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06/3/2015

Fox News: HRC EMAILS: Federal officials voiced growing alarm over Clinton’s compliance with records laws, documents show

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Over a five-year span, senior officials at the National Archives and Records Administrations (NARA) voiced growing alarm about Hillary Clinton’s record-keeping practices as secretary of state, according to internal documents shared with Fox News.  During Clinton’s final days in office, Paul Wester, the director of Modern Records Programs at NARA – essentially the agency’s chief records custodian – privately emailed five NARA colleagues to confide his fear that Clinton would take her official records with her when she left office, in violation of federal statutes.  Referring to a colleague whose full name is unknown, Wester wrote on December 11, 2012: “Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans afoot for taking her records from State to Little Rock.” That was a reference to the possibility that Clinton might seek to house her records at the Clinton Presidential Center, which was largely funded by the Clinton Foundation….The 73 documents from NARA and State were turned over to Cause of Action, a non-partisan government accountability watchdog that had filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March, after the New York Times revealed that Clinton had exclusively used a private email server and domain name during her tenure as secretary of state. Cause of Action shared the documents with Fox News on an exclusive basis, ahead of Senate testimony by the group’s executive director, Daniel Epstein.  “Given NARA’s stated concerns,” Epstein said in written testimony submitted this week to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, “it either was aware of the failure to preserve Mrs. Clinton’s emails or was extremely negligent in its efforts to monitor [the preservation of] senior officials’ emails.”

Fox News’ Special Report, Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein spoke with Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen about recently uncovered government documents that reveal critical faults with the federal records archiving system during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.

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06/2/2015

Washington Examiner: How FOIA is pulling back the curtain on Clinton emails

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Internal State Department documents from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state have slowly made their way to the public through the Freedom of Information Act as Congress fights to reform what many see as a broken transparency law.  A high-profile lawsuit between Vice News and the State Department over the agency’s failure to respond adequately to a FOIA request prompted the court ruling last week that will force the agency to release batches of Clinton’s private emails every 30 days….

Daniel Epstein, executive director of nonpartisan watchdog Cause of Action, said the Benghazi Committee has likely obtained scores of documents it has decided not to release to the public.  “They don’t want the media to adjudicate these issues,” Epstein said. “You may leak certain documents at opportune times because getting the media to talk about an issue is helpful to put pressure on a target,” Epstein said. “But you don’t want your target to know all the information you may be aware of.”  Epstein said FOIA requesters often have “different incentives” than congressional investigators. He said the barrage of FOIA lawsuits against the State Department often fail to produce documents “when you have an agency whose incentive is to obfuscate the truth.”

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05/28/2015

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

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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

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

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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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05/19/2015

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

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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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05/14/2015

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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