New York Congressman asks Treasury to blacklist Wikileaks' Assange

from Datamation:

A prominent House lawmaker is ratcheting up pressure on the Obama administration to take action against Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

In a letter delivered this week, Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to add Assange to the department's Specially Designated National and Blocked Persons List, or SDN List, a move that would prohibit U.S. businesses and individuals from doing business with the whistleblower site or anyone associated with it.

The SDN List is a registry maintained by Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control that seeks to impose sanctions against individuals and companies associated with targeted foreign countries, or independent entities that have been identified as criminal operations, such as terrorists or drug traffickers.

King and other lawmakers have warned that Wikileaks' publication of a cache of secret State Department documents, many relating to confidential conversations between diplomats and local informants, puts the lives of U.S. operatives and their sources in danger.

Read the rest here.

Read about Geithner's response here.

Who gave $1.5 million to pay down the national debt?

from NPR's Planet Money -- Every year, people give the government millions of dollars in gifts to reduce the national debt.

The government reports the total value of the contributions, but it doesn't say anything about the size of each donation, or how many gifts there are.

We wanted to learn more, so we submitted a Freedom of Information Act to the Treasury Department asking for details; they responded with a spreadsheet listing the amount of every donation they've received for the past five years.

The details are pretty interesting. ... more than 1,500 people gave gifts of $100 or less (including a bunch of jokers who donated one cent). But there were some big donations as well — 17 gifts were for more than $100,000. The biggest donation was for more than $1.5 million.

More here.

FOIA Suits Filed to Gain Information About Federal Bailout Programs

Public interest investigation group Judicial Watch has filed two new FOIA lawsuits against the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve for their respective failures to provide information about the federal government's bailout programs.

The group filed a request with the Treasury Department on June 19, 2009 relating to a congressional briefing on the financial crisis held on September 18, 2008. The Treasury Department acknowledged receipt of the FOIA request on June 22, but has not yet produced any documents or indicated when documents will be provided.

Similarly, Judicial Watch made a FOIA request with the Federal Reserve on September 2, 2009, seeking access to visitor logs for meetings with Chairman Ben Bernanke and advisor Kevin Warsh from August 2007 to the present. The Federal Reserve acknowledged the request, but has not yet produced any records.

For more information, click here.

AP Finds Out Who Geithner's "Favorites" Are

The Associated Press reviewed seven months of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's appointment calendars and found he talks to executives from Citigroup, Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. frequently, sometimes several times a day.  These executives had the ear of the Treasury Secretary more often than Senate Banking Committee Chair Christopher Dodd (D-Conn) or Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) who lead the effort to approve Geithner's overhaul of the financial system.  

As BusinessWeek notes, "There is nothing inherently wrong with senior Treasury Department officials speaking regularly with industry executives, or even with the secretary keeping tabs on the market's biggest players, even though critics say Geithner risks succumbing too much to these bankers' self-interested worldview." 

Get more info here. 

Fox loses bailout-related Federal Reserve suit

A U.S. District Court judge ruled that the Federal Reserve Board had the right to withhold bailout-related documents from Fox News, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reported. Judge Alvin Hellerstein said the records fell under the exemption that protects trade secrets and confidential information and that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are not government agencies (therefore, the board doesn't have to search the banks' records in response to Fox's request). Fox is likely to appeal and has another pending FOIA suit against the Treasury Department for other bailout records. Bloomberg News and The New York Times have simliar pending requests.

A federal judge ruled against Fox News Thursday in a key Freedom of Information Act case involving bailout-related documents held by the Federal Reserve Board.

Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled that the Federal Reserve Board in Washington had properly withheld more than 6,000 pages of documents from Fox because the records fell under the FOIA exemption protecting trade secrets and confidential information.

Fox sought information about the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending program, known as the discount window.

More here.