The Evidence Slowly Drips Out

The American Center for Law and Justice posted an article yesterday about the documents they have begun to receive as the result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding the unmasking of Americans in wiretaps.

The article reports:

We’ve all seen the reports of the unprecedented unmasking of U.S. citizens by senior Obama official, Ambassador Samantha Power, in the final days of the of the Administration – to the tune of more than one a day.  Now, through our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, we have unearthed evidence of significant political bias during the same time period she was unmasking Americans.

Last fall the media began reporting that among other Obama Administration officials, former Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power made numerous requests seeking the “unmasking” (or unredacted identification) of names and other information about members of the Trump campaign team whose communications had been incidentally caught up in intelligence surveillance efforts. Power’s requests, reported to number in the hundreds, occurred mostly in the final days of the Obama Administration, that is between the election of President Trump in November 2016 and his inauguration in January 2017.

What the media has not reported, but the ACLJ has since discovered through one of our FOIA lawsuits, is that the clear political—and personal—bias of Power against the incoming President and the conservative agenda led her to undertake efforts aimed at undercutting support for the new Administration.

The article further reports:

We warned you about the 73 Days of Danger – the final days of the Obama Administration, and this new evidence confirmed what we said all along. The Administration was fully engaged in attempts to do whatever they could to undermine the conservative agenda and the will of the American voters.  But it was far worse than we thought.

Power goes on in this November 11th email to pitch a 60 Minutes episode to help lay a public foundation to undermine the incoming Administration. She wrote:

I am not sure exactly what I am pitching, but it seems there could be something interesting to show through USUN about this waning multilateral moment for the US, how we use these last two months, what we are trying to defend, how we are consoling other countries, etc. I wondered if there could be something in this that would hit home for viewers, even or perhaps especially those who support Trump. Let me know if you would like to brainstorm.”

The conversation continues four days later with Owens acknowledging and agreeing to help pitch the piece. He further stated, “I can only imagine the conversations you are having with some of our allies now and I would love a chance to brainstorm.”

The article concludes:

Further, and of critical importance, is that nothing in the unredacted portion of either email chain that day is responsive to our FOIA request. That means, that something in those redacted email chains – sent just 3 days before the presidential inauguration – is responsive to our FOIA request.

What is the Deep State hiding?

We will be challenging these redactions. The American people deserve to know the truth. 

In addition, we are pleased to report that late last week we secured a federal court order increasing the State Department’s required processing rate for production in this case by 33%. With nearly 9,000 pages that we know have yet to be processed, there is much more that we can and will learn about this situation.

Power’s political bias was palpable and calls into severe question any suggestion that Power’s unprecedented unmasking requests against U.S. citizens was done with anything other that political animus.  If this production is what the Deep State was willing to turn over to us, we can only imagine what remains to be turned over, litigated over, and be unredacted.

Stay tuned. The Freedom of Information Act may be the only way will be able to save our republic.

Was The Obama Administration Using The Government To Spy On Americans?

The Washington Examiner is reporting today that former United Nations Ambassador Susan Powers requested the unmasking of more than 260 Americans‘ identities during the waning days of the Obama Administration. These were conversations captured inadvertently while non-citizens were being wiretapped (theoretically). Susan Powers is scheduled to testify before Congress in October.

The article reports:

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., submitted a letter in July to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats that said the committee was aware “that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence-related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama Administration.”

It is suspected that the official referenced is Power.

Power also was one of three top Obama administration officials named in subpoenas received by several of the nation’s intelligence agencies in May.

Power is not the first U.N. ambassador to make unmasking requests, but Fox News reports the requests fall in the low double digits.

Power will meet with congressional intelligence committees as part of their Russia probes and is expected to appear before the House intelligence panel in a classified session next month.

It will be interesting to see exactly who winds up taking the fall for the abuses or power that occurred during the Obama Administration.

 

About That Refugee Resettlement Program

Received in my email today from Judicial Watch:

State Dept. Redacts Big Chunks of $22.8 Mil Contract to Resettle Muslim Refugees

MAY 24, 2017

The U.S. government spends billions of dollars to “resettle” foreign nationals and transparency on how the money is spent depends on the agency involved. Judicial Watch has been investigating it for years, specifically the huge amount of taxpayer dollars that go to “voluntary agencies”, known as VOLAGs, to provide a wide range of services for the new arrivals. Throughout the ongoing probe Judicial Watch has found a striking difference on how government lawyers use an exemption, officially known as (b)(4), to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to withhold records. All the cases involve public funds being used to resettle foreigners on U.S. soil and Americans should be entitled to the records.

The (b)(4) exemption permits agencies to withhold trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person which is privileged or confidential. Depending on the government agency and the mood of the taxpayer-funded lawyers handling public records requests, that information is exempt from disclosure. In these cases, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) disclosed a VOLAG contract to resettle tens of thousands of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) that entered the U.S. through Mexico under the Obama administration while the State Department withheld large portions of a one-year, $22.8 million deal to resettle refugees from Muslim countries. Most of the UACs came from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala and the Obama administration blamed the sudden surge on violence in the three central American nations. The agency responsible for resettling the minors and issuing contracts for the costly services is HHS.

As a result of Judicial Watch’s work HHS furnished records  with virtually nothing redacted. Disclosed were employee salaries of VOLAGs contracted by the agency to provide services for the illegal immigrant minors, the cost of laptops, big screen TVs, food, pregnancy tests, “multicultural crayons” and shower stalls for the new arrivals. The general contract was to provide “basic shelter care” for 2,400 minors for a period of four months in 2014. This cost American taxpayers an astounding $182,129,786 and the VOLAG contracted to do it was government regular called Baptist Children and Family Services (BCFS). The breakdown includes charges of $104,215,608 for UACs at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and an additional $77,914,178 for UACs at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

HHS rightfully provided all sorts of details in the records, including the cost of emergency surge beds ($104,215,608) for just four months; food for the illegal alien minors and staff ($18,198,000); medical supplies such as first aid kits, latex gloves, lice shampoo and pregnancy tests ($1,120,400); recreation items such as board games, soccer balls and jump ropes ($180,000); educational items like art paper and multicultural crayons ($180,000); laptops ($200,000) and cellphones ($160,000). Hotel accommodations for the BCFS staff was $6,765,000, the records show, and the salary for a 30-member “Incident Management Team” was $2,648,800, which breaks down to $88,293 per IMT member for the four-month period. It was outrageous that the Obama administration spent nearly $200 million of taxpayer funds to provide illegal alien children with the types of extravagant high-tech equipment and lavish benefits many American families cannot even afford for their own children.

This has become a heated issue for the government which may explain why other agencies aren’t as forthcoming in providing specific figures, thus abusing the (b)(4) exemption. The State Department, for instance, redacted huge portions of records involving contracts with VOLAGs to resettle refugees from mostly Muslim countries. The files illustrate the disparate redaction treatment given by different government agencies to the same types of records. The State Department paid a VOLAG called United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) a ghastly  $22,838,173 in one year to resettle refugees that came mostly from Muslim countries. Unlike HHS, the agency redacted information related to what the USCCB charged the government for things like furniture, personnel, equipment and other costs associated with contracts to resettle refugees. Why did one government agency hand over the same types of records that another agency claims are trade secrets? Judicial Watch is challenging the State Department’s (b)(4) exemption and will provide updates as they become available.

HHS and the State Department work with nine VOLAGs to resettle refugees and the voluntary agencies have hundreds of contractors they like to call “affiliates.” It’s a huge racket that costs American taxpayers monstrous sums and Judicial Watch is working to pinpoint the exact amount. Besides BCFS and USCCB, other VOLAGs with lucrative government gigs to resettle refugees are: Church World Service, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Episcopal Migration Ministries, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, International Rescue Committee, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Lutheran Immigration Refugee Services and World Relief Corporation.

###

Some People Are Not Happy With The Current Silent Coup

Judicial Watch posted the following press release today:

Judicial Watch Sues CIA, DOJ and Treasury for Records Related to Intelligence Leaks Regarding Investigation of General Flynn

MARCH 06, 2017

National Security Agency Refuses to Confirm or Deny Existence of Records 

(Washington DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury regarding records related to the investigation of retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michel Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (Judicial Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency et al. (No.1:17-cv-00397)).  (The National Security Agency refused to confirm or deny the existence of intelligence records about communications between Gen. Flynn and Amb Kislyak.)

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the agencies failed to respond to a January 25, 2017, FOIA request seeking:

Any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to the investigation of retired Gen. Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak between October 1, 2016 and the present.

This request includes, but is not limited to, any and all related warrants, affidavits, declarations, or similar records regarding the aforementioned investigation.

For purposes of clarification, please find enclosed a CNN report regarding the investigation, which cites information that was provided to CNN by members of the Intelligence Community.

In its complaint Judicial Watch asks the court to order the agencies to search for all records responsive to its FOIA requests and demonstrate that they employed reasonable search methods; order the agencies to produce by a specific date all non-exempt records and a Vaughn index of all withheld records; and instruct the agencies to cease withholding all non-exempt records.

On January 23, 2017, CNN reported that the government was investigating Flynn, former national security adviser to President Trump:

The calls were captured by routine US eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats, according to the intelligence and law enforcement officials. But the officials said some of the content of the conversation raised enough potential concerns that investigators are still looking into the discussions, amid a broader concern about Russian intelligence-gathering activities in the United States.

The officials all stressed that so far there has been no determination of any wrongdoing.

FBI and intelligence officials briefed members of the Obama White House team before President Barack Obama left office about the Flynn calls to the Russian ambassador, sources said.

“President Trump is on to something. The Obama-connected wiretapping and illegal leaks of classified material concerning President Trump and General Flynn are a scandal,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Judicial Watch aims to get to the truth about these crimes and we hope the Trump administration stands with us in the fight for transparency.”

This is a necessary action. There are some serious questions about the actions of President Obama and some of the people in government during the transition of power to the Trump Administration.

The Numbers Tell The Story

According to Wikipedia:

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, is a federal freedom of information law that allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States government. The Act defines agency records subject to disclosure, outlines mandatory disclosure procedures and grants nine exemptions to the statute.[1][2] This amendment was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, despite his misgivings,[3][4] on July 4, 1966, and went into effect the following year.[5]

The Freedom of Information Act works well as long as the people in power respect it. Sometimes getting information is a bit of a challenge.

Hot Air posted the following today:

Speaking of Hillary and her top aides, one guess which agency within the Obama administration had the very worst record when it came to responding to FOIA requests. If you guessed the State Department under Hillary Clinton, you are correct. A report published in January by the State Department Inspector General found that out of 240 FOIA requests for information connected to Secretary Clinton, 177 were still outstanding more than a year after she left office. Here’s a chart from the report showing that:

State FOIA responseIf Clinton wins the 2016 election, the Obama administration will look like the most transparent administration in history by comparison.

The article reports that the Obama Administration has broken the record for not being able to find documents requested in FOIA requests. Miraculously, when a court order is involved, the documents mysteriously appear. As I said in the beginning of this article, when people on both sides of the request respect FOIA requests, the system works. If an administration or member of an administration thinks they are above the law, FOIA requests do not always get honored.

Indoctrination Does Not Belong In America

Judicial Watch posted an article today about some documents they have uncovered regarding some of the training American soldiers are receiving.

The article reports:

Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained documents from the United States Department of the Army revealing that in April 2015, 400 soldiers in the 67th Signal Battalion at Fort Gordon, Georgia, were subjected to a “white privilege” briefing, including a PowerPoint presentation instructing the attendees: “Our society attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual …”

The slideshow also informed the soldiers: “Race privilege gives whites little reason to pay a lot of attention to African Americans.” It alleged that there are unspecified “powerful forces everywhere” keeping different kinds of people from being valued, accepted, and appreciated, but “we act as if it doesn’t exist.” This alleged privilege creates a “yawning divide” in income, wealth, and dignity.  The material described a mythical African woman who isn’t aware that she’s black until she comes to America, encounters “white racism” and discovers the U.S. is “organized according to race.”

Why in the world is our military doing this? How is it constructive?

The article concludes:

Though news of the indoctrination incident was briefly reported in Stars and Stripes shortly after it occurred, only one of the above slides previously has been made public.  Confronted with the information at the time, an Army spokesperson claimed the presentation was not officially sanctioned.

Judicial Watch previously obtained Defense Department equal opportunity training materials that depict conservative organizations as “hate groups” and advise students to be aware that “many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.”  And last month, Judicial Watch uncovered Air Force Academy documents that show how the Academy used its “Chapel Tithes and Offering Fund” to pay for cadets to participate in worship services featuring witchcraft, “Faery Magick,” and voodoo.

Outrageous – that is the only word to describe this type of raw racist indoctrination,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  “The Obama administration undermines the morale of our military with morally repugnant ‘equal opportunity’ that makes many soldiers feel unwelcome because they are the wrong sex, race, religion or aren’t part of a politically correct group.”

Please follow the link to the article and read the excerpts from the presentation. This is totally unacceptable.

A Circumstantial Smoking Gun

The Internet has gone a bit crazy (as it sometimes does) about new Hillary Clinton emails released that show her instructing someone to remove the classified header and footing from a classified document and then send it over a regular fax machine. That is a serious offense that would send an ordinary citizen to jail. Therein lies the problem–Hillary Clinton is not an ordinary citizen. That is not a problem for Hillary–that is a problem for America. Somehow we have forgotten the concept of equal justice under the law.

Ed Morrissey posted the details of the story at Hot Air yesterday. The article includes a picture of the email in question. I recommend going to Hot Air and reading the entire article, but here are some highlights:

Has the State Department released a smoking gun in the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal? In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.

I don’t even have the words to tell you how much of a ‘no-no’ that is when dealing with classified information. The relevant criminal (yes, I said criminal) statutes are posted in the article at Hot Air.

There is an update to the article at Hot Air that concludes:

Update: There are a few people wondering whether the “TPs” (talking points”) in question in this thread were classified in the first place. There are a couple points to remember in that context:

  • Unclassified material doesn’t need to be transmitted by secure fax; if the material wasn’t classified, Sullivan would have had them faxed normally.
  • Ordering aides to remove headers to facilitate the transmission over unsecured means strongly suggests that the information was not On top of that, removing headers to avoid transmission security would be a violation of 18 USC 793 anyway, which does not require material to be classified — only sensitive to national security.
  • State did leave this document unclassified, but that’s because there isn’t any discussion of what the talking points cover. They redacted the subject headers with B5 and B6 exemptions, invoked to note that the FOIA demand doesn’t cover the material (in their opinion).

Ordering the headings stripped, and Sullivan’s apparent reluctance to work around the secure fax system, makes it all but certain that the material was classified at some level — and Hillary knew it.

I am sharing this information because it is something voters need to be aware of. Do I think this will amount to anything? No. I have become somewhat cynical about enforcing any laws regarding the Clintons. Unless the FBI decides to go against the obvious political biases of the Justice Department, this is not going anywhere. If there is someone in the FBI who has enough ethics and backbone to pursue this, we might see something, but I doubt it. General Patraeus was charged and convicted of a much lesser infraction and was dealt with. He obviously was not part of the in crowd and did not know where enough of the bodies were buried. The Clintons know where all the bodies are buried and probably helped bury a few of them.

 

Thank God For The Freedom Of Information Act

The government’s Freedom of Information Act website describes the act as follows:

What is FOIA?

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a law that gives you the right to access information from the federal government. It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.

I suspect there are more than a few politicians that really despise this law.

The Washington Examiner reported today that a federal judge has ordered the State Department to release 700 new pages of records from Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State. In November of last year, Jason Leopold of Vice News had filed a FOIA request for virtually all written records from Hillary Clinton and her staff. This was long before we knew anything about her private server.

The article reports:

That FOIA case eventually prompted the court’s high-profile decision to force the State Department to publish all of Clinton’s emails in batches at the end of every month.

Now, the agency could be compelled to prepare thousands of additional documents for release in order to satisfy other aspects of Leopold’s FOIA request, which was narrowed after he and his attorney, Ryan James, sued the State Department.

Remember, Hillary Clinton deleted all of her emails that she deemed personal. This FOIA request may shed some light on how many of those deleted emails were actually personal. Stay tuned. This does not seem to be going away.

The Internal Revenue Service Under President Obama Is Still Political

Fox Business posted an article today about a Government Accountability Office investigation of the Internal Revenue Service. A House Oversight subcommittee will take testimony from IRS commissioner John Koskinen today.

The article reports:

The GAO now says that IRS political “targeting is indeed possible in the audit process” for nonprofits, largely due to poor agency oversight and controls.

“Unfortunately, the IRS has not taken sufficient steps to prevent targeting Americans based on their personal beliefs,” the GAO says.

Specifically, The GAO found that “control deficiencies” do “increase the risk” that the IRS nonprofit unit “could select organizations for examinations in an unfair manner—for example, based on an organization’s religious, educational, political or other views.”

Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, says it has obtained Freedom of Information Act filings that show IRS workers were using donor lists from conservative nonprofit groups to target people for audit. It also says documents detail a October 2010 meeting between former IRS official Lois Lerner, Justice Department officials and the FBI to plan “for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity,” and that the IRS transferred confidential tax returns from 113,000 nonprofit social welfare groups to the FBI “as part of its prosecution effort.” The documents also show “the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress.”

The IRS is a very obvious example of a government agency out of control. We need to revise our tax system so that the IRS is no longer necessary. The IRS is a descendant of  the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue, established in The Revenue Act of 1862 as part of a temporary war-time tax plan. The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1913) allowed Congress to levy an income tax.

It is time to seriously consider a flat tax or a value-added tax.

 

How Naive Do You Have To Be To Believe This?

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted an article today about the latest twists and turns on Hillary Clinton’s private server and private emails. A few months ago, Mrs. Clinton explained to America that she never used her private email server for classified emails. Some of us were skeptical about that statement because, as Secretary of State, a lot of her emails would be at least confidential, but that was her story. Now that many of her emails have been made public (how did that happen when she erased the server? Did only the emails that would not be seriously damaging survive?)

The article reminds us:

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton received information on her private email server that has now been classified about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi.

The email in question, forwarded to Clinton by her deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, relates to reports of arrests in Libya of possible suspects in the attack.

…The information was not classified at the time the email was sent but was upgraded from “unclassified” to “secret” on Friday at the request of the FBI, according to State Department officials. They said 23 words of the Nov. 18, 2012, message were redacted from the day’s release of 296 emails totaling 896 pages to protect information that could damage foreign relations.

Because the information was not classified at the time the email was sent, no laws were violated, but Friday’s redaction shows that Clinton received sensitive information on her unsecured personal server.

…QUESTION: Were you ever — were you ever specifically briefed on the security implications of using — using your own email server and using your personal address to email with the president?

CLINTON: I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.

Note the statement that says the information was not classified at the time. The author of an email determines its classification. Why did the author of the emails that are now classified change their status?

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. The article includes a very interesting email exchange between Hillary Clinton and Jacob Sullivan. One email includes a second email address (after the existence of a second email address was denied).

The article concludes:

Note the e-mail address on this message — not the hdr22 address that the Clintons have insisted was the only one used by Hillary, but the hrod17 address that got exposed a few days ago. In this e-mail, it looks like Hillary used this address for her more political issues, although without looking at the whole record, it would be difficult to establish that kind of a pattern. This does show, though, that Hillary understood the significance of the collapse of that false narrative, and got her State Department staff to do pre-emptive oppo research on her behalf.

Don’t forget that this is just the first release of material. We will likely see more problems along the same lines, and that may or may not include issues of classification.

Changing The Law For Political Convenience

USA Today posted an article today about White House plans to remove a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act.

The article reports:

The White House said the cleanup of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the transparency law. The office handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails.

But the timing of the move raised eyebrows among transparency advocates, coming on National Freedom of Information Day and during a national debate over the preservation of Obama administration records. It’s also Sunshine Week, an effort by news organizations and watchdog groups to highlight issues of government transparency.

Amazing. Historically, the Office of Administration has responded to FOIA requests.

The article reports:

In 2009, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the Office of Administration was not subject to the FOIA, “because it performs only operational and administrative tasks in support of the president and his staff and therefore, under our precedent, lacks substantial independent authority.”

The appeals court ruled that the White House was required to archive the e-mails, but not release them under the FOIA. Instead, White House e-mails must be released under the Presidential Records Act — but not until at least five years after the end of the administration.

In a notice to be published in Tuesday’s Federal Register, the White House says it’s removing regulations on how the Office of Administration complies with Freedom of Information Act Requests based on “well-settled legal interpretations.”

The White House has stated that there will be no 30-day comment period on this change, and thus the change will be final.

I understand that sometimes security needs require that information be kept from the public. However, we live in a representative republic. The government represents us. The American people have every right to know the details of what is going on in our government. We need more sunshine in our government–not more secrecy.

Amoral vs. Immoral

According to the ConstitutionCenter.org:

If there is a lesson in all of this it is that our Constitution is neither a self-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attention and devotion of all citizens. There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The brevity of that response should not cause us to under-value its essential meaning: democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.

Somehow we have not done as good a job of keeping our republic as we might have. The recent election was a ray of hope, but we have a long way to go to get back to the government our Founding Fathers envisioned.

Fox News is reporting:

The Justice Department released nearly 65,000 pages of subpoenaed documents related to the DOJ’s botched gunrunning sting, after a federal judge overruled the Obama administration’s decision to withhold the records by invoking executive privilege. The program, which targeted Mexican gun cartels, came under scrutiny after weapons involved in the operation were connected to the killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in 2010.

“Issa and his idiot cronies never gave a damn about this when all that was happening was that thousands of Mexicans were being killed with guns from our country,” Holder wrote to members of his staff in April 2011, after Issa threatened to subpoena a Federal Firearms Licensee witness to testify on the investigation. “All they want to do — in reality — is cripple ATF and suck up to the gun lobby,” he continued, referring to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the branch of the Justice Department that was in charge of the gunrunning operation.

“Politics at its worst — maybe the media will get it,” Holder’s email added.

It is obvious from that statement that Eric Holder did not believe he had done anything wrong. There is no acknowledgement that running guns to Mexico might be illegal or immoral.

According to the dictionary:

amoral – lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something

immoral – not conforming to accepted standards of morality

Somehow we have morphed from the representative republic created by the U.S. Constitution to a country ruled by a bunch of elite political class who can no longer distinguish between right and wrong. If we do not remedy this situation in 2016, we will lose our republic.

Also, please note that the documents released were released on the eve of the election in the hopes that no one would pay attention to them.