Washington Examiner: Justice Department officials may have shared taxpayer info with White House

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Attorneys from the Department of Justice’s tax division may have improperly shared confidential taxpayer information with President Obama’s White House staff for political reasons, a watchdog group said.

 

Cause of Action, a nonprofit government watchdog group, filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests Wednesday for records demonstrating whether Justice attorneys — some of whom worked directly on elements of the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal — leaked protected information to Obama administration officials while detailed to the Office of White House Counsel.

 

“Documents obtained by Cause of Action have revealed that since 2009, several DOJ Tax Division attorneys, many of whom have been involved in litigation where … protected information was involved, have elected to serve the president as ‘clearance counsel,’ ” Daniel Epstein, president of Cause of Action, wrote in a letter to Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Washington Examiner: Interactive graphic: Hillary Clinton’s insider network

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Daniel Epstein, Cause of Action’s Executive Director, says, “Due to Secretary Clinton’s failure to preserve emails on an authorized system, and the State Department’s failure to preserve any employee text messages at all, the full truth of whether Mrs. Clinton’s associations improperly influenced her decisions will never be known… Unfortunately, this lack of transparency has become the norm in Washington.”

 

The Hill: Federal secrecy watchdog has yet to bite

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The federal agency charged decades ago with policing excessive government secrecy has never taken a single action against a federal official.

 

Transparency advocates fear the Office of Special Counsel’s (OSC) inability to carry out a prosecution points to problems in the underlying law and represents a lost opportunity by Congress to hold federal officials accountable for cover-ups.

 

“There is a risk that there is a lot of arbitrary and capricious withholding, and DOJ [the Department of Justice] is just not doing its job in making sure these individuals are held to account,” said Dan Epstein, executive director of the right-leaning Cause of Action.

 

“It appears that process isn’t happening, which provides incentives to employees to withhold documents.”

Washington Examiner: Reid retirement follows call for probe of his role in visas-for-cash mess

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Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s announcement Friday that he won’t seek re-election in 2016 came at the end of a week in which his role in pressuring Department of Homeland Security officials on behalf of foreign investors in his home state of Nevada sparked one investigation and calls for another.

 

On Thursday, the nonprofit government watchdog Cause of Action called for a review by the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section of allegations that a top Homeland Security official improperly intervened on behalf of friends and political associates of Reid, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Anthony Rodham, brother of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

 

The review by Justice Department’s top anti-public corruption staff is needed, according to Cause of Action Executive Director Daniel Epstein, because “federal employees were pressured to make decisions that financially or politically benefited certain applicants and left many visa applicants feeling deprived of a fair process from their government.”

Fox News: Misuse of power in the Department of Homeland Security?

Watch: Cause of Action’s letter to DOJ on Fox News

Watchdog.org: Criminal investigation sought in McAuliffe-Mayorkas dealings

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A government accountability group says “unanswered questions” warrant a criminal investigation into actions by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and others involved in the EB-5 visa program.

 

Cause of Action called for the investigation after the federal Office of Inspector General confirmed this week that McAuliffe repeatedly lobbied the director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for visa approvals.