Politico – New lawsuit tests Hillary Clinton’s claim private email system was legal

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Just a day after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that she violated no law in storing tens of thousands of work-related emails on a private server, a watchdog organization is putting that claim to the legal test in court.  D.C.-based Cause of Action filed a lawsuit Wednesday against current Secretary of State John Kerry and National Archives chief David Ferriero, seeking to force them to recover Clinton’s emails and ensure they are placed in government hands. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, also asks a judge to issue a legal finding that Clinton illegally removed federal records from government control when she stored them on a private server.  “Fundamentally, when you’re head of a Cabinet agency, the Federal Records Act requires you to have an enormous amount of duties in terms of preserving records. Clearly, former Secretary of State Clinton did not exercise those duties diligently,” Cause of Action executive director Dan Epstein said in an interview. “What concerns us is the signal is sent when somebody with that much power blatantly ignores the law.”  In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Clinton repeatedly insisted that her decision to use a personal email account and private server as her sole email account as secretary of state did not break any law or government rules.

Bloomberg – Hillary Clinton E-Mail Must Be Moved to Archives, Group Says in Suit

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Hillary Clinton was accused of violating federal law by storing e-mails on her private server while she was secretary of state, in a new lawsuit that seeks to have messages she sent turned over to the national archives.  The nonprofit group Cause of Action asked a judge in Washington to rule the presidential contender broke the Federal Records Act. Clinton failed to ask the National Archives and Records Administration for permission to use her own server to send government-related e-mail, the group claimed.  Clinton also didn’t turn over some e-mails as required under an earlier court ruling, according to the complaint. The State Department was ordered to begin releasing some of her correspondence in batches starting June 30.  The new claim, filed against U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the head of the National Archives, seeks to force a government lawsuit to recover all of Clinton’s e-mail. Clinton, 67, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. president, isn’t named as a defendant.  “As Clinton knew or should have known, the Federal Records Act did not authorize her to set up her own record keeping system or to maintain e-mails on a personal server or use a private e-mail account without ensuring that the e-mails were concurrently archived in the State Department’s official record keeping system,” the group said in its complaint.  Pooja Jhunjhunwala, a press officer with the State Department, declined to comment on the suit. Neither a Clinton campaign spokesman, Jesse Ferguson, nor the organization’s media relations department, immediately replied to e-mailed requests for comment on the filing.

Investors Business Daily – Obama DOJ Channels Bank Shakedown Money To Private Groups

By Dan Epstein

The Department of Justice’s war against the financial industry shows no sign of ending. The agency is now suing Quicken Loans over alleged issues with its taxpayer-backed housing loans. This follows a string of multibillion dollar settlements with major banks for their alleged actions prior to the Great Recession, most notably the record $16.65 billion deal with Bank of America and $7 billion settlement with Citigroup in 2014 and the $13 billion deal with JP Morgan Chase in 2013.

To date, the DOJ has extracted at least $127 billion from these and other companies in the wake of the financial crisis.

Yet while the DOJ says that its actions are in the public interest, the public has no way of verifying whether this is true. Moreover, the agency’s opaque administrative process has resulted in settlements that raise more questions than answers.

The DOJ has not explained which laws or regulations allow it to divert a bare minimum of $150 million, and potentially billions, from its bank settlements to third-party organizations — a historically unprecedented arrangement.

Before the Department of Justice can squeeze a similar settlement out of Quicken Loans, the public deserves to learn the details about how — and why — such deals were reached.

On June 15, government watchdog Cause of Action, where I am executive director, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the DOJ concerning its recent settlements with Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase. We seek an explanation of the DOJ’s statutory authority to direct a private organization’s settlement money to third-party organizations — and why specific organizations were chosen.

The settlements’ problems primarily stem from their “consumer relief” sections. Under the terms of their respective deals, Citigroup must commit $2.5 billion, JP Morgan must pay $4 billion, and Bank of America must remit $7 billion on this item.

Normally, consumer relief money would go to actual victims of fraud. Instead, the Department of Justice provided a menu of organizations to which the banks could give their money.

The Bank of America settlement, for instance, included a minimum of $20 million to “housing counseling agencies” approved by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and a minimum $50 million to “Community Development Financial Institutions” approved by the U.S. Treasury. The settlement also offers to forgive $2 of money owed for every $1 given to such groups — a powerful incentive to direct money their way.

Moreover, such arrangements conveniently dovetail with several of the Obama administration’s other policy goals.

The money to community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, is the most obvious example. They are marketed as taxpayer-backed alternatives to payday lenders and check-cashing services in low-income communities. Not coincidentally, the DOJ is also engaged in a multiyear campaign — “Operation Choke Point” — that’s effectively shutting down payday lenders and giving CDFIs an opportunity to gain market share. Bank of America is now legally obliged to assist them.

The money to housing counseling agencies is also troublesome. By directing cash to these groups, the DOJ is forcing Bank of America to fund a program whose budget was eliminated by Congress in 2014. In effect, the Obama administration is using the private sector’s money in lieu of taxpayer dollars.

Another eyebrow-raising provision requires that Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase spend a combined $4.15 billion on loan forgiveness and forbearance. Both settlements note that this money can be given to the “Making Home Affordable Program,” a taxpayer-funded federal program created by the Obama administration as part of the 2009 stimulus bill.

MHA is set to expire at the end of 2016, but before that day comes, it can likely count on an influx of cash from the private sector.

Finally, there’s the matter of what happens if the three banks haven’t disbursed their consumer relief budgets by December 2017 for JP Morgan Chase, August 2018 for Bank of America and December 2018 for Citigroup. At that point, all of the money still owed by Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, and 25% of Bank of America’s outstanding obligation, will go to the third-party organization NeighborWorks America, which will spend the money on many of the programs and causes listed above.

Imagine if a Republican administration directed billions of dollars of “small business relief” into the coffers of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business and the National Restaurant Association, all while hiding the details from the public. The media and political outcry would be severe.

Yet that’s essentially what the Obama administration has done with its campaign against the financial industry, forcing banks to bankroll organizations and causes that advance its political agenda.

The Justice Department must release the documents that make clear why it structured the Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase settlements in such a way, and why that is legally acceptable. The American people deserve to know if the federal government is disguising political shakedowns as a public service.

New York Post – Obama’s pet watchdog left veterans out in the cold

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Driven out by whistleblowers, Acting Inspector General of the Veterans Administration Richard Griffin finally resigned last week. Good riddance.  Griffin had whitewashed and concealed information about inadequate care and phony waiting lists and tried to retaliate against truth-tellers.  But don’t expect real improvement at the VA. Griffin’s successor is another bureaucratic lifer, Lin Halliday. She’s been collecting a paycheck from the VA Inspector General’s Office since 1992, while the deadly problems festered. President Obama seems to like that approach.  On July 2 in Wisconsin, whistleblower Ryan Honl — a Gulf War veteran — urged Obama to appoint an independent inspector general: “If they just pick someone new from inside the agency, it will be business as usual and the problems will continue.” But Obama brushed him off, saying VA Secretary Robert McDonald “had it covered.”  Sorry. That’s just not true.  Only the president can appoint an inspector general. Federal law requires that the Veterans Administration and other departments have outside inspectors general to guard against corruption and mismanagement. Obama simply refuses to appoint them, allowing the vacant offices to be filled instead by “acting” IGs like Griffin and Halliday.  They’re lapdogs instead of watchdogs, compliant temporary placeholders from inside the system…

Daniel Epstein, executive director of Cause of Action, a good-government group, said for Hillary Clinton’s entire tenure at the State Department, Obama refused to appoint a permanent IG.  Consequently, “oversight” at State was in the hands of the ultimate insider, acting IG Harold Geisel, who’d served as an ambassador under former President Bill Clinton and remains a close friend of the Clintons: The very definition of a lapdog.

TechDirt – Lawsuit Filed After Export-Import Bank Official Swears He ‘Accidentally’ Deleted All Of His Responsive Text Messages

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Sure, Freedom of Information laws are great, but they have their downsides. For one thing, they clearly signal to agencies which records are being sought. It’s unavoidable. To answer a request, an agency needs to know what it’s looking for. Once the request is out in the open, efforts can begin in earnest to excise information anyone affected doesn’t want made public.   I’m not saying anyone did anything wrong, but it very definitely looks like someone did something deliberately wrong.  A top official at a controversial U.S. export finance agency deleted text messages sent within days of the 2014 midterm elections after a watchdog group filed an open records request for the messages, the agency admitted recently.

The watchdog group — Cause of Action — sought “text messages, Blackberry messenger chats and SMS messages sent or received by top officials during the period of days between November 2, 2014 and November 8, 2014.” These would be texts fired back and forth during the mid-term elections by officials of the controversial US Export-Import Bank, which was facing the reality of having its funding halted by House Republicans.   Cause of Action got most of what it sought… several months later. It filed the request on November 20, 2014 but didn’t receive a response until May 12, 2015. That response brought with it the following bad news:  [T]he messages for Scott P. Schloegel were accidently deleted on approximately January 1, 2015. Enclosed is signed declaration from Mr. Schloegel attesting to the deletion.

 

Cause of Action Forces U.S. Treasury to Stop Snooping on Americans

Treasury Department concedes to Cause of Action’s request to stop collecting online users’ location data

WASHINGTON – Cause of Action, a nonpartisan government accountability organization, last Thursday submitted a letter to the Treasury Department requesting it cease the unauthorized collection of users’ location data online and investigate the program. By Monday morning, the Treasury website in question no longer prompted users to allow it access to their location, marking rapid progress towards government reform, while supporting our claim the practice was indeed unauthorized.

While performing its oversight work recently, Cause of Action utilized a Bureau of the Fiscal Service (“BFS”) website under the control of the United States Department of the Treasury to conduct research. We were surprised to find that when we attempted to access the Treasury Financial Manual located at tfm.fiscal.treasury.gov, the website prompted us to allow it access to the our current location.  We were presented with a message stating the website “wants to track [the user’s] physical location,” and required us to choose to allow the Treasury Department to access our location or to not allow.

“When a government agency uses taxpayer dollars to collect private information about the people they serve, and does so without any apparent authority, we must take every action available to reign in this abuse of executive power,” Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein said. “While we commend the agency for quietly stopping this practice, our work continues to find out all the details about the agency’s unwarranted data collection.”

Cause of Action believes that the location access request by Bureau of the Fiscal Service constituted an unwarranted invasion of privacy, could discourage individuals from accessing government information, and was unlawful under applicable statutes, regulations, guidance, and policy. We are concerned that BFS was collecting data on the location of website users without any proper authority.

Read More Here

CLICK HERE TO READ OUR FOIA REQUEST

CLICK HERE TO READ OUR REQUEST FOR INVESTIGATION

The Government is STILL Watching You

Cause of Action demands the Treasury Department stop collecting user location data online

WASHINGTON – Cause of Action, a nonpartisan government accountability organization, has submitted a letter to the Treasury Department requesting it cease the unauthorized collection of users’ location data online and investigate the program. Additionally, CoA has requested all relevant information on this data collection through a Freedom of Information Act.

While performing its oversight work recently, Cause of Action utilized a Bureau of the Fiscal Service (“BFS”) website under the control of the United States Department of the Treasury to conduct research.

We were surprised to find that when we attempted to access the Treasury Financial Manual located at tfm.fiscal.treasury.gov, the website prompted us to allow it access to the our current location.  We were presented with a message stating the website “wants to track [the user’s] physical location,” and required us to choose to allow the Treasury Department to access our location or to not allow.

“In light of an unprecedented data breach at the Office of Personnel Management that affected as many as 18 million people, and the subsequent White House cover-up, it goes without saying this new discovery of more government data collection is incredibly troubling,” Cause of Action Executive Director Dan Epstein said. “We have dedicated ourselves to finding out what is going on behind the government curtain and continue to be amazed at the woefully failed White House pledge to run the ‘most transparent’ administration in U.S. history.”

Cause of Action believes that the location access request by Bureau of the Fiscal Service constitutes an unwarranted invasion of privacy, could discourage individuals from accessing government information, and is unlawful under applicable statutes, regulations, guidance, and policy. We are concerned that BFS is collecting data on the location of website users without any proper authority.

Cause of Action has requested that the Treasury Department cease the unauthorized collection of information at tfm.fiscal.treasury.gov, review the propriety of this collection of information, and submit this matter to the Office of the Inspector General for investigation.

CLICK HERE TO READ OUR FOIA REQUEST

CLICK HERE TO READ OUR REQUEST FOR INVESTIGATION