CLINTON FOUNDATION PAYS ITS TOP MALE EXECS 38 PERCENT MORE THAN ITS WOMEN EXECS: Here’s what Hillary Clinton said today on the issue: “Last time I checked, there is no discount for being a woman. Groceries don’t cost us less, rent doesn’t cost us less, so why should we be paid less?”

Well, the former Secretary of State might want to have a chat with the former president in her family about the family foundation. Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group checked the latest available tax return for the William, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and found this:

“The foundation’s 2013 IRS form 990 reveals that nearly three times as many men as women occupy the executive suites at the Little Rock, Arkansas-based foundation.  On average, top male executives at the foundation earn $109,000 more than the top female executives with positions in the C-suite.” Overall, the men make 38 percent more than the women in the C Suite.

Somebody might also want to explain to Mrs. Clinton that in the real world employees are paid on the basis of the comparative value of their work, not on how much they have to pay for groceries and rent.

AND NOW, HERE IS  TODAY’S OUTRAGE FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS: Officials at VA’s Phoenix hospital manipulated wait-time data to make it appear they were connecting doctors and veterans seeking appointments much faster than they actually were. This was done so VA managers at the Arizona facility could keep getting generous performance bonuses. They got their bonuses but dozens of waiting veterans died.

How does VA respond? They transferred Deborah Amdur from her post managing VA’s White River Junction hospital in Vermont to Phoenix amid much hoopla about her being a turnaround artist.Well, guess what VA officials soon learned from their department’s Inspector General?

“The same week Amdur took over the Phoenix hospital, her superiors saw papers confirming the Vermont hospital had the same issues with wait-time falsification — with equally deadly results — as Phoenix,” reports Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

You might think that would be enough for VA officials to cancel Amdur’s transfer. You would be wrong: “VA officials are typically aware of the general thrust of IG investigations and are given draft reports prior to their release to the media and the public. A VA spokesman refused to tell The Daily Caller News Foundation when agency leaders received a draft copy or why Amdur’s transfer wasn’t cancelled because of the findings,” Rosiak reported.

EPA LETS HUNDREDS OF SUPERFUND SITES GO UNCLEANED FOR DECADES: Federal environmental officials began putting horribly polluted sites on the Superfund list in 1983. Now we find, thanks to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton, that hundreds of Superfund sites go years, even decades, with nothing being done to rectify their environmental damage.

Barton analyzed nearly 14,000 sites in EPA’s Superfund database and found that “of the 818 superfund sites where EPA cleaning hadn’t yet begun, 771 had been waiting for at least five years. In fact, 154 of those sites were among the first added to the NPL in 1983 — when areas were first added to the list.” The National Priority List includes the most serious threats to public health, as defined by EPA.

Barton found another 864 sites were cleanup actions had begun or had been completed but the news is no better: “The agency began cleanup efforts at 460 superfund sites, but only after waiting more than five years on average following their NPL designation — of those, 15 waited longer than 20 years.” Barton said EPA officials weren’t helpful when he asked questions about the Superfund data, typically taking multiple to respond or not responding at all.

EIGHT MORE OBAMACARE CO-OPS TO FAIL: By the end of 2016, odds are only one or two of the original 23 non-profit health insurance providers Obama promised would make for-profit insurers lower prices and improve services will still be around. And the price of this predictably failed experiment is $2.5 billion, plus an incalculable opportunity cost. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock has the details, as he has from the very beginning of the co-op epoch.

THOUSANDS ARE WAITING FOR PUBIC HOUSING BUT HUD WORKER GETS TWO APARTMENTS IN NO TIME: Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group strikes HUD again! Seems a HUD employee was able to rent two subsidized apartments by somehow leaping ahead of the hundreds of thousands of poor people waiting for public housing units to become available.

The employee lived in the Alexandria, VA., apartment and sublet the apartment in the nation’s capital to her sister who used it, among other things, to park her Lexus SUV. Housing authorities in both cities knew about the arrangement, yet did nothing. When the HUD Inspector General discovered the deal, HUD managers initially promised “severe discipline” for their misbehaving colleague.

Can you guess what comes next?

“But instead of being severely disciplined, Mathis was hastily promoted to a position in charge of giving out millions of tax dollars in federal grants,” Rosiak reports. So a HUD employee steps on poor people who need places to live and gets a promotion to give away millions of tax dollars instead of being fired. What’s wrong with this picture???

OBAMA POLITICAL APPOINTEES AT HUD MUST RETURN THEIR SALARIES AFTER OBSTRUCTING CONGRESS: Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group is probably not the most popular reporter covering the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He keeps turning up stories like today’s on the two Obama political appointees who GAO says must pay the penalty for obstructing Congress, literally.

The dynamic duo “refused to let an employee speak with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about a major scandal. The congressional watchdog agency cited a federal law barring the use of taxpayer dollars to pay executive branch officials to obstruct Congress,” Rosiak reports. The scandal involved a fraud in HUD that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The two barred a career subordinate from telling Congress about the fraud.

“The GAO said that unless HUD’s associate general counsel and a deputy assistant secretary personally return their salaries, the department would be knowingly retaining ‘improper payments’ on its books in violation of the law,” Rosiak said. The two political appointees make six-figure salaries and GAO estimates their obstruction lasted six months, so this is going to hurt. Unless HUD’s corrupt leadership contrives to save them, that is.

Rosiak reports that “a HUD spokesman told The Daily Caller News Foundation that officials there have no plans to require the salary repayments despite the GAO opinion.” Stay tuned because GAO has just handed Congress an open invitation to regrow a couple of big brass ones and enforce its power of the purse over the executive branch, as the founders intended.

ANY ONE OR MORE OF THESE FOUR LAWS COULD MEAN JAIL FOR HILLARY AND HER TOP AIDES: That’s the assessment of a former FBI assistant director and multiple national security experts, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. They aren’t certain that indictments will be filed but what is certain is they, along with a lot of others in the law enforcement and national security communities, will be dumbfounded and outraged if there aren’t indictments.

“As a former career senior intelligence officer and special operations special mission intelligence officer and National Security Council staff member, I believe it is inconceivable that if it is verified that Hillary Clinton’s server contained or had SAP information on it that she could possibly escape indictment and criminal prosecution,” retired Col. James Waurishuk, a 30-year veteran in the national security field, told Pollock.

To date, 22 emails found on Clinton’s private, home-brew server contained Top Secret and SAP materials. The latter contain information related to the nation’s highest national security secrets. Intelligence experts believe hackers working for foreign intelligence agencies hacked Hillary’s server to glean the most sensitive information.

VA MANAGEMENT, UNION LEADERS SABOTAGE PRIVATE CARE OPTION, THEN CALL FOR REPEAL: Department of Veterans Affairs leaders in management and the employee union fought Congress when it adopted the Choice Card program in 2014 allowing veterans to get private care when a government facility couldn’t provide it within 30 days.

Now, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak reports, there is substantial evidence VA  management and unionized workers purposely mismanaged the program because they fear it threatens their jobs. And guess who is pushing Congress to repeal the program? Lesson: When Big Government feels threatened, everybody in it puts aside differences and defends it.

EIGHT YEARS LATER, THE FEDS DECIDE TO CLOSE A HUGE SECURITY GAP IN GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS: It took nearly a decade, a critical inspectors general report and a Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group story but the federal house-keeping agency is now going to close a major anti-terrorist security gap.

A 2008 Homeland Security directive ordered federal agencies to stop using easily counterfeited ID badges for employees and contractors. The General Services Administration oversees thousands of federal facilities, including courthouses, laboratories, ports of entry and data centers, and is responsible for ensuring such directives are observed. But nothing changed for eight years.

Then TheDCNF posted a story Thursday reporting a watchdog report that noted the eight-year delay and pointed out that having thousands of easily counterfeited badges “increases the risk of a security event, such as an active shooter, terrorist attack, or theft of government property, as well as exposure of sensitive and proprietary information.”

On Friday, GSA Administrator confirmed late in the day to TheDCNF that her agency is now moving on “discontinuing the practice of issuing building-specific local badges.” She declined to say if anybody at GSA would be disciplined or fired for the eight-year delay. And no, this is NOT an April Fool’s Day joke.

FEDS HAVE NO IDEA IF OR HOW MANY FIREARMS HAVE BEEN STOLEN FROM U.S. PRISON ARMORIES: Officials at the federal Bureau of Prisons operate 120 armories containing handguns, rifles, ammunition, and incapacitating chemical agents – think tear gas – all of which could be useful to domestic terrorists.

The problem is, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson, government officials likely have no clue where any of these items are at any given time. Here’s why: The BOP inventory control system is “neither complete nor accurate” and lacks data for “tracking product movement,” which increases “the risk that armory munitions and equipment could be lost or stolen,” an inspector general report notes.

Watson said the IG investigation was prompted in 2011 after a BOP employee pleaded guilty to stealing munitions from a federal prison facility, but changes made since 2011 by BOP have not remedied the problem. U.S. prisons have been hotbeds of Muslim recruiting for decades.

ARE MOST FEDERAL BUILDINGS WIDE OPEN TO TERRORIST ATTACKS? It’s hard not to think so, thanks to a highly disturbing Inspector General report that found “serious security” lapses likely at thousands of federal facilities across the country because General Services Administration bureaucrats have ignored an important national security directive for at least eight years!  

The directive told GSA to stop using easily counterfeited security badges that are unique to specific federal installations. Such badges are issued to employees and contractors to allow holders easy access to facilities like ports of entry, federal courthouses, computer data centers and laboratories.

“Unauthorized access to a federal facility increases the risk of a security event, such as an active shooter, terrorist attack, or theft of government property, as well as exposure of sensitive and proprietary information,” the IG reported. Even worse, the IG added, is that GSA “does not centrally monitor the management of building badges issued by its staff.”

How serious is this? Well, an ISIS attack against the federal courthouse in Rochester was only recently thwarted by the FBI.

Next question: Will anybody in government be fired for this?

ALCOHOLIC BEHAVIOR OR JUST FOLLOWING UNION LOGIC TO ITS PREDICTABLE END? Federal disability Judge Sridhar Boini admits he repeatedly showed up drunk for work at the Social Security Administration. So have some of his colleagues but they weren’t disciplined, he told the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Since management didn’t stop them, it must mean, according to federal employee union logic, that it’s ok to show up soused at the SSA, reports the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak. And that in turn means Boini can’t be disciplined, he told MSPB.

But that’s not all. Boini also claims his drinking qualifies him for a disability pension! And despite MSPB’ rejection of hi appeal, the board note that Boini can still take his case to the federal courts. Rosiak is not making this up, I promise.

WILL HILLARY AND HER CLOSEST AIDES TELL THE EMAIL TRUTH OR RISK JAIL BY LYING TO THE FBI? That’s a question they will likely soon have to answer because it appears federal prosecutors are getting ready to call them all in for a little chat.

SHOOT THE PRESIDENT, THEN LIVE IN LUXURY 35 YEARS LATER: That’s the life of failed Reagan assassin John Hinckley, who spends much of his time these days free to stroll about an upscale gated resort community on the James River near Williamsburg, Virginia, where he shares a luxury residence with his elderly mother.

It was 35 years ago today that Hinckley shot Reagan, White House Press Secretary Jim Brady, Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahunt. All four survived, but Brady, who was shot in the head, was permanently disabled. The bullet that hit Reagan came literally within a half inch of striking the president’s heart.

His lawyers are pushing a federal judge to end all restraints on Hinckley, who is often seen shopping, alone, in area stores, and walking, alone, on the many secluded trails in the heavily forested area, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. Government lawyers are fighting to keep Hinckley under observation because the doctors say some of his mental problems persist.

As it happens, the Hinckley home is on the 13th hole of one of the resort’s three PGA-quality golf courses, not far from where President Obama prepared for one of his 2012 debates with Mitt Romney and both congressional Democrats and Republicans frequently convene meetings.

“This is absolutely so wrong. To let this guy go free. He almost killed the 40th President of the United States, coming within an inch of his heart,” Jim Kuhn, top executive assistant to Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan throughout their eight years in the White House, told Pollock. “He ruined Jim Brady’s life. And he shot two other people. And he’s going to walk? This guy is out scot-free? I just don’t get it.”

EPA HAS A DISTANT RELATIONSHIP WITH TRUTH ABOUT ITS ‘SUCCESSES:’ EPA published a report earlier this week claiming its diesel emissions reduction program “greatly improved” air quality and public health, to the tune of improvements worth $13 for every $1 of cost. Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group explains why if you believe that claim, EPA has got an incredible deal for you on a certain bridge in Brooklyn.

HILLARY IGNORED MANDATORY ANNUAL CLASSIFIED INFO SECURITY UPDATE BRIEFINGS: She sat for one – on her first day as Secretary of State – then ignored them for the rest of her tenure at Foggy Bottom, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. TheDCNF and Pollock had to take the State Department to federal court to force release of the documents involved.

A former very senior State Department executive with direct knowledge of State Department classified information security protocols was astonished, according to Pollock, saying  “If there is only one instance of her being briefed and nothing for the next four years, then I would consider that to be a lapse in security protocol, even at that level. Even the secretary needs to be reminded from time to time.”

Late Thursday, State Department spokesman  Mark Toner confirmed that all State Department employees are required to take cyber-security training. The lone certificate that Hillary had the briefing on her first day was the only evidence of her being informed about the growing threats to the security of classified secrets. Those threats evolve continually, which is why the mandatory updates are done every year. She missed them.

YOU: DO A SHADY LAND DEAL FOR VA. YOUR BOSS: HERE, HAVE A BIG PROMOTION: In a case that speaks volumes about the management culture in the Department of Veterans Affairs, a project manager on a new medical center in North Carolina was implicated in the government buying land owned by a relative. She admitted to the VA inspector general that she “may have” alerted family members to the forthcoming land selection and purchase, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak.

“Within three months, in June 2015, Gillis was put on a detail to serve as acting associate director, the second-highest position in the hospital, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned. The elevation was a big promotion considering the fact that others were more senior and higher-ranked,” Rosiak reports.

But Gillis was required to take “refresher ethics training.”

NEXT THEY’LL TELL US GOVERNMENT HAS FEWER CROOKS: How else can they explain why the Department of Justice under President Obama has filed fewer public corruption cases each year than either of his two predecessors? The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson sums it up: “The Obama administration has filed an annual average of 390 such prosecutions, which represents a 16 percent decrease from the Bush and Clinton years.”

Alternative explanation: “A particular problem with this Justice Department is if there are claims of corruption within Justice itself, they are the ones who ultimately make the decision to prosecute their own people,” the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky told Watson.

EPA EXECS ROUTINELY FLOUT ACCOUNTABILITY LAWS, USE PRIVATE EMAIL FOR PUBLIC BUSINESS: It’s all but impossible to see why a federal official would use a private email account to conduct government business except that private email can be more easily hidden from public view, which might be especially vital when one of the correspondents is a lobbyist for special interest groups. But they just keep right on doing it.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton reports that lobbyist, Michael J. Brady, asked in a private email for a little favor of EPA General Counsel Joe Goffman, his insider friend at EPA: “Joe, would you please send this email to Gina for me? I would have sent it to her directly with a cc to you but I don’t have a private email address for her and would prefer to not use an office email address.” (Emphasis added) Brady represents a number of green energy groups that want to support EPA’s Cross-State Pollution Rule. Goffman

The casual tone of the email exchange shows “that it is a regular practice of senior officials of this EPA to use private e-mail accounts and other ‘off-book’ techniques to craft rules with ‘green’ activists with clear financial and political interests is now clear beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Chris Horner, the man who exposed former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s “Richard Windsor” email moniker. Horner’s group, the Energy and Environment Legal Group, obtained the Brady/Goffman email via the FOIA.

YES, BRUSSELS CAN HAPPEN HERE, TOO: With security like this at the Keating federal building in Rochester, NY, it may only be a matter of time.

PENTAGON CONTRACT MANAGEMENT IS TRAPPED IN THE DIGITAL DARK AGES: How else to explain that answering this simple question would cost $660 million and take 15 million man-hours. HT: Center for Public Integrity.

HERE’S WHY FEDERAL BUREAUCRAT UNIONS LOVE BIG GOVERNMENT: Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports today that federal employee unions added 40,000 new members in 2015. That’s the biggest annual increase in eight years. But wait, there’s more!

“Due to the growth of the government’s workforce, however, the percentage of unionized federal employees dropped from 27.5 percent in 2014 to 27.3 percent in 2015. The federal government employed 3.59 million people in 2015, up from 3.41 million people in 2014,” according to Watson, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Bigger government means more union members, many of whom will contribute to the unions’ political action committees, which will enable more contributions to sympathetic congressmen who in turn vote for more government. Completing the Iron Triangle are the government contractors and special interests beneficiaries of government. Round and round they go, and can you guess who’s paying for it?

ANYBODY ELSE GET THE FEELING HILLARY IS IN POLITICAL HOSPICE CARE? Judicial Watch attorneys told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia today that they would like to depose eight present and former Department of State employees concerning Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address and home brew server.

They also said it “may be necessary” to depose Clinton “based on information learned during discovery,” but kindly assured the court they would first ask permission. Judge Emmet G. Sullivan will decide after April 15 who among the eight will be deposed. Don’t be surprised if it’s all eight, including:

• Stephen D. Mull, executive secretary of the State Department from June, 2009, to October, 2012. Mull proposed Clinton use a State Department BlackBerry for email. Her identity would have been protected but the messages would have been subject to the FOIA.
• Lewis A. Lukens, executive director of the department’s executive secretariat from 2008 to 2011. Lukens suggested to Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy and Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, have a government computer to read messages sent to her clintonmail.com address.
• Patrick F. Kennedy preceded Clinton at the department, having served since 2007. He became Clinton’s primary adviser on technology and information services issues.
• Donald R. Reid, senior coordinator for security infrastructure in the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, a position he has held since 2003. Judicial Watch believes Reid participated in discussions in 2009 about Clinton’s use of the Blackberry and other communications devices to conduct official government business.
• Cheryl Mills, chief of staff throughout Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
• Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff for the entirety of Clinton’s tenure. Abedin also had an email account on the Clinton server and accompanied Clinton whenever she was seen in public.
• Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s IT guru from her unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign and the individual who kept the private server located at her New York residence operational while she was at the department.
• The eighth individual would be somebody designated by the department to provide information on the process by which FOIA requests are processed in the agency.

WILL THE SUPREME COURT CRIPPLE THIS DEMOCRATIC SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP? Class-action plaintiffs lawyers are likely keeping a VERY close eye on whether the High Court will agree to hear a challenge to settlements that enrich counsel but provide little or nothing to alleged victims. The challenge comes from Ted Frank, director of the Center for Class-Action Fairness at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Frank’s challenge is to the decision by the U.S. Appeals Court for the 11th District to uphold the settlement in Joshua D. Poertner v. The Gillette Co., et. al. in which the trial lawyers got $5.7 million and 99 percent of the estimated 7.26 million class members got zilch. Poertner is just one of the many class-action settlements in which the plaintiffs’ lawyers get rich and the plaintiffs get … stiffed.

Rules vary widely among federal courts on the metrics for deciding whether a settlement is fair and reasonable. Frank hopes the High Court will nationalize something like the Seventh Circuit’s dictum that “the attorney award must be a fraction of the amount actually realized by the class …” Four of the justices must agree to hear the case. The decision will be made public March 21.

Democratic office-holders, candidates and campaign fund-raisers may be paying even closer attention here than the class-action trial attorneys because the latter are routinely among the former’s biggest funders. If the High Court throws a wrench in these settlement bonanzas, it could blow a huge hole in Democratic Party’s bank accounts.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy called the Gold King Mine Disaster in Colordao last August an “unfortunate accident.” Actually, the disaster, which polluted drinking water in three states and the Navajo Nation and turned the Animas River yellow for weeks, was anything but an accident.

The disaster was the direct result of EPA incompetence, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton and TheDCNF Energy Group’s Michael Bastasch. The B&B Boys turned up an Aug.7, 2o15, email from the Bureau of Land Management’s Brent Lewis to colleagues in which he said he was told by EPA:

“The EPA’s plan was to slowly drain and treat enough mine water in order to access the inner mine working and assess options for controlling its discharge. While removing small portions of the natural plug, the material catastrophically gave-way and released the mine water.”

The core of EPA’s incompetence was they knew the abandoned mine’s millions of gallons of toxic wastewater was under pressure, but they failed to have on hand the proper equipment to contain and direct the resulting flow when they unplugged it. But don’t expect there to be any consequences such as lost jobs for anybody at EPA because that’s not how the federal bureaucracy works.

Even so, this isn’t going to get any better for EPA because Barton and Bastasch have more stories on this massive screwup coming for the next several days. And it appears Rep. Rob Bishop, R-UT, and his staff investigators for the House Committee on Natural Resources have done some deep mining of their own. Stay tuned.