06/7/16

Will the Media Also Examine the Clinton For-Profit Education Scandal?

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

Clinton

Is the race for the White House really coming down to which presidential candidate was tied to the less scandal-plagued for-profit school? Not if the media have anything to say about it. They only want you to know about one of them.

We have seen an endless run of articles and TV segments focusing on Trump University. How does it look? Well, a former sales director there said that “…Trump University was only interested in selling every person the most expensive seminars they possibly could.”

Trump claims that “98% of those people liked the school,” and gave it great report cards, according to CNN. There are currently three lawsuits focusing on Trump University, including one by the New York State Attorney General. Trump has pointed to U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s Mexican heritage as a likely factor in the treatment he has received from the class action lawsuits—treatment which he calls unfair. You can read plenty on that issue elsewhere and decide for yourself.

While many Republicans who have reluctantly endorsed Trump view his comments about Judge Curiel as a costly, unforced error that makes it harder for them to publicly defend him, one fact that could play to his advantage is that the law firm behind one of the class action lawsuits has paid the Clintons $675,000 in speaking fees since 2009, which is more than they’ve collected from any other law firm. Politics obviously plays a big part in this saga.

And that’s just the beginning. The real story deals with Laureate Education, whose connection to the Clintons was revealed in Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash. More than $16 million was paid to Bill Clinton through a shell corporation, after which more than $55 million American taxpayer dollars flowed out of Hillary Clinton’s State Department to a non-profit run by Laureate CEO Douglas Becker.

Thanks to Judicial Watch, and an outstanding article by WorldNetDaily’s Jerome Corsi, the story is out there. And Corsi has no problem citing unpalatable facts, such as

  • “The biggest borrower on the for-profit college list is Laureate Education’s Walden University, whose grad students borrowed $756 million in 2014.”
  • A Miami Herald article pointed out that “The firm is being sued by several online graduate students for allegedly dishonest practices, and a 2012 U.S. Senate report found that more than half of Laureate’s online Walden University revenue went to marketing and profit.”
  • “But, as Forbes pointed out in its July 12, 2015, story, Laureate Education’s Walden University was built by inducing prospective students to incur massive tuition debt to attend a school with no academic reputation and virtually no standards for admission other than ability to pay.”

So Laureate Education and the Clintons lined their pockets with cash from students incurring massive personal debts. This sounds an awful lot like the allegations against Trump University.

Mr. Clinton’s shell corporation scheme allowed him “to avoid disclosing the existence of the shell company even to the IRS, as long as compensation payments to him were withdrawn as soon as they were deposited, ensuring the account always showed a zero balance,” writes Corsi.

Bill Clinton resigned from his position as “honorary chancellor” of Laureate in April of 2015, right after the disclosure of the information from Clinton Cash was made public.

So where are the media? Why is one story worthy of so much coverage, but the other, virtually none outside of some conservative media? Could it be that the media are determined to destroy the Trump campaign, and don’t want to make things any tougher than they already are for Hillary?

After all, Mrs. Clinton still has dozens of FBI agents investigating criminal activity on her part in how she handled classified materials while serving, and after serving, as secretary of state. These agents are also investigating any public corruption she might have participated in, such as the Laureate Education scam with connections between Douglas Becker, Bill Clinton, and the State Department. She is also still being dogged by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who vows to take the fight all the way to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia next month. But the media have bestowed the title of “presumptive nominee,” and announced that Mrs. Clinton has clinched the nomination as of one night before the California and New Jersey primaries.

Here is a challenge for the media: take a look at this article by Corsi, based on the Judicial Watch Freedom of Information documents, and go through the story. Then report on it, or else explain why the Laureate Education story doesn’t deserve the attention that the Trump University story has garnered.

Conservatives often cite Jake Tapper of CNN as one of the only mainstream reporters willing to ask the tough questions of Democrats and the left. However, during his interview with Trump on The Lead with Jake Tapper on June 3, Tapper followed up 23 times, basically trying to label Trump a racist over his comments about Judge Curiel.

Although he appeared to sheepishly hint at the Clintons’ involvement with Laureate Education in an interview with Hillary that aired on the same show, Tapper failed to even make clear what he was talking about. However, during his session with Mrs. Clinton, Tapper offered no specific accusation for her to defend herself against, provided no follow-up—zero—and worded the question in the most softball of terms:

TAPPER: When you were launching your criticism, your attack against Trump University, which is right now in the middle of a civil suit for fraud, the Trump campaign started hitting back by questioning donations to the Clinton Foundation and how the money is spent. There have been questions in the media about that, and I’m not equating Trump University with the Clinton Foundation.

But do you think those questions undermine at all your argument against the Trump University?

CLINTON: Not at all. I mean, really, this is like an absurd comparison. We have disclosed everything. You can see what we do…

There are lawsuits in both cases. Lawsuits mean plaintiffs. Can’t Jake Tapper, or George Stephanopoulos—who failed to bring up Laureate in his June 5 interview with Mrs. Clinton on ABC’s This Week—find any of the plaintiffs in that case to interview?

Neither Trump nor Hillary wants to be talking about their respective ties to these for-profit education institutes. But so far only one party is being asked the hard questions—or any questions at all on this subject. How about some questions from the press for Hillary? It would, after all, be her first actual press conference in over 180 days, were she to grant one. Just to be fair and balanced.


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.

11/18/15

Terrorism, not Climate Change, Kills People

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

On November 13, the same day as the terrorist attacks in Paris, USA Today ran a full-page ad from billionaire Tom Steyer’s group NextGen Climate highlighting the alleged global threat from climate change. As hundreds of people were being injured or killed in Paris, the ad featured these quotes about the “climate crisis:”

  • Hillary Clinton: “An existential threat”
  • Bernie Sanders: “The greatest threat facing the planet”
  • Martin O’Malley: “Critical threat to our economy”

In a new development, we have just learned from Judicial Watch that Hillary Clinton was characterized by her Muslim-connected aide, Huma Abedin, as being “very confused” about the world leaders she was supposed to be communicating with as secretary of state. The confusion may also be reflected in Mrs. Clinton’s bizarre utterance that so-called climate change is an “existential threat” that is somehow comparable to Russian nuclear weapons, which could reduce America to a burned-out cinder.

Mrs. Clinton is not alone, however. All of the Democrats running for president, plus former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, want to treat changes in the weather as something to be addressed through new treaties, international agreements and global tax schemes. This campaign has taken precedence over defeating international terrorism.

At the Democratic Party debate this past weekend, Sanders claimed that “Climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism and if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you’re going to see countries all over the world—this is what the CIA says—they’re going to be struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops and you’re going to see all kinds of international conflict…”

So from one disputed claim about people causing climate change, they have reached another disputed claim that climate change is causing people to commit terrorism.

On the same day as the Paris attacks, former Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was staging his 24-hour climate change telethon from the foot of the Eiffel Tower to focus attention on this month’s United Nations climate summit in Paris. The attacks forced him to pull the plug on the event after five hours.

In advance of his ill-fated climate change telethon, People magazine asked Gore which Democrat he was endorsing for president. “It’s still too early, in my opinion, to endorse a candidate or pick a candidate,” he said.

But why is his endorsement worth anything? Al Gore has become a very rich man, a one percenter. He and his partners sold Current TV (Gore personally netted an estimated $100 million of the $500 million sale price) to the terrorist-supporting Middle Eastern oil and gas dictatorship of Qatar.

A member of Apple, Inc.’s board of directors, Gore is today worth as much as $170 million. Even the New York Times has wondered if his climate change campaign is designed to make himself rich, while preserving his lifestyle as an elite member of the one percent.

His telethon carried the official title of “Live Earth: 24 Hours of Reality.” The reality of terrorism got in the way of the broadcast, featuring various rock stars and co-sponsored by Arianna Huffington’s television channel, HuffPost Live.

Gore and his partners sold Current TV to Qatar so another Al Jazeera spin-off could be piped into American homes. The Al Jazeera America channel was the result, and it is now publishing nonsense like the piece by Rami G. Khourientitled, “Military responses alone will not defeat ISIL.”

Khouri acknowledges that “Religion is critical for shaping the theological concept of the Islamic State and the wider Caliphate…” But, he says, “it may not be the most important reason why individuals go there to live, work and do battle.” He lists “eight reasons why people across Islamic societies join or support ISIL.”

But none of the “reasons” for the rise of the Islamic State, in his analysis, consists of the hate-filled passages from the Koran which guide their beliefs and actions.

Instead, we are told, in reason number four, that their motivations include “To live among like-minded people in a society defined by camaraderie, peace, justice and wholesome family life.” Reason number six is “To find meaning, direction and purpose to one’s personal life, or to escape family or personal problems, loneliness or alienation.”

We are supposed to believe this may be why terrorists opened fire on people in Paris. This is why the Islamic State beheads people or burns them alive?

It is easy to forget that the website publishing this material is financed by a Middle Eastern dictatorship that promotes Islamic terrorism. Like the notion of the “existential threat” allegedly posed by climate change, Al Jazeera America constitutes a diversion from what really threatens America, our way of life, and our people. Perhaps that was the intention all along.

As serious as this is, the problem of foreign propaganda in the U.S. media market could get far worse. Television producer Jerry Kenney notes that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is planning to remove the barriers to broadcast station ownership by foreigners, a move that would enable American broadcasters to sell out to foreign interests, just like Gore did. The FCC could allow the sale of local broadcast stations and other media properties to the Chinese, Russian and Mexican governments, or to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The public must respond to what the FCC is planning to do by December 21.

08/25/15

Green Beret Discharged for Trying to Protect Muslim Boy From Child Rapist

By: Dave Gibson
UFP News

Sgt Martland

The Obama administration is discharging Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland, an 11-year veteran of the U.S. Army’s Green Berets. The highly-decorated soldier who spent two tours of duty in Afghanistan, will be “involuntary discharged” from the Army by Nov. 1, 2015.

So, just how did Sgt. Martland, a Bronze Star recipient, get on the bad side of Obama’s Defense Department?

Fox News reported:

One day in early September 2011 at their remote outpost, a young Afghan boy and his Afghan-Uzbek mother showed up at camp. The 12-year-old showed the Green Berets where his hands had been tied. A medic took him to a back room for an examination with an interpreter, who told them the boy had been raped by another commander by the name of Abdul Rahman.

After learning of the meeting, Rahman allegedly beat the boy’s mother for reporting the crime. It was at this point, the Green Berets had had enough. [Lt. Daniel] Quinn and Martland went to confront Rahman.

He confessed to the crime and laughed about it, and said it wasn’t a big deal. Even when we patiently explained how serious the charge was, he kept laughing,” Quinn said.

The outraged soldiers reportedly physically attacked the Afghani child molester, and the commander walked away with only a few bruises after the incident.

Martland and Quinn were actually taken off of their original mission at this point and sent to another region of Afghanistan. Both men were eventually sent home before their deployment was scheduled to end.

Quinn has since left the Army.

In February 2015, the Army conducted a “Qualitative Management Program” review board, and ordered that Martland be “involuntary discharged” from the Army by Nov. 1, 2015.

Of course, child rape is as much a part of Muslim culture, as is baseball to Americans.

We had been hearing for months about raping in our province, not just in Afghanistan,” Lt. Quinn told Fox News.

In fact, in 2012, Pentagon lawyers, at the request of the Obama administration drafted an Army manual which forbade any criticism of child molestation by troops serving in Muslim countries.

The 75-page handbook stated troops should avoid “making derogatory comments about the Taliban, advocating women’s rights, any criticism of pedophilia, directing any criticism towards Afghans, mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct” or “anything related to Islam,” Judicial Watch reported.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Ashston Carter, U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter said:

SFC Martland acknowledged he was wrong to strike the ALP (Afhgan Local Police) commander, but according to SFC Martland, he and others felt they could no longer stand by and allow the ALP to commit atrocities. To intervene was a moral decision, and SFC Martland and his Special Forces team felt they had no choice but to respond.

Thus far, the Obama administration has yet to respond to Rep. Hunter’s request that Sgt. Martland be allowed to stay in the Army, and the Green Beret is facing a discharge which could come at any time now.

Meanwhile, our tax dollars are paying the salaries of child rapists in Afghanistan.

As Obama stated in his book, “Dreams From My Father,” he “will stand with Muslims!”

07/8/15

Illegal alien advocates: accessories to an epidemic of murder and child rape

By: James Simpson
DC Independent Examiner

And should be charged as criminal accomplices and dealt with accordingly. Does that sound outrageous? Sure it does, but withhold judgment until you read this post.

It is absolutely indisputable that San Francisco’s sanctuary policies contributed to the horrific, senseless, shooting death of 32-year-old Kate Steinle on July 2. Francisco Sanchez, the illegal alien who admitted killing her, has said that it was the city’s sanctuary policies that attracted him to it. City leaders have Kate’s blood on their hands. But that blood is a drop in the bucket compared to the outrages regularly being committed by the illegals among us, while politicians of both parties sing their praises.

Donald trump has been roundly criticized by both Democrats and Republicans for saying that 80 percent of women crossing the border are being raped. NBC decided to drop his popular show, The Apprentice, and the Miss Universe pageant he produces. Mexico says it will withdraw its entrant to the pageant based on Trump’s offensive statements. ESPN, NASCAR and others have piled on. But Trump was just quoting an article from Fusion magazine. The piece, “Is rape the price to pay for migrant women chasing the American Dream?” leads off by saying:

Before they can reach the American Dream, many migrant women have to survive a Mexican nightmare. A staggering 80 percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped along the way, according to directors of migrant shelters interviewed by Fusion.

Could it be any clearer than that? Democrats have long since abandoned even a shred of honesty, but are Republicans again rebranding themselves as “The Party of Stupid?” How about “The Party of Insufferably Mindless Idiots?” Is that what they should be called, or maybe just the cowards, frauds and hypocrites they are?

In fact, the problem is infinitely worse than the article reveals. For example, almost half of all federal crimes committed in the United States in fiscal year 2013 were committed in a few districts along the Southwest Border with Mexico. Of 61,529 criminal cases initiated by federal prosecutors, 24,746 – fully 40 percent of the total – originated in five border jurisdictions in Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California, Western Texas and Southern Texas. Almost all were committed by illegals.

Following are some statistics on illegal alien crime that were compiled by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for its 2011 report, Criminal Alien Statistics. The GAO study included a review of 249,000 criminal aliens. They were arrested a total of 1.7 million times, an average of about 7 arrests per alien. Between them they committed 2.9 million crimes. About 50 percent were arrested at least once for either assault, homicide, robbery, sex crimes or kidnapping. Here are the eye-popping stats:

Homicide, 25,064 (8% of total), Sex Offenses 69,929 (12%), Assault 213,047, (35%), and Kidnapping, 14,788 (4%).

But this doesn’t give context. These crimes were committed over multiple years. It is obviously not insignificant, but is difficult to tell how it stacks up to the total without reviewing all crimes during the period. The following stats will put it in proper perspective.

GAO also studied a subset of five states with large illegal alien populations, New York, Florida, Arizona, Texas and California. At the time of the study, 2011, the latest data available were for 2008. In New York, 28 percent of illegal aliens convictions in 2008 were for murder. Another 11 percent was for sex offenses. Those sounded like a lot but GAO did not provide the numbers that generated those percentages, so a FOIA request was submitted. Following are the unpublished numbers provided by the GAO, placed side-by-side against the total of each type of crime committed in each state in 2008:

New York

Total Murders: 835. Illegal Alien Murder Convictions: 1,168 (140% of total)

Total Sex Crimes: 2,775; Illegal Alien Sex Crimes: 459 (17% of total).

California

Total Murders: 2,143. Illegal Alien Murder Convictions: 2,859 (135% of total)

Total Sex Crimes: 8,906; Illegal Alien Sex Crimes: 3,325 (37% of total)

Texas

Total Murders: 1,373. Illegal Alien Murder Convictions: 934 (68% of total)

Total Sex Crimes: 8,004; Illegal Alien Sex Crimes: 1,825 (23% of total)

Arizona

Total Murders: 404. Illegal Alien Murder Convictions: 326 (81% of total)

Total Sex Crimes: 1,654; Illegal Alien Sex Crimes: 391 (24% of total)

Florida

Total Murders: 1,169. Illegal Alien Murder Convictions: 1,762 (151% of total)

Total Sex Crimes: 5,972; Illegal Alien Sex Crimes: 2,971 (50% of total)

The reason convictions exceed state total crimes for the year in some cases is because convictions are for crimes that may not have been committed that year but went to trial in 2008. However if total murders for the previous three years 2005 – 2007 are added up, the 2008 illegal alien convictions are still astronomical:

New York, 45%; California, 40%; Texas, 22%; Arizona, 24%; Florida, 55%.

North Carolina is a haven for illegals for some reason. Sex crimes committed by illegals against children in NC are off the charts. For example:

In North Carolina there were 752 arrests of illegals for sex crimes against children in 2014. Each illegal was arrested on an average of five charges, for a total of 3,695! Statistics were not available for November 2014, so the actual number is doubtless higher.

Despite this glaring issue, and the serious vote fraud problems in NC, the newly elected GOP majority in the state just passed a law providing driver licenses to illegals. One must scratch deep to uncover something more idiotic and irresponsible. Such stupidity will insure NC’s GOP majority is short-lived. Does the GOP have a death wish?

People are being killed, and raped in epidemic numbers. Illegals are praying on our children! President Obama’s catch and release program for illegal aliens, including violent criminals, is directly responsible for 121 murders committed by illegal alien criminals released from jail under Obama.

What kind of insanity allows this to continue? By coddling illegals at the expense of Americans, President Obama, Eric Holder, Jeh Johnson and all the other self-serving parasites in this unbearable, destructive cabal, as well as leaders of both parties in the U.S. House and Senate, and countless state and local politicians (Martin O’Malley can you hear me?) are personally responsible for this violent crime wave. They have blood on their hands and should be criminally charged as accessories to rape and murder.

06/22/15

How Did Valerie Jarrett Pass a Background Check

By: Denise Simon
FoundersCode.com

Now this also begs the question, what did Obama know, did he approve and what is he going to do now?

The 73 page FBI file on Valerie Jarrett’s family is found here. The father is noted here.

From Judicial Watch:

FBI Files Document Communism in Valerie Jarrett’s Family

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.

Jarrett’s dad, pathologist and geneticist Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows. In 1950 Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage. Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students. After his discharge from the Army Medical Corps in 1955, Bowman moved to Iran to work, the FBI records show.

According to Bowman’s government file the Association of Internes and Medical Students is an organization that “has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line” and engages in un-American activities. Bowman was born in Washington D.C. and had deep ties to Chicago, where he often collaborated with fellow Communists. JW also obtained documents on Bowman from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) showing that the FBI was brought into investigate him for his membership in a group that “follows the communist party line.” The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett’s maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.

Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was also another big-time Chicago Communist, according to separate FBI files obtained by JW as part of a probe into the Jarrett family’s Communist ties. For a period of time Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would “disseminate the Communist Party line among…the middle class.”

It’s been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Jarrett and her family also had strong ties to Frank Marshal Davis, a big Obama mentor and Communist Party member with an extensive FBI file.

JW has exposed Valerie Jarrett’s many transgressions over the years, including her role in covering up a scandalous gun-running operation carried out by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Last fall JW obtained public records that show Jarrett was a key player in the effort to cover up that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress about the Fast and Furious, a disastrous experiment in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed guns from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels. Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of hundreds of weapons which have been used in an unknown number of crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

In 2008 JW got documents linking Valerie Jarrett, who also served as co-chairman of Obama’s presidential transition team, to a series of real estate scandals, including several housing projects operated by convicted felon and Obama fundraiser/friend Antoin “Tony” Rezko. According to the documents obtained from the Illinois Secretary of State, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago slum projects operated by Rezko.

06/19/15

Obama-linked Extremist Group Publishes “HIT LIST” of Anti-Sharia Females in the U.S.

Doug Ross @ Journal

By Judicial Watch

The Obama-tied leftist group that helped a gunman commit an act of terrorism against a conservative organization has assembled a starter kit for Islamists to attack American women who refuse to comply with Sharia law, the authoritarian doctrine that inspires Islamists and their jihadism.

It’s the summer special from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an extremist nonprofit that lists conservative organizations that disagree with it on social issues on a catalogue of “hate groups.” A few years ago a gunman received a 25-year prison sentence for carrying out the politically-motivated shooting of the Family Research Council (FRC) headquarters after admitting that he learned about the FRC from the SPLC “hate map.” Prosecutors called it an act of terrorism and recommended a 45-year sentence.

Now the SPLC, which has conducted diversity training for the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ), is targeting female bloggers, activists and television personalities who refuse to comply with Sharia law which is rooted in the Quran. The European Court on Human rights has repeatedly ruled that Sharia is “incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy” yet politically-connected radical Muslim groups—such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)—keep pushing to implement it in the United States and the movement has gained steam.

Among those resisting this effort publicly are the high-profile women being targeted by the SPLC. Some of them are colleagues or friends of Judicial Watch and now they must fear for their safety simply for practicing their rights under the U.S. Constitution. The new hate list is titled Women Against Islam/The Dirty Dozen and includes illustrations and detailed information on all the women, who are branded “the core of the anti-Muslim radical right.” The new SPLC hate brochure further targets them by claiming that they’re “a dozen of the most hardline anti-Muslim women activists in America.”

Political activist and commentator Pamela Geller is branded the “country’s most flamboyant and visible Muslim-basher” for, among other things “smearing and demonizing Muslims.” Blogger Ann Barnhardt is identified as one of the “most extreme Muslim-bashers in the United States” and radio talk-show host Laura Ingram made the list for saying that hundreds of millions of Muslims were delighted that 12 people were massacred by Islamic terrorists in the Paris headquarters of a satirical magazine. Former CIA agent Clare Lopez, who runs a Washington D.C. think-tank focusing on national security issues, made the list for saying that the Muslim Brotherhood has “infiltrated and suborned the U.S. government to actively assist…the mission of its grand jihad.”

Others appearing on the anti-Sharia docket include television personality and former judge and prosecutor Jeanine Pirro, former chairwoman of the Texas Republican Party Cathie Adams, talk-show host Sandy Rios of the American Family Association, syndicated columnist Diana West, attorney and columnist Debbie Schlussel, blogger Cathy Hinners, ACT! for America founder Brigitte Gabriel and conservative writer and TV personality Ann Coulter. Among her biggest offenses, according to the SPLC, is proclaiming that “not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims—at least all terrorists capable of assembling a murderous plot against America.”

Incredibly, the SPLC is one of a number of leftist special interest groups that has colluded with the DOJ since Obama moved into the White House. A few years ago JW uncovered government records that show the DOJ Civil Rights and Tax divisions engaged in questionable behavior while negotiating for SPLC co-founder Morris Dees to appear as the featured speaker at a 2012 “Diversity Training Event.” JW pursued the records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to determine what influence the SPLC’s branding of hate groups has had on government agencies.

Please consider supporting the important work of Judicial Watch by clicking here.

06/10/15

The Clinton Record on Libya

By: Kenneth Timmerman
Accuracy in Media

Exclusive to Accuracy in Media
The emails show more than you might think

On August 21, 2011, a top aide to Hillary Clinton penned a memo lauding his boss for steering U.S. policy in Libya, aimed at convincing the media of her accomplishments as Secretary of State.

“HRC has been a critical voice on Libya in administration deliberations, at NATO, and in contact group meetings—as well as the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya. She was instrumental in securing the authorization, building the coalition, and tightening the noose around Qadhafi and his regime,” Clinton aide Jake Sullivan wrote.

Sullivan’s memo to Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle is, of course, embarrassing today, which is one reason you are not reading about it on the front pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post.

But that’s not the only reason.

The memo, as well as other critical State Department correspondence, was withheld from multiple committees in Congress that have been investigating the September 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department communications officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy Seals then working on contract to the CIA, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

It finally surfaced on May 22, 2015, in response to a subpoena from the Select Committee on Benghazi chaired by South Carolina Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy. That was six months after Gowdy’s initial request to the State Department for all documents relating to Benghazi, and more than two-and-a-half years after a similar request from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which initiated its investigation into Benghazi just days after the attacks.

In Sullivan’s memo, Mrs. Clinton was the driving force in getting the Russians to drop opposition to a UN-imposed no fly zone on Qadhafi’s Libya. She alone got Turkey, Qatar and Jordan to join the coalition military operations and to provide critical support to the anti-Qadhafi forces.

To convince skeptical allies to embrace her policies, Sullivan noted that Mrs. Clinton had traveled to Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa and Istanbul. She visited with “House Democrats and Senate Republicans to persuade them not to de-fund the Libya operation.”

Sullivan’s memo provided background for media appearances by Secretary Clinton in the ensuing months, including a famous encounter with a TV news reporter in Afghanistan, just three days after Mrs. Clinton’s October 2011 visit to Libya to proclaim victory against the then-still-missing Libyan dictator.

In video outtakes, Clinton aide Huma Abedin hands the Secretary a Blackberry, with information that Colonel Qadhafi has been killed, apparently just hours after Mrs. Clinton’s brief visit to the country.

“We came, we saw, he died,” Mrs. Clinton joked.

In short, without Mrs. Clinton’s vigorous intervention, Qadhafi would still be in power, Libya would still be a country, and the jihadis who now own the place would be toast. And, of course, Chris Stevens, Smith, Doherty and Woods would still be alive.

After the attacks, Mrs. Clinton quickly forgot her leading role on Libya, sending a clueless Susan Rice to the Sunday talk shows to be the “public face” of the Obama administration’s Libya policy.

In her only public appearances to address what happened in Benghazi, she portrayed herself as a disengaged onlooker, called upon to pick up the pieces when the hired help failed to get things right. “[It] was very disappointing to me that the [Accountability Review Board (ARB)] concluded there were inadequacies and problems in the responsiveness of our team here in Washington to the security requests that were made by our team in Libya. And I was not aware of that going on. It was not brought to my attention,” she told the House Foreign Affairs committee in January 2013.

She reminded House and Senate panels in January 2013 that the State Department’s ARB, which she appointed, had determined that the failures in Benghazi were entirely the responsibility of lower level officials, even though Libya was among the top ten most dangerous postings in the world at the time of the attacks. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler busily helped to reinforce that fiction in a “fact-checking” blog aimed to show that there were simply too many cables going in and out of the State Department for a busy Secretary to see all of them.

Interestingly, in the approximately 300 Clinton emails the State Department has released so far, there is no record of Mrs. Clinton’s original request to her staff to draft a memo lauding her achievements in Libya. Did Sullivan simply dream up the idea and forward it up the chain of command to see if it would please his boss? Or was Mrs. Clinton’s request for these talking points one of the 30,000 “personal” emails the former Secretary of State deleted as irrelevant to her official duties?

Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills forwarded Sullivan’s August 2011 memo to a second private Hillary email address. Remember how she insisted that she had just one private email account? The memo included a note that said, “Here’s the memo.” That sounds an awful lot like, “Here’s the memo you requested.”

Hillary sent it on to her personal assistant with the instruction, “Pls print for me.”

This type of exchange gets repeated many times in the Clinton emails released so far, suggesting that Mrs. Clinton was not given to making substantive comments via email, or that she deleted material that is relevant to the House Select Committee on Benghazi and is therefore guilty of obstructing justice. The other possibility is that the State Department Freedom of Information office is inexplicably dragging its feet in clearing Mrs. Clinton’s correspondence, even though the delay casts Mrs. Clinton in an embarrassing light.

Judicial Watch and other watchdog organizations—including this author—had been trying to get Mrs. Clinton’s emails and other U.S. government documents relevant to the Benghazi attacks for the past two-and-a-half years without success until the subpoena from the Select Committee on Benghazi compelled a response.

Now, thanks to a federal court order in Washington, DC, compelling the State Department to produce additional documents it previously had said did not exist or were properly categorized as classified, we can now put Mrs. Clinton’s emails into a broader context.

As the first reports of the attacks on Benghazi were whizzing through the State Department Operations Center, bouncing off the computers of lower level employees, one is impressed by their professionalism.

For example, the British security firm that had the contract to guard the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi sent several ungrammatical missives through a State Department contact to update him on what was happening during the attacks.

Dylan Davies, one of the contractors working for the security firm, was apparently holed up in his hotel room (not at the scene of the Compound leading a daring rescue attempt, as he told CBS’ 60 Minutes), with no information at 11:55 p.m. local time—by which time, Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith were dead, the CIA contractors led by Ty Woods had driven the attackers away from the burning diplomatic compound, and evacuated back to the CIA Annex.

A half hour later, Davies sent a second report, claiming there had been “no casualties,” and relaying a hearsay report from his “Benghazi facilitator,” who claimed that sources on the street were telling him the attack was either a September 11th anniversary attack, or caused by an Internet movie “disrespecting Mohammed.”

In relaying those reports, the State Department’s Command Center cautioned that they should be “taken with a grain of salt as the Employee may not be aware of the extent of the situation.”

And yet, less than four hours later—with no other independent reporting that had been released—Hillary Clinton issued her statement blaming the attacks on an Internet video.

What happened in the meantime? Who pushed the idea of the Internet video?

The short answer is that:we still don’t know. Either Mrs. Clinton destroyed the emails and other documents showing how she latched onto a report her own specialists had rejected as hearsay, or perhaps the Archangel Gabriel whispered in her ear while she had her head in a closet in her 7th floor office suite.

Several emails released to Judicial Watch show the intense involvement of the Bureau of Public Affairs in scouring the Internet for information on the attacks, but nothing to suggest the Secretary of State was asking the intelligence community what they knew.

At 9:30 p.m,—just 40 minutes before Mrs. Clinton issued her official statement blaming the attacks on a YouTube video—Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Dana Shell Smith sent out a request to her reporting officers to find information “in the aftermath of today’s demonstrations at Embassy Cairo.” For whatever reason, her request failed to mention Benghazi.

Rebecca Brown Thompson, head of a State Department media office called the “Rapid Response Unit” (reminiscent of the Clinton campaign “war room”), responded by sending snippets from Facebook postings gleaned by Arabic language media analysts.

“I see a variety of responses spanning from conspiracy theories (that is what the Americans and Israelis are doing on purpose to hurt Arabs and Muslims, they financed the offensive movie), to those who condemn the attacks as ‘UnIslamic and barbaric,’” one analyst reported.

Two hours after Mrs. Clinton issued the statement blaming the attacks on the “inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” a second Arabic media analyst tasked with justifying that statement found a lone tweet about the film, but also reported that “some Twitter users in Libya and Egypt are spreading reports that the attacks in Libya may not be related to the infamous film but to the killing of Al Qaeda’s second in command, who is Libyan.”

The “infamous” film, which was much less well known in Libya than in Egypt, became the subject of a scurrilous account appearing the very next morning that was penned by Max Blumenthal, son of the infamous Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal who was advising Mrs. Clinton. It was picked up and amplified in a second attack blog posted at 6:56 a.m. the same morning, suggesting that the real blame for the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi fell on Mitt Romney and his “extremist” backers who produced this YouTube video in the first place.

Once information from the professionals rose to the level of Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills in Clinton’s office, it just seemed to disappear, replaced with a weird concoction of politics, public relations and outright fantasy, such as the YouTube video concoction or the Sid Blumenthal “intelligence” reports. (When Mrs. Clinton sent those around to the professional diplomats, the comments she received in response were rarely complimentary.)

The 300 recently released Clinton emails give the impression that the 7th floor of the State Department was inhabited by a bunch of grad students, pretending to be government officials.

The most tragic example of the apparent ignorance of how the State Department and the federal government actually worked appeared in Mrs. Clinton’s order to not engage the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), an interagency team on 24/7 stand-by alert, that had been created to respond to just such an emergency as the Benghazi attacks.

Counterterrorism Bureau official Mark Thompson, who helped to establish the FEST after the 1998 Africa embassy attacks, testified at length before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about this on May 8, 2013.

The Judicial Watch emails include a frustrated note he sent to the State Department Operations Center at 9:01 p.m. on the night of the attacks, complaining that Secretary Clinton was trying to get the FBI to send an evidence response team to Libya, when “the State (CT) led Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) would include those folks, along with experts from other agencies. We should avoid multiple requests for assistance and rely on the comprehensive FEST approach.”

In his Congressional testimony, Thompson said he had tried to get Mrs. Clinton’s office and the White House to approve activating the FEST as soon as he first learned about the attacks from the State Operations Center, but was told “it was not the right time and it was not the team that needed to go right then.”

The redacted portions of Thompson’s email undoubtedly included a reference to the heavily-armed special operations component of the FEST whose job would be to secure the facility under attack. Had Secretary Clinton not told the FEST to stand down early on, there’s a chance they might have arrived in Benghazi before Woods and Doherty were killed in the 5 a.m. mortar attack the next morning.

At the very least, they would have been able to secure the compounds and gather evidence on the spot, instead of waiting three weeks as the FBI was ultimately forced to do.

Mrs. Clinton’s aversion to any overt U.S. military presence in Libya was well-known at U.S. Africa Command, which had been supplying the ambassador’s security detail up until just weeks before the attacks. “We were not allowed to wear uniforms outside the embassy compound, not even our boots,” the head of Stevens’ U.S. Special Forces security detail told me. “People high up at State resented like Hell us being there and doing what we did.”

And in the end, those same people ordered the Ambassador’s Special Forces security detail to leave Libya—with disastrous consequences.

05/20/15

Hillary Clinton’s Hypocritical and Totalitarian War on Free Speech

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has suggested that a key litmus test in evaluating prospective Supreme Court appointees would be their willingness to challenge “the right of billionaires to buy elections.”

Presumably, a suitable judge would indicate a desire to overturn the Citizens United decision that struck down a ban on political expenditures by corporations and unions ruled to violate the First Amendment protection of free speech – a case coincidentally centered on Citizen United’s attempt to advertise for and air a film critical of none other than Clinton.


Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks to the reporters at United Nations headquarters,
Tuesday, March 10, 2015. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

In light of recent allegations swirling around the presidential favorite, Clinton’s support of such a position is highly ironic.

For while the former secretary of State may oppose the rights of the wealthy to spend money on politics, she seems to have no such concern with the wealthy spending money on the Clinton Foundation and her husband Bill – all while Hillary served in the Obama administration.

Would Clinton seek a Supreme Court justice who would protect the rights of the likes of Carlos Slim and James Murdoch to contribute to the favored cause of a politician and shower the politician’s spouse with millions for speaking engagements?

If so, this apparent hypocrisy can be read in one of two ways:

  1. Clinton believes that money does not have a corrupting influence so long as it is funneled through “indirect” channels
  2. Clinton believes that the wealthy and powerful ought to bypass funding elections and simply pay politicians outright.

Appearances of impropriety aside, there are a few substantive questions around political speech that Clinton should be required to address.

Why does Clinton believe that the government has a compelling interest in stifling the political speech of any American, rich or poor?

How does Clinton square her supposed advocacy of human rights with her belief in inhibiting the right to free speech — which facilitates the robust and vigorous debate essential to a liberal society?

More generally, given a system in which millions of dollars are spent on losing causes each election cycle on both the left and right, what have Americans to fear about spending so long as laws are enforced equally and impartially regarding “pay-to-play” schemes and other politically corrupt activity?

Spending is a symptom of our system, and an all-intrusive government its proximate cause.

This is well known to Clinton, who seeks to raise a record $2.5 billion for her own campaign.

She is aware that people spend money on politics because there is the perception that there is something to be bought.

This perception becomes a reality when government creeps into every aspect of our lives, creating an unfortunate two-way street: Individuals and businesses spend money in order to maintain competitive advantages. Politicians in effect extort individuals and businesses by threatening to take away said competitive advantages, or threatening to mitigate them.

If we want money out of politics, the answer is not to stifle speech, but to shrink government.

***

While Hillary Clinton’s aversion to political speech is well-documented, less scrutinized is her support of limitations on speech of an entirely different kind: Religious speech.

During her time as secretary of State, Clinton championed the Organization of Islamic Conference-backed United Nations Human Rights Commission Resolution 16/18, which calls for “combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief.”

Retired Maj. Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon’s leading adviser on Islamic law as it relates to national security, makes a compelling case in his book “Catastrophic Failure” that the resolution is actually a Shariah-based Trojan Horse meant to stifle all criticism of Islam.

Coughlin writes that the Islamic Conference, through the resolution, seeks to criminalize incitement to violence by imposing a “legal standard designed to facilitate the “shut up before I hit you again” standard associated with the battered wife syndrome.”

He convincingly argues that the Islamic Conference desires that…

the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and all other non-Muslim countries pass laws criminalizing Islamophobia. This is a direct extraterritorial demand that non-Muslim jurisdictions submit to Islamic law and implement shariah-based punishment over time. In other words, the OIC is set on making it an enforceable crime for non-Muslim people anywhere in the world—including the United States—to say anything about Islam that Islam does not permit.

For believers in the sanctity of the First Amendment, Clinton’s support of this policy as secretary of State should be disqualifying.

This is made crystal clear when we consider that Clinton has shown her support for the resolution in practice.

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi, then-Secretary of State Clinton and President Barack Obama felt compelled to film an address for the Muslim world. In the video, Clinton and Obama disavowed any link between the U.S. government and the “Innocence of Muslims” movie that critically depicted Muhammad, which the Obama administration infamously argued prompted the jihadist attack.


Hillary Clinton delivers a message to the Arab world disavowing any ties between the U.S. government
and the “Innocence of Muslims” video following the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack.
(Image Source: YouTube screengrab)

That address we may chalk up to political correctness.

But a related fact we cannot.

In spite of Judicial Watch’s bombshell report indicating that the Obama administration knew about the Benghazi attack 10 days in advance – and knew that it had nothing to do with “Innocence of Muslims” — as revealed in an October 2012 interview with Glenn Beck, Charles Woods, father of slain Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, told Beck that Clinton had personally vowed to “make sure that the person who made that film [“Innocence of Muslims”] is arrested and prosecuted.”

The “Innocence of Muslims” filmmaker and former bank fraudster Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was later arrested and charged with violating the terms of his probation, spending one year in prison.

Consequently, the U.S. government — as promised by Clinton — in effect enforced Shariah compliance concerning blasphemy consistent with the Islamic Conference-backed resolution, and did so knowing that the film had nothing to do with the Benghazi attack.

Of course, even if a jihadist declared explicitly that he killed Americans because of a film, or a Muhammad cartoon or a burned Koran, it is the jihadist and the jihadist alone responsible for such actions. This point is apparently lost on the U.N.’s policy advocates, who in their victomology fail to realize that they are exhibiting the soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to Muslims.

Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be an ardent opponent of free speech, notably with respect to politics and religion.

Her positions are anathema to an America founded on the basis of protecting political and religious dissent, which requires free expression.

Absent such protections, an America under Clinton will look increasingly like the totalitarian Islamic world that she seeks to protect, rather than the Liberal Judeo-Christian America with which we have been so blessed.

Feature Image: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

05/20/15

Mike Morell Attempts to Repair His Damaged Credibility

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Mike Morell, the former Deputy CIA Director and Acting CIA Director, is out with a new book, and has been making the rounds on virtually every TV network. This is supposed to be his time to set the record straight, but he has apparently decided not to do that. Instead, his truthful revelations are mixed in with obvious falsehoods, so it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other.

We noted his difficulty with the truth back in this 2014 column by former CIA officer Clare Lopez, in which she cited, among other things, that Morell and then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice met with several Republican senators about the editing process that the Benghazi talking points had gone through before Rice used them on the five Sunday morning shows, just days after the attacks in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Lopez, in her column titled “Benghazi and the Politicization of Intelligence,” wrote:

Under questioning from the senators about the talking-points editing process, Morell tried to blame the FBI for cutting the reference to al-Qa’eda terrorism; he said the FBI didn’t want to compromise an ongoing criminal investigation. When Graham called the FBI and told them what Morell had said, ‘they went ballistic,’ Graham said in an interview with Fox News. ‘Confronted with this, Morell changed his statement and admitted that he, and the CIA, had been responsible after all.’

Although Morell has made statements undermining Hillary Clinton and President Obama on other intelligence issues, he is actively assisting both the mainstream media and the Obama administration in an effort to ignore and revise the 2012 events in Benghazi with his new book The Great War of Our Time.

“One of the most striking aspects of Morell’s chapters on Benghazi is his dogged insistence that the attacks were simply the result of a mob spinning out of control,” writes Steven Hayes for The Weekly Standard. “But Morell maintains that the attacks were not planned and claims, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the attackers did not necessarily want to harm Americans.”

This, Hayes notes, does not match the Abu Khatallah indictment, which contends that the objective of the attackers in Benghazi was tokill United States citizens at the Mission and the Annex.”

A Defense Intelligence Agency email, obtained by Judicial Watch and made public on May 18, shows that the DIA reported on September 16, 2012 that the terrorist attack had been planned 10 or more days prior by Al Qaeda.

“The memo was copied to the National Security Council, the State Department and the CIA,” reports Catherine Herridge of Fox News. “A third DIA memo, dated Oct. 5, 2012, leaves no doubt that U.S. intelligence agencies knew that weapons were moving from Libya to Syria before the attack that killed four Americans.”

Morell refused to comment on the flow of weapons to Syria during his recent Fox News interview with Bret Baier, host of Special Report. Morell’s carefully crafted chapters on Benghazi, a total of 47 pages, deceive so systematically and so completely as to create an entirely false account of these events. He seeks to rewrite history by contradicting other witnesses. All evidence supporting this scandal that is not ascribed to the White House’s stonewalling efforts is reduced to spurious claims or myths.

But it is his word against those on the ground that night—from Gregory Hicks to the former Libyan president, including the security contractors and diplomatic security agents. Morell’s own account is irredeemably sullied by the fact that he won’t even admit to conversations he’s had concerning the CIA’s Benghazi talking points.

“I told my colleagues that I had some concerns about the talking points and that I knew other agencies did as well,” he writes of his controversial participation in a Deputies Meeting. “I did not say what my concerns were. I concluded by saying I would edit the talking points myself and share them with the relevant deputies before sending them to the Hill. McDonough simply said, ‘Thank you, Michael.’” McDonough is Denis McDonough, then-Deputy National Security Advisor, now White House Chief of Staff.

Contrast this with email records obtained by Judicial Watch, and you find that Morell’s assertions prove entirely false. “On the SVTS [call], Morell noted that these points were not good and he had taken a heavy editing hand to them,” states an administration email from September 15, 2012. “[Morell] noted that he would be happy to work with Jake Sullivan and Rhodes to develop appropriate talking points. McDonough, on Rhodes’ behalf, deferred to Sullivan.” Rhodes is Ben Rhodes, former Obama speechwriter, Deputy National Security Advisor, and brother of David Rhodes, the president of CBS News.

“It was agreed that Jake would work closely with the intelligence community (within a small group) to finalize points on Saturday that could be shared with HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence],” it continues.

In order for there to be an agreement, there must first be a conversation involving multiple parties. And the details of this email clearly demonstrate that there was more of a discussion with others than Morell would like to admit.

But the mainstream media aren’t interested in asking Morell about his factual inaccuracies or contradictions.

During a Q&A, Michael Hirsh of Politico asked Morell a softball question on Benghazi, saying, “You say the CIA reevaluated its security posture in Benghazi after that but it’s unclear why State did not do more. Can you explain?”

This approach revealed that Hirsh hadn’t done any independent research, and was hoping that the Benghazi scandal could be “explained” away by the most authoritative—and, in this case, incredibly biased—administration source.

Politico also published an article by Morell, which claims to be “The Real Story of Benghazi.”

Hirsh’s question doesn’t even reflect Morell’s actual statements. “It was only …after the tragedy of 9/11/12…that we learned that only a few security enhancements had been made” at the Special Mission Compound, writes Morell.

Members of the Annex Security Team write in their book, 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi, that status updates between them (at the CIA Annex) and the Special Mission Compound (located about one mile from the Annex) occurred “usually every Friday.” Does Morell really expect his readers to believe that these two facilities, located so close together, were not aware of each others’ security efforts? Hirsh apparently does.

By informing his readers about unreleased video footage from the night of the attack at the Special Mission Compound (SMC), Morell seeks to establish himself as a first-hand expert on what happened there. He is not. But because the video footage is not available to others, it is impossible to independently verify the facts.

For Politico to have taken Morell at his word without fact-checking is no better than citing anonymous administration officials.

“Some of the attackers were armed with small arms; many were not armed at all,” Morell writes. “No heavy weapons were seen on the videotape.” This contradicts another account, from the book Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi by Fred Burton and Samuel M. Katz, which maintains that “Some of the attackers carried RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] slung over their shoulders, apparently to be used on the armored doors of the safe haven and the TOC [Tactical Operations Center] or to repel any counterattack. The DS [Diplomatic Security] agents knew they were facing superior firepower.”

“…definitely, it was planned by foreigners, by people who—who entered the country a few months ago, and they were planning this criminal act since their—since their arrival, said former Libyan President Mohammed al Magariaf on September 16, 2012 on CBS’ Face the Nation.

But, according to Morell, this is merely a “myth,” a false perception “that the attacks were well organized, planned weeks or even months in advance.”

“What’s more, the failure to anticipate and prevent such attacks would be, by definition, an intelligence failure,” writes Steven Hayes. Such a failure would reflect badly on the CIA, and therefore Morell himself.

Morell contends that there was no tactical warning for the attacks. Instead, “We routinely sent such cables each year on the anniversary of 9/11—but we did want our people and their US government colleagues to be extra vigilant.”

“Be advised, we have reports from locals that a Western facility or US Embassy/Consulate/Government target will be attacked in the next week,” reads the warning described in 13 Hours.

Morell recounts the stand down order with as much dishonesty as his description of the secret Deputies Meeting. “While these calls were being made, the response team was frustrated that it was not moving out,” he writes. “Although the delay was no more than five to eight minutes, I am sure that to those involved it must have seemed like forever.” But, he writes, it wasn’t ordered by anyone up the chain of command and was totally justified.

Morell’s account doesn’t even address whether the security team left with CIA Chief of Base “Bob’s” blessing or otherwise. They did not. And, according to the 13 Hours account, at least 20 minutes “had elapsed since the operators had first mustered at Building C.”

In a firefight, 20 minutes can be an eternity. AST Member Kris Paronto told Fox News’ Bret Baier last year that, without the delay, “Ambassador Stevens and Sean [Smith], yeah, they would still be alive, my gut is yes.”

Admitting as much would concede the CIA’s role in the overall dereliction of duty. Yet Nick Romeo writes for the Christian Science Monitor that although “it’s clear that he wants to defend the reputation of the agency” Morell has credibility because he notices “the many weaknesses and flaws in the design and function of intelligence agencies.”

However, when it comes to the death of four Americans—where it counts—Morell perpetuates the cover-up.

After leaving the CIA in 2013, Morell joined Beacon Global Strategies, started by Hillary Clinton’s “principal gatekeeper”—as described by The New York Times—Philippe Reines. The company serves as a sort of Clinton government-in-waiting. Thus, Morell’s statements become even that much more suspect due to a conflict of interest, while trying to protect Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House.

And the dereliction of duty could have been prevented. Chief of Base “Bob” had already been given an opportunity to see the February 17 Martyrs Brigade’s lack of action earlier that year when they failed to come to the aid of another operator and Tyrone Woods during an altercation with a group they believed to be Ansar al Sharia. Woods himself later became a September 11, 2012 casualty. Even the Accountability Review Board notes that on the day of the attacks, the militia “had stopped accompanying Special Mission vehicle movements in protest over salary and working hours.”

But it is easier to ignore and marginalize the Benghazi scandal than for journalists to do independent research. Case in point, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed Morell on May 13 about ISIS and the Osama bin Laden operation, but did not ask him about his false Benghazi narrative.

If Morell has so transparently lied about the death of four Americans and the resulting administration cover-up, why, exactly, should the media trust him on other matters?