Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Stonewalling & A Government Unafraid



In 2012, Landmark Legal Foundation submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to EPA. By law, EPA was required to timely respond. They didn't, and indeed, they seem to have purposely clouded their actions so that, even at this date, it is not clear whether the EPA ever fully responded to the request and whether they destroyed evidence. The Landmark Legal Foundation brought suit against EPA for these failures, and in a depressingly useless 25 page opinion issued yesterday, Judge Royce Lamberth castigated the EPA, found misconduct, yet held no one, including the EPA itself, liable. There are no criminal or professional referrals. Indeed, the Judge even bemoaned the fact that the EPA would very likely continue its pattern of misconduct despite the findings in the case.

This is par for the course in our country today. No one is held liable. There are no consequences for those in government.

- The travesty of the IRS investigation has been going on for two years now. The IRS may well have tipped the balance in the 2012 election. We now know that people have been lying about the availability of documentary evidence, and yet no one is being held accountable.

- In Benghazi, the government refused for years to provide relevant information. They claimed to have conducted an internal investigation -- a whitewash that deliberately excluded the upper echelons of the State Dept. -- and reassigned a few people.

- After years of stonewalling on the Fast and Furious documents, the Obama administration claimed executive privilege, turning discovery into a snails pace.

- We have Obamacare today because the DOJ prosecuted Sen Ted Stevens of Alaska under false pretenses. Stevens lost his re-election bid but the DOJ attorneys, whose "egregious" acts included hiding evidence from the defense. To date, those in charge of the prosecution in the upper levels of the DOJ have not been held liable.

- In 2007 we suffered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. While it's causes were firmly rooted in government, at least some aspects of our economic system were criminally corrupted, in particular the bond rating companies that gave AAA status to subprime loans. Yet not a single individual has been held liable for any of that, and with Dodd Frank, many of the practices that led to our economic crisis are being repeated.

As Hillary famously asked about Benghazi, "what difference does it make?"

Well, to answer, it's the difference between liberty and tyranny. It is the difference between repeating catastrophic errors and or correcting for them. But, because the DOJ and the MSM are, today, largely arms of the Democrat Party, and because Congress is largely supine, none of this will be addressed. It will not change. Judge Lamberth can shake his fist at the EPA all he wants. Until there are heads on pikes, it is useless. And until then, our government will become ever more corrupt.

Update: The NYT has broken a story apparently leaked from the Benghazi Select Committee being chaired by Congressman Trey Gowdy. One of the mysteries surrounding the Benghazi intestigations has been why so little correspondence was produced from then Sec. of State Hillary Clinton. Today we learn, because Hillary, in a clear violation of protocol and almost certainly the law, routed all her correspondence while Sec. of State through a personal e-mail account, one that she set up on the day of her confirmation hearings for Sec. of State. I really want to hear her under oath asking "What difference does it make?" The likelihood that she'll be held to account for this . . . I won't recommend holding your breath.





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