By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
A Texas group dedicated to combatting voter fraud applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and has suffered three years of delays, been through four different IRS agents, undergone six FBI inquiries and submitted thousands of pages of documentation — and it still hasn't been approved.
Ever since Barack Obama was nominated in 2008 as the Democratic candidate for the president of the United States, his staunchest critics have implied that he had the makings of a dictator.
Maybe most surprising in the Justice Department's subpoenas of phone records from The Associated Press was how wide the Obama administration cast its net: 20 phone lines, used by up to 100 reporters.
Washington, D.C., has failed to remove from its voting rolls as many as 13,000 former residents who years ago moved to Prince George's County and cast ballots there, making fraud by voting in two jurisdictions as easy as going to the polls in their old neighborhoods, The Washington Times found in a review of records.
Spoiler alert: The IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal — they go nowhere. In September, we'll all be looking back thinking, "Huh, that was a big waste of time." It will be — in fact, it already is.
The president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press on Sunday called the government's secret seizure of two months of reporters' phone records "unconstitutional" and said the news cooperative had not ruled out legal action against the Justice Department.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday described the leak about a foiled terrorist plot in Yemen to The Associated Press as a "very, very serious" matter that "put the American people at risk," but he did not remember when he recused himself from the investigation into it, did not put his recusal in writing and never told the White House.
One-time journalist and presidential press secretary Jay Carney is channelling his inner Sgt. Schultz, a favorite of "Hogan's Heroes." He "knows nothing, absolutely nothing" about the Department of Justice snooping on the communication habits of 20 reporters and editors at the Associated Press.
Nearly 100 people, including 14 doctors and nurses, were charged for their roles in separate Medicare scams that collectively billed the taxpayer-funded program for roughly $223 million in bogus charges in a massive bust spanning eight cities, federal authorities said Tuesday.
In damage control on multiple fronts, the White House on Tuesday struggled to contain a series of escalating scandals that likely will test President Obama's willingness to hold administration officials accountable.
"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot," Mr. Holder said, "in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."
"The facts alleged in this indictment show that the Pakistani Taliban facilitated Faisal Shahzads attempted attack on American soil," said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. "Our nation averted serious loss of life in this attempted bombing, but it is a reminder that we face an evolving threat that we must continue to fight with every tool available to the government."
