(US) The Washington Post - Politics

A State Department staffer put on administrative leave after the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi tells the Daily Beast that he was scapegoated by top officials.

"I had no involvement to any degree with decisions on security and the funding of security at our diplomatic mission in Benghazi," Raymond Maxwell said.

The trio of controversies in Washington -- the IRS scandal, the Benghazi debate and the Justice Department secretly obtaining AP phone records -- have given the tea party new life, according to a new poll.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's opponent is out with a new ad, and it might be a candidate for sneakiest ad of the year.

At first glance, Democrat Barbara Buono's ad appears to be just a fun, cutesy new ad making light of her hard-to-pronounce last name -- comparing it to U2 s Bono and Sonny Bono.

Fox News has responded to a Justice Department probe of reporter James Rosen, reported by the Washington Post, that involved tracking his movements, phone calls and e-mails.

"We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter," Fox News executive vice president Michael Clemente said in a statement. "In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press."

Senior White House officials, including Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, learned last month about a review by the Treasury Department's inspector general into whether the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, but they did not inform President Obama, the White House said Monday.

Fox News reacted with outrage Monday to the revelation that the Justice Department tried to criminalize the newsgathering activities of reporter James Rosen in 2009 “for simply doing his job.”

“It is downright chilling,” Michael Clemente, executive vice president for news, said in a statement. “We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”

Crossroads GPS, the largest right-leaning advocacy group during the 2012 election cycle, believes it was one of the conservative groups the Internal Revenue Service targeted for special scrutiny as part of a campaign the agency apologized for earlier this month.

Signaling that it intends to conduct an aggressive investigation into how the Internal Revenue Service targeted certain conservative-leaning groups, the Senate Finance Committee has asked the agency's outgoing acting commissioner to document any communications with top Obama administration officials about the unfolding scandal.

Here's a stunning fact: The Obama Administration has prosecuted more government officials for leaking than all previous administrations combined.

Combine that eye-popper with the Justice Department's secret culling of months of phone records from AP reporters and the surveillance -- there's really no other word for it -- of Fox News Channel's James Rosen and it's clear that the careful balance President Obama pledged to maintain between national security and the 1st Amendment appears to have gotten out of whack.

A nominating convention helped put Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli on the gubernatorial ballot. It might also sink his chance to win.

Nominating conventions turn out the most committed and partisan members of the party. Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, a more moderate Republican, dropped out of the race for governor because he knew the convention would favor Cuccinelli. And at the convention this past weekend, Cuccinelli won -- but so did the Rev. E.W. Jackson, lieutenant governor candidate and a fiery conservative. Within hours, news organizations had dug up scores of controversial comments made by Jackson about abortion, homosexuality and the Democratic party. Among other things, he has compared Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan and referred to gays in the military as "sexually twisted."

Senators debating a bipartisan immigration bill agreed to changes Monday that would bar immigrants who received asylum from returning to their home country, a proposal drafted in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings.

Miriam Sapiro is expected to be named this week as acting United States Trade Representative, taking over for acting trade rep Demetrios Marantis when he leaves on Wednesday to take a top job at Square, the mobile payments company.

Former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D), who Democrats have said is likely to run for that state's open Senate seat, has nonetheless taken a new job as chairman of the board of the Stillwater Mining Company.

The Justice Department inspector general said Monday that the former U.S. attorney in Phoenix retaliated against the main whistleblower in a botched federal gun operation by leaking information to a television producer that was meant to harm the whistleblower’s credibility.

Republicans continue to struggle with electing women to office because of the remnants of the party's "old boy network," says the man who leads the party's effort to win state and local elections.

Chris Jankowski, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, said Republican women who want to run often face obstacles in the male-dominated world of local politics. He said the party is making progress on that front, but that it remains an issue.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has submitted a plan to Congress that would eliminate sequester furloughs for the agency despite the $600 million in cuts it will have to make under the automatic spending reductions.

If you had any doubt about who the most important person -- if salary is an indicator of importance (and it is) -- is in most states in the country, the map below put together by the good folks at Deadspin should dispel it.

What's in a name? For the Obama administration, a lot, when it comes to the repressive, long-isolated nation of Burma.

Seven months after the president's historic trip to the Southeast Asian country, Obama will welcome President Thein Sein to the White House on Monday. But the administration has been working through some strategic machinations over how to refer to Thein Sein's homeland -- as Burma, the U.S. government's official policy, or as Myanmar, the ruling regime's preferred name.