Obama, emboldened GOP leaders meet to chart course -- and clash over immigration

King Obama just can't understand that he's lost the throne.

And you can tell that the Jester sitting to his left is not happy about it. (Reid)

Senate Cartoon

Source says reported letter from Obama to Ayatollah ‘f***s up everything'

President Obama reportedly penned a secret letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month discussing their shared interest in fighting the Islamic State -- a development one congressional source told Fox News "f***s up everything."
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that, according to people briefed on the letter, Obama wrote to Khamenei in the middle of last month and stressed that any cooperation on dealing with the Islamic State, or ISIS, was tied to Iran striking a deal over its nuclear program. The U.S., Iran and other negotiators are facing a Nov. 24 deadline for such a deal.
A senior congressional source told Fox News that there is not anything definitive as to whether the letter even exists. But the source indicated they don't doubt that it's true because "we've seen [the president] do it before, so there is [a] precedent."
According to the Journal, Obama has written to Khamenei four times now since taking office.
The congressional source told Fox News that the letter would upset the inroads they've tried to make with "the Sunni league," noting that the president should have informed Congress of this back-channel if it was in fact going on.
"This f***s up everything," the source said.
Iran's government is Shiite-led, while the Islamic State is a Sunni terror group. The source was apparently referring to efforts to rally support among Sunni-led Arab states to confront ISIS.
Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina issued a joint statement Thursday night saying it was "outrageous that, while the cries of moderate Syrian forces for greater U.S. assistance fall on deaf ears in the White House, President Obama is apparently urging Ayatollah Khamenei to join the fight against ISIS.
Asked about the reported letter, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest would not confirm the report.
"I'm not in a position to discuss private correspondence between the president and any world leader," he said.
However, he said the U.S. policy toward Iran "remains unchanged."
"The United States will not cooperate militarily with Iran in that effort [against ISIS]. We won't share intelligence with them," he said. "But their interests in the outcome is something that's been widely commented on ... and something that on a couple of occasions has been discussed on the sidelines of other conversations."

Issa: Document dump shows Holder ‘at the heart’ of Fast and Furious debate

House oversight committee Chairman Darrell Issa told Fox News on Thursday that a massive trove of emails handed to his office on the eve of the elections indicates Attorney General Eric Holder was “at the heart” of deliberations over the Operation Fast and Furious scandal.
More than 64,000 pages of documents were given to the committee Monday night, a move Issa, R-Calif., said was a ploy to make sure they didn’t sway the election. But he said his staff is starting to go through them – already, one email exchange has surfaced in which Holder in 2011 blasted Issa “and his idiot cronies” looking into the botched anti-gun trafficking operation.
In that email, published by The Wall Street Journal, Holder claimed Issa and others “never gave a damn about” the program “when all that was happening was that thousands of Mexicans were being killed with guns from our country.” He accused them of trying only to “cripple ATF and suck up to the gun lobby.”
Issa rejected the charges, saying on Fox News the culpability lies with higher-ups, not the ATF, anyway.
“This was an undercover activity that specifically cut out our allies in Mexico … so if there’s culpability, I think it really belongs with the attorney general,” he said.
The now-halted operation allowed firearms to be trafficked into Mexico so U.S. agents could track them. But many guns ended up in the hands of criminals and at multiple crime scenes, including the murder of U.S. border agent Brian Terry.
Issa said that while Holder has suggested before Congress that he didn’t know much about the program, “it looks very much like he’s CC’d on everything.”
“This is an example of where the attorney general is at the heart of this,” he said.
The documents were released to the committee in response to a court order. Issa’s office claimed the turn-over is proof the department never had grounds to withhold them in the first place through so-called executive privilege.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon, though, said the department has been willing to cooperate.
“We have long been willing to provide many of these materials voluntarily in order to resolve this matter outside of court, and believe that producing them now should bring us a big step closer to concluding this litigation once and for all,” he said.
According to the department, the latest delivery includes about 10,000 documents, bringing the total provided so far to 18,000. Some documents still withheld were deemed “deliberative,” and exempt.  
A DOJ official said nothing in the materials contradicts what the department has said before about the “flawed” operation, and said they affirm the finding that Holder was not aware of the tactics until February 2011.

Election results looked nothing like the polls -- what gives?

WASHINGTON –  Tuesday's midterm elections were supposed to be a night of nail-biters, from Sen. Mitch McConnell's re-election race in Kentucky to veteran Sen. Pat Roberts' battle in Kansas. The too-close-to-call refrain was expected to be heard throughout the night. 
Instead, when the dust settled, Republicans rumbled to one of their biggest victories in decades. 
How could so many polls get so many races so wrong? 
"I want an investigation of the polls in Virginia," University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato told Fox News. "They were completely wrong, just as they were in Georgia. They were also way off in Illinois. And I could go on and on." 
Virginia played host to one of the biggest surprises of the night, for anyone who had been basing their election predictions on the polls. In the same state where pollsters failed to predict then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's loss to economics professor Dave Brat in the primaries, they also misjudged the race between incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Warner and Republican Ed Gillespie. 
Many polls had Warner with a double-digit lead over Gillespie. Warner is currently clinging to a 1-point lead, with the ballot count ongoing. 
It's not just that candidates thought to be dark horses ended up winning, or coming close. A flood of polls also showed several races to be tight in the closing weeks -- but on election night, Republicans soundly defeated Democrats in those contests. Exhibit A is the race between Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky. Polls showed Grimes within single digits -- one even showed her within a point -- of McConnell. The powerful senator ended up winning by 15 points. 
The results have led to some self-reflection, as well as recriminations, over the state and accuracy of political polling. 
Sabato, who said the polling industry "needs some housecleaning," clarified to FoxNews.com on Thursday that he wants the polling business -- not the government -- to conduct an internal review of its practices and procedures. 
"The government is the last group you'd want conducting any inquiry. Not only would it become partisan, inevitably, but the best polling professionals are well capable of organizing this themselves," he told FoxNews.com in an email.
In Kansas, number-crunchers at FiveThirtyEight had forecast a big loss for Gov. Sam Brownback, but he won by a 4-point margin. Data from FiveThirtyEight also predicted Roberts would be defeated in Kansas -- and many polls showed him virtually tied -- but he won by more than 10 percentage points against independent candidate Greg Orman. Likewise, in Georgia, Republican David Perdue beat Michelle Nunn for an open Senate seat by 8 points, despite polls showing a much closer race. 
Sabato, who heads up the Center for Politics' Crystal Ball website, had his own share of misses Tuesday night. Sabato had nine races leaning Democrat. Of those, seven were won by Republicans including the gubernatorial races in Maryland, Maine and Illinois. Maryland was a huge upset, as most polls showed Democrat Anthony Brown well ahead, yet Republican Larry Hogan won comfortably. 
Real Clear Politics, an online site that compiles polls from various resources, posted polling averages that largely did not square with the results. In almost every contested Senate race, Republican candidates beat the Real Clear Politics polling data. 
Sabato believes that in many cases, pollsters failed to factor in how heavily Republican and conservative the electorate in a low-turnout midterm was going to be. 
"After the experience of 2012, when they undercounted Hispanics and young people, they were concerned about the same phenomenon happening again," he said. "Perhaps they over-compensated. I want them to tell us." 
Rasmussen Reports defended its polling data on its website, saying in a written statement that they got it right "most of the time." 
"It's interesting to note that in the races in which the spread was really off for us (and the Real Clear Politics average of all pollsters), most of the time we were spot-on for the Democratic number but wrong on the Republican number," the message stated. 
Rasmussen pointed to a number of unknowns. "If you add the percentage of voters 'not sure' to the GOP side, you will come very close to the final Republican number," the statement said. 
Rasmussen believes that the data "suggests the last-minute swing vote went to the Republicans, and while it did not necessarily change the game in terms of the winner, it very much changed the spread between the candidates." 
This is not the first time some off-base polling has prompted a review of the methods used by polling firms. After Gallup showed Mitt Romney ahead in the 2012 presidential race -- he lost -- the Gallup Poll reviewed its own methodology of selecting voters. 
"It's becoming a much more difficult, nerve-wracking business," Geoff Garin, the president of Hart Research Associates and a leading Democratic pollster, told Bloomberg News at the time.

Speculation swirls over timing, pick for Holder replacement

WASHINGTON –  Tuesday’s elections have thrown President Obama a potential curveball when it comes to replacing outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder -- forcing him to decide whether to introduce a nominee during the lame duck session or take his chances with a more hostile Senate majority after January.
“(Obama) seemed pretty unapologetic yesterday, he didn’t seem to be extending an olive branch at all,” said Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation. “I think if he has someone in mind who might be at all controversial, he won’t have any trouble getting (Democratic Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid to push it through the lame duck session.”
But reports this week indicate that while there’s still time to announce a nominee and have him or her vetted and voted on by the Senate Judiciary Committee and full Senate before the holiday break, the White House is sending out signals it might wait until 2015.
Last week, Holder, who announced his retirement in September, told a reporter that he expects to stay on until early February.
A short list of nominees is making the media rounds. Missing from it are the more colorful and familiar faces, like outgoing Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. The three who appear to be in the running, according to unnamed White House sources: Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, and current Labor Secretary Thomas Perez.
“I don’t know if there are any (nominees) that Republicans would speedily or readily confirm,” said Sarah Binder, congressional expert at the Brookings Institution, who believes the two-month lame duck session may be too crowded with budget and spending priorities to properly vet and channel a nominee through the dangerous shoals of a Senate confirmation.
So it’s possible, she said, that these restraints will lead to “the White House saying we’ll just have to find a nominee come January, and that it will be a hard road but we’ll find a nominee who will be a bit more acceptable to Republicans.”
That might not include Perez, a former assistant attorney general at DOJ, who was opposed by Republicans when he was confirmed as Labor Secretary in a party line vote on July 18, 2013. He was called a “crusading ideologue” by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is poised to take over Reid’s position in January. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a judiciary committee member who voted against Perez, said the nominee showed “a lack of respect for the rule of law.” Critics pointed to his work on voting rights and immigration as “radical.”
Meanwhile, Lynch is being called an under-the-radar contender for Holder’s job. She is a 55-year-old Harvard grad with no particular ties to Obama – which could either help or hurt her in the process. She is close to Holder, however, serving on his AG’s Advisory Committee in Washington. 
During her tenure as U.S. Attorney, she convicted potential terrorists in a thwarted Al Qaeda attack on New York subways, and a Mexican drug kingpin, and she brought tax evasion charges against Republican Rep. Michael Grimm.
In addition, seeing Lynch become the first African-American woman to hold the AG position would “be inspiring to millions of people, especially children, to know what they could become,” said former federal prosecutor Andrew Weisman, who worked closely with Lynch.
As solicitor general, Verrilli has the confidence of the president, but like Perez, might have some difficulties getting past Senate critics. Republicans don’t like the fact that he is the administration’s top lawyer on every issue they have fought against at the Supreme Court level, including the Affordable Health Care Act. Others say he has a mixed record on winning cases.
Other names also have been floated. The National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) has asked the president to nominate the number two at the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, for the job.
In a letter to Obama dated Oct. 31, FOP president Chuck Canterbury wrote that his “reverence for the law, his respect for people of all persuasions and backgrounds and ready willingness to give a fair hearing to opposing views make him an extraordinary candidate.”
Whoever the nominee is, he or she will have to face Holder’s baggage with Senate Republicans, which will no doubt include questions on the ongoing IRS scandal, and any executive orders the president issues to protect undocumented workers in the U.S. from deportation. “Anyone who is not cooperative and who is not willing to answer questions is going to have a hard time,” said von Spakovsky.
That means the nominee will not only have to fulfill the myriad requirements of the job, but be able to keep his or her cool under fire in the hearing room.
“They will need to know their way around Capitol Hill, in congressional offices and in hearing rooms, and be able to work with both sides of the aisle," said Michele Jawanda, legal expert at the Center for American Progress. "The attorney general operates under the spotlight, which is why the position requires a savvy and calm, but an aggressive pursuer of injustice anywhere.”