During a panel discussion on the Department of Justice seizing the phone records of Fox News’ James Rosen, Bret Baier revealed that the seizure included the phone records of Rosen’s parents. The entire panel agreed the scandal was an outrage, with Kirsten Powers pointing out that there have been a number of high-profile leaks from the Obama administration, but the only ones they seem interested in going after are the ones that make them look bad. Charles Krauthammer found it amazing that the government would make such a “huge assault on the first amendment” in trying to go after Rosen for doing his job.

Assaulting the First Amendment is well within the character of the Obama administration. It similarly attacked the free press in the AP phone records seizure, and a film maker still sits in one of the most obscure prisons in the country after the Obama government blamed the Benghazi terrorist attack on the movie that he made. The president also directly assault freedom of religion and free speech in his remarks to the UN Sept. 26, 2012, in which he said that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Who is he to dictate what “slander” is, whose prophet gets official protection, or to whom the future will belong? Through ObamaCare, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services has made providing abortifacient drugs mandatory, in violation of millions of Americans’ right of religious conscience.

The Rosen case is merely a fresh outrage against the First Amendment piled atop the others, and it’s unlikely to be the last as long as this president remains in office.

And it gets even worse. According to Ryan Lizza, the DOJ sweep hit at least five phone lines at Fox and scores elsewhere.

The Obama Justice Department has seized the phone records of numbers that are associated with White House staffers and, apparently, with Fox News reporters, according to a document filed on October 13, 2011, in the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to James Rosen, a Fox News reporter. Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is prosecuting the case, has seized records associated with two phone numbers at the White House, at least five numbers associated with Fox News, and one that has the same area code and exchange as Rosen’s personal-cell-phone number (the last four numbers are redacted).

In all, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has seized records associated with over thirty different phone numbers.

Who’s next?

Spotted: @joshtpm @capehartj @ezraklein & other lefty columnists headed into the West Wing as a group. POTUS coffee? Carney meeting? Anyone?

— Ari Shapiro (@arishapiro) May 21, 2013

What’s this about? Maybe Jay Carney will be asked about it tomorrow.

Those columnists should be very careful. Obstructing justice is still a crime.

HOUSTON, TX. May 21, 2013 – True the Vote (TTV), the nation’s leading voters’ rights organization, filed suit in federal court in Washington today against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), asking the Court to grant its long-awaited tax exempt status and seeking damages for the unlawful actions by the IRS in the processing of its application for exempt status.  ActRight Legal Foundation, a 501(c)3 fundamental rights and public interest law firm represents True the Vote in the lawsuit.

“We’ve been waiting for three years to receive a decision from the IRS about our tax exempt status,” True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht said. “After answering hundreds of questions and producing thousands of documents, we’re done waiting. The IRS does not have the power to pocket veto our application. Federal law empowers groups like True the Vote to force a decision in court – which is precisely what we aim to do.”

The discovery process should be interesting in this case. After True the Vote filed for its tax-exempt status, founder Catherine Engelbrecht was subjected to a flurry of abuse by not just the IRS but also the FBI, OSHA and the BATF. Discovery might help ferret out any connections between the IRS and those other agencies that just happened to come down on Engelbrecht and her family.

During today’s White House press briefing, spokesman Jay Carney allowed that the White House was consulted about how to inform the public that the abuse had been going on.

Carney also said that White House deputy chief of staff Mark Childress spoke with Treasury Department officials about how to best reveal the IRS’s targeting, including a “discussion about the possibility of a speech.” The targeting was instead revealed when Lois Lerner responded to a planted question about the targeting at a conference earlier this month.

So, to unpack this a bit, the White House deputy chief of staff was informed of and involved in managing the abuse to the level of working with Treasury officials about how to let the public know. Rather than come up with an honest and straightforward way of communicating it, the IRS planted a question in an obscure conference call on a Friday that would elicit a very incomplete apology, a few days before the IG report was expected to hit.

Are we supposed to expect that Childress was acting alone? He’s the deputy White House chief of staff, his boss is chief of staff Denis McDonough. We learned on Monday that McDonough and the White House counsel learned of the IRS abuse in April at the latest. Did he not know — did he order — Childress to work with IRS to manage the planted question? What did McDonough know about the planted question? Was the White House counsel involved in planting the question? What did Obama know about any of this?

The White House’s story has changed about five times since the scandal broke. There’s no reason to take their word on anything.

A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups.

Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening – or why she didn’t reveal it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor 3rd.

Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight committee Wednesday.

According to her lawyer (she has lawyered up) Lerner believes she hasn’t done anything wrong. Even though she ran the office that even the fake-fired commissioner now admits was targeting Americans because of partisan politics.

Taylor, a criminal defense attorney from the Washington firm of Zuckerman Spaeder, said that the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation, and that the House committee has asked Lerner to explain why she provided “false or misleading information” to the committee four times last year.

Since Lerner won’t answer questions, Taylor asked that she be excused from appearing, saying that would “have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” There was no immediate word whether the committee will grant her request.

h/t Ace

Update: According to the National Journal, Issa has subpoenaed Lerner anyway, after her lawyer informed that she will plead the fifth. This sets up Lerner to appear before the committee, as she should, and repeatedly answer straightforward questions with versions of “I cannot answer on the advice of counsel, as my answer may incriminate me.” After fake-fired acting commissioner Miller’s evasions and lies by omission and the White House’s own changing story, Lerner pleading the fifth will give the story some nasty new optics for the Obama White House.

It is undisputed that the government is withholding the images not to shield wrongdoing or avoid embarrassment, but rather to prevent the killing of Americans and violence against American interests,” the opinion said.

Judicial Watch, a non-profit conservative watchdog group, had sued the government, seeking release of the bin Laden photos.

Inflaming Muslim opinion may be one reason to conceal the photos. There may be another. Recall how bin Laden’s carcass was treated after he was killed.

“Traditional procedures for Islamic burial was followed,” the May 2 email from Rear Adm. Charles Gaouette reads. “The deceased’s body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased’s body slid into the sea.”

Photos of US military personnel being forced to show any respect to the author of the mass murder of Americans might inflame the American street.

“I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months but I’m not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I’ve been patient and methodical about this matter,” Attkisson told POLITICO on Tuesday. “I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get their recommendations on info we make public.”

In an earlier interview with WPHT Philadelphia, Attkisson said that though she did not know the full details of the intrustion, “there could be some relationship between these things and what’s happened to James [Rosen],” the Fox News reporter who became the subject of a Justice Dept. investigation after reporting on CIA intelligence about North Korea in 2009.

Attkisson is being careful as she should be. But in 2011, she told radio host Laura Ingraham that a DOJ employee had screamed and swore at her over her Fast and Furious reporting.

I’m certainly not the one to make the case for DOJ and White House about what I’m doing wrong. They will tell you that I’m the only reporter–as they told me–that is not reasonable. They say the Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.

Given what the DOJ has done to the Associated Press and several Fox News employees, it’s by no means unthinkable that it could have targeted Attkisson, too. Fast and Furious was a DOJ scandal, after all.

Steven Miller says planted-question IRS IG revelation was his idea. ‘Obviously the entire thing was an incredibly bad idea.’

— Byron York (@ByronYork) May 21, 2013

Miller made the admission in a Senate hearing today. During the House IRS scandal hearing last week, Miller was evasive about the planted question.

QUESTION: Did you or any of your subordinates direct Ms. Lerner to make the public statement at the panel discussion acknowledging the targeting of tax-exempt groups?
MILLER: Um, it was a prepared Q&A.

Today Miller acknowledged that it was a Q&A that sprang from his mind, also allowing that it was an “incredibly bad idea.”

It has taken two rounds of hearings after the fake apology with the fake-fired commissioner just to get this one admission out of Miller. This scandal isn’t going away anytime soon, nor should it.

Nugget #1: Accountability and the so-called Accountability Review Board.

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.

The people who were found the be responsible and failed in their jobs, were not punished at all. One has been promoted. Because they were close to Clinton, or they are close to Cheryl Mills, who is close to Clinton.

Nugget #2: The Accountability Review Board was designed not to hold anyone who was responsible, accountable.

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.”

If failing to read one’s daily intel briefings is a sin deserving of administrative leave, Barack Obama should have been disciplined years ago. He routinely skipped his briefings, even in the days leading up to Benghazi itself. Obama sets the tone, dontcha know.

Drill down far enough into all this and it’s evident that a little political clique centered on Cheryl Mills probably ran Hillary Clinton’s State Department while Hillary was busy logging all those flight miles. They set up the ARB to shield themselves from their own lethal failures, and protected Clinton’s 2016 viability to the best of their ability. Ray Maxwell is just collateral damage.

A new poll finds that a majority of Americans believe the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal was an intentional effort to harass conservative political groups.

In a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday, 56 percent said the IRS use of higher scrutiny on Tea Party groups seeking tax exempt status was a deliberate move, with 31 percent calling it an “administrative mistake.”

Bystander pretender Obama feigns outrage over the abuse, but the IRS officials at the heart of the scandal have suffered no consequences. Sarah Hall Ingram oversaw the determinations office that abused taxpayers. She was handed over $100,000 in bonuses. Now she’s heading up the implementation of ObamaCare. Fake-fired acting commissioner Steven Miller lied to Congress, and was already on his way out when Obama made a show of asking for his resignation. Rather than real outrage and action, Obama is treating Americans to his version of Masterpiece Theatre. Just like his underlings. He sets the tone.

Lois Lerner planted the question that elicited the IRS apology that kicked off the scandal. That gambit was a little PR stunt that didn’t work. Since then, she has lied about why the abuse started in the first place. She claimed that the IRS was dealing with a “flood” of new applications, when the IG report revealed that applications were actually lower in calendar year 2010 than in 2009. But according to Lerner:

“But between 2010 and 2012, we started seeing a very big uptick in the number of 501(c)(4) applications we were receiving, and many of these organizations applying more than doubled, about 1500 in 2010 and over 3400 in 2012.”

The abuse started in 2010. And the abuse created more work for the determinations officers, not less, as they had to process thicker applications with far more questions, and often did follow-up queries and interrogations.

Lerner earned four Pinocchios for the big lie, but she still has her job.

You can’t get unionized workers to do more work without their union buying in. In the federal workforce and especially in union shops, increases in workload roll downhill, not uphill. The union boss, Colleen Kelley, met with the great bystander the day before the abuse started. What did they talk about? What led up to the meeting? Who else was involved?

The pretender bystander’s story keeps changing. It’s time to get some people to talk under oath.

The Department of Defense confirms to NBC 5 Investigates that accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan has now been paid more than $278,000 since the Nov. 5, 2009 shooting that left 13 dead 32 injured. The Army said under the Military Code of Justice, Hasan’s salary cannot be suspended unless he is proven guilty.

If Hasan had been a civilian defense department employee, NBC 5 Investigates has learned, the Army could have suspended his pay after just seven days.

Personnel rules for most civilian government workers allow for “indefinite suspensions” in cases “when the agency has reasonable cause to believe that the employee has committed a crime for which a sentence of imprisonment may be imposed.”

Meanwhile, more than three years later soldiers wounded in the mass shooting are fighting to receive the same pay and medical benefits given to those wounded in combat.

They were wounded in combat in a terrorist attack on US soil, and deserve that pay and those benefits. Barack Obama’s Pentagon is denying them those things by classifying Hasan’s terrorism as “workplace violence” akin to someone going postal. People who go postal, though, tend not to have motivational speakers behind them, who later get droned on the president’s orders.

Hasan’s total salary breaks out to about $69,000 per year. The median US salary is about $42,979.61 according to the Social Security Administration.

Obama didn’t know the IRS was targeting conservatives until he read it in the papers. He didn’t know about “Fast and Furious” until he read it in the papers, too. He has “complete confidence” in Holder, and didn’t know about the decision to collect the phone records of reporters.  He didn’t know about the investigation into CIA director David Petraeus’s affair.  He told Letterman during the election he didn’t know what the national debt was. He didn’t know about the AIG bonuses in the TARP legislation. He said he didn’t know how bad the economic crisis was when he took office.

That “empty chair” metaphor from the Republican convention was so out of line, huh?

He also didn’t know what the IRS, OSHA, ATF and FBI were doing to persecute Catherine Engelbrecht and still doesn’t know of anyone who should really and truly be fired, in an “actual real” way, for any of what’s going on anywhere in his own administration.

Funny thing, though. I seem to recall a time when news broke that Obama hadn’t met with his jobs council in a month of Sundays. When the papers finally reached the White House and the bystander had to explain the lack of meetings — at a time when the unemployment rate remained stubbornly high, as it is now — this was the reason the American people were given.

CARNEY: Blah blah blah wah wah word salad wah wah doublespeak blah blah The president has got a lot on his plate.

It is true, that every year around March the president is very busy checking and re-checking the vital signs of a minimum of 64 separate and distinct entities across this great land. He undertakes this painstaking work so that he can fill out his NCAA March Madness bracket. But other than that one time of year, just what is on this pretender’s plate?

On Thursday morning, after news that Miller was sacked, two ABC News journalists walked into the Peck Federal Building in Cincinnati looking for answers. The newsmen were screened at the door by security. They emptied their pockets as instructed, removed their belts, then went through the metal detectors.We wanted to ask who about made the decisions in the unit and when the profiling started. And whether those decision makers been identified yet.

But the answers – like the people involved – remained elusive.

As we traveled the public hallways of the building – watched over by security cameras – an armed uniformed police officer with the Federal Protective Service followed us. We were looking for a particular office—of someone who would not want to be seen talking to reporters–but chose to bypass it because of our official babysitter.

Asked why we were being escorted in a public building, the officer identified himself as Insp. Mike Finkelstein and said he was only trying to make sure that the newsmen were not a “nuisance.” He brushed aside further questions. The cop said a supervisor would call to explain.

One of the reporters wanted to know if the act of following the journalists was an effort intended to scare off any federal employee who might have considered speaking to the press. That’s sure what it looked like; and, even if that wasn’t the goal, it was the effect.

The supervisor never called to explain. After repeated calls to Washington to obtain an explanation, the Department of Homeland Security eventually called back to tell the ABC reporters that the security guard following them around was proper.

So, the reporters’ calls of inquiry about a Department of the Treasury office were eventually referred over to the Department of Homeland Security. For what?

Is this America anymore, or have we truly been fundamentally transformed into something else?

h/t Dan Riehl

KOTV reports a local elementary school took a direct hit, where children are reportedly trapped inside.

The NWS office in Norman described the tornado as large and violent.

The first images emerging from Moore show demolished homes, smashed cars, downed power lines and scattered debris.

An unidentified mother told KOTV she and her two children were taking cover in the bathtub when the tornado blew through their neighborhood.

“Our whole house is gone, everything but where we were is gone,” she said, through sobs.

Had she not been in the bathtub “it would have been completely different,” she said.

Interstate 35 in Moore is closed in both directions.

Reports are that two schools were destroyed. Students were reportedly in underground shelters as the tornado struck. The storm is far from over. A tornado-spawning wall cloud is reportedly moving east along I-40. The forecast calls for more violent weather later today and tomorrow.

When the subject turned to Benghazi, Tantaros asked Rumsfeld who could possibly have given the “stand down” order that prevented US Special Forces from going to Benghazi to relieve the Americans under seige at the hands of terrorists in the 10-hour attack.

“When you have people that are being attacked, and everyone knew that there were al Qaeda-related organizations threatening Western facilities in Benghazi, the standard procedure is to try to protect your people,” Rumsfeld said, adding that “If you can’t protect them, you pull them out.”

“When they were under attack, at that point the tradition in our country and in the military is to step forward and do what you can to try to save the lives,” Rumsfeld continued. “There were forces that could’ve done something, from everything I can tell. In Tripoli there was a unit, in Sigonella, Italy I believe there was a unit. And someone in that chain of command said ‘Don’t do it,’ and I can’t imagine it. It is the most unprofessional, unmilitary thing. Unless there’s a good reason that I don’t know.”

Rumsfeld served as President George W. Bush’s defense chief from 2001 to 2006. During that time, Democrats smeared him with the Abu Ghraib scandal, charging that both he and Bush were directly responsible for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners because it occurred on their watch. They have not applied similar logic to Benghazi or any other scandal currently swirling around the Obama White House.

Tantaros asked Rumsfeld who he believes should be held most responsible for Benghazi.

“Certainly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has the principal responsibility for ensuring the security of the people who work for the Department of State,” he answered. “The idea that she could go before a congressional committee and say, ‘What at this point does it matter?’ and chastise the members of the committee for asking questions, I think was inexcusable and I must say I was not very impressed by the response by the members of Congress.”

Later in the interview, Rumsfeld said that the flight time from several US bases near Libya is “relatively short.”

Tantaros also asked Rumsfeld if comparing the current Obama scandals to Watergate is apt.

“I think the comparison is useful one in this sense,” Rumsfeld said. “Leaders lead by persuasion. And to persuasive in our country, you’ve gotta be trustworthy. To the extent that what you say turns out to be inaccurate, incrementally you lose the trust of the American people. The idea that the government would turn against the American people with with Internal Revenue Service, with all of the power that they have, and all of the legal authorities, and all of the people and all of the money…is something that’s so fundamentally against how we function as a democracy.”

Rumsfeld added that lost trust weakened Nixon’s presidency, and he sees the same thing happening in the IRS, media and Benghazi scandals.

Rumsfeld also took issue with the Obama administration’s decision not to establish a status of forces agreement with Iraq, calling that decision “inexcusable.”

Listen to the entire interview here.

The Andrea Tantaros Show is produced for Talk Radio Network by the Fox and Rice Experience.

William LaJeunesse identified as other @foxnews reporter who was monitored.

— Brian Faughnan (@BrianFaughnan) May 20, 2013

Producer Mike Levine (sp?) 3rd Fox news person monitored.

— Brian Faughnan (@BrianFaughnan) May 20, 2013

In order to obtain the information that the DOJ sought, it had to accuse the media workers of engaging in criminal conspiracy. In the affidavit accusing Rosen, the FBI accuses him of using “flattery” and persuasion to obtain information from his source, and of using pseudonyms and a special communications method to meet and to pass on information.

Every reporter who has ever written an exclusive based on unnamed sources has done what Rosen is accused of doing. It is not criminal activity, it is reporting. In Rosen’s case, he was working on obtaining classified information. Again, though, many reporters who have worked on national security issues have tried to obtain classified information from sources. The government routinely classifies information that has no business being classified. The First Amendment protects reporters’ freedom to try to obtain whatever information they can in pursuit of stories. Accusing them of criminal activity is extremely rare.

Meanwhile, the DOJ that targeted the AP and Fox for leaking, also leaked documents to smear a Fast and Furious whistleblower.

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.

Under questioning, AG Eric Holder will probably claim that he knew nothing of any of this. He’s lying. After the AP story broke, he claimed that the leak in that story was one of the most serious he had ever seen. Will that be his excuse in this case, too?

After Catherine founded the two groups, she soon found herself publicly accused by Sen. Barbara Boxer and other prominent Democrats of “suppressing” Democratic voters, though her actual actions involved training citizens to monitor polls on election day. I’ve witnessed True the Vote’s training sessions myself. There is nothing suppressive about them at all.

The accusations, which even extended to publicly accusing Engelbrecht of engaging in a criminal conspiracy, were just the start.

Engelbrecht applied to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status for her groups in 2010. That’s when the trouble began.

• Her application was put through questioning similar to inquiries other groups have reported, including questions about her political aspirations, the groups’ Facebook posts, etc.
• She was subjected to four rounds of IRS questioning.
• Her family business was audited by the IRS, as were her family’s personal finances.
• Her business was subjected to Occupational Health and Safety Administration audits. OSHA found only minor problems, and subjected the Engelbrechts’ business to $25,000 in fines.
• Her business was subjected to an unannounced audit by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and explosives.
• The Federal Bureau of Investigations inquired about someone who had visited one of Engelbrecht’s meetings, and subsequently called up the Engelbrechts just to ask “how they were doing.”

All of this, over the course of about two years, and all of it came after Mrs. Engelbrecht became politically active. Engelbrecht gained national attention after Andrew Breitbart became aware of her groups and spoke at one of its meetings (I introduced Breitbart at that meeting). It’s no secret that the Obama administration viewed Breitbart as one of its chief enemies, along with Fox News and the Tea Party.

Considering the breadth and scope of the inquiries to which Engelbrecht has been subjected, she has had the entire executive branch of the United States government focused on her and targeting her.

Because she is a leading and effective public critic of Barack Obama. But perhaps just as important, because she works against voter fraud by promoting voter ID laws. The Obama administration has made no secret of its hatred for voter ID security laws.

Congress must hold hearings about Engelbrecht’s experience, subpoenaing every single government employee involved to get their testimony and evidence under oath. Who orchestrated these actions against her and her family?

Catherine Engelbrecht was subjected to harassment to the point of tyranny, and it must not stand.

CHS Executive Director Chris Salcedo did not mince words in his reaction to the news: “It seems the Obama political machine has infiltrated every aspect of our government.  Politics now dictates our response to terrorist attacks.  And now the IRS is being used as a weapon to punish people our president has referred to as his ‘enemies’.”

The “enemies” mention refers to a statement that President Obama gave in October 2010, as the IRS abuse was in full swing. Mr. Salcedo, a veteran journalist, has frequently written for this site.

CHS President Steve Navarre focused on how deeply un-American the IRS abuse is. “Through the Constitution, our nation’s founding fathers tried to guard against elected leaders using the power of government to oppress the people,” Navarre says in the press release. “The type of government overreach displayed by the IRS brings to life our founder’s deepest fears.”

The Conservative Hispanic Society is far from alone. On March 16, Fox Latino reported that several conservative groups in Texas say that along with Tea Party groups and Jewish and Christian groups, the Internal Revenue Service targeted them too. Texas Rep. Bill Flores (R) believes he was targeted after working with the Waco Tea Party, which was also targeted. Flores, a certified public accountant, was among the first in Congress to question the IRS’ actions. The San Antonio and Dallas Tea Party groups both report being targeted by the IRS. Katrina Pierson, head of the Dallas Tea Party, traveled to Washington last week as the IRS abuse blew up into a full scandal.  Voces Action, a Texas-based group that teaches Spanish-speaking and English-speaking communities about the Constitution, was targeted according to its founder and president, Adryana Boyne.

The breadth of IRS abuse across Texas is disturbing, given President Obama’s tense relationship with the Lone Star State and Democratic ambitions to turn it blue. Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas in a generation, and Republicans control both houses of the state legislature with strong majorities. Republican Gov. Rick Perry has battled with the administration over everything from offshore drilling to coal power plants to border security for years. State Attorney General Greg Abbott was party to the state lawsuit against ObamaCare and has battled the administration on Second Amendment rights. President Obama’s response to a call for enhancing security on the border was to joke about putting alligators and moats in place of the Rio Grande. Both John McCain and Mitt Romney defeated Obama handily in Texas’ 2008 and 2012 presidential votes.

IRS abuse of Hispanic groups across Texas may introduce racial and demographic angles into the scandal. Democrats have long pined for Texas’ growing Hispanic population to help them flip the staunchly Republican state to Democratic control. Conservative and Republican Hispanic groups have sprung up in the last few years to bring more Hispanic voters, who in Texas tend to be socially conservative, into the GOP fold. The IRS abuse of these groups has undoubtedly curbed their ability to fund raise and spread their messages, at the same time that the president’s Battleground Texas group ramps up its operation, unfettered by any IRS interference, to turn Texas blue.

“We’re not political,’’ said one determinations staffer in khakis as he left work late Tuesday afternoon. “We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

This rings true with anyone who has ever spent much time within or around a government bureaucracy. The fact is, the targeting regime created more work for agents, not less. Hardly anyone in a government bureaucracy ever comes up with ways to increase their work load. Someone decided to target the president’s critics for abuse. Someone wrote up the questions. Someone ordered the street-level agents to “be on the lookout” for these groups and subject them to extra scrutiny. Someone told street-level agents to drag these groups’ application processes out for months and years.

The IRS’ street-level agents are unionized. Ever try to load up more work on union members, especially when they’re already busy and you’re not offering them raises? You have to get their union to cooperate, or you will get nowhere. You don’t start at the bottom with the employees who will carry out the work. You have to start at the top, to get the directive put in place and get the work to roll downhill.

At the American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord may have found a smoking gun in the hand of a very high-level IRS union official.

According to the White House Visitors Log, provided here in searchable form by U.S. News and World Report, the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that Wednesday noon time of March 31st.

The White House lists the IRS union leader’s visit this way:

Kelley, Colleen Potus 03/31/2010 12:30

In White House language, “POTUS” stands for “President of the United States.”

The very next day after her White House meeting with the President, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Report, IRS employees — the same employees who belong to the NTEU — set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America. The IG report wrote it up this way:

April 1-2, 2010: The new Acting Manager, Technical Unit, suggested the need for a Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager Agreed.

Colleen Kelley heads the National Treasury Employees Union. The NTEU represents 150,000 agents in 31 different agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service. If she was not present and meeting with Obama on March 31 to launch the abuse regime that began the very next day, then why was she there? What communications between Kelley and Obama led up to that March 31, 2010 meeting?

This major revelation was not uncovered by the IG report, because the inspector general did not examine White House visitor logs or communications with the White House at all. Like the State Department’s Benghazi Accountability Review Board, its focus was too narrow by design to get at the real root of the scandal.

That tone that Bystander Barack Obama has set has manifested itself in his senior aide, Dan Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer appeared on Face the Nation today, and downplayed the significance of the IRS scandal.

“What would be an actual real scandal in Washington would be if the president had been involved or had interfered in an IRS investigation,” Pfeiffer  said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

An actual real scandal is the IRS abusing groups similar to those that had handed him a “shellacking” in the 2010 election. That’s what happened.

Pfeiffer’s dismissal of the systemic abuse was not a one-off. It’s the White House’s new message.

Pfeiffer said the White House is remaining focused and will not going to let Republicans “drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped up hearings and false allegations.”

The IRS abused Americans for years for their political and religious beliefs and that abuse impeded the president’s critics as he sought re-election. Bystander Obama doesn’t seem to think that it’s his problem.

Flashback: Jay Carney gaslit last week and claimed that the Obama scandals don’t exist. Obama sets the tone…

Russia has sent advanced antiship cruise missiles to Syria, a move that illustrates the depth of its support for the Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad, American officials said Thursday.

Russia has previously provided a version of the missiles, called Yakhonts, to Syria. But those delivered recently are outfitted with an advanced radar that makes them more effective, according to American officials who are familiar with classified intelligence reports and would only discuss the shipment on the basis of anonymity.

The Obama regime responded to the news with a forked tongue today. The Pentagon acknowledged that the new missile shipment is a huge problem. The State Department denied that Russia was sending in any new missile shipments at all. Bystander Obama will chuckle about it all when he reads about it in the paper. And if there’s a problem, by gum, Barack’ll fix it!

The new missiles would complicate any US-UN-NATO effort to arm the rebels, should we decide to make that mistake.

“It enables the regime to deter foreign forces looking to supply the opposition from the sea, or from undertaking a more active role if a no-fly zone or shipping embargo were to be declared at some point,” said Nick Brown, editor in chief of IHS Jane’s International Defense Review. “It’s a real ship killer.”

Jeffrey White, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior American intelligence official, said Syria’s strengthened arsenal would “tend to push Western or allied naval activity further off the coast” and was also “a signal of the Russian commitment to the Syrian government.”

Russia wants Assad to stay. Assad is a nasty butcher. But given the nature of his opposition, it’s hard to say that they’re wrong. Two things are certain. Our government is run by corrupt hacks who don’t look out for the nation’s interests. Russia’s government is corrupt but at least it’s professionally corrupt and does look out for Russian interests. Another Islamist state is not in Russia’s or America’s interests.

Congress has a responsibility to determine
not only who is responsible for this outrage, but also how it was allowed to continue despite repeated concerns and inquires raised by Congress. In addition, answers are needed as to why senior IRS officials did not correct the record after learning of the problem.

The House investigation enters a new phase now that the allegations of political bias, denied for two years, have been revealed to be true. On Wednesday, acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller submitted his resignation at the request of the White House and the Department of the Treasury.

Whether or not the Administration is sincere in its condemnation of these actions will quickly be revealed by its willingness to cooperate with Congress, turn over requested documents, and make officials available for interviews with congressional investigators. A failure to swiftly and fully comply with congressional requests will speak louder than any words of apology or condemnation could.

The memo is address to all House members, from Majority Leader Eric Cantor, House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, and House Government Oversight and Reform Chairman Darrell Issa.

Miller’s testimony earlier today was consistently uninformative. When asked for specific information and names of individuals involved in the abuse, Miller tended answer with variations of “I don’t know.”

Attorney General Eric Holder followed a similar pattern earlier in the week when he testified about the Department of Justice’s sweep of Associated Press phone records.

When he was asked about his knowledge of the IRS scandal at the White House Thursday, President Barack Obama likewise refused to answer directly, and instead offered a lawyerly reply that did not answer the question at all.

Today’s memo suggests that going forward, the House will expect the White House to stop claiming that it finds the IRS’ actions outrageous, and just comply with any investigations demanding information, witnesses and answers.

The memo also offers a comprehensive timeline of the major events in the IRS abuse scandal.

There’s only one proper response to Kelly’s performance.

Having spent most of my legal career working with tax exempt entities, the IRS scrutiny on the Tea Party isn’t news to me. In my days at large law firms, I handled a portfolio of nonprofit Tea Party organizations and saw firsthand how the IRS treated them when it came to granting exemptions.

In many cases, the organizations fight tooth-and-nail to get through IRS scrutiny, often facing pages of questions from the IRS on their activities.

In some instances, the IRS went about it in a more roundabout way, calling into question the organization’s use of funds, its outside grants and operational issues.

Several of the applications were even sent up to the IRS’ National Office for elevated scrutiny.

The experiences mirror the allegations of the American Center for Law and Justice, who represented 27 organizations.

On the flip side, I’ve worked with numerous Muslim organizations as well. And every single application of a Muslim nonprofit has gone through the IRS, with less scrutiny. Of course, they still did get scrutiny– after all, Islamophobia is still pretty rampant everywhere and it’s inaccurate to say that they got a free pass. But truth be told, they never got a 10-page questionnaire on each and every one of their grantees.

What does this say about the way that the IRS is handling applications from Muslim nonprofits? For one, in the application phase, Muslim nonprofits seem to have an upper hand over Tea Party groups.

I’m sure no one in the IRS asked those Muslim groups to divulge the content of their members’ prayers.

Outgoing fake-fired commissioner Steven Miller could not address that specific case or question, but allowed that he would be “surprised” if that question was asked.

There was no “if.” The IRS asked it, in writing. Steven Miller’s agency appears to have become a secularist Inquisition.

[IRS official] Lerner disclosed the information last Friday while speaking at a tax conference organized by the American Bar Association. Asked about the incident, she said only that she answered honestly a question that was posed to her. The question, however, was posed to Lerner by Celia Roady, a Washington, D.C. tax lawyer who sits on the Advisory Committee on Tax Exempt and Government Entities.

Miller indicated today that Roady was in fact instructed by the IRS to ask the question, and the Lerner knew about the question in advance.

“Who told her to ask the question?” asked Republican representative Kenny Marchant.

“I don’t know, actually, I’m not sure, might have been Lois Lerner,” Miller responded. He went on to say that the IRS intended simultaneously to inform Congress, but admitted the agency only inquired about the congressional calendar.

Prior to the hearings, Lisa Myers reported that the IRS deliberately delayed acknowledging the abuse until after the 2012 election.

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said Myers, “and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when — after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we — if you can — what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

The outlines of this scandal are now, that the IRS intentionally, maliciously and systematically abused groups opposed to President Obama’s re-election and agenda. The agency delayed acknowledging that until after the election was over, and only acknowledged it after the fact, once Obama was safely in office for another four years and when its officials believed they could low-ball the news.

When he was asked point blank whether he or anyone else in the White House knew about the abuse, President Obama gave a distracting, non-responsive answer.

CBS’ Sharyl Attkisson has produced a comprehensive behind-the-scenes report based on her interviews with many officials who were involved in the lack of response to the Benghazi attack. About two-thirds of the way in, Attkisson addresses the role played, or not, by the Counterterrorism Security Group.

Under presidential directive, an interagency task force called the Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) is to be convened when emergency terrorist events are suspected. According to a public military document, it’s part of a plan to “synchronize the efforts of all the government agencies that have a role to play in the Global War on Terrorism.” But on Sept. 11, 2012, the Obama administration did not convene this body of terrorism expert advisers.

One official associated with the State Department now acknowledges that the CSG would probably have advised decision makers that FEST “was not just backup generator and radios.” Said the official: “the CSG could have made the argument, they were upset that they weren’t heard.” Another former Defense Department official says he finds no merit to using the CSG. “I’d like to hear them say what they could have done.”

Last October, National Security Council (NSC) Spokesman Tommy Vietor told CBS News that the CSG wasn’t needed because consultations were quickly underway at the highest levels. He indicated that, under the Obama administration, the function of the CSG has become a “lower level group” that “does different tasks” than under the Bush administration. “From the moment [President Obama] was briefed on the Benghazi attack, the response effort was handled by the most senior national security officials in governments. Members of the CSG were of course involved in these meetings and discussions to support their bosses,” said Vietor.

However, absent the CSG’s collective advice, there’s evidence that some high-level decision makers were unaware of all available resources. In October, on a phone call that included then-Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough (now White House Chief of Staff), Vietor initially told CBS News: “I don’t know what [FEST] is… it sounds antiquated.”

Barack Obama and many of his supporters believed that his election to the presidency would essentially end the war on terrorism. That belief rears its head here. What other tasks besides counterterrorism and security should the Counterterrorism Security Group be doing? Why was it pushed down the food chain? What are its current tasks? If they’re not counterterrorism and security, why does it still exist?

Tommy Vietor keeps turning up conspicuously in the Benghazi scandal, in part because the president sets the tone. Obama’s loyalist bus driver was heavily involved in the talking points discussion, playing the pivotal role of looping the State Department into what started as a vetting of intelligence-based talking points and quickly became a political discussion. The eventual outcome of that was a product that was useless on the facts, misleading to the public, but helpful to Obama and his tone on terrorism.

As Attkisson reports, Vietor acknowledges that under Obama the presidential Counterterrorism Security Group has been effectively demoted. This president has consistently downplayed the threat of terrorism, and his administration in fact doesn’t even acknowledge that the Ft. Hood massacre was an act of terrorism. To them, it was “workplace violence.” The Department of Homeland Security infamously tried describing terrorism as “man-caused disasters.”

Here is one consequence of a president going out of his way not to know what’s going on or why:

Vietor initially told CBS News: “I don’t know what [FEST] is… it sounds antiquated.”

Tommy Vietor was Obama’s National Security Council spokesman. His ignorance of the Foreign Emergency Support Team’s existence and capabilities is shocking. It’s his job to know. Obama put him in that position, based not on his national security credentials but on his loyalty to Obama. Vietor wasn’t doing his job and wasn’t even shy about expressing his ignorance. He had some reason to believe there would be no consequences for not knowing basic details directly relevant to his ability to do his job.

The president sets the tone, and raised his loyalist driver to become his NSC spokesman. His administration also just raised Jen Psaki to become a State Department spokesman, despite the fact that she has no foreign policy experience at all. What she is, though, is a loyal partisan who is not shy about attacking Americans who disagree with Obama.

What the IRS actually did was formulate a “be on the lookout” or BOLO list by which it targeted Tea Party, conservative and pro-life groups systematically for years. It kicked patriots in the face, for years, when they decided to become engaged in the political process.

Again under questioning, Miller admitted that this “horrible customer service” did not stop him from promoting Sarah Hall Ingram from the tax-exempt office that abused these groups, to head the implementation of ObamaCare.

If the office Ingram headed provided such “horrible customer service,” then why did Miller promote her?

“Because she is an exemplary civil servant,” Miller replied, evidently creating a new definition of the word “exemplary.”

Miller also offered up another memorable line when questioned about his previous testimony, in which he failed to acknowledge that the targeting had taken place. “It was incorrect but not untruthful,” Miller said.

PIERS MORGAN: Final question, Jay Carney. Obviously the president made a big deal when he came into office of being not like previous administrations and was going to be much more transparent. The charge today after this week is that you have had that reputation for transparency pretty heavily dented. Do you accept that and just on a general picture, how are you going to move on now and restore perhaps faith that some Americans have lost this week in your openness and honesty?

JAY CARNEY: Well, I’m not sure, again, you’re concocting scandals here that don’t exist, especially with regard to the Benghazi affair that was contrived by Republicans and I think has fallen apart largely this week. The fact of the matter is that this administration has a record on transparency that outdoes any previous administration, and we are committed to that. The president is committed to that.

“You’re concocting scandals here that don’t exist…” Plural. Carney just denied that any of the massive scandals ripping around this presidency — the AP phone records sweep, the IRS systematically abusing Americans and even a congressman because of their political beliefs, Benghazi — are real. He also insisted that something is true that clearly is not, and hardly anyone believes — that the Obama administration is transparent. Obama appointed more unaccountable czars than any other previous president, and has operated an opaque and very political administration built in part on a philosophy of “punishing your enemies.”

Carney’s statement isn’t denial and it isn’t accidental. It’s gaslighting.

In the book Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation and Other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Analysis, the late forensic psychiatrist Theodore Dorpat defines gaslighting as a situation in which one individual “attempts to exert control over the feelings, thoughts or activities of another.” According to Dorpat, the gaslighting behavior itself is covert — neither “directly hostile” nor “intimidating.”

“In order to be effective, gaslighting depends on first convincing the victim that his thinking is distorted and secondly persuading him that the victimizer’s ideas are the correct and true ones,” writes Dorpat.

Carney will continue to insist, even as the facts pile up against him, that there is no scandal here and that you’re crazy to think that there is. The facts in the AP scandal suggest that DOJ went on a fishing expedition to retaliate after the news agency ran a story outside of the administration’s preferred timing. The facts of the IRS scandal suggest that it went very high up in and probably beyond that agency’s leadership, and constituted naked political abuse aimed to intimidate Americans and disengage them from the 2012 election. The facts on Benghazi suggest that the administration abandoned Americans under assault so that it could preserve its campaign narrative that al Qaeda had been more or less defeated. The movie was pushed as the reason for the attack to reach that same end.

No one has been held accountable in any of these scandals yet. The State Department’s firings connected to Benghazi turned out to be phony. The IRS resignation turned out to be a sham. Nothing has happened to anyone in connection with the AP sweep yet.

Carney, Obama et al will try to convince America that we’re all crazy to be concerned about and demand justice in these scandals. We’re being gaslit by an abusive and manipulative administration.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part of that time, Grant served as deputy commissioner of the tax-exempt unit.

Ingram turns out not to be another lifelong Obama loyalist or even partisan Democrat campaigner, which is welcome news. She has been around the IRS for decades, according to an official agency bio of her. That’s less welcome news. Someone around the agency for that long had to have known how deeply wrong it was to abuse citizens as the IRS did.

Since July 2004, Ingram has been serving as Deputy Commissioner of the Tax Exempt/Government Entities Division (TE/GE). Ingram began her career with the IRS in the former Tax Litigation Division in 1982. She became Employee Plans Litigation Counsel in 1987, providing litigation coordination nationwide for employee benefit cases. In 1992, Ingram became Deputy Associate Chief Counsel, Employee Benefits and Exempt Organizations (EBEO), where she served until her 1994 appointment as Associate Chief Counsel, EBEO. As part of the IRS Modernization program, Ingram was appointed in 1999 to the new position of Division Counsel/Associate Chief Counsel, TE/GE, where she was responsible for providing legal services to the TE/GE Division and its customers as well as other parts of the IRS.

So she isn’t a Tommy Vietor. Nevertheless, her office abused patriots who became engaged in the political process because they love their country. She was handed massive bonuses to the tune of over $100,000 during the abuse years. And is now on track to head IRS’ ObamaCare enforcement.

This won’t do. She needs to be testifying and may need to lawyer up. It’s not possible that a couple of rogue employees ran such a widespread and granular program of abuse. It had to have buy-in from echelons within and above the Cincinnati office, and we know that it did. IRS officials in Washington participated in it.

IRS should never have been involved in our health care. Ever. Of all the horrible ideas Democrats have come up with, putting the IRS essentially between citizen and doctor may be the absolute worst. The House repealed ObamaCare Thursday, again. If Republicans can take the Senate next year and hold it long enough to see a replacement for Obama elected, it can still be repealed in full and it should be.

An internal IRS memo says Joseph Grant, commissioner of the agency’s tax exempt and government entities division, will retire June 3. Grant joins Steven Miller, who was forced to resign as acting IRS commissioner on Wednesday.

As part of his duties, Grant oversaw the IRS division that targeted tea party groups for additional scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.

Grant joined the IRS in 2005.

Congressional investigators should keep his name handy.

Yahoo is digitizing all of them and creating an interactive that works like an email inbox. You can click through and see which email was sent when, and by whom. Check it out.

Only about 25% of the emails have been digitized and included so far. But just looking at the inbox at this point, two things are apparent. Tommy Vietor, the loyalist bus driver who became Obama’s national security spokesman, is the one who looped the State Department into the talking points discussion. That’s in the 9/14/2012 email sent at 6:21 PM. It’s after that that State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has a conversation with her “building’s leadership” and comes back with substantive edits to the CIA’s talking points.

h/t Drew M.

Yeah, about that. It appears not to be true.

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.

Get that? The administration wanted to own the story, and wanted AP to hold off publishing until Obama et al could announce it themselves.

The CIA, which would later allow the State Department to edit the Benghazi talking points, continued arguing with the AP to delay releasing the story even after all the security concerns about it went away.

The news service was prepared to publish its scoop on May 2, 2012. But in discussions with government officials, the CIA stressed to AP that publishing anything about the operation to obtain the bomb and thwart the plot would create grave national security dangers and compromise a “sensitive intelligence operation.”

Michael J. Morell, the CIA’s deputy director, gave AP reporters some additional background information to persuade them to hold off, Vietor said. The agency needed several days more to protect what it had in the works.

Then, in a meeting on Monday, May 7, CIA officials reported that the national security concerns were “no longer an issue,” according to the individuals familiar with the discussion.

When the journalists rejected a plea to hold off longer, the CIA then offered a compromise. Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?

It’s after the AP decides to run with the story, that the DOJ goes after its phone records in a sweep so vast that it even included the AP’s phone at the US House of Representatives. Given who the AP may have been talking to on that phone, we may have a violation of the separation of powers.

Obama bus driver Tommy Vietor helpfully wraps the story up for his boss.

“We shouldn’t pretend that this leak of an unbelievably sensitive dangerous piece of information is okay because nobody died,” he said.

We shouldn’t pretend that lifelong Obama loyalists are qualified to be national security spokesmen, either.

h/t Allahpundit

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said Thursday that it appeared the standard procedures for subpoenaing records from a media organization were not followed in the Justice Department’s seizure of phone records from The Associated Press.

“There is a process when you are subpoenaing documents from a media organization that apparently were not followed in this case and we need to find out why,” Goodlatte told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Now, even liberal talker Bill Press is calling for Obama to fire Attorney General Eric Holder.

“I have no confidence in Eric Holder anymore, and you shouldn’t either,” Press wrote. “This AP story from the Justice Dept is too far-reaching. Seizing these phone records is a violation of freedom of the press. FIRE Holder.”

On Thursday, Press renewed his call for Holder’s dismissal, writing, “I still haven’t heard a legit justification for the subpoenaing the AP phone records. They didn’t notify AP, they didn’t narrow search.”

“What ‘breach of national security’ are we talking about re the AP story? It’s BS and Holder should be fired,” Press tweeted.

On Fox just now, Democrat talker Julie Roginsky said that Obama’s claim that he only learned about the IRS abuse last Friday, in the press, means one of two things: Either he’s uniformed because his staff aren’t doing their jobs, or he knows more than he is saying and is not being “entirely forthcoming.” It clearly pained Roginsky to speak both of those possibilities.

It’s such a distinct pattern we have here: Obama doesn’t know anything. Holder doesn’t know anything. Hillary Clinton doesn’t know anything. About anything.

The truth, obviously, is that they all knew. They’re just lying about it now.

More: WaPo: Eric Holder May Have Lied About that Whole ‘It Put Americans at Risk’ Thing

By now, everyone who has paid any attention knows that budget cuts had nothing to do with the terrorist attack in Benghazi. The State Department’s Charlene Lamb testified to that fact, after Democrats raised the question months ago.

But take a look at how the AP reports President Obama’s remarks today regarding Benghazi and embassy security.

Headline: OBAMA: CONGRESS MUST ‘FULLY FUND’ EMBASSY SECURITY

Below that, a story that quotes the president notes how much money the State Department wants to upgrade security, and this:

Since the attack, Democrats have complained that Republicans cut $300 million from the Obama administration’s budget request of $2.6 billion for diplomatic and embassy security in 2012.

Nothing — at all — about the fact that a senior State Department official, Deputy Assistant Secretary Charlene Lamb, testified that budget cuts and finances had nothing to do with the attacks, or the denials to upgrade security in the months leading up to it.

The AP may need to spend some time in a battered media shelter, to get away from the man it still obviously loves.