Obama Administration Under Siege From 3 Huge Scandals: Here’s Why It Could All Come Crashing Down

Three revelations have come together like an avalanche. First, there was a Benghazi hearing that proved beyond any reasonable doubt that this administration is feckless, dishonest, and cravenly politicized. But in its aftermath on Friday, an executive branch information dump dropped another bombshell: the IRS does indeed target and intimidate conservative groups.

This appalling admission from a senior IRS official was obviously meant to slide into the news cycle and dissipate over the weekend. This unseemly public relations gambit has become a hallmark of the Obama approach to all issues, regardless of their importance to the nation. Deny or delay, spin and win.

And, to the discredit of our electorate, it has worked--until perhaps now.

As the country was still reeling from the gut-wrenching testimony of three Benghazi whistleblowers and the IRS mea culpa, yet another log was thrown onto the bonfire of the Obama administration's credibility. Yesterday the Associated Press broke a news story that Obama's Justice Departmentcollected phone data on dozens of AP reporters as part of a national security leak investigation.

Such sweeping intrusion upon a news organization's privacy--exposing all its sources and chilling all speech in the process--makes a mockery of the Constitution's guarantee of not "abridging the freedom of speech." We can now add the First Amendment to the butcher's bill of Obama administration overreach and nascent autocracy.

These three scandals have encircled the Obama administration. They threaten to turn the President's second term into an ongoing partisan dogfight as the GOP pushes for answers that could trigger investigations, resignations--yes, possibly even impeachment, depending on what is found.

Here's a brief rundown of the current debacles facing Obama:

1) IRS as a Political Weapon

The IRS singled out and harassed conservative political groups, including during the election year of 2012. The mere mention of the IRS understandably sends a jolt of anxiety through most Americans, so the implications of this conduct for Tea Party and other conservative groups are obvious. This was the worst kind of dirty politics, and an affront to even the most basic trust in government.

While the IRS admitted this egregious conduct, already there have been lies peddled about the depth and scope of this malfeasance. At first we were told that the breaches were limited to low-level civil servants in a few field offices. But that was also false, as we now know Washington DC-based IRS officials were involved too.

The familiar script from Obama and his phalanx of public relations protectors in the White House--that the IRS abuses are not political, and only those who want answers have any political motivations--sounds increasingly obtuse, and pathetic. All the obfuscation on these issues come from the same direction, and benefit the same side of the political aisle.

And ultimately, incompetence and ignorance are poor excuses for a chief executive. The president can only claim he didn't know what his agencies were up to so many times before someone asks the President that all important question- what would you say, you do here?

2) Frontal Assault on the First Amendment

If a free press is the foundation upon which representative government is built, the Obama administration has allowed the Department of Justice to take a sledgehammer to it. The wholesale investigation of a major news outlet like the Associated Press undermines the intent and spirit of laws meant to promote the discourse necessary for democracy.

And this sets a very dangerous precedent. Unknown to much of the public, there is no special exception for the media to publish classified government information, nor are there hard-and-fast statutory constraints on calling members of the press to divulge their sources under pressure of subpoena. If Obama's DOJ can do this once, there is no reason they can't make it standard operating procedure. That would mean bye-bye, fourth estate.

Until now, the federal government has been generally aware of the tension that exists between national security and the First Amendment. Not this administration. Leakers, at least the ones not authorized from the White House itself, are punished severely.

At this early stage, it seems likely the Obama administration recognized that, despite its loud proclamations of outrage, no arrests have been made over the string of national security leaks over the past two years. In order to make it look like they take all leaks seriously, and to send a message to any prospective whistleblowers, Obama officials probably decided to go all in after one unauthorized leaker without the benefit of White House connections. That frenzied effort may have led to the unprecedented, secret seizure of Associated Press records.

3) Benghazi Lies Laid Bare

While the audacity of hyper-partisanship from Obama is jarring, it's not shocking. So much about this administration, and for so long, has been venal, petty, and undignified. The most recent iteration of the Benghazi hearings solidified those feelings and left even the most ardent administration supporter defending the indefensible. But many questions remain:

Who made up the story about the YouTube video? Was Hillary Clinton incapable of calling her own employees to find out what happened? Where was President Obama during the 8-hour attack? What is being done to bring the attackers to justice? These are just some of the unknowns that require continued investigation despite the administration's efforts at stonewalling.

It's impossible to tell at this point what the consequences of these scandals will be for the Obama administration. To be sure, more information on the IRS targeting, DOJ snooping on journalists, and Benghazi is certain to come out. And while it will be damning overall, we can't yet tell whether the sum total will be an ironclad implication of President Obama or his cabinet.

But if this administration can get away with using federal agencies to stifle political dissent, harassing and spying on journalists, and lying about the origins, actions, and aftermath of a terrorist attack, America is no longer worthy of the Constitution left to us by the Founders.

China tightens grip on discourse, ideology

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese authorities have shut down or frozen the microblog accounts of several prominent liberal intellectuals and harassed rights lawyers lobbying against unofficial "black jails," underlining the determination of the country's new leadership to control dissent even as it vows to root out corruption.

The moves over the last few days occurred around the time officials announced that a senior official was being investigated for graft, months after a prominent journalist accused him of wrongdoing. The probe against Liu Tienan, deputy chairman ofChina's economic planning agency, was heralded by the Chinese press as proof that the battle against corruption is best fought when authorities allow public participation.

"The authorities and the people combined their strengths in this case, and it is an encouragement to the public's power in fighting corruption," said a state-run daily, the Beijing News, in a commentary.

The government issued a defense of its human-rights policies in a report Tuesday, outlining progress made in improving health, welfare and other living standards — a key measure the government uses in its definition of rights. The report said China takes measures to ensure the "citizens' right to know and right to be heard."

But the authoritarian government also has shown an unwavering intent to clamp down on anyone who seeks to publicly pressure it into social or political change. The message appears to be that if any reform is on the agenda, the Communist Party will push it through on its own terms.

"The controls are tighter than ever," said Li Cheng, an expert on China's elite politics at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. "The challenges are greater, so the suppression is escalating."

Small groups of activists have been detained in Beijing and other cities for holding banners calling for officials to publicly declare their assets — a key anti-graft measure that the government has been reluctant to implement. One activist, Liu Ping, has been accused of inciting subversion, a vaguely worded charge frequently used to suppress dissidents.

Authorities are also maintaining a years-long effort to quash legal activism.

On Monday, several rights lawyers attempting to visit one of China's unofficial detention centers — also known as "black jails" — in the southwestern city of Ziyang were beaten by unidentified men, said Beijing attorney Li Heping, who was contacted by one of the lawyers.

The efforts to police discourse are also being ramped up in the Chinese blogosphere, where users often challenge the government's version of events and its control over information.

Over the weekend, authorities apparently removed all microblog accounts belonging to the writer Hao Qun, better known by his pen name Murong Xuecun, from four different sites. His subsequent efforts to set up new accounts have been blocked, he said.

No explanation was provided for the shutdown of his accounts on the popular Sina Corp. platform, Weibo, and three other microblogging sites, Hao said. He said his Weibo account had about 4 million followers.

"The ruling party is losing in the field of public opinion, which is threatening its legitimacy," Hao said. "Now, they must exert tighter control, and that's why they have gone on the offense in public opinion."

The blog closure could have been related to Hao's recent post of a two-line verse critical of the party's authoritarian rule, or his posts criticizing the freezing of a microblog belonging to He Bing, an outspoken, liberal professor at the China University of Political Science and Law.

In a rare move, the official China Internet Network Information Center explained in state media reports Friday that He's account had been suspended because he was "intentionally spreading rumors."

The professor has issued a statement protesting the suspension as being illegal. "It is every citizen's responsibility to unswervingly promote a government that rules by law," He said.

The ratcheting up of controls on Chinese microblog platforms — targeting verified accounts of well-known opinion leaders with hundreds of thousands of followers — appears designed to send warnings that China's leaders will not give ground to its political critics, no matter how popular they might be.

President Xi Jinping has made fighting official corruption a priority, and the investigation against Liu had suggested that the government was willing to allow the public to play a role.

The investigation was foreshadowed by public allegations against him five months ago by Luo Changping, deputy chief editor of Caijing magazine. The official probe against Liu was announced Sunday, and on Tuesday state media reported that Liu has been removed from his posts as part of investigations into "serious disciplinary violations."

At the same time, there are concerns that the government is cracking down on the kind of public discourse that could help expose official misdeeds.

Rumors have begun to circulate online that party authorities issued a directive to some college campuses that seven topics are now barred from class discussion, including press freedom, judicial independence, civil rights, civil society and the party's historic mistakes.

The rumor could not be verified. Several law and politics professors contacted by the AP said they had not directly seen or heard about such an instruction, nicknamed the "Seven Don't Mentions." Several academics said it would be impossible to enforce.

He Weifang, a legal scholar at Peking University, said no topic has been off-limits in his classroom.

"I can speak of everything. There is nothing that cannot be discussed," he said. "If the law does not talk about civil rights, there's no law, because the law is about protecting one's rights."

Veteran journalist Gao Yu said that an edict, or the rumors of one, could be related to a broader ideological strategy laid out by the party's new leadership in an unpublicized meeting earlier this year that identifies seven key "problems" propaganda officials should tackle. She said they include the concept of democracy and constitutionalism, civil society, neoliberalism and the Western concept of the press.

The strategy was laid out in a document issued by the general office of the party's central committee, the contents of which were briefly leaked online, Gao said. She said she verified details of the document with retired, high-ranking propaganda officials.

Measures recommended in the document include efforts to "better broadcast" the party's voice and "strengthen the party's leadership of the media," Gao said.

Gao expressed concern that the new leadership was veering toward the more authoritarian era of Mao Zedong that lasted into the 1970s.

"We can see that the party currently faces a lot of problems, from environment pollution to the income gap," Gao said. "But this marks a big step backwards. Who would have known that they are going back to Mao Zedong's era?"

___

How big is the IRS scandal?

IRS employees used a couple different sets of criteria to scrutinize tax-exempt applicants, and some look pretty bad

Across the political spectrum, there's a pretty broad bipartisan consensus that the Internal Revenue Service's targeted scrutiny of conservative applicants for 501(c)4 nonprofit status is a big deal that needs to be investigated. Lois G. Lerner, the head of the Cincinnati-based IRS division that oversees tax-exemptorganizations, got the ball rolling on Friday when she apologized for her division's flagging of groups with "Tea Party," "Patriot," or "9/12" in the title. But the scandal is bigger than that.

How big? The IRS inspector general will release an audit sometime this week, but congressional aides gave several media outlets a draft of the audit. According to the document, IRS employees in theCincinnati office used several troublesome phrases to single out 501(c)4 applicants for review — including, at various points between 2010 and May 2012, groups that "criticize how the country is being run," aim to educate Americans "on the Constitution and Bill of Rights," and lobby to "make America a better place to live."

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In order to avoid paying taxes under section 501(c)4 of the tax code, groups are supposed to have "social welfare" as their primary goal. And while advocating for issues and legislation can be a secondary goal, outright politicking is forbidden, especially for individual candidates. After the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in January 2010 allowed 501(c)4 groups to raise unlimited amounts of money, the IRS was flooded with applications.

Any group that applies for tax-exempt status has "opened themselves up to scrutiny" by the IRS, Loyola Law School professor Ellen Aprill tells The Washington Post. "It's part of their job to look for organizations that may be more likely to have too much campaign intervention." Where the IRS appears to have flubbed here is that "it is important to try to make these criteria as politically neutral as possible."

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Probably the biggest question is who knew about this, and when. On June 29, 2011, according to the inspector general's timeline, Lerner discovered at a meeting that her staff was scrutinizing groups based on partisan-sounding criteria, like groups with "Tea Party" in the name or those focused on government debt and spending. She "raised concerns" and "instructed that the criteria be immediately revised," the report says. And it was.

By July 5, 2011, the criteria had been changed to the more politically neutral "organizations involved with political, lobbying or advocacy for exemptions under 501(c)3 or 501(c)4." Still, "repeated revisions of the lookout list kept lapsing back to the original search," say Jonathan Weisman and Matthew L. Wald in The New York Times. By February 2012, Lerner ordered her office to stop sending applicants requests for more information. And in May 2012, the Cincinnati office finallysettled on flagging "organizations with indicators of significant amounts of political campaign intervention (raising questions as to exempt purpose and/or excess private benefit.)"

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In March 2012, then–IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a House Committee that his agency was absolutely not targeting tax-exempt applicants based on ideology. Shulman was a George W. Bush appointee, and there's no evidence so far that he or anyone else in the IRS' Washington leadership knew about the targeting of conservatives. Is it plausible that some lower-level staffers were making these decisions on their own? Juliet Eilperin explains in The Washington Post:

The staffers in the Cincinnati field office were making high-level decisions on how to evaluate the groups because a decade ago the IRS assigned all applications to that unit. The IRS also eliminated an automatic after-the-fact review process Washington used to conduct such determinations. [Washington Post]

A bedrock principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends....

The IRS insisted emphatically that partisanship had nothing to do with it.... If it was not partisanship, was it incompetence? Stupidity, on a breathtaking scale? At this point, the IRS has lost any standing to determine and report on what exactly happened. Certainly Congress will investigate. [Washington Post]

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The big surprise is the IRS' "clumsy handling of the whole thing," says Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. "And I'm being charitable by calling it 'clumsy.'" The story is "explosive," even if the "evidence suggests this affair probably wasn't quite as outrageous as it seems at first glance." The IRS really was facing a problem: 501(c)4s "have grown like kudzu" and "lots of them really are used primarily as electioneering vehicles," so it makes sense some IRS employees tried to find a shortcut to highlight dubious applications.

But understandable or not, they bungled it horribly, leaving themselves open to equally understandable charges of politicizing the IRS. Conservative groups are as outraged as liberals would be if the Bush-era IRS were flagging groups with "environment" or "progressive" in their names. So even if, as seems likely, this whole thing turns out to have been mostly a misguided scheme cooked up by some too-clever IRS drones, it doesn't matter. Conservatives are right to be outraged and right to demand a full investigation. They suspect there might be more to it, and so would I if the shoe were on the other foot. We need to find out for sure whether this episode was just moronic, or if it had some kind of partisan motivation. [Mother Jones]

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The U.S. government's scandalous approach to truth, privacy, and equality

The Obama administration is under fire this week. And rightfully so.

The government is spying on journalists. The IRS engaged in a covert war against conservatives. And the administration at least bent the truth on Benghazi out of political self-interest.

There is a disease at the heart of American government.

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Let's consider the (almost unbelievable) facts.

For a start, the revelation that AP journalists have been monitored en masse is nothing short of extraordinary. That shared phone lines would be tapped, that a multitude of journalists would have both their personal and professional phones targeted, ought to be truly shocking to all Americans. Our democracy relies upon citizens who are willing to stand in scrutiny of government. The media must be independent of intimidation, threat, or coercion. Our democracy requires these things because without media scrutiny, without questions being asked and answers being demanded, the government can get away with all sorts of malfeasance. The First Amendment is first for a reason.

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Then there's the IRS scandal, in which conservative groups were discriminated against by getting special scrutiny from the feds. Though we don't yet know who authorized this systemic abuse of the tax system, or how this abuse was able to continue unchallenged for so long, we should nonetheless be deeply concerned. This is a modern heir to Nixon's enemies list. It's the most perverse qualification of free speech — a government penalization of lawful ideas due to their subjective content.

Finally, there's Benghazi. Last week, in testimony that was widely scorned as irrelevant before it even began, we learned that the Obama administration's Benghazi statements have held a far too flexible relationship with reality. Supposedly impartial intelligence community talking points somehowmorphed into Obama administration messaging points. The president's truth reeks of political calculation; of a strategy designed to mitigate the domestic political fallout of a terrorist attack abroad.

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Some might argue that these scandals are a combination of unfortunate but otherwise independent circumstances. I disagree.

In the case of Benghazi, the disinterest in truth is absurd and utterly inexcusable. It's obvious that our continued examination of Benghazi is necessary. But listen to the White House and you'd believe that Benghazi was old news; that just concerns are the ramblings of unstable minds.

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These scandals also speak to a government bureaucracy running amok. In a Department of Justice that uses a hammer instead of a scalpel and an IRS that unjustly targets and unlawfully shares the private information of others, our public sector is in deep trouble. Where are the inspector generals? Where were the whistle-blowers? Where is the honorable leadership?

And like it or not, we are all partly to blame.

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By constantly obsessing over politics rather than the health of our government, we've allowed a rot to take root in the American political system. We need to remember that without our scrutiny, without structures that restrain ill intentions and protect national imperatives, without a focus on ideals as well as political ideologies, American democracy will not sustain itself.

We need to pay closer attention to government. And we need to challenge those who say otherwise.

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Eviction fears haunt Haiti camps after attacks

In this April 24, 2013 photo, Darlin Lexima, left, holds his head after seeing the body of Merius Civil on a computer, shown to him by camp leader Elie Joseph Jean-Louis inside Lexima's tent home at Camp Acra in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Lexima, 21, was arrested by police while walking home from a disco club on the same early morning that Civil was arrested, on April 15 while residents at their camp were protesting a raid by motorcyclists who set fire to their homes. Civil's sister says her brother was taking out the trash when he was arrested. Lexima said he later saw Civil in police custody, too dazed to speak. The law firm of Patrice Florvilus, an attorney representing the dead man’s family and other Camp Acra residents, said that it believes Civil died at the Delmas station, and that witnesses reported seeing officers carry a sheet-covered body from the station to a patrol car. (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

In this April 30, 2013 photo, camp leader Elie Joseph Jean-Louis holds up a photograph of the body of Merius Civil after he was allegedly beaten by police during a protest in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Civil was arrested by police early April 15, who according to his sister was taking out the trash, when police stormed the camp as residents were protesting a raid by motorcyclist who set fire to their homes. The band of motorcyclists came to Camp Acra hours after attorney Reynold Georges arrived with a judge and a police officer and told the some 30,000 people who had lost their homes in the 2010 earthquake that they were squatting on his land and had to leave, witnesses said. If they didn't vacate, he said he'd have the place burned down and leveled by bulldozers. (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Attorney Reynold Georgesshowed up with a judge and a police officer on a recent afternoon atCamp Acra, a cluster of tents and plywood shelters scattered across rocky hills dotted with trees in the heart of the Haitian capital.

The lawyer told the camp of some 30,000 people that they were squatting on his land and had to leave, witnesses said. If they didn't vacate, he said he'd have the place burned down and leveled by bulldozers. Camp leader Elie Joseph Jean-Louis said other angry residents, who had lost their homes in a catastrophic 2010 earthquake, fought back by lobbing rocks at Georges and the people he had come with.

The camp residents managed to protect their homes that day but they also brought to life a far-reaching problem.

In the few weeks since the mid-April confrontation, their plight has become a symbol for what many say is the growing use of threats and sometimes outright violence to clear out sprawling displaced person camps, where some 320,000 Haitians still live.

The standoff set off a chain of events that left several shelters burned and a camp resident dead. It occurred a little more than a week before the human rights group Amnesty International issued a report on the jump in camp evictions in Haiti over the past year.

"This terrible event is proof of the consequences of continuing forced evictions in Haiti," Javier Zuniga, a special adviser to Amnesty International, said in a statement about the standoff. "They have been living in camps with appalling living conditions. As if this were not enough, they are threatened with forced evictions and, eventually, made homeless again."

Georges tells a different story. The former senator, whose most famous law client is former dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, denied that he had threatened residents, saying he was only there to show officials what he said was his land.

"If they said that, they are crooks and liars," Georges said of camp residents.

After Amnesty released its report, Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamonthe told The Associated Press that the government of President Michel Martelly was in fact trying to stop the evictions.

The government does not "believe in forced evictions," Lamonthe said. "There are some private owners that do it, but the government itself does not condone that."

Haitians displaced by the earthquake are entitled to special legal protection under the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, which prohibit forced evictions unless necessary to protect the safety and health of those affected. National authorities are responsible for protecting and providing humanitarian assistance to those displaced people.

By all accounts, clearing the camps in a humane way reflects the epic challenge that Haiti still faces more than three years after one of the worst natural disasters in modern history.

The earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and displaced as many as 1.5 million others, a staggering number in a country of 10 million. In its aftermath, settlements such as Acra sprang up around the crowded capital where land runs scarce, with people building shelters with debris, tree branches, salvaged timber, tarps from aid groups and bed sheets. The camps eventually became miniature cities with their own stores, barber shops, bars and churches. About 385 of the settlements are still standing.

Aid groups and officials from Martelly's government say fewer visible encampments and a smaller number of displaced residents are proof Haiti is recovering. But housing advocates worry that many people are actually being evicted with no place to go, at the hands of authorities or people such as Georges who claim to own the land.

Evictions were far more common just after the quake, with the International Organization for Migration calculating that 6,650 people were forced from informal camps during the last six months of 2010.

The practice tapered off, however, with just 279 people evicted in the last six months of 2012, according to the organization.

Now, that number is growing again as private property owners grow impatient to regain their long-occupied land. According to the migration organization, 977 displaced people left the camps through force or threats during the first three months of 2013.

The story is different on public lands, where many displaced people have already moved out of after the government offered rent subsidies elsewhere.

Earlier this year, about 700 people were kicked out of another encampment on private land in the Port-au-Prince district of Carrefour after police fired warning shots and a judge ordered them to leave.

People from yet more camps have said they've fled their temporary homes after fires tore through the settlements in the middle of the night or in some cases when police destroyed their tents or lean-tos with machetes. But unlike Camp Acra, no one in those cases was reportedly killed by the authorities.

That bloodshed has thrust Camp Acra into the heart of the debate, with much of the ire focusing on Georges and his infamous client.

Duvalier, the ex-dictator, returned to Haiti from exile in 2011 and is fighting off human rights charges stemming from years of brutal rule. Camp residents say the former strongman is also among several Camp Acra visitors who have claimed ownership to the land.

Although most of the area is believed to belong to the government, as well as a small portion to Haiti's influential Acra family, even humanitarian groups specializing in housing issues aren't certain who the owners are. Land disputes in Haiti are often settled with bags of cash, guns, machetes or arson.

Residents say Georges' visit was only the start of their problems.

Hours later, an unidentified band on motorcycles raided the camp while residents slept, setting fire to seven makeshift homes, according to an Amnesty investigation. Residents who woke to the smell of smoke quickly doused the flames with buckets of water.

Over the long night, several hundred residents walked down the hill to a police station to report the raid, but the officers refused to help, said camp leader Jean-Louis.

"The police said they didn't have gas for their cars," he said.

Angry camp residents protested by lighting a bonfire of tires and other trash and blocking Delmas 33, a major thoroughfare.

It was around the same time that the tensions turned deadly.

At around 5 a.m., one camp resident, Merius Civil, left his shelter to throw out the trash, just as police officers from the station stormed the camp, his sister Anele said.

The officers arrested Civil as well as neighbor Darlin Lexima, said Patrice Florvilus, an attorney representing the dead man's family and other Camp Acra residents. Lexima said he later saw Civil in police custody, too dazed to speak.

"I saw that his face was bashed in, his nose was bashed in, and he had marks on his body," Lexima said.

Florvilus' law firm said that it believes Civil died at the Delmas station, and that witnesses reported seeing officers carry a sheet-covered body from the station to a patrol car.

Police Inspector Jean-Faustin Salomon offered a different account, saying Civil died at a hospital. He also said a preliminary report showed neighbors beat Civil and Lexima because they didn't participate in the protest.

"A good man has left the world," sister Anele said sitting on a bucket in the doorway of her brother's shelter. "Now that he's dead I want to know why."

For the Rev. Waler Baptiste, a Camp Acra pastor, the settlement came under attack for a simple reason: Haiti wants to rid itself of displaced people without giving them anywhere to go.

"People have been trying to remove us to take back their land," Baptiste said. "The government doesn't care about us. Whoever can take advantage of us will try to take advantage of us."