Missouri Governor Jay Nixon called a state of emergency, last week, and announced that he was mobilizing the National Guard in preparation for the expected chaos in the wake of the Ferguson grand jury verdict, so where were they last night while Ferguson was burning?
Guard members were reportedly in place last night at key locations in St. Louis when the grand jury decision not to indict police officer Darrell Wilson was announced. But for some reason, none were at the flash point, where you would think, most of the attention would have been focused.
Ferguson Mayor James Knowles toldFOX 2 late Monday night thathe had repeatedlypleaded with the Governor’s office to deploy the the National Guard in his town, but his requests were “completely ignored.”
On Fox News’,America’s Newsroom, Kinder asked, “did the Obama administration lean on Governor Nixon to ignore pleas from Ferguson Mayor to send in National Guard?”
“He (Governor Nixon) declared a State of Emergency almost a week ago and mobilized the National Guard. Then they were kept away at the crucial time while Ferguson burned…
We know they were kept away because they did not come in and stop that from the get-go. They were deployed in other parts of the St. Louis region… Why were they not in there at the first sign of an overturned police car or a smashed police car window with a show of force that would have stopped this?
Here’s my question that the governor must answer – Is the reason that the National Guard was not in there because the Obama Administration and the Holder Justice Department leaned on you to keep them out? I cannot imagine any other reason why the governor who mobilized the National Guard would not have them in there to stop this.”
It’s absolutely chilling that such a question is being asked.
Holder also expressed concerns privately about Gov. Jay Nixon’s decision this week to declare a state of emergency at a news conference and activate the National Guard . . .
A top aide to Holder called the governor’s office earlier this week to express Holder’s displeasure and “frustration,” according to a Justice Department official.
“Instead of de-escalating the situation, the governor escalated it,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject. “He sent the wrong message. The tone of the press conference was counterproductive.”
UPDATE II:
Kinder was also on the Kelly File with Megyn Kelly Tuesday night:
It is said that a leader who is a malignant narcissist will be at his most tyrannical and dangerous when his popularity is on the decline. A large component of Obama’s fundamental transformation of America requires an huge influx of immigrants from the third world to become clients of the State, adding to the Democrat voting base. It should not come as a surprise that Obama means to reach that goal before he leaves office even as his serial executive overreaches repel the American people. His plan to grant up to 9 million illegal immigrants amnesty without the approval of Congress represents an abuse of power so extreme, and audacious it’s almost beyond comprehension. To call it a coup d’Etatis not hyperbole.
Despite no official action from the president ahead of the election, the Obama administration has quietly begun preparing to issue millions of work authorization permits, suggesting the implementation of a large-scale executive amnesty may have already begun.
Unnoticed until now, a draft solicitation for bids issued by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Oct. 6 says potential vendors must be capable of handling a “surge” scenario of 9 million id cards in one year “to support possible future immigration reform initiative requirements.”
The request for proposals says the agency will need a minimum of four million cards per year. In the “surge,” scenario in 2016, the agency would need an additional five million cards – more than double the baseline annual amount for a total of 9 million.
“The guaranteed minimum for each ordering period is 4,000,000 cards. The estimated maximum for the entire contract is 34,000,000 cards,” the document says.
The agency is buying the materials need to construct both Permanent Residency Cards (PRC), commonly known as green cards, as well as Employment Authorization Documentation (EAD) cards which have been used to implement President Obama’s “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) program. The RFP does not specify how many of each type of card would be issued.
Jessica Vaughan, an immigration expert at the Center for Immigration Studies and former State Department official, said the document suggests a new program of remarkable breadth.
People who wonder what the Regime was doing while ISIS gathered strength in the Middle East and Ebola went from a few cases in a village in Guinea to the largest outbreak of the disease to date, have their answer. Obama is not as idle as people make him out to be, and has been putting his particular skill set to good use. It’s just that his particular skill-set – community organizing – doesn’t lend itself well to terror threats and plagues.
At a recent event at the Heritage Foundation entitled “An Imperial Presidency,” headlined by Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, remedies like an “emergency injunction” and “power of the purse” were discussed.
However, he said, should the President follow up in the near future with additional “major” abuses of power, one of which would be the “dramatic expansion” of unlawful and unilateral amnesties, that would call for an “immediate response.” He suggested that this response might take the form of going to Court and asking for an emergency injunction to stop the unilateral amnesty. He acknowledged, however, that the Courts could drag out the process of hearing until past the end of the President’s term, meaning it would not be an effective way of addressing the issue. While he mentioned that the “Enforce the Law Act” expedites the legal process to a few months, of course, that bill is not currently law, leaving the prospect of litigation as a way to curb the President’s executive overreach quite murky.
Given the difficulties a lawsuit would present at holding the President accountable, I asked if stopping the President through appropriations and not just a lawsuit is also on the table. In response, Goodlatte said that the power of the purse is “always” on the table. However, he implied that if one chamber of Congress refuses to use the power of the purse to rein in the Executive branch, it is difficult for the other to do so alone. If the Republicans should take the Senate, appropriations would therefore be a more likely option for the Republicans to pursue, he hinted.
They’d better get moving if they really want to stop him, because the president is already way ahead of them.
Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) told Breitbart News that black workers across America should be wary of supporting Democrats because of President Obama and other Democrats’ support for immigration policies that displace them economically.
Monday morning, the hosts of Fox & Friends, the hosts wondered if the Obama Administration had pressured him to change his position.
“For Martin Dempsey — and he’s a smart guy, he knows what’s going on — for him to say no Syria action at this point, and the fact that he was much more direct last week, you got to wonder whether or not politics from the administration is coming into play,” cohost Steve Doocy said Monday morning. “Where after he said the stuff on Thursday, somebody from the White House called him and said, ‘Come on. We can’t do anything right now.’”
Meanwhile, there are increasing calls among Republicans for the president to come up with a clear and decisive plan of action to combat ISIS (or as he and members of the Regime – but virtually no one else likes to call them – ISIL.)
“I get the sense that [Defense] Secretary [Chuck] Hagel and [Army] General [Martin] Dempsey understand the gravity of the situation. Candidly, … I don’t want to hear from the president how he’s reacting to events like the Mosul Dam,” the House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“What I want to hear from our commander-in-chief is that he has a strategy to finish ISIS off. To defeat ISIS,” Ryan said. “If we don’t deal with this threat now thoroughly and convincingly, it’s going to come home to roost.”
The former Republican vice presidential nominee was hardly the only GOP member to take to the airwaves to criticize Obama’s handling of ISIS on Sunday.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also had advice for Obama on Sunday calling on him “to expand U.S. airstrikes to Syria so the militant group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) does not have a base of operation.”
“There is no boundary between Syria and Iraq,” McCain said on “Fox News Sunday.” “One of the key decisions the president is going to have to make is airpower in Syria. We cannot give them a base of operations. And we have got to help the Free Syrian Army.”
McCain said the recent beheading of U.S. journalist James Foley by ISIS will hopefully work as a catalyst for the administration to define a comprehensive strategy in Iraq and other parts of the world. The United States has launched more than 90 airstrikes in Iraq against ISIS.
“This is an administration, which the kindest word I can use is ‘feckless,’ where they have not outlined a roles that the United States has to play. And that is a leadership role,” he said.
Democrats, on the other hand prefer Obama’s brilliant lead from behind, do a lot of talking and evaluating and wait until it’s pretty much too late strategy.
“We have to begin with the assumption that they could be such a threat, then we have to evaluate what their capabilities are, what their intentions,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Appearing on Fox and Friends,this morning, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) expressed hope that the missing IRS emails would be found after channeling Ricky Ricardo from “I Love Lucy” to explain his reaction to the lost emails.
“You know, I think back to the old black-and-white series with Lucille Ball when Ricky Ricardo would say, ‘Lucy, you got some ’splaining to do.’ The IRS has some ’splaining to do,” the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform committee said.
The revelation that the IRS had lost two years of emails (coincidentally! ) within the precise time frame Republicans were seeking – came during last week’s Friday afternoon document dump.
Issa subpoenaed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen to testify before the committee, Monday.
And yesterday, Republicans revealed that the IRS had also lost the emails of about six more employees.
In a press release Camp reveals that the emails of 6 other individuals have also gone missing. Only one of the six is mentioned by name. Nikole Flax was the Chief of Staff to Deputy Commissioner Steve Miller. Miller was later promoted to acting Commissioner and then resigned last May amid fallout from the scandal.
Flax, it turns out, was a frequent White House visitorbetween July 2010 and May of 2013 which (coincidentally!) is when the IRS scandal broke.
Issa expressed his hope that the emails would be found – “unless the IRS and Lois Lerner have made sure they can’t be found.” But added, “we expect that forensics will get them.”
He told Fox and Friends host Elisabeth Hasselbeck,“the commissioner knew or should have known that this had already occurred, they they were getting us data through other sources and failed to tell us month after month. It’s contemptible and he’s going to have some answering to do, but so are people up and down the IRS.”
“The emails we have, Elizabeth, show that, in fact, these people were trying to overturn a Supreme Court decision and target conservative groups because they don’t like what conservatives say; that’s at the heart of this,” Issa said. “If Lois Lerner is the kingpin, so be it. But if we can’t see the connection in her emails fully, we won’t know all the people that worked with her to target unfairly Americans for what they believe, what they say and what they want to associate with.”
The scale of the wrongdoing is staggering. Targeting Americans for criminal investigation without evidence, attempting to enlist multiple federal agencies in the effort, selective audits, selective disclosures of confidential documents, selective questioning and delays of nonprofit applicants — all in the service of suppressing dissent. At the ACLJ, I’m one of the attorneys in our litigation — on behalf of 41 conservative groups in 22 states — against the IRS and key IRS officials.
As of today, we’re putting the DOJ, FEC, and even key Democratic senators on notice: They’re bound by law to preserve any communications with IRS officials that would be discoverable in our lawsuit.
The administration’s misconduct and its cover-up are so brazen, so contemptuous of common sense and the truth, that they will — once and for all — put the media and the Left to the test: When it comes to this administration, does the rule of law matter at all? Does the truth matter at all? Or is it all about ideology now?
“The [Federal Records Act] requires agencies to make and preserve records of agency decisions, policies, and essential transactions and to take steps to safeguard against the loss of agency records,” said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, who subpoenaed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Monday.
The IRS’s own definition of the Federal Records Act makes clear that emails must be saved and documented, according to an instructional page for employees on the IRS website.
“The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media,” according to the IRS. “Emails are records when they are: Created or received in the transaction of agency business. Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities; or Valuable because of the information they contain.”
“If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly,” according to the IRS. “The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy.”
Obviously, the White House is deeply involved in the IRS scandal- Obama and his flunkies have made that abundantly clear with their ongoing efforts to poo-poo and controversialize a legitimate investigation into IRS malfeasance.
Josh Earnest deployed the Regime’s tried and true “conspiracy theory” defense on reporters aboard Air Force One, yesterday. This is how they (as Sharyl Attkisson so aptly put it) “controversialize” a story that’s damaging to the Regime. Read closely.
Asked by a reporter aboard Air Force One whether he thought the technical glitch was in fact a “reasonable explanation,” Earnest, the incoming press secretary, was at first dismissive.
“You’ve never heard of a computer crashing before?” Earnest asked.
Regime: “Move on, you guys, nothing to see, here.”
When pressed that emails are stored on servers and not hard drives, Earnest gave a more detailed response, including attacking Republicans in Congress.
“I think it’s entirely reasonable because it’s the truth and it’s a fact,” Earnest said. “And speculation otherwise I think is indicative of conspiracies that are propagated in a way that left people with a disinformation about exactly what occurred.”
Regime: “Do you want to align yourselves with tea party conspiracy theorists?” Reporters’ expected response: “Oh God, no.”
Earnest said the IRS provided 67,000 emails to and from Lerner to congressional committees. He said this included emails during the period of time that the IRS said the crash included.
“So a good-faith effort has been made by the IRS to cooperate with congressional oversight,” Earnest continued. “The far-fetched skepticism expressed by some Republican members of Congress is not at all surprising and not particularly believable.”
Actually, it’s Josh Earnest’s pathetic spin that isn’t believable.
Via Communities Digital News, here’s Charles Krauthammer’s reaction to that on Special Report, Monday night.
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer reminded viewers that one of the articles of impeachment brought against President Richard Nixon was the abuse of the IRS to pursue political enemies. A missing 18 ½ minutes of audio on Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era tapes versus 26 months of emails? “This is a high crime, this is not a triviality,” Krauthammer warned.
National Journal columnist Ron Fournier, who has, for the most part, been pretty supportive of the Obama administration had this sobering response: “Josh’s statement, with all due respect, is insulting to my intelligence — it really makes me angry. The reason there’s questions about this is because they haven’t answered the questions. The fact of the matter is that, we don’t know the facts, we don’t know if anybody is guilty here or not, but we do know that one of the most pernicious things our government can do is use the IRS to come after us.”
Obama White House is losing many of his liberal supporters because they can no longer defend him and retain any degree of self-respect. That leaves the hard left and the lofo default libs still in his camp.
Meanwhile, on another scandal front that the Regime has tried hard to controversialize: CNN Poll: 61% Say Obama Admin Has Been “Dishonest” With Details Of Benghazi Terror Attack…
(CNN) – Six in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the way the Obama administration has handled the deadly terror attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, a new poll shows.
The CNN/ORC International poll released on Monday indicates only 37% are satisfied with the administration’s response to the September 2012 assault that killed four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya. […]
Sixty-one percent of Americans surveyed think the administration has generally been dishonest in providing information about Benghazi in the aftermath of the attack.
The truth is finally catching up to this criminal cartel of a White House.
With the public becoming more aware of the Regime’s ongoing corruption and lawlessness, can the political remedy of impeachmentfinally become a reality?
We really need to get this guy out of there before he does any more damage to this country. I don’t care if that means the simpleton Biden becomes president – anything is better than this malignant tumor that’s been plaguing the nation for five and a half God-awful years in the person of Barack Hussein Obama.
It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.
The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.
The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the targeting. They expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”
Ace says: “Because it’s politically chancey to even mention Impeachment, Obama is now basically daring the GOP to impeach him.”
I say, we take him up on the dare. I’ve had it with him, and so have most sentient beings.
This is from a radio interview with Philadelphia talk show host Dom Giordano:
“These emails are not stored on a signal server or a single computer, so if there were a crash of a hard drive or some sort of system failure, they would still be retrievable. According to [John] Koskinen, the IRS Commissioner at the time, he told Congress that emails were stored offsite. That jives with people who said emails were backed up daily. There is a responsibility on the part of government officials to retain the data, make sure that is and can’t be lost in the system. If it’s true that the emails are lost, that’s quite a story in itself,” she said.
She thinks Congress should act fast to investigate if anyone inside the IRS is attempting to hide or destroy the emails.
“I would call in certain officials. Let’s assume there could have been some mischief committed — before they have time to get their stories straight and fix things up, I would get them in there under oath and start digging down and getting the timeline and getting people on the record about this. The only people that I see than can do this are members of Congress. The question is, do they have the will to do that?” Attkisson stated.
She goes on to make several other good points, including the fact that “the IRS is part of Healthcare.gov, if the IRS system can indeed be so vulnerable that some sort of crash can lose all kind of important data like this, what does t say about the federal system?”
MORE:
Glenn Reynolds: “I think it’s fair at this point to assume that the “missing” emails are missing because someone in the White House was behind this.”
FBI Director James Comey had no answers Wednesday to Senator Ted Cruz ‘s questions regarding the Obama Administration’s failure to fully investigate the IRS targeting scandal.
During a Senate Judiciary meeting, this morning, Sen. Cruzasked the following questions:
To date how many victims, or alleged victims, of improper targeting have been interviewed by the FBI? More or less than 10 victims?
Can you tell this committee, to date, how many White House employees the FBI has interviewed for this investigation?
The Attorney General appointed to lead this investigation a major Obama donor who has given President Obama and Democrats over $6,000. Do you see any actual or apparent conflict of interest in that?
Do you think it would have been appropriate to trust John Mitchell to investigate Richard Nixon?
Four days after Attorney General Eric Holder told the committee that this was a vigorous investigation, the President of United States went on national television and told the American people, categorically, there was not a smidgen of corruption… [these statements] are facially inconsistent.. which of those statements was true and which was false?
None of these questions were fully answered, which Democratic Judiciary Chairman Sen. Pat Leahy said was “appropriate.”
“That’s not fair… he answered very appropriately”, Leahy protested after Cruz expressed his disgust at the stonewall. “In the same way that – appropriately – similar answers were given during Republican administrations, and we accepted them.” (Oh, Suuuuurrrrre they did!)
Cruz shot back: “Mr. Chairman, you’re welcome to accept them, and I would note… “this IRS targeting correspondence (that) has come out, came in significant regard at the written behest of Democrat members of this body. So I understand that there is not an interest among some members of this body in learning what happened.”
Oh SUH-NAP.
Leahy stammered, “Uh…again….you’re not responding to what I said at all. I’m just saying that what Mr. Comey has said was an appropriate answer….based on….the reason he did it.” (Good answer!) “It has nothing to do with how they feel. I don’t like the targeting of anybody, but what Mr. Comey said was a correct and appropriate answer.”
Cruz was having none of it. “I would note for the record that when I introduced an amendment before this committee to make it a criminal offense to target Americans based on their political views, the Chairman and every Democratic member of this committee voted against it,” he said sadly.
Nice Deb 