Commentary on the economic , geopolitical and simply fascinating things going on. Served occasionally with a side of snark.
Monday, May 20, 2013
White House , Absentee President Obama , Wanna Be President Hillary - about to be swallowed up by the ever widening scandals and the cover ups ? And while the press and pols feast upon or deflect scandals , who's watching out for foreign threats - such as Mexican Drug Cartels invading the US ?
Yesterday, when we reported that as a result of new disclosures regarding the timing of who learned what, but most importantly when, in the White House regarding the IRS persecution (if not prosecution) of conservative groups, we made it quite clear that the narrative enacted by the White House, which could simply be summarized as "we'll make it up as we go along", was nothing more than damage control in total disarray. Because once caught lying, the best solution usually is to stop lying and tell the truth, tying up all those loose ends that eventually lead to Watergate-type outcomes unless addressed early on. No such luck here.
Instead, the White House has doubled down on its crash and burn storyline and in doing so is merely guaranteeing that the very same conservatives, and all others who would rather not have a very political IRS on their back, who have smelled blood are not going to let go until someone at the very top takes responsibility for what, together with the AP-fiasco, is rapidly becoming Obama's Nixonian scandal.
Sure enough, here is The Hill with the White House's official explanation for what happened: "White House officials were notified of a Treasury Department inspector general report on the IRS but elected not to tell President Obama about it." In other words, neither the IRS chief was aware of what is going on at the IRS (recall the countless "I don't knows" and "I don't recalls") and apparently, neither was the president briefed on what everyone beneath him at the White House knew weeks in advance of the premeditated IRS leak. And in fact, it turns out it was someone else's executive duty to make the decision what the chief executive of the nation is and isn't allowed to know in the first pace. So, maybe we are confused, but just how is Obama the "president" again?
For more on how when the White House finds itself in a hole, it merely keeps on digging and digging, we go to The Hill:
White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday that Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough and other senior officials knew of the general nature of the report but decided to keep the president in the dark about the report’s finding that the IRS had targeted conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny
Carney said it was the White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler’s judgment that the matter should not be told to the president, and that she conveyed this sentiment to senior staff.
Carney defended the decision, saying conclusions often change in the final stages of inspector general reports, and that it would’ve been inappropriate for the White House to involve itself in an ongoing investigation.
“To be clear, we knew the subject of the investigation and the nature of some of the potential findings,” Carney said.
“But we did not have a copy of the draft report, we did not know the details, the scope, or the motivation surrounding the misconduct. And we did not know who was responsible. Most importantly, the report was not final and still very much subject to change.”
Carney said that upon learning about the report, McDonough “rightly chose not to take action” to avoid being seen as intervening.
“That’s what any White House should do,” Carney said at the daily White House briefing
So according to the head spin doctor of the administration, what the White House should do is serve as a buffer for Obama, who should take all the credit for any and all correct decisions, but have heard no evil, seen no evil, and spoken no evil, when the implications could be potentially impeachable. Come to think of it, if we were running an unaccountable enterprise, we would do the same.
As for Ms. Ruemmler, or the women who decided what the president of the US should and shouldn't know, or in other words, his superior, should she perhaps be culpable of at least something?
Lanny Davis, a former special counsel under President Bill Clinton, wrote last week that Ruemmler should resign if she knew about the probe of the IRS and failed to tell the president.
Davis, writing for The Hill, argued that a White House counsel must have a keen ear for politics, and that it would have been better to tell Obama immediately of the facts of the case.
"If Ms. Ruemmler did know about this IRS story and didn’t inform the president immediately, then, respectfully, that must mean she didn’t appreciate fully the mammoth legal and political implications for the U.S. government as well as the American people of a story involving IRS officials abusing power and possibly violating criminal laws," Davis wrote.
Carney said Ruemmler and McDonough had only “top line” knowledge of the report’s findings. He argued that some in Congress, including House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrel Issa (R-Calif.), had been similarly briefed on the upcoming report, but chose to sit on the information so as not to interfere.
“Our whole point has been that knowing this was coming does not change the fact that there was nothing we could have or should have done about it,” Carney said, adding that it was wrong to say “that somehow the president should have been notified.”
The bottom line is that it appears the president is nothing but a figurehead, at least according to the White House's own take on things:
Carney said the president wasn’t upset that he had to learn about the report through the media, rather than from his advisers.
“The president believes and has faith that it is entirely appropriate that nobody here took any action to intervene,” Carney said. “Some matters are not appropriate to convey to him, and this is one of them.”
In other words, Executive-In-Chief... except when being Janitor-In-Chief leads to a more palatable outcome. Ironically we doubt the public will be very upset when they too learn, ostensibly through the wiretapped media, that Obama was and is nothing but a charismatic expert at reading a teleprompter, and that those who make the actual decisions, including what the "president" should and shouldn't know, are sitting comfortably, far behind the curtains.
That said it would not surprise us if the broader US population, engrossed in its Obamaphones and Tumblr blog accounts, has already long forgotten not only about this scandal, but that the whole premise of a functioning democracy is to have operating check and balances to those in charge. Which by definition means holding them accountable and responsible when such travesties of justice as those exposed in the past two weeks come to light.
Or maybe, once again, it will all be just Fabrice Tourre's fault...
“IRS-gate,” as political opponents of President Obama’s Administration have named the completely inappropriate targeting of Tea Party-ish organizations applying for 501(c)(4) social welfare organization status for special review, has been a royal political and administrative muck-up. Whether perpetrated by out-of-control rogue IRS agents or conducted with the knowledge of higher-ups, the IRS scandal is likely to cause damage to the governmental process inside and outside of the Service. Its reverberations extend far beyond whether some Tea Party groups were made to suffer through IRS questions outside the realm of what’s typical for social welfare organization applicants.
Disrespectful revelation: Lois Lerner’s admission that some IRS agents in one office (Cincinnati, which is charged with nonprofit reviews) had subjected Tea Party and other right wing groups to over-the-top grilling over their applications to become 501(c)(4)s took place on Friday. Everyone in Washington knows what a Friday news leak is: a story meant to fade away over the weekend. If the question at Lerner’s presentation at the American Bar Association that spurred her acknowledgement and apology for the behavior of the IRS wasn’t teed up, the timing and content of the answer certainly was. With an Inspector General’s report to be released soon after, Lerner and her colleagues knew the story was about to break. Her ability to answer with a statement that seemed all but rehearsed was an attempt to make the story happen on a Friday and have it die in the Saturday papers. Except in the new world of social media, it doesn’t work that way. By the time Lerner left the ABA conference dais, the audience was looking at the Associated Press story reporting on Lerner’s ABA admission that had already run. One lawyer grabbed Lerner as she made her way out of the room and showed her the story on his cell phone. The attempt to have the story wither over the weekend failed—embarrassingly so—as a statement of disrespect to the public that deserved not to be manipulated and played by the White House press controllers.
Drip, drip, drip: Having unleashed a firestorm that wouldn’t go away, the IRS hastily convened a telephone press conference, during which Lerner presented some additional information but obfuscated and dodged reporters’ questions as best she could, leaving David Cay Johnston of the Columbia Journalism Review, among others, flustered with the IRS’s inability to answer questions. Of course the answers were there, but the White House chose, as it has done in a number of recent controversies, to let information slowly emerge in dribs and drabs rather than getting out ahead of the story with a full statement.
Misinformation: The IRS statements on Friday have been revealed to be incomplete and inaccurate, with the increasing sense that the inaccuracies were not by accident. It wasn’t one office, but more than one IRS office. It wasn’t just some low-level staff; higher-ups were aware and had intervened. And when former IRS commissioner Doug Shulman had strenuously told Congress in 2012 that nothing like this had been going on, other senior IRS personnel knew differently. As a matter of governmental competence and ethics, they should have corrected the misinformation given to Congress, but they didn’t. In effect, by withholding information that senior people in the IRS knew to be true in 2011 and even 2010, the IRS was perpetrating a lie to Congress and, in effect, to the American electorate.
Feckless White House press office: Jay Carney’s response to the brewing IRS scandal on Friday has to be one of the lowest moments for the White House Press Office since Nixon’s Ron Ziegler tried to explain that his previous false public statements were, once the truth came out, then “inoperative.” His subsequent statements about the IRS controversy from the press office have not improved: one thing to have to be the flak-catcher for press questions, but there still has to be some integrity to the person in the position if they want to have the semblance of a career once they leave and if they expect the press and the public to bother listening to what they say at the dais every day. Carney’s performance was truly sad, relegating all future statements he might make on the IRS issue also “inoperative.”
The absent POTUS: Even if it had been simply rogue IRS agents, rather than the agency officially, going after Tea Party groups for their political beliefs, it goes to the heart of what makes American democracy workable. The idea is that you can believe anything you want and stand up for it. This is an increasingly tattered premise for a nation that maintains a political prison on the island of Cuba, continues to conduct illegal renditions, unleashes drone attacks on targets in sovereign nations not officially at war with the U.S., and apparently now clandestinely taps the phone records of Associated Press reporters, but isn’t the United States supposed to be defending democracy, which holds at its core freedom of speech, political thought, and action? President Obama held public appearances on Friday; he should have immediately denounced the IRS state of affairs, regardless of how wide and deep it might go, as an affront to American democracy. Instead, he stayed silent. When he finally spoke out, said he was withholding judgment to see whether the story was true—a line consistent with Carney’s statements. Amazing! The head of the tax-exempt unit of the IRS had already publicly apologized for the treatment of the Tea Party applicants. The only factual question for the President was not whether it had happened, but how high in the agency or elsewhere in the federal government the responsibility went.
501(c)(4) phony social welfare functions: Here’s the shocking part. While some of the questions that IRS agents sent to the Tea Party-ish applicants were out of bounds, especially about their donors and their voter registration activities, there was plenty that the IRS could have asked these groups—and every other applicant for a 501(c)(4) status. The big joke is that, overall, organizations form 501(c)(4)s not because they want to pursue social welfare programming, but because they want to be directly engaged in partisan electoral activities without having to reveal their donors. Does anyone think that the recent wave of 501(c)(4)s from the right or the left —the number of applications to be 501(c)(4)s increased from 1,741 in 2010 and 1,777 in 2011 to 2,774 in 2012-- are because of social welfare programs? To use a term popularized by Vice President Biden, malarkey! They are all but political action committees, but unlike PACs, they don’t have to reveal their donors, so they can make donations to real PACs while camouflaging the sources of the funding. Shared among the Tea Party-ish applicants for 501(c)(4) status was an in-your-face political intent combined with a dare-you attitude toward the federal government if the IRS were to deny their applications, given that many of the libertarian-oriented groups viewed even the process of having to apply for 501(c) status as an infringement on their rights. The left-wing 501(c)(4)s, including President Obama’s Organizing for America, may be less oriented to thumb-snubbing the government, but are no less dedicated to partisan political activity. This could explain the initially tepid response from the left as a sort of “there but for the grace of God go I” stance; in some future administration, the pendulum could swing and thump their 1024 application forms similarly. Worse, there’s a sense among some on the progressive side that the Tea Party groups and their alleged big-money backers “deserved” this, because they’rebad and wrong while we’re good andright. On the contrary, when the government suppresses legitimate, legal political speech, the only good or bad involved is the suppression itself.
IRS misunderstanding its authority: What hasn’t been mentioned in most circles is that the IRS’s approach to 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations is simply wrong. The IRS regulation misinterprets the law. The law says that the social welfare organizations must be operated exclusively for the social welfare, but the IRS reinterpreted that to mean that there shouldno “preponderance” of (partisan electoral) political activities over social welfare activities—without ever clearly defining political activities or what a preponderance might mean. Less than half of dollar expenditures? Less than half of activities? What kinds of political activities get to be redefined, for the purposes of the less-than-half test, as social welfare programming, even though they are political? Are some activities more political or more social welfare in their content? The Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed suit in federal court against the IRS on this matter and, to our thinking, nailed the IRS for its misreading of the law. As CREW points out, the IRS allows (c)(4)s to exist so long as they “primarily” carry out social welfare functions; the law says that they must “exclusively” do so. While the IRS has had some difficulty in the past defining things such as partisan political or electoral activity, there can be no doubt to the difference between the words “primarily” and “exclusively.” If the controversy over these incidents with Tea Party-oriented groups, generally tiny, by the way, diverts attention from what the IRS should be doing to go after the big “dark money” (c)(4)s that have been pouring money into partisan political ads that have zero social welfare intent or content, that would be disastrous. In its current workplan, the IRS had no special plans to reexamine how it was dealing with 501(c)(4)s. Now is the time, and the Service should not let itself be distracted by its truly problematic targeting of 501(c)(4) applicants with right-wing code language in their names.
The level of these infractions: The initial language of the IRS about low-level functionaries in the Cincinnati office didn’t last long, as news about the IG’s report attaching IRS executives to the timetable began to leak. But any effort to pin responsibility on low-level players is a sign of the reprehensible strategy that this administration has used in the past to absolve agency executives and higher-ups of responsibility. Combine that with this administration’s consistent hostility toward whistleblowers and you can imagine what the IRS agents thought and felt as they heard about their “going rogue.” Hopefully, they were getting ready to show up at a House or Senate hearing to identify which higher-ups knew what if the low-level rogue strategy persisted. In this case, the timeline reveals Lerner’s involvement and indicates the awareness of her superiors and others But remember the IRS is part of the Department of the Treasury. Did longstanding Treasury chief Tim Geithner know? Did current boss Jack Lew know? President Truman planted a placard on his desk that said, “the buck stops here.” Shouldn’t the public know where the buck stops in this case, and be assured that the appropriate people will be sacked for their roles in undermining democracy?
Reverberations: The incredibly slow and initially hands-off White House approach to the IRS imbroglio has given the green light to conspiracy theorists who imagine as only they could that this scandal was leaked in order to draw press attention away from Benghazi and other second-term problems of the Administration. The real importance of the IRS scandal, plus the revelations from lower-level people regarding Benghazi and the really dubious Department of Justice actions against Associated Press investigative reporters, is that it has the potential to derail the legitimate and important things that the Administration has pledged to make happen in the remainder of Obama’s term. It undermines the public’s trust that the Administration will stand by its words and deliver on immigration reform, gun control, the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (with the IRS having major ACA oversight regarding nonprofit hospitals) and tax reform, just to name a few issues on the docket for this year.
Partisanship: Though Democrats were slow to come to this issue, as the IRS crisis expanded by the minute, more have come on board to call for investigations into the details of the story. Nevertheless, they were slow to speak out on actions led to Tea Party groups’ waiting several additional months or even years to get 501(c)(4) approvals, or in some cases perhaps being deterred from pursuing their applications altogether. More distressing was the reaction from some on the political left. Some have dismissed the issue, along with the right-wing (c)(4)s’ concerns, as “Republicans complaining about the IRS when corporations don’t pay taxes” or “criticizing the treatment of Tea Party groups when they went after ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and Big Bird.” Unbelievably, some administration insiders alluded to the fact that this occurred at the IRS under the leadership of a commissioner who was a holdover appointee of President George W. Bush. This shouldn’t be a political schoolyard battle of one-upsmanship, getting back at opponents for their even worse behaviors. Wrong is wrong. The left is stronger when it stands for principles of democracy and free speech without moral or political equivocation.
Ultimately, there is a reason for the IRS scandal, and it’s the problem of money and politics. So long as money—secret money through 501(c)(4)s—is the holy grail of political success, people will game the system with phony social welfare organizations that do no social welfare and the system will be structured to allow abuses or narrow politically-based targeting and retribution. If the buck stops at the top, President Obama’s culpability in this is his longstanding abandonment of campaign finance reform. Because he and his allies have been able to work the system of Super PACs and 501(c)(4)s to their advantage, to the point where Obama has long eschewed participating in public financing and has taken no steps toward overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision or any other part of the money scaffolding of political campaigns, the President has in essence condoned the latitudes given to moneyed players and their instruments of choice to manipulate the electoral system.
CREW’s position in response to the IRS scandal is definitely correct: in getting to the bottom of the IRS scandal to figure out who knew what when, the nation shouldn’t lose sight of the deeper issue of phony 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and an IRS that is implementing regulations based upon a misreading of the law. But equally important is what the IRS scandal says about campaign finance: the need for comprehensive reform that gets money out of politics and, as one wag said, politics out of money. If this IRS scandal doesn’t revive a national conversation about campaign finance that leads to public funding of political campaigns, it is hard to imagine what would.
Monday afternoon, ABC News released a chilling report that details what journalists have faced while trying to get some answers from the Cincinnati IRS office, which is where a majority of the Tea Party targeting took place.
According to ABC, an "armed uniform police officer with the Federal Protective Service" "escorted" reporters through the public building. ABC says if the intent wasn't to "scare off" employees who might talk, "it was the effect."
ABC News is also hearing conflicting reports from Cincinnati IRS employees and the IRS Headquarters in Washington. A Washington spokesman told ABC that press queries are "referred to the press office," but that "people have First Amendment rights, they are entitled to speak."
An employee in OH said that is not the case and that staffers have been threatened with their jobs if they are caught talking to the media:
At the [Cincinnati] IRS office on the fourth floor, a woman who answered the buzzer referred reporters to officials in Washington, though they were not returning very many calls. That staffer also said she was not allowed to speak to anyone – a line that was repeated by agency personnel during the week.
IRS headquarters in Washington denied that a no-talk rule was official policy because, after all, agency staffers still have a constitutional right to talk to whomever they want. …
Not so, said IRS folks in Ohio.
One of them, who asked not be named, told ABC News that security guards did remind employees of the official policy not to talk with the press – a warning cemented by the punch line "or risk losing our jobs."
Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen had his emails read by the Obama DOJ, which accused him of being a co-conspirator in a criminal leak case. Photo: screen grab
(updated below - Update II - Update III)
It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined - in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week's controversy over the DOJ's pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general.
New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ's attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News' chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests - something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist - something done every day in Washington - and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for "espionage".
The focus of the Post's report yesterday is that the DOJ's surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters. The FBI tracked Rosen's movements in and out of the State Department, traced the timing of his calls, and - most amazingly - obtained a search warrant to read two days worth of his emails, as well as all of his emails with Kim. In this case, said the Post, "investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material." It added that "court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist".
But what makes this revelation particularly disturbing is that the DOJ, in order to get this search warrant, insisted that not only Kim, but also Rosen - the journalist - committed serious crimes. The DOJ specifically argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information - something investigative journalists do every day - Rosen himself broke the law. Describing an affidavit from FBI agent Reginald Reyes filed by the DOJ, the Post reports [emphasis added]:
"Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, 'at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator'. That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target. Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a 'covert communications plan' and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information. . . . However, it remains an open question whether it's ever illegal, given the First Amendment's protection of press freedom, for a reporter to solicit information. No reporter, including Rosen, has been prosecuted for doing so."
Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for "soliciting" the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.
That same "solicitation" theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can "charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them." When that theory was first disclosed, I wrote that it would enable the criminalization of investigative journalism generally:
"Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren't typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter. Journalists virtually always take affirmative steps to encourage its dissemination. They try to cajole leakers to turn over documents to verify their claims and consent to their publication. They call other sources to obtain confirmation and elaboration in the form of further leaks and documents. Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau described how they granted anonymity to 'nearly a dozen current and former officials' to induce them to reveal information about Bush's NSA eavesdropping program. Dana Priest contacted numerous 'U.S. and foreign officials' to reveal the details of the CIA's 'black site' program. Both stories won Pulitzer Prizes and entailed numerous, active steps to cajole sources to reveal classified information for publication.
"In sum, investigative journalists routinely — really, by definition — do exactly that which the DOJ's new theory would seek to prove WikiLeaks did. To indict someone as a criminal 'conspirator' in a leak on the ground that they took steps to encourage the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as much as charging Assange with 'espionage' for publishing classified information."
That's what always made the establishment media's silence (or even support) in the face of the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks so remarkable: it was so obvious from the start that the theories used there could easily be exploited to criminalize the acts of mainstream journalists. That's why James Goodale, the New York Times' general counsel during the paper's historic press freedom fights with the Nixon administration, has been warning that "the biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it's absolutely frightening."
Indeed, as Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler noted recently in the New Republic, when the judge presiding over Manning's prosecution asked military lawyers if they would "have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?", the prosecutor answered simply: "Yes, ma'am". It has long been clear that this WikiLeaks-as-criminals theory could and would be used to criminalize establishment media outlets which reported on that which the US government wanted concealed.
Now we know that the DOJ is doing exactly that: applying this theory to criminalize the acts of journalists who report on what the US government does in secret, even though there is no law that makes such reporting illegal and the First Amendment protects such conduct. Essentially accusing James Rosen of being an unindicted co-conspriator in these alleged crimes is a major escalation of the Obama DOJ's already dangerous attacks on press freedom.
It is virtually impossible at this point to overstate the threat posed by the Obama DOJ to press freedoms. Back in 2006, Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales triggered a major controversy when he said that the New York Times could be prosecuted for having revealed the Top Secret information that the NSA was eavesdropping on the communications of Americans without warrants. That was at the same time that right-wing demagogues such Bill Bennett were calling for the prosecution of the NYT reporters who reported on the NSA program, as well as the Washington Post's Dana Priest for having exposed the CIA black site network.
But despite those public threats, the Bush DOJ never went so far as to formally accuse journalists in court filings of committing crimes for reporting on classified information. Now the Obama DOJ has.
This week, the New Republic's Molly Redden describes what I've heard many times over the past several years: national security reporters have had their ability to engage in journalism severely impeded by the Obama DOJ's unprecedented attacks, and are operating in a climate of fear for both their sources and themselves. Redden quotes one of the nation's best reporters, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, this way:
It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill."
Redden says that "the DOJ's seizure of AP records will probably only exacerbate these problems." That's certainly true: as surveillance expert Julian Sanchez wrote in Mother Jones this week, there is ample evidence that the Obama DOJ's seizure of the phone records of journalists extends far beyond the AP case. Recall, as well, that the New York Times' Jim Risen is currently being pursued by the Obama DOJ, and conceivably faces prison if he refuses to reveal his source for a story he wrote about CIA incompetence in Iran. Said Risen:
I believe that the efforts to target me have continued under the Obama Administration, which has been aggressively investigating whistleblowers and reporters in a way that will have a chilling effect on the freedom of the press in the United States."
If even the most protected journalists - those who work for the largest media outlets - are being targeted in this way, and are saying over and over that the Obama DOJ is preventing basic news gathering from taking place without fear, imagine the effect this all has on independent journalists who are much more vulnerable.
There is simply no defense for this behavior. Obama defenders such as Andrew Sullivan claim that this is all more complicated than media outrage suggests because of a necessary "trade-off" between press freedoms and security. So do Obama defenders believe that George Bush and Richard Nixon - who never prosecuted leakers like this or formally accused journalists of being criminals for reporting classified information - were excessively protective of press freedoms and insufficiently devoted to safeguarding secrecy? To ask that question is to mock it. Obama has gone so far beyond what every recent prior president has done in bolstering secrecy and criminalizing whistleblowing and leaks.
AMY GOODMAN: "You say that President Obama is worse than President Nixon. JAMES GOODALE: "Well, more precisely, I say that if in fact he goes ahead and prosecutes Julian Assange, he will pass Nixon. He's close to Nixon now. The AP example is a good example of something that Obama has done but Nixon never did. So I have him presently in second place, behind Nixon and ahead of Bush II. And he's moving up fast. . . .
"Obama has classified, I think, seven million — in one year, classified seven million documents. Everything is classified. So that would give the government the ability to control all its information on the theory that it's classified. And if anybody asks for it and gets it, they're complicit, and they're going to go to jail. So that criminalizes the process, and it means that the dissemination of information, which is inevitable, out of the classified sources of that information will be stopped.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: "What about the—
JAMES GOODALE: "It's very dangerous. That's why I'm — I get excited when I talk about it."
That was before it was known that the Obama DOJ read James Rosen's emails by formally labeling him in court an unindicted co-conspirator for the "crime" of reporting on classified information. This all just got a lot more dangerous.
UPDATE
Even journalists who are generally supportive of Obama - such as the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza - are reacting with fury over this latest revelation:
Source: Lee Rogers, Blacklisted News
The Obama regime is now in the midst of three separate scandals all of which are revealing just a small portion of the criminal activity that has been taking place in the federal government. Based upon historical precedent the actual nature of criminal activity within governments is usually much worse than is ever fully revealed to the public.
Let’s take a look at a few examples. Specifically the federal government has participated in covering up the true facts of many events including the JFK assassination, the Israeli military attack on the U.S. Navy warship the USS Liberty, the 1993 government sanctioned slaughter of women and children in Waco Texas, the FBI’s involvement in facilitating the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the government’s complicity in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City and most importantly Israeli and U.S. government involvement in the attacks of September 11th, 2001. The Obama regime and prior Presidential regimes have gotten away with these criminal acts because the big corporate controlled media outlets have willfully served as propagandists and mouthpieces for the government. Instead of asking real questions and applying basic common sense principles of journalism they have openly dismissed and mocked anyone engaged in seeking the truth. They have even resorted to calling these critical thinkers names or discrediting their work by using terms like conspiracy theory and the like.
There is little doubt that the corporate controlled media is at the very least partially to blame for much of the government criminality that we see today. Instead of serving as a government watchdog, they serve primarily as a government lapdog and merely repeat whatever official story the government puts out. The end result of this type of propaganda fueled journalism is that the people at the highest levels of government have become incredibly drunk and corrupt with power. The corruption has become so great that there were actually people in the Eric Holder run Justice Department that felt as if they could get away with broadly wiretapping phone lines with no judicial review at the nation’s largest news gathering organization the Associated Press. Holder has attempted to justify this activity by claiming it was for national security which is utterly insane and ridiculous. Like the “mistakes were made” quote, this seems to be another popular response given by government officials when they get caught breaking the law or worse.
With all sorts of garbage unconstitutional legislation passed like the 2002 Patriot Act and others, people at the highest levels of government feel as if they can get away with an increasing amount of criminality. If the Associated Press and other news gathering organizations were actually attempting to seek the truth instead of concealing it all of these years, it is doubtful we would be in this place we see today. It is insane that there are people in the government like Holder who believe that they can merely site national security in order to justify any number of unlawful programs such as these wiretaps.
Reporters at the Associated Press and at other news agencies should be outraged at this sort of governmental abuse. Considering that the government had the nerve to illegally wiretap a news gathering organization as large as the Associated Press, who knows how many other news gathering organizations they are or have been illegally wiretapping. It is hard to describe this as anything but a blatant attack on the First and Fourth Amendments which protect free speech and prevent unreasonable searches and seizures.
This should be a huge wake up call to all news gathering organizations that have been complicit in covering up the truth surrounding government crimes. Even if you willfully serve the system, the government has now proven it is so corrupt that it will even go after people and organizations that help spew their propaganda. It is time for the corporate media to blow the whistle on the truth surrounding the history of government corruption and criminality and fully expose what is happening in this country. Real reporting on subjects like government sponsored terrorism, the rigged two-party political system, the fraud of central banks, the fake terror war, illegal manipulation of financial markets, the Israeli and Zionist influence on American foreign policy and other important topics need to become a common narrative amongst the corporate media.
Unfortunately it is doubtful we will see anything of the sort. At this point the Obama regime could send goons in Darth Vader outfits with machine guns to shut down the Associated Press or another large news gathering entity and we’d probably still see the same level of compliance in supporting government sanctioned narratives from the corporate media. Unfortunately, much of the corporate media is inherently behind supporting the causes of international Zionism and exposing these lies would severely undermine these efforts. There is no doubt that this scandal is outrageous and criminal on so many levels, but it will be a big surprise if the Associated Press and other news outlets finally start seeking and reporting the real truth of what is going on in this country.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General published a new report Monday that confirms former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked a document intended to smear Operation Fast and Furious scandal whistleblower John Dodson.
The DOJ IG said it found “Burke’s conduct in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to be inappropriate for a Department employee and wholly unbefitting a U.S. Attorney.”
“We are referring to OPR our finding that Burke violated Department policy in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to a member of the media for a determination of whether Burke’s conduct violated the Rules of Professional Conduct for the state bars in which Burke is a member,” the IG wrote.
Burke resigned from his post as U.S. Attorney over the incident in August 2011, the first major Department of Justice official to leave his or her post in the Fast and Furious scandal. He said after the fact, in interviews with congressional investigators, that he now views leaking the document as a “mistake.”
In addition to Burke’s involvement in leaking the document, emails the IG uncovered show senior officials at the Department of Justice discussed smearing Dodson.
One of those was Tracy Schmaler, the Director of the Department’s Office of Public Affairs, who resigned her position at the DOJ after emails uncovered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request showed that she worked with leftwing advocacy group Media Matters for America to smear whistleblowers and members of Congress and the media who sought to investigate DOJ scandals under Attorney General Eric Holder.
As a result of Fox News Channel’s State Department reporter James Rosen’s 2009 investigation into the government’s response to North Korea’s repeated provocations, it wasreported on Monday that the Department of Justice tracked Rosen’s movements as well as subpoenaed telephone and email records. According to the DoJ’s subpoena, Google surrendered Rosen’s emails, who is described as “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator,” to the government.
“Rosen was not charged with any crime, but it is unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on government secrets,” declared New Yorker reporter and CNN contributor Ryan Lizza.
Raymond Maxwell, the only official at the State Department's bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to lose his job after the attacks, tells Josh Rogin that he’s been scapegoated by Hillary Clinton’s team.
Following the attack in Benghazi, senior State Department officials close to Hillary Clinton ordered the removal of a mid-level official who had no role in security decisions and has never been told the charges against him. He is now accusing Clinton’s team of scapegoating him for the failures that led to the death of four Americans last year.
Hillary Clinton laughs as she testifies before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill in January. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Raymond Maxwell was placed on forced “administrative leave” after the State Department’s own internal investigation, conducted by an Administrative Review Board (ARB) led by former State Department official Tom Pickering. Five months after he was told to clean out his desk and leave the building, Maxwell remains in professional and legal limbo, having been associated publicly with the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American for reasons that remain unclear.
Maxwell, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs from August 2011 until his removal last December, following tours in Iraq and Syria, spoke publicly for the first time in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast.
“The overall goal is to restore my honor,” said Maxwell, who has now filed grievances regarding his treatment with the State Department’s human resources bureau and the American Foreign Service Association, which represents the interests of foreign-service officers. The other three officials placed on leave were in the diplomatic security bureau, leaving Maxwell as the only official in the bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA), which had responsibility for Libya, to lose his job.
“I had no involvement to any degree with decisions on security and the funding of security at our diplomatic mission in Benghazi,” he said.
Maxwell was removed from his job on Dec. 18, the day after the ARB report was released, and subsequently placed on administrative leave, which is meant to give the State Department time to investigate whether Maxwell should be fired or return to work. Five months later, that investigation seems stalled and Maxwell sits at home, where he continues to be paid but is not allowed to return to his job.
The State Department declined to comment on the reasons that Maxwell and the other officials were placed on administrative leave, or on what the four were told about the reasons for the decision. It did confirm that the ARB did not recommend direct disciplinary action because it didn’t find misconduct or a direct breach of duty by the officials. “As a matter of policy, we don’t speak to specific personnel matters,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
Since the leave is not considered a formal disciplinary action, Maxwell has no means to appeal the status, as he would if he had been outright fired. To this day, he says, nobody from the State Department has ever told him why he was singled out for discipline. He has never had access to the classified portion of the ARB report, where all of the details regarding personnel failures leading up to Benghazi are confined. He also says he has never been shown any evidence or witness testimony linking him to the Benghazi incident.
Maxwell says he had planned to retire last September, but extended his time voluntarily after the Sept. 11 attack to help the bureau in its time of need. Now, he is refusing to retire until his situation is clarified. He is seeking a restoration of his previous position, a public statement of apology from State, reimbursement for his legal fees, and an extension of his time in service to equal the time he has spent at home on administrative leave.
“For any FSO being at work is the essence of everything and being deprived of that and being cast out was devastating,” he said.
Soon after being removed from his job, Maxwell was visited at his home late one evening and directed to sign a letter acknowledging his administrative leave and forfeiting his right to enter the State Department. He refused to sign, responding in writing that it amounted to an admission he had done something wrong.
“They just wanted me to go away but I wouldn’t just go away,” he said. “I knew Chris [Stevens]. Chris was a friend of mine.”
“Behind Beth’s back, Maxwell ended up being put on administrative leave.”
The decision to place Maxwell on administrative leave was made by Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills, according to three State Department officials with direct knowledge of the events. On the day after the unclassified version of the ARB’s report was released in December, Mills called Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones and directed her to have Maxwell leave his job immediately.
"Cheryl Mills directed me to remove you immediately from the [deputy assistant secretary] position," Jones told Maxwell, according to Maxwell.
The decision to remove Maxwell and not Jones seems to conflict with the finding of the ARB that responsibility for the security failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi should fall on more senior officials.
“We fixed [the responsibility] at the assistant secretary level, which is in our view the appropriate place to look, where the decision-making in fact takes place, where, if you like, the rubber hits the road," Pickering said when releasing the ARB report.
The report found “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department,” namely the Diplomatic Security (DS) and Near East bureaus. Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns testified in December that requests for more security in Libya, denied by the State Department, did reach the assistant secretaries and “it may be that some of my colleagues on the 7th floor saw them as well."
But Jones was not disciplined in any way following the release of the report, nor was the principal deputy assistant secretary of State at NEA, Liz Dibble, who is slated to receive a plush post as the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London this summer. In the DS bureau, the assistant secretary, principal deputy, and deputy assistant all lost their jobs. In the NEA bureau, only Maxwell was asked to leave.
Jones and Dibble were responsible for security in Libya, Maxwell and three State Department officials said. What’s more, when Maxwell was promoted to his DAS position in August 2011, most responsibility for Libya was carved out of his portfolio, which also included Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Although Maxwell did some work on Libya, all security related decisions were handled by Dibble and Jones, according to the three officials.
One State Department official close to the issue told The Daily Beast that Clinton’s people told the leadership of the NEA bureau that Maxwell would be given another job at State when the Benghazi scandal blew over. Maxwell said Jones assured him he would eventually be brought back to NEA as a “senior advisor,” but that Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff, reneged.
“The deal that NEA made with Cheryl Mills and the 7th floor was to keep Ray within NEA and just give him another portfolio. For whatever reason, it didn’t go down like that and that was a complete shock to Beth [Jones], because that was the deal that Beth made with Cheryl,” the official said. “Behind Beth’s back, Maxwell ended up being put on administrative leave.”
Jones and Mills both declined to comment for this article, but a source close to Mills denied that any kind of deal was made or reneged on regarding Maxwell’s future employment. The decision to place Maxwell on administrative leave was based on the classified portion of the ARB’s report, which named Maxwell specifically, the source said, but since the ARB didn’t say that Maxwell had committed a “breach of duty,” he couldn’t be outright fired.
“Administrative leave was the best option available within the very narrow authority that anyone had. That was the harshest discipline the department could mete out,” a State Department official involved in the decision making process said. “There really weren’t any other options available. If they could have been fired they would have been.”
One person who reviewed the classified portion of the ARB report told The Daily Beast that it called out Maxwell for the specific infraction of not reading his daily classified briefings, something that person said Maxwell admitted to the ARB panel during his interview.
“The crime that he is being punished for is not reading his intel. That explains why Jones and Dibble were not disciplined,” this person said.
Maxwell had no response to this allegation other than to say he has not been officially counseled on what he did wrong and has not been allowed to read the classified report. Also, he believes that Clinton’s staff, not the ARB, was in charge of the review of the attack that took place during her watch.
“The flaws in the process were perpetrated by the political leadership at State with the complicity of the senior career leadership,” he said. “They should be called to account.”
“There are people who seem to have responsibility who have yet to be held accountable.”
Eight months after the attack, Congressional investigators and outside groups are still pressing the State Department to explain how the ARB came to the conclusion that four mid-level officials were the only ones with responsibility for the failures that led up to the attack.
The Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darryl Issa (R-CA), has announced that he will subpoena Pickering in order to compel him to submit to a deposition. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the chairman of the subcommittee on national security, told The Daily Beast in an interview that he wants to know exactly why Maxwell and the three other officials were placed on administrative leave, and have not been granted due process to defend themselves.
“I certainly would like to hear their side of the story. It seems fair that they should be given that opportunity. If they can’t get it within the administration, I think Congress would love to hear their story,” he said. “Secretary Clinton says she takes responsibility, but that seems like lip service rather than the reality because there are people who seem to have responsibility who have yet to be held accountable and I don’t understand that.”
Chaffetz and Issa sent a letter in January to State asking why Clinton, Deputy Secretary Tom Nides, and Deputy Secretary Bill Burns were not interviewed by the ARB. Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy admitted in Oct. 10 congressional testimony that he was in the loop on decisions regarding security requests in Libya before the attack. He was interviewed by the ARB but not identified as having done anything wrong.
“The ARB tried to blame everyone but hold no one responsible, except for some of the lower level people who were not in control of the situation,” said Chaffetz. “You have a report that seems incomplete at best.”
Susan Johnson, the president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), told The Daily Beast that administrative leave does damage to a foreign service officer’s reputation and career if it goes on for more than a couple of weeks, much less several months. The treatment amounts to a de facto disciplinary action, she said.
“There’s a feeling that foreign service officers often end up as scapegoats when scandals rise to congressional or public attention,” she said. “Our broader concern is to ensure some measure of fairness and transparency, ensure some reasonable process that meets some kind of minimal standard here.”
AFSA sent a letter to Burns in January asking a number of questions about the review process and the criteria senior department leaders used in choosing to discipline the four individuals removed from their jobs in relation to the Benghazi attack.
“The State Department began an administrative process to review the status of the four individuals placed on administrative leave. That review process continues and Secretary Kerry will be briefed with an update, and decisions will be made about the status of these employees,” Psaki told the Beast. “This internal administrative process can take some time.”
She added: “It is also important to remember that the four people discussed are all long-serving government officials who over the years have provided dedicated service to the U.S. Government in challenging assignments.”
Maxwell just wants his day in court. He wrote a poem on his personal blog in April which referred to the State Department’s treatment of the four officials removed from their jobs after Benghazi as a “lynching.”
Last week, he posted another poem about the growing Benghazi scandal.
“The web of lies they weave gets tighter and tighter in its deceit until it bottoms out -at a very low frequency – and implodes,” he wrote. “Yet all the while, the more they talk, the more they lie, and the deeper down the hole they go.”
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/20/2013 18:04 -0400
As a result of Fox News Channel’s State Department reporter James Rosen’s 2009 investigation into the government’s response to North Korea’s repeated provocations, it wasreported on Monday that the Department of Justice tracked Rosen’s movements as well as subpoenaed telephone and email records. According to the DoJ’s subpoena, Google surrendered Rosen’s emails, who is described as “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator,” to the government.
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