(Newsmax.com) The New York Times has blasted the Obama White House’s move to label a Fox News reporter a possible “co-conspirator” in a criminal investigation of a news leak about North Korea’s nuclear missile program.
The administration has “moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news,” the newspaper said in an editorial on Wednesday.
The incident involves James Rosen, chief Washington correspondent for Fox News.
After Rosen reported in 2009 that Pyongyang planned to launch a missile in response to United Nations condemnation of its nuclear tests, the Justice Department investigated the article’s source and indicted Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State Department security adviser, on charges of leaking classified information.
That was not the end of the investigation, however. Federal prosecutors also asked a federal judge for permission to troll through Rosen’s personal e-mails, arguing that “there is probable cause to believe” he is “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in the leak,” according to the Times.
(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) accused outgoing IRS chief Steven Miller of lying by not mentioning that he knew his agency had been “improperly” targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny when Miller responded to letters from members of Congress looking into the matter.
“Now Mr. Miller, that’s a lie by omission. There’s no question about that in my mind. It’s a lie by omission, and you kept it from people who have the obligation to oversee this matter,” Hatch said.
Hatch and his colleagues wrote to then IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman on March 14, 2012 and June 18, 2012, asking about the IRS’s “selective enforcement” of conservative groups and request for donor information. Shulman served as IRS chief from 2008-2012, during the Bush and Obama administrations.
(FoxNews-AP) WASHINGTON – A top White House adviser staked out a defiant defense Sunday on a series of scandals that have hit the Obama administration, going so far as to say it was an “irrelevant fact” where the president was the night of the Benghazi terror attacks and saying the Obama administration wouldn’t cooperate in “partisan fishing expeditions” over IRS officials targeting Tea Party groups.
Dan Pfeiffer went on five Sunday talk shows where he tried to reverse the damage done to the Obama administration this week by a series of scandals. On “Fox News Sunday” he tried to hammer home that the president only heard that the IRS unfairly targeted Tea Party groups “when it came out in the news.”
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who also appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” suggested there was a written policy to target political groups opposing the president but when pressed for proof by Wallace, he was unable to provide details.
(TheBlaze.com) TheBlaze’s S.E. Cupp battled liberal filmmaker Michael Moore on the gun issue Friday, arguing against gun restrictions and schooling him on basic statistics on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Cupp, contending with boos from the “Real Time” audience, said the problem with a gun registry is that “it treats law-abiding citizens as if they are guilty until proven innocent.”
She went on, “The problem with background checks, five-day waiting periods, they assume that I have criminal intent to use my gun to pursue my Second Amendment rights…I go to get a background check, ‘Prove to me you’re not a criminal.’ I go to get a gun, ‘Prove to me you don’t want to use it in the heat of passion right now, wait five days, you need to cool off.’ That’s not fair — the government is not in the business of intimidating me away from my Second Amendment rights. It’s an abuse of power, and it seeps into the culture — it’s why newspapers think they can publish gun owners’ addresses, as if they are pariahs. It’s not appropriate.”
(FoxNews.com) For the first time in years, the IRS was knocked down a peg or two.
In a hearing that escalated into a boisterous public shaming of one of the country’s most-feared government agencies, lawmakers took turns Friday calling outgoing IRS Commissioner Steven Miller on the carpet for his department’s scandalous practice of targeting conservative groups.
Miller rebuffed attempts to extract the names of those responsible, saying he did not know. But lawmakers vowed that the tense hearing would mark only the start of a series of investigations, in which criminal activity could be probed.
