Posts Tagged ‘Eric Holder’

by Vince Coglianese

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that he isn’t sure how many times he’s seized reporters’ records.

“I’m not sure how many of those cases … I have actually signed off on,” Holder said in an interview with NPR’s Carrie Johnson. “I take them very seriously. I know that I have refused to sign a few [and] pushed a few back for modifications.”

Holder’s answer serves as confirmation that the Justice Department’s secret seizure of The Associated Press’s phone records is not an isolated incident.
Though the decision to subpoena information from media organizations normally falls to Holder, he insists that he recused himself from the AP case, leaving Deputy Attorney General James Cole to make the decision.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/15/holder-not-sure-how-many-times-hes-seized-press-records/#ixzz2TeZihUkU

by Steven Ertelt

The revelations about Attorney General Eric Holder and his connection to an abortion clinic are becoming worse as new information has come to light showing he failed to disclose his wife’s co-owning of an abortion business.

Just before the election, Human Events broke the news that Holder’s wife and sister-in-law co-own, through a family trust, the building where a controversial abortion practitioner operates. The Holder family transferred ownership to a family trust in 2009, eight months after President Barack Obama’s inauguration and a deed names Holder’s wife and sister-in-law as trustees.

Fulton County tax records show Holder’s wife and sister-in-law own the building, located at 6210 Old National Highway, College Park, Ga. A statement from the Georgia Department of Law shows the building was home to Old National Gynecology, the practice of abortion practitioner Tyrone Cecil Malloy.

Now, Human Events has an update, revealing that Holder failed to disclose his wife’s ownership of the building. The attorney general’s financial disclosure reports for 2008 through 2011 show Holder neglected to report his wife’s co-ownership.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch in Washington, D.C., said he was “surprised there is this trust out there and (Holder) hasn’t reported it.”

“It looks to me like the sort of thing that should be disclosed. If he and his spouse are gaining income off this trust, generally that would be subject to disclosure,” Fitton said. “I mean, if you have an ownership interest, you get the income. You may not be making the day-to-day decisions about the investments, but you are certainly benefiting from them.”

Holder did not respond to several requests for comment.

Dana Cody, an attorney and the president and executive director of Life Legal Defense Foundation, a pro-life legal defense organization in Napa, Calif., agreed that Holder should have “disclosed any financial interest he had in the abortion industry.”

Under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, high-level federal officials are required to “disclose publicly their personal financial interests to ensure confidence in the integrity of the federal government by demonstrating that they are able to carry out their duties without compromising the public trust.”

The law further requires disclosure of the “holdings of and income from the holdings of any trust, estate, investment fund or other financial arrangement from which income is received by, or with respect to which a beneficial interest in principal or income is held by, the filer, his spouse, or dependent child.”

Those found violating the law can face penalties ranging from criminal and civil fines to imprisonment, according to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. This includes fines of up to $50,000 and a maximum of a year imprisonment, if the non-disclosure was done willfully, according to the Office of Government Ethics.

Interestingly, though he did not disclose his connection to the abortion practice, Holder did disclose his wife’s ownership of a D.C.-area medical practice and her pension.

Holder has failed to prosecute abortion practitioners who run afoul of federal laws and some say the connection helps explain why he has been eager to prosecute pro-life advocates who protest outside of abortion centers.

About the abortion practitioner that works at the Holder-owned abortion clinic, LifeNews reported in December 2011 that Malloy faces accusations of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medicaid payments that were fraudulent.

Tyrone Malloy and his abortion facility office manager were arrested, according to a spokesman for the office of the Georgia Attorney General. Malloy and office manager CathyAnn Warner reportedly took in more than $380,000 in payments for pre-abortion ultrasounds Malloy never did and abortions that did not qualify for reimbursement under Medicaid.

Malloy and Warner were indicted by a grand jury on two counts of Medicaid fraud and, if they are convicted, they face 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. After his arrest, Malloy posted bond. Federal rules allow for Medicaid funding for abortions only if they are done in the very rare cases such as saving the life of the mother or rape or incest.

(ABC/UNIVISION) – On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez. Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.

Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers. Three of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), according to a Mexican army document obtained exclusively by Univision News.

Univision News identified a total of 57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during Operation Fast and Furious, and then recovered in Mexico in sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre.

As part of Operation Fast and Furious, ATF allowed 1,961 guns to “walk” out of the U.S. in an effort to identify the high profile cartel leaders who received them. The agency eventually lost track of the weapons, and they often ended up in the hands of Mexican hit men , including those who ordered and carried out the attack on Salvarcar and El Aliviane, a rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez where 18 young men were killed on September 2, 2009.

In Mexico, the timing of the operation coincided with an upsurge of violence in the war among the country’s strongest cartels. In 2009, the northern Mexican states served as a battlefield for the Sinaloa and Juarez drug trafficking organizations, and as expansion territory for the increasingly powerful Zetas. According to documents obtained by Univision News, from October of that year to the end of 2010, nearly 175 weapons from Operation Fast and Furious inadvertently armed the various warring factions across northern Mexico.

“Many weapons cross the border and enter Mexico, but that [Fast and Furious] number, quantity and type of weapons had quite an impact in the war in this area” Jose Wall, an ATF agent stationed in Tijuana from 2009 to 2011, told Univision News.

Following the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry at the hands of Mexican bandits on December 14, 2010, media and Congressional investigations prompted hearings. On September 20, the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General report, which opened the door for sanctions of 14 ATF and DOJ officials.

In Washington, the Fast and Furious scandal became politicized, diverting the attention from the human cost in Mexico to political battles on Capitol Hill. In June, a vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt ignored the real tragedy in Mexico.

“Americans are not often moved by the pain of those outside [their country]…” Javier Sicilia, a Mexican poet whose son was killed in the midst of the violence, told Univision News. “But they are moved by the pain of their own. Well, turn around and watch the massacres.”

The Univision News investigation also found ATF offices from states besides Arizona pursued similar misguided strategies. In Florida, the weapons from Operation Castaway ended up in the hands of criminals inColombia, Honduras and Venezuela (link audio crumpler), the lead informant in the case told Univision News in a prison interview.

“When the ATF stopped me, they told me the guns were going to cartels,” Hugh Crumpler, a Vietnam veteran turned arms trafficker, told Univision News. “The ATF knew before I knew and had been following me for a considerable length of time. They could not have followed me for two months like they said they did, and not know the guns were going somewhere, and not want for that to be happening.”

Other firearms under ATF surveillance were permitted to leave the country from Texas, according to court documents and the exclusive testimony of Magdalena Avila Villalobos, the sister of an ICE agent who survived a confrontation with cartel hit men on a rural highway in Mexico on February 15, 2011. His fellow agent, Jaime Zapata, was killed during the attacks.

“It’s not from Arizona and Fast and Furious,” Avila Villalobos told Univision News, speaking in her brother’s stead for the first time, “but it’s a very similar operation…” She later added, “Those weapons that have been recovered, it’s been confirmed that they were weapons used in the shootout that killed Jaime Zapata and wounded Victor Avila.”

The Texas-based operation and the firearms linked to the attack were bought by two trafficking rings in the state, according to Raymond Thomas, the Zapata family’s lawyer.

Earlier this year, Texas Senator John Cornyn had echoed Thomas’ assertions . Moreover, on September 25, Congressman Darrell Issa and Senator Charles Grassley, the politicians behind the Fast and Furious congressional report released in July, sent a letter to the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, requesting an investigation into Avila’s and Zapata’s case.

http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/fast-furious-scandal-details-emerge-us-government-armed/story?id=17352694#.UGp5uxht1N3

By Richard A. Serrano

WASHINGTON — Republican congressional investigators have concluded that five senior ATF officials — from the special agent-in-charge of the Phoenix field office to the top man in the bureau’s Washington headquarters — are collectively responsible for the failed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation that was “marred by missteps, poor judgments and inherently reckless strategy.”

The investigators, in a final report likely to be released later this week, also unearthed new evidence that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix initially sought to hide from the Mexican government the crucial information that two Fast and Furious firearms were recovered after the brother of a Mexican state attorney general was killed there.

According to a copy of the report obtained Monday by The Times, the investigators said their findings are “the best information available as of now” about the flawed gun operation that last month led to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. being found in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over subpoenaed documents.

Two more final reports, they said, will deal with “the devastating failure of supervision and leadership” at the Department of Justice and an “unprecedented obstruction of the [congressional] investigation by the highest levels of the Justice Department, including the attorney general himself.”

The first report did allege some Justice Department involvement, however, notably that Kenneth E. Melson, then acting ATF director, was made into a “scapegoat” for Fast and Furious after he told congressional Republicans his Justice Department supervisors “were doing more damage control than anything” else once Fast and Furious became public.

“My view is that the whole matter of the department’s response in this case was a disaster,” Melson told the investigators.

Fast and Furious, which allowed some 2,500 illegal gun sales in Arizona with the hope that agents would track the weapons to Mexican drug cartels, began in fall 2009 and was halted after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010. By then, most of the weapons had been lost, and two were recovered at the scene of his slaying.

The five ATF managers, since moved to other positions, have either defended Fast and Furious in congressional testimony or refused to discuss it. They could not be reached for comment Monday. At the Justice Department, senior officials, including Holder, have steadfastly maintained that Fast and Furious was confined to the Arizona border region and that Washington was never aware of the flawed tactics.

The joint staff report, authored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was highly critical of the ATF supervisors.

They found that William Newell, the special agent-in-charge in Phoenix, exhibited “repeatedly risky” management and “consistently pushed the envelope of permissible investigative techniques.” The report said “he had been reprimanded … before for crossing the line, but under a new administration and a new attorney general he reverted back to the use of risky gunwalking tactics.”

His boss, Deputy Assistant Director for Field Operations William McMahon, “rubber stamped critical documents that came across his desk without reading them,” the report alleged. “In McMahon’s view it was not his job to ask any questions about what was going on in the field.”

They added that McMahon gave “false testimony” to Congress about signing applications for wiretap intercepts in Fast and Furious.

His supervisor, Mark Chait, assistant director for field operations, “played a surprisingly passive role during the operation,” the report said. “He failed to provide oversight that his experience should have dictated and his position required.”

Above Chait was Deputy Director William Hoover, who the report said ordered an exit strategy to scuttle Fast and Furious but never followed through: “Hoover was derelict in his duty to ensure that public safety was not jeopardized.”

And they said Melson, a longtime career Justice official, “often stayed above the fray” instead of bringing Fast and Furious to an “end sooner.”

But, the investigators said, ATF agents said that they were hamstrung by federal prosecutors in Arizona from obtaining criminal charges for illegal gun sales, and that Melson “even offered to travel to Phoenix to write the indictments himself. Still, he never ordered it be shut down.”

In the November 2010 slaying in Mexico of Mario Gonzalez, the brother of Patricia Gonzalez, then attorney general for the state of Chihuahua, two of 16 weapons were traced back to Fast and Furious after they were recovered from a shootout with Mexican police.

But 10 days later, ATF Agent Tonya English urged Agent Hope MacAllister and their supervisor, David J. Voth, to keep it under wraps. “My thought is not to release any information,” she told them in an email.

When Patricia Gonzalez later learned that two of the guns had been illegally obtained under Fast and Furious, she was outraged. “The basic ineptitude of these officials [who ordered the Fast and Furious operation] caused the death of my brother and surely thousands more victims,” she said.

The following month, Agent Terry was killed south of Tucson. Voth emailed back, “Ugh … things will most likely get ugly.”

Fido, Casper the Friendly Ghost and Juan Valdez walk into a polling place.  No this isn’t the beginning of a joke it is a key part of the Chicago Plan to re-elect the worst President in American History.

The Voter Participation Center (VPC), a left wing organization whose work to register Democrat voters exemplifies the process used for generations in Chicago to ensure the Outfit/Machine maintains control of the government, the power, and the swag.  The VPC is mass mailing pre-printed voter registration forms to selected voter blocks known to be part of the Democrat coalition, African-Americans, Latinos, young adults, and single women. In their effort to extend the Chicago system to the rest of the country VPC mailed nearly 200,000 third-party voter registration forms to Virginia residents in June.  This has resulted in more than 15,000 new voters being registered.

However, there are a few problems with this exercise in Chicago-style democracy.  They are violating rules set forth in the state code and the Virginia Constitution requiring that voters fill out their own form.  The State Board of Elections, which the group says pre-approved their forms and their methods, has asked the group to stop filling in the forms prior to sending them to the people, and pointing to the errant forms they have also raised questions concerning how the group obtained lists of registered voters.  In addition, according to Justin Riemer, the Virginia State Board of Elections’ deputy secretary, forms have been sent by the group to “deceased infants, out-of-state family members, and non-U.S. citizens, among others.”  Given the fact that these forms can be mailed in and that the Federal Government will sue any State that has the chutzpah to require a photo ID to vote don’t be surprised if in this, the most crucial election of our lives Fido, Casper, or Juan cast their vote to continue the occupation of Washington by the Progressive Statists and their totalitarian plans.

The list of problems with Democrat voting procedures that have ensured their iron-fisted rule in the tottering hulks of our once great cities is as long as it is disturbing.  There are the great Democrat machines that have used every form of voter fraud and intimidation to dominate the urban political scene in America for generations in places such as Philadelphia, Detroit, and of course the Mecca of corruption President Obama’s adopted hometown and political base, Chicago.  In East St. Louis and Indianapolis there are actually more registered voters than eligible citizens.

As the Obama Justice Department circles the country like a bird of prey waiting to pounce on any jurisdiction that attempts to purge the dead the illegal immigrants or felons from the voting lists, it is apparent that voter fraud has been elevated from a crime to a national policy.  So far Attorney General Holder has sued Florida, Georgia, and Texas while investigating Pennsylvania.  Yet there is no time or resources spent on investigating sixteen counties in Texas with more voters on the rolls than in the census or sixteen jurisdictions in Illinois that also have more registered than eligible. There also was no interest in prosecuting the clear case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party who patrolled voting locations armed with clubs while making racist statements to voters.  And the most reprehensible case of voter suppression of all is the campaign waged to limit the vote of our active duty military.

Any attempt to slow the growth of phantom voters is met vigorously by the Federal Government with strident accusations of racism saying that anyone who requires a photo ID to vote might as well burn a cross on the White House lawn.  This is patently absurd.  It takes a photo ID to do many things people do every day.  You need a photo ID to:

Get a Driver’s license
Buy alcohol
Buy cigarettes
Apply for welfare
Apply for food stamps
Cash a check
Purchase a firearm
Make any large credit card purchase
Open a bank account
Rent an apartment
Be admitted to a hospital
Get a marriage license

And yet according to Attorney General Holder any jurisdiction that requires a photo ID to vote is placing an undue burden on minorities akin to a poll tax collected by a man in a white hood.  But for security purposes you needed a photo ID to get into the NAACP meeting recently to hear Mr. Holder speak in a state he is currently suing over their requirement of a photo ID to vote. The irony never ends in a world that is fast becoming the theater of the absurd.

Add into the mix that most states offer free IDs and provisional ballots that are counted once ID is verified to anyone who shows up without an ID, and it’s easy to see the righteous battle against voter ID is really a reprehensible defense of voter fraud.

And just in case the actual living citizens of America show up to vote in great enough numbers to compete with Fido, Casper the Ghost, and Juan the Obama administration has retained the services of thousands of lawyers.  These devil’s advocates will challenge the vote in any district that goes against them or to defend themselves in any jurisdiction with the gall to challenge their manufactured majority.

Passing over the debates of who is Barack Obama, where did he come from, and what motivates him we must deal now with the Fete Accompli.  He has been legally sworn in and has run the country into the ground for almost four years.  We cannot afford four more years of the Progressive’s spend us into oblivion with the Cloward–Piven Strategy as national policy.  We cannot afford another four years of international support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s march to power in Middle East and serial apology tours.  We cannot afford another four years of trillion dollar yearly deficits.  We cannot afford another four years of Barack Obama ifAmerica is to have any chance to remain the land of the free and the home of the brave.

If we don’t end this soon the Progressives will end it later.

If we don’t reassert our devotion to constitutionally limited government, personal liberty, and economic freedom we will sink into a quagmire of endless entitlements for the idlers paid for by plundering the productive.  In four short months we will have an opportunity to choose.  The opponents of liberty are lined up to steal the election, but we can overwhelm them if we will all show up and vote.  Make sure every Patriot is registered, and do anything and everything you can to make sure everyone you know votes, because you can bet Fido, Casper the Friendly Ghost and Juan Valdez will. And that’s no joke.

Keep the faith.  Keep the peace.  We shall overcome.

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College.  He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2012 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com  Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens