BIGOTRY RAMPANT INSIDE AGENCY OBAMA CREATED TO FIGHT FINANCIAL BIAS: Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are coming forward in droves talking about widespread racial, gender and ethnic discrimination within the workforce there, according to Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

Things are so bad in one key division of CFPB that workers there refer to it as “The Plantation.” One in four of the black, Asian and female CFPB employees surveyed by the Government Accountability Office said they had been discriminated against by managers on at least one occasion.

“Now five years old, CFPB was intended as a model for government when Obama joined with one of his top appointees, Elizabeth Warren, in designing and proposing the bureau in 2010. Warren later became the progressive Democratic senator from Massachusetts. The bureau was created under the Dodd-Frank Act, and among its purposes was to root out discrimination in the financial marketplace,” Pollock reports.

In its five year existence, CFPB has done little other than compile two huge intrusive databases containing billions of bytes of information about individual Americans financial position. Because it was created as part of the Federal Reserve, the CFPB is beyond the financial and regulatory oversight of Congress.

“You have a lawless agency when it comes to its own employees,” attorney David H. Shapiro, a former U.S. Attorney who for the last 40 yeas has represented individuals in civil rights law and discrimination cases, told Pollock.

HERE’S FIVE WAYS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS CAN GET YOU KILLED: As evidence from Orlando continues to pile up about the bloodiest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, this counter-terrorism expert points to five ways rampant PC blinders among federal officials can be lethal for the rest of us.

HOUSE COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN LACERATES EPA, INTERIOR: Rep. Rob Bishop is chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources. The Utah Republican is a long-time critic of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior.

But what he told the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton about the deception of the two federal departments about the true cause of the Gold King Mine disaster is truly searing. This is Barton’s fifth story this week and it ends the Gold King Mine series with the question – what is Congress going to do about an obvious coverup by bureaucrats?

MEET HAYS GRISWOLD, THE GOLD KING MINE MAN FROM EPA: Griswold was the On-Scene Coordinator at the facility the day in August 2015 when the mine was breached, unleashing a three-million gallon flood of dangerous mine waste into Colorado’s Animus River, the drinking water source for people in three states and the Navajo Nation. Suspended in that flood were an estimated 880,000 pounds of toxic elements like lead and arsenic.

These facts are known now because the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton ignored the avalanche of evasions, half-truths, glittering generalities and unexplained delays that for months characterized the response from Environmental Protection Agency officials about what looks increasingly like a major environmental disaster caused by the agency.

To date, neither Griswold, nor anybody else at EPA or any of the several other federal agencies active in the Gold King Mine region or connected to the disaster in some way has been disciplined, much less fired. Ultimately, taxpayers will pay millions of dollars in damages for the government’s actions that created a serious public health threat and inflicted long-term environmental damage that could have been avoided.

And in case you are wondering, Hays Griswold is not a known relative of Clark Griswold.

HERE’S A CLASSIC CASE OF BUREAUCRATS COVERING UP FOR EACH OTHER: When an Environmental Protection Agency work-crew accidentally unleashed a three-million gallon flood of dangerous waste from Colorado’s Gold King Mine in August 2015, it turned the Animus River yellow for nearly a week. That river provides drinking water for millions of people in three states and the Navajo Nation.

Federal officials promised an “independent” review of the disaster by the Army Corps of Engineers to determine its cause and who was responsible for it, not least because the flood included 880,000 pounds of toxic materials like lead and arsenic. But when the review came out, it was full of gaps, most notably concerning who made the critical decisions that resulted in the flood.

Ethan Barton, one of the determined reporters with the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group, has been digging for months seeking the full story about Gold King Mine. His findings are being published this week and what has become clear is that officials at EPA caused the disaster and they then joined with compatriots at the Department of the Interior (which is a part-owner of the mine, oh by the way!) in a bald-faced coverup.

The review was ultimately conducted by Interior, not the Army Corps because, Barton reports today, “Army Corps, however, had already developed potential topics to probe, and its lead reviewer was highly experienced in similar investigations, documents obtained by TheDCNF show. DOI’s final scope for the Gold King Mine review, in fact, nixed crucial topics Army Corps planned to examine, including the root cause of the spill.”

House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop has been closely following Barton’s reporting and the panel’s investigators have compiled a mountain of evidence about the events that led up to Gold King Mine. Don’t be surprised if a full-fledged congressional investigation is in the offing. Barton has also exposed EPA’s $3.3 billion worth of secret slush funds.

GOT A CREDIT CARD OR A MORTGAGE? THEN CFPB KNOWS ALL ABOUT YOU: Officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – the hybrid financial regulatory agency President Obama and a Democratic Congress created in 2010 – are accumulating what may well be the world’s largest database of information on American consumers. And CFPB’s bureaucrats refuse to tell Congress how or why they are doing so, or what specifically they intend to do with the data.

Now, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, chaired by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, has asked Mark Bialek, the Federal Reserve’s Inspector General, to disclose everything it knows about the CFPB data collection operation. Bialek is involved because Obama and the Capitol Hill Democrats put CFPB in the Federal Reserve, which essentially puts the bureau beyond congressional oversight.

What is known, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock, is the database is being created “by pulling private consumer records from 7,062 financial institutions and 300 credit card issuers without the permission of the record holders. The bureau has rebuffed previous congressional queries about its big data program and the measures it has taken to protect the security of millions of records and the privacy of the people covered by the records.”

In other words, not only are these unaccountable bureaucrats collecting the intimate financial data about hundreds of millions of Americans, they won’t say how they are protecting the information from hackers. Let’s just hope they aren’t consulting colleagues elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy such as the Office of Personnel Management. 

PERSIST IN FIGHTING EPA AND YOUR TOWN JUST MIGHT BE FLOODED: Slowly but surely, thanks to the determined digging of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton, the whole story about the August 2015 Gold King Mine disaster is coming to light. The Environmental Protection Agency Barton is steadily exposing isn’t pretty, at all.

Here’s the nut of the story:

“Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representatives have focused intently on Silverton, Colorado, since the mid-1990s, accumulating evidence — and sometimes using scare tactics — to persuade residents to drop their opposition to a Superfund designation for the surrounding region.

“Residents surrendered to federal demands only after an EPA work-crew turned the nearby Animas River bright yellow for nearly a week by releasing a three-million-gallon flood of acidic mine waste under extremely questionable circumstances in August 2015.

“Suspended in the flood was 880,000 pounds of toxic metals, including lead and arsenic, that poured into the river that supplies drinking water for people living in three states and the Navajo Nation. The mine is just upstream from Silverton.”

Read those three paragraphs again. Government agents just happened to “mistakenly” release a flood of acidic mine waste on a town that opposes the Superfund designation that would give the feds a stranglehold on the local economy. Incredibly enough, Barton has more coming. Stay tuned.

IS THE LEFT CLOSING IN FOR THE KILL ON AMERICA? If that strikes you as an unbalanced question, consider that the guy posing it is Kim Holmes, a former Assistant Secretary of State and a long-time foreign policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. Holmes new book – The Closing Of The Liberal Mind: How GroupThink and Intolerance Define the Left – lays out all of the disturbing facts.

Holmes sat down with Ginni Thomas of the Daily Caller (yes, and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) to explain why he believes the Left’s various contemporary outrages constitute “a mopping-up operation and they’re going in for the kill.” Rather than merely dismissing this as another despairing old conservative, you would do well to read and hear Holmes make his case.

HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP TELLS KERRY TO DIVEST HIS INVESTMENT IN CHINESE FIRM: Tibet Water Resources, Llc., is a firm close to the Chinese Communist party. Perhaps that’s why it has such a sweet deal to exploit Tibet’s rich mountain waters, which it sells in Europe as a competitor to Evian and Perrier. Guess who is one Tibet Waters’ most famous investors?

Secretary of State John Kerry’s family fortune has investments in Tibet Waters even though official U.S. policy has long deplored China’s repression of Tibet, which the Asian giant treats as a vassal. Now Free Tibet, the international human rights group that has been defending the embattled nation, is calling on Kerry to divest that investment, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock.

Free Tibet’s challenge came in a May 17 letter obtained by Pollock. A Kerry State Department spokesman refused to comment when asked by Pollock about the letter. Perhaps the fact his predecessor as secretary ignored State Department policy on a highly significant issue leads Kerry to think it’s ok for him to do the same with regard to investing in a foreign company whose profits have a certain tint of red to them.

WHERE’D ALL THOSE FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE REPORTS GO? About a thousand top appointees in every presidential administration are required to file financial disclosure reports that enable journalists, academic experts and members of the public to spot conflicts-of-interest. Well, not anymore, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak.

In January, Rosiak reports this morning, “the list was inexplicably removed, leaving only a search box. That action severely reduced the chance of officials’ finances being scrutinized because it became necessary to know the name of a person and have a reason to want to look up that individual, as opposed to, for example, looking for listings from an agency of interest.”

And now? “Even that capability is gone, along with almost all references to actually seeing the disclosures. Thousands of PDFs have also been deleted, leaving dead links.” Just another day at the office for the “most transparent administration in history.”

CLINTON FOUNDATION GOT $100 MILLION FROM “BLOOD MINERALS” FIRM: Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unaccountably delayed implementation in 2009 of a congressionally mandated certification process designed to bar human rights abuses by mining companies in Africa.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock found a hundred million reasons for Clinton’s dallying. Two years before, the Clinton Foundation got a $100 million pledge from the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group.

Lundin is one of the giants of the global mining industry, with huge operations in the Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia. Those operations were repeatedly condemned by human rights groups claiming native populations were being forced to flee their homelands and even being killed because they stood in the way of Lundin projects.

“’Blood minerals’ are related to ‘blood diamonds,’ which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords,” according to Pollock. Lundin has a long history of “cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships” in war-torn Africa.

The least surprising aspect of this story? Spokesmen for the Clinton Foundation and Lundin refused to comment.

TWO EPA BUREAUCRAT PANELS MEET SECRETLY, SPEND BILLIONS: And no, you can’t have the names of the bureaucrats on either panel, minutes of their minutes or records of their spending decisions, reports Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

“Congress appropriates about $1 billion annually for EPA’s Superfund program, and the agency has accumulated nearly $6.8 billion in more than 1,300 slush fund-like accounts since 1990,” according to Barton. “Two committees consisting entirely of EPA officials meet behind closed doors twice annually to decide how the agency spends those funds on highly polluted – and often dangerous – Superfund sites.”

Even though Superfund sites can involve significant risks to the public health, “all reports to and from the groups, as well as the minutes of their meetings and all other details, are kept behind closed doors,” Barton reports.

Secret meetings. Spending without accountability. No public records of who they are. Will Congress – the “First Branch” of the government established by the Constitution – do anything about it?

NEW OBAMA/HOLDER DECEPTIONS EXPOSED: Turns out the Department of Justice under former Attorney General Eric Holder used the power of government to force settlements on Bank of America, Citicorps and other financial industry titans that required them to make millions of dollars in contributions to “community groups,” including many that are political favorites of President Obama and advocates for more government regulation.

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports on a briefing Friday by the Cause of Action Institute and Rep. Sean Duffy, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations. It’s bad enough that these big banks routinely collude with the government on regulation; here they are found submitting themselves and their abundant resources to serve the liberal political agenda.

“Among the political activist groups favored favored by the settlements is La Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic activist organization that routinely supports Democratic candidates and causes. Cecilia Munoz, a La Raza senior vice president, was appointed by Obama in 2012 to head the White House Domestic Policy Council.

“La Raza is flush with money, reporting in 2013 to the IRS assets of $55 million. Janet Murguia, the group’s president and CEO was paid $417,000 that year, according to the group’s IRS tax return. Even so, La Raza is slated to receive at least $1 million from the Bank of America settlement and $500,000 from the Citigroup settlement,” according to Pollock.

There is more here to this story, much, much more, and all of it is worth reading. Just be careful to keep some nitro pills handy in case you have a weak heart because this stuff will make your blood boil. This is a story of liberal politicians using the power of government to divert millions of dollars slated for folks suffering in 2008’s housing meltdown to political groups, all to advance their personal and political agendas.

REVOLVING DOORS ARE SPINNING AT HYPER-SPEED AT THE CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BOARD: Three of the top four executives at the CFPB – the questionably constitutional hybrid agency created by President Obama and Elizabeth Warren – have left the bureau in recent months for lucrative positions in the financial industry, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock.

Obama, Warren and the Democratic Congress in 2010 put CFPB under the Federal Reserve, ostensibly to insure its independence of financial industry special interests, but also effectively insulating it from congressional oversight, As Pollock reports, however, CFPB has instead become “a breeding ground for bureaucrats becoming highly paid executives in the very industry the bureau was created to regulate. The CFPB has an unusually high turnover rate for a government agency as nearly 50 top CFPB officials have abandoned the agency since its creation to take high-paying jobs in the industry.”

‘AUDIT THE FED’ BILL MAKING PROGRESS IN CONGRESS: Federal Reserve officials may yet have to cough up a lot more information about their activities when auditors from the Government Accounting Agency come calling. A measure sponsored by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky, greatly expands GAO’s auditing authority over the Fed, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has scheduled a mark-up session on Massie’s proposal for Tuesday. Mark-up sessions are the among the last steps before proposals go to the House floor for final votes. A similar measure failed last year in the Senate but Sen. Rand Paul, another Kentucky Republican, introduced it again this year.

BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON GOT AT LEAST $100 MILLION FROM MIDDLE EAST SHEIKS: The Clintons have done something that has never before been done by any U.S. political figures – Using speaking fees, business partnerships, foundation grants and who knows what else made possible by public service to make themselves fabulously wealthy, without apparent regard for who suffered the consequences.

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group pored over countless public documents and connected the dots to tell an incredible – and previously unreported – story that raises a multitude of disturbing new questions about a second Clinton presidency. Like how would the American people ever know with any certainty that a decision by President Hillary Clinton was made to advance the best interests of the U.S. or to make the Clintons even richer?

FEDS HIRED A CREDIT CARD FRAUD FELON FRESH OUT OF PRISON, NOW HE RUNS A BIG VA PURCHASING UNIT: Trust me, friends, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak did not make up this story that captures pretty much everything that is wrong with the Department of Veterans Affairs (and probably the federal bureaucracy in general as well).

“Almost immediately after Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate #11109-017 completed a 14-month sentence for using sensitive credit card data on his previous employer’s computer system to steal $70,000, he was hired by the Department of Veterans Affairs in a position that ultimately led to his present job — running an office racked with credit card fraud and bribery problems,” Rosiak writes this morning.

Really, you owe it to yourself this morning to read the whole story, which you can do right here.

IF YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF “TIBET 5100 WATER RESOURCES, LTD,” YOU’RE NOT ALONE: It’s a Chinese firm doing business in Tibet as “Tibet Water.” Secretary of State John Kerry knows about it because a family trust of his wife, Teresa Heinz, is invested in the company that bottles Tibetan glacial water and sells it in Europe as an alternative to Evian and Perrier.

Tibet is the world’s highest land and home to Mt. Everest and Tibetan Bhuddism.  It’s also long been the object of Chinese imperialism and is under Beijing’s heavy-handed rule today. Thanks to the thousands of glaciers in Tibet, the land has lots of water, which is why Tibet Water is there. Tibet Water is closely linked to the Chinese government and to the Communist Party that controls it.

So why is the U.S. Secretary of State’s family invested in a company that is exploiting the natural resources of a poor neighbor, an exploitation, by the way, that could not occur without the approval of the government of China? Good question. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock, who exclusively reported the investment today, has asked Kerry’s spokesman for an explanation.

PUBLIC HOUSING AUTHORITY EXECS MAY SOON BE THE MOST POWERFUL FEDS IN TOWN: They’re already among the best paid, with 80 of them making more than $200,000 annually and at least 340 getting $150,000 or more every year. And did we mention those sweet bonuses? Four of these lucky guys got bonuses of more than $75,000 and 74 of them received checks for more than $25,000.

But what makes these figures of particular interest is that the feds running America’s 4,000+ public housing authorities may soon be telling the rest of us where we must live and who must be our neighbors. That’s thanks to a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in June 2015 that upheld the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s power to take action against neighborhood discrimination even when there’s zero evidence of it other than demographics.

Julian Castro, President Obama’s HUD Secretary, has the regulatory regime in place to do this in a program called “Affirmatively Affirming Fair Housing.” Castro is prominently mentioned as a potential Clinton running mate. With or without Castro, however, Clinton can be expected to push the AAFH. Remember this next year when the folks from your local public housing authority suddenly show up in your neighborhood. They won’t be bringing welcome baskets.

ONCE AN ANTI-WAR HERO, ALWAYS AN ANTI-WAR HERO? Hundreds of veterans of 1971’s May Day civil disobedience in Washington, D.C. returned to the scene earlier this week for a nostalgic review of an event that saw more than 12,000 arrests, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. Among the highlights of the conference was a video presentation to the group by the Pentagon Papers’ Daniel Ellsberg.

It seems like a reasonable conjecture to think that former community organizer Barack Obama would have been among the May Day demonstrators had he been around, but now that he’s president and there is a war somewhere in the world involving U.S. troops, he’s an inviting target for anti-war heroes like Ellsberg, who warned that Obama will “furtively” escalate the Iraq conflict, just as Ike, JFK, LBJ and RMN did in Vietnam:

“’Right now, Marines are being furtively being sent into combat in Iraq in a hopeless operation as before,’ he said, adding that like the early days in Vietnam, there will be ‘gradually advisors calling in air support,’” Pollock reported. Somethings never change for the far Left. It’s always all about Vietnam and evil American presidents who can’t wait to send young Americans into combat.

FEDERAL REGULATIONS ADD $1.9 TRILLION TO THE COST OF GOVERNMENT EVERY YEAR: That’s the conclusion of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Wayne Crews in his annual update, “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State,” according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton.

HERE’S WHY GOVERNMENT HOUSING VOUCHERS CAUSE MORE POVERTY, NOT LESS: Question – Which program does the federal government spend more on each year, public housing vouchers or welfare checks? If you said the former, you must know the Manhattan Institute’s Howard Husock. What he knows about public housing is more valuable than the work of the 10 smartest people on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s bloated payroll.

“Its incentives are completely skewed,” Husock, vice president for policy research and director of the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative at Manhattan, told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson.

“You’ve ‘hit the lottery’ and you’re set for life. Not only do you hit the lottery and you can sit back and have a housing unit for life, but, remember, your deal is you pay 30 percent of your income in rent, but what it means is for every additional dollar you earn, you pay an addition 30 cents in rent,” he said.

The voucher concept is grounded in common sense, but it somehow got corrupted when HUD applied it to the public housing arena. Husock explains in straightforward terms why the way HUD does vouchers ends up encouraging the very traits most likely to produce poverty in an individual’s life.

IS THIS THE ONLY FEDERALLY SUBSIDIZED HOUSING PROGRAM THAT ACTUALLY WORKS? It’s in Delaware and it turns hundreds of subsidy receivers into independent, working, productive citizens. It’s called “Moving to Work” and Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group found it.

“’Before we started Moving to Work, we had people who were on their third or fourth generation of the same family who were at the same site,’ Rebecca Kauffman, social service senior administrator at the Delaware Housing Authority’s Moving to Work program, told The Daily Caller News Foundation,” Watson reports.

“More than 850 families have completed the program to enter assistance-free living, and 30 percent of program participants became homeowners when they left,” according to Watson. Key to the program’s success is putting a time-limit on how long people can live in subsidized housing, and requiring them to work an increasing number of hours during their tenure.

The Delaware program is one of only 39 pubic housing authorities in the country that doesn’t allow tenants to remain in subsidized housing permanently. There are more than 3,000 pubic housing authorities in the country. Moving to Work was created as an experiment during the Clinton administration. Ya think it might be time to expand it?

EPA STASHING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN OBSCURE SLUSH FUND-LIKE ACCOUNTS: What happens when federal bureaucrats take billions of dollars collected for one purpose and squirrel them away in hundreds of obscure accounts to spend on whatever they decide? Does this help explain why EPA so often acts like it answers to no one?

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton confirmed the existence of 1,308 “special accounts” and his next objective is to expose how they have been used during both Republican and Democrat presidential administrations. That won’t be easy, considering it’s been seven years since either GAO or the Inspector General at EPA reviewed the accounts.

“The ‘special accounts’ are financed by legal settlements between the agency and parties responsible for polluting Superfund sites. Funds are deposited and spent without prior congressional approval,” Barton reports. The accounts aren’t technically secret because EPA admits their existence, but the agency makes it all-but-impossible to learn anything about the accounts or how they are used.

Next question: Will Congress do anything about this? If not, the constitutional principles of separate-but-equal branches and separation of powers will be officially dead, to say nothing of congressional oversight. And Congress will have only itself to blame for the bad joke it becomes.

DON’T TELL THAT GUY WHO SAID “FIRST THING WE DO IS KILL ALL THE LAWYERS” ABOUT THIS! Federal taxpayers spent $26.2 billion between 2007 and 2014 on more than 25,000 lawyers working for Uncle Sam, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton.

Barton’s story is based on a new report from Open The Books, the nonprofit watchdog that tracks spending at all levels of government. Open The Books’ founder and report author Adam Andrzejewski said the highest paid lawyer in the federal establishment in 2014 received $266,649. Andrzejewski also found that more than 50 attorneys on the federal payroll got more than $250,000 during the period.

“The lawyers aren’t the problem per se,” the report said. “They simply serve at the pleasure of entrenched politicians and bureaucrats. Federal spending on attorneys both reflects and perpetuates the size, scope, expanse and inertia of today’s federal government.”