety.  But politicians (whether in DC or in Cook County) must stop putting politics over the rule of law – or they may see us in court!

Missteps by Feds Exposed on Boston Marathon Bombings

Ten days into the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings, here is what we know – or at least what we think we know:  The terrorist attack was perpetrated by Chechen national Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dhokhar.  Tamerlan was killed during a gun battle with police, while Dhokhar lies in a hospital bed recovering from wounds sustained during a dramatic manhunt last week. Three people were killed during the blast and nearly 200 others wounded.  Many victims are now without limbs. One police officer was shot and killed on the campus of MIT by the terrorists.

We know both brothers self-identified as Muslims, and we know both were “radicalized” at some point over the last few years.

And we also know, as reported on our Corruption Chronicles blog, that Tamerlan could have been deported after a 2009 domestic violence arrest.

As to the rest of the story, there is much we don’t yet know for certain regarding how these brothers fit into the overall terrorist network.

But we are beginning to get a disturbing read on the depth of the U.S. national security failures that allowed the attacks to happen in the first place, a subject considered by a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing this week.  The narrative is emerging of willful blindness by Obama administration agencies to the warning signs leading up to this attack:

• The Boston Globe notes that Russian authorities alerted the U.S. government not once but “multiple times” over their concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, “including a second time nearly a year after he was first interviewed by FBI agents in Boston.”

• Members of Congress were “particularly concerned that U.S. Customs generated an alert when Tamerlan Tsarnaev left for Russia in 2012 but no one was aware when he returned and he was not re-interviewed,” Reuters reports.

• According to The Washington Post, the CIA had its suspicions more than a year before the bombings and urged action: “The CIA pushed to have one of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers placed on a U.S. counterterrorism watch list more than a year before the attacks, U.S. officials said Wednesday…The disclosure of the CIA’s involvement suggests that the U.S. government may have had more reason than it has previously acknowledged to scrutinize Tsarnaev in the months leading up to the bombings in Boston. It also raises questions why U.S. authorities didn’t flag his return to the United States and investigate him further after a seven-month trip he took to Russia last year.”

Reuters also further noted that some of the accusations of “information hoarding” by intelligence agencies are cropping up again: “Some on Capitol Hill questioned whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other U.S. security agencies failed to share information about suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, even after reforms enacted to prevent information-hoarding following the September 11 hijacked plane attacks 12 years ago.”

And, of course, your Judicial Watch is the go-to source for details and analysis on this issue.  Today, we posted another Corruption Chronicles story highlighting documents dating from 1998 in that detail how Chechen terrorists Chechen terrorists use cell phones to detonate backpack bombs.  You can view this article, which is sure to make headlines, here.

Could intelligence agencies have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings?  We sure can’t rule that out. Yahoo reported that the surviving terrorist, Dhokhar, “told investigators from his hospital bed that the brothers grew radical from anti-U.S. material on the internet and acted without assistance from any foreign or domestic militant groups.”

So we’re supposed to believe the word of a terrorist? Not a chance, says Rep. Peter King: “That basically seems to be the story, but I don’t see how we can accept that,” King told CNN.

I couldn’t agree more. Authorities must investigate every shred of evidence and pursue every lead until they determine who else, if anyone, was involved in this terrorist attack on the United States.  But the Obama administration is blaming a federal magistrate for prematurely Mirandizing Dhokhar, and he has clammed up.  (The Obama administration had infamously “Mirandized” the would-be Christmas bomber.)

As you know, even before 9/11, JW launched a comprehensive investigation into terrorist networks, including the so-called moderate Muslim groups that fund acts of terror, and the rampant political correctness inside federal agencies that keep federal investigators blind to the “enemy within.”  You may be surprised to know, as The Washington Examiner editorializes, that:

It is quite possible, though, the FBI agents who interviewed Tsarnaev on both occasions failed to understand what they saw and heard because that’s what they were trained to do. As The Washington Examiner‘s Mark Flatten reported last year, FBI training manuals were systematically purged in 2011 of all references to Islam that were judged offensive by a specially created five-member panel. Three of the panel members were Muslim advocates from outside the FBI, which still refuses to make public their identities. Nearly 900 pages were removed from the manuals as a result of that review. Several congressmen were allowed to review the removed materials in 2012, on condition that they not disclose what they read to their staffs, the media, or the general public.

You can trust that Judicial Watch is on the case and is actively litigating and investigating this terrorist-front-inspired bowdlerization of our national security establishment’s counter-terrorism training materials.

We will have more for you on the Boston Marathon bombing next week or as news events warrant.

Judicial Watch Uncovers USDA Records Promoting US Food Stamp Program for Illegal Aliens

A few weeks ago, I was a guest on the Fox News Channel’s Hannity program to talk about food stamp fraud. The title of the show was “Boomtown 2: The Business of Food Stamps,” and it laid bare an Obama administration scheme to use the food stamp program to foster a massive redistribution of wealth.

(Click here to find out how Obama and his friends have actually found a way to meld corporate cronyism with food stamp abuse to line their pockets while undermining our election systems.)

Well, this week Judicial Watch released explosive new details regarding a new corruption of the food stamp program perpetrated by the Obama administration – this time involving illegal aliens

On Thursday, we released documents detailing how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is working with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal aliens in the U.S. food stamp program.

The promotion of the food stamp program, now known as “SNAP” (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA with a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they do not need to declare their immigration status in order to receive financial assistance.

Emphasized in bold and underlined, the statement reads, “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”

We got the records pursuant to a FOIA request made to USDA on July 20, 2012, seeking “Any and all records of communication relating to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals, and migrant communities, including but not limited to, communications with the Mexican government.”

What we received in response was truly shocking.

According to the records, USDA officials are working closely with their counterparts at the Mexican Embassy to widely broaden the SNAP program in the Mexican immigrant community, with no effort to restrict aid to, identify, or apprehend illegal immigrants who may be on the food stamp rolls.

In an email to Borjon Lopez-Coterilla and Jose Vincente of the Mexican Embassy, dated January 26, 2012, Yibo Wood of the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) sympathized with the plight of illegal aliens applying for food stamps, saying, “FNS understands that mixed status households may be particularly vulnerable. Many of these households contain a non-citizen parent and a citizen child.

The email from Wood to Lopez-Coterilla and Vincente came in response to a request from the Mexican Embassy that the USDA FNS step in to prevent the state of Kansas from changing its food stamp policy to restrict the amount of financial assistance provided to illegal aliens. In a January 22, 2012, article, the Kansas City Star had revealed that the state would no longer include illegal aliens in its calculations of the amount of assistance to be provided low-income Hispanic families in order to prevent discrimination against legal recipients.

Here are some other gems from the records:

• March 30, 2012 – The USDA seeks approval of the Mexican Embassy in drafting a letter addressed to consulates throughout the United States designed to encourage them to enroll in a webinar to train Mexican embassy staffers how to promote increased enrollment among “the needy families that the consulates serve.”

• August 1, 2011 – The USDA FNS initiates contact with the Mexican Embassy in New York to implement programs already underway in DC and Philadelphia for maximizing participation among Mexican citizens.The Mexican Embassy responds that the Consul General is eager to strengthen his ties to the USDA, with specific interest in promoting the nation’s food stamp program.

• February 25, 2011 – USDA and the Mexican Consulate exchange ideas about getting the First Ladies of Mexico and United States to visit a school for purposes of creating a photo opportunity that would promote free school lunches for low-income students in a predominantly Hispanic school. Though a notation in the margin of the email claims that the photo op never took place, UPI reported that it actually did.

• March 3, 2010 – A flyer advertises a webinar to teach nonprofits how to get reimbursed by USDA for serving free lunch over the summer. The course, funded by American taxpayers, is advertised as being “free for all participants.”

• February 9 , 2010 – USDA informs the Mexican Embassy that, based on an agreement reached between the State Department and the Immigration & Naturalization Service (now ICE), the Women, Infants & Children (WIC) food voucher program does not violate immigration laws prohibiting immigrants from becoming a “public charge.”

Now while these records might be news to many folks, Judicial Watch has been on this story since 2006, when our Corruption Chronicles blog revealed that the USDA was spending taxpayer money to run Spanish-language television ads encouraging illegal immigrants to apply for government-financed food stamps.

The Mexico Consul in Santa Ana, California, at the time even starred in some of the U.S. Government-financed television commercials, which explained the program and provided a phone number to apply. In the widely viewed commercial, the Consul assured that receiving food stamps “won’t affect your immigration status.”

In 2012, Judicial Watch reported that in a letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions questioned the Obama administration’s partnership with Mexican consulates to encourage foreign nationals, migrant workers and non-citizen immigrants to apply for food stamps and other USDA administered welfare benefits. Sessions wrote, “It defies rational thinking for the United States – now dangerously $16 trillion in debt – to partner with foreign governments to help us place more foreign nationals on American welfare and it is contrary to good immigration policy in the United States.”

The revelation that the USDA is actively working with the Mexican government to promote food stamps for illegal aliens should have a direct impact on the fate of the immigration bill now being debated in Congress. These disclosures further confirm the fact that the Obama administration cannot be trusted to protect our borders or enforce our immigration laws. And the coordination with a foreign government to attack the policies of an American state is contemptible.

Our work on this issue earned national and _{interzznational headlines} educating untold numbers about this Obama corruption and abuse.  The documents will be seen this evening, Friday 26, on the Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.” We aren’t letting go of this issue and have ramped up our investigations accordingly.  I will be sure to keep you apprised of what we find.

Until next week…

The breaking developments surrounding the Boston terrorist attack has the nation transfixed on events in Boston.  Judicial Watch is contributing to the public’s understanding by breaking news about the terrorist suspects and highlighting the results of past investigations on terrorism in Chechnya.  Our Corruption Chronicles blog post is making national headlines.  I’ll save the commentary on this story for another time and reprint our news post for you in full:

One of the Chechen terrorists who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings could have been deported years ago after a criminal conviction and the other was granted American citizenship on the 11^th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the 26-year-old killed in a wild shootout with police, was a legal U.S. resident who nevertheless could have been removed from the country after a 2009 domestic violence conviction, according to a Judicial Watch source. That means the Obama administration missed an opportunity to deport Tsarnaev but evidently didn’t feel he represented a big enough threat.

Adding insult to injury, the other bomber, little brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was rewarded with American Citizenship on September 11, 2012, in Boston, according to JW’s source. The 19-year-old, who is still on the run, was granted asylum in Arlington, Virginia on September 27, 2002, JW’s source reveals.

Years before these Chechen terrorists carried out the Boston Marathon bombings Judicial Watch uncovered critical intelligence documents detailing al Qaeda’s activities in Chechnya, including the creation of a 1995 camp—ordered by Osama bin Laden—to train “international terrorists” to carry out plots against Americans and westerners.

The goal, according to the once-classified documents obtained by JW in 2011, was to “establish a worldwide Islamic state capable of directly challenging the U.S., China, Russia, and what it views as Judeo-Christian and Confucian domination.” Further, radical Islamic regimes were to be established and supported everywhere possible, from “sea to sea,” including Chechnya. “Terrorist activities are to be conducted against Americans and westerners…” according to the report issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

In other words, it was only a matter of time before terrorists from the predominantly radical Islamic republic carried out an attack on U.S. soil. Chechnya declared independence from Russia in 1991 and Chechen militants are quite the savvy terrorists because they’ve successfully targeted Moscow with bombings and hostage plots for more than two decades.

In 2004 Chechen Islamic militants attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, Russia and they murdered 380 children, parents, teachers and visitors after holding more than 1,000 captive for three days. Judicial Watch also obtained intelligence documents from the government detailing that terrorist attack. Jointly released by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the October 12, 2004, report analyzes the Beslan terrorist attack with a view toward gleaning lessons for potential attacks on schools in the United States.

There’s no telling how many of these Chechen terrorists have infiltrated the United States or how many opportunities the government has missed to protect the country by deporting them. Osama bin Laden specifically chose Chechnya as a terrorist training camp because it’s an “area unreachable by strikes from the west,” according to the intelligence report obtained by JW years ago.

Amnesty Plus, Plus

At first it was called “stealth amnesty,” back when the Obama administration circumvented Congress and began quietly (and unlawfully) releasing illegal aliens onto the streets. After the press outed the Homeland Security-led scheme, the Obama administration went public and started proudly “prioritizing” illegal alien deportations, allowing violent illegal alien criminals to stay in the country without repercussion.

And now, President Obama’s illegal alien amnesty program has been concretized in a mammoth 844-page bill endorsed by the so-called “Gang of 8” Senators, including key Republicans, who struck a deal on the bill behind closed doors.

(You can read the legislation for yourself here. But at 844 pages, be prepared to give up your entire weekend and then some – and that’s if you read nonstop! Credit to CNS News’ Craig Bannister for doing the math.)

But here’s the bottom line: this legislation provides amnesty for millions of illegal aliens – and their relatives – almost immediately with the possibility of permanent status for illegals after 10 years of “good behavior,” followed by citizenship three years later. (Some illegals are given a “streamlined path to citizenship” in half that time.)

Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican from the border state of Texas, did not mince words in his response to the illegal immigration overhaul:

“It’s hard to believe, but the Senate immigration bill is worse than we thought. Despite assurances, the border is not secured before almost everyone in the country illegally is given amnesty.  The bill guarantees there will be a rush across the border to take advantage of massive amnesty.”

“And the Senate proposal offers amnesty to far more illegal immigrants than we thought. In addition to most of the 11 million illegal immigrants already in the country, the bill offers to legalize the relatives of illegal immigrants outside the U.S. and even others who have already been deported back home. So current immigration laws are shredded.”

As The Hill reports, the new bill, heavily criticized for its lack of attention to border security would, nonetheless, “bring a raft of new regulations and add more layers to the federal bureaucracy.” New federal agencies will be created, new rules devised, the visa system completely overhauled.

And if you take a look at some of the legislation’s key components, an inordinate amount of money and time are wrapped up in helping illegal aliens – who should lawfully be deported immediately – to transition into society.

How else do you explain the fact that the legislation calls for the creation of a task force of Cabinet-level officials to help with illegal alien integration issues?

Or the bill’s proposed pilot program which provides block grants to state and local governments to establish New Immigrant Councils to help illegal aliens successfully transition from illegal to legal. (The cost of these proposed grants – $100 million.)

Or the Agriculture Department’s charter to establish new housing and pay standards for sheep and goat herders?

And the special treatment is not simply limited to government coddling.  As the law is written, newly legalized aliens are even given a leg up on jobs over their citizen counterparts! According to an analysis by Investor’s Business Daily, under this proposed legislation businesses have a $3,000 incentive to hire a “newly legalized immigrant” over a U.S. citizen:

The bipartisan legislation released Wednesday dictates that those granted provisional legal immigrant status would be treated the same as those ‘not lawfully present’ are treated under the 2010 health law.

That means they would neither be eligible for ObamaCare tax credits nor required to pay an individual tax penalty for failing to obtain qualifying health coverage. It also means some employers would face no penalty for failing to provide such workers affordable health coverage.

As IBD points out, under Obamacare, if health insurance costs are above 9.5% of a full-time worker’s salary, that worker is eligible for the Obamacare exchange program. And employers who provide health insurance for their employees may be required to pay up to a $3,000 fine for each worker who receives Obamacare subsidies – but not if that worker is “newly legalized” and, therefore, exempt from provisions of Obamacare.

And, folks, pay attention to the language in this bill. It is important.

The legislation creates a brand new bureaucratic phrase: “registered provisional immigrant.” So if you’ve been paying attention to how things have unfolded to this point since President Obama took office, we have moved from the term “illegal alien” to “undocumented worker” to now “registered provisional immigrants.”

Guess what term comes next. According to the bill, the name of the chief federal agency responsible for overseeing immigration policy will be changed from “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services” to the “Office of Citizenship and New Americans.”

From “illegal alien” to “New American.”

Yes, this is the largest overhaul of the immigration system in decades. So obviously, given the complexity and enormity of this legislation, Congress will allow for a protracted review process, right? Not if the “Gang of Eight” have their way. Bill supporter Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) seems to think two hearings, at most, should do the trick. The first is scheduled for April 22, 2013.  This hearing had originally been scheduled for this past Wednesday, but has been postponed due to the Boston terror attack (which, as you can see above, is directly related to this issue.)  Like Obamacare, the process is being perverted.  The bill is released in the middle of the night, a hearing with still-secret witnesses is held less than a few days later, and a key committee vote would take place by May 15.

So, here is how I see it.  This bill grants amnesty almost immediately to most of the illegal aliens here.  It also allows for amnesty for relatives of these illegal aliens.  And it allows certain illegal aliens who have been deported to be granted amnesty.  That, folks, is amnesty, plus, plus!  To be clear, the bill does not require the border to be secure for this nearly instant, massive amnesty to take place.

There’s still much to be unwrapped from this monstrous bill.  This comprehensive immigration reform is to immigration as Obamacare is to health care.

I strongly encourage you to contact your senators today.  Do not wait as this legislation is set to be rushed through the process without your voice being heard. The phone number for the Capitol Hill switchboard is 202-224-3121.  And here’s a link to a site where you can find the contact information for every U.S. Senator.

Judicial Watch Sues Department of Justice for Records on Controversial Voter Registration Effort in Massachusetts

As I’ve said before, Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project, launched in 2012, continues to be a major priority for the organization. The next election season is already almost upon us, believe it or not, with the mid-terms next year. Much remains to be learned from dissecting the Left’s attempts to lie, cheat and steal votes during the last go-around.

And so JW’s investigations continue, including our efforts to get to the bottom of a rather obvious effort to aid the campaign of Elizabeth Warren, now a Senator from Massachusetts.

On March 27, 2013, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) to obtain records revealing “any and all” communications between the DOJ Civil Rights Division and New England United for Justice (NEU4J), NEU4J President Maude Hurd, the NAACP, Demos, and Project Vote regarding the enforcement and implementation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) in Massachusetts. (Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.)

The Judicial Watch lawsuit came in response to the failure of the DOJ to comply with two separate FOIA requests regarding voter registration activities in Massachusetts. In both cases, the DOJ not only failed to produce the records in the time period required under FOIA, it also failed to indicate when the records would be produced, as required by law. No surprises there, right?

Now here’s what we’re specifically after pursuant to our original May 24, 2012, FOIA request submitted to the DOJ Civil Rights Division seeking information dating back to January 1, 2011:

• Any and all records of communications between any official or employee of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and any officer, employee or representative of New England United for Justice (NEU4J), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and/or Demos, regarding, concerning, or related to the implementation and enforcement of the National Voter Registration Act in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

• Any and all records of communications between any official of the Department of Justice and Ms. Maude Hurd, the President of New England United for Justice.

By a letter dated May 29, 2012, the DOJ Civil Rights Division acknowledged receiving the Judicial Watch FOIA on May 24, and was required by law to respond by June 21, 2012. It failed to do so.

Regarding the second FOIA, on August 20, 2012, we sent a request to the Civil Rights Division seeking the following information also dating back to January 1, 2011:

• Any and all records of communications between any official or employee of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and any officer, employee or representative of New England United for Justice (NEU4J), Demos, and/or Project Vote regarding, concerning, or related to voter registration in Massachusetts.

By a letter dated August 21, 2012, the Civil Rights Division acknowledged receiving the FOIA request on the same day, and was required by law to respond by September 19, 2012. Once again, it failed to do so.

The Judicial Watch lawsuit filed on March 27 asks that the District Court order the Obama DOJ to “conduct a search for any and all responsive records” to the FOIA and “produce, by a certain date, any and all non-exempt records,” along with an index of all records the department continues to declare exempt. It also asks the Court grant Judicial Watch attorney’s fees and additional litigation costs.

Now let’s get to the heart of why this information matters.

According to a Judicial Watch analysis of records, NEU4J is the reincarnation of the corrupt “community organization” ACORN in New England, the nationwide Obama-tied community organization famous for operating fraudulent voter registration drives during the 2008 presidential campaign. Judicial Watch research found that ACORN’s Boston office rebranded into New England United for Justice, headed by Maude Hurd, the former president of ACORN and ACORN Housing. (Click here to read JW’s special report on ACORN rebranding.)

And in 2012, the ACORN-connected organization was up to its old tricks.

In the final days of the senatorial election campaign between then-Sen. Scott Brown current and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, NE4J’s Hurd orchestrated a move by the state of Massachusetts to send out voter registration letters to some 500,000 welfare recipients. The mailing was forced through by the Department of Transitional Assistance after a lawsuit pushed by Hurd’s New England United for Justice. The mailings, which were seen to directly aid the Warren campaign, cost taxpayers nearly $275,000. The state also had to advertise on TV and radio stations, again targeting welfare recipients.

In March, the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General issued a report raising questions about inappropriate coordination and conduct on this election integrity issue by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and outside left-wing groups. Thomas Perez, President Obama’s nominee for Labor Secretary, had headed the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and has stonewalled the American people for nearly a year now. (Perez reportedly “breezed” through a Senate hearing this week on his nomination.)

Now, as you know by now, this latest lawsuit against the DOJ is part of the JW’s comprehensive Election Integrity Project, which seeks to force states to maintain accurate voter registration lists, while upholding voter integrity measures, such as Voter ID laws.

Judicial Watch has been a leading critic of the Obama DOJ’s efforts to abuse Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which seeks to expand the number of registered voters on public assistance, while failing to enforce Section 8 of the NVRA, which requires states to maintain clean voter registration lists. In fact, we’ve done more than criticize. We’ve gone to court over the matter and sued states directly to clean up the rolls.

And we’ve also taken actions to expose the rampant collusion between the DOJ and leftist special interest groups.

It seems clear from our investigations that leftist special interest groups are running the DOJ and we need to know the full extent of this corrupt partnership – especially on this matter of election integrity.

We aim to get to the bottom of this corrupt partnership.

Until next week…

Obamacare set a nasty precedent in Washington:  radical and unpopular legislation is developed behind closed doors and then passed quickly, without time for sufficient public scrutiny.

Tragically, this is exactly what is happening on Capitol Hill as the so-called “bi-partisan Gang of Eight” Senators (four Democrats and four Republicans) is working with the Obama White House to craft broad, sweeping changes to our immigration enforcement system with a shocking lack of transparency.

Some U.S. Senators don’t like the backroom dealing on this so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.”

In fact, on March 19, 2013, Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee – sans two Senators from the so-called “Gang of Eight” (Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona) – sent a letter to Chairman Patrick Leahy issuing a simple request: “provide all members of the Senate, and, most importantly, the public, a full and fair opportunity to become adequately informed on illegal alien amnesty discussions and legislation.”

Here are a few excerpts from the letter I’d like to share with you:

• As you are aware, this [amnesty] bill potentially could be the most dramatic and consequential alteration of our immigration system in nearly 30 years, impacting nearly every aspect of our legal and economic structure, and increasing entitlement spending to historic levels.

• Accordingly, we respectfully request that the public be given adequate time, consistent with past practices in handling complex comprehensive immigration legislation, to read and analyze the contents of any such bill before it is listed on the Committee’s Executive Business Meeting agenda. We further request that during this time, the Committee hold hearings on the overarching issues integral to the legislation.

• We believe the process we have set forth is necessary not only to ensure that members are properly educated on this complex measure, but also to ensure a fair and open process so that the American people know what is in any such bill.

The letter also noted that, during debate over immigration reform in 1982, Congress held 100 hours of hearings and hosted 300 witnesses. Debate over the bill lasted for three years.

And this time around? Senator Leahy has one measly hearing on the calendar, scheduled for next week – despite the fact that the amnesty legislation has not been presented yet!  Not good enough say Senate Republicans. According to Fox News: “Republican senators complained…that plans to hold just one hearing on a yet-to-be-unveiled immigration overhaul are ‘unacceptable’ – as they continued to press for more details on how much the legislation could cost taxpayers…”

Senator Jeff Sessions, a vocal critic of the secretive nature of the amnesty negotiations issued a strong statement on Wednesday of this week rebuking Senator Leahy for “doubling down” on his plan to rush the bill through Congress:

The process that Chairman Leahy has described – a single hearing on a potentially 1,500 page bill – is unacceptable. It is an explicit rejection of the process demanded by Judiciary Committee Republicans and endorsed by Senator Rubio.

To acquiesce to such a process would be to accept the Majority’s plan to rush through this massive legislation before the American people know what’s in it. Now that the special interests have what they want, the deal has been made: force it through and set the public interest aside

Senator Sessions called for a hearing “on every component of reform, including the extraordinary potential costs to taxpayers, the impact on wages and job prospects for the unemployed, and the Administration’s continued refusal to enforce the laws previously enacted by Congress.”

Now it’s your turn. Contact your Senators today and tell them your views on whether amnesty should be rushed through Congress. The phone number for the Capitol Hill switchboard is 202-224-3121. And here’s a link to a site where you can find the contact information for every U.S. Senator.

Senate liberals, open border Republicans and their special interest illegal immigration allies want to shut you out of this debate. Don’t let them.

Corporate Cronyism and the Food Stamp Army

The massive $80 billion per year federal “food stamp” program was the focus of a special on the Fox News Channel’s Hannity program called “Boomtown 2: The Business of Food Stamps.” I was privileged to be a guest on the program, which exposed an Obama administration scheme to use the food stamp program to foster a massive redistribution of wealth.

As has been reported frequently, the Obama administration is proudly shattering welfare records with an astonishing number of people collecting public benefits long-term, especially food stamps. Obama and his friends have actually found a way to meld corporate cronyism with food stamp abuse to line their pockets while undermining our election systems.

Under Obama, the “food stamp” program has exploded with a record number of people—46 million and growing—getting free groceries from the American taxpayer. Adding insult to injury, a federal audit revealed last year that many who don’t qualify for food stamps now receive them under a new “broad-based” eligibility program that disregards income and asset requirements.

Obama says the food stamp extension is part of his intention of eradicate “food insecure households.” But, it’s really part of a massive redistribution of the wealth. Last year, taxpayers were forced to pay more than $80 billion, including an estimated $750 million a year in outright fraud.

The term “estimated” is used advisedly here, because, the fact is, the government is involved in a deliberate cover-up to prevent taxpayers from learning the full truth about who receives food stamps, how they are spent, and how much of it is going for illicit – and even nefarious – purchases. As a stunning study by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) recently revealed, “The USDA already collects such data. So far, however, the data have not been made available to the public.”

Now, you might be wondering why the federal government would want to withhold such vital information from those who are forced to pick up the food stamp tab. In particular, why would it be so reluctant to thoroughly investigate and expose food stamp fraud? Well, a large part of the answer lies in the title of the GAI study: “Profits from Poverty: How Food Stamps Benefit Corporations.”

According to the study, the current food stamp Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card industry is dominated by three main players: J.P. Morgan Electronic Financial Services, Affiliated Computer Services, and eFunds. Together they collect money from 49 states and three territories. In fact, since 2004, 18 of 24 states that contract with J.P. Morgan have paid more than $560 million to the financial monolith.

Little wonder then that those three companies appear to be perfectly content with the exploding food stamp rolls – and wholly unconcerned about rampant fraud and abuse. As the GAI study observed, “The more persons enrolled in the program, the more money the EBT industry makes.” That may also help explain why, when the state of Florida initiated an eight-month program to detect and prevent fraud among its three million EBT card users, J.P. Morgan saw fit to assign just one employee to the program.

And then there is this: During the 2008 election, Barack Obama received more than $800,000 from J.P. Morgan alone. After his election, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, initiated by Obama and passed by a compliant Congress, made two major changes to existing food stamp policies. First, it increased benefits by 13.6 percent. Second, it actively encouraged states to add more recipients to their food stamp rolls.

But, the corporate cronyism and political payoffs don’t end there. The House and Senate Agricultural Committees have jurisdiction over all food assistance and distribution programs, including the food stamp program.

So, just as one might expect, analysis by the GAI uncovered a clear trend of increasing contributions to Agriculture Committee members of both the House and Senate on the part of J.P. Morgan that clearly coincides with their entry into the lucrative EBT card food stamp market. Between 1998 and 2002, Morgan’s total contributions per election cycle averaged $82,897. After the bank entered the EBT services market until the 2010 election cycle, their average donation per cycle more than doubled to $215,120. And the Agriculture Committees, in turn, have broadly expanded the number of food stamp recipients.

Of course, the more recipients that are added to the food stamp rolls, the more voters Obama can count on at election time. And, the offshoots of Obama’s former client and campaign partner, ACORN, assure not only that those voters are registered, but also that they know to whom they are beholden for their government handouts.

The GAI study concludes, “Increasing profits for JP Morgan in turn means increasing returns for investors.” And, unfortunately, they also appear to mean an exponentially increasing food stamp bill for the American taxpayer. And, Obama’s new Food Stamp Army is seen as a reliable source of new voters for the progressive agenda.

ACORN’s Project Vote remains highly active in registering voters on public assistance. In Colorado, as you may recall, Judicial Watch uncovered documents proving that ACORN/Project Vote successfully pressured Colorado officials into implementing new policies for increasing the registration of public assistance recipients during the 2008 and 2010 election seasons.

And what was the result of these new policies?

The percentage of fraudulent voter registration forms from Colorado public assistance agencies exploded to four times the national average. Our investigations also show that the Obama Justice Department is partnering with Project Vote in this campaign to register as many public assistance voters as possible, while neglecting (or outright opposing) legal requirements that ineligible voters are kept off of the voting rolls.

You can see that there are many big lies in the food stamp program. Rather than putting food on the table for poor people, the program is now about massive cash transfer payments to not-so-poor people and major corporations, greased by campaign donations – all in the hopes of gaining new voters – legal or not. 

The 11-year-old FOIA

If you haven’t clicked to read our Corruption Chronicles blog, you’re missing a treat. My JW colleague Irene Garcia has made this blog the “go to” source for government corruption stories on the Internet.  This week, a post on an almost comical contempt for transparency gained a lot of attention.

I reprinted this post below in full. (Please visit our blog here to read more.)

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The U.S. government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, is renowned for violating federal transparency laws and blowing off or unscrupulously delaying records requests, but this is a bit much.

Judicial Watch recently got an official rejection letter involving a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that dates back to 2002! It almost seems like a joke, but it’s not. As part of a broad investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks, JW submitted FOIA requests to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) in September 2002.

It’s quite common for federal agencies as well as the White House to flip the finger at FOIA requests that could expose wrongdoing or shed a negative light. In fact, JW often must file lawsuits to get “public” records that should not require litigation to obtain. In this particular case, it took the DIA and NSA a whopping 11 years to determine that the information falls under the “release authority” of a different agency—the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).

This means that the NCIS must now take the time to consider the records request, which requires a “classification review,” according to the 11-year-old response JW got recently from the Navy. “Your request has been placed in our complex queue. At this time we are unable to provide you an approximate completion date.” Reading between the lines, this means that no one should hold their breath since there appears to be no intention of furnishing the records.

At least the Navy’s letter, laughable as it is, offers an apology for taking 11 years to respond. “We apologize for the delay in processing your request.” Again, it’s not uncommon to get the run-around during the FOIA process and lawsuits are par for the course, but this shatters all records. Perhaps this one should be framed.

These types of obstacles, however, don’t stop JW from rooting out government corruption.  When it comes to 9/11, JW has been a leader in exposing much of what the mainstream media has failed to report. Earlier this year, for instance, JW obtained documents from the State Department indicating that the FBI knew days after the 9/11 attacks that Anwar al-Aulaqi, assassinated by a U.S. drone in Yemen in 2011, had purchased airplane tickets for three of the terrorist hijackers.

This is relevant because al-Aulaqi, who was born in the U.S., was detained and released by authorities at least twice and had been invited to dine at the Pentagon. Yet the feds knew he had purchased airline tickets for the following 9/11 hijackers: Mohammed Atta, America West Airlines, 08/13/2001, for a flight from Washington, DC, to Las Vegas, Nevada, to Miami, Florida; S. Suqami, Southwest Airlines, 07/10/2001, for a flight from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, to Orlando, Florida; Al-Sheri, National Airlines, 08/01/2001, for a flight from San Francisco, California, to Las Vegas, Nevada, to Miami, Florida.

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Over the years, we have seen some off-the-wall attempts by the federal government to avoid releasing information. We’ve heard the ridiculous excuses, the outrageous legal claims, and have suffered one trick after another.

As I told the Daily Caller:

“It is a sad reminder that when it comes to being accountable, when it comes to following the law, the federal government doesn’t give a rat’s tail,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told The Daily Caller. “And this is why we have had to sue well over a hundred times to get access to government information.”

There is a transparency crisis in Washington, DC – remember that (and the 11-year Freedom of Information Act request!) the next time you hear President Obama (or any other president) boast of their transparency efforts.  I encourage you to go to our Internet site to find out about efforts to stem the transparency crisis – and how you can help us bring transparency and accountability to our out-of-control government.

Until next week…