04/12/16

The Panama Papers Scandal Ensnares Hillary Clinton

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Hillary Clinton is being caught up in the Panama Papers scandal and the Mossack Fonseca leak. Among the information released are revelations concerning Russia’s biggest bank and their connection to the Podesta Group as their lobbyist in Washington, DC. That’s right… Podesta. The CEO, Tony Podesta, is well known within the DC beltway among movers and shakers and he has strong ties to Hillary Clinton. Tony founded the firm in 1998 with his brother John, who is formerly a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. Next, he was counselor to President Barack Obama. John Podesta is the very definition of a Democratic insider. They are power brokers within the Democratic Party.

The Podesta Group registered with the federal government as a lobbyist for Sberbank, Russia’s largest financial institution. Three Podesta Group staffers were on the registration: Tony Podesta, Stephen Rademaker and David Adams. The last two were former assistant secretaries of state. It should be noted that Tony Podesta is a big-money bundler for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, while his brother John is the chairman of that campaign and the chief architect of her plans to take the White House this November.

You might wonder why Sberbank (Savings Bank in Russian) would engage the Podesta Group. As I understand it, they supposedly wanted help with their image. Russia is not exactly known for being honest and untainted when it comes to corruption. More to the point, the Podesta’s were tasked with helping to get sanctions lifted from Russia that were imposed after their aggression in the Ukraine.

This indicates that the Russians have a very good grasp of American politics and that they are seeking to use fellow Marxists to accomplish their goals while providing a facade of respectability. It’s also easy to understand the allure of Sberbank’s money and the Podestas’ greed. That Sberbank or the Podestas wound up in the Panama Papers should be of no surprise to anyone. I would have been surprised if they didn’t. We are talking Russian mobsters and ill-gotten money here.

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07/9/15

AIM Editor Talks About Latest Clinton Email Dump

Accuracy in Media

AIM Editor Roger Aronoff appeared on July 7 on the Philadelphia, PA Conservative Commandos radio show with Rick Trader and Anna C. Little to talk about Aronoff’s recent column “Email Dumps Continue to Undermine Clinton Candidacy.”

Hillary Clinton’s excuses regarding her private email server were immediately exposed as lies when Sidney Blumenthal provided additional emails to the Select Committee on Benghazi, ones that she herself had not provided to the State Department.

Blumenthal “was faced with a dilemma when he went to the Committee,” said Aronoff on the show. He added that if Blumenthal had withheld the emails that made clear that Mrs. Clinton hadn’t turned over all of her work-related emails to the Committee, he would have been risking being held in contempt by the Committee.

“So what we know is that she provided edited material, she didn’t provide all the material—and so she’s caught in these lies,” said Aronoff. He also noted that some of her messages are now classified.

“Yet you don’t hear the media talking about it at all,” he continued. “It’s basically, ‘What did [Donald] Trump say?’ and ‘Ask Chris Christie what Trump said,’ and ask everybody what Trump said, and let’s spend three hours talking about that.”

“But none of this with the apparent nominee for the Democrats,” said Aronoff. “There’s no—very little interest [from] the media in digging into this and talking about this.”

This scandal has a twin counterpart in the conflicts of interest posed by the Clinton Foundation, another story the mainstream media have either not pursued or attacked. “So what they ended up doing was through the Clinton Foundation…that when Hillary was Secretary of State they would take millions of dollars from countries who were doing business with the U.S. government,” he said. “And, again, everyone just wants to act like she’s just above all that, that there’s no way she would do anything. But yet she gets caught in lie, after lie, after lie…”

Aronoff argued that since there is no controlling legal authority willing to hold Clinton accountable at this time, the consequences for her may be more political than legal, especially if Vice President Joe Biden were to jump into the Democratic presidential primary. “I think the Clintons believe it’s their time and their entitlement to have that position,” he said, “and if they see the Obama administration all of a sudden line up behind Biden, whether openly and overtly or kind of behind the scenes, I think it’s going to be a real battle in the party.”

While the Select Committee is currently focused on accessing Clinton’s and her staff’s emails, no further information is necessary to expose the ongoing Benghazi cover-up by the Obama administration and Mrs. Clinton. “We put out a report a year ago April, and people can go look at this,” said Aronoff. “It’s at aim.org/Benghazi, and see what the real story is.”

The Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi’s interim report details how the initial intervention in Libya was unnecessary, that Muammar Qaddafi offered truce talks that the U.S. did not pursue, and that the U.S. government was facilitating the provision of arms to al-Qaeda-linked rebels in that nation.

CCB Member and former CIA officer Clare Lopez recently explained to WorldNetDaily that when Ambassador Chris “Stevens was facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-affiliated militia in Libya, he was living in the facility in Benghazi that was later designated the Special Mission Compound.”

You can listen to the complete interview here.

07/6/15

Email Dumps Continue to Undermine Clinton Candidacy

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Hillary Clinton’s reputation is taking repeated blows as the drip, drip, drip of email productions from her private email server draw attention to her many lies. The Obama administration has admitted that she did not, in fact, turn over all the necessary emails from her private mail server to the government. It also has released nearly 3,000 pages of emails implicating members of the Obama administration in their own lies.

As Vice President Joe Biden appears to be preparing to jump in the race for the Democratic nomination later this summer, questions are also emerging as to whether or not the Obama administration is throwing Hillary under the bus through these emails.

Each new batch of these emails expose additional lies made by the Obama administration and Mrs. Clinton, despite MSNBC, Newsweek, and other news organizations maintaining that there is little to be found. This is the same treatment that the Benghazi scandal has regularly received.

“…I hear it all the time from your previous guest and others, is that seven or eight previous congressional committees looked into Benghazi,” said chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi Trey Gowdy (R-SC) on CBS’ Face the Nation on June 28. “Well, none of those other committees looked at a single one of her e-mails… So our committee has done things that none of those seven other committees were able to do.”

The Committee has also gained access to the documents from the Accountability Review Board investigation which failed to interview Secretary of State Clinton—documents which were not turned over to other members of Congress. It also recently received information related to Clinton aides Jake Sullivan and Cheryl Mills, as well as former United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice.

As Accuracy in Media (AIM) asked when the Clinton email scandal initially broke, the key question is what did President Obama and Secretary Clinton “know, and when did they know it?” A recent set of emails obtained by Judicial Watch confirms that the White House coordinated with the State Department on the night of the attack to make Mrs. Clinton’s statement blaming it on a YouTube video the official U.S. government line.

But for the media, it’s old news and hardly worth a mention. Their tactic is, whenever possible, to repeat assertions by various administration supporters that the Benghazi investigation is a partisan witch hunt.

When the first set of emails was produced, the media dismissed those emails as revealing no relationship between Mrs. Clinton and the security situation in Libya or an order to stand down. That’s not surprising, since reporters made similar claims before they actually saw the emails.

The excuses offered by the media are further attempts to throw sand in the eyes of the public. These emails were first stored on a private email server under Mrs. Clinton’s control, then vetted by her advisors, and then partially redacted by a State Department with a vested interest in ensuring that Mrs. Clinton’s reputation, and its own, are preserved.

In other words, the State Department emails were Hillary Clinton’s and the Obama administration’s attempt at self-exoneration.

The media now complain that the mission of the Select Committee on Benghazi has become overbroad, wasteful, and doesn’t focus on the attack. Yet many in the media focused on the cost of this investigation, and Democrat accusations that it is wasteful and duplicative, even when the Committee was narrowly focusing on the attack.

“She said that the public record was complete,” noted Rep. Gowdy on CBS. “You will remember in her single press conference she said that she had turned over everything related to work to the Department of State. We know that that is false.”

As for the emails from Sidney Blumenthal being unsolicited, “We know that that was false,” he said. “So, so far, she also said that she had a single device for convenience,” he continued.

“So every explanation she’s offered so far is demonstrably false.”

It’s even worse than that. As Kimberly Strassel reported for The Wall Street Journal, we now “know that the State Department has now upgraded at least 25 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails to ‘classified’ status. State is suggesting this is no big deal, noting that it is ‘routine’ to upgrade material during the public-disclosure process. But that’s beside the point. This isn’t about after-the-fact disclosure. It’s about security at the time—whether Mrs. Clinton was sending and storing sensitive government information on a hackable private email system. Turns out, she was. For the record, it is a federal crime to ‘knowingly’ house classified information at an ‘unauthorized location.’”

In addition, Strassel stated that “The real bombshell news was the State Department’s admission that, in at least six instances, the Clinton team altered the emails before handing them over. Sentences or entire paragraphs—which, by the way, were work-related—were removed. State was able to confirm this because it could double-check against Mr. Blumenthal’s documents.” Strassel wonders, “But how many more of the 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton provided have also been edited?”

Apparently Blumenthal, long time hatchet man for the Clintons, was not prepared to withhold documents from the Select Committee, and risk a contempt citation. Instead he chose, in effect, to throw Mrs. Clinton under the bus.

The Obama administration has now asserted executive privilege to withhold a “small number” of documents from the Select Committee, reports Byron York. The plot thickens.

“He sent me unsolicited emails, which I passed on in some instances, and I see that that’s just part of the give-and-take,” Mrs. Clinton told the press in May.

“I’m going to Paris tomorrow night and will meet w TNC [Transitional National Council] leaders so this additional info useful,” wrote Clinton to Blumenthal on August 30, 2011. “Let me know if you receive this,” she writes.

“This strains credulity based on what I know,” writes Clinton in another email. “Any other info about it?”

That particular April 2012 email exchange, in which Blumenthal says he will “seek more intel,” does not appear in the State Department’s documents. But an exchange between close Clinton aide Jacob Sullivan and Christopher Stevens using that same Blumenthal information does. Sullivan forwarded Stevens’ response to Hillary Clinton within 15 minutes.

Stevens was appointed Ambassador to Libya in late May of 2012. On July 6, 2012 the State Department’s Charlene Lamb told Regional Security Officer at Embassy Tripoli Eric Nordstrom “NO, I do not [I repeat] not want them to ask for the MSD [security] team to stay!”

That same day, Blumenthal sent Clinton another memo regarding the Libyan election. “Greetings from Kabul! And thanks for keeping this stuff coming!” she replied the next morning, on July 7. Within a couple of hours her aide, Sullivan, had again sent the memo to Ambassador Stevens, and Stevens provided his impressions of Blumenthal’s information promptly. Sullivan again sent Stevens’ communication on to Mrs. Clinton in under 20 minutes.

If these lines of communication were open through her aides, how much did Mrs. Clinton actually know about the security situation in Libya, and when did she know it?

Blumenthal received $10,000 a month from the Clinton Foundation at the same time that he provided his assistance to the Secretary of State, also serving as “an on-and-off paid consultant for Media Matters.”

One of his 2011 emails released by the State Department warns that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb might be inspired by the death of Osama bin Laden to conduct attacks on American and western targets using weapons they had diverted from the Libyan rebels.

Clinton forwarded the May 2, 2011 email from Blumenthal regarding al Qaeda to Sullivan with the words, “disturbing, if true.”

AQIM participated in the Benghazi attacks, according to the Senate. A Defense Intelligence Agency message dated September 12, 2012 indicates that the Benghazi attacks were planned ten or more days in advance by al Qaeda elements partially in revenge for a U.S. killing in Pakistan. As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton received that message, yet continued to blame the YouTube video, as did others in the Obama administration.

As we have repeatedly argued, America already knows enough to demonstrate that there is, and continues to be, a widespread cover-up of the many aspects of the Benghazi scandal.

“The public record has already established that President Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, AFRICOM’s Carter Ham, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey were all told that the assault in Benghazi was a terrorist attack almost immediately after they began,” we reported in May. “Yet the President and his administration still continued to blame a YouTube video titled ‘The Innocence of Muslims.’”

Also, we reported, “the former Secretary of State’s aides became aware that this was a terrorist attack about a half an hour after the initial attack began on the Special Mission Compound…”

Any additional information the Select Committee finds on Benghazi, Blumenthal, or Clinton’s role in the scandal can only confirm the breadth and depth of the dereliction of duty that took place. Yet the media argue that this has somehow become a political circus because the Committee is exploring the background of someone informing Clinton’s Libya policy.

AIM’s articles, along with the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, have exposed how the administration blindly pushed for an intervention in Libya, switched sides in the War on Terror, and passed over an opportunity for a truce with Muammar Qaddafi. It defies reason to continue to report that broader administration actions had little to no influence on creating the climate and circumstances which led to the death of four Americans in Benghazi.

05/21/15

What Does Blumenthal Know About Obama?

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

It appears that Hillary Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal has a network of military and intelligence connections that made him anathema to the Obama White House. Blumenthal must know something about Obama that kept him from getting a State Department job under Hillary.

Congress has the power to compel Blumenthal to testify in public about how he collected intelligence information on Obama and other matters for the use of Mrs. Clinton, before and during the time she was Secretary of State.

The New York Times reports that when Clinton was Secretary of State, she used Blumenthal as an unofficial adviser and sent his memos to “senior diplomatic officials” about such topics as Libya. Blumenthal’s contacts included Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former CIA spy, among others, the paper said. It appears some of them were trying to do business in Libya.

The CIA spy was identified as Tyler Drumheller, described by the paper as “a colorful former Central Intelligence Agency official.”

In the course of reporting this information, the Times said that Blumenthal “had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama…” But why? This question goes unanswered.

It might have something to do with how Blumenthal gained access to information and who else might have gotten access to the same information.

As the Times notes, it appears that the Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” breached Blumenthal’s email account and discovered correspondence he sent to Mrs. Clinton. Some of this material had to do with business in Libya. A story about this correspondence ran in Gawker and Pro Publica under the headline, “Leaked Private Emails Reveal Ex-Clinton Aide’s Secret Spy Network.” The story said that some of the memos were marked “confidential” and relied in many cases on “sensitive” sources inside the Libyan opposition, in addition to Western intelligence and security services.

The publication Slate has a series of questions that need to be asked of Hillary about Blumenthal, his relationship with Hillary, and his controversial connections.

One of the proposed questions: “Did you ever consider hiring Sidney Blumenthal as an employee in your State Department? And, if so, did the Obama administration block such a move, as has been reported? Did the White House know that he provided you with unofficial advice nonetheless?”

Again, the question is why the Obama White House reportedly blocked Blumenthal from working in the State Department.

I think we know the answer, and it has nothing to do with business in Libya or anywhere else: Blumenthal had the goods on Obama’s mysterious past and controversial communist connections that made him susceptible to blackmail by foreign agents and interests.

When Hillary Clinton was running against Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Blumenthal was acting as a Hillary adviser and circulated a memorandum about Obama’s communist connections. The political left was shocked.

In a May 9, 2008 column in The Huffington Post, Peter Dreier, the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College in California, complained that Blumenthal had “circulated an article taken from the fervently hard-right AIM website” that was entitled, “Obama’s Communist Mentor.” I was the author.

This was, of course, the column about Obama’s relationship with Communist Party operative Frank Marshall Davis.

The column was completely accurate, but Dreier tried his best to play down the revelations. He wrote:

“The Kincaid article that Blumenthal circulated sought to discredit Obama by linking him to an African-American poet and writer whom Obama knew while he was in high school in Hawaii. That writer, Frank Marshall Davis, was, Kincaid wrote, a member of the Communist Party. Supported by no tangible evidence, Kincaid claimed that Obama considered his relationship to Davis to be ‘almost like a son.’ In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote about meeting, during his teenage years, a writer named ‘Frank’ who ‘had some modest notoriety once’ and with whom he occasionally discussed poetry and politics. From this snippet, Kincaid weaves an incredulous tale that turns Davis into Obama’s ‘mentor.’”

It appears that Dreier was only one among many on the left who received this information, but he was the only person who went public and attempted to discredit it.

Notice how Dreier attempts to play down the substantial evidence of the relationship by using terms like “no tangible evidence” and an “incredulous tale.” At the same time, Dreier was astonished that “a self-professed liberal operative like Blumenthal” had been circulating “anti-Obama attacks” from “highly-ideological and militant right-wing sources.”

It must not have occurred to Dreier that the information being distributed by Blumenthal was accurate and had been verified by Hillary’s associates. It would appear that Blumenthal had the connections necessary to verify that kind of information—and perhaps to add some more important details to it.

Blumenthal’s contacts included that “colorful” former CIA spy, Tyler Drumheller, who “served as the CIA’s top spy—the division chief for the Directorate of Operations (DO)—in Europe until he retired in 2005.” It’s safe to say that Drumheller was well-positioned to have knowledge of intelligence operations throughout the world, then and now.

Considering that we now know that Blumenthal had military and intelligence connections, it is likely that Blumenthal had the information about Obama’s communist connections in Hawaii and Chicago checked out and verified. He would have concluded that the Davis connection to Obama was enough to disqualify the then-senator from Illinois from the White House.

Dreier used the terms “fervently hard-right” and “highly-ideological and militant right-wing sources,” in order to discredit the information. But the original revelation about Davis came from a left-wing source, Marxist historian Gerald Horne. He had spilled the beans about Obama’s mentor “Frank” being Frank Marshall Davis, a notorious communist with a 600-page FBI file.

The Davis material circulated by Blumenthal was just one tidbit of negative material that Dreier says had been circulating against Obama almost every day over a six-month period during the 2008 campaign, This material, he complained, “attacks Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations.”

It looks like Blumenthal recognized that the Frank Marshall Davis relationship to Obama was real political dynamite and something that could sink the candidate. If Blumenthal had confirmed all of this—and he might have even had more damaging information—we have to wonder whether the information was obtained by others for possible use as blackmail material against Obama. After all, if a Romanian hacker got access to some of the more sensitive material, it seems at least possible that it was made available to others.

The additional question is why Hillary never used the damaging information against Obama. The answer to that, quite clearly, is that Obama made a deal with Hillary so she could become his Secretary of State. That part of the deal went forward, but when Hillary said she wanted to bring Blumenthal into the State Department as her trusted adviser, somebody in the Obama White House rejected that outright. Hillary may have been told that her job at State was for the taking if she would keep Blumenthal under control. She had to have known that Blumenthal was involved in circulating information about the Obama-Davis connection, since The Huffington Post had publicized it.

Hillary continued to use Blumenthal in an unofficial capacity, collecting information and intelligence on Libya and perhaps many other sensitive topics. Did she use this secret spy network to gather intelligence on Obama himself? That question is far more important than whether Blumenthal had friends who did business in Libya.

The New York Times reported that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, planned to subpoena Blumenthal, “for a private transcribed interview.” Reuters now reports that the subpoena has been served, demanding that Blumenthal appear before the House committee on June 3 to give a deposition.

Under no circumstances, however, should this be conducted in private and behind closed doors. The American people are entitled to hear the truth in an open and public setting.

What did Blumenthal know about Obama? And when did he know it?