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Add Another Name to the List of 2016 Hopefuls…

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is headed to New Hampshire, the destination for top presidential contenders and long shots alike leading up to 2016′s presidential season.

Issa will speak at the Lincoln Day Dinner for the Concord Republican City and Merrimack County committees on February 7, U-T San Diego reported.

“There are two conversations that will shape the 2014 and 2016 elections and there couldn’t be a better place to start those conversations than in New Hampshire,” Issa said in a statement. “The first is whether or not the Republican Party can define itself as the party that supports individual opportunity and American entrepreneurship so that you can be the engine of your own prosperity, not government. The second comes down to how comfortable the American people are with a large, invasive and powerful government that escapes accountability with no check-and-balance.”

Under Issa’s leadership, the Oversight Committee has regularly gone head-to-head with the Obama administration, particularly on issues like the attack in Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service’s practice of applying heightened scrutiny to some conservative groups.

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Issa Subpoenas Lew for Tea Party Targeting Docs

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Photo Credit: APRep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, served Treasury Secretary Jack Lew with another subpoena relating to the IRS scandal in which the organization targeted Tea Party organizations, the committee announced on Friday.

This is the second subpoena Issa has served on Lew regarding the scandal. “Secretary Lew is responsible for providing all pertinent documents Treasury has in its possession, both within and outside the IRS,” Issa said in a statement. “The Committee is aware of responsive documents in Treasury’s possession that have not been produced to the Committee.”

In a press release, the House oversight committee detailed the committee’s and other House committees’ efforts to obtain documents from the IRS and the Treasury Department about the scandal—and how President Barack Obama’s administration has obfuscated and not complied with the House’s investigations and previous subpoena.

On June 13, Issa joined Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the chairman of the House oversight committee’s subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairs; Dave Camp, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; and Charles Boustany (R-LA), the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee’s subcommittee on oversight, to write to Lew to demand he produce nine categories of documents by June 27. On June 27, Issa’s committee notes in its release that the Treasury Department responded by producing “only 356 pages of documents, mostly letters from Member of Congress and drafts of congressional testimony.”

On Sept. 18, Issa and Jordan wrote to Lew to again demand compliance by Oct. 2 with the June letter’s request for nine categories of documents and made clear that the committee was prepared to use “compulsory process” (subpoenas) if Lew did not comply. On Oct. 2, the Treasury Department wrote to the committee and said it would not be able to meet the deadline due to the government shutdown. “As an accommodation to the Treasury Department, the Committee allowed an extension of time for a response,” Issa’s committee noted.

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IRS Official Who Played ‘Spock’ in Video Apologizes Under Issa Grilling

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Photo Credit: AP

The Internal Revenue Service executive who portrayed Spock in the agency’s “Star Trek” video parody apologized to lawmakers for inappropriate spending on a $4.1 million conference from 2010.

The videos, “at the time they were made, were an attempt in a well-intentioned way to use humor,” said Faris Fink, moments after the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee showed excerpts from the video. “It’s embarrassing and I apologize.”

Fink is commissioner of the agency’s small business and self-employed division, which has 24,000 employees across the country and organized the conference.

The IRS spending on conferences was “at best, maliciously self-indulgent,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, the committee chairman.

Issa, a California Republican, said he was less concerned about the total IRS spending on conferences — $49 million from 2010 to 2012 — than about perks such as discounted presidential suites and hotel rooms for local employees at the expense of other employees who could have gotten better training.

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Holder Backing Into Corner, Blasts Issa’s Conduct as “Unacceptable” and “Shameful” (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTubeDuring a House Judiciary Committee hearing today, a visibly agitated Eric Holder blasted Rep. Darrell Issa’s conduct as “unacceptable” and “shameful.”

As Holder continued to mouth off to Rep. Issa, Issa tried to gain control, asking the chairman to shut Holder up.

Holder responded, “No, no, no, that’s – I am not going to stop talking now.”

Holder, perhaps one of the most integrity-challenged attorney generals in recent US history then had the gall to say, “It is inappropriate and too consistent with the way in which you conduct yourself as a member of Congress. It is unacceptable. And it’s shameful.”

What?! Rep. Issa Says Hillary Isn’t a Target in Benghazi Probe (+video)

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A top GOP critic pushed back Sunday on charges that Republican efforts to investigate last year’s Benghazi attack are designed to inflict political damage on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton’s not a target,” said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on NBC’s Meet the Press. “President Obama is not a target.”

Issa, who heads a panel probing the assault on the diplomatic outpost that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, said he will seek depositions from Benghazi review board heads Ambassador Thomas Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The interagency process of modifying talking points in the wake of the attack scrubbed the fact that the incident was “a terrorist attack from the get-go,” Issa said Sunday.

“The American people were effectively lied to for a period of about a month,” he charged. “That’s important to get right.”

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Fast & Furious: Issa’s report holds 5 ATF Officials Responsible but not Holder

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WASHINGTON — Republican congressional investigators have concluded that five senior ATF officials — from the special agent-in-charge of the Phoenix field office to the top man in the bureau’s Washington headquarters — are collectively responsible for the failed Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation that was “marred by missteps, poor judgments and inherently reckless strategy.”

The investigators, in a final report likely to be released later this week, also unearthed new evidence that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix initially sought to hide from the Mexican government the crucial information that two Fast and Furious firearms were recovered after the brother of a Mexican state attorney general was killed there.

According to a copy of the report obtained Monday by The Times, the investigators said their findings are “the best information available as of now” about the flawed gun operation that last month led to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. being found in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over subpoenaed documents.

Two more final reports, they said, will deal with “the devastating failure of supervision and leadership” at the Department of Justice and an “unprecedented obstruction of the [congressional] investigation by the highest levels of the Justice Department, including the attorney general himself.”

The first report did allege some Justice Department involvement, however, notably that Kenneth E. Melson, then acting ATF director, was made into a “scapegoat” for Fast and Furious after he told congressional Republicans his Justice Department supervisors “were doing more damage control than anything” else once Fast and Furious became public.

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Issa staffer: Gunrunner investigation points much higher than ATF director

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A spokesman for House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told The Daily Caller the congressman expects his investigations into the Justice Department’s gun walking programs to point to a much higher political appointee than acting ATF director Kenneth Melson.

Melson is widely expected to resign some time in the next couple of days in the face of political pressure from Issa’s investigations into Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast Furious.

Even if Melson resigns, Issa spokesman Frederick Hill said the Committee expects to find much more and continue with investigations.

“The investigations are far from over,” Hill told TheDC. “It’s quite certain that Kenneth Melson was not the principal architect of this plan nor was he the only high-ranking official who knew about and authorized this operation.”

Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious were programs that involved ATF officials allowing guns to be taken into Mexico with the ultimate apparent goal of tracking the larger Mexican drug cartels’ arms market.

Read More at the Daily Caller By Matthew Boyle, the Daily Caller