Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on the search warrant targeting James Rosen of Fox News.

As head of enforcement at the Federal Election Commission Lois Lerner targeted Republicans and Christian groups, so her behavior at the IRS shouldn’t be a surprise. She’s reportedly been placed on leave (a.k.a. paid vacation) from her IRS job.

Republican Senator Mark Kirk endorsed Penny Pritzker’s nomination to be Commerce Secretary.

The new Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, believes there’s no room for debate over climate change.

California’s three largest health insurance companies, UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Cigna, will not participate in the state’s ObamaCare exchanges, which leaves Californians with fewer choices.

Daniel Allot wrote an article for The American Spectator that explains the new generation of non-invasive prenatal tests and explores the potential for their application to cross the line into eugenics.

The Daily Mail published an article about a British girl, Ellie Sanders, who is enduring bureaucratic runaround from the National Health Service as she tries to obtain a hearing aid implant before she starts school.

The Telegraph is updating its coverage of the British soldier who was beheaded on a London street here. Then there’s this head-scratcher: “Cub scout leader Ingrid Loyau-Kennett selflessly engaged the terrorists in conversation and kept her nerve as one of them told her: ‘We want to start a war in London tonight.’” That’s one way to know you’re in London and not Texas, although a policewoman who arrived on the scene (20 minutes after the attack!) did shoot the two terrorists.

Lois Lerner appeared before the House Oversight Committee, read a prepared statement declaiming her innocence of any crimes, and invoked her Fifth Amendment rights. Committee chair Darrell Issa allowed Lerner to leave over the objections of Trey Gowdy, who claimed Lerner effectively waived her Fifth Amendment rights when she read her opening statement proclaiming her innocence. Andrew McCarthy has more on Lerner’s gambit as it’s practiced in courts. Issa seems to have changed his mind and agreed with Gowdy, because he’s recalling Lerner to testify. If Lerner invokes her Fifth Amendment rights again, it’s conceivable that Issa could move to holder her in contempt, which would place her in the company of…Eric Holder.

The IRS narrative to the effect that the targeting of conservative groups who applied for tax exempt status originated in the Cincinnati office and was restricted to that location is false. National Review cultivated sources in the Cincinnati office who reported that a “Technical Unit” in Washington, D.C. was heavily involved, and was at least partially responsible for dragging out the application process: “Delays caused by the Technical Unit in Washington contributed to the long waits described by tea-party groups, whose applications often languished in IRS offices for over a year.”

The IRS failed to produce records for the House Ways and Means Committee regarding communication between the IRS, the White House, and the Treasury Department regarding the targeting of conservative groups.

Sarah Palin on the IRS scandal: “The IRS has always been the face of intimidating and controlling big government. Now it’s the face of corrupt big government that actively attacks the people it is supposed to serve. This isn’t the change America was hoping for, Mr. President, but it certainly is transformative.”

The role of ACORN-like “patient navigators” in ObamaCare’s rollout is the subject of criticism (again) as Kathleen Sebelius solicits money from businesses to fund them.

For the first time the Obama administration admitted killing Americans in drone strikes, one of them on purpose (Anwar al-Awlaki) and three…not so much on purpose. If a Republican administration admitted to accidentally killing Americans in drone strikes, the mainstream media would be wailing about it for weeks.

A FBI agent shot and killed Ibragim Todashev in Orlando, Florida. Todashev was a friend of Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and according to press reports he confessed that he and Tsarnaev murdered three people in Waltham, Massachusetts in 2011; he then attacked the FBI agent who was questioning him.

Jack Cashill relates the last hour of Trayvon Martin’s life, and it helps explain why prosecutors do not want the subject of Martin’s marijuana use to be brought up during George Zimmerman’s trial.

The Guardian published an interesting article describing how disabled people are treated by Britain’s National Health Service: “Each week 24 disabled people are killed by such prejudiced presumptions [that disabled people have lives not worth living]; indeed, there was a case at my local hospital recently. These shocking figures are based on a government-commissioned inquiry into one region of the country, which found people with disabilities 37% more likely to be killed by incompetence or inadequate care – and their lives end on average 16 years earlier than they should. The more serious the disabilities, the higher the risk.”

Jeffrey Lord of The American Spectator dug through the White House visitor logs and discovered that the head of the union representing IRS employees, Colleen Kelley, visited President Obama the day before the IRS began targeting conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status. It obviously doesn’t prove anything, but it’s an amazing coincidence.

ABC News reporters visited the IRS office in Cincinnati that’s supposedly ground zero for targeting conservative groups who apply for tax exempt status. They found themselves escorted by an armed member of the Federal Protective Service. The IRS workers had been instructed not to speak to the press and the official spokescritters weren’t responding to questions.

Jillian Kay Melchior wrote a summary of what happened to Catherine Engelbrecht after two groups she founded, King Street Patriots and True the Vote, applied to the IRS for tax exempt status. It involves unexpected visits by the FBI, BATF, OSHA, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The 1851 Center for Constitutional Law filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the IRS in 2010 that asked for documents related to its policy of targeting conservative groups who filed for tax exempt status. The IRS responded in 2011, saying it found no such documents. The IRS Inspector General did find relevant documents dating to that period.

A search warrant associated with a case the Department of Justice is developing against a State Department employee named Stephen Jin-Woo Kim revealed that DOJ monitored the movements, phone calls, and personal emails of a Fox News reporter named James Rosen. DOJ believes Kim leaked the contents of a classified intelligence report on North Korea to Rosen. The DOJ affidavit implicates Rosen as a “criminal co-conspirator,” a charge that could draw a ten year prison sentence. Fox News reporter William La Jeunesse and producer Mike Levine are also reportedly DOJ targets. The worst aspect of this as far as the rest of the mainstream media is concerned is that they might have to do/say something in support of Fox News. *shudder*

A report issued by the Department of Justice Inspector General confirms that U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke attempted to smear Operation Fast and Furious whistleblower John Dodson by leaking a memo to the media. Burke resigned over the leak, and the Inspector General is forwarding the report to the state bar associations of which Burke is a member.

The U.S. filed federal criminal charges against three New York University researchers who accepted bribes from a Chinese medical imaging company and a research institution supported by the Chinese government. The researchers turned over information on NYU’s magnetic resonance imaging technology. One of the three appears to have returned to China before he could be arrested.

A Washington Times investigation showed that Washington, D.C. failed to remove from its voter rolls the names of 13,000 people who moved out of the district and into adjacent Prince George’s County over the past several years. Many of these people appear to be voting in both jurisdictions, while in other cases unknown people are voting in the district using their names.

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama’s “Chicago way”: “The president had a strange habit, like a moth to a flame, of demagoguing the wealthy as toxic (spread the wealth, pay your fair share, fat cat, you didn’t build that, etc.), while being attracted to the very lifestyle that he damns, a sort of Martha’s Vineyard community organizer.” Hanson concludes with this: “Government has become a sort of malignant metasisizing tumor, growing on its own, parasitical on healthy cells, always searching for new sources of nourishment, its purpose nothing other than growing bigger and faster and more powerful – until the exhausted host collapses. We have a sunshine king and our government has become a sort of virtual Versailles palace. I suppose that when a presidential candidate urges his supporters to get in someone’s face, and to take a gun to a knife fight, from now on you better believe him. And, finally, the strangest thing about nearing the threshold of 1984? It comes with a whimper, not a bang, with a charismatic smile and mellifluous nonsense – with politically correct, egalitarian-minded bureaucrats with glasses and iPhones instead of fist-shaking jack-booted thugs.”

French President François Hollande’s major accomplishment in office could be setting the stage for another revolution.

During his tour of Sunday morning talk shows, White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer insisted it was “irrelevant” where President Obama was the night of the Benghazi attack. The answer to that question must be embarrassing – otherwise the White House would have answered it after months of badgering. Best guess: Obama gave an order to the effect that the U.S. military shouldn’t intervene and then went to bed. After all, he had to get up early the next morning for a trip to a Las Vegas fundraising event.

CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson told a C-SPAN interviewer that the Obama administration has perfected delaying responses to Freedom of Information Act requests and has stopped talking to her altogether.

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus wrote an op-ed for The Christian Science Monitor describing how orchestrated campaigns are used to silence small business owners who complain about the Obama administration’s policies, particularly ObamaCare.

Mia Love announced she’s running again for the House of Representatives. She lost to incumbent Jim Matheson by less than 1,000 votes last November.

The FBI arrested Arkansas State Treasurer Martha Shoffner on Saturday and charged her with “extortion under color of official right.”

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo engaged in a Twitter troll war over his support for universal background checks for firearms purchases.

Obama denies role in government. (via NewsBusters)

Sharyl Attkisson writes that the Obama administration’s new explanation for Benghazi amounts to, “We’re idiots.” Here’s the laundry list of idiocy: “The list of mea culpas by Obama administration officials involved in the Benghazi response and aftermath include: standing down the counterterrorism Foreign Emergency Support Team, failing to convene the Counterterrorism Security Group, failing to release the disputed Benghazi ‘talking points’ when Congress asked for them, and using the word ‘spontaneous’ while avoiding the word ‘terrorism.’” Read the whole thing.

Outgoing IRS Commissioner Steve Miller apologized for targeting conservative groups, but then contested the word “targeting,” deemed the IRS’s actions “horrible customer service,” and refused to admit that his previous Congressional testimony was misleading – even though it clearly was. Miller did indirectly confirm that Lois Lerner’s apology was staged, an attempt to steer the narrative before the Inspector General’s report was published. Treasury Department leadership knew about the targeting before the November 2012 election but sat on the information, and no whistleblowers came forward. Reports are circulating that White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler knew about the targeting but failed to inform the president. There are calls for Obama to fire Sarah Hall Ingram, who headed the IRS’s tax-exempt division before she was promoted to oversee the IRS’s implementation of ObamaCare. We also learned that the IRS demanded access to the members’ side of web sites operated by conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

Mark Steyn’s weekly column discusses the IRS scandal: “Speaking at Ohio State University earlier this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who ‘incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.’ Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists with a straight face that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he ‘learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.’ Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up.”

Mike Lee again tried to pass a resolution calling on the Senate to investigate illegal abortion practices, but Democrats objected. Richard Blumenthal suggested that the resolution be expanded to include other objectionable medical practices, such as those used by dentists. Remind me to enter Blumenthal in the next moral equivalence gymnastics competition.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released illegal immigrants in February (you’ll recall they blamed the sequester for this), they released 622 illegal immigrants with criminal records, including 32 with multiple felony convictions. Oops. ICE claims they’ve recaptured 24 of the 32.

The Department of the Interior relaxed its proposed fracking regulations, thereby ticking off environmental groups who will undoubtedly sue Interior using grant money they received from the EPA.

The IRS official who was in charge of the tax-exempt organization unit when it targeted conservative groups, Sarah Hall Ingram, is now running the IRS office responsible for implementing ObamaCare. You just knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? The IRS official who followed her into the tax-exempt organization job, Joseph Grant, is retiring on June 3.

The IRS asked at least two Texas Tea Party groups about their relationship with King Street Patriots, the group that spawned True the Vote. True the Vote posted the seven page list of information the IRS demanded as part of its 501(c)(3) application. The IRS quizzed another Tea Party group about its involvement with Verify the Recall, the effort to verify the vote to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The IRS also targeted Adryana Boyne’s Voces Action group.

The union that represents IRS and other Treasury Department employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, spent 94% of its contributions to 2012 House and Senate campaigns on Democrat candidates.

The Senate confirmed Ernest Moniz to become Energy Secretary by a 97–0 vote. The nomination of Tom Perez to become Secretary of Labor passed the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on a party line vote, 12–10. And the nomination of Gina McCarthy to lead the EPA passed the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on another party line vote, 10–8. The Senate Republicans need to grow a backbone and stop the Perez nomination.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit vacated a NLRB decision because Craig Becker was unconstitutionally appointed to the board – his was one of Obama’s non-recess recess appointments.

We’re learning more about the Associated Press story that prompted the Department of Justice to subpoena the call records for 20 AP phones. The AP learned about the CIA operation that foiled an al Qaeda attack on a U.S. airliner and wrote their story, only to have the CIA ask them to sit on it for five days, citing operational security. Then the CIA said operational security was no longer an issue, but they wanted the AP to sit on the story for one more day. The AP discerned that the White House was preparing another Osama bin Laden-style victory lap that would spoil their scoop, so they published the story. That – not national security – appears to have been the DOJ’s justification for the subpoena.

On Monday a Kansas City, Missouri man pleaded guilty to voter fraud in the 2010 Democrat primary. He voted illegally in a U.S. House race that was decided by one vote, and he’s the winner’s uncle; the winner of the primary, John Rizzo, went on to win the general election. Yes, voter fraud can decide elections.

Maryland declined to press criminal charges against abortionist LeRoy Carhart in the death of Jennifer McKenna Morbelli. Maryland’s state health board is still investigating the case.

Russia is investing in missile defense systems even as it successfully pressures Obama to back down on U.S. missile defense systems in Europe.

Here is Eric Holder’s Sergeant Schultz impersonation during yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee meeting: