JW Sues Homeland Security for Records on Obama’s Uncle
You remember Barack Obama’s Uncle Onyango Obama, yes? He was arrested last year on drunken driving charges in Framingham, Massachusetts after running a stop sign and nearly crashing into a police car.
And that’s when Uncle O’s shocking little secret was discovered. The native Kenyan had been living in the United States illegally since 1963 and had been ordered out of the country all the way back in 1992!
Stopping just shy of a guilty plea, Onyango admitted police have enough evidence to convict him during a hearing in March. Despite this confession, all charges will be dropped if he “stays out of trouble” for one year. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have said they are prepared to move forward with Onyango’s deportation. But, since the last one didn’t “take,” will Uncle O truly be forced to leave this time around? Maybe, maybe not, says The Boston Herald:
The Herald learned that Onyango Obama, 67, is being summoned to the Burlington offices for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement…to arrange his pending deportation. It’s just the beginning of what is sure to be a high-profile case.
The Herald quoted an immigration attorney, saying that Onyango could seek asylum because he might be targeted for abuse in his home country given his special relationship to President Obama.
(This is the type of special treatment afforded Oynango’s sister, Obama’s Aunt Zeituni. An illegal alien, Zeituni was also scheduled for deportation in 2004, but refused to leave. After her illegal presence in the U.S. became a hot topic during the 2008 presidential campaign, Zeituni was subsequently granted asylum behind closed doors by the same judge who had previously ordered her deportation. Such proceedings are generally supposed to be public.)
While Uncle Omar is here fighting his deportation, he will be allowed to drive the streets of Framingham once again. Onyango was supposed to lose his license for 45 days, but the Massachusetts’s Department of Motor Vehicles decided to grant him a “hardship license,” so that he can drive back and forth to his job – at a liquor store.
As reported by our own blogger Irene Garcia, “A spokeswoman for the Massachusetts agency- Registry of Motor Vehicles-that reinstated Obama’s license…said ‘he met all of the criteria,’ but refused to elaborate on what exactly that means. When a reporter questioned an illegal immigrant getting a driver’s license, the state agency spokeswoman snapped back saying ‘registry business is based on registry records.'”
Speaking of records, Judicial Watch is in hot pursuit of all Immigration and Customs Enforcement records related to the Onyango fiasco. Specifically, here’s what we’re after pursuant to a September 2, 2011 FOIA request filed with ICE:
- The Framingham Police Department
- The White House
- The Executive Office of the President
- The Department of Justice
All records of communications between officials, officers or employees of ICE concerning or relating to Onyango Obama.
After Onyango Obama was released from federal custody at the Plymouth County House of Correction on September 8, 2011, via an “order of supervision,” JW filed a second FOIA request, seeking access to “all records of communications, contacts and correspondence” between ICE and the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department,” as well as the other organizations listed in the previous FOIA request. Sanctuary policies like those in Massachusetts are dangerous, encourage more illegal immigration, and undermine (and often violate) the law. The Obama Justice Department, rather than cracking down on pro-illegal alien sanctuary lawlessness, is attacking states like Arizona that are seeking to uphold and enforce the rule of law on immigration.
By letter dated September 20, 2011, ICE acknowledged both FOIA requests. A response was due by October 19, 2011. However, to date, Homeland Security has failed to turn over any records, explain why they should be withheld, or indicate when a response is forthcoming. This is rather obvious gamesmanship and stonewalling. So, we sued in federal court this week to obtain the material.
Now Oyango, an illegal alien arrested for drunk driving, has his driver’s license in hand, but as you’ll see in this next story, he would not need it in order to vote for his nephew this fall. Read on…
Undercover Reporter Obtains Holder’s Ballot
James O’Keefe did it again. The undercover reporter who caught ACORN employees on tape advising undercover reporters how to violate tax and prostitution laws has struck again. And, this time Eric Holder is on the hot seat.
Big Government broke the story:
In a new video provided to Breitbart.com, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas demonstrates why Holder should stop attacking voter ID laws–by walking into Holder’s voting precinct and showing the world that anyone can obtain Eric Holder’s primary ballot. Literally.
The video shows a young man entering a Washington, DC polling place at 3401 Nebraska Avenue, NW, on primary day of this year–April 3, 2012–and giving Holder’s name and address. The poll worker promptly offers the young man Holder’s ballot to vote.
The young man pointedly asked the poll worker if he should provide a driver’s license but was told this was not required. Of course, the undercover reporter did not actually sign his name to the voter roll, or cast a vote, as this would have been violation of the law. (He was simply making a point – and a good one.)
Nonetheless, the District of Columbia Board of Elections is now investigating O’Keefe for “potential criminal activity,” saying that the voting booth is “sacrosanct.”
Talk about missing the point! Instead of attacking an undercover reporter for merely pointing out the haphazard and potentially fraudulent nature of the voting process, why doesn’t the Election Board actually concern itself with protecting the “sacrosanct” nature of the voting process itself!
The Justice Department, meanwhile, issued a predictable response. It did not come from Holder. It came from a Justice Department official who “asked not to be identified.”
This Justice Department response, which echoes talking points for the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign, is non-responsive. Of course the video doesn’t demonstrate rampant voter fraud, but demonstrates how easy it is to commit fraud in a jurisdiction, such as the District of Columbia, that doesn’t require voters to present identification.
If anyone is trying to “manufacture” rampant voter fraud, it is the Obama campaign, its leftist allies, and the Justice Department itself.
Judicial Watch investigators have uncovered evidence suggesting that Justice Department officials – with the full participation of the Obama White House – are partnering with scandal-ridden Project Vote to potentially expand the universe of questionable voters by enforcing laws that force states to register more welfare recipients (Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act). At the same time, the Justice Department is ignoring laws that force states to clean up voter rolls (Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act).
Actually it’s much worse than that. The Justice Department is specifically opposing state voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas that would protect the integrity of every vote! (Not to mention the administration’s stealth amnesty plan to allow illegal aliens in the country as potential voters for Obama this fall.)
Look, we already know what happens when you increase voter registrations without implementing policies to ensure these voters are legitimate. Take Colorado as one example.
Our investigators found that the percentage of invalid voter registration forms from Colorado public assistance agencies was four times the national average after Project Vote successfully forced the state to implement new policies for increasing the registration of public assistance recipients during the 2008 and 2010 election seasons.
The Justice Department ought to look at this partial list of news reports of voter fraud in California, Florida, West Virginia, Texas and New York (to name only a few). And then there’s the related election fraud in Indiana that may have helped Barack Obama become president.
There really is no way to sugar coat this, folks. The Obama gang is intent on stealing the elections, if necessary. And we aim to make sure the elections remain clean and fair and honest. We can’t have dead people voting. We can’t have illegal aliens voting.
That’s why we launched our 2012 Election Integrity Project (in partnership with True the Vote and the Election Law Center). This is among the most important projects we’ve ever undertaken.
Based upon publicly available data, we have concerns that the voter rolls in the following states appear to contain the names of individuals who are ineligible to vote: Mississippi, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Florida, Alabama, California, and Colorado.
So we have put election officials on notice in these states that if they fail to clean up voter rolls in according with the law, we are prepared to file lawsuits to force them to do it. You can view the letters we sent out here. Lawsuits are a practical certainty.
You can read more about Judicial Watch’s 2012 Election Integrity Project by clicking here. And, check out our special report, The Voter Fraud Threat to Free and Fair Elections, here.
JW and Client Vern McKinley Challenge Bernanke Over Bailouts in W. Times Op-Ed
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been peddling his own version of events regarding the government’s unprecedented decision to bailout large swaths of the private sector. Not content to allow this fiction to go unchallenged, on Wednesday, I co-authored an opinion editorial with Vern McKinley, a former employee of the Federal Reserve and a Judicial Watch client.
The following is reprinted in its entirety with permission from The Washington Times:
Records show Fed had no coherent strategy for bank bailouts
It’s an oldie but a goodie for our Federal Reserve chairman. In one of his recent lectures at George Washington University (GWU), Ben S. Bernanke made the self-congratulatory assertion that the “forceful policy response” led by the Federal Reserve in 2008 helped avoid a more serious economic downturn.
This rhetoric is nothing new. Mr. Bernanke has made similar remarks in the past. As he confided in one interview, “I was not going to be the Federal Reserve chairman who presided over the second Great Depression.” It is clear that like Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who recently trumpeted the fourth anniversary of his role in the Bear Stearns bailout, Mr. Bernanke is aggressively using the GWU lectures to shape his legacy before he steps down.
During the chairman’s one-hour-plus lecture, he dedicated five full minutes (and four PowerPoint slides) to a case study on AIG. In the classic dour assessments reminiscent of 2008, Mr. Bernanke used Chicken Little hyperbole, noting that the “failure of AIG, in our estimation, would have been basically the end.” The chairman did not elaborate for the benefit of the students in attendance what he meant by “the end” or the precise connection between the failure of AIG and the end of financial life as we know it, but it certainly made for a dramatic moment during the lecture.
Interestingly enough, one of the GWU students pressed the chairman for more details on the decision-making process underlying interventions like what occurred with AIG. The student, identified by Mr. Bernanke as “Max,” boldly questioned the chairman’s methods:
“Where do you draw the line between bailing out a bank and allowing it to fail? Is it arbitrary or is there some sort of methodology?” Mr. Bernanke meandered a bit in responding to Max and eventually admitted that the process was somewhere in between arbitrary and a set methodology, noting that it was a “case-by-case process” and “somewhat ad hoc.”
Let’s suppose for a moment that Max wasn’t satisfied with the chairman’s ill-defined response and he decided to do a more in-depth analysis of the Fed’s bailout of AIG for the semester’s final term paper. Surely, there would be an abundance of documents available supporting the Fed’s approach in the AIG case. After all, if the Fed’s bailout of AIG really saved us from “the end,” as Mr. Bernanke called it, the Fed should be all too happy to provide such details, and likely already has released an abundance of them.
We actually brought suit against the Fed nearly two years ago, requesting precisely that type of information. Some of the details revealed the shocking extent of the ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants nature of the analysis just days before the Fed made the AIG bailout decision. Emails produced by the Fed show confusion about basic information concerning AIG. One Fed email in particular says it all: “What do you know about AIG? Have you produced memos on them anytime recently?”
What we know from the material that was released is damaging enough but more than half of the content of the documents was redacted. We continue to this day to press the Obama administration to release details related to this bailout “success story.”
In the nearly 100 years since the Fed’s creation, the deeper the economic downturn, the greater the number of policy missteps by the Federal Reserve and its cohorts in Washington. This was the case in the Great Depression, which was a downturn rife with Fed policy mistakes. Similarly, the most recent downturn, although not as bad as the Great Depression, was quite deep and also involved numerous policy errors by the Fed.
Unfortunately, that’s not one of the obvious lessons of financial crises that professor Bernanke shared with the GWU students.
Rather than admitting to the arbitrary and capricious nature of the bailouts, Mr. Bernanke would have us believe that he and his band of bureaucrats executed a cogent strategy to pull from the brink of disaster companies – and, indeed, a nation – that were too big to fail. The fact is that they guessed their way through the bailouts and cannot point to any cogent analysis of the costs of “inaction.”
We know this because we asked. But don’t expect these facts to get in the way of Mr. Bernanke’s fairy tale.
Click here to read more about JW’s massive bailout investigations, including the FOIA lawsuits we’ve filed on behalf of Vern McKinley and the documents we’ve uncovered so far.
Until next week…
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