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05/28/2015

Moultrie News: Mira retrieves eight cases of underwater wine, extending commitment to innovation

Read the full story: Moultrie News

Mira Winery, a producer of critically acclaimed wines exclusively from Napa Valley, announced today that it had retrieved seven cases of the winery’s Rutherford Cabernet and one case of Chardonnay, a fraction of the winery’s total production, as it extends its commitment to innovation. As part of that effort, Mira will join forces with Cause of Action, a national, nonpartisan government accountability organization, to fight back against government overreach that threatens to stifle Mira’s Aquaoir experiment… Mira has partnered with Cause of Action. The legal non-profit group will provide counsel as Mira tries to understand the government’s intentions and resolve the issue. Mira has filed additional requests based on the Freedom of Information Act. The findings of these requests will inform next steps.

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05/27/2015

Nonpartisan Transparency Coalition Asks Federal Trade Commission For Information About Email Use

Cause of Action, along with MuckRock News and National Security Counselors, have submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Federal Trade Commission seeking to determine whether agency employees may be attempting to shield government records.

The FOIA specifically seeks “access to all records referring or relating to, but not maintained or hosted on, the domain name ftcexchange.com.”

The existence of this domain was recently confirmed via emails obtained by MuckRock showing that FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez lobbied former Sen. Jay Rockefeller to delay important FOIA reform legislation late last year. MuckRock requested those emails based on a tip from Cause of Action.

The emails show not only how the FTC lobbied aggressively against transparency reform, but also that Jeanne Bumpus, the FTC’s congressional liaison, used a non-government email account, ftcexchange.com, to lobby the FTC.

“While this revelation may come as a shock to some, opacity at the FTC is nothing new to us,” said Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein.

On a related note, Cause of Action is currently defending LabMD, a cancer detection facility that is being targeted by the FTC. Throughout our efforts, the FTC has failed to fully cooperate with our requests to view agency communications regarding the case.

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05/27/2015

Cause of Action Sues the Justice Department For Information On Tax Detail Program

Cause of Action, a nonprofit government accountability organization, recently discovered that the Department of Justice has been placing their Tax Division attorneys, some of whom have worked directly on the IRS targeting scandal, in the White House to provide legal advice to the President.

Having found no evidence of agency policies in place to safeguard against confidential tax information being shared with the wrong people, this practice of DOJ attorneys being detailed at the White House is alarmingly urgent.

In April, Cause of Action submitted several Freedom of Information Act requests and sent a letter to the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. These documents sought answers to whether appropriate legal and ethical safeguards are in place at both the Office of White House Counsel, as well as the DOJ, to ensure that detailed attorneys are appropriately screened to prevent confidential taxpayer returns and/or return information protected under Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code from being unlawfully accessed or disclosed.

Having received no response from the government since our April requests, Cause of Action on Tuesday filed a complaint in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service.

As the complaint states, CoA is seeking the release of records relating to how the federal government protects Americans’ private tax information when government attorneys have the power to access and disclose that information. These records have been requested and improperly withheld by the Internal Revenue Service and United States Department of Justice.

“Given the IRS’ track record of failing to protect confidential tax information, this lack of agency oversight is a threat to our privacy and democracy,” said Cause of Action President Dan Epstein. “Ethical and legal protocols at these agencies should be held to the highest standards, especially when government attorneys are accessing confidential taxpayer return information while intermittently leaving to work in the White House.”

The case number is 15-cv-00770.

[Read the Complaint below]

 

ECF No. 1 5.26.2015 Complaint

ECF No. 1-1 5.26.2015 Exhibits 1-15 to Complaint

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05/27/2015

Daily Caller: Cause of Action Sues DOJ, IRS On Protecting Tax Info From White House Abuses

Read the full story: Daily Caller

A watchdog group filed a complaint against the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service Wednesday after the two agencies failed to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests  for documentation of how they protect Americans’ private tax information from abuse by government attorneys.  Cause of Action, a nonprofit government accountability group, filed the claim in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to force the agencies to disclose information regarding how Justice Department tax attorneys assigned to the White House are screened before gaining access to taxpayers’ confidential information. “Given the IRS’ track record of failing to protect confidential tax information, this lack of agency oversight is a threat to our privacy and democracy,” said Cause of Action President Dan Epstein in a statement. “Ethical and legal protocols at these agencies should be held to the highest standards, especially when government attorneys are accessing confidential taxpayer return information while intermittently leaving to work in the White House.”  Cause of Action recently found that Justice Department tax attorneys, some of whom worked on the IRS’s illegal targeting of conservative and Tea Party non-profit applicants during the 2010 and 2012 elections, now work in the White House giving legal advice.

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05/27/2015

Wall Street Journal: The Wine-Dark Sea of Regulation

By: Jim Dyke Jr.

On May 27, our Napa Valley winery will pull eight cases of Cabernet Sauvignon out of Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. We placed them there six months ago, protected from the elements, following similar experiments in the past two years. The cold water and the tides seem to expedite the aging process, and we believe that our ocean-aged fine wine—which we’ve trademarked as Aquaoir—could revolutionize how vintners around the world think about winemaking. The only obstacle: the federal government.

For more than a year, our winery has been targeted by the Treasury Department, specifically, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. The agency believes our product is unfit for human consumption, despite an utter lack of evidence, and it has threatened to revoke our winemaking license. Washington doesn’t recognize this wine for what it is: the product of entrepreneurship and experimentation.

As a small business in a highly competitive industry, we out of necessity want to stand out through innovation. The aging process was the logical place to start. The traditional technique, developed in France hundreds of years ago and hardly changed, is to age wine at a cool 55 degrees Fahrenheit, often for years or decades. Such factors as light and pressure are also important.

Aware of the renown that has historically been attached to wine pulled up from shipwrecks after years on the ocean floor, we decided to see if intentionally submerging wine bottles for months at a time could speed the aging process and enhance flavor along the way. Our search for an ideal location eventually took us to Charleston Harbor. Sixty feet under the waves, there exists a promising blend of temperature, pressure and darkness, with the additional variable of constant motion.

In February 2013, we submerged four steel mesh cages, each containing a case with 12 bottles of our winery’s 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon. To protect the wine, the top of each bottle was coated with high-grade wax sealant. The bottles were left underwater for three months.

After retrieving the wine, we blind-tasted it with a sommelier, comparing it with the original land-aged vintage. It became immediately clear that the ocean had somehow sped the aging process. Intrigued, we took the wine to several experts and chemists, who confirmed that the experiment had created a vintage that, for its age, had uncharacteristically round tannins—the sign of a mature wine.

We promptly took the new product on a road trip, hosting tastings with sommeliers and food-and-beverage experts in Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The experimentation also continued, with eight cases sitting in Charleston Harbor for six months rather than three.

The tour prompted a certain amount of publicity last year. That’s when we heard from the feds. In March 2014 the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau sent us an email saying that it had identified several potential safety concerns regarding the ocean-aged wine. The letter was informal and contained no indication that we should cease and desist. We retrieved the eight cases, conducted additional tests and dropped a third batch into Charleston Harbor in November.

Then the federal government tried to end our experiment…

Read the full story: Wall Street Journal

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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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