1) State Department cover-up of drug and sex scandals from October, 2012 (just breaking, will send more info later). Gee, who was the Sec'y of State way back then, and "why does it matter?" lol
2) Hundreds in government had advance word of Medicare action at heart of trading-spike probe
Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg -
The Securities and Exchange Commission, pictured, and the
Justice Department are investigating whether Wall Street investors had
advance access to inside information about a then-confidential Medicare
funding plan.
Hundreds of federal employees were
given advance word of a Medicare decision worth billions of dollars to
private insurers in the weeks before the official announcement, a period
when trading in the shares of those firms spiked.
The surge of trading in Humana’s
and other private health insurers’ stock before the April 1
announcement already has prompted the Justice Department and the
Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Wall Street
investors had advance access to inside information about the
then-confidential Medicare funding plan.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa)
told The Washington Post late last week that his office reviewed the
e-mail records of employees at the Department of Health and Human
Services and found that 436 of them had early access to the Medicare
decision as much as two weeks before it was made public.
The number of federal employees with advance knowledge is surely
higher; the figures Grassley’s staff compiled did not include people at
the White House’s Office of Management and Budget who also saw the
information. The e-mail records of those employees have not been made
available to Grassley.
The discovery that sensitive information was so widely disseminated
could complicate the forensic task for investigators trying to
determine who may have leaked confidential information, and it brings
further attention to the government’s handling of policy details valued
by Wall Street traders.
“This should sound an alarm,” Grassley said. “It should result in
better controls to avoid unfair access to information that the average
investor could never tap.”
Tracing leaks of confidential financial information can be
especially challenging in official Washington, where Congress and the
executive branch — along with the reporters and lobbyists who track them
— are accustomed to a relatively unfettered exchange of information,
compared with the more regulated environment on Wall Street.
The potential sensitivity of such exchanges was brought home for
Grassley last month, when the Justice Department hand-delivered to his
office a letter asking for details about a staff member’s communications
with a former staffer. That former Grassley staffer was a lobbyist who
occasionally worked in the burgeoning field of “political intelligence,” which specializes in providing government information to investors for a fee.
Grassley has led calls in the Senate for more scrutiny of that field, and he has said he plans to introduce legislation that would require political-intelligence consultants to disclose their activities, as lobbyists are required to do.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) made the April
1 decision to increase funding to the private-sector Medicare Advantage
program by $8 billion. Officials there did not dispute Grassley’s tally
of how many employees had advance word but said the complexity of
Medicare policy requires wide and careful review.
“CMS takes the security and integrity of sensitive information
very seriously,” Brian Cook, a spokesman for the centers, said in a
statement. “Our agency regularly handles sensitive information regarding
payment rates, coverage decisions, and other technical policy decisions
that need to be safeguarded until public release.”
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