Showing posts with label FOIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FOIA. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

FOIA lawsuit reveals Biden used taxpayer money to fly 320,000 illegal aliens directly from their home countries into the US in 2023

Use of a cell phone app has allowed for the near undetected arrival by air of 320,000 aliens with no legal rights to enter the United States.

It comes after a controversy over a 2022 transportation program in which the administration used taxpayers money to move migrants throughout the country on overnight flights.

Included in details of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit first reported by Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies found Biden's CBP approved the latest secretive flights that transported hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from foreign countries into at least 43 different American airports from January through December 2023.

The whole thing is here.

Wednesday, July 6, 2022

This is as good a day as any to remember that Ben Bernanke's Fed under Obama bailed out the banksters and hung 6.5 million homeowners out to dry

 Bloomberg, August 21, 2011, here:

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley, got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress. ...
Homeowners are more than 30 days past due on their mortgage payments on 4.38 million properties in the U.S., and 2.16 million more properties are in foreclosure, representing a combined $1.27 trillion of unpaid principal, estimates Jacksonville, Florida-based Lender Processing Services Inc. ...
Congress required the disclosure after the Fed rejected requests in 2008 from the late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman and other media companies that sought details of its loans under the Freedom of Information Act. After fighting to keep the data secret, the central bank released unprecedented information about its discount window and other programs under court order in March 2011.


 

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

FOIA'd Fauci email shows his top people informed him 31 Jan 2020 that the coronavirus looked engineered and was inconsistent with evolutionary theory

In other words, it might have come out of a lab, not out of nature by crossing from bats to some unknown animal intermediary found at the Wuhan wet market.

 



Monday, March 18, 2019

Wow, WaPo's Glenn Kessler almost becomes Rush Limbaugh, doubts Bernie's $1 trillion bailout claim

If anything, Bernie underestimates the scope of the secret loans during the financial crisis ten years ago. The Freedom of Information Act inquiry which brought them to light went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ben Bernanke only relented at the last second.

Discount Window lending behind the scenes during the crisis period soared into the multi-trillions of dollars by the time it ended in 2010 while everyone was fixated on the shiny object known as TARP ($700 billion, about a tenth the size of the generally accepted figure of $7.7 trillion). That's probably why TARP was undertaken to be honest: Oh look! A deer!

The DW loans were made to all kinds of entities for whom normal lending had disappeared. In too many cases very questionable collateral was put up. The loans were ultra-cheap, at rates unavailable to homeowners defaulting on their comparatively much more expensive mortgages because they had lost their jobs. Many of the loans rolled over and over and over again for protracted periods to keep the entities from going under, while Bush & Co. and then Obama & Co. did nothing for Joe Six-pack. Many millions lost their homes while businesses which should have gone bankrupt did not.

Hard to believe this clueless so-called fact checker still has a job.


Sunday, June 4, 2017

Judicial Watch obtains new Clinton emails involving Huma contradicting Clinton's claim to have turned over everything

From the story here:

Judicial Watch says it obtained the documents after suing the State Department for its failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in March 2015. The FOIA request sought “All emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-state.gov email address.”

Judicial Watch notes that the 115 Clinton email exchanges were not among the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton previously handed over to the State Department, contradicting her claim that she had turned over all of her government emails.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Hillary aide Patrick Kennedy at State Dept. tried to bribe FBI to reclassify Benghazi document

From the story here:

We have here a clear pattern of corruption that makes Watergate look like child’s play. Hillary’s aide, Patrick Kennedy, tried to bribe the FBI to change the classification of a Benghazi document so as to enable Hillary’s false claim that she didn’t send or receive classified information on her illegal home server. The FBI, to its credit, refused. (James Comey wasn’t involved at that stage.)

Hillary’s aide then asked whether the FBI would be saying anything publicly about the classification issue. Once assured that the FBI would be silent, Hillary took the stage and alleged publicly, and falsely, that she never used her illegal home server to send or receive classified information. One wonders, too, how many critically important documents have been “archive[d] … in the basement of DoS [the State Department] never to be seen again,” based on bogus FOIA exemptions.

Donald Trump has his faults, but Hillary Clinton is far too corrupt to serve as President of the United States.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

Documents released last week implicate Cheryl Mills in covering up Hillary's private e-mail server

From the Daily Beast here:

The top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was told in late 2012 that a non-profit watchdog group had requested information about Clinton’s email, including the number of accounts she used, according to documents released Wednesday. ... [The aide] was alerted to the request, from the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), via an email from a State Department spokesman, Brock Johnson, on Dec. 11, 2012. [The aide] was told that the group had filed a “significant” request seeking “records sufficient to show the number of email accounts of or associated with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton…” The aide, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and other Clinton advisers knew at the time that the secretary was using a private email system to conduct official business. But despite the information request, the State Department told the group that it had found no “responsive” records. “This is evidence that Cheryl Mills covered up Hillary Clinton’s email system,” Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that sued for information about that original 2012 request, said in a statement. “She was aware of the [Freedom of Information Act] request about Clinton’s email accounts and allowed a response to go out that was a plain lie. And you can bet if Cheryl Mills knew about this inquiry, then Hillary Clinton did, too.”

Friday, March 18, 2016

USA Today: Congress had a right to access Hillary Clinton’s emails as part of their investigation regardless of motive


Nevertheless, members of Congress, like reporters and the public, had a right to access Clinton’s emails as part of their investigation regardless of motive. And were it not for the dogged partisanship of Republicans and the actions of a hacker, Clinton’s private email system might never have come to light.

Nine days after the Benghazi attack, Congress asked for any State Department emails related to the subject. It took two years before Congress was given access to a single email from Clinton’s private account. By then, four House committees and two Senate committees had already issued their reports on the issue.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Obama State Department stonewalls everybody on FOIA requests

Story here. No mention that this is the State Department's long record of behavior under Hillary Clinton, let alone under her successor John F. Kerry, who served in Viet Nam.

At least the judge is as pissed as he can be.

I guess they are too busy over there at State securing Obama's legacy, and covering up Benghazi:


Sunday, March 8, 2015

Moochelle and Barack have milked the taxpayers well over $40 million for vacations with two years left to go

Moochelle with mother and daughters on safari in June 2011 
As reported here, where there appear to be some lacunae involving the extracurricular activities enjoyed while on official trips:

"Costs are hard to pin down, and most come as a result of Freedom of Information Act suits from taxpayer watchdog Judicial Watch which pegged the Obama-Biden vacation tab at $40 million last year [2014]. That was before first lady and daughters took spring break in China, and the first family's annual summer vacation in Martha's Vineyard, Christmas in Hawaii, and this year's holidays [2015]."

Sunday, February 22, 2015

WaPo worries about Jeb's wife's spending of personal money, totally ignores Michelle Obama's marathon milking of the taxpayers

It took a FOIA request of the most transparent government ever to find out that Moochelle Obama milked the taxpayers for a $250,000 vacation in Ireland in 2013, but the Washington Post is all abuzz tonight over Jeb Bush's wife's personal spending on jewelry.

Keith Koffler reported here in April 2014 about Moochelle:

"First Lady Michelle Obama’s egregious use of the G-8 Summit in Northern Ireland last June to stage a luxury, touristy side-trip for herself and her daughters to Dublin cost taxpayers at least $251,161 according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch.

"But the cost is almost certainly much higher. For example, a separate Air Force jet that appeared to be Air Force Two, which costs more than $10,000 an hour to fly, was dispatched to Ireland to handle Michelle’s vacation-related travel. This cost is not included in the figures provided to Judicial Watch."

But WaPo's story, "Documents show the expensive tastes of Jeb Bush’s low-key wife", here, only has this to stay about the extravagant and unethical spending of President Obama's wife:

"First lady Michelle Obama drew fire for wearing a pair of sneakers that cost upward of $500 when she went to bag groceries at a food bank in 2009."

Saturday, March 10, 2012

The Opposite of Transparency: Obama Regime Claims GSEs Exempt from FOIA

From an editorial on the subject here:

Judicial Watch sought those documents because the FHFA claimed in a separate lawsuit against the 17 firms that losses on securities were caused by material misrepresentations the firms made to Fannie and Freddie. Finance industry experts claim Fannie and Freddie officials were more than sufficiently knowledgeable about the mortgage industry to realize the risks involved in such securities. By putting all Fannie and Freddie documents about such transactions beyond the reach of FOIA requesters like Judicial Watch, the Obama administration is making it difficult, if not impossible, for independent evaluators to determine who bears responsibilities for the losses [$150 billion and climbing] now being covered by taxpayers.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Net Return On Massive Secret Loans To Biggest Banks By Federal Reserve Was Barely 1 Percent During Subprime Meltdown Between 2007 and 2009

Bloomberg has the story here.

This while home buyers in the US in 2007 with excellent credit were paying 6 percent or more for 30 year fixed rate mortgages.

Here's the propaganda line from the article:

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages.

But the depression wasn't averted, no matter how much lipstick Bloomberg tries to put on this pig:

While the 18-month U.S. recession that ended in June 2009 after a 5.1 percent contraction in gross domestic product was nowhere near the four-year, 27 percent decline between August 1929 and March 1933, banks and the economy remain stressed.

Instead of "banks and the economy remain stressed," how about, "it was a depression nevertheless"? We now know thanks to revised GDP numbers released by the government in its annual revision in July that GDP went slightly negative for the first time in 2008, followed by a substantial negative GDP report for 2009. Two back to back years of negative GDP are a depression, just as surely as two back to back quarters of negative GDP are a recession. Clearly not the Great Depression, but a depression nonetheless.

Yet we still can't bring ourselves to say it.

As usual, the banks are ground zero for depression, whether it's under the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 which was meant to prevent booms and busts, or not:

Data gleaned from 29,346 pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and from other Fed databases of more than 21,000 transactions make clear for the first time how deeply the world’s largest banks depended on the U.S. central bank to stave off cash shortfalls. Even as the firms asserted in news releases or earnings calls that they had ample cash, they drew Fed funding in secret, avoiding the stigma of weakness.

Why do you think there's been such a flight to cash ever since, first by the banks, then by the corporations, and now by the citizenry, always the last to know?

Nothing has changed, and nothing has been fixed. 

Debt that can be repaid might be. What cannot be repaid won't be. Not ever. And that's what depressions in real capitalist economies are for: quick, dirty and nasty little episodes of failure which reset the chess board. Except we can't seem to accept that because we're not really a capitalist society anymore, which is why this sorry tale keeps dragging on.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Why Obama Revealed His Certificate of Live Birth This Week

Because he wanted to divert attention from a different, unavoidable, embarrassing revelation.

What revelation is that?

The revelation disclosed here as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request.

Namely, that the narrative Obama has been telling about the first two years of his life is a lie. His mother and father never lived together with Barack Jr. as a family. She went to Washington State. Obama Sr. stayed in Hawaii and left for Harvard before the future president turned one, not when he was two. The marriage itself might be in question.

Everyone is consumed by the release of the Certificate of Live Birth, but not with the truth behind it.

Obama is skillfully playing this out, no doubt on the advice of counsel, to divert, dissemble and distract.

See the discussion here.  

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Bush's DHS Planned to Test Mobile Scanning of Pedestrians

The creeping American fascist police state may have begun in earnest under Bush, but Obama is doing nothing to stop it. There are mobile scanning vans in the possession of the federal government right now. And you'd know nothing about it from Obama, either, but for a Freedom of Information Act request by EPIC.

Forbes has the story, here:

Newly uncovered documents show that as early as 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has been planning pilot programs to deploy mobile scanning units that can be set up at public events and in train stations, along with mobile x-ray vans capable of scanning pedestrians on city streets.

The non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on Wednesday published documents it obtained from the Department of Homeland Security showing that from 2006 to 2008 the agency planned a study of new anti-terrorism technologies that EPIC believes raise serious privacy concerns. ...


“When you’re out walking on the street, it’s not acceptable for an officer to come up and search your bag without probable cause or consent. ... This is the digital equivalent” [said an attorney for EPIC]. ...

[S]ecurity contractor American Sciences & Engineering ... sold more than 500 of its backscatter x-ray vans to governments around the world, including some deployed in the US. Those vans are capable of scanning people, the inside of cars and even  the internals of some buildings while rolling down public streets. ... [T]he van scans do penetrate clothing, and EPIC president Marc Rotenberg called them “one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

The Forbes story has links to the documents obtained under the FOIA request.

For a guy who won't disclose any of his academic or medical records, Obama sure does think he has the right to invade your privacy, against your will and without your knowledge.

Mubarak should have resigned? Gaddafi? I say Obama should resign, NOW.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Here's Why Your Government Stalled on the FOIA for Two Years

Because the American taxpayer has bailed out the whole world, that's why. We're now the biggest suckers in history.

And the following information wouldn't have been released either, except for the Dodd-Frank legislation:

Citigroup ($2.2 trillion)

Merrill Lynch ($2.1 trillion)

Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion)

Bear Stearns ($960 billion)

Bank of America ($887 billion)

Goldman Sachs ($615 billion)

JPMorgan Chase ($178 billion)

Wells Fargo ($154 billion)

Swiss bank UBS ($165 billion)

Deutsche Bank ($97 billion)

Royal Bank of Scotland ($92 billion)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack ($1.25 trillion)

General Electric ($16 billion)

Harley-Davidson Inc. ($2.3 billion)

Caterpillar Inc. dealers ($733 million)

The story from yahoo.com is totally irresponsible for saying the Fed didn't take part in an appeal to the Supreme Court with a group of commercial banks seeking to prevent the disclosure of the names of institutions receiving emergency loans in 2008. Hell, the Fed appealed all the way up the line until it came time to appeal to the Supreme Court or comply with two (2! II! Zwei!) orders from lower courts to disclose the information. And we still don't have that.

Has anyone painted a clearer picture of the bankruptcy of our largest institutions and industries?

Only a fool would keep his money in a bank now.

Hell, only a fool would keep money.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Major Banks Appeal Federal Reserve Disclosure Ruling to Supreme Court

But the Federal Reserve did not join in the appeal, apparently in order to enhance the standing of the banks in the case.

At stake are the details of $2 trillion in Federal Reserve assistance to financial institutions beginning in late 2007 and running through the crisis of 2008, details which the Fed does not want to reveal to protect the institutions which received the dough.

Nevermind it's your money.

Down with the Fed!

Reuters.com has the story here.

Monday, October 25, 2010

US Treasury Still Stonewalling FOIA Request on Citigroup Guarantees

Twenty months and counting, including a non-response response on what securities $300 billion of taxpayer monies guarantee. It's our money! We have a right to know!

And tomorrow it will be the Federal Reserve's turn to continue the stonewalling on a separate FOIA request involving $2 trillion in taxpayer guarantees for financial institutions from two years ago, and we still don't know even though the courts have ordered the Federal Reserve to comply with the requests. When they finally do, how much do you want to bet it will be a similar non-response response?

No wonder the people want the Federal Reserve abolished, and the Treasury to burn down.

Bloomberg, which supports the FOIA requests, has the full story here.