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Email messages between two FBI officials suggest widespread use of unsecure communications by the bureau, according to records obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Judicial Watch, a Washington-based nonpartisan government watchdog organization, announced Thursday that it received 47 pages of records from the Justice Department that show FBI officials used “unsecure devices” while discussing a matter involving the European Union.

The records include emails between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI officials who were close to investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Neither remains with the bureau.

Judicial Watch filed a FOIA lawsuit after the Justice Department declined to respond to the organization’s Dec. 4, 2017, request asking for:

All records of communications, including but not limited to, emails, text messages and instant chats, between FBI official Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page; all travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Peter Strzok; and all travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Lisa Page.

Both former FBI officials made disparaging remarks about Trump in text exchanges when he was the Republican candidate for president, facing Democratic nominee Clinton in the election Nov. 8, 2016.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton ordered the FBI …read more

Lawmakers who passed the Endangered Species Act four decades ago inserted a “degree of ambiguity” in key terms that led to most legal controversies surrounded enforcement of the law, the Interior Department’s No. 2 official said in a presentation at The Heritage Foundation.

To resolve such questions, Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said, the Interior Department joined with other agencies to propose changes aimed at providing “clarity and predictability” to regulations covering endangered or threatened wildlife.

“We are intent on maintaining our environmental standards, but we are equally intent on leaving a reliable, efficient, and defensible regulatory regime in place that better serves the American people than what we found when we walked into the department, and I’m confident that we’ll be able to do this,” Bernhardt said in his speech Monday.

Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service teamed with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service on overhauling the regulations.

The Trump administration announced proposed revisions in July that primarily address two sections of the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

One of them, Section 4, involves procedures for listing species, recovering species, and designating critical habitat, the term for areas identified as essential to conserving a species. The other, Section …read more

California Gov. Jerry Brown is host of a three-day “Global Climate Action Summit” in San Francisco organized by an “activist donor network” that has burrowed into state government agencies, a climate change skeptic says in a new report.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is the author of two reports detailing how a well-endowed “climate industry” steers donor money through nonprofit organizations into the offices of state governors and attorneys general.

The relationship between governors and environmental activists who are using governors’ offices to advance the climate change agenda of certain donors is the subject of a report by Horner released Tuesday by CEI, a libertarian think tank in Washington.

“A particular theme slated for the San Francisco event is that President Trump’s promise to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty is isolating the United States from what is otherwise and elsewhere a doable, successful, and economically beneficial adoption of this agenda,” Horner writes.

The new report highlighting Brown, a Democrat, builds on Horner’s report last month describing how these same special interests work with compliant state attorneys general.

It highlights the actions of Brown in California as a case study, examining how elected officials and other …read more

The classified material Hillary Clinton sent and received using an unsecure, private email server included correspondence with foreign leaders, according to documents obtained from the State Department by a government watchdog group.

Judicial Watch, which has called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to order “an honest criminal investigation” of Clinton’s email practices while she was secretary of state, now awaits a federal judge’s Sept. 28 deadline for the State Department to finish sorting through the emails.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton last month said the classified information in Clinton emails uncovered by his team shows that then-FBI Director James Comey and other top FBI officials conducted a “sham investigation” into Clinton’s misuse of email as secretary of state.

“These classified Hillary Clinton emails that she tried to hide or destroy show why it is urgent that the DOJ [Department of Justice] finally undertake an honest criminal investigation,” Fitton said in a press release Aug. 16. “It is past time for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to order a new investigation of the Hillary Clinton email scandal.”

Comey, apparently without consulting then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, told reporters in July 2016 that Clinton was careless in using her private email account for official business and transmitted …read more

Congressional leaders are pressing their case against environmental activists who are closely aligned with Chinese government officials.

In a letter Wednesday to the Washington-based World Resources Institute, Reps. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, and Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., ask the leader of the nonprofit international research group to document compliance with federal law covering agents of foreign powers.

Bishop and Westerman note that World Resources Institute consistently has praised China’s actions through certain media platforms even as it sharply criticizes recent U.S. policy under the Trump administration:

While WRI criticizes policies of the U.S. government, WRI is silent on Chinese human rights violations such as arrests of environmental protesters and the mass detention of ethnic minorities. By contrast, WRI advocates on behalf of the rights of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in other countries. On important issues for Chinese leadership, WRI’s position appears to closely reflect China’s goals and objectives.

Bishop is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and Westerman is chairman of its oversight and investigations subcommittee.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires anyone who acts as an agent of foreign principals “in a political or quasi-political capacity” to disclose that relationship periodically with the U.S. government, according to the Justice Department. The …read more

How can Americans be certain that scientific studies that are the basis of costly EPA regulations are accurate, and that the benefits of the regulations outweigh the expense?

Contrary to what critics say about a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency, part of the answer lies in greater openness and transparency by federal officials, according to a new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank.

The rule, called “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science,” would require the EPA to publish the scientific data behind regulations so that the information would be available for public scrutiny.

The value of the proposal became apparent Aug. 9, when a federal appeals court ordered the EPA to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide used to protect crops, within 60 days, says CEI senior fellow Angela Logomasini, who authored the study.

“The Trump administration should certainly challenge this ruling, which goes beyond the bounds of reason and conflicts with all the best science on chlorpyrifos,” Logomasini, who specializes in environmental and consumer issues, said in a press release, adding:

The EPA is currently pursuing a scheduled scientific review on chlorpyrifos, and there is no reason they should stop that because of a misguided activist …read more

The Environmental Protection Agency accelerated the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda Tuesday by announcing a proposed rule to replace the Obama administration’s “Clean Power Plan” with guidelines that give states more flexibility to determine how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.

The proposed Affordable Clean Energy Rule rejects what acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler described in a conference call as the Clean Power Plan’s “top-down, one-size-fits-all” approach.

Instead, President Donald Trump’s administration embraces an alternative strategy, rooted in federalism, that allows states to reduce carbon emissions while providing their residents with reliable, affordable energy.

“The era of top-down, one-size-fits-all federal mandates is over,” Wheeler said.

Obama’s Clean Power Plan, finalized in August 2015, set out to curtail carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants for the purpose of combating climate change.

However, the Trump administration views the Obama administration plan as an overreach of the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act of 1970, which requires the agency to set “national ambient air quality standards for certain common and widespread pollutants based on the latest science.”

“Replacing this disastrous plan with a more rational standard and empowering states in this effort is a welcome shift away from the Obama-era standards that would …read more

NEW ORLEANS—Sterling Burnett doesn’t always want to sit next to someone he doesn’t know on a train, plane, or bus.

But he’s willing to fight for the freedom of those same strangers when it comes time for them to purchase a motor vehicle.

“What I care about is … your freedom to choose the vehicle of your choice,” Burnett, an environmental policy expert for the Heartland Institute, said during a panel discussion at the free-market think tank’s America First Energy Conference that took a critical look at fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks.

“I don’t think government should be in the business of deciding the characteristics of the vehicle you drive,” Burnett said of the so-called Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. “That’s what CAFE standards do. Automobility is a form of freedom.”

Burnett, a senior fellow on environmental policy at the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit research and education organization based in Illinois, espoused the virtues of automotive freedom:

I take the train, I enjoy the train, and we all fly. And I take buses. But sometimes that’s not my alternative and quite frankly, I don’t always want to sit next to strangers. And maybe I want to listen to a particular kind …read more

NEW ORLEANS—President Donald Trump’s policy of unleashing American energy through deregulation has unsettled the Russian government in much the same way Ronald Reagan’s proposed space-based missile shield panicked Soviet leaders in the 1980s, a prominent climate skeptic says.

Speaking at a conference devoted to greater freedom in the energy sector, writer and editor Marc Morano also challenged the economics behind what many environmentalists term “clean energy.”

Morano, executive editor and chief correspondent of the Climate Depot website and author of the bestseller “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” criticized policymakers who want to regulate energy sources that are more efficient and reliable.

“If solar and wind really are competitive and there’s so much money to be made in that industry, then all they have to do is outsource it to entrepreneurs to make money,” Morano said, adding:

Instead, so-called clean energy wants to ban energy that works. It’s an insidious agenda. If you really believe in your product and want to make money, why are you going to spend all this money and issue all these regulations, shutting down coal, oil, and gas? That’s where they fail.

Morano spoke as part of a panel discussion, “Battling Russia and America’s Big Green Machine,” …read more

American consumers who want safe, affordable vehicles will find new models with improved technology becoming less costly if a federal rule amending standards for fuel economy and emissions goes into effect, Trump administration officials said Thursday in announcing the proposal.

California has been permitted to set its own auto emissions standards under a federal waiver. But President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration could seek to eliminate this waiver as part of the proposed rule change.

Twelve states, concentrated in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest, follow California’s lead with stricter emissions standards, as does— closer to the White House—the District of Columbia.

The Obama administration worked with state officials in California to set fuel efficiency standards, a key component of President Barack Obama’s efforts to address climate change.

Democratic Party officials quoted in Politico warn that the Trump administration’s proposal could create a rift between red states and the blue states that adopted California’s stricter emissions standards.

If the new proposal is implemented, California and the 12 other states would need to observe the new federal rules on emissions.

“Since California started to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards, new car prices have increased $6,800 above the pre-2009 baseline …read more