by Ken Blackwell • Townhall
A year ago the Department of Justice was finishing up eight long years of a scandal-plagued term under Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, as President Obama’s political arm. A year later, the department has done a complete 180 degree turn back to upholding – instead of undermining – the rule of law, and restoring law and order.
The last thing we remember about the Obama Justice Department was the unseemly, secret meeting between General Lynch and former President Bill Clinton while his wife Hillary, then running for President, was under criminal investigation by the FBI. Today, DOJ has back on track; fixed on its mission to keep the public safe and pursue justice.
For conservatives especially, the Department of Justice under the leadership of Jeff Sessions, has been a breath of fresh air. Continue reading
By Katie Pavlich • The Hill
On Wednesday, Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, will raise her right hand in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and swear to tell the whole truth to lawmakers during her nomination hearing for attorney general of the United States.
Following in the footsteps of Attorney General Eric Holder, Lynch will be forced to tackle a series of complicated, corrupt and highly controversial topics when she takes her seat on Capitol Hill. She will have to make her own case about how to clean up the highly politicized, and often toxic, Department of Justice.
Now that Republicans are in charge of the Senate, Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has the subpoena power he needs to dig deeper into scandals ignored by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the previous Democratic leadership — and you can bet he’s planning on getting answers to unanswered questions. Continue reading
The Obama administration has tarnished nearly every major federal agency.
by Victor Davis Hanson • National Review
Many have described the Obama departure from the 70-year-old bipartisan postwar foreign policy of the United States as reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s failed 1977–81 tenure. There is certainly the same messianic sense of self, the same naïveté, and the same boasts of changing the nature of America, as each of these presidents was defining himself as against supposedly unpopular predecessors. But the proper Obama comparison is not Carter, but rather Warren G. Harding. By that I mean not that Obama’s scandals have matched Harding’s, but rather that by any fair standard they have now far exceeded them and done far more lasting damage — and without Obama’s offering achievements commensurate with those that occasionally characterized Harding’s brief, failed presidency.
The lasting legacy of Obama will be that he has largely discredited the idea of big government, of which he was so passionate an advocate. Almost every major agency of the federal government, many of them with a hallowed tradition of bipartisan competence, have now been rendered either dysfunctional or politicized — or both — largely because of politically driven appointments of unqualified people, or ideological agendas that were incompatible with the agency’s mission.
The list of scandals is quite staggering. In aggregate, it makes Harding’s Teapot Dome mess seem minor in comparison. Continue reading
by Editorial Board • Investor’s Business Daily
An aide to the attorney general accidentally calls the office of the House Oversight Committee chairman, asking for help in spinning the defense of the agency whose head just said they obey the law when they can.
We have commented many times of the all-too-cozy relationship between the IRS and Democratic members of the House and Senate, with members writing to the agency demanding that specific conservative groups and political action committees they find particularly irritating be subject to the “special scrutiny” that the Tea Party and other conservative and religious groups were subjected to in the ongoing scandal.
Of particular interest to us has been Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., ranking member on Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, who has made every effort to keep the committee from finding out the true extent of IRS corruption and abuse of power in its targeting of conservatives.
As we’ve noted, emails released by Issa, a California Republican, show that Cummings’ Democratic staff had requested information from the IRS’ tax-exempt division, the one headed by Lois Lerner, on True the Vote, a conservative group that monitors polling places for voter fraud and supports the use of voter IDs, something that Cummings opposes. Continue reading
by Michael Graham
“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball.” — President Obama, Wednesday
Question: How many Americans have to be murdered in an al-Qaeda attack on a U.S. consulate before it stops being a “phony” scandal?
Answer: If Barack Obama is president, more than four.
Writers across the spectrum — from the liberal New York Times to the conservative Wall Street Journal — have beaten up on President Obama’s latest “dreadful, cliche-ridden” (James Taranto, wsj.com) speech on economic policy, the second-longest speech of his presidency. Continue reading