APRIL 25, 2014
Obamacare Navigators: Criminals and ACORN Activists? Judicial Watch Sues for Details
Tens of millions of people struggling to find their way through the
bureaucratic mess that is Obamacare to find quality health care. Do not
despair. Your government is there to help you!
The Obama administration has hired some
50,000
“navigators,” at a taxpayer cost of $67 million, to help guide
Americans through the Obamacare labyrinths. There’s just one catch.
You might be feeding your personal information to a convicted felon.
And that’s not a claim coming from any “right wing conspirators,” but
rather, directly from the mouth of outgoing Health and Human Services
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Check out this remarkable exchange between Sebelius and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) during a
November 6, 2014, Senate Finance Committee hearing.
Cornyn: So I want to ask you about the
navigators … Isn’t it true that there is no federal requirement for
navigators to undergo a criminal background check, even though they will
receive sensitive personal information from the individuals they help
to sign-up up for the Affordable Care Act?”
Sebelius: That is true ….
Cornyn: So a convicted felon could be a
navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an
individual unbeknownst to them?
Sebelius: That is possible.
Criminals in control of your sensitive data? It’s not just “possible.” It could be happening right now under Obamacare.
Last August,
13 state attorneys general warned Sebelius
that training and safeguards in place for the navigators appeared to be
inadequate. In a letter to the HHS secretary, they wrote that the
background check system “pales in comparison” to what is typically
required for workers in programs receiving federal health dollars,
adding, “It is not enough simply to adopt vague policies against fraud.”
In January 2014,
National Review reported
that as many as 43 convicted criminals were working as Obamacare
navigators in California. (Offenses include forgery, burglary, child
abuse, battery, petty theft, and evading a police officer.) And in
March,
Breitbart reported that Obamacare navigators were enrolling clients at Mexican Consulates nationwide, including Mexican nationals.
Add to this the enormous security holes in the Obamacare website Healthcare.gov – currently the subject of
another Judicial Watch lawsuit
– and it’s impossible to see how anyone would trust their personal
data, indeed their very health and well-being, to this bureaucratic
boondoggle.
Truly, when it comes to these navigators, the security concerns are
just the tip of the iceberg. There’s also the corrupt deal-making
between the Obama administration and the political organizations who
employ these navigators.
According to a November 11, 2013, article in
National Review Online,
among the organizations providing Obamacare navigators is Local 100
United Labor Unions, a New Orleans group run by ACORN founder Wade
Rathke. The article reports, “Local 100 is a ‘sub-grantee’ providing
navigators for the Southern United Neighborhoods group, which received a
$600,678 grant to promote Obamacare enrollment. It also received a
$270,193 grant for similar work in Arkansas and a $486,123 grant for
Louisiana.”
Other organizations include the National Urban League, which was paid
$376,000 for its Obamacare outreach in Texas, as well as such leftwing
groups as
Planned Parenthood and the Virginia Poverty Law Center Inc.
So we have the Obama administration paying leftwing groups to hire
untrained, unskilled operatives to recruit Obamacare customers and
collect sensitive data. What could possible go wrong?
James O’Keefe, the conservative investigator and journalist who
effectively helped shut down ACORN’s first incarnation with his
incriminating undercover videos, has some answers. O’Keefe has new
evidence,
again on video, showing the nefarious activities of these navigators. Per
The National Review:
“You lie because your premiums will be
higher,” one navigator advises an investigator for O’Keefe’s Project
Veritas, who tells the worker he sometimes smokes. “Don’t tell them
that. Don’t tell ’em.”
The investigator then poses as a
low-income worker at a university who has unreported cash income on the
side, worrying about how that might affect his premium subsidies. That’s
no problem for a navigator, who says, “Don’t get yourself in trouble by
declaring it now.”
“Yeah, it didn’t happen,” another navigator says. One more chimes in: “Never report it.”
As I mentioned, there are more than enough flags to warrant Judicial
Watch’s attention, and we are now in court to get to the truth in the
matter.
On March 27, 2014, JW filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit
against HHS to obtain records about controversial Obamacare navigators,
including records about navigator qualifications and background checks.
Here’s what we’re after according to our original FOIA request filed in
November 2013:
- Any and all records concerning, regarding, or related to contracts
awarded to private entities to provide navigators to assist individuals
obtaining health insurance under the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act; and
- Any and all records concerning, regarding, or related to federal
requirements for the above-mentioned navigators, including but not
limited to background checks and qualifications.
The Obamacare navigator program seems as corrupt as any Chicago
patronage operation – and is a danger to the privacy of millions of
Americans who are participating in Obamacare. The use of Obamacare
navigators and the Healthcare.gov web site should come with consumer
warnings. The Obama administration’s illegal secrecy about these
Obamacare navigators should make Americans very nervous. As if we didn’t
have enough reason for rattled nerves already. And on that front…
Is Obama Lying About Obamacare Numbers?
When does government incompetence turn to government corruption? When
the incompetent government officials lie, stonewall, and refuse to obey
transparency laws.
And that is exactly what is happening inside the Obama administration
in an attempt to cover up an Obamacare blunder that places healthcare
consumers in danger of having no coverage at all.
Judicial Watch initiated an investigation of the matter and ran right
into an Obama administration stonewall. And on March 27, 2014, JW was
forced to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit
against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Specifically, JW seeks records regarding the testing and oversight of
the Obama administration’s error-filled Healthcare.gov “834” reporting
forms.
Form 834 is an electronic file sent from HealthCare.gov to an
insurance company after a consumer picks a health care coverage plan.
The file is supposed to contain the person’s name, address, contact
information, Social Security number, and information about the plan they
have chosen. Insurance companies use the form to enroll people in
insurance plans and bill consumers for their portion of the payment. An
inaccurate 834 form may result in consumers either not having coverage,
or being turned down for payment claims.
It
has been estimated that as many as 33 percent of the 834 forms for
enrollees in the federal health care website may have been inaccurate,
incomplete, or missing altogether.
Of course, this problem threatens the Obama administration’s
narrative that everything is hunky dory with the Obamacare rollout, and
that the administration hit all of its goals for the number of Americans
covered; hence the cover-up.
Here’s what we’re after:
- Any and all documents and communications generated on or after April
1, 2103, regarding the timing and procedures for testing the back end
systems that are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of Form 834
transactions on Healthcare.gov;
- Any and all documents and communications generated on or after April
1, 2013, regarding reports of instances or potential instances of
inaccuracies, discrepancies, and/or missing information in Form 834
transactions;
- Any and all documents and communications generated on or after April
1, 2013, regarding the establishment and operation of an official
mechanism to report and/or remedy instances of inaccuracies,
discrepancies, and/or missing information in Form 834 transactions.
In a December 2, 2013, article entitled “Health-care enrollment on Web plagued by bugs,”
the Washington Post reported:
“The enrollment records for a significant portion of the Americans who
have chosen health plans through the online federal insurance
marketplace contain errors — generated by the computer system — that
mean they might not get the coverage they’re expecting next month.”
Also, the Form 834 problems “have affected roughly one-third of the
people who have signed up for health plans since Oct. 1.”
Though the administration has refused to reveal how many consumers
have been affected by the Form 834 failures, Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services spokesperson Julie Bataille admitted in early December
that it is a
major problem,
being worked on by “a team of experts from CMS, key outside contractors
working closely with health plan representatives and overseen by CMS’s
general contractor, Optum/QSSI.”
At a
December 5 press briefing
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney described the costly Form 834
failures as “self-inflicted problems,” adding, “We know every person who
has enrolled, or believes he or she has enrolled, we – the CMS and
others, and every one of them is being contacted …”
None of this is reassuring.
The Obama administration has been playing games with the enrollment
numbers from the very beginning. And it speaks volumes that the Obama
administration doesn’t want to give us information about whether those
who want insurance were actually able to get it through Healthcare.gov.
Given HHS’s unlawful cover up, it is fair to presume that President Obama’s
touted figure of eight million
Obamacare enrollments is a knowing fiction. With all its illegal
stonewalling of basic information, we frankly can’t believe much of
anything this administration has to say on what Obamacare is doing to
the American people.
“USA is an Islamic Country” – Says FBI Award Winner under Investigation by Judicial Watch
The response of the FBI to the threat of Islamic terrorism too often
has been nonsensical. In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the FBI
implemented a
“catch and release” program for terrorist criminals,
purged its training curricula
of material deemed “offensive” to radical Muslims, and, almost to the
day of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, gave a prestigious award to a
radical Muslim who once “tweeted” that the U.S. is an “Islamic
country.” This radical, Mohammed Elibiary, also serves as a Homeland
Security Advisor to the Obama administration and has been under Judicial
Watch’s microscope for some time.
Can any of you make sense of this? We can’t, which is why we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuiton
March 25, 2014. We’re seeking agency records related to the awarding of
the Louis E. Peters Award in 2011 to Mohammed Elibiary, who is alleged
to have close ties to radical Islamist organizations, including the
Muslim Brotherhood.
Our request, which has been ignored for nearly a year by the FBI, is simple:
Any and all records regarding,
concerning, or related to the awarding of the Louis E. Peters Memorial
Award to Mr. Mohamed Elibiary on September 8, 2011. This request
includes, but is not limited to, any and all recommendations and other
records of communications regarding, concerning, or related to the
award.
Elibiary, who in his role as Homeland Security advisor has regular
access to classified information, most recently came under fire in
November 2013 for tweeting out the message that America is “
an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution.” In its December 2013 “
Special Report: U.S. Government Purges of Law Enforcement Training Material Deemed ‘Offensive’ to Muslims”
Judicial Watch identified Elibiary as one of nearly a half-dozen
“Islamist influence operators” within the Obama administration “seeking
to advance an ideological agenda completely at odds with our
constitutional system.”
In October 2010, when DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano
announced that she had sworn in Elibiary as a member of the agency’s Advisory Council,
Judicial Watch reported
he was a backer of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian revolutionary
whose teachings continue to govern Middle Eastern terrorist
organizations.
In December 2004, Elibiary had participated in a Dallas, Texas, tribute to Khomeini called “
A Tribute To The Great Islamic Visionary, Ayatollah Khomeini.”
In 2012, Judicial Watch reported that Elibiary leaked classified
documents to a media outlet that had declined to do a story supposedly
exposing DHS’s promotion of “Islamophobia.”
Records obtained by Judicial Watch
included documents showing that Elibiary was given access to the Texas
state terrorism database on October 18, 2011. The investigation of the
allegation by the Texas Department of Public Safety found that Elibiary
downloaded two documents from the system just days before he allegedly
offered to leak documents to
Newsweek/The Daily Beast.
In October 2013, the Center for Security Policy, a Washington, DC, think tank, published a revealing 33-page
report
based on a lengthy, five-part interview with Elibiary. In the
interview, Elibiary admitted he was a longtime friend of self-described
Islamist Shukri Abu Baker, who was convicted in 2008 of financing the
terrorist organization Hamas through his U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity,
the Holy Land Foundation. Elibiary disclosed that he donated to the
Holy Land Foundation monthly until it was shut down by the U.S.
government and he defended Baker, depicting his prosecution as a case of
political persecution.
The document includes a number of alarming details of Elibiary’s
close relationship with a wide array of U.S. Islamist groups, including
the radical Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, which declares that
the only legitimate law according to Islam is Sharia. The group also
urges American Muslims to nurture hostility toward U.S. law, according
to Arabic documents discovered and translated into English by the Center
for Security Policy.
I’m sure none of this information found its way into Elibiary’s
acceptance speech when receiving his Louis E. Peters Award, which is
presented annually “
to that person who best exemplifies the standards set by Peters in providing service to the FBI and the Nation.”
In 1977, Peters informed the FBI of a shakedown attempt by mob boss Joe
Bonanno. At the time, the California car dealer was recognized by
then-FBI Director William Webster as having “set new standards of
patriotism.”
We have no doubt why the FBI would be embarrassed about giving an
award to someone with Elibiary’s extreme Islamist views. But
embarrassment does not excuse the FBI’s cover-up of its relationship
with this radical.
You would think the FBI, of all agencies, would follow the law. But
it doesn’t. It is especially egregious that the government agencies
that can arrest you for violations of law don’t bother to follow the law
themselves.
Supreme Court Decision in Michigan Affirmative Action Ban
I will close this week with some good news. The
U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-2 decision
to uphold Michigan’s affirmative action ban, which prevents the use of
race as a factor in college admissions. Justice Kennedy issued the
Court’s opinion, joined by Justices Alito and Chief Justice Roberts.
Justices Scalia, Thomas and Breyer while concurring with the decision
wrote separate opinions, as did dissenters Justices Sotomayor and
Ginsberg. (Justice Kagan recused herself.)
Here’s the statement I offered to the press in response to the ruling:
Today’s decision is a green light for
more states to take steps to end discriminatory racial preferences. The
Court’s ruling was a strong statement in support of the people’s right
to democratic self-governance, and against the detrimental spread of
racial politics into all areas of American public life. Today’s ruling
is also a signal that Obama administration’s dishonest use of the “race
card” to advance its policy agendas may face significant skepticism in
the Supreme Court.
The High Court decision overturned a November 15, 2012, ruling by the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. The lower court had ruled
8-7 that the affirmative action ban, which Michigan voters
overwhelmingly passed in a 2006 referendum, violated the U.S.
Constitution’s equal protection laws.
This is a case in which Judicial Watch took legal action, having joined with the Allied Educational Foundation (AEF) to file an
amicus curiae brief
with the Supreme Court in support of Proposition 2, Michigan’s
seven-year-old ban on the use of racial preferences in college
admissions.
Here’s a squib from the Judicial Watch-AEF
amicus brief filed on July 1, 2013:
Among the harms caused by the Sixth
Circuit’s decision are: a dangerous erosion of the people’s right to
democratic self-governance; the needless further enshrinement of the
intellectually impoverished concept of race into law; the perpetuation
of a culture of racial and ethnic politics in American public life; and
the perpetuation of racial and ethnic resentment and intolerance in
American society.
Justice Scalia, in a stinging
concurrence,
argued that the courts must remove themselves altogether from the
“dirty business of dividing the nation into racial blocs,” through an
affirmative action theory that “promotes the noxious fiction that,
knowing only a person’s color or ethnicity, we can be sure that he has a
predetermined set of policy ‘interests,’ thus reinforcing the
perception that members of the same racial group—regardless of their
age, education, economic status, or the community in which they
live—think alike, and share the same political interests.”
I rather like what Chief Justice Roberts wrote in a previous lawsuit
involving the issue of race based preferences: “The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the
basis of race.”
Let us hope this judicial wisdom continues to prevail.
Until next week…