While Congress is on recess and President Obama vacations in Martha’s Vineyard, a coalition of free press groups is escalating an already-aggressive campaign against the Obama administration for allegedly freezing out the press and cracking down on reporters.

The flood of critical letters and petitions and statements from First Amendment groups marks a new level of tension in a relationship that for years has been deteriorating. Though Obama, as a candidate in 2008, was widely seen to enjoy favorable media treatment, his administration now is fielding accusations that it’s one of the least transparent in history.

Society of Professional Journalists President David Cuillier, in a statement earlier this week, blasted the administration for what he called “excessive message management and preventing journalists from getting information on behalf of citizens.”

SPJ is among the groups that’s been leading the charge on the issue. Last month, more than three dozen groups, including SPJ, wrote to the White House about what they described as growing censorship throughout federal agencies.

Cuillier’s latest statement came in response to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s Aug. 11 letter to his organization regarding their complaints.

In it, Earnest said Obama’s commitment to transparency is “unwavering.” While he acknowledged “there will always be a healthy, natural tension between journalists and the White House,” Earnest vowed greater transparency going forward and pointed to several steps the administration has taken: like processing more “freedom of information” requests, declassifying records and releasing information on White House visitors.

“Typical spin and response through non-response,” Cuillier shot back.

He said he hopes the administration is “sincere” about being more open, “but we want action. We are tired of words and evasion.”

Media groups are gearing up for another confrontation on Thursday, when they plan to present a petition with 100,000 signatures — backed by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and others — to the Justice Department. It calls for the administration to halt legal action against New York Times reporter James Risen, who detailed a botched CIA effort during the Clinton administration to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Risen’s reporting is at the center of criminal charges against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. Federal prosecutors want to force Risen to testify about his sources at Sterling’s trial, and the Supreme Court recently refused to get involved in the case.

Risen argued he has a right to protect his sources’ identity, either under the Constitution or rules governing criminal trials. A federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., earlier rejected Risen’s bid to avoid being forced to testify.

At the same time federal prosecutors have fought Risen in court, Attorney General Eric Holder has suggested that the government would not seek to put Risen in jail should he refuse to testify as ordered.

But journalist groups want assurances. Risen also is expected to speak during a press conference at the National Press Club on Thursday afternoon.

The case follows tension last year surrounding the Justice Department’s snooping on Fox News’ reporter James Rosen’s phone records and emails, and its seizure of AP phone records in the course of leak investigations. The controversy over those actions led to some reforms at the Justice Department.

Press groups’ complaints about the administration are manifold. They say agencies are prohibiting staffers from talking to journalists without public affairs office approval — and sometimes without public affairs employees sitting in on interviews. Further, they complain about long delays in getting information and about communications staff speaking “confidentially” even on routine matters.

In yet another complaint, journalist and scientific organizations accused the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday of attempting to muzzle its independent scientific advisers by directing them to funnel all outside requests for information through agency officials.

In a letter, the groups representing journalists and scientists urged the EPA to allow advisory board members to talk directly to news reporters, Congress and other outside groups without first asking for permission from EPA officials. An April memo from the EPA’s chief of staff said that “unsolicited contacts” need to be “appropriately managed” and that committee members should refrain from directly responding to requests about committees’ efforts to advise the agency.

The scientific advisory board’s office had asked the EPA to clarify the communications policy for board members, who are government employees.

“The new policy only reinforces any perception that the agency prioritizes message control over the ability of scientists who advise the agency to share their expertise with the public,” the groups wrote.

The chair of that panel, H. Christopher Frey, said in an interview with the Associated Press Tuesday in which he stressed he was offering his personal opinion, that he found the tone of the EPA memo to be unnecessary.

Frey, a distinguished professor in North Carolina State University’s engineering department, said that many of the scientists that seek to serve on the committees are national and internationally-renowned experts and that EPA “need not be too strong in precluding interactions with the media or others.”

An EPA spokeswoman said there are no constraints on members fielding requests in a personal or professional capacity. She said the memo was designed to assure transparency.

Hillary Clinton and congressmen alike have called on Obama to arm Syria’s rebels. But the president fumed at lawmakers in a private meeting for suggesting he should’ve done more.

President Obama got angry at lawmakers who suggested in a private meeting that he should have armed the Syrian rebels, calling the criticism “horseshit.”

The argument that America should have done more in Syria, made for years by foreign policy leaders in both parties and several members of Obama’s senior national security team, was brought back to the fore this past weekend. Obama and Hillary Clinton gave dueling interviews in which they publicly split on whether the security and humanitarian catastrophe in Syria could have been avoided if the United States had played a larger role. Obama’s outburst on July 31, one week prior, reveals the criticism was already getting to him, even before the White House tried to deflect Clinton’s remarks as pre-presidential political posturing.

Just before the congressional recess, President Obama invited over a dozen Senate and House leaders from both parties to the White House to talk about foreign policy. According to two lawmakers inside the meeting, Obama became visibly agitated when confronted by bipartisan criticism of the White House’s policy of slow-rolling moderate Syrian rebels’ repeated requests for arms to fight the Assad regime and ISIS.

According to one of the lawmakers, Sen. Bob Corker asked the president a long question that included sharp criticisms of President Obama’s handling of a number of foreign policy issues—including Syria, ISIS, Russia, and Ukraine. Obama answered Corker at length. Then, the president defended his administration’s actions on Syria, saying that the notion that many have put forth regarding arming the rebels earlier would have led to better outcomes in Syria was “horseshit.”

White House officials confirmed the charged exchange between Obama and Corker but declined to confirm that Obama used the expletive. The interaction between Obama and Corker was a tense moment in the otherwise uneventful meeting.

Corker’s office declined to comment for this story. But days after the White House meeting, Corker wrote a blistering op-ed for The Washington Post criticizing Obama’s handling of foreign policy. “Today, after three years of bold rhetoric divorced from reality, 170,000 Syrians are dead, and we are not innocent bystanders. The president encouraged the opposition to swallow deadly risks, then left them mostly hanging,” the senator wrote. “Extremist groups from Syria have surged into Iraq, seizing key territory and resources, and are threatening to completely undo the progress of years of U.S. sacrifice.”

Top Democratic lawmakers agreed with Corker and Clinton that doing more to support the moderate rebels would have at least had a chance of averting or mitigating the current crisis, which has now spread to large parts of Iraq as ISIS expands its newly declared Caliphate.

“We may never know for sure if ISIS’s decisions were encouraged by Obama’s choices in Syria. What we know for sure is that ISIS metastasized in Syria and was not deterred because of anything Obama said or did so far.”

Rep. Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, arrived at the White House meeting after the Obama-Corker exchange. But the congressman also heard Obama defend his Syria policy, although using more polite language.

“The president still feels very strongly that we are deluding ourselves if we think American intervention in Syria early on by assisting these rebels would have made a difference,” Engel told The Daily Beast in an interview. “He still believes that. I disagree, respectfully. They were not looking for U.S. troops, they were looking for help and the Syria civil war started with the most noblest of causes.”

In a New York Times interview published Aug. 8, Obama said that the idea arming the rebels would have made a difference had “always been a fantasy.”

“This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards,” Obama said.

Clinton told The Atlantic in an interview published Aug. 10 that Obama’s “failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.”

In 2012, Clinton revealed that she and then-CIA Director David Petraeus had pushed a plan earlier that year to arm the Syrian rebels that was rejected by the White House. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey later said they supported the plan at that time. Many lawmakers, including Corker and Engel, still support that plan and they agree with Clinton that Obama’s policy left a vacuum that ISIS rushed to fill.

“[ISIS’s threat in Iraq] is definitely tied to Syria because when the uprising started against Bashar al Assad, it was a movement of people wanting freedom and democracy in Syria, it wasn’t a war involving jihadism at all,” Engel said. “They desperately needed our help, which we didn’t supply, and as a result ISIS got the upper hand. We are now paying the price of that.”

Not all lawmakers support arming the rebels; Sen. Rand Paul, for example, is on the record opposing the use of U.S. military resources to fight ISIS in Iraq or Syria. Also, Clinton and many lawmakers acknowledge that arming the rebels was risky and might not have worked. The weapons could’ve fallen into the extremists’ hands, and Syria might have remained a jihadist free-for-all.

“Well, I did believe, which is why I advocated this, that if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight into what was going on on the ground,” Clinton said.

By Josh Rogin

Labor Secretary-turned-college professor Robert Reich’s latest lectures on income inequality don’t square with his $240,000 salary for teaching just one class, economists tell FoxNews.com.

Reich, who served in the Clinton White House and is now a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, took on the topic of “Work and Worth” in an Aug. 2 post on his blog. In it, he lamented that there is “little or no relationship” between what someone is paid and their actual worth to society, and he wrapped up his post by calling for student loans to be forgiven for graduates in fields like social work, nursing and teaching.

“The moral crisis of our age has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion; it’s insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street’s continued gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy,” Reich wrote in a separate Facebook post.

But a professor who earns a one-percenter’s income for a relatively easy workload has a tough time complaining about how unfair the economy is, according to some critics.

“It’s definitely hypocritical,” said Dan Mitchell of the Washington-based Cato Institute. “And not only does he earn that salary, but I’m sure he pulls in a lot of money from consulting and from giving speeches. But he’s obviously in the top 1 or 2 percent, so if he really thinks that society mismeasures these things, then why isn’t he giving some of his money away?”

By and large, contrary to Reich’s point of view, most workers do “get paid on the basis of their worth,” Mitchell said.

“That type of thinking to sound economic policy analysis is what faith-healing is to medicine.” – Economist Peter Morici

“That being said, the much greater problem is that his economic analysis is wrong and perhaps non-existent,” he continued. “That’s because the private hedge fund people only make money because others voluntarily decide that it’s worth it to invest their money with them. People only pay corporate lawyers what they think they’re worth.”

Reich, whose latest work, “Beyond Outrage,” is now available in paperback, was unavailable for comment Wednesday. He earned $242,613 in 2013, according to a University of California compensation website.

“Professor Reich is out of town, and off the grid for the rest of the summer, unfortunately,” his assistant wrote FoxNews.com. “Thank you for thinking of Professor Reich.”

The tenor of Reich’s recent posts reeks of “wealthy dilettante leftism,” Mitchell said, especially when considering that higher education costs have increased far faster than the rate of inflation in recent years.

“So, if we’re worrying about people getting exploited, why not focus on the students and the bureaucracy and the higher education system as a whole? That might be a good place to start,” Mitchell said.

Peter Morici, a professor of business at the University of Maryland and a Fox News contributor, echoed Mitchell’s take, saying most people get paid what the market says they’re worth.

“He’s just an ideologue, he’s not really an economist,” Morici told FoxNews.com. “He’s basically a social scientist. This is his belief to me; it’s not an analytic position.”

Morici said Reich’s call to redistribute income downward simply won’t work because “half of the population” already doesn’t pay income tax.

“Basically, he’s not thinking systemically, but he’s thinking of policies he wants to support his personal values,” Morici continued. “That type of thinking to sound economic policy analysis is what faith-healing is to medicine.”

The market has a way of bringing salaries in line, according to Joseph Minarik, of the Washington-based think tank Committee for Economic Development.

“Eventually, excessive compensation will be reduced when people offer to provide the same service at lower pay,” Minarik said. “That may be true of financial executives, and of university presidents as well. And caring professions will be paid more when we all decide that we will be willing to foot the bill.”

By Joshua Rhett Miller

Forty years ago public outrage about the actions of President Richard Milhous Nixon, lead by his long time liberal critics, forced him to be the first U.S. chief executive to resign the presidency. Critics screamed about Nixon’s extra-legal and extra-constitutional conduct as protestors ringed the White House chanting “Jail to the Chief.”

Nixon’s men had spied on their fellow citizens, allegedly used the IRS to harass their political enemies, waged war without the consent of Congress and used the CIA in an effort to hide their crimes.

No man, Nixon’s critics assured us, was above the law. For his transgressions, Richard Nixon was forced from office, evading prosecution only because of a presidential pardon.

Liberals are silent as Obama shreds the Constitution in ways Richard Nixon would have marveled at.

Yet by any reasonable measure, Nixon’s sins seem venal compared to those of President Barack Obama.

Nixon’s men illegally wiretapped his political opponents — and they went to jail for it. When the FBI used warrantless surveillance to wiretap and intercept the mail of anti-war radicals, those who did so were charged, tried and convicted.

Obama has used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to guarantee any surveillance the government wants without probable cause. Nixon spied on a virtual hand-full. Barack Obama’ s NSA wire-taps the entire nation and monitors the e-mails of thousands.

Nixon talked about using the IRS to harass his opponents but there is no evidence that he successfully did so, yet illegal use of the IRS was among the Articles of Impeachment voted by the House of Representatives. Obama’s IRS has actually used the IRS to harass conservative groups. Can you imagine the liberal outcry if IRS officials under Nixon referred to liberals as “a—holes’ and “crazies”?

The White House tapes show Nixon attempting to use the CIA to impede the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in. This pales in comparison to the CIA spying on members of the US Senate charged with investigating the Agency’s illegal activities.

Where is liberal outrage over Obama’s Justice Department spying on reporters? What would have happened if Nixon’s Justice Department had opened the mail and tracked the movements of Walter Cronkite as Obama’s Justice department did with Fox’s News’ James Rosen?

Nixon’s impeachment included the charge that he evaded Congress’ sole authority to declare war by bombing Cambodia. Yet in Libya Obama said that only he had the inherent authority to decide what is a “war” and that no congressional approval was necessary. He proceeded to bomb  Libya, destroy its military and spend more than a billion dollars in borrowed money in support of one side, who was not aligned with the United States, in a civil war.

Nixon’s men considered the murder of investigative journalist Jack Anderson. That’s nothing compared with Obama’s assertion that he has right to kill any U.S. citizen without a charge, let alone conviction.

Nixon was excoriated for the missing 18 and a half minutes in his White House tapes although his long-time Secretary Rose Mary Woods claimed to have erased them by mistake. In the torture scandal, CIA officials admitted to destroying tapes that they knew could be used against them in criminal cases at the same time Obama’s IRS says hundreds of thousands of documents regarding abuse against Tea Party and Conservative groups are “missing,” without repercussion.

While Nixon was known for his  “Enemies List,” the former head of the National Security Agency’s global digital data gathering program says that Obama also has an enemies list stored by keyword, which has been used to take down perceived political enemies such as General Petraus. During his re-election campaign Obama even brazenly posted his enemies list on-line as a not-so-subtle threat not to donate to his opponents. How Nixon’s critics would have howled if he had publicly targeted Sen. George McGovern’s donors.

Because of Obama’s iconic status on the left, liberals are silent as Obama shreds the Constitution in ways Richard Nixon would have marveled at. Democrats scoff at the notion of the impeachment of Obama for crimes far more serious and reaching than of those committed by Richard Nixon.

By Roger Stone, author of “Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon” (Skyhorse Publishing) which will be released on August 11.

Montana Democratic Sen. John Walsh is dropping out of his Senate race after being dogged by allegations of plagiarism, potentially boosting Republicans’ chances of picking up the seat in November.

The senator made the announcement late Thursday in a message to supporters. Walsh said the plagiarism claims have become a “distraction” from the issues.

“I am ending my campaign so that I can focus on fulfilling the responsibility entrusted to me as your U.S. Senator. You deserve someone who will always fight for Montana, and I will,” he said in the message.

Calls for Walsh to bow out have grown louder following accusations that first surfaced last month that he plagiarized part of a paper he submitted for his master’s degree in 2007.

Three of Montana’s largest newspapers recently called for him to withdraw his candidacy, while others have demanded he apologize or forfeit his master’s degree.

The decision comes as a U.S. Army War College investigation is set to begin Aug. 15 into the paper that Walsh previously said unintentionally contained wrongfully cited passages. Walsh also had until Monday to drop out of the race.

His decision to withdraw from the November election allows the Montana Democratic Party to hold a nominating convention to choose a replacement candidate before the Aug. 20 deadline to do so. The convention will be composed of Democratic leaders from each county’s party committee, along with federal and statewide elected officials and the party’s executive board. They will nominate potential candidates who will have a chance to speak before the convention before voting gets underway.

The nominee who receives a majority of votes will be selected as the replacement candidate, according to the party’s rules.

Walsh’s decision is likely to give a boost to Republican Rep. Steve Daines, who is giving up his House seat to run for Senate. Republicans need to gain a net of six seats in the election to take control of the Senate, and Walsh had faced a tough race against Daines before the plagiarism allegations.

Walsh had already announced his candidacy for the seat when Gov. Steve Bullock appointed him in February to replace Max Baucus, who resigned from the Senate to become ambassador to China. Republicans blasted Bullock’s appointment of his lieutenant governor as a political move designed to gain an advantage in the elections.

The New York Times revealed the extensive use of unattributed material in Walsh’s paper about the spread of democracy in the Middle East. Walsh originally called it an “unintentional mistake” and told The Associated Press part of the blame may lie in his being treated for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder following his deployment in Iraq.

He later said he was not blaming PTSD for his mistake.

Walsh is the only U.S. senator who served in the Iraq war. He capped a 33 years in the Montana National Guard, his career rising to state adjutant general before he took his first elected office in 2013 as Bullock’s lieutenant governor in 2013. Walsh received the Master of Strategic Studies degree from the war college at age 47, a year before he became adjutant general overseeing the Guard and the state Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.

Dozens of government watchdogs are sounding the alarm that the Obama administration is stonewalling them, in what is being described as an unprecedented challenge to the agencies they’re supposed to oversee.

Forty-seven of the government’s 73 independent watchdogs known as inspectors general voiced their complaints in a letter to congressional leaders this week. They accused several major agencies — the Justice Department, the Peace Corps and the chemical safety board — of imposing “serious limitations on access to records.”

The inspectors general are now appealing to Congress to help them do their jobs uncovering waste, fraud, and mismanagement.

“Agency actions that limit, condition, or delay access thus have profoundly negative consequences for our work: they make us less effective, encourage other agencies to take similar actions in the future, and erode the morale of the dedicated professionals that make up our staffs,” they wrote.

The letter to the chairmen and ranking members of relevant oversight committees in the House and Senate claimed agencies are withholding information by calling it “privileged.”

In the letter, they said this interpretation poses “potentially serious challenges to the authority of every Inspector General and our ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner.”

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., calls that extremely troubling.

“If there is anyone who should have transparency, it should be the watchdogs inside the government working for the president,” Issa told Fox News in an interview.

The letter offered specific examples of investigators having trouble getting what they need.

In the case of the Peace Corps, it withheld records of sexual assaults against its volunteers. A Peace Corps spokeswoman told Fox News, “We are committed to working with the inspector general to ensure rigorous oversight while protecting the confidentiality and privacy of volunteers who are sexually assaulted.”

At the Justice Department, the letter said officials withheld records for three reviews until they found the reviews were helpful to department leadership.

Justice spokesman Brian Fallon said everything sought was provided and “because the documents at issue included grand jury material, credit reports, and other information whose dissemination is restricted by law, it was necessary to identify exceptions to the laws to accommodate the inspector general’s request.”

The watchdogs also claimed the EPA’s inspector general had problems getting documents from the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board for a separate investigation.

Issa said that since most IG activities are not public until they are completed, “some of the best examples of obstruction probably are the ones the IGs don’t want to say in a public format.”

The letter notes a 1978 law ensures inspectors general have “complete, unfiltered, and timely access to all information and materials … without unreasonable administrative burdens.”

Issa called the letter unprecedented. “I’ve never seen a letter like this, and my folks have checked — there has never been a letter even with a dozen IGs complaining.”

He added, “This is the majority of all inspectors general saying not just in the examples they gave, but government wide, they see a pattern that is making them unable to do their job.”

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has long voiced concerns about impediments faced by the IGs, and used the letter to hammer the administration on that point. “This is an administration that pledged to be the most transparent in history. Yet, these nonpartisan, independent agency watchdogs say they are getting stonewalled,” he said.

Issa said he’s planning to hold hearings on this issue when Congress, which currently is on recess, returns in September.

By Mike Emanuel

President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have dipped to a new low—40%—according to a new poll released Tuesday.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which was conducted by a Democratic pollster and a Republican pollster working together, has Obama’s favorability at 40% positive and 47% negative. NBC News reports that the decline in Obama’s polling numbers stems chiefly from a decline in support among Democrats and African Americans.

The President’s approval rating for his handling of foreign policy is particularly low, at 36%.

The approval rating for Congress is far worse, crouching down at 14%, a level where it has been for several years, but disapproval in Congress isn’t split evenly across the aisle. Americans view congressional Democrats (31%) more favorably than they do congressional Republicans (19%).

The President’s dismal numbers heading into a midterm spell trouble for the Democrats but not necessarily a tidal wave like in 2006 or 2010 — enthusiasm, pollsters said, is particularly low all around this campaign season.

The NBC/WSJ survey polled 1,000 adults between July 30 and Aug. 3 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.1%.

By Denver Nicks

Charles Krauthammer said Monday on “Special Report with Bret Baier” that Secretary of State John Kerry meddled in the Israeli-Gaza conflict by showing up uninvited to the latest cease fire negotiations.

Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist and a Fox News contributor, said Kerry has caused “wreckage” by intervening.

“The Israelis did not invite him,” he said. “The Egyptians did not want him and he still says he advanced a peace plan that was sort of building on the Egyptian one. It didn’t at all. It undermined it.”

Kerry spent Saturday in Paris meeting with several European diplomats and the foreign ministers of Qatar and Turkey, who are negotiating on behalf of Hamas, hoping to establish an immediate cease fire in the ongoing conflict.

Krauthammer said Kerry returned from the negotiations as essentially Hamas’ lawyer, and the plan Kerry supported “would have given Hamas all of its demands.”

“(Kerry) hands Israel a proposition that is so outrageous that the cabinet votes 19-0 against it,” he said. “Israeli cabinets have never voted 19-0 on whether the sun rises in the east. It was unbelievable.”

The head of the IRS confirmed Wednesday that investigators looking into missing emails from ex-agency official Lois Lerner have found and are reviewing “backup tapes” — despite earlier IRS claims that the tapes had been recycled.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, testifying before a House oversight subcommittee, stressed that he does not know “how they found them” or “whether there’s anything on them or not.” But he said the inspector general’s office advised him the investigators are reviewing tapes to see if they contain any “recoverable” material.

The revelation is significant because the IRS claimed, when the agency first told Congress about the missing emails, that backup tapes “no longer exist because they have been recycled.”

It is unclear whether the tapes in IG custody contain any Lerner emails, but Koskinen said investigators are now checking.

Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee first raised questions about the backup tapes on Monday, releasing a partial transcript from an interview with IRS official Thomas Kane. In it, Kane said “there is an issue” as to whether all the backup tapes were destroyed. Asked if they might still exist, he said he didn’t know but “it’s an issue that’s being looked at.”

Investigators in Congress and with the inspector general’s office want to see those backup tapes because of the possibility they might contain emails that otherwise were lost in Lerner’s apparent hard drive crash in 2011. Lerner is the former IRS official at the center of the controversy over agency targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status — the agency’s acknowledgement last month that years’ worth of emails were lost has infuriated GOP investigators.

The so-called backup tapes are considered a last resort option for recovering any missing emails. Though certain federal employees are supposed to store certain communications, the backup tape system was used at the IRS to store such data for a six-month period.

“There are still many unanswered questions,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said Wednesday.

Several other questions have been raised in recent days over how Lerner’s emails disappeared and when the agency learned about it.

The House Ways and Means Committee claimed Tuesday that Lerner’s hard drive was only “scratched,” but not necessarily damaged beyond repair. Asked about that claim on Wednesday, Koskinen claimed not to know much about that allegation.

“It concerns me,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are calling for a special prosecutor to investigate why the IRS delayed telling Congress and the Justice Department that the emails from Lerner disappeared.

According to a transcript from a July 17 interview, Kane told oversight committee investigators that senior leadership in the IRS learned about the apparent hard drive crash in early February. Koskinen, though, did not mention issues with Lerner’s emails at a March 26 hearing, or at a subsequent committee staff meeting, according to Republicans.

“You guys sat on the information for several months,” Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., said Wednesday.

Koskinen, though, said he was advised in February only that there was a discrepancy in the number of emails turning up from Lerner before 2011 and that there was a “problem” with Lerner’s computer. He said the problem was not described to him in any greater detail at the time.

He said they found out about the hard-drive crash in April.

Republicans claim that the new details emerging raise concerns about how forthcoming the agency has been.

“It is unbelievable that we cannot get a simple, straight answer from the IRS about this hard drive,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., said in a statement Tuesday.

Democrats, meanwhile, slammed Republicans for continuing to bring Koskinen before the congressional committees.

“This is unseemly, it’s embarrassing, this is not a proper way to run an investigation,” Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said.

House investigators said Tuesday that the computer hard drive of ex-agency official Lois Lerner — a key figure in the IRS targeting scandal — was only “scratched,” not irreparably damaged, as Americans have been led to believe.

GOP-led Ways and Means Committee investigators, in their quest to recover missing Lerner emails, learned her hard drive was damaged but recoverable by talking to IRS information-technology experts, after the government originally refused to make them available, according to the committee.

“It is unbelievable that we cannot get a simple, straight answer from the IRS about this hard drive,” said committee Chairman Dave Camp.

The Michigan Republican said the new information also raises more questions about potential criminal wrongdoing at the IRS because the committee was told no data was recoverable and the physical hard drive was recycled and potentially shredded.

In addition, learning that the hard drive was only scratched also raises questions about why the IRS refused to use outside experts to recover the data.

“In fact, in-house professionals at the IRS recommended the agency seek outside assistance in recovering the data,” the committee said Tuesday in a release.

House investigators said they also are trying to determine whether the scratch was accidental or deliberate.

“If the IRS would just come clean and tell Congress and the American people what really happened, we could put an end to this,” Camp said. “Our investigators will not stop until we find the full truth.”

Lerner was the IRS’s exempt organizations director during the period of 2009 to mid-2011 — when applications for tax-exempt status from Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations were held up for extra scrutiny.

The committee also said the information gleamed from the new interviews conflicts with a July 18 IRS court filing that states the data on the hard drive was unrecoverable — including years of missing emails.

On June 13, more than one year into the investigation, and one month after the committee was promised it would receive all of Lerner’s emails, Congress learned that potentially thousands of them, over roughly two years, were destroyed as a result of a 2011 computer crash.

The recent interviews are bolstered by former federal law-enforcement and Defense Department forensic experts also telling investigators that most of the data on a scratched drive should be recoverable, the committee said.

A declaration filed Friday by the IRS stated the agency tried but failed to recover the data. The agency also said it is not sure what happened to the hard drive, other than saying they think it was recycled, which according to the court filing means “shredded.”

The committee also said a review of internal IRS documents found Lerner’s computer was actually described as “recovered.”

The targeting to the groups applying to the IRS was made public in May 2013 by Lerner. She has since refused to testify before Congress, invoking the Fifth Amendment, and resigned in September 2013.

The IRS has turned over tens of thousands of emails to and from Lerner’s account and says it has recovered thousands of others that were lost when her government-issued computer crashed.

Democrats say there is no scandal and that Republicans are trying to turn it into an election-year issue.

Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, protested Monday about the continuing House investigations, including his committee’s plans to call IRS Commissioner John Koskinen to testify on Wednesday, for the third time over the past month.

“This public harassment of an agency head is not only an abuse of authority, but a dereliction of the committee’s obligation to conduct responsible oversight on a host of other critical issues within our jurisdiction,” he said.

Investigators also are still trying to learn whether the targeting of conservative groups was ordered by the White House.

A dramatic spike in the number of Americans with permits to carry concealed weapons coincides with an equally stark drop in violent crime, according to a new study, which Second Amendment advocates say makes the case that more guns can mean safer streets.

The study by the Crime Prevention Research Center found that 11.1 million Americans now have permits to carry concealed weapons, up from 4.5 million in 2007. The 146 percent increase has come even as both murder and violent crime rates have dropped by 22 percent.

“When you allow people to carry concealed handguns, you see changes in the behavior of criminals,” said the center’s president, John R. Lott, a Fox News contributor. “Some criminals stop committing crimes, others move on to crimes in which they don’t come into contact with victims and others actually move to areas where they have less fear of being confronted by armed victims.”

“When you allow people to carry concealed handguns, you see changes in the behavior of criminals.” – John R. Lott, Crime Prevention Research Center

Increasing gun ownership, litigation and new state laws have all contributed to the rise in concealed carry permits. In March, Illinois became the 50^th state to begin issuing concealed weapons permits. But the cost and other requirements for obtaining the permits varies greatly, from South Dakota, where a permit requires $10, a background check and no training, to Illinois, where the cost of obtaining a permit comes to more than $600 when the fee and cost of training programs are taken into account.

Six states don’t require a permit for legal gun owners to conceal their weapons, and Lott notes those states have some of the lowest violent crime rates in the nation.

The real measure of the deterrent effect of concealed carry permits, according to Lott, is not laws on the books, but the percentage of a given state’s population that holds the permits. In 10 states, more than 8 percent of adults hold concealed carry permits, and all are among the states with the lowest crime rates. Lott claims his group’s analysis shows that each one percentage point increase in the adult population holding permits brings a 1.4 percent drop in the murder rate.

“We found that the size of the drop [in crime] is directly related to the percentage of the population with permits,” Lott said.

Between 2007 and the preliminary estimates for 2013, murder rates have fallen from 5.6 to 4.4 per 100,000.

Tod Burke, a former police officer and a professor of criminal justice at Radford University, in Radford, Va., said he doesn’t buy the idea that gun permits are driving the reduction in crime. Burke said several factors, including smarter, “data-driven” policing and increased incarceration of violent criminals likely play a bigger role.

“I think we have to be cautious about having a causal relationship between gun permits and a decrease in crime,” Burke said. “[Lott’s] theory is one to consider, but not to the exclusion of others.”

The report is the first tally of concealed carry permit holders since a survey in 2011 by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 8 million Americans held them.

The total of 11,113,013 Americans who currently hold concealed carry permits represents 4.8 percent of the total adult population. But the center stated that the number of concealed carry permit holders is likely much higher, because numbers are not available for all states that issue permits, such as New York. Additionally, four states and the majority of Montana do not require that residents have a concealed handgun permit to carry within the state, so the number of residents who carry a concealed weapon is not recorded.

Florida has the most active concealed carry permits, at nearly 1.3 million. Texas is second, at just more than 708,000, while Hawaii, at 183, has the fewest of states whose data was available.

Earlier this year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California must allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed firearms in public, striking down the core of the state’s permit system for handguns.  The judges found in a 2-1 holding that San Diego County’s rule that residents must show “good cause” — and not merely the desire to protect themselves — to obtain a concealed-weapons permit, violated their constitutional rights.

That ruling is awaiting an en banc review by the entire circuit.

By FoxNews.com