Tag Archives: OIG

Two-Track Justice

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Yesterday The National Review posted an article with the title, “With Liberty and Two-Track Justice for All.” Unless things change quickly, we will officially become a banana republic.

The article notes the contrasts in the way similar charges against Americans were handled:

• President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is doing seven and a half years at the Federal Correctional Institution in Loretto, Pa., for his pre-Trump tax and bank fraud. Manafort has endured solitary confinement.

• Former campaign aide George Papadopoulos served twelve days in the slammer for false statements to FBI officers. His steep legal bills and spooked clients drove him back into his parents’ house.

• Former national security adviser Michael Flynn awaits sentencing, and wants his charges dropped, after pleading guilty to false statements. Flynn reportedly took a plea after selling his house to pay his lawyers. DOJ prosecuted Flynn, although no less than Andrew McCabe acknowledged that “the two people who interviewed [Flynn] didn’t think he was lying.” Indeed, the G-men who spoke with Flynn later reported: “Throughout the interview, Flynn had a very ‘sure’ demeanor and did not give any indicators of deception. He did not parse his words or hesitate in any of his answers.” Never mind those details; Flynn still could wind up in an orange jump suit.

The article compares the above scenarios with the fate of James Comey:

As the OIG concluded:

Comey violated applicable policies and his Employment Agreement by failing to either surrender his copies of Memos 2, 4, 6, and 7 to the FBI or seek authorization to retain them; by releasing official FBI information and records to third parties without authorization; and by failing to immediately alert the FBI about his disclosures to his personal attorneys once he became aware in June 2017 that Memo 2 contained six words (four of which were names of foreign countries mentioned by the President) that the FBI had determined were classified at the “CONFIDENTIAL” level.

So, Comey did spill state secrets.

“By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action,” the OIG concluded in August, “Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees — and the many thousands more former FBI employees — who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.”

So, is Comey breaking rocks? Awaiting his prison sentence? Preparing for trial?

The article notes the activities of Hillary Clinton:

Despite 588 security violations that the State Department attributed to Hillary Clinton and her associates in the Emailgate scandal, as well as her role in purchasing the “dirty dossier” that triggered the Russia hoax, the former first lady has suffered zero consequences for an entire career of professional misconduct. Anyone who survived her husband’s presidency recalls Hillary as a latter-day Ma Barker, or Bonnie to Bill’s Clyde. Regardless, Hillary always walks away, Scot-free. And she always gets paid.

Her 2014 book Hard Choices scored her some $14 million. The next year, Business Insider reports, she made $12 million in speaking fees to well-connected organizations and huge corporations. A sample of these for 2015 included:

California Medical Association: $100,000 (via satellite!)

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce: $150,000

Institute of Scrap Metal Recycling Industries: $225,000

National Automobile Dealers Association: $225,500

United Fresh Produce Association: $225,000

eBay Inc.: $315,000 (for a 20-minute speech)

Cisco: $325,000 (She reportedly sat onstage with the CEO)

Biotechnology Industry Organization: $335,000

Qualcomm Incorporated: $335,000

GTCR Private Equity: $780,000

Atop this steady cash, Hillary never stops playing presidential-campaign hokey-pokey: She puts her left foot in, she takes her left foot out, she puts her left foot in, and she shakes it all about. Rumors that Michael Bloomberg is considering her as a potential running mate gives this entitled woman yet another opportunity to show some West Wing ankle.

Lois Lerner also made the list of insiders with minimal consequences for breaking the law:

Lois Lerner ran the IRS unit that perpetrated the systematic political profiling of conservative groups that sought tax-exempt designation. IRS’s wingtip-dragging, relentless demands for paperwork, and Orwellian questions (“please provide the percentage of time your organization spends on prayer groups”) all subjected to extra scrutiny 94 percent of center-right and Tea Party groups that sought 501(c)(3) and (c)(4)status, versus 6 percent of analogous liberal outfits, the House Ways and Means Committee found in August 2013. Consequently, rather than educate citizens on limited-government principles before the 2012 election, scores of these organizations either failed to launch or did so, only to run out of fuel and tumble back to earth.

Lerner supervised this virtual gag-the-Right scheme. When GOP congressional overseers sought Lerner’s laptop hard drive, they learned that it was shipped to a Federal Bureau of Prisons recycling facility in Florida. As the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration testified in 2015, “this shipment of hard drives was destroyed using an AMERI-SHRED AMS-750HD shredder.” The industrial-strength machine chopped the drives into quarter-sized pieces. The Feds then sold this material as scrap.

Was Lerner punished? Reprimanded? Ordered to stand in the corner for 20 minutes?

Lerner was placed on administrative leave. This is Potomac for “paid vacation.” She received her $177,000 annual salary while she stayed home and relaxed. (If she were U.S. senator Lois Lerner, she would have earned $3,000 less.) According to the Washington Post, “Lerner has received a $100,000 annual pension since retiring from the IRS in September 2013, and she and her husband, an attorney with a national law firm, live in a $2.5 million home in Bethesda,” Maryland, where she walks her dogs and gardens outside her 6,500-square-foot house.

The article concludes:

America needs equal justice, but neither undue leniency nor undeserved cruelty toward Stone.

Given Stone’s sentence, McCabe, Comey, Clinton, and Lerner should be locked up.

But since those four got zero prison time, plus book deals, TV contracts, and a hefty pension, then Roger Stone deserves to walk into a green room at Fox News Channel. I would expect to congratulate him there on his new contributor agreement and hear all about his upcoming memoir.

Fair is fair.

I agree.

When The Timeline Doesn’t Work

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One of the things generally cited by the media as justification for charging President Trump with obstruction of justice has been the memo written by James Comey claiming that the President asked him to go easy on General Flynn. Aside from the fact that most Americans would have agreed with the President’s request to handle a matter involving an American war veteran gently, the Inspector General’s Report brings the memo about that entire conversation into question.

Yesterday American Greatness posted an article that explains the problem with the memo.

The article explains:

According to Comey, during a private meeting in the Oval Office on February 14, 2017, President Trump asked the former FBI director to drop an inquiry into Flynn about his discussions with the Russian ambassador shortly after the election. (Flynn had resigned amid media reports he possibly violated an arcane federal law.)

“He misled the Vice President but he didn’t do anything wrong in the call,” Comey claimed Trump said to him. “[Trump] said, ‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

According to Russian collusion truthers, those alleged comments form the most convincing evidence that Team Trump not only conspired with the Russians and tried to cover it up, but that the president broke the law by asking his FBI director to halt an investigation into one of his top advisors.

The memo is cited numerous times in the second volume of the Mueller report to implicate the president for obstructing justice by interfering in the Russian investigation, although Comey’s memo is the only evidence of such an act. (Trump has disputed Comey’s description of the conversation.)

Note that James Comey’s memo is the only description of the conversation. There is no second source.

The article continues:

But that portrayal of events was never the truth. The conversation in February 2017 had nothing to do with the Russia investigation, as I’ve written before: Neither Trump nor Congress nor the general public knew at that time that James Comey’s FBI had been investigating Trump’s campaign, including Flynn, since July 2016.

And the new report by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) confirms as much.

The article also notes:

Further, in late January 2017, Justice Department officials refused to confirm to the White House that Flynn was under “any type of investigation.”

In fact, Comey himself admitted that the discussion about Flynn wasn’t related to the FBI’s Russia investigation.

“I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December,” Comey said in his June 2017 statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I did not understand the President to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign.”

The article concludes:

Further, in late January 2017, Justice Department officials refused to confirm to the White House that Flynn was under “any type of investigation.”

In fact, Comey himself admitted that the discussion about Flynn wasn’t related to the FBI’s Russia investigation.

“I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December,” Comey said in his June 2017 statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I did not understand the President to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign.”

It really is time to put as many of the deep state as possible in jail.

More Rules For Thee But Not For Me

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Breitbart.com reported yesterday that there are some questions as to the amount of money Elizabeth Warren spent to set up the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” as a federal watchdog to prevent financial institutions from abusing U.S. consumers.

The article reports:

The Office of Inspector General of the United States Federal Reserve (OIG) was requested by the House Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Committee on January 29, 2014, to evaluate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) headquarters renovation costs that rose from $55 million to at least $215.8 million.

…According to a 2012 Independent Performance Audit, the legislation uniquely guaranteed the CFPB an automatic percentage of the Federal Reserve System’s operating expenses and that “funding is not subject to the traditional formulation and review of the Congressional appropriations process.” In addition, “Receipt of funds from the Federal Reserve authorizes the agency’s budget spending authority.”

The article explains why this spending is a problem for Ms. Warren:

The OIG found that the “Scope and Justification for Estimates” for the “$55 million and $95 million budget amounts for the renovation for fiscal year FY 2012 [beginning October 1, 20011] and FY 2013 [beginning October 1, 2012], respectively, were published in the CFPB’s public budget documents.” The OIG also found that “Approvals through decision memorandums were obtained for these amounts.” But the OIG reported that “CFPB was unable to locate any documentation of the decision to fully renovate the building.”

It therefore appears that although Sen. Elizabeth Warren was the responsible party at the CFPB who approved the “decision to renovate,” the design, and the cost “Scope and Justification for Estimates,” all documents regarding her decisions have vanished.

More missing paperwork from the Obama Administration. Someone needs to open a Lost and Found for these people. Ms. Warren was supposed to be protecting consumers from overzealous corporations, meanwhile she was exploiting the taxpayers to create her own luxurious offices. This sort of expense can be added to the list of places the federal budget could easily be cut.

 

When Bureaucracies Act Like Squabbling Children

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Yesterday the Washington Examiner reported that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) has charged that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) violated the Buy America Act that was part of the Recovery Act. This is bureaucracy at its worst.

The article reports:

In March 2011, the OIG inspected the wastewater plant in Ottawa, Ill., and determined several European and Korean-made parts didn’t satisfy the Buy America Act that requires parts to be purchased or “substantially transformed” in the U.S.

The EPA for the past two years has refused to either eliminate the rule or return the stimulus funds spent on the foreign equipment, saying the purchase didn’t violate its own rules.

“In the event that the region decides to retain foreign-manufactured goods in the Ottawa project… the region should either ‘reduce the amount of the award by the cost of the steel, iron, or manufactured goods that are used in the project or . . . take enforcement or  termination action in accordance with the agency’s grants management regulations,’ the OIG said. “Neither the region nor the city agreed with our conclusion that the documentation was not sufficient to support Buy American compliance for some items.”

How many man hours did it take to reach this conclusion, how many more man hours will be spent on this before it is resolved, and what difference does it make? How about a law that says you buy the best quality for the lowest price? Wouldn’t that save taxpayers money which would put more money in taxpayers’ pockets that the taxpayers could spend to stimulate the economy?

The article further reports:

The EPA instead blamed its Office of Water for establishing a flimsy test for whether products met the Buy America act. The agency admitted the rule isn’t a good test, but described it as “inartful” rather than wrong.

To me that sounds like a teenager explaining why it was okay to stay out past curfew!

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