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Archives for May 2015

05/21/2015

Cause of Action Obtains New Documents Showing That The National Archives Feared That Hillary Clinton Might Try To Keep Her Emails Secret

Emails reveal that senior officials at NARA expressed concern privately that Mrs. Clinton would attempt to conceal her records

WASHINGTON – In December 2012, NARA Chief Records Officer Paul Wester notified several other National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) employees that NARA COO Tom Mills and NARA’s Director of the Federal Records Center Jay Trainer were concerned that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would take her records with her to the Clinton Library upon her departure from the State Department.

The information is contained in new documents that Cause of Action, a nonpartisan government transparency organization, has obtained via a series of public records requests to both NARA and the State Department.

Click here and here to view the documents

In one email, Wester stated, “Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans afoot for taking her [Mrs. Clinton’s] records from State to Little Rock.”

Wester said NARA needed “to make sure everyone leaving the Administration does not leave with Federal records,” adding that NARA was “aware of the issue and are working on it.”

Wester said Mills and Trainer “continued to invoke the specter of the Henry Kissinger experience vis-à-vis Hillary Clinton.” This is a reference to the long and litigious battle over former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s records.

In February 2015, days before the news broke that Mrs. Clinton used a personal email address during her time as Secretary of State, NARA received an inquiry from a staffer on the Congressional Benghazi committee seeking information about the State Department’s records management system. In a prepared a response that was to be sent to staffer, Wester wrote, “the State Department records management program and staff are considered very strong. NARA has awarded the State Department two Archivist Achievement Awards in Records Management in the past decade.”

Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein issued the following statement:

“These records reveal that before Hillary Clinton exited the State Department, there were serious concerns about her violating federal records laws. Yet, despite knowledge by the State Department and the Archives, nothing was done about it. What’s clear is that without pressure from transparency organizations like mine, the public would never get the full story of what happened behind the scenes regarding Mrs. Clinton’s emails.”

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05/21/2015

Politico: Archives officials worried about protecting Hillary emails

Read the full story: Politico

Transparency advocates said they were troubled that despite the warnings, no action appears to have been taken to recover Clinton’s cache of emails until last October.

“These records reveal that before Hillary Clinton exited the State Department, there were serious concerns about her violating federal records laws. Yet, despite knowledge by the State Department and the Archives, nothing was done about it,” said Dan Epstein of Cause of Action, which also demanded and received the Clinton-related messages the Archives released this week under FOIA. “What’s clear is that without pressure from transparency organizations like mine, the public would never get the full story of what happened behind the scenes regarding Mrs. Clinton’s emails.”

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05/19/2015

National Review: Conservative Group Uncovers New Roots of the IRS Scandal

Read the full story: National Review

A group of lawyers who have been investigating the origins of the IRS scandal for the past year-and-a-half say they’ve uncovered the real roots of the IRS scandal — and they’ll surprise both liberals and conservatives alike.

 

The group, Cause of Action, which has subpoenaed thousands of pages of documents from the agency and is still embroiled in litigation with it, says the targeting of conservative groups resulted as much from IRS personnel merely following the instructions laid out in their employee handbook, the Internal Revenue Manual, as from any political bias at the top.

 

When the scandal broke nearly two years ago, the IRS and the Obama administration pointed the finger at a few bad apples in the agency’s Cincinnati office. The agency’s inspector general blamed the inappropriate targeting of tea-party groups on the “ineffective management” of top bureaucrats. Many reporters, particularly on the right, including here at National Review, concluded that top D.C. official Lois Lerner and her colleagues in the IRS’s Exempt Organizations office had orchestrated events from the outset.

 

Dan Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, is a former attorney and investigator for the House Oversight Committee. He and his team, a group of 13 attorneys funded by the Koch brothers’ sprawling network of donors, say none of these stories fully explain what happened at the IRS between 2010 and 2014 and that, in fact, the targeting was baked in the cake. That is, the Internal Revenue Manual, the handbook by which IRS employees are required to abide, mandates the sort of scrutiny that delayed the processing of the applications of hundreds of conservative nonprofit organizations. Cause of Action has laid out its case in a confidential, 35-page memo obtained by National Review. They concluded that many of the IRS officials involved in the scandal were just following the rules.

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05/19/2015

Cause of Action Testifies Before Congress On Questionable White House Detail Program

WASHINGTON – Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein testified before Congress today about CoA’s recent investigation into whether the White House may have illegally accessed confidential taxpayer information.

During a hearing held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law, Epstein discussed Cause of Action’s finding that attorneys in the Justice Department’s Tax Division are being detailed to the White House to review the background files of potential presidential nominees.

As Epstein stated, the program raises ethical and legal questions because of these attorneys’ access to confidential taxpayer returns and return information.

“Cause of Action is concerned that this program may be a manner by which the President can be armed with information that may benefit him politically,” Epstein said.

Through a handful of Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests, Cause of Action found that the detailing of Tax Division attorneys to the White House has been unique to the current Administration. Since 2009, these attorneys, many involved in controversial matters involving confidential tax records, have served the President as “clearance counsel” – that is, vetting the President’s nominees by examining their tax records.

During its examination of these White House details, CoA found no evidence of policies, procedures, rules and/or guidelines that exist to ensure that detailed attorneys are appropriately screened to prevent confidential taxpayer returns and/or return information from being unlawfully accessed or disclosed. This means Americans’ most private information may be inappropriately disclosed to the White House.

Epstein noted two DOJ Tax Division attorneys in particular, Andrew Strelka and Norah Bringer. Prior to being assigned to White House detail, both served as trial attorneys involved in litigation concerning the IRS’s targeting of political groups.

It is known that Ms. Bringer accessed confidential taxpayer return information, and it is reasonable to assume that Mr. Strelka did the same.

“The American people deserve answers as to whether their most private information may have been shared with the White House for political gain,” Epstein told the committee.

In light of this concern, Cause of Action requested on April 15, 2015 that the DOJ Inspector General investigate the Tax Division’s practice of detailing attorneys to the White House. To date, the Inspector General has not responded to our request.

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05/14/2015

Weekly Rundown 5-14-2015

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Cato Institute: A Spurned Vendor — And a Tip To the FTC – Cause of Action continues to fight for accountability and transparency in legal battle… Read More

Nonprofit Quarterly: IRS Scandal Still Simmers after Two Years — “…Republican congressional sources criticize the IRS and the Obama administration for obstructing the various investigations and being slow to produce evidence, including Lerner emails found by Treasury investigators a year after the IRS claimed they were unrecoverable. Democratic congressional sources and President Obama claim that there is no scandal, no evidence of political motivation for the IRS actions. They see the various investigations as partisan witch-hunts. Meanwhile, independent advocacy groups like Judicial Watch and Cause of Action file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and uncover Lerner e-mails and related documents from the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department that were not produced by the IRS…”Read More

Gov Info Security: FTC’s LabMD Case: The Next Steps — “…The FTC has confirmed that it found no reason to challenge the testimony given last week,” says attorney Reed Rubinstein of Cause of Action, a non-profit organization representing LabMD in the FTC legal dispute. “The only evidence in the record now is that LabMD was telling the truth from the beginning that they were hacked by a cyberthief, and that the FTC did nothing to verify the information it was given by Tiversa…” Read More

We Live Security: Whistleblower claims cybersecurity firm hacked clients – Ex-employee alleges company does not play by the rules… Read More

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05/13/2015

Cato Institute: A Spurned Vendor — And a Tip To the FTC

Read the full story: Cato Institute 

In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission approached an Atlanta-based medical testing company, LabMD, with accusations that it had wrongfully left its customer data insecure and vulnerable to hackers. LabMD’s owner denied that the company was at fault and a giant legal battle ensued. To quote my post last year at Overlawyered:

 

…according to owner Michael Daugherty, allegations of data insecurity at LabMD emanated from a private firm that held a Homeland Security contract to roam the web sniffing out data privacy gaps at businesses, even as it simultaneously offered those same businesses high-priced services to plug the complained-of gaps.

 

Last week, finally, after five years, the case reached an administrative hearing at the FTC, which heard “bombshell” testimony given under immunity by former Tiversa employee Richard Wallace:

 

After LabMD CEO Michael Daugherty refused to buy Tiversa’s services, Tiversa reported false information to the FTC about an alleged security incident involving LabMD’s data, Wallace claimed in his testimony.

 

CNN headlined its story “Whistleblower accuses cybersecurity company of extorting clients” – that is, by threatening to turn them in to the feds if they spurned its vendor services.

 

To be sure, allegations are merely allegations, and we haven’t heard Tiversa’s side of the story, except for a statement from its CEO Bob Boback: “This is an overblown case of a terminated employee seeking revenge. Tiversa has received multiple awards from law enforcement for our continued efforts to help support them in cyber activities.” The advisory board of the Pittsburgh-based security services company includes former four-star Army general and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark.

 

Two years ago, Daugherty wrote up his experience in a book, The Devil Inside the Beltway. Tiversa tried to stop its publication, saying it had been defamed. While the book got write-ups in various places – by our friend Edward Hudgins at the Atlas Society, for example – and while the story has drawn the interest of a House oversight committee and the group Cause of Action, the threatened litigation probably did chill some media coverage.

 

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05/13/2015

Gov Info Security: FTC’s LabMD Case: The Next Steps

Read the full story: Gov Info Security 

The Federal Trade Commission has confirmed that it will not call a witness to refute damaging testimony given last week by a former employee of Tiversa, the peer-to-peer security firm at the center of the FTC’s security enforcement case against medical testing company LabMD. That means the case potentially could proceed to closing arguments in the coming weeks.

 

The case is being closely watched by Congress and others because it has raised questions about the FTC’s jurisdiction on security cases as well as its methods for gathering evidence for these cases.

 

Last week, after months of delay in the FTC administrative hearing on the LabMD data security investigation, former Tiversa employee Richard Wallace testified with immunity that the Pittsburgh-based security firm exaggerated the extent to which a LabMD insurance-related spreadsheet file containing information on 9,000 individuals was exposed and “spread” on the Internet in 2008.

 

After LabMD CEO Michael Daugherty refused to buy Tiversa’s services, Tiversa reported false information to the FTC about an alleged security incident involving LabMD’s data, Wallace claimed in his testimony. Wallace additionally testified that it was a “common practice” by Tiversa to approach prospective clients with exaggerated information about their allegedly unsecured files that Tiversa found “speading” on the Internet in an attempt to sell the company’s security monitoring and remedial services.

 

“The FTC has confirmed that it found no reason to challenge the testimony given last week,” says attorney Reed Rubinstein of Cause of Action, a non-profit organization representing LabMD in the FTC legal dispute. “The only evidence in the record now is that LabMD was telling the truth from the beginning that they were hacked by a cyberthief, and that the FTC did nothing to verify the information it was given by Tiversa.”

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