11/2/2009
Certificate of Completion awarded to Richard Windsor* by Office of Environmental Information for completing Online Email Records Management Training.
7/28/2010
Lisa Jackson is awarded certificate in recognition of Cybersecurity Awareness.
12/23/2010
Certificate of Completion presented to Richard Windsor for 2010 No FEAR Act Training Module.
Richard Windsor awarded 2010 Certificate of Ethics.
8/22/2011
Richard Windsor receives test score report of 83% for FY11 Cybersecurity Awareness Training.
12/22/2011
Richard Windsor issued Certificate of Ethics for 2011.
6/28/2012
Richard Windsor receives test score report of 90% for the No FEAR Act.
11/5/2012
Richard Windsor awarded Certificate of Ethics for 2012
12/12/2012
Richard Windsor presented Certificate of Completion for 2012 NSI Annual Training
Richard Windsor presented Certificate of Completion for 2012 SCI Annual Refreshing Training.
4/9/2013
EPA acknowledges releasing personal data of private farmers and ranchers.
5/28/2013
Lisa Jackson is hired by Apple to be the company's Senior Environmental Advisor
6/4/2013
Report: EPA accused of targeting Conservative groups. The Environmental Protection Agency is accused of trying to charge conservative groups fees while largely exempting liberal groups. The fees applied to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests -- allegedly, the EPA waived them for liberal groups far more often than it did for conservative ones.
6/6/2013
Bipartisan group of 24 Senators demand answers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on why it leaked the personal data of more than 80,000 farms and livestock facilities to environmental groups.
*Richard Windsor does not exist.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Friday, June 7, 2013
Civis Analytics
civis is a noun that means citizen
Civis Analytics is a Big Data analytics firm based in Chicago, IL and Washington, DC. We help companies, non-profits, and campaigns leverage their data to develop smarter strategy, make better decisions, and build stronger, data-driven organizations.
OUR COMPANY was born in a large backroom of the Obama 2012 re-election headquarters.
5/30/13 --- Bloomberg
Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big Data Brains
5/30/13 --- National Journal
Google's Eric Schmidt Is Pouring 'Millions' Into Progressive Big Data
5/31/13 --- Datanami
Obama Big Data Team Reforms as Civis Analytics
5/31/13 --- Bloomberg
Obama's Data Team Totally Schooled Gallup
6/3/13 --- Research
Obama's big data team move into consulting
6/7/13 --- Gonna Say It
CIVIS Analytics: Big Data and the Federal Government
http://www.civisanalytics.com/
https://twitter.com/CivisAnalytics
https://www.facebook.com/CivisAnalytics
Dan Wagner is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Civis Analytics.
Dan was Chief Analytics Officer on the 2012 Obama campaign.
Tim Trautman is Advisor to the CEO at Civis Analytics.
Tim was the 2012 Obama campaign Deputy Director of Analytics Operations.
Caroline Grey is Vice President and Co-Founder at Civis Analytics.
Caroline was Director of Analytics Operations at Obama for America.
Gabriel Burt is Vice President of Engineering and Interim Chief Technology Officer at Civis Analytics.
Gabriel was Lead Analytics Engineer and Product Manager for the 2012 Obama campaign.
Kelly Kreft is an Analyst at Civis Analytics.
Kelly was Analytics Project Manager for the 2012 Obama campaign.
Peter Bouchard is Director of Media Analytics at Civis Analytics.
Peter was the Director of Integrated Insights at Starcom Worldwide, following seven years at Obama for America, Omnicom Media Group and National Geographic Networks.
Jesse Stinebring is a Political Analyst at Civis Analytics.
Jesse interned on Sen. Sherrod Brown's 2006 campaign in high school. He joined the 2008 Obama campaign in his senior year.
Jesse served as an intern in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and work with the 2012 Obama campaign.
Ben Fuller is Director of Business Development
Ben was the National Data Manager for the 2012 Obama campaign.
Previously, Ben was an Assistant Director at the Service Employees International Union where he managed the data, technology and analytics for the political and membership programs of the nation's largest union.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Little Ice Age Timeline 1250-1850
Based on 5/26/2013 Forbes article by Peter Ferrara
950 - 1250 AD
Medieval Warm Period
1250 AD
Ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic.
Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island.
1275 - 1300 AD
Glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth.
1270 - 1475 AD
Oxygen/isotope analysis from the Pacific Islands indicates a 1.5 degree Celsius temperature decline.
1270 - 1380 AD
Tree ring data from Patagonia in South America show cold periods.
1280 - 1350
A period of sharply lower sunspot activity known as the Wolf Minimum.
1300 AD
Summers began cooling in Northern Europe, negatively impacting growing seasons.
1315 - 1317
The Great Famine.
1300-1400
Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving the Norse settlers out.
1408
The last, surviving, written records of the Norse Greenland settlements, which had persisted for centuries, concern a marriage in the church of Hvalsey, today the best preserved Norse ruin.
1460 - 1550
Even lower sunspot activity known as the Sporer Minimum.
1500
Colder winters began regularly freezing rivers and canals in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Northern France, with both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris frozen solid annually.
1500 - 1800
A 3,000 year temperature reconstruction based on varying rates of stalagmite growth in a cave in South Africa indicates a colder period.
1520 - 1670
Tree ring data from Patagonia in South America show a second cold period
1570 - 1820
Sediment cores from Lake Malawi in southern Africa show colder weather.
1600 - 1800
Ice cores from the Andeas mountains in South America show a colder period.
1607
The first River Thames Frost Fair was held.
1607-1608
Early European settlers in North America reported ice persisting on Lake Superior until June.
1645 - 1715
The number of sunspots declined to zero for the entire time.
This is known as the Maunder Minimum, named after English astronomer Walter Maunder
January 1658
A Swedish army marched across the ice to invade Copenhagen.
1665
Historic snowstorms in Lisbon, Portugal.
1675 - 1766
Spanish explorers noted the expansion of the San Rafael Glacier in Chile.
End of the 17th century
Famines had spread from northern France, across Norway and Sweden, to Finland and Estonia.
Early 1700's
The Franz Josef glacier on the west side of the Southern Alps of New Zealand advanced sharply during the period of the Little Ice Age, actually invading a rain forest at its maximum extent.
The Mueller glacier on the east side of New Zealand’s Southern Alps expanded to its maximum extent at roughly the same time.
1744
Snowstorms in Lisbon, Portugal
1777 - 78
The American Revolutionary Army under General George Washington shivered at Valley Forge.
1780
New York harbor was frozen in the winter.
1790 - 1830
The Dalton Minimum, another period of well below normal sunspot activity.
Early 19th century
Glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana cease their advance.
1814
The last River Thames Frost Fair was held.
Late 19th century
The increase in global temperatures reflects the end of the Little Ice Age.
1915 - 1945
Ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, rose global temperatures from point when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years.
The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water.
That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.
1945 - 1970's
The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.
1970's - 1990's
The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period.
1998 - 2013
Warming ended and global temperatures have stopped increasing, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period.
2000 - 2010
The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.
950 - 1250 AD
Medieval Warm Period
1250 AD
Ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic.
Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island.
1275 - 1300 AD
Glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth.
1270 - 1475 AD
Oxygen/isotope analysis from the Pacific Islands indicates a 1.5 degree Celsius temperature decline.
1270 - 1380 AD
Tree ring data from Patagonia in South America show cold periods.
1280 - 1350
A period of sharply lower sunspot activity known as the Wolf Minimum.
1300 AD
Summers began cooling in Northern Europe, negatively impacting growing seasons.
1315 - 1317
The Great Famine.
1300-1400
Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving the Norse settlers out.
1408
The last, surviving, written records of the Norse Greenland settlements, which had persisted for centuries, concern a marriage in the church of Hvalsey, today the best preserved Norse ruin.
1460 - 1550
Even lower sunspot activity known as the Sporer Minimum.
1500
Colder winters began regularly freezing rivers and canals in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Northern France, with both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris frozen solid annually.
1500 - 1800
A 3,000 year temperature reconstruction based on varying rates of stalagmite growth in a cave in South Africa indicates a colder period.
1520 - 1670
Tree ring data from Patagonia in South America show a second cold period
1570 - 1820
Sediment cores from Lake Malawi in southern Africa show colder weather.
1600 - 1800
Ice cores from the Andeas mountains in South America show a colder period.
1607
The first River Thames Frost Fair was held.
1607-1608
Early European settlers in North America reported ice persisting on Lake Superior until June.
1645 - 1715
The number of sunspots declined to zero for the entire time.
This is known as the Maunder Minimum, named after English astronomer Walter Maunder
January 1658
A Swedish army marched across the ice to invade Copenhagen.
1665
Historic snowstorms in Lisbon, Portugal.
1675 - 1766
Spanish explorers noted the expansion of the San Rafael Glacier in Chile.
End of the 17th century
Famines had spread from northern France, across Norway and Sweden, to Finland and Estonia.
Early 1700's
The Franz Josef glacier on the west side of the Southern Alps of New Zealand advanced sharply during the period of the Little Ice Age, actually invading a rain forest at its maximum extent.
The Mueller glacier on the east side of New Zealand’s Southern Alps expanded to its maximum extent at roughly the same time.
1744
Snowstorms in Lisbon, Portugal
1777 - 78
The American Revolutionary Army under General George Washington shivered at Valley Forge.
1780
New York harbor was frozen in the winter.
1790 - 1830
The Dalton Minimum, another period of well below normal sunspot activity.
Early 19th century
Glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana cease their advance.
1814
The last River Thames Frost Fair was held.
Late 19th century
The increase in global temperatures reflects the end of the Little Ice Age.
1915 - 1945
Ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, rose global temperatures from point when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years.
The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water.
That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.
1945 - 1970's
The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.
1970's - 1990's
The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period.
1998 - 2013
Warming ended and global temperatures have stopped increasing, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period.
2000 - 2010
The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.
Friday, May 24, 2013
Joseph Farman, Discovery of Hole In the Ozone Layer
Excerpts from 5/18/2013 Paul Vitello article in The New York Times:
Joseph Farman, a British researcher whose... study of atmospheric changes in the Antarctic established the existence of a hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole approximately the size of the United States...
Joseph Farman, a British researcher whose... study of atmospheric changes in the Antarctic established the existence of a hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole approximately the size of the United States...
Mr. Farman studied the Antarctic atmosphere for 25 years...
When he began collecting ozone readings in 1957 as a young geophysicist at the Halley Bay research base in Antarctica, scientists had already come to understand the basic Jekyll-and-Hyde facts of ozone: that it was a pollutant when clumped in high concentrations near the ground and a vital shield when concentrated in the upper atmosphere, absorbing the sun’s most perilous ultraviolet rays.
After 1974, when two American scientists, Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, proved that chlorofluorocarbons, commonly used in aerosol spray cans and refrigeration, could destroy ozone in the upper atmosphere, the United States and a few other countries began regulating their use and scrutinizing the ozone readings already being collected by NASA satellites.
But Mr. Farman refused to stop making ground-level readings, despite his superiors’ questions about their usefulness, and despite his lack of standing in the field of ozone research. He did not have a Ph.D., and his primary work was in meteorological science...
“His willingness to do research he thought was important, even when others did not, made him a model scientist,” said Sharon Roan, author of the 1989 book “Ozone Crises: The 15-Year Evolution of a Sudden Global Emergency.” ...
In an interview years later, Mr. Farman recalled budget-cutters in his office telling him: Your ozone records show little change over the last 25 years; the ozone problem is under control now; the Americans are tracking all this with their orbiting satellites; and there is no point in our doing it too.
[H]e argued that the agency’s Antarctic ozone level readings were valuable because they were the longest continuous record maintained anywhere...
About a year later, in October 1982, Mr. Farman collected Antarctic ozone readings so radically different from anything seen before that he assumed that his 25-year-old Dobson meters had given out. He ordered new ones. (The devices calculate ozone thickness by measuring the amount of ultraviolet radiation penetrating the atmosphere. They had been found to work best when their photographic plates and other sensitive instruments were wrapped in heavy quilts.)
The new machines produced results even more startling. “It just went haywire,” Mr. Farman said.
After a series of double- and triple-check tests, Mr. Farman and his colleagues Jonathan Shanklin and Brian Gardiner published a paper in the journal Nature in May 1985 showing that ozone levels over Antarctica had fallen by about 40 percent from 1975 to 1984. The ozone hole was no longer a theoretical possibility, as Dr. Molina and Dr. Rowland had postulated, it was a real and present danger to life on earth.
Based on the Britons’ findings, and later readings taken by American high-altitude aircraft, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded in 1986 that the increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation caused by the ozone hole could be responsible for 40 million cases of skin cancer and 800,000 cancer deaths in the United States over the next 88 years.
How NASA’s satellites missed it has been answered in various ways. In one version, the ozone hole was detected by NASA’s monitors but discarded by data-analysis computer software intended to dismiss wild anomalies...
The paper by Mr. Farman and his colleagues, coupled with the research of Dr. Molina and Dr. Rowland — who with a Dutch scientist, Paul Crutzen, shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for chemistry for their ozone research — changed the international politics of environmental regulation. A treaty, the Montreal Protocol, intended to phase out the production of ozone-depleting compounds, was signed by 24 countries in 1987 and has since been ratified by almost 200...
Though ozone depletion is said to have leveled off in the early 2000s, the effects of long-living, ozone-depleting chemicals already in the atmosphere will continue for an additional 80 to 100 years, by most accounts...
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
IRS Scandal, Who Knew What When, timeline
3/26/2009
Washington Post’s David Ignatius publishes a column questioning the tax-exempt status of Pro-Israel Green Line groups.
3/27/2009
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) announces it will begin a campaign of filing legal complaints with the IRS and the Treasury Department to investigate groups “allegedly raising funds for the development of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.”
9/15/2009
IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman's first of 157 visits to the White House. (Previous IRS commissioner visited WH once in five years.)
10/2009
The ADC announces that it has expanded its legal campaign against pro-Israel charities and was “working with a number of coalition partners, both nationally and internationally, in conducting this ongoing campaign.”
Chief negotiator for Palestinian Authority raises Israel charity issue two days later during a meeting with US Consul General Daniel Rubenstein, according to a State Dept. cable revealed by Wikileaks.
“[Palestinian negotiator Ahmad Quraya] gives the Consul General a copy of an article by Uri Blau and Nir Hasson, published in Israeli daily Haaretz newspaper on August 17, entitled ‘American Non-profit Organization Raises Funds for Settlement,’ and asked the USG to review the situation with an eye toward eliminating organizations’ tax exempt status if they are funding settlement activity,” said the cable.
2/25/2010
Email from Cincinnati-based IRS agent Jack Koester to his boss, Screening Group Manager John Shafer. Shafer, in turn, sends it to his superiors, including some Washington staff, elevating it as a "high profile case."
The Cincinnati employees weren't quite sure what the Tea Party was, but they knew it was politically sensitive. "This case will be sent to inventory for further development."
3/2010
Gary Muthert's, an IRS agent in Cincinnati, local supervisor tells him in to check the applications for tax-exempt status to see how many were from groups with “tea party” in their names, both pending and closed. This local supervisor: “Washington, D.C., wants seven” cases.
4/2010
Team of IRS specialists assembled to process the tax-exempt nonprofit status of conservative groups that might be potential political operations.
4/2010
Elizabeth Hofacre's Cincinnati IRS office put in charge of handling tax-exempt status applications from conservative groups by her Cincinnati supervisor. She seeks help from IRS officials in the Washington unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations after she starts getting the tea-party cases.
Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, begins to oversee and guide Hofacre's work and provides some of the questions asked applicants.
5/2010
Cincinnati IRS employee Muthert “batched up” seven of the cases for “EO Technical,” a unit of the Exempt Organizations Division in Washington, headed by Ms. Lerner.
Another local official asks Muthert to locate more applications to send to Washington. Muthert locates about 40 tea-party cases after expanding his search to include the terms “patriot” and “9/12.”
7/2010
Elizabeth Hofacre, an IRS official in Cincinnati who is coordinating "emerging issues" for the agency's tax-exempt unit, is corresponding with Washington-based IRS tax attorney Carter Hull.
7/5/2010
New York Times published its 5,000-word cover story on the groups, following up with a Room for Debate series two days later. The article quoted an unnamed senior State Department administration official calling such groups “a problem” and “unhelpful to the efforts that we’re trying to make.” The story also quoted a senior Obama Middle East adviser, Daniel Kurtzer, saying the groups “drove us crazy.”
7/19/2010
Pro-Israel group Z Street’s application for tax-exempt status first runs into trouble with the IRS, two weeks after the lengthy New York Times article was published.
8/9/2010
In Texas, President Obama for the first time publicly names the group Americans for Prosperity (founded by the Koch Brothers) and warns about conservative groups. He says: "Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."
8/11/2010
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sends out a fundraising email warning about "Karl Rove-inspired shadow groups."
8/2010
IRS circulates the first BOLO (Be On Look Out) to tax exempt screener and evaluator unit.
IRS flagging applications with words “Tea Party”, “Patriots”, and “9/12” in organization names and applications that contain issues of government spending, government debt or taxes; education of the public by advocacy/lobbying to “make America a better place to live;” or statements in the case file that criticized how the country is being run.
8/21/2010
President Obama devotes his weekly radio address to the threat of "attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don't know who's behind these ads and we don't know who's paying for them. . . . You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation. . . . The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide."
8/23/2010
The New Yorker's Jane Mayer authors a hit piece on the Koch brothers, entitled "Covert Operations," in which she accuses them of funding "political front groups." The piece repeats the White House theme, with Ms. Mayer claiming the Kochs have created "slippery organizations with generic-sounding names" that have "made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington."
8/27/2010
White House economist Austan Goolsbee, in a background briefing with reporters, accuses Koch industries of being a pass-through entity that does "not pay corporate income tax."
The Treasury inspector general investigates how it is that Mr. Goolsbee might have confidential tax information. (The report has never been released.)
This same week, the Democratic Party files a complaint with the IRS claiming the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is violating its tax-exempt status.
9/2/2010
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warns on its website that the Kochs have "funneled their money into right-wing shadow groups."
9/16/2010
President Obama, in Connecticut, repeats that a "foreign-controlled entity" might be funding "millions of dollars of attack ads."
9/20/2010
President Obama, in Philadelphia, says the problem is that "nobody knows" who is behind conservative groups.
9/21/2010
Sam Stein, in his Huffington Post article "Obama, Dems Try to Make Shadowy Conservative Groups a Problem for Conservatives," writes that a "senior administration official" had "urged a small gathering of reporters to start writing on what he deemed 'the most insidious power grab that we have seen in a very long time.' "
9/22/2010
In New York City, Mr. Obama warns that conservative groups "pose as non-for-profit, social welfare and trade groups," even though they are "guided by seasoned Republican political operatives" who might be funded by a "foreign-controlled corporation."
9/26/2010
On ABC's "This Week," Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declares outright that the "benign-sounding Americans for Prosperity, the American Crossroads Fund" are "front groups for foreign-controlled companies."
9/28/2010
The president, in Wisconsin, warns about conservative organizations "posing as nonprofit groups."
Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, writes to the IRS demanding it investigate nonprofits. The letter names conservative organizations.
10/2010
Elizabeth Hofacre of Cincinnati office says she became so frustrated with the delays that she applied for a different job within the agency and is transferred.
10/11/2010
Democrat Senator Dick Durbin letter to IRS demanding they investigate Conservative 501(c)(4)'s.
10/14/2010
President Obama calls Conservative 501c4 groups "a problem for democracy."
10/22/2010
President Obama slams those who "hide behind these front groups."
10/25/2010
President Obama calls Conservative 501c4 groups to a "threat to our democracy."
10/26/2010
President Obama decries Conservative groups engaged in "unsupervised spending."
3/11/2011
Internal Revenue Service (IRS), in the course of executing a search warrant at a California health care provider’s corporate headquarters, improperly seize personal medical records of millions of citizens.
6/2/2011
"What criteria are being used to label a case a 'Tea Party case'?" writes Holly Paz, director of Rulings and Agreements, in an Email. "We want to think about whether those criteria are resulting in over-inclusion. Lois wants a briefing on these cases."
6/3/2011
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Camp sends letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman inquiring about IRS targeting of taxpayers who donated money to conservative groups, as well as information regarding audits of 501(c)(4) organizations
6/29/2011
Lois Lerner, Director of IRS Exempt Organizations Division, claims to have first learned of the IRS targeting lists.
7/1/2011
IRS responds to Chairman Camp’s June 3 letter by offering assurances “the IRS’s actions in this area were in no way influenced by political considerations.”
7/5/2011
IRS changes criteria used to identify tax-exempt applications for review, cutting out specific references to conservative groups and returning the operation to its proper nonpartisan bent.
A conference call is held with the Technical Unit; the Director, EO; and the Determinations Unit Program Manager. They develop new criteria for identifying cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager makes changes to the BOLO listing.
10/6/2011
Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Boustany sends letter to Commissioner Shulman requesting information regarding the tax-exempt sector.
11/18/2011
IRS responds to Chairman Boustany with some requested information but includes no mention of targeting conservative groups.
1/2012
IRS targeting criteria changes to “Political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement” based on IRS staff concerns that July 2011 criteria were too generic.
1/23/2012
Shulman meets personally with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Controller DannyWerfel in Room 234 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
1/25/2012
The criteria used by the IRS to identify tax-exempt applications for review is once again revised, according to the Inspector General report, in order to resume targeting small-government groups.
2/2012
A letter signed by Democrat Senators Schumer, Bennet, Whitehouse, Merkley, Udall, Shaheen and Franken addressed to Commissioner Shulman urges the IRS to better enforce rules pertaining to 501(c)4 organizations.
2/24/2012
During briefing on onerous follow-up letters received by some conservative organizations, Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff ask Director Lerner whether criteria for evaluating tax-exempt applications changed at any point. Lerner responds that criteria has not changed.
2/29/2012
IRS issues a 60-day extension to all groups who have received the onerous follow-up letters and Director Lerner orders that no further developmental letters are to be sent.
3/1/2012
Chairman Boustany sends a follow-up letter to Commissioner Shulman with additional questions about reports that “the IRS has been questioning new tax-exempt applicants, including grassroots political entities such as Tea Party groups.”
3/7/2012
New York Times article: Scrutiny of Political Nonprofits Sets Off Claim of Harassment
3/12/2012
IRS responds to recent Congressional letters with no mention of knowledge of targeting conservative groups.
3/12/2012
A second follow-up letter is sent to IRS Commissioner Shulman from Democrat Senators Schumer, Bennet, Whitehouse, Merkley, Udall, Shaheen and Franken. The letter, citing New York Times March 7 article, demands that the IRS redouble its efforts scrutinizing 501(c)4 organizations and propose that the IRS make implement three administrative changes to this end.
3/22/2012
Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee holds its 2012 hearing on the tax return filing season and general IRS operations. Chairman Boustany asks IRS Commissioner Shulman about reports that the IRS has been targeting Tea Party groups. Shulman responds, “I can give you assurances…There is absolutely no targeting.”
3/23/2012
IRS sends a supplementary response to Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee containing additional information, but makes no mention of knowledge of targeting conservative organizations.
3/27/2012
Following a number of news stories and additional complaints from many groups, Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Issa and Subcommittee Chairman Jordan send Director Lerner a letter asking for information related to reports that conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status were receiving extra scrutiny from IRS.
3/30/2012
Gay rights group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) boasts on its website that it has obtained IRS financial documents revealing that Mitt Romney “donated $10,000 to the National Organization for Marriage [NOM] in 2008 …”
4/4/2012
During telephone briefing, Director Lerner tells Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff that the information IRS was requesting in the additional follow-up letters to groups applying for tax-exempt status was not out of the ordinary.
4/26/2012
IRS sends a second supplementary response to the Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee but includes no information about its discriminatory practices.
4/26/2012
Director Lerner writes in response to the March 27th letter from Chairmen Issa and Jordan that the letters to targeted organizations were “in the ordinary course of the application process to obtain the information as the IRS deems necessary to make a determination whether the organization meets the legal requirements for tax-exempt status.”
5/3/2012
Chairman Camp sends letter to Commissioner Shulman seeking all 501(c)(4) applications from 2010 and 2011 in order to conduct an investigation into whether the IRS targeted conservative groups.
5/3/2012
IRS completes internal investigation on illegal targeting of conservatives - finds significant problems in the review process with a substantial bias against conservative groups.
Internal Revenue Service Deputy Commissioner Steven Miller learns of the findings from IRS’s internal review.
Former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman learns of the findings from IRS’s internal review.
5/2012
Treasury Department launches Inspector General for Tax Administration investigation
5/4/2012
Director Lerner responds a second time to Chairmen Issa and Jordan’s March 27th letter. The Chairmen had requested the authority, rationale, and precedent for 16 pieces of information that IRS asked of conservative groups that seemed to be beyond the scope of typical IRS inquiries. Lerner provides justifications for all of the 16 areas, including asking groups applying for tax-exempt status for complete lists of donors with corresponding donation amounts.
6/25/2012
Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee holds hearing on charitable organizations. In response to questions regarding reported IRS harassment of conservative groups, Deputy Commissioner Miller tells the Subcommittee, “I am aware that some 200 501(c)(4) applications fell into this category [the determinations letter process]. We did group those organizations together to ensure consistency, to ensure quality.” Miller makes no reference to the IRS’s discriminatory practices.
11/15/2012
Ways and Means Oversight staff meet with IRS staff, including Director Lerner. The IRS staff does not mention knowledge that the IRS targeted conservative groups.
11/28/2012
ProPublica's Kim Barker and Justin Elliot receive private IRS tax information illegally
12/2012
IRS adds additional specialists in effort to scrutinize the tax-exempt status of conservative groups and launch audits of existing conservative nonprofit groups
3/14/2013
Treasury Inspector General J Russell George releases report on IRS Tax scandal
3/14/2013
Class action suit accuses corrupt and abusive IRS agents of stealing 10 million people's medical records without a warrant - including "intimate medical records of every state judge in California." John Doe Company sued 15 John Doe IRS agents in Superior Court.
4/16/2013
White House General Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler "first" learns of IRS targeting of conservatives
4/24/2013
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough is briefed on IRS scandal by Ruemmler.
5/10/2013
American Bar Association conference is informed by Lerner's planted question of IRS targeting.
White House Spokesman Jay Carney learns of scandal.
President Obama is informed of IRS scandal.
5/14/2013
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration Report officially released
5/16/2013
Obama appoints Danny Werfel to be acting IRS Commissioner.
5/21/2013
Congressional investigators interview Washington IRS technical unit supervisor Holy Paz (age early 20's?). She says she was personally involved in scrutinizing some of the earliest applications from tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status. Holly Paz reviewed 20 to 30 applications.
5/21/2013
IRS misses its deadline to turn over documents to the House Ways and Means Committee.
5/21/2013
IRS’s director of Exempt Organizations Louis Lerner is placed on paid administrative leave after refusing to tender her resignation.
5/22/2013
Louis Lerner invokes the Fifth Amendment before House hearing.
5/31/2013
IRS ignores Senate Finance Committee deadline to answer 41 questions regarding the scandal.
6/4/2013
Report:
Louis Lerner, placed on paid administration leave on 5/21 is still logging into the IRS’s computer system using her agency computer. She has the ability to access the same information that was available to her before she was placed on leave:
[Lerner] can still access taxpayer data. If your duties do not include dealing with taxpayers, you are forbidden from seeing the information. That is a violation of IRS policy, and if she actually accesses any file that contains any Personal Identifiable Information, it is a felony violation. That would include emails that she has in her files discussing any taxpayer case that contains the name, address, phone numbers or tax data from a case. Actual Unauthorized Access (IRS uses the term UNAX) would be a really good reason for the new boss to can her in a hurry. I am sure a simple examination of her email files and hard drive would discover she still has taxpayer data.
6/7/2013
Internal Revenue Service replaces Holly Paz, director of agency’s Rulings and Agreements office.
6/13/2013
While testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller could not name the lead investigator in the IRS case involving the targeting of conservative groups. It is now one month into the investigation.
6/13/2013
The IRS would not confirm or deny reports of firing Holly Paz (age early 20's), the director of the agency’s Rulings and Agreements office, citing her right to privacy as protected by federal law.
***
Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times - twice more than any other cabinet member and 156 more times than his predecessor. Some of these meetings in the White House were with Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter.
***
***
69% of tax returns filed by parents of adopted children were audited.
Washington Post’s David Ignatius publishes a column questioning the tax-exempt status of Pro-Israel Green Line groups.
3/27/2009
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) announces it will begin a campaign of filing legal complaints with the IRS and the Treasury Department to investigate groups “allegedly raising funds for the development of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.”
9/15/2009
IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman's first of 157 visits to the White House. (Previous IRS commissioner visited WH once in five years.)
10/2009
The ADC announces that it has expanded its legal campaign against pro-Israel charities and was “working with a number of coalition partners, both nationally and internationally, in conducting this ongoing campaign.”
Chief negotiator for Palestinian Authority raises Israel charity issue two days later during a meeting with US Consul General Daniel Rubenstein, according to a State Dept. cable revealed by Wikileaks.
“[Palestinian negotiator Ahmad Quraya] gives the Consul General a copy of an article by Uri Blau and Nir Hasson, published in Israeli daily Haaretz newspaper on August 17, entitled ‘American Non-profit Organization Raises Funds for Settlement,’ and asked the USG to review the situation with an eye toward eliminating organizations’ tax exempt status if they are funding settlement activity,” said the cable.
2/25/2010
Email from Cincinnati-based IRS agent Jack Koester to his boss, Screening Group Manager John Shafer. Shafer, in turn, sends it to his superiors, including some Washington staff, elevating it as a "high profile case."
The Cincinnati employees weren't quite sure what the Tea Party was, but they knew it was politically sensitive. "This case will be sent to inventory for further development."
3/2010
Gary Muthert's, an IRS agent in Cincinnati, local supervisor tells him in to check the applications for tax-exempt status to see how many were from groups with “tea party” in their names, both pending and closed. This local supervisor: “Washington, D.C., wants seven” cases.
4/2010
Team of IRS specialists assembled to process the tax-exempt nonprofit status of conservative groups that might be potential political operations.
4/2010
Elizabeth Hofacre's Cincinnati IRS office put in charge of handling tax-exempt status applications from conservative groups by her Cincinnati supervisor. She seeks help from IRS officials in the Washington unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations after she starts getting the tea-party cases.
Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, begins to oversee and guide Hofacre's work and provides some of the questions asked applicants.
5/2010
Cincinnati IRS employee Muthert “batched up” seven of the cases for “EO Technical,” a unit of the Exempt Organizations Division in Washington, headed by Ms. Lerner.
Another local official asks Muthert to locate more applications to send to Washington. Muthert locates about 40 tea-party cases after expanding his search to include the terms “patriot” and “9/12.”
7/2010
Elizabeth Hofacre, an IRS official in Cincinnati who is coordinating "emerging issues" for the agency's tax-exempt unit, is corresponding with Washington-based IRS tax attorney Carter Hull.
7/5/2010
New York Times published its 5,000-word cover story on the groups, following up with a Room for Debate series two days later. The article quoted an unnamed senior State Department administration official calling such groups “a problem” and “unhelpful to the efforts that we’re trying to make.” The story also quoted a senior Obama Middle East adviser, Daniel Kurtzer, saying the groups “drove us crazy.”
7/19/2010
Pro-Israel group Z Street’s application for tax-exempt status first runs into trouble with the IRS, two weeks after the lengthy New York Times article was published.
8/9/2010
In Texas, President Obama for the first time publicly names the group Americans for Prosperity (founded by the Koch Brothers) and warns about conservative groups. He says: "Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."
8/11/2010
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sends out a fundraising email warning about "Karl Rove-inspired shadow groups."
8/2010
IRS circulates the first BOLO (Be On Look Out) to tax exempt screener and evaluator unit.
IRS flagging applications with words “Tea Party”, “Patriots”, and “9/12” in organization names and applications that contain issues of government spending, government debt or taxes; education of the public by advocacy/lobbying to “make America a better place to live;” or statements in the case file that criticized how the country is being run.
8/21/2010
President Obama devotes his weekly radio address to the threat of "attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don't know who's behind these ads and we don't know who's paying for them. . . . You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation. . . . The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide."
8/23/2010
The New Yorker's Jane Mayer authors a hit piece on the Koch brothers, entitled "Covert Operations," in which she accuses them of funding "political front groups." The piece repeats the White House theme, with Ms. Mayer claiming the Kochs have created "slippery organizations with generic-sounding names" that have "made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington."
8/27/2010
White House economist Austan Goolsbee, in a background briefing with reporters, accuses Koch industries of being a pass-through entity that does "not pay corporate income tax."
The Treasury inspector general investigates how it is that Mr. Goolsbee might have confidential tax information. (The report has never been released.)
This same week, the Democratic Party files a complaint with the IRS claiming the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is violating its tax-exempt status.
9/2/2010
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warns on its website that the Kochs have "funneled their money into right-wing shadow groups."
9/16/2010
President Obama, in Connecticut, repeats that a "foreign-controlled entity" might be funding "millions of dollars of attack ads."
9/20/2010
President Obama, in Philadelphia, says the problem is that "nobody knows" who is behind conservative groups.
9/21/2010
Sam Stein, in his Huffington Post article "Obama, Dems Try to Make Shadowy Conservative Groups a Problem for Conservatives," writes that a "senior administration official" had "urged a small gathering of reporters to start writing on what he deemed 'the most insidious power grab that we have seen in a very long time.' "
9/22/2010
In New York City, Mr. Obama warns that conservative groups "pose as non-for-profit, social welfare and trade groups," even though they are "guided by seasoned Republican political operatives" who might be funded by a "foreign-controlled corporation."
9/26/2010
On ABC's "This Week," Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declares outright that the "benign-sounding Americans for Prosperity, the American Crossroads Fund" are "front groups for foreign-controlled companies."
9/28/2010
The president, in Wisconsin, warns about conservative organizations "posing as nonprofit groups."
Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, writes to the IRS demanding it investigate nonprofits. The letter names conservative organizations.
10/2010
Elizabeth Hofacre of Cincinnati office says she became so frustrated with the delays that she applied for a different job within the agency and is transferred.
10/11/2010
Democrat Senator Dick Durbin letter to IRS demanding they investigate Conservative 501(c)(4)'s.
10/14/2010
President Obama calls Conservative 501c4 groups "a problem for democracy."
10/22/2010
President Obama slams those who "hide behind these front groups."
10/25/2010
President Obama calls Conservative 501c4 groups to a "threat to our democracy."
10/26/2010
President Obama decries Conservative groups engaged in "unsupervised spending."
3/11/2011
Internal Revenue Service (IRS), in the course of executing a search warrant at a California health care provider’s corporate headquarters, improperly seize personal medical records of millions of citizens.
6/2/2011
"What criteria are being used to label a case a 'Tea Party case'?" writes Holly Paz, director of Rulings and Agreements, in an Email. "We want to think about whether those criteria are resulting in over-inclusion. Lois wants a briefing on these cases."
6/3/2011
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Camp sends letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman inquiring about IRS targeting of taxpayers who donated money to conservative groups, as well as information regarding audits of 501(c)(4) organizations
6/29/2011
Lois Lerner, Director of IRS Exempt Organizations Division, claims to have first learned of the IRS targeting lists.
7/1/2011
IRS responds to Chairman Camp’s June 3 letter by offering assurances “the IRS’s actions in this area were in no way influenced by political considerations.”
7/5/2011
IRS changes criteria used to identify tax-exempt applications for review, cutting out specific references to conservative groups and returning the operation to its proper nonpartisan bent.
A conference call is held with the Technical Unit; the Director, EO; and the Determinations Unit Program Manager. They develop new criteria for identifying cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager makes changes to the BOLO listing.
10/6/2011
Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Boustany sends letter to Commissioner Shulman requesting information regarding the tax-exempt sector.
11/18/2011
IRS responds to Chairman Boustany with some requested information but includes no mention of targeting conservative groups.
1/2012
IRS targeting criteria changes to “Political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement” based on IRS staff concerns that July 2011 criteria were too generic.
1/23/2012
Shulman meets personally with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Controller DannyWerfel in Room 234 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
1/25/2012
The criteria used by the IRS to identify tax-exempt applications for review is once again revised, according to the Inspector General report, in order to resume targeting small-government groups.
2/2012
A letter signed by Democrat Senators Schumer, Bennet, Whitehouse, Merkley, Udall, Shaheen and Franken addressed to Commissioner Shulman urges the IRS to better enforce rules pertaining to 501(c)4 organizations.
2/24/2012
During briefing on onerous follow-up letters received by some conservative organizations, Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff ask Director Lerner whether criteria for evaluating tax-exempt applications changed at any point. Lerner responds that criteria has not changed.
2/29/2012
IRS issues a 60-day extension to all groups who have received the onerous follow-up letters and Director Lerner orders that no further developmental letters are to be sent.
3/1/2012
Chairman Boustany sends a follow-up letter to Commissioner Shulman with additional questions about reports that “the IRS has been questioning new tax-exempt applicants, including grassroots political entities such as Tea Party groups.”
3/7/2012
New York Times article: Scrutiny of Political Nonprofits Sets Off Claim of Harassment
3/12/2012
IRS responds to recent Congressional letters with no mention of knowledge of targeting conservative groups.
3/12/2012
A second follow-up letter is sent to IRS Commissioner Shulman from Democrat Senators Schumer, Bennet, Whitehouse, Merkley, Udall, Shaheen and Franken. The letter, citing New York Times March 7 article, demands that the IRS redouble its efforts scrutinizing 501(c)4 organizations and propose that the IRS make implement three administrative changes to this end.
3/22/2012
Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee holds its 2012 hearing on the tax return filing season and general IRS operations. Chairman Boustany asks IRS Commissioner Shulman about reports that the IRS has been targeting Tea Party groups. Shulman responds, “I can give you assurances…There is absolutely no targeting.”
3/23/2012
IRS sends a supplementary response to Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee containing additional information, but makes no mention of knowledge of targeting conservative organizations.
3/27/2012
Following a number of news stories and additional complaints from many groups, Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Issa and Subcommittee Chairman Jordan send Director Lerner a letter asking for information related to reports that conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status were receiving extra scrutiny from IRS.
3/30/2012
Gay rights group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) boasts on its website that it has obtained IRS financial documents revealing that Mitt Romney “donated $10,000 to the National Organization for Marriage [NOM] in 2008 …”
4/4/2012
During telephone briefing, Director Lerner tells Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff that the information IRS was requesting in the additional follow-up letters to groups applying for tax-exempt status was not out of the ordinary.
4/26/2012
IRS sends a second supplementary response to the Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee but includes no information about its discriminatory practices.
4/26/2012
Director Lerner writes in response to the March 27th letter from Chairmen Issa and Jordan that the letters to targeted organizations were “in the ordinary course of the application process to obtain the information as the IRS deems necessary to make a determination whether the organization meets the legal requirements for tax-exempt status.”
5/3/2012
Chairman Camp sends letter to Commissioner Shulman seeking all 501(c)(4) applications from 2010 and 2011 in order to conduct an investigation into whether the IRS targeted conservative groups.
5/3/2012
IRS completes internal investigation on illegal targeting of conservatives - finds significant problems in the review process with a substantial bias against conservative groups.
Internal Revenue Service Deputy Commissioner Steven Miller learns of the findings from IRS’s internal review.
Former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman learns of the findings from IRS’s internal review.
5/2012
Treasury Department launches Inspector General for Tax Administration investigation
5/4/2012
Director Lerner responds a second time to Chairmen Issa and Jordan’s March 27th letter. The Chairmen had requested the authority, rationale, and precedent for 16 pieces of information that IRS asked of conservative groups that seemed to be beyond the scope of typical IRS inquiries. Lerner provides justifications for all of the 16 areas, including asking groups applying for tax-exempt status for complete lists of donors with corresponding donation amounts.
6/25/2012
Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee holds hearing on charitable organizations. In response to questions regarding reported IRS harassment of conservative groups, Deputy Commissioner Miller tells the Subcommittee, “I am aware that some 200 501(c)(4) applications fell into this category [the determinations letter process]. We did group those organizations together to ensure consistency, to ensure quality.” Miller makes no reference to the IRS’s discriminatory practices.
11/15/2012
Ways and Means Oversight staff meet with IRS staff, including Director Lerner. The IRS staff does not mention knowledge that the IRS targeted conservative groups.
11/28/2012
ProPublica's Kim Barker and Justin Elliot receive private IRS tax information illegally
12/2012
IRS adds additional specialists in effort to scrutinize the tax-exempt status of conservative groups and launch audits of existing conservative nonprofit groups
3/14/2013
Treasury Inspector General J Russell George releases report on IRS Tax scandal
3/14/2013
Class action suit accuses corrupt and abusive IRS agents of stealing 10 million people's medical records without a warrant - including "intimate medical records of every state judge in California." John Doe Company sued 15 John Doe IRS agents in Superior Court.
4/16/2013
White House General Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler "first" learns of IRS targeting of conservatives
4/24/2013
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough is briefed on IRS scandal by Ruemmler.
5/10/2013
American Bar Association conference is informed by Lerner's planted question of IRS targeting.
White House Spokesman Jay Carney learns of scandal.
President Obama is informed of IRS scandal.
5/14/2013
Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration Report officially released
5/16/2013
Obama appoints Danny Werfel to be acting IRS Commissioner.
5/21/2013
Congressional investigators interview Washington IRS technical unit supervisor Holy Paz (age early 20's?). She says she was personally involved in scrutinizing some of the earliest applications from tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status. Holly Paz reviewed 20 to 30 applications.
5/21/2013
IRS misses its deadline to turn over documents to the House Ways and Means Committee.
5/21/2013
IRS’s director of Exempt Organizations Louis Lerner is placed on paid administrative leave after refusing to tender her resignation.
5/22/2013
Louis Lerner invokes the Fifth Amendment before House hearing.
5/31/2013
IRS ignores Senate Finance Committee deadline to answer 41 questions regarding the scandal.
6/4/2013
Report:
Louis Lerner, placed on paid administration leave on 5/21 is still logging into the IRS’s computer system using her agency computer. She has the ability to access the same information that was available to her before she was placed on leave:
[Lerner] can still access taxpayer data. If your duties do not include dealing with taxpayers, you are forbidden from seeing the information. That is a violation of IRS policy, and if she actually accesses any file that contains any Personal Identifiable Information, it is a felony violation. That would include emails that she has in her files discussing any taxpayer case that contains the name, address, phone numbers or tax data from a case. Actual Unauthorized Access (IRS uses the term UNAX) would be a really good reason for the new boss to can her in a hurry. I am sure a simple examination of her email files and hard drive would discover she still has taxpayer data.
6/7/2013
Internal Revenue Service replaces Holly Paz, director of agency’s Rulings and Agreements office.
6/13/2013
While testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller could not name the lead investigator in the IRS case involving the targeting of conservative groups. It is now one month into the investigation.
6/13/2013
The IRS would not confirm or deny reports of firing Holly Paz (age early 20's), the director of the agency’s Rulings and Agreements office, citing her right to privacy as protected by federal law.
***
Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times - twice more than any other cabinet member and 156 more times than his predecessor. Some of these meetings in the White House were with Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter.
***
Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS official currently in charge of overseeing the agency’s implementation of Obamacare, has logged 165 recorded visits to the White House 165 times since 2011. She met six times with President Obama. Ingram headed the IRS’ tax-exempt division in 2010 when the scandal-ridden agency began improperly targeting the tax-exempt nonprofit status of conservative groups.
***
69% of tax returns filed by parents of adopted children were audited.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Surveillance, Leaks, DOJ, FBI, NSA, FISA, FISC, Article 215, PRISM, Program 702, FAIRVIEW, BLARNEY, Boundless Informant, Snowden, Timeline, "Turn-key Tyranny"
10/25/1978
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act takes effect.
10/26/2001
USA Patriot Act amends Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
8/5/2007
Protect America Act signed into law.
9/11/2007
PRISM data collection begins for Microsoft servers.
3/12/2008
PRISM data collection begins for Yahoo servers.
7/9/2008
FISA Amendment Act.
1/14/2009
PRISM data collection begins for Google servers.
3/2009
Analysts enter a phone number into agency computers and “put one digit wrong,” mining a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter is reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The Justice Department represents NSA before this secret court. The judges are "really upset about this" and require that all the data be destroyed. Attorney General Eric Holder pledges to the judges that the intelligence agencies would take correct the problem as condition of renewing the NSA’s surveillance program.
4/2009
The Justice Department publicly confirms to the New York Times that Holder has taken “comprehensive steps” to correct a problem in NSA collection after it “detected issues that raised concerns.” But department officials decline to discuss details about what was described at the time as the “over-collection” of information.
6/3/2009
PRISM data collection begins for Facebook servers.
6/11/2009
FOXN reporter James Rosen posts story about North Korea on website with words "Sources inside North Korea..."
6/12/2009
FBI investigates: Of the 95 people who saw classified document on North Korea only one spoke on phone with Rosen, State Department intelligence analyst Stephen Kim.
11/9/2009
Search warrant issued for Kim's emails.
12/3/2009
Google CEO Schmidt in CNBC interview: If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time.
We're all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.
12/7/2009
PRISM data collection begins for PalTalk servers.
2010
Annual report to Congress, the Justice Department reports 21 applications in 2009 for business records to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) under Section 215 – all of which were granted, though nine were modified by the court. (The reports do not explain how or why the orders were modified.)
5/28/2010
Search warrant issued for James Rosen's emails - personally approved and signed by AG Holder.
U.S. Attorney Ron Machen motion argues that the traditional 30-day notice period does not apply to Rosen as Justice secretly monitors his Gmail account.
6/30/2010
AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman publish article containing extensive details from an indictment, then still sealed, against Adnan Shukrijumah, accused of being a Qaeda operative.
7/8/2010
AP article about the arrest of terrorism suspects in Norway. In article AP discloses that it had delayed publication at government officials’ request.
8/27/2010
News Corp. lawyer notified by DOJ of Rosen suspicion via certified mail.
9/24/2010
PRISM data collection begins for YouTube servers.
2/6/2011
PRISM data collection begins for Skype servers.
3/2011
FBI Director Mueller during Senate Judiciary Oversight Committee hearing testifying about intelligence failures that contributed to 2009 Fort Hood massacre: “We put in place technological improvements relating to the capabilities of a database to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.”
3/31/2011
PRISM data collection begins for AOL servers.
2011
Annual report to Congress, the Justice Department reports the number of requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) under Section 215 jumps from 21 in 2009 to 205 in 2010 (all again granted, with 176 modified.)
FBI Director Mueller, written responses to Congress: “Beginning in late 2009, certain electronic communications service providers no longer honored NSLs to obtain” records because their lawyers cited “ambiguity” in the law. As a result the FBI switched over to demanding the same data under Section 215. “This change accounts for a significant increase in the volume of business records requests,” Mueller writes.
5/2/2011
Osama bin Laden raid.
5/4 or 5/11/2011
Secretary of Defense Gates confronts National Security Advisor Donilon about outpouring of leaks from White House regarding bin Laden raid: ‘I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend,’ Gates said in his trademark droll tones, according to an account later provided by his colleagues. What was that, Donilon asked? ‘Shut the fuck up,’ the defense secretary said.
5/2011
Congress reauthorizes the FISA provision of the Patriot Act, with the Senate voting 72-23 in favor, and the House approving the measure by a 250-153 count.
5/26/2011
PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act signed into law.
8/2011
Parents of Navy SEAL killed on 8/7/2011 who publicly criticized President Obama complain to Verizon about hearing clicking sounds during phone conversations and receiving text messages of 001 and 002.
Verizon explains that third parties are accessing their calls from inside US and Afghanistan.
10/2011
Mosques are now off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.
10/3/2011
A classified FISA 86-page court opinion is issued stating that the Justice Department engaged in surveillance activity that the court had found improper or unconstitutional.
10/13/2011
Document filed: Justice Department seized phone records associated with White House staffers and Fox News reporters in the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, former State Department contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to Rosen at Fox News.
11/7/2011
FOXN James Rosen secretly named as co-conspirator by DOJ in US DC District Court
4/2012
AP reporters learn from leakers that CIA infiltration of an al-Qaeda branch has thwarted a Yemeni terror plot similar to the underwear bomber that failed to detonate on a 12/25/2009 flight to Detroit.
4/30/12
Department of Homeland Security issues a statement: “No indication of any specific, credible threats or plots against the US tied to the one-year anniversary of Bin Laden’s death.”
5/2/12
AP prepares to publish its leaked scoop of CIA infiltration of al-Qaeda branch.
In AP discussions with government officials, the CIA stresses to AP that publishing anything about the operation to obtain the bomb and thwart the plot would create grave national security dangers and compromise a “sensitive intelligence operation.”
Michael Morell, CIA’s deputy director, gives AP reporters additional background information to persuade them to hold off. The agency wants several days more to protect what it has in the works.
5/2/12 - 5/7/12
Reporters at AP sit on their big scoop at request of CIA officials.
5/7/12
AP scheduled to release the story.
AP journalists asked by certain CIA officials to hold off on publishing story for just one more day.
Other CIA officials claim national security concerns are “no longer an issue."
AP rejects plea to hold off longer.
CIA offers a compromise: Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?
Reporters leave meeting to discuss the idea with their editors.
Within an hour, an White House administration official calls AP’s offices.
White House quashes the one-hour offer as impossible.
AP should have story exclusively for five minutes before White House makes its own announcement.
AP rejects request to postpone publication any longer. Story is published.
WH plans to announce the successful counter terrorism operation the following day Tuesday, May8.
5/8/12
White House’s top counter terrorism adviser John Brennan goes on Good Morning America and announces the successful operation, praises intelligence officials and says that because of their work the Al Qaeda plot was never an active threat to the American public.
6/1/2012
New York Times article by David Sanger details with classified material how President Obama ordered the Sustenex cyber attacks against Iran's nuclear program.
7/2012
A U.S. intelligence official acknowledges in a letter to Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon that “on at least one occasion” the national security court found that “some collection” by the intelligence community “was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution.
10/2012
PRISM data collection begins for Apple servers.
12/2012
FISA Amendment Act of 2008 renewed.
12/2012
Cheryl Attkisson of CBS News has her computer breached while investigating White House Benghazi scandal. (Attkisson says she noticed unusual activity in her CBS-issued laptop and her home computer, such as dormant computers spontaneously “waking up” at odd hours. The unusual activity, which also included disruptions on her home phone line, predate the December 2012 breach that CBS confirmed.)
2/4/2013
Representative Maxine Waters: "The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That's going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it's never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They're going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can't get around it. And he's [President Obama] been very smart. It's very powerful what he's leaving in place."
2/12/2013
President Obama signs executive order Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, establishing a two-year timeline during which the federal government will determine what constitutes critical “physical or virtual” infrastructure, and establish security standards to keep those assets safe.
Development of the standards — called “Cybersecurity Framework” — will be led by director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
“The Cybersecurity Framework shall include a set of standards, methodologies, procedures, and processes that align policy, business, and technological approaches to address cyber risks.”
3/2013
NSA's data mining tool used to map information, called Boundless Informant, collects almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013.
3/11/2013
DNI Clapper receives all questions that he will be asked under oath at tomorrow's Senate hearing.
3/12/2013
Director of National Intelligence Clapper and other intelligence officials testify about threats to US.
Senator Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any kind of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
Clapper: "No, sir."
Wyden: "It does not?"
Clapper: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently, perhaps..."
4/18/2013
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passes the House.
Directs the federal government to conduct cybersecurity activities to provide shared situational awareness enabling integrated operational actions to protect, prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents.
Directs the President, with respect to information shared by a cybersecurity provider... to designate:
(1) an entity within Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the civilian federal entity to receive cyber threat information under prescribed procedures and subject to specified exceptions, and
(2) an entity within the Department of Justice (DOJ) as the civilian federal entity to receive information related to cybersecurity crimes.
4/25/2013
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) grants renewal of court order to the FBI forcing Verizon to provide phone record data of all customers on a daily basis for three months.
4/30/2013
Letter from Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reports that the government submitted to the court 1,789 applications requesting authority to carry out electronic snooping in 2012.
4/30/2013
Annual report to Congress, DOJ reports filing 212 requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) under Section 215 in 2012.
FBI's number of national security letters (NSLs) issued by the bureau in 2012 was 15,229.
4-5/2013
DOJ seizes phone records – home, work and cell -- of 20 AP reporters and editors between April 2012-May 2012 from four AP bureaus including Washington and New York trying to hunt down government source of leaked info about a operation to thwart Al Qaeda plan to blow up an airliner.
5/5/2013
POTUS commencement address at OSU: "Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."
5/2013
Holder on AP leak: "put the American people at risk." Unauthorized disclosure of intelligence operation to stop al-Qaeda from bombing US airliner among most serious leaks he could remember.
AP: “As we told Reuters a year ago, at no point did AP offer or propose a deal in relation to this story,” said spokeswoman Erin Madigan White. “We did not publish anything until we were assured by high-ranking officials with direct knowledge of the situation, in more than one part of the government, that the national security risk was over and no one was in danger. The only deal was to hold the story until any security risk was resolved.”
5/2013
Edward Snowden makes final preparations at the NSA office in Hawaii where he is working, he copies the last set of documents he intends to disclose.
He then notifies his NSA supervisor that he needs to be away from work for "a couple of weeks" in order to receive treatment for epilepsy.
5/15/2013
Holder has recused himself from the AP case. He can not offer details on the investigation.
Holder testifies under oath that he was not involved in any "potential prosecution" of journalists.
5/17/2013
DOJ officials get word that The Washington Post is working on an explosive story: a reporter has obtained an affidavit for a search warrant to seize a Fox News journalist’s personal emails.
5/20/2013
Edward Snowden boards a flight from Hawaii to Hong Kong.
5/23/2013
President Barack Obama on Thursday asked Holder to review Justice’s guidelines on leak investigations and news organizations.
5/24/2013
Edward Snowden emails Washington Post using code name Verax.
5/31/2013
South Carolina Democrat operative Curtis Morrison admits to bugging Senate Minority Leader McConnell's campaign office.
6/5/2013
Attorney General Eric Holder misses deadline set by Republican Congress to explain questionable testimony he gave on reporter surveillance, as lawmakers threaten to subpoena Holder if necessary.
6/5/2013
Holder says he will not resign.
6/6/2013
IRS solicitation for surveillance equipment:
The Internal Revenue Service intends to award a Purchase Order to an undisclosed Corporation. The following descriptions are vague due to the use and nature of the items...
The following equipment will be purchased:
(QTY 4) Plant Concealment Color 700 Lines Color IP Camera Concealment with Single Channel Network Server, supports dual video stream, Poe, software included, case included, router included
(QTY 4) Covert Coffee tray with Camera concealment
(QTY 4) Remote surveillance system, Built-in DVD Burner and 2 Internal HDDs, cameras
(QTY 2) Concealed clock radio
(QTY 4) Color IP Camera Concealment with single channel network server...
6/6/2013
DOJ announces it will investigate the NSA/Verizon leak that ended up in the UK Guardian.
6/6/2013
Washington Post and UK Guardian break PRISM story after receiving 41-slide PowerPoint presentation from leaker.
6/6/2013
Report: Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to Internet service providers, two government officials familiar with the arrangements said.
Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL and Apple deny participation in NSA PRISM surveillance program
Google CEO Page: "First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."
Zuckerberg: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday."
Apple spokesman: “We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”
Paltalk statement: “We have not heard of PRISM. Paltalk exercises extreme care to protect and secure users’ data, only responding to court orders as required to by law. Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers.”
6/7/2013
President Obama falsely claims that "every member of Congress has been briefed on this program [PRISM]."
6/7/2013
US Assistant District Attorney cancels meeting with lawyer of Dem operative Curtis Morrison, admitted bugger of Senator McConnell's campaign office.
6/8/2013
UK Guardian publishes new slide from leaked PowerPoint presentation:
PRISM is distinct from four other Upstream programs (FAIRVIEW, BLARNEY, two others redacted) that involve the "Collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past." PRISM is the "Collection directly from the servers of these US Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."
6/8/2013
Administration opens criminal investigation into security breach leaking of classified documents related to the tracking of Americans' phone calls and emails, "a criminal report has been filed.”
FBI and DOJ will focus on British and US newspapers including The Guardian.
It remains unclear whether the secretive National Security Agency is involved in the filing.
6/9/2013
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tells NBC News that the phone-records program has helped foil two terrorism plots in 2009: a New York subway bombing scheme and a plot against a Danish news publisher.
6/9/2013
UK Guardian 15 minute video from Hong Kong luxury hotel room identifies PRISM leaker Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has worked at the National Security Agency for last four years as an employee of Booze Allen Hamilton. Snowden warns against 'Turn-key Tyranny.'
6/9/2013
Report: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government in 33 years.
6/9/2013
Class action lawsuit filed in Washington DC against DOJ and NSA by Freedom Watch over Verizon data collection.
6/10/2013
Report: 1.3 million people have top-secret US security clearance - 800,000 government officials and 500,000 non-government private contractors.
6/10/2013
Former senior NSA official claims that only 30 or 40 people have access to FISA Court orders.
6/10/2013
Booz Allen Hamilton fires Edward Snowden.
6/11/2013
House of Representatives receives a classified briefing by the NSA and FBI on PRISM.
6/11/2013
11:49am
IRS cancels order for the spying equipment solicited on 6/6/2013.
6/11/2013
ACLU files lawsuit against Obama Administration over PRISM..
6/11/2013
White House: Celebrating the Opening of a New High Performance Computing Center.
OSTP’s Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs Dr. Patricia Falcone provided keynote remarks yesterday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of the US Army Research Laboratory’s (ARL) new supercomputing center at Aberdeen Proving Ground in northern Maryland.
The event also featured remarks by Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, ARL Director Dr. Thomas Russell, and other Army officials.
The new ARL Supercomputing Center—containing two new IBM iDataPlex computers with the capacity to perform 50,000 trillion floating point operations per second, or 50 petaflops—will provide state-of-the art high performance computing capabilities as well as extraordinary capacities in advanced high-speed networking and data analysis, providing unprecedented benefits to the Army, the Department of Defense, and the Nation as a whole.
6/12/2013
Former DOJ prosecutor Larry Klayman files a class action lawsuit against the 9 US companies that participated in PRISM.
6/12/2013
Parents of Navy SEAL killed on 8/7/2011 who are outspoken critics of President Obama join Freedom Watch lawsuit citing Verizon's 2011 admission that their phone was being tapped.
6/12/2013
Report: Obama's Surveillance Program Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers
6/12/2013
ABC News Rick Klein: McConnell's confessed bugger still not charged; DOJ not talking .
6/12/2013
NSA director, General Keith Alexander testifies that maintaining a database of Americans' phone records was critical to thwarting "dozens" of plots.
6/13/2013
Senators Udall and Wyden say they want proof that surveillance programs have disrupted plots against US.
6/14/2013
Bloomberg News: Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said.
6/14/2013
“A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data.
This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.
CBS News is taking steps to identify the responsible party and their method of access.”
6/14/2013
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants, disclosing in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.
6/14/2013
Facebook statement: Between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from all government entities, from local to federal, in the last six months of 2012. The orders involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users on a broad range of surveillance topics, from missing children to terrorism.
6/14/2013
Microsoft statement: Between 6,000 and 7,000 government orders, affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts were requested in last six months of 2012.
6/15/2013
A government paper is unclassified by intelligence agencies and Obama administration:
Surveillance data collection is legal, controlled and does not intrude on privacy.
Collection of "metadata" is raw information that does not identify individual telephone subscribers.
Of phone records collected in 2012, authorities looked at records of fewer than 300 phone numbers.
6/17/2013
Apple Statement: "From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from US law enforcement for customer data."
6/17/2013
Yahoo statement: From 12/1/2012 to 5/31/2013 "we received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests, inclusive of criminal, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and other requests."
6/17/2013
CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson: "The unauthorized party accessed the CBS computer at my home on multiple occasions, and specifically in December, they used sophisticated methods to cover their tracks, meaning they tried to remove the indications of their previous unauthorized activity. We're not prepared to talk more about the who's and who did this today, but the intruder is considered highly skilled and used very sophisticated methods."
6/18/2013
The FBI is investigating whether the highly protected and segregated computer systems that store the secret court warrants authorizing electronic surveillance inside the United States have been breached, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act takes effect.
10/26/2001
USA Patriot Act amends Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
8/5/2007
Protect America Act signed into law.
9/11/2007
PRISM data collection begins for Microsoft servers.
3/12/2008
PRISM data collection begins for Yahoo servers.
7/9/2008
FISA Amendment Act.
1/14/2009
PRISM data collection begins for Google servers.
3/2009
Analysts enter a phone number into agency computers and “put one digit wrong,” mining a large volume of information about Americans with no connection to terror. The matter is reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The Justice Department represents NSA before this secret court. The judges are "really upset about this" and require that all the data be destroyed. Attorney General Eric Holder pledges to the judges that the intelligence agencies would take correct the problem as condition of renewing the NSA’s surveillance program.
4/2009
The Justice Department publicly confirms to the New York Times that Holder has taken “comprehensive steps” to correct a problem in NSA collection after it “detected issues that raised concerns.” But department officials decline to discuss details about what was described at the time as the “over-collection” of information.
6/3/2009
PRISM data collection begins for Facebook servers.
6/11/2009
FOXN reporter James Rosen posts story about North Korea on website with words "Sources inside North Korea..."
6/12/2009
FBI investigates: Of the 95 people who saw classified document on North Korea only one spoke on phone with Rosen, State Department intelligence analyst Stephen Kim.
11/9/2009
Search warrant issued for Kim's emails.
12/3/2009
Google CEO Schmidt in CNBC interview: If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time.
We're all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.
12/7/2009
PRISM data collection begins for PalTalk servers.
2010
Annual report to Congress, the Justice Department reports 21 applications in 2009 for business records to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) under Section 215 – all of which were granted, though nine were modified by the court. (The reports do not explain how or why the orders were modified.)
5/28/2010
Search warrant issued for James Rosen's emails - personally approved and signed by AG Holder.
U.S. Attorney Ron Machen motion argues that the traditional 30-day notice period does not apply to Rosen as Justice secretly monitors his Gmail account.
6/30/2010
AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman publish article containing extensive details from an indictment, then still sealed, against Adnan Shukrijumah, accused of being a Qaeda operative.
7/8/2010
AP article about the arrest of terrorism suspects in Norway. In article AP discloses that it had delayed publication at government officials’ request.
8/27/2010
News Corp. lawyer notified by DOJ of Rosen suspicion via certified mail.
9/24/2010
PRISM data collection begins for YouTube servers.
2/6/2011
PRISM data collection begins for Skype servers.
3/2011
FBI Director Mueller during Senate Judiciary Oversight Committee hearing testifying about intelligence failures that contributed to 2009 Fort Hood massacre: “We put in place technological improvements relating to the capabilities of a database to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.”
3/31/2011
PRISM data collection begins for AOL servers.
2011
Annual report to Congress, the Justice Department reports the number of requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) under Section 215 jumps from 21 in 2009 to 205 in 2010 (all again granted, with 176 modified.)
FBI Director Mueller, written responses to Congress: “Beginning in late 2009, certain electronic communications service providers no longer honored NSLs to obtain” records because their lawyers cited “ambiguity” in the law. As a result the FBI switched over to demanding the same data under Section 215. “This change accounts for a significant increase in the volume of business records requests,” Mueller writes.
5/2/2011
Osama bin Laden raid.
5/4 or 5/11/2011
Secretary of Defense Gates confronts National Security Advisor Donilon about outpouring of leaks from White House regarding bin Laden raid: ‘I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend,’ Gates said in his trademark droll tones, according to an account later provided by his colleagues. What was that, Donilon asked? ‘Shut the fuck up,’ the defense secretary said.
5/2011
Congress reauthorizes the FISA provision of the Patriot Act, with the Senate voting 72-23 in favor, and the House approving the measure by a 250-153 count.
5/26/2011
PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act signed into law.
8/2011
Parents of Navy SEAL killed on 8/7/2011 who publicly criticized President Obama complain to Verizon about hearing clicking sounds during phone conversations and receiving text messages of 001 and 002.
Verizon explains that third parties are accessing their calls from inside US and Afghanistan.
10/2011
Mosques are now off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.
10/3/2011
A classified FISA 86-page court opinion is issued stating that the Justice Department engaged in surveillance activity that the court had found improper or unconstitutional.
10/13/2011
Document filed: Justice Department seized phone records associated with White House staffers and Fox News reporters in the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, former State Department contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to Rosen at Fox News.
11/7/2011
FOXN James Rosen secretly named as co-conspirator by DOJ in US DC District Court
4/2012
AP reporters learn from leakers that CIA infiltration of an al-Qaeda branch has thwarted a Yemeni terror plot similar to the underwear bomber that failed to detonate on a 12/25/2009 flight to Detroit.
4/30/12
Department of Homeland Security issues a statement: “No indication of any specific, credible threats or plots against the US tied to the one-year anniversary of Bin Laden’s death.”
5/2/12
AP prepares to publish its leaked scoop of CIA infiltration of al-Qaeda branch.
In AP discussions with government officials, the CIA stresses to AP that publishing anything about the operation to obtain the bomb and thwart the plot would create grave national security dangers and compromise a “sensitive intelligence operation.”
Michael Morell, CIA’s deputy director, gives AP reporters additional background information to persuade them to hold off. The agency wants several days more to protect what it has in the works.
5/2/12 - 5/7/12
Reporters at AP sit on their big scoop at request of CIA officials.
5/7/12
AP scheduled to release the story.
AP journalists asked by certain CIA officials to hold off on publishing story for just one more day.
Other CIA officials claim national security concerns are “no longer an issue."
AP rejects plea to hold off longer.
CIA offers a compromise: Would they wait a day if AP could have the story exclusively for an hour, with no government officials confirming it for that time?
Reporters leave meeting to discuss the idea with their editors.
Within an hour, an White House administration official calls AP’s offices.
White House quashes the one-hour offer as impossible.
AP should have story exclusively for five minutes before White House makes its own announcement.
AP rejects request to postpone publication any longer. Story is published.
WH plans to announce the successful counter terrorism operation the following day Tuesday, May8.
5/8/12
White House’s top counter terrorism adviser John Brennan goes on Good Morning America and announces the successful operation, praises intelligence officials and says that because of their work the Al Qaeda plot was never an active threat to the American public.
6/1/2012
New York Times article by David Sanger details with classified material how President Obama ordered the Sustenex cyber attacks against Iran's nuclear program.
7/2012
A U.S. intelligence official acknowledges in a letter to Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon that “on at least one occasion” the national security court found that “some collection” by the intelligence community “was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution.
10/2012
PRISM data collection begins for Apple servers.
12/2012
FISA Amendment Act of 2008 renewed.
12/2012
Cheryl Attkisson of CBS News has her computer breached while investigating White House Benghazi scandal. (Attkisson says she noticed unusual activity in her CBS-issued laptop and her home computer, such as dormant computers spontaneously “waking up” at odd hours. The unusual activity, which also included disruptions on her home phone line, predate the December 2012 breach that CBS confirmed.)
2/4/2013
Representative Maxine Waters: "The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That's going to be very, very powerful. That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it's never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They're going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can't get around it. And he's [President Obama] been very smart. It's very powerful what he's leaving in place."
2/12/2013
President Obama signs executive order Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, establishing a two-year timeline during which the federal government will determine what constitutes critical “physical or virtual” infrastructure, and establish security standards to keep those assets safe.
Development of the standards — called “Cybersecurity Framework” — will be led by director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
“The Cybersecurity Framework shall include a set of standards, methodologies, procedures, and processes that align policy, business, and technological approaches to address cyber risks.”
3/2013
NSA's data mining tool used to map information, called Boundless Informant, collects almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013.
3/11/2013
DNI Clapper receives all questions that he will be asked under oath at tomorrow's Senate hearing.
3/12/2013
Director of National Intelligence Clapper and other intelligence officials testify about threats to US.
Senator Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any kind of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
Clapper: "No, sir."
Wyden: "It does not?"
Clapper: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently, perhaps..."
4/18/2013
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passes the House.
Directs the federal government to conduct cybersecurity activities to provide shared situational awareness enabling integrated operational actions to protect, prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents.
Directs the President, with respect to information shared by a cybersecurity provider... to designate:
(1) an entity within Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the civilian federal entity to receive cyber threat information under prescribed procedures and subject to specified exceptions, and
(2) an entity within the Department of Justice (DOJ) as the civilian federal entity to receive information related to cybersecurity crimes.
4/25/2013
The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) grants renewal of court order to the FBI forcing Verizon to provide phone record data of all customers on a daily basis for three months.
4/30/2013
Letter from Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reports that the government submitted to the court 1,789 applications requesting authority to carry out electronic snooping in 2012.
4/30/2013
Annual report to Congress, DOJ reports filing 212 requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) under Section 215 in 2012.
FBI's number of national security letters (NSLs) issued by the bureau in 2012 was 15,229.
4-5/2013
DOJ seizes phone records – home, work and cell -- of 20 AP reporters and editors between April 2012-May 2012 from four AP bureaus including Washington and New York trying to hunt down government source of leaked info about a operation to thwart Al Qaeda plan to blow up an airliner.
5/5/2013
POTUS commencement address at OSU: "Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."
5/2013
Holder on AP leak: "put the American people at risk." Unauthorized disclosure of intelligence operation to stop al-Qaeda from bombing US airliner among most serious leaks he could remember.
AP: “As we told Reuters a year ago, at no point did AP offer or propose a deal in relation to this story,” said spokeswoman Erin Madigan White. “We did not publish anything until we were assured by high-ranking officials with direct knowledge of the situation, in more than one part of the government, that the national security risk was over and no one was in danger. The only deal was to hold the story until any security risk was resolved.”
5/2013
Edward Snowden makes final preparations at the NSA office in Hawaii where he is working, he copies the last set of documents he intends to disclose.
He then notifies his NSA supervisor that he needs to be away from work for "a couple of weeks" in order to receive treatment for epilepsy.
5/15/2013
Holder has recused himself from the AP case. He can not offer details on the investigation.
Holder testifies under oath that he was not involved in any "potential prosecution" of journalists.
5/17/2013
DOJ officials get word that The Washington Post is working on an explosive story: a reporter has obtained an affidavit for a search warrant to seize a Fox News journalist’s personal emails.
5/20/2013
Edward Snowden boards a flight from Hawaii to Hong Kong.
5/23/2013
President Barack Obama on Thursday asked Holder to review Justice’s guidelines on leak investigations and news organizations.
5/24/2013
Edward Snowden emails Washington Post using code name Verax.
5/31/2013
South Carolina Democrat operative Curtis Morrison admits to bugging Senate Minority Leader McConnell's campaign office.
6/5/2013
Attorney General Eric Holder misses deadline set by Republican Congress to explain questionable testimony he gave on reporter surveillance, as lawmakers threaten to subpoena Holder if necessary.
6/5/2013
Holder says he will not resign.
6/6/2013
IRS solicitation for surveillance equipment:
The Internal Revenue Service intends to award a Purchase Order to an undisclosed Corporation. The following descriptions are vague due to the use and nature of the items...
The following equipment will be purchased:
(QTY 4) Plant Concealment Color 700 Lines Color IP Camera Concealment with Single Channel Network Server, supports dual video stream, Poe, software included, case included, router included
(QTY 4) Covert Coffee tray with Camera concealment
(QTY 4) Remote surveillance system, Built-in DVD Burner and 2 Internal HDDs, cameras
(QTY 2) Concealed clock radio
(QTY 4) Color IP Camera Concealment with single channel network server...
6/6/2013
DOJ announces it will investigate the NSA/Verizon leak that ended up in the UK Guardian.
6/6/2013
Washington Post and UK Guardian break PRISM story after receiving 41-slide PowerPoint presentation from leaker.
6/6/2013
Report: Analysts at the National Security Agency can now secretly access real-time user data provided by as many as 50 American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to Internet service providers, two government officials familiar with the arrangements said.
Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL and Apple deny participation in NSA PRISM surveillance program
Google CEO Page: "First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."
Zuckerberg: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday."
Apple spokesman: “We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”
Paltalk statement: “We have not heard of PRISM. Paltalk exercises extreme care to protect and secure users’ data, only responding to court orders as required to by law. Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers.”
6/7/2013
President Obama falsely claims that "every member of Congress has been briefed on this program [PRISM]."
6/7/2013
US Assistant District Attorney cancels meeting with lawyer of Dem operative Curtis Morrison, admitted bugger of Senator McConnell's campaign office.
6/8/2013
UK Guardian publishes new slide from leaked PowerPoint presentation:
PRISM is distinct from four other Upstream programs (FAIRVIEW, BLARNEY, two others redacted) that involve the "Collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past." PRISM is the "Collection directly from the servers of these US Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."
6/8/2013
Administration opens criminal investigation into security breach leaking of classified documents related to the tracking of Americans' phone calls and emails, "a criminal report has been filed.”
FBI and DOJ will focus on British and US newspapers including The Guardian.
It remains unclear whether the secretive National Security Agency is involved in the filing.
6/9/2013
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tells NBC News that the phone-records program has helped foil two terrorism plots in 2009: a New York subway bombing scheme and a plot against a Danish news publisher.
6/9/2013
UK Guardian 15 minute video from Hong Kong luxury hotel room identifies PRISM leaker Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has worked at the National Security Agency for last four years as an employee of Booze Allen Hamilton. Snowden warns against 'Turn-key Tyranny.'
6/9/2013
Report: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government in 33 years.
6/9/2013
Class action lawsuit filed in Washington DC against DOJ and NSA by Freedom Watch over Verizon data collection.
6/10/2013
Report: 1.3 million people have top-secret US security clearance - 800,000 government officials and 500,000 non-government private contractors.
6/10/2013
Former senior NSA official claims that only 30 or 40 people have access to FISA Court orders.
6/10/2013
Booz Allen Hamilton fires Edward Snowden.
6/11/2013
House of Representatives receives a classified briefing by the NSA and FBI on PRISM.
6/11/2013
11:49am
IRS cancels order for the spying equipment solicited on 6/6/2013.
6/11/2013
ACLU files lawsuit against Obama Administration over PRISM..
6/11/2013
White House: Celebrating the Opening of a New High Performance Computing Center.
OSTP’s Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs Dr. Patricia Falcone provided keynote remarks yesterday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of the US Army Research Laboratory’s (ARL) new supercomputing center at Aberdeen Proving Ground in northern Maryland.
The event also featured remarks by Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, ARL Director Dr. Thomas Russell, and other Army officials.
The new ARL Supercomputing Center—containing two new IBM iDataPlex computers with the capacity to perform 50,000 trillion floating point operations per second, or 50 petaflops—will provide state-of-the art high performance computing capabilities as well as extraordinary capacities in advanced high-speed networking and data analysis, providing unprecedented benefits to the Army, the Department of Defense, and the Nation as a whole.
6/12/2013
Former DOJ prosecutor Larry Klayman files a class action lawsuit against the 9 US companies that participated in PRISM.
6/12/2013
Parents of Navy SEAL killed on 8/7/2011 who are outspoken critics of President Obama join Freedom Watch lawsuit citing Verizon's 2011 admission that their phone was being tapped.
6/12/2013
Report: Obama's Surveillance Program Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers
6/12/2013
ABC News Rick Klein: McConnell's confessed bugger still not charged; DOJ not talking .
6/12/2013
NSA director, General Keith Alexander testifies that maintaining a database of Americans' phone records was critical to thwarting "dozens" of plots.
6/13/2013
Senators Udall and Wyden say they want proof that surveillance programs have disrupted plots against US.
6/14/2013
Bloomberg News: Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said.
6/14/2013
“A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data.
This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.
CBS News is taking steps to identify the responsible party and their method of access.”
6/14/2013
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants, disclosing in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.
6/14/2013
Facebook statement: Between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from all government entities, from local to federal, in the last six months of 2012. The orders involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users on a broad range of surveillance topics, from missing children to terrorism.
6/14/2013
Microsoft statement: Between 6,000 and 7,000 government orders, affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts were requested in last six months of 2012.
6/15/2013
A government paper is unclassified by intelligence agencies and Obama administration:
Surveillance data collection is legal, controlled and does not intrude on privacy.
Collection of "metadata" is raw information that does not identify individual telephone subscribers.
Of phone records collected in 2012, authorities looked at records of fewer than 300 phone numbers.
6/17/2013
Apple Statement: "From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from US law enforcement for customer data."
6/17/2013
Yahoo statement: From 12/1/2012 to 5/31/2013 "we received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests, inclusive of criminal, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and other requests."
6/17/2013
CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson: "The unauthorized party accessed the CBS computer at my home on multiple occasions, and specifically in December, they used sophisticated methods to cover their tracks, meaning they tried to remove the indications of their previous unauthorized activity. We're not prepared to talk more about the who's and who did this today, but the intruder is considered highly skilled and used very sophisticated methods."
6/18/2013
The FBI is investigating whether the highly protected and segregated computer systems that store the secret court warrants authorizing electronic surveillance inside the United States have been breached, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Watergate Benghazi psychoanalysis word association
Watergate --- Benghazi
Nixon --- Obama
1972 re-election campaign --- 2012 re-election campaign
June 17, 1972 --- September 11, 2012
tapes --- emails
11 minute gap --- 67 hour gap
Ziegler --- Carney
Colson --- Cutter
Sheehan --- Rosen
IRS Enemies List --- IRS Conservative Targets
Pentagon Papers --- PRISM
diplomatic success with China --- diplomatic failure with China
Grey burns docs --- Holder deletes data
Martha --- Michelle
DOJ wiretaps --- DOJ wiretaps
Haldeman --- Jarrett
Magruder --- Plouffe
Woodward --- Attkisson
Bernstein --- Hayes
CRP --- OFA
Ellsberg --- Jin-Woo Kim
I'm not a crook --- There's no there there
Ehrlichman --- Axelrod
John Dean --- Kathryn Ruemmler
Plumbers --- Leakers
ITT --- HHS
What did the President know and when did he know it? --- Where was the President between 5:15 and 10 PM?
Washington Post --- UK Guardian
Nixon --- Obama
1972 re-election campaign --- 2012 re-election campaign
June 17, 1972 --- September 11, 2012
tapes --- emails
11 minute gap --- 67 hour gap
Ziegler --- Carney
Colson --- Cutter
Sheehan --- Rosen
IRS Enemies List --- IRS Conservative Targets
Pentagon Papers --- PRISM
diplomatic success with China --- diplomatic failure with China
Grey burns docs --- Holder deletes data
Martha --- Michelle
DOJ wiretaps --- DOJ wiretaps
Haldeman --- Jarrett
Magruder --- Plouffe
Woodward --- Attkisson
Bernstein --- Hayes
CRP --- OFA
Ellsberg --- Jin-Woo Kim
I'm not a crook --- There's no there there
Ehrlichman --- Axelrod
John Dean --- Kathryn Ruemmler
Plumbers --- Leakers
ITT --- HHS
What did the President know and when did he know it? --- Where was the President between 5:15 and 10 PM?
Washington Post --- UK Guardian
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Watergate Articles of Impeachment, President Nixon, July 27,1974
Articles of Impeachment
RESOLVED, That Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment to be exhibited to the Senate:
ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT EXHIBITED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN THE NAME OF ITSELF AND OF ALL OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AGAINST RICHARD M. NIXON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IN MAINTENANCE AND SUPPORT OF ITS IMPEACHMENT AGAINST HIM FOR HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANOURS.
Article 1: Obstruction of Justice
In his conduct of the office of the President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, in that: On June 17, 1972, and prior thereto, agents of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President committed unlawful entry of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, District of Columbia, for the purpose of securing political intelligence. Subsequent thereto, Richard M. Nixon, using the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his subordinates and agents in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede and obstruct investigations of such unlawful entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.
The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan have included one or more of the following:
(1) Making or causing to be made false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States.
(2) Withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States.
(3) Approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counseling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States and false or misleading testimony in duly instituted judicial and congressional proceedings.
(4) Interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force and congressional committees.
(5) Approving, condoning, and acquiescing in, the surreptitious payments of substantial sums of money for the purpose of obtaining the silence or influencing the testimony of witnesses, potential witnesses or individuals who participated in such unlawful entry and other illegal activities.
(6) Endeavoring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States.
(7) Disseminating information received from officers of the Department of Justice of the United States to subjects of investigations conducted by lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States for the purpose of aiding and assisting such subjects in their attempts to avoid criminal liability.
(8) Making false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation has been conducted with respect to allegation of misconduct on the part of personnel of the Executive Branch of the United States and personnel of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and that there was no involvement of such personnel in such misconduct; or
(9) Endeavoring to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favored treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony, or rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.
Article 2: Abuse of Power
Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.
This conduct has included one or more of the following:
(1) He has, acting personally and through his subordinated and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigation to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.
(2) He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.
(3) He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, authorized and permitted to be maintained a secret investigative unit within the office of the President, financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions to him, which unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, engaged in covert and unlawful activities, and attempted to prejudice the constitutional right of an accused to a fair trial.
(4) He has failed to take care that the laws were faithfully executed by failing to act when he knew or had reason to know that his close subordinates endeavored to impede and frustrate lawful inquiries by duly constituted executive; judicial and legislative entities concerning the unlawful entry into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the cover-up thereof, and concerning other unlawful activities including those relating to the confirmation of Richard Kleindienst as attorney general of the United States, the electronic surveillance of private citizens, the break-in into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, and the campaign financing practices of the Committee to Re-elect the President.
(5) In disregard of the rule of law: he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch: including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Criminal Division and the Office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force of the Department of Justice, in violation of his duty to take care that the laws by faithfully executed.
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.
Article 3: Contempt of Congress.
In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, contrary to his oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives on April 11, 1974, May 15, 1974, May 30, 1974, and June 24, 1974, and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas. The subpoenaed papers and things were deemed necessary by the Committee in order to resolve by direct evidence fundamental, factual questions relating to Presidential direction, knowledge or approval of actions demonstrated by other evidence to be substantial grounds for impeachment of the President. In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore, Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.
RESOLVED, That Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment to be exhibited to the Senate:
ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT EXHIBITED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN THE NAME OF ITSELF AND OF ALL OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AGAINST RICHARD M. NIXON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IN MAINTENANCE AND SUPPORT OF ITS IMPEACHMENT AGAINST HIM FOR HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANOURS.
Article 1: Obstruction of Justice
In his conduct of the office of the President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, in that: On June 17, 1972, and prior thereto, agents of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President committed unlawful entry of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, District of Columbia, for the purpose of securing political intelligence. Subsequent thereto, Richard M. Nixon, using the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his subordinates and agents in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede and obstruct investigations of such unlawful entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.
The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan have included one or more of the following:
(1) Making or causing to be made false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States.
(2) Withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States.
(3) Approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counseling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States and false or misleading testimony in duly instituted judicial and congressional proceedings.
(4) Interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force and congressional committees.
(5) Approving, condoning, and acquiescing in, the surreptitious payments of substantial sums of money for the purpose of obtaining the silence or influencing the testimony of witnesses, potential witnesses or individuals who participated in such unlawful entry and other illegal activities.
(6) Endeavoring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States.
(7) Disseminating information received from officers of the Department of Justice of the United States to subjects of investigations conducted by lawfully authorized investigative officers and employes of the United States for the purpose of aiding and assisting such subjects in their attempts to avoid criminal liability.
(8) Making false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation has been conducted with respect to allegation of misconduct on the part of personnel of the Executive Branch of the United States and personnel of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and that there was no involvement of such personnel in such misconduct; or
(9) Endeavoring to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favored treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony, or rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.
Article 2: Abuse of Power
Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.
This conduct has included one or more of the following:
(1) He has, acting personally and through his subordinated and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigation to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.
(2) He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.
(3) He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, authorized and permitted to be maintained a secret investigative unit within the office of the President, financed in part with money derived from campaign contributions to him, which unlawfully utilized the resources of the Central Intelligence Agency, engaged in covert and unlawful activities, and attempted to prejudice the constitutional right of an accused to a fair trial.
(4) He has failed to take care that the laws were faithfully executed by failing to act when he knew or had reason to know that his close subordinates endeavored to impede and frustrate lawful inquiries by duly constituted executive; judicial and legislative entities concerning the unlawful entry into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the cover-up thereof, and concerning other unlawful activities including those relating to the confirmation of Richard Kleindienst as attorney general of the United States, the electronic surveillance of private citizens, the break-in into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, and the campaign financing practices of the Committee to Re-elect the President.
(5) In disregard of the rule of law: he knowingly misused the executive power by interfering with agencies of the executive branch: including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Criminal Division and the Office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force of the Department of Justice, in violation of his duty to take care that the laws by faithfully executed.
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.
Article 3: Contempt of Congress.
In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, contrary to his oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives on April 11, 1974, May 15, 1974, May 30, 1974, and June 24, 1974, and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas. The subpoenaed papers and things were deemed necessary by the Committee in order to resolve by direct evidence fundamental, factual questions relating to Presidential direction, knowledge or approval of actions demonstrated by other evidence to be substantial grounds for impeachment of the President. In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.
In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.
Wherefore, Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.
Monday, May 13, 2013
The Buffalo News, front page headlines, scandals, Benghazi, IRS, DOJ, May 2013
[Bold shows center, above the fold]
5/10/2013
--- News breaks of IRS targeting Conservative groups.
--- WH press briefing, Jay Carney deluged with Benghazi and IRS questions.
Mother's Day weekend
--- Benghazi and IRS questions dominate all network news programs.
5/13/2013 - The Buffalo News A1 headlines:
-After surgery, he's Reed thin
-Bill would reform oversight of charities
-No easy answers on Gitmo stalemate
-Diversity lacking in attorneys who argue before high court
First mention of either topic - Page A5:
-Diplomat absolves Clinton in Libya flap
5/13/2013
--- Obama responds to Benghazi and IRS scandals at presser
--- News breaks of DOJ tapping phones of AP reporters.
5/14/2013 - The Buffalo News A1 headlines:
-What to do with a dinosaur 80 feet high?
-Abortion doctor found guilty of murder
-Rates, choices down in new health plans
-Orphaned polar bear cub to have home in Buffalo
-O.J. in court
5/14/2013
--- IRS scandal expands in scope, AG doubles down on DOJ phone taps
5/15/2013 - The Buffalo News A1 headlines:
-Mass email breaches the privacy of patients
-Angelina's choice
-Proposal to lower DWI limit stirs debate
-Russia expels U.S. diplomat accused of espionage
5/15/2013
--- AG Holder Congressional testimony on wiretaps
--- WH releases 94 Benghazi emails, previous claims contradicted, 67 hour gap
--- POTUS White House statement on IRS scandal
5/16/2013 - The Buffalo News A1 front page:
-A playmate for Luna / The zoo's latest attraction (7'x7' photo polar cub)
-Border fee study hits dead end in House committee
-Reports rip Silver over Lopez prode
-Acting IRS commissioner resigns
-Dominican wins 10-year battle for U.S. citizenship
5/16/2013
--- POTUS from Rose Garden will not answer if he knew about IRS illegal activity
--- POTUS from Rose Garden supports DOJ actions against AP
--- IRS official in charge of target list now heads IRS Obamacare office
5/17/2013 - The Buffalo News front page:
-Sheriff on SAFE Act: 'I won't enforce it'
-Falls businessman accused of trying to murder rival
-Bipartisan group in House reaches deal on immigration
-GOP senators target three Buffalonians
5/10/2013
--- News breaks of IRS targeting Conservative groups.
--- WH press briefing, Jay Carney deluged with Benghazi and IRS questions.
Mother's Day weekend
--- Benghazi and IRS questions dominate all network news programs.
5/13/2013 - The Buffalo News A1 headlines:
-After surgery, he's Reed thin
-Bill would reform oversight of charities
-No easy answers on Gitmo stalemate
-Diversity lacking in attorneys who argue before high court
First mention of either topic - Page A5:
-Diplomat absolves Clinton in Libya flap
5/13/2013
--- Obama responds to Benghazi and IRS scandals at presser
--- News breaks of DOJ tapping phones of AP reporters.
5/14/2013 - The Buffalo News A1 headlines:
-What to do with a dinosaur 80 feet high?
-Abortion doctor found guilty of murder
-Rates, choices down in new health plans
-Orphaned polar bear cub to have home in Buffalo
-O.J. in court
5/14/2013
--- IRS scandal expands in scope, AG doubles down on DOJ phone taps
5/15/2013 - The Buffalo News A1 headlines:
-Mass email breaches the privacy of patients
-Angelina's choice
-Proposal to lower DWI limit stirs debate
-Russia expels U.S. diplomat accused of espionage
5/15/2013
--- AG Holder Congressional testimony on wiretaps
--- WH releases 94 Benghazi emails, previous claims contradicted, 67 hour gap
--- POTUS White House statement on IRS scandal
5/16/2013 - The Buffalo News A1 front page:
-A playmate for Luna / The zoo's latest attraction (7'x7' photo polar cub)
-Border fee study hits dead end in House committee
-Reports rip Silver over Lopez prode
-Acting IRS commissioner resigns
-Dominican wins 10-year battle for U.S. citizenship
5/16/2013
--- POTUS from Rose Garden will not answer if he knew about IRS illegal activity
--- POTUS from Rose Garden supports DOJ actions against AP
--- IRS official in charge of target list now heads IRS Obamacare office
5/17/2013 - The Buffalo News front page:
-Sheriff on SAFE Act: 'I won't enforce it'
-Falls businessman accused of trying to murder rival
-Bipartisan group in House reaches deal on immigration
-GOP senators target three Buffalonians
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
