President Barack Obama has nominated the "Political Director" of his Presidential campaign to head the Office of Personnel Management in an apparent effort to weed out politicization of government services and partisan activists in the civil service.
That is a masterful statement from Breitbart to demonstrate just how political a nomination this is...
[Atlantic] The New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... reports the Department of Justice investigated national security leaks given to Times news hound David Sanger over his story last year about the Stuxnet virus by pulling all the email and phone records of government officials who communicated with the news hound. Last summer, Sanger reported the U.S. helped develop the Stuxnet virus and used it to attack Iran, becoming the first country to carry out a sustained cyber attack with the intent of destroying another country's infrastructure. The was some hoopla and a hullaballoo about leaks and DOJ investigations, the News Agency that Dare Not be Named case, and now a year later we're finding out just how far things went.
The Times' Ethan Bronner, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane report the FBI requested for any phone and email logs from the White House, the Defense Department and other "intelligence agencies" that showed any contact between employees and Sanger. It does not appear they went so far as to seize Sanger's telephone records or emails, as they did with the Associates Press and Fox News news hound James Rosen. They at least got creative this time. Instead of looking at his communication records, they looked at the communications between him and every government employee by looking on their end.
As a result of the intense scrutiny, the Times says some sources are starting to clam up.
[WashingtonExaminer] Claims of political targeting by the Internal Revenue Service are flooding into the House Ways and Means Committee, bolstered by evidence that includes secretly recorded conversations with IRS officials.
Ways and Means has created a website inviting Americans who believe they were targeted to share their stories, and among the information being forwarded to committee investigators are surreptitious recordings of interviews with the IRS. The recordings and other evidence are coming from conservatives who believe they were subjected to tax audits because of their political activism, or from members of conservative groups who believe their organizations' requests for tax-exempt status was subjected to extra scrutiny.
Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio, a member of Ways and Means, confirmed to The Washington Examiner on Thursday that the evidence being sent to the committee includes secret recordings with IRS officials. This information comports with legal sources who have clients who believe they were targeted by the IRS because they are politically active conservatives who opposed President Obama's re-election.
#1
Too bad this doesn't represent just plain stubbornness by the IRS in ignoring their own published regulations; I could give them at least a dozen cases.
#2
Jeez, I think the House Ways and Means website is going to get flooded with "targeted by the IRS" stories, after all have they not heard of the IRS administering provisions of Obamacare?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.