Tag Archives: Email

09/30/16

Was the Fix in on FBI Investigation of Hillary Clinton’s Emails?

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

comey

The more that details about the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices come to light, the more their efforts appear to have been a sham designed to exonerate her of wrongdoing from the very beginning. As we wrote, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) failure to indict Hillary, based on the recommendation of FBI Director James Comey, has moved the United States closer to banana republic status.

The Clinton family’s ongoing corruption and Hillary Clinton’s pay-to-play as secretary of state have also created a precedent which could encourage other politicians to enrich themselves at the expense of the integrity of their office. The FBI’s light touch also has created a double standard on national security, where high-profile figures such as Mrs. Clinton walk free while others lose their security clearance or are fined or jailed.

Yet some on the left are unhappy with Comey’s investigation because of the comments he made publicly characterizing Mrs. Clinton as “extremely careless” with classified information. “What Comey should have done…was handle the Clinton probe like any other routine inquiry: provide confidential recommendations to prosecutors, release a strictly factual statement noting that the investigation would be closed, and resist external pressures to inappropriately air the FBI’s findings outside a court of law,” argues Riley Roberts, former speechwriter for former Attorney General Eric Holder, in Politico Magazine.

Arguably, Clinton’s status as a presidential candidate under FBI investigation may have called for some public justification of the FBI’s decision. However, despite Comey’s open criticisms, the fact remains that he decided to recommend no indictment for Hillary Clinton. There will be no accountability for Clinton’s many lies about classified information on her private email server or the way she jeopardized national security as secretary of state.

Upon further review, it appears that Mr. Comey’s investigation was highly unusual, given the five immunity agreements that were handed out. According to Paul Sperry, writing for the New York Post, not only was Platte River Networks’ Paul Combetta granted immunity, the DOJ upheld this immunity despite the fact that he had lied to the investigators during an interview.

“Instead of asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch to revoke his immunity deal and squeezing him, Comey let [Combetta] go because he was a ‘low-level guy,’ he testified at the House hearing. It’s yet another action by Comey,” wrote Sperry, “that has left former prosecutors shaking their heads.”

At that September 28 House Judiciary Committee hearing featuring Director Comey as a witness, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) accused Combetta of “trying to cover-up the cover-up” by first using Reddit to solicit information on how to strip email address information and then trying to delete his posts. “The same guy later took Bleachbit and did delete emails,” continued Rep. Jordan.

But Comey insisted that the immunity agreement was necessary to ensure that the FBI got the facts.

“There’s no doubt Combetta was involved in deleting emails,” said Comey. “He had the ‘O-sh-t’ moment, as he told us, and that’s why it was very important for us to interview this guy to find out who told you to do that, why did you do that.”

According to Andy McCarthy, writing for National Review, Secretary Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills and Clinton aide Heather Samuelson also received immunity agreements meant to ensure that they gave the FBI access to their laptops. However, the FBI could have just subpoenaed the computers or obtained a search warrant instead.

Sperry makes it clear that Mills was lying to investigators, as well. She, apparently, “told agents she had no idea Clinton maintained a private email server,” he writes. However, the email record demonstrates that she emailed the server administrator to ask about the status of that very server.

McCarthy calls the granting of these immunity agreements “very strange” behavior by the FBI. “The Justice Department could have required the production of the computer by simply issuing a grand jury subpoena,” he writes. “And had there been any concern that Mills would not cooperate, would destroy the computer, or would ‘misplace’ it (as Team Clinton claims to have misplaced so many Hillary devices), investigators could have applied for a search warrant and seized the computer.”

To add insult to injury, the FBI allowed Samuelson and Mills to sit in on Hillary Clinton’s interview with the bureau.

Former U.S. attorney Solomon Wisenberg, who conducted the grand jury questioning of President Bill Clinton, argues that the FBI should never have allowed Cheryl Mills to sit in on Mrs. Clinton’s interview. “Competent prosecutors do not allow a key witness to participate as an attorney in an FBI interview of the main subject,” he writes. “It just isn’t done.” He writes that “if Clinton insisted on Mills’s attendance, the interview would be conducted under the auspices of the federal grand jury.”

In addition, it was inappropriate that the only interview of such a high profile subject wasn’t recorded. It is preposterous that nine people were allowed to sit in during the interview. Comey acknowledged that this was unusual, but he said it was not unprecedented, though he didn’t cite any precedents.

The FBI should have convened a grand jury instead of just conducting light touch interviews, argued former U.S. attorney Joe DiGenova, speaking at a recent Judicial Watch event. “Now, it is evident to me…what Mr. Comey should have done at the beginning of this investigation was empanel a grand jury,” said DiGenova. “When you want to investigate crimes involving national security information, classified information, you don’t do interviews. You issue subpoenas to witnesses, third parties for documents. You make people come into court and fight them in front of a federal judge…”

The left continues to claim that Mrs. Clinton is held to a different standard, a double standard when compared to other candidates. However, it is clear that the FBI did hold Mrs. Clinton and her aides to a different standard—one which gives a free pass to lies and corruption.

Roger Aronoff

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.

03/16/16

Media Pluses and Minuses at Recent Democratic Debate

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

Members of the mainstream media often don’t mention their conflicts of interest. So it was refreshing when Jorge Ramos of Univision noted on air during the March 9th Democratic debate that his daughter works for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Ramos should be credited for asking Mrs. Clinton tough questions about her private email server and Benghazi. “Secretary Clinton, on the night of the attacks in Benghazi, you sent an e-mail to your daughter Chelsea saying, that al Qaeda was responsible for the killing of the Americans,” said Ramos. “However, some of the families claim that you lied to them…Secretary Clinton, did you lie to them?”

Hillary Clinton has lied about the events of that night, repeatedly, and continues to still blame the YouTube video for the attacks.

Continue reading →

01/26/16

Hillary Clinton Faces Legal and Political Obstacles in Presidential Bid

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

This is not how Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House was supposed to go: full of never-ending scandals, with a close primary competitor, and two FBI investigations. There is but one week to go before the Iowa caucuses, where the first votes in this year’s presidential race will finally be cast.

While Hillary Clinton is still the clear leader in national polls and likely to receive the nomination, the numbers are extremely close in Iowa between Hillary and the democratic socialist candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). And in the first actual primary, the following week in New Hampshire, Mrs. Clinton is trailing in a CNN poll by almost 30 points. Yes, New Hampshire is right next to Sanders’ home state of Vermont, but Sanders’ potential victories in Iowa and New Hampshire could dramatically alter the dynamics of the race.

But winning the Democratic presidential primary might be the least of Mrs. Clinton’s worries. As the State Department continues its monthly release of Mrs. Clinton’s emails, in compliance with a federal judge overseeing their release, the news keeps getting worse and worse. In the meantime, the weekend snowstormserved as an excuse for the State Department to try to get an extra month to release the final batch of emails, which would conveniently be after—instead of before—the first four states’ primaries and caucuses.

It was recently reported that the emails that crossed Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured “home brew” server included those with the Top Secret classification of SAP, or Special Access Programs, including “‘dark projects,’ such as drone operations,”according to The New York Post. In addition, Paul Sperry reports, “at least one of Clinton’s emails included sensitive information on spies.”

To date, at least 1,340 emails that went through Mrs. Clinton’s server have been deemed classified. Clinton’s defense is that none of these emails were marked classified when she sent or received them. Yet, “An intelligence official familiar with the matter told NBC News that the special access program in question was so sensitive that [Inspector General Charles] McCullough and some of his aides had to receive clearance to be read in on it before viewing the sworn declaration about the Clinton emails.”

In other words, this information was too important for the intelligence community’s inspector general to view it without special access, yet it made its way freely through an unsecure server almost certain to have been hacked by foreign nations. If the CIA were to ever have such access to the Russian foreign minister’s email server, it would be considered a bonanza for them.

Even if Mrs. Clinton’s claims were true, it would make no difference. It doesn’t matter if the material was “marked” classified. What matters is if the content was, in fact, classified. It was her responsibility as secretary of state to know the difference. Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President Bush, spelled it out: “Having any classified information on your private server is against the law. But Special Access Programs contain information so sensitive, it is given a secret ‘codeword’ and placed into a ‘compartment’ to which only a small number of specially cleared people have access. To see this information, it is not enough to have Top Secret security clearance; you have to be cleared for that specific compartment.”

The truth is that as secretary of state, Clinton showed blatant disregard for the security of our nation. When her aide Jake Sullivan said that aides were having trouble sending information via secure fax, Clinton wrote back, “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.”

“This is gigantic,” argues former federal prosecutor Joe diGenova. “The removal of the classified marking is a federal crime. It is the same thing to order someone to do it as if she had done it herself.”

The FBI investigation will no longer be examining just the transmission of classified information. There are also 150 FBI agents looking into allegations of public corruption between Secretary Clinton’s State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

But the cronyism and corruption didn’t just start when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state. Peter Schweizer’s recent article on the Clinton-pardoned international fugitive Marc Rich highlights some of the continuing rewards the Clintons are reaping in return for that last minute pardon of Rich, who was on the list of the FBI’s ten most wanted.

“Rich died in 2013,” writes Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash. “But his business partners, lawyers, advisers and friends have showered millions of dollars on the Clintons in the decade and a half following the scandal.”

Rich’s ally, a Nigerian businessman named Gilbert Chagoury, who was previously convicted of money laundering and working with a criminal organization, “organized an event at which Bill was paid $100,000 to speak (in 2003), donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and in 2009 pledged a cool $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative,” according to Schweizer. One of Chagoury’s relatives even served on Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

No matter where one looks, there seems to be even more Clinton corruption. But don’t expect the mainstream media to report on it.

The mainstream media have been fond of saying that Mrs. Clinton is not the “subject” of the FBI investigation. However, according to Andy McCarthy, subjects may or may not be charged with a crime after the investigation is completed.

“As a technical matter, no matter how extensively the FBI pokes around on its own, no one can be a subject of a real investigation—i.e., one that can lead to criminal charges—unless and until there is a grand jury,” writes McCarthy. “That does not happen until the Justice Department hops on board.”

“So Obama is hedging his bets. He is letting the FBI investigate, but on its own, without Justice Department prosecutors and the grand jury,” writes McCarthy. He adds, “The FBI cannot convene a grand jury and present an indictment. But you’d best believe the FBI can make the Obama administration look very bad if it shrinks from doing so. Then it will be a matter of how far Barack Obama is willing to stick his neck out for Hillary Clinton.”

The Clinton family cannot run away from its corrupt and scandalous record, no matter how far the mainstream media will go to avoid mentioning specifics. Mrs. Clinton set off a firestorm recently when she accused Donald Trump of having “a penchant for sexism.” This brought out people who the Clinton campaign would have much preferred stayed beneath the radar, such as alleged Clinton rape victim Juanita Broaddrick.

The Trump campaign shot back about Bill Clinton’s history with women. There is a lengthy list of women who claim to have been hit on, assaulted, or even raped by Bill Clinton. And Hillary was forced to answer those questions in the context of having just recently tweeted that “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”

Mrs. Clinton’s best ally at this point is a corrupt establishment media that largely ignore her legal and ethical challenges, and which regularly portray the Democratic Party race as being fought over such high-minded virtues as “heart vs. head,” or between “Bernie Sanders’s idealism and Hillary Clinton’s pragmatism.” We’ll see how long they can continue to enable her.

10/1/15

ATTACK SCENARIO: How Hillary Clinton’s Lust for Money and Power Led to America’s “Digital Pearl Harbor”

Doug Ross @ Journal

It’s hard to overstate the impact on national security of what is commonly known as “The OPM Hack”. The secret files of 22 million individuals who have applied for security clearances — maintained by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — was ripped off as cleanly as Michael Moore stealing cookies from a Girl Scout.

WHAT WAS THE ‘OPM HACK’?

Every person who applies for a security clearance fills out an electronic application called an EQIP or EPSQ, which are questionnaires of applicants.

Those applying for a Top Secret clearance must answer an extremely detailed questionnaire delving into every aspect of their personal life: marital affairs, drug use, criminal activity, and any other bit of information that foreign intelligence services might use to blackmail or compromise a cleared individual.

All of those files were stolen by Red China.

The OPM hack has been so devastating to clandestine operations, including NOCs (agents operating under non-official cover), that the CIA just pulled its agents from Beijing “for their safety”.

Virtually every current and future military and intelligence operation was put at risk by the OPM hack.

100% CERTAIN THAT HILLARY’S SERVER WAS COMPROMISED BY CHINA
Today the FBI has admitted they are investigating what other cyber security experts had already acknowledged: it is virtually certain that Hillary Clinton’s bathroom email server had been compromised by foreign entities.

“In my opinion there is a 100% chance that all emails sent and received by her, including all the electronic correspondence stored on her server in her Chappaqua residence, were targeted and collected by the Russian equivalent of NSA,” said former CIA case officer Jason Matthews, an expert in Russian intelligence.

A top intelligence official under Barack Obama — Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — noted that China was one likely attacker.

Kelly asked, “What do you think the odds are that the Chinese, the Russians hacked into that server and her e-mail account?”

“Very high,” Flynn said without hesitation. “Likely.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Likely. They’re very good at it. China, Russia, Iran, potentially the North Koreans. And other countries who may be ‘our allies’ because they can.”

HILLARY AND HER OPERATIVES KNEW HER BATHROOM EMAIL SERVER WAS INSECURE

In the most recent email dump, today we discovered that Clinton consigliere Cheryl Mills warned Hillary that use of her bathroom server was unprecedented and dangerous.

n A June 4, 2011 email chain between Hillary Clinton, her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and senior aides Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, all of whom used private email accounts, and in Clinton and Abedin’s case, Clinton’s secret server, Mills admits she was “someone who attempted to be hacked,” and warned against telegraphing the use of private email, as it “may encourage others who are out there.”

It is clear that everyone involved with the Clintons knew that they were violating the law and endangering U.S. national security.

NUMBER OF EMAILS DEEMED CLASSIFIED ON HILLARY’S SERVER DOUBLED TODAY

Even with the limited number of emails we’ve seen, the State Department revealed that over 400 messages on Hillary’s personal email server were classified.

Each violation constitutes a felony subject to imprisonment for up to 10 years.

As Democrat operative James Carville admitted earlier this year, Hillary employed a personal email server in order to avoid public scrutiny of her actions, be they her cash-for-favors deals, mishandling of classified data, or other illegal activities.

I BELIEVE THAT HILLARY CLINTON’S BATHROOM SERVER LED TO THE OPM HACK

My contention is that Hillary Clinton’s use of a bathroom server led directly to the OPM hack, which cyber experts have called “a digital Pearl Harbor.”

Here’s how the attack chain worked from the perspective of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

1. PLA operative compromises HRC’s email server.

2. PLA operative sends emails to various government officials using the accounts of HRC, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills or another senior official. Nothing gets the attention of a government apparatchik like an email from the likes of Hillary.

3. The emails contained a spear-phishing link with instructions to click on the link (e.g., “please check out these travel plans and see if they sync up with your schedule”) that installed malware on the targeted device. Predicted click-through rate: 70%+.

4. Targeted device is infected and then used to launch attacks inside applicable government network. These attacks take the form of reconnoitering on the compromised device (reading documents, emails, network drives, etc.); performing reconnaissance on the government network, and launching additional attacks.

In short, compromising Hillary’s email server was a gold mine for foreign intelligence agencies.

I can assure you we haven’t heard the last of tragic, needless compromises of America’s national security due to Hillary Clinton’s voracious lust for power and money.

Hat tip: BadBlue News.

09/17/15

The Democratic Party’s Deepening Dilemma

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

While Republicans are preparing for their second debate on Wednesday night, with most of the attention focused on the surprising, continuing strength of the Donald Trump campaign, the Democrats are facing an identity crisis of their own. It could prove far more chaotic than the one that the Republicans are facing.

After years of assuming Hillary Clinton would be nominated by the Democrats and swept into office by the American people, the party doesn’t know which way to turn. With the radical, left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) now leading in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, and Hillary, facing possible indictment for mishandling classified information, the party is looking for help. The names that emerge are Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, and even former VP Al Gore. If the Obama Justice Department greenlights an indictment for Hillary, there would be open warfare between the Obama and Clinton forces, creating havoc and a deeply divided party for whoever the eventual nominee would be. And if they don’t indict, they are risking having her as a badly tarnished candidate, since she is rapidly losing the support and trust of a large percentage of the American people, including her natural constituency.

The liberal media are finally admitting Hillary Clinton’s political weakness, even if they refuse to recognize the underlying deception that has undermined her candidacy. The Washington Post devoted a September 15 front page article to a poll showing that Hillary’s overall support among Democratic-leaning voters has declined by over 20 points since July.

Her appeal among female Democratic leaning voters has dropped further, a full 29 points in just eight short weeks, the Post reports.

No longer can Mrs. Clinton be called the woman’s candidate, a historic force destined to take the White House. “Her numbers among women have declined to the point where they are about even with her share among men,” reports the Post.

“The poll suggests that the historic significance of Clinton’s campaign is being overtaken by other forces,” it states.

The idea that Mrs. Clinton should become heir apparent to the presidential throne was a narrative perpetuated by the liberal media, akin to the demographic demagoguery used to hasten President Obama’s ascendance. Whereas the media were largely derelict in their duty to investigate candidate Barack Obama’s radical background, they have been unable to avoid exposing many of Mrs. Clinton’s pervasive lies.

“All the information we have is that the server wasn’t wiped,” Platte River Networks spokesman Andy Boian told The Washington Post on September 12.

If Mrs. Clinton’s email server was not actually wiped, then her deleted emails could possibly be retrieved. It would then be possible to determine what she withheld from the State Department, and, ultimately, the public.

“The revelation that Clinton never ordered the server wiped could bolster her statements that her actions have been aboveboard, suggesting that she did not take active steps to hide her e-mails,” contends the Post.

If no deception was intended, why would Mrs. Clinton have altered some emails she turned over and withheld other work-related correspondence with Sidney Blumenthal?

In addition, the State Department does not have “any emails Clinton sent between her first day in office in Jan. 2009 to April 12 of that year,” nor anything she “received between Jan. and March 2009,” nor sent during “her final month in office,” according to The Washington Examiner. The State Department only denied “the gap from Dec. 2012 to Feb. 2013,” according to the Examiner. These latest revelations came as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information requests, announced at a conference they held on Monday of this week. As many of the speakers stated at the conference, Judicial Watch has been doing much of the heavy lifting that both the media and the Justice Department should have been doing.

It strains credulity to presume that Mrs. Clinton did not send or receive a single work email for months, much less that nothing she knowingly sent or received during her four years as Secretary of State was classified. Yet this is what she has expected the public to believe.

“Now is precisely the time for Clinton and her team to wet the bed—indeed, they may already be doing so,” commented Matthew Continetti for National Review on September 12. He notes that “many of the campaign bundlers who donated to Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 haven’t written checks this time around” and that donors’ loyalties depend on perceptions of who can win, not who should win.

However, if Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy has been harmed, it has been by her own lack of integrity—not the liberal media’s desire to undermine her. Indeed, as werecently reported, journalists have repeatedly gone to great lengths to avoid damaging her campaign. One of the latest examples was during Mrs. Clinton’s recent, disingenuous apology tour, when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, during an interview with Mrs. Clinton on MSNBC, ended her questions about the email arrangement out of fear that further inquiry might sabotage her access to this candidate.

In 2008, notes Continetti, Clinton’s “political and personal future did not depend on the outcome of decisions made at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC.” The question is, if the FBI says there is enough evidence to indict, would the Justice Department go along with it? My guess is that they wouldn’t, for the reasons stated above.

As National Review Senior Editor Jonah Goldberg notes, there is not one—but an “arsenal” of smoking guns implicating Hillary. “The problem is that the standards for what counts as a smoking gun keep changing,” he writes, from minor lies about wanting to use a single device to lies about Clinton’s relationship with confidant Blumenthal.

The cumulative weight of these lies has already been sufficient to seriously damage Mrs. Clinton’s credibility with voters.

“The Washington Times reports that Clinton’s unsecured emails contained spy satellite information about North Korea’s movement of its nuclear assets,” Goldberg writes. “This sort of information is universally recognized as top secret and is normally subjected to draconian safeguards. There is no way Clinton didn’t know this.”

“All of these—and many other—facts would have counted as ‘smoking guns’ if they were divulged immediately after Clinton’s U.N. press conference,” writes Goldberg. “But Clinton, with the help of her praetorian defenders in the media, keeps moving the goalposts.”

It becomes clearer by the day that no matter how many times the media move the goalposts in order to aid Mrs. Clinton and maintain the viability of her candidacy, voters will continue to recognize the dishonesty of both. That, in essence, is the Democratic Party’s dilemma.

08/29/15

You know who’s not #ReadyForHillary? The thousands who’ve died fleeing the Libya she destroyed

Doug Ross @ Journal

Hillary Clinton is directly responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea as the death toll of those who drowned fleeing her destabilized Libya approaches 2,500.

Rescue workers counted dozens of victims Friday from the increasingly desperate tide of humanity sweeping into Europe fleeing war, oppression and poverty. Austrian police said 71 people likely suffocated in an airless truck and authorities estimated 200 people drowned off the Libyan coast when two overloaded boats bound for Europe capsized…

…The International Office of Migration has recorded 2,432 deaths linked to Mediterranean crossings this year, but countless more have vanished beneath the waves out of sight of rescuers. The official count was set to rise Friday as authorities counted the dead from three shipwrecks off the Libyan coast.

Two ships went down on Thursday alone off the western Libyan city of Zuwara. Hussein Asheini of Libya’s Red Crescent, said at least 105 bodies had been recovered, adding: “a coast guard team is still diving in and checking inside to see if there’s anyone else.”

Say, Doug, isn’t it unfair to pin these deaths on Hillary?

Well, let’s put it this way. Hillary was eager to take credit for destabilizing Libya when Muammar Gaddafi was executed in 2011:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi had been killed.

“We came, we saw, he died,” she joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi’s death by an aide in between formal interviews.

Clinton was in Tripoli earlier this week for talks with leaders of Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC).

The reporter asked if Qaddafi’s death had anything to do with her surprise visit to show support for the Libyan people.

Now, as the mouthpiece of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy known as The New Yorker reported earlier this month, Hillary’s masterwork has resulted in the rise of ISIS in Libya:

The wars in Syria and Iraq continue to dominate international headlines, but a growing stream of news offers reminders that Libya is in a state of meltdown. In Cairo on Sunday, John Kerry said he had discussed the need for “increased border cooperation” along Egypt’s long, mostly unguarded Libyan border. Tunisia has begun building a security wall along its own hundred-and-four-mile-long border with Libya.

For months, ISIS has been trumpeting its abduction and execution of African Christians in Libya. In February, a slick, ghoulish video showed twenty-one Egyptian hostages in orange jumpsuits being led along a beach by black-masked executioners, who forced them to kneel and then cut off their heads. In April, another video appeared, showing the execution of twenty-nine Ethiopians in Libya. Gunmen who trained with ISIS in Libya were involved in the murder of twenty foreign tourists, at a Tunis museum in March, and thirty-eight more tourists, most of them British, at a seaside resort in Tunisia in June. These attacks focused attention on the fact that Libya, a vast, oil-rich, underpopulated country with a long southern-Mediterranean coastline, has become part of the self-proclaimed ISIS caliphate.

In a parallel phenomenon, armed trafficking gangs in Libya are driving most of Africa’s illegal immigration across the Mediterranean to Europe. As many as a hundred and seventy thousand are thought to have made the crossing last year, with thousands dying en route. Unprecedented numbers are continuing to cross this year, taking advantage of the chaos in Libya.

Hillary’s email exploits are getting the headlines, and deservedly so for actions that would have sent a lesser mortal to prison long ago, but no one is discussing her complicity in crimes against humanity.

One other odd point: I don’t hear the word “chickenhawk” bandied about when these Democrat politicians bloviate about “their” military achievements. I wonder why that is?

Hat tip: BadBlue Gun News.

08/27/15

The Email Issue Goes Beyond Just Hillary Clinton

By Frank Salvato

As scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of unsecured email servers to access classified information during her time as US Secretary of State continues to unravel her presidential aspirations, a more comprehensive overview of the many email issues related to the Obama Administration presents a more sinister possibility. From the State Department to the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy to the White House itself, everywhere you turn in the Obama Administration there has been an issue with high-ranking personnel using alternative email accounts and/or servers for government business and then refusing access to those communications to oversight authority.

In 2010, President Barack Obama, speaking in Elyria, Ohio, bragged,

“We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest transparency rules of any administration in history…in history! And by the way, this is the first administration since the founding of the country where all of you can find out who visits the White House. First time in history! And that’s just one example.”

In fact, Mr. Obama’s claim to open visitor’s logs was first trumpeted in 2009. It sounded good, like his claim that his was the most transparent administration in history. Alas, as usual, what sounds good during his “speechifying” never quite pans out to be the truth. The Obama Administration actually vetted which visitors to include on those “transparent” visitor’s logs and in 2013 pulled the logs from public access completely during its budget battle with Congress saying, “Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, the information on this web site may not be up to date,” the placeholder on the visitor’s log page reading, “This dataset is currently private.”

But the visitor’s log duplicity pales in comparison to the administration’s use of alternative email accounts and servers for official communication where the claim of being the most transparent administration in American history is concerned. In fact, if you examine the many instances of the abuse of email communications protocol a pattern is evidenced; a pattern that serves plausible deniability and political opportunity, while denying transparency, accountability and oversight.

The instance most in the public eye is the use of – and subsequently the cleansing of – Hillary Clinton’s personal email server during her time as Secretary of State. This attention is only awarded by the media because she is a candidate for the presidency. Many in media didn’t give much attention to the fact she was using a private email server when she was corresponding with aides, States Department personnel and the White House before, during and after the assassination of a sitting US ambassador and his security team in Benghazi, Libya.

I won’t even get into the disingenuous manipulation of talking points memos that circulated from White House Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes about the cause of the Benghazi attacks.

But Mrs. Clinton isn’t the only high-ranking State Department official who has used a personal email account to perform official US government business. Caroline Kennedy, US ambassador to Japan, has been cited by the State Department’s Inspector General – as has the entirety of her staff at that embassy location – for using personal email accounts to receive and transmit communications regarding official business.

CNN reported:

“Senior embassy staff, including the ambassador, used personal email accounts to send and receive messages containing official business…In addition, (investigators) identified instances where emails labeled sensitive but unclassified were sent from, or received by, personal email accounts…The watchdog report said that Kennedy’s practices were against State Department policy and put the agency at risk.”

Then there is the issue of Environmental Protection Agency senior staff – both during Lisa Jackson’s tenure and Gina McCarthy’s – using email aliases and emails from those alias accounts being destroyed in direct violation of federal records preservation policies. Breitbart.com describes the EPA’s goal thusly:

“The point of this scheme was to evade public accountability, to conduct official government business under the table, outside of the public eye. When Congress and others asked for [senior officials’] EPA correspondence and email, the [alias] e-mails would fall outside that request and, eventually, be destroyed allowing official EPA business to be conducted secretly. That falls well short of conducting business in the open and in a transparent fashion. It also falls well short of the standards required by federal law.”

Dovetailing on the EPA email malfeasance is the refusal of John Holdren to honor a FOIA request relating to policy emails he maintained on the private servers of his former employer, the high-pressure eco-zealot group Woods Hole Research Center, as he sits as the director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy. Holdren, you may recall, is a man-made “global warming” believer with a penchant for smearing scientists who disagree with him. About the OSTP emails, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s senior attorney, Hans Bader, writes:

“The use of such non-official accounts for agency business frustrates federal open-government laws, and undermines government accountability, since such accounts are generally not searched in response to FOIA or congressional oversight requests seeking work-related communications or agency records. Moreover, the use of email accounts at a former employer that lobbies the federal government gives such pressure groups direct access to and control over public records, including highly sensitive information.”

But the most damning instance of unethical and criminal abuse of email correspondence lies with Lois Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service. Not only did Ms. Lerner conspire with other IRS operatives to marginalize the First Amendment free speech rights – as well as the guaranteed right to redress of government – of TEA Party and other Conservative organization members, she attempted to conceal and destroy any and all email evidence that proved her criminal acts. More recent revelations indicate that Ms. Lerner not only had contact with White House policy adviser Jeanne Lambrew that served to collude about Conservative targets, but that she, too, like her counterparts at the EPA, used alias emails to avoid detection by oversight authorities.

So, while the country remains rightfully obsessed with the Hillary Clinton email scandal (I prefer to call her actions “crimes”), there appears, to any honest broker, to be evidence pointing to a systemic issue with alternative communications and transparency in the Obama Administration. This evidence – a chronicle of criminal and unethical acts from the State Department to the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy to the Internal Revenue Service and the White House itself – must serve as proof of a pattern establishing an early effort by the Obama Administration to circumvent the legislated communications and information sharing protocol in federal government in an effort to control the informational narrative for political and ideological reasons. The evidence is overwhelming and, by virtue of the pattern’s existence, proves a conscious mandate from the highest levels.

What we have here, if you look at the evidence before you, is proof of a concerted conspiracy to deceive entities that execute governmental oversight, from the Inspector Generals of affected agencies all the way to the hall of Congress. What we have here is a direct attack by the Executive Branch of the United States on the authorities, rights and privileges of the co-equal branches of government. What we have here is a direct attack on the sovereign rights of the American people.

Yes, the emails scandals being exposed today are bigger than Watergate. Now, what are we going to do about it?

Frank Salvato is the Executive Director of BasicsProject.org a grassroots, non-partisan, research and education initiative focusing on Constitutional Literacy, and internal and external threats facing Western Civilization. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His opinion and analysis have been published by The American Enterprise Institute, The Washington Times, The Jewish World Review, Accuracy in Media, Human Events, Townhall.com and are syndicated nationally. Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel, and is the author of six books examining Islamofascism and Progressivism, including “Understanding the Threat of Radical Islam”. Mr. Salvato’s personal writing can be found at FrankJSalvato.com.

08/12/15

The Hillary Email Server Scandal Runs Deeper at State Dept.

By: Denise Simon
FoundersCode.com

The Hillary email scandal-palooza began on July 31 with Judge Sullivan’s declaration demanding Hillary and her staff certify certain conditions with regard to all the emails being turned over to the State Department.

On August 8, 2015, Hillary signed a certification document under penalty of perjury that all materials within server communications have been provided to the State Department. Concurrent to this action, the FBI visited the Denver IT company, Platt River that provided email support and redundant systems to the Hillary server established in her home in 2009. Of note, this server was NOT Bill’s server as she previously stated.

The two page certification signed by Hillary is found here.

Most important to readers here is the fact that the communications of the two emails in question that originated from the CIA were transmitted via a controlled pathway to the State Department, from there, someone(s) at State had to find a unclassified printer and computer to create hard copies, re-format them into electronic form and then email them to Hillary meaning that others at State are surely going to be investigated and caught up in the web or dragnet of culpability.

A 7 page email document chain is found here where the classified material is simply chilling.

On August 11, the Intelligence Community Inspector General briefed several members of the Senate as well as James Clapper, the Director of the Office of National Intelligence on the exact classifications of at least 2 newly discovered emails, which at the time of transmission were given the classification rating of TS/SI/TK/NF. This classification is the top confidential rating designation. Of particular note is the ‘TK’ rating which means Talent Keyhole, stemming from signals intelligence/geo-spatial via the CIA. These communications are only done on highly controlled systems and within a SCIF system.

Embedded image permalink

Senator Chuck Grassley took the aggressive and positive step on August 11 to provide voters with the new information noted here.

From Associated Press dates August 11:

Also Tuesday, Kendall gave to the Justice Department three thumb drives containing copies of work-related emails sent to and from her personal email addresses via her private server.

Kendall gave the thumb drives, containing copies of roughly 30,000 emails, to the FBI after the agency determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The State Department previously had said it was comfortable with Kendall keeping the emails at his Washington law office.

Word that Clinton had relented on giving up possession of the server came as Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said two emails that traversed Clinton’s personal system were deemed “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information” — a rating that is among the government’s highest classifications. Grassley said the inspector general of the nation’s intelligence community had reported the new details about the higher classification to Congress on Tuesday.

“Secretary Clinton’s previous statements that she possessed no classified information were patently untrue,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement. “Her mishandling of classified information must be fully investigated.”

Those two emails were among four that had previously been determined by the inspector general of the intelligence community to have been classified at the time they were sent. The State Department disputes that the emails were classified at that time.