Corruption, lies, and emails 276
The number of persons in government agencies known to have lied to protect Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton from public knowledge of their wrong-doing, mounts up continually. The full count may never be known.
The very fact they needed to lie is a glaring indication that the cause they supported was a bad one. But if any of them realized this, it apparently didn’t trouble them.
Judicial Watch reports:
Judicial Watch [has] obtained 44 pages of records from the State Department through court-ordered discovery revealing that the Obama White House was tracking a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records concerning then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system.
That 2012 request had been made by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). They did not get what they asked for.
Months after the Obama White House involvement, the State Department responded … falsely stating that no such records existed.
CREW’s general counsel, Anne Weismann, submitted a FOIA request to the State Department on December 6, 2012, seeking “records sufficient to show the number of email accounts of or associated with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the extent to which those email accounts are identifiable as those of or associated with Secretary Clinton.”
On May 10, 2013, [Information Programs and Services] replied to CREW, stating that “no records responsive to your request were located.”
So Judicial Watch made a court application to obtain the information that CREW had been denied.
Judicial Watch’s discovery is centered upon whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system and whether the State Department acted in bad faith in processing Judicial Watch’s FOIA request for communications from Clinton’s office.
They were lucky that their case came before a nonpartisan judge.
U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides, as well as E.W. Priestap [assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division], to be deposed or answer written questions under oath. …
So certain agency records have fallen into the hands of Judicial Watch at last, recording the intention to lie, and proving that lying and evasion were what Obama required.
They “include a January 2013 email exchange discussing Clinton’s departure from the State Department in which Agency Records Officer Tasha M. Thian specifically stated that Secretary Clinton ‘does not use email’.”
But also include this, directly contradicting that statement:
The State Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a report in January 2016 saying “At the time the [2012] request was received, dozens of senior officials throughout the Department, including members of Secretary Clinton’s immediate staff, exchanged emails with the Secretary using the personal accounts she used to conduct official business.” Also, the IG “found evidence that [Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills] was informed of the request at the time it was received …”
On whose orders – in addition to Secretary Clinton’s – were the lies told and the CREW request not complied with?
Several documents answer that question: the Obama White House.
The State Department produced records in response to court-ordered document requests that detail Obama White House involvement in the Clinton email FOIA request [and the refusal to grant it].
In a December 20, 2012, email with the subject line “Need to track down a FOIA request from CREW”, Sheryl L. Walter, director of the State Department’s Office of Information Programs and Services (A/GIS/IPS), writes to IPS officials Rosemary D. Reid and Patrick D. Scholl and their assistants:
WH called – have we received a FOIA request from CREW (Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington) on the topic of personal use of email by senior officials? Apparently other agencies have. If we have it, can you give me the details so I can call the WH back? I think they’d like it on quick turnaround. Thanks! Sheryl
In the same email chain, Walter on December 20, 2012 also emailed Heather Samuelson, Clinton’s White House liaison, describing the CREW FOIA request:
Hi Heather – Copy attached, it was in our significant weekly FOIA report that we send to L and S/ES also. Do you want us to add you to that list? It’s a subset of things like this that we think likely to be of broader Department interest. More detail below re this request. As a practical matter given our workload, it won’t be processed for some months. Let me know if there are any particular sensitivities. If we don’t talk later, happy holidays! All the best, Sheryl
Sheryl: The request is assigned Case #F-2012-40981. It was received on 12/6/2012 and acknowledged on 12/10/2012. The request is assigned for processing.
On January 10, 2013, Walter writes to Samuelson that she is not including “personal” accounts in the FOIA request search:
Hi Heather – did you ever get any intell re what other agencies are doing re this FOIA request that seeks records about the number of email accounts associated with the Secretary (but isn’t specifying “personal” email accounts so we are interpreting as official accounts only). We are considering contacting the requester to find out exactly what it is they are looking for. Do you have any-concerns about that approach?
Soon afterward, Samuelson responds, “White House Counsel was looking into this for me. I will circle back with them now to see if they have further guidance.” …
The White House counsel found that Clinton had no email accounts.
Which was exactly what Secretary Clinton wanted them to find.
She was very pleased with Heather Samuelson.
Samuelson became Secretary Clinton’s personal lawyer and in 2014 led the review of Clinton’s emails to determine which ones were work-related and which were personal. She was also one of five close Clinton associates granted immunity by the Department of Justice in the Clinton email investigation. …
Further proof that President Obama was involved in the deception – can be said to have presided over it – is found in the sworn testimony of Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division:
[He] admitted, in writing and under oath, that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically the Executive Office of the President.
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch concludes:
“These documents suggest [prove – ed] the Obama White House knew about the Clinton email lies being told to the public at least as early as December 2012,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “A federal court granted Judicial Watch discovery into the Clinton emails because the court wanted answers about a government cover-up of the Clinton emails. And now we have answers because it looks like the Obama White House orchestrated the Clinton email cover-up.”
And Judge Lamberth is taking the matter as seriously as it needs to be taken. He added a comment to his order: “The Clinton email system” he said, was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency”.
It remains to be seen if there will be any consequences for the officials who cheated and lied for Obama and Clinton. To expect that Obama himself will be so much as mildly reproached for “orchestrating” the cover-up, or Clinton punished for breaking the law, is probably, tragically, to expect too much.
Calumnies, collusion, conspiracy, and crimes 203
Victor David Hanson, writing at American Greatness, provides this summary of the lies that Hillary Clinton and a cabal of dishonest Obama-appointees told, and the crimes they committed, in a conspiracy to get the duly elected president, Donald Trump, falsely convicted of treason.
The irony of the entire Russian collusion hoax is that accusers who cried the loudest about leaking, collusion, lying, and obstruction are themselves soon very likely to be accused of just those crimes.
Now that Robert Mueller’s 674-day, $30 million investigation is over and has failed to find the original goal of its mandate — evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government to sway the 2016 election — and now that thousands of once-sealed government documents will likely be released in unredacted form, those who eagerly assumed the role of the hunters may become the hunted, due to their own zealous violation of the nation’s trust and its laws.
Take Lying
Former FBI Director James Comey’s testimonies cannot be reconciled with those of his own deputy director Andrew McCabe. He falsely testified that the Steele dossier was not the main basis for obtaining FISA court warrants. On at least 245 occasions, Comey swore under oath that he either did not know, or could not remember, when asked direct questions about his conduct at the FBI. He likely lied when he testified that he did not conclude his assessment of the Clinton illegal email use before he had even interviewed Clinton, an assertion contradicted by his own written report. I guess his credo and modus operandi are reflected in the subtitle of his recent autobiography A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.
Andrew McCabe currently is under criminal referral for lying to federal investigators about leaking to the media. He and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein each have accused each other of not telling the whole truth about their shared caper of trying to force President Trump out of office by invoking the 25th Amendment.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has admitted to lying under oath to Congress — and since lied about his earlier admission of that lying. His recent sworn congressional testimony of not having leaked information about the Steele dossier to the media is again likely to be untrue, given that Clapper had admitted to speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper about the dossier’s contents. CNN, remember, would in turn go on to hire the mendacious Clapper as an analyst. And once on air, Clapper would insist that Trump was both a Russian asset and thus guilty of collusion crimes greater than those of Watergate. Lies. All lies.
Former CIA Director John Brennan has admitted to lying under oath to Congress on two occasions. He may well face further legal exposure. When he lost his security clearance, he repeatedly lied that Trump was guilty of collusion, however that non-crime is defined. And as the Mueller probe wound down, Brennan with pseudo-authority and trumped-up hints of phony access to secret intelligence sources deceitfully assured the nation that Trump within days would face indictment — perhaps along with his family members.
Brennan in 2016 also reached out to foreign intelligence services, primary British and Australian, to surveille and entrap Trump aides, as a way of circumventing rules preventing CIA monitoring of American citizens. And he may well have also reverse-targeted Americans, under the guise of monitoring foreign nationals, in order to build a case of so-called Trump collusion.
Finally, Brennan testified to Congress in May 2017 that he had not been earlier aware of the dossier or its contents before the election, although in August 2016 it is almost certain that he had briefed Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on it in a spirited effort to have Reid pressure the FBI to keep or expand its counterintelligence investigation of Trump during the critical final weeks of the election.
Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin likely also lied to FBI investigators when they claimed they had no knowledge while working at the State Department that their boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was using an illegal private email server. In fact, they had read her communications on it and actually inquired about its efficacy.
Samantha Power, the former U.N. ambassador, in her last year in office requested on more than 260 occasions to unmask names of Americans monitored by the government. Yet Power later claimed that most of these requests were not made by her. And yet she either does not know or does not cite who exactly used her name to make such requests during the election cycle. In any case, no one has come forward to admit to the improper use of Power’s name to request the hundreds of unmaskings.
Susan Rice, the former Obama national security advisor, could have made a number of unmasking requests in Power’s name, although she initially denied making any requests in her own name—a lie she immediately amended. Rice, remember, repeatedly lied on national television about the cause and origins of the Benghazi attack, denied there were cash payments for hostages in the Iran deal, misled about the conduct of Beau Bergdahl, and prevaricated over the existence and destruction of weapons of mass destruction in Syria.
Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr did not tell the truth on a federal written disclosure required by law when he omitted the key fact that his wife Nellie worked on Christopher Steele’s Fusion GPS dossier. Ohr’s testimony that he completely briefed key FBI officials on the dossier in July or August 2016 is not compatible to what former FBI attorney Lisa Page has testified to concerning the dates of her own knowledge of the Steele material.
Take Foreign Collusion
Christopher Steele is a foreign national. So are many of the Russian sources that he claims he had contacted to solicit dirt on Donald Trump and his campaign aides. In fact, John Brennan’s CIA, soon in consultation with the FBI, was used in circuitous fashion to facilitate surveillance of Donald Trump’s campaign through the use of foreign nationals during the 2016 campaign.
Foreigners such as Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, and former Australian minister for foreign affairs Alexander Downer and an array of intelligence contractors from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) mysteriously met with minor Trump aide George Papadopoulos and others. It is likely that to disguise American intelligence agencies’ efforts to besmirch, surveille, and leak to the press damaging unfounded rumors about the Trump campaign that John Brennan enlisted an entire cadre of foreign nationals. And it is likely to be the most egregious example of using non-U.S. citizens to affect the outcome of an election in our history.
If there is a crime of foreign collusion — a conspiracy of U.S. officials to use foreigners to interfere with an American election — then Brennan’s efforts are the textbook example.
Take Leaking
Many of the names unmasked by requests from Samantha Power and Susan Rice were leaked illegally to the media. James Comey himself leaked confidential memos of presidential conversations to the press; in at least one case, the memo was likely classified.
Former FBI general counsel James Baker is currently under criminal referral for improperly leaking classified documents. He seems to have been in contact with the media before the election and he may have been one of many FBI officials and contacts, along with Christopher Steele, that reporters such as David Corn, Michael Isikoff, and Julia Ioffe anonymously referenced in their pre-election published hit pieces on Russian collusion — all the result of the successful strategies of Fusion GPS, along with some in the FBI, to seed unverified anti-Trump gossip to warp the election.
Andrew McCabe also is under criminal referral both for leaking classified information and then lying about it.
In a fashion emblematic of this entire sordid mess, the always ethically compromised James Clapper in January 2017 had leaked the dossier to Jake Tapper of CNN and likely other journalists and then shortly afterwards publicly deplored just this sort of government leaking that had led to sensational stories about the dossier.
Take Obstruction of Justice
A number of FBI and Department of Justice high ranking employees such as James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, and Sally Yates all signed off on FISA warrants to surveille Carter Page without apprising the courts that they knew that their chief evidence, the Steele Dossier, was unverified, was paid for by Hillary Clinton, and was used in circular fashion as the basis for news accounts presented to the court. Nor did the Justice Department and FBI officials apprise the FISA justices that Christopher Steele had been terminated as a FBI source.
No one believes that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch just happened to meet Bill Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac and confined their conservations to a variety of topics having nothing to do with Hillary Clinton — at a time when Lynch’s Justice Department was investigating her. Note the meeting was only disclosed because a reporter got a tip and arrived on the scene of the two adjoining Lynch and Clinton private jets — which suggests that the only thing Lynch and Clinton regretted was being found out. Few believe that Lynch had recused herself as she promised, given her strict oversight of the sort of language Comey’s FBI was allowed to use in its investigation of Clinton.
Take Conflict of Interest
Andrew McCabe never should have been in charge of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton, given that just months earlier his wife had been the recipient of $675,000 in campaign cash donated by Clinton and Democratic Party-affiliated political action committees. And the apology of a “time line” that suggests conflicts of interest like McCabe’s expired after an arbitrary date is specious. McCabe knew his spouse had been a recent recipient of Clinton-related money, knew that he had substantial influence on the fate of her [Hillary Clinton’s] email investigation, and hoped and assumed that she was likely to be the next president of the United States quite soon.
Rod Rosenstein never should have been appointed acting attorney general in charge of oversight of the Mueller investigation. He knew Mueller well. In circular fashion, he had drafted the rationale to fire Comey that had prompted the Mueller’s appointment. He had signed off on a FISA warrant request without apprising the court of the true nature of the Steele dossier’s origins and nature. He had met shortly before the Mueller appointment with acting FBI director Andrew McCabe to investigate the chance of removing Trump under a distortion of the 25th Amendment. So, in essence, Rosenstein had been one of the catalysts for McCabe to investigate removing Trump for his own part in the removal of Comey and then in Orwellian fashion joined McCabe’s efforts.
Comey deliberately leaked a classified memo of a presidential conversation, in which he had misled the president about his actual status under FBI investigations, in order to cause enough media outrage over his firing to prompt the hiring of a special counsel. That gambit succeeded in the appointment of his own longtime associate Robert Mueller, who would be charged to investigate “collusion”, in which Comey played an important role in monitoring the Trump campaign with the assistance of British national Christopher Steele.
Robert Mueller did not need to appoint a legal team inordinately Democratic, which included attorneys who had been either donors to the Clinton campaign, or had been attorneys for Clinton aides, or had defended the Clinton Foundation. And he certainly should not have included on his investigative team that was charged with adjudicating Russian collusion in the 2016 election both Zainab Ahmad and Andrew Weissman, Obama Justice Department officials, who had been briefed by Bruce Ohr before the election on the nature of the Steele dossier and its use of foreign sources.
It will be difficult to unravel all of the above lying, distortion, and unethical and illegal conduct.
The motives of these bad actors are diverse, but they share a common denominator. As Washington politicos and administrative state careerists, all of them believed that Donald Trump was so abhorrent that he should be prevented from winning the 2016 election. After his stunning and shocking victory, they assumed further that either he should not be inaugurated or he should be removed from office as soon as they could arrange it.
They further reasoned that as high and esteemed unelected officials their efforts were above and beyond the law, and rightly so, given their assumed superior wisdom and morality.
Finally, if their initial efforts were predicated on winning not just exemption from the law, but even promotions and kudos from a grateful President Hillary Clinton, their subsequent energies at removing Trump and investing in the collusion hoax were preemptive and defensive. Seeding the collusion hoax was a way either of removing Trump who had the presidential power to call them all to account for their illegality, or at least causing so much media chaos and political havoc that their own crimes and misdemeanors would be forgotten by becoming submerged amid years of scandal, conspiracies, and media sensationalism.
And they were almost — but so far not quite — correct in all their assumptions.
They are people so low as to be truly beneath contempt. Their rightful place, as far from leadership positions in government and law-enforcement as any could be, is prison.
But the injustice goes on and on! 64
Many of us looked to President Trump to right the glaring injustices of the Obama era.
But the months since his inauguration pass, and Hillary Clinton, whom everyone knows to be not just corrupt but felonious, is still not indicted.
And the Department of Justice has announced that Lois Lerner will not be prosecuted for the crimes everyone knows she committed.
President Trump himself is being investigated for obstruction of justice which everyone knows he is not guilty of. He could stop the stupid investigation into Russian connections he did not have and obstruction of justice suspicions that are unjustified, but he isn’t doing so.
Everyone knows that Obama obstructed justice and nobody is calling for his prosecution.
He it was who obstructed the justice that should have come down hard on Hillary Clinton.
From National Review by Andrew C. McCarthy:
On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference.
The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham.
Pundits and the Trump administration are shrieking because this indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed. It shows, they cry, that the fix was in! …
[But] this is not news.
No, but the letter provides proof of what everyone already knew.
Let’s think about what else was going on in April 2016. …
On April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the criminal statutes relevant to her e-mail scandal). The president acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, its importance had been vastly overstated.
This is precisely the reasoning that Comey relied on in ultimately absolving Clinton. …
On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey publicly stated that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in using a private email server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The director acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, it was just a small percentage of the emails involved.
Obama’s April statements are the significant ones. They told us how this was going to go. The rest is just details. In his April 10 comments, Obama made the obvious explicit: He did not want the certain Democratic nominee, the candidate he was backing to succeed him, to be indicted.
Conveniently, his remarks (inevitably echoed by Comey) did not mention that an intent to endanger national security was not an element of the criminal offenses Clinton was suspected of committing – in classic Obama fashion, he was urging her innocence of a strawman crime while dodging any discussion of the crimes she had actually committed.
As we also now know – but as Obama knew at the time – the president himself had communicated with Clinton over her non-secure, private communications system, using an alias. The Obama administration refused to disclose these several e-mail exchanges because they undoubtedly involve classified conversations between the president and his secretary of state.
It would not have been possible to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information without its being clear that President Obama had engaged in the same conduct. The administration was never, ever going to allow that to happen.
What else was going on in May 2016, while Comey was drafting his findings (even though several of the things he would purportedly “base” them on hadn’t actually happened yet)?
Well, … the Obama Justice Department was leaking to the Washington Post that Clinton probably would not be charged – and that her top aide, Cheryl Mills, was considered a cooperating witness rather than a co-conspirator.
Why? Well, I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but it turns out the Obama Justice Department had fully adopted the theory of the case announced by President Obama in April. The [Washington] Post explained that, according to its sources inside the investigation, there was “scant evidence tying Clinton to criminal wrongdoing” because there was “scant evidence that Clinton had malicious intent in the handling of e-mails”. Like Obama, the Post and its sources neglected to mention that Mrs. Clinton’s felonies did not require proof of “malicious intent” or any purpose to harm the United States – just that she willfully transmitted classified information, was grossly negligent in handling it, and withheld or destroyed government records. …
The Obama Justice Department was simultaneously barring the FBI from asking Mills questions that went to the heart of the e-mails investigation – questions about the process by which Clinton and her underlings decided which of her 60,000 e-mails to surrender to the State Department, and which would be withheld (it ended up being about 33,000) as purportedly “private” (a goodly percentage were not).
This was the start of a series of Justice Department shenanigans we would come to learn about: Cutting off key areas of inquiry; cutting inexplicable immunity deals; declining to use the grand jury to compel evidence; agreeing to limit searches of computers (in order to miss key time-frames when obstruction occurred); agreeing to destroy physical evidence (laptop computers); failing to charge and squeeze witnesses who made patently false statements; allowing subjects of the investigation to act as lawyers for other subjects of the investigation (in order to promote the charade that some evidence was off-limits due to the attorney-client privilege); and so on.
And never did a single Republican in Congress call for a special investigator into these despicable persons’ crimes and corruption.
The establishment Right does not know how to fight these political battles. Or it does not want to.
But once President Trump was elected, we looked to him and his Department of Justice under new management to apply the law and deliver actual justice.
There is a way – a notoriously aggressive way – that the Justice Department and FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case. Here, they were trying to unmake a case. …
The main issue is not that witnesses hadn’t been questioned; it is that by April 2016, restraints were already in place to ensure that witness interviews would be fruitless, and that any incriminating information they accidentally turned up would be ignored or buried.
The decision not to indict Hillary Clinton was not made by then-FBI Director Comey. It was made by President Obama and his Justice Department – Comey’s superiors.
If you want to say Comey went along for the ride rather than bucking the tide (as he concedes doing when Lynch directed him to call the Clinton probe a “matter,” not an “investigation”), that’s fair. But the fact that Comey already knew in April what he would say in July has long been perfectly obvious. The Obama administration was going to follow its leader. What Comey ultimately stated was just a repeat of what Obama was openly saying in April, and what Obama’s Justice Department was leaking to the press in May.
Bottom line: In April, President Obama and his Justice Department adopted a Hillary Clinton defense strategy of concocting a crime no one was claiming Clinton had committed: to wit, transmitting classified information with an intent to harm the United States.
With media-Democrat complex help, they peddled the narrative that she could not be convicted absent this “malicious intent”, in a desperate effort to make the publicly known evidence seem weak. Meanwhile, they quietly hamstrung FBI case investigators in order to frustrate the evidence-gathering process. … It was not Comey’s plan. It was Obama’s plan.
So now, in the United States of America, the law is not applied equally to all.
Everyone knows that to be the case.
So why isn’t everyone outraged and protesting?
Everyone knows the answer to that.
The Democratic Party: a criminal organization? 180
Will the crimes and corruption of the Democratic Party at last be investigated, exposed, prosecuted and punished?
Seems that some may be.
From Breitbart, by Ian Mason:
Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee [have] drafted a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein … asking them to appoint a second special counsel to investigate the 2016 elections. …
(Robert Mueller being the first “Special Counsel, appointed to look into the non-existent crime, alleged by the Democrats, of “collusion” between President Trump and President Putin.)
The letter lists 14 specific inquiries the congressmen would like this potential second special counsel to look into:
- Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch directing Mr. Comey to mislead the American people on the nature of the Clinton investigation;
- The shadow cast over our system of justice concerning Secretary Clinton and her involvement in mishandling classified information;
- FBI and DOJ’s investigative decisions related to former Secretary Clinton’s email investigation, including the propriety and consequence of immunity deals given to potential Clinton co-conspirators Cheryl Mills, Heather Samuelson, John Bentel and possibly others;
- The apparent failure of DOJ to empanel a grand jury to investigate allegations of mishandling of classified information by Hillary Clinton and her associates;
- The Department of State and its employees’ involvement in determining which communications of Secretary Clinton’s and her associates to turn over for public scrutiny;
- WikiLeaks disclosures concerning the Clinton Foundation and its potentially unlawful international dealings;
- Connections between the Clinton campaign, or the Clinton Foundation, and foreign entities, including those from Russia and Ukraine;
- Mr. Comey’s knowledge of the purchase of Uranium One by the company Rosatom, whether the approval of the sale was connected to any donations made to the Clinton Foundation, and what role Secretary Clinton played in the approval of that sale that had national security ramifications;
- Disclosures arising from unlawful access to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) computer systems, including inappropriate collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign to undermine Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign;
- Post-election accusations by the President that he was wiretapped by the previous Administration, and whether Mr. Comey and Ms. Lynch had any knowledge of efforts made by any federal agency to unlawfully monitor communications of then-candidate Trump or his associates;
- Selected leaks of classified information related to the unmasking of U.S. person identities incidentally collected upon by the intelligence community, including an assessment of whether anyone in the Obama Administration, including Mr. Comey, Ms. Lynch, Ms. Susan Rice, Ms. Samantha Power, or others, had any knowledge about the “unmasking” of individuals on then candidate-Trump’s campaign team, transition team, or both;
- Admitted leaks by Mr. Comey to Columbia University law professor, Daniel Richman, regarding conversations between Mr. Comey and President Trump, how the leaked information was purposefully released to lead to the appointment of a special counsel, and whether any classified information was included in the now infamous “Comey memos”;
- Mr. Comey’s and the FBI’s apparent reliance on “Fusion GPS” in its investigation of the Trump campaign, including the company’s creation of a “dossier” of information about Mr. Trump, that dossier’s commission and dissemination in the months before and after the 2016 election, whether the FBI paid anyone connected to the dossier, and the intelligence sources of Fusion GPS or any person or company working for Fusion GPS and its affiliates; and
- Any and all potential leaks originated by Mr. Comey and provided to author [and NYT reporter – ed] Michael Schmidt dating back to 1993.
The letter is signed by all 20 Republican members of the committee.
Will John Koskinen, head of the IRS, and his underling Lois Lerner also be investigated soon for crimes and corruption? (See here and here.)
And former DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s involvement with a gang of Pakistani crooks and supporters of Islamic terrorism, who, as IT experts, were given access by Democrats on congressional committees to highly sensitive information? (See our post, A huge political scandal, July 27, 2017.)
Will it be revealed that the Democratic Party is essentially a criminal organization?
Celebrate, celebrate, this glorious day! 114
This day of President-elect Donald Trump’s triumph.
To add to the pleasure of the victory, consider how glum must they be feeling, all those princes, emirs, CEOs, diplomats, wheeler-dealers, unscrupulous exploiters of the downtrodden, financiers of mass murderers who gave money to the Clintons – ostensibly to their “charitable” Foundation – in the expectation that a future President Hillary Clinton would reward them with favors. Millions, tens of millions of dollars, down the drain! George Soros, the èminence mauvaise of the whole international Left, poured … what… billions ? into getting the corrupt Clintons back into supreme power. All wasted, George, all wasted now.
The Clinton Foundation will get no more donations. Not much point now in its continuing to exist. It never did give anything worth mentioning to charity. And what need now for Bill and Hillary and Chelsea to jet round the world and live high on the hog – the “good causes” on which the Foundation spent most of its bribe-money?
The Clintons will be out of public life at last. As a former president, Bill and his wife will continue to have Secret Service guards – to her continuing annoyance. The disadvantage of being Someone Important without being important.
Let’s think gleefully of the impending departure from high office of Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Loretta Lynch, Jeh Johnson. Maybe James Comey too.
Members of the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR will no longer be welcome at the White House. Happiness!
And yet more happiness: Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, John Kerry – that bunch of irritating women who have surrounded Barack Obama – will pass into dim obscurity, and their dirty deeds will have to be undone, now that the eight-year long winter of our discontent is changed to glorious summer by this Son of New York.
Hillary Clinton’s corrupt State Department 99
The Clintons’ corruption is like an infectious disease. Everything they touch becomes as rotten as they are.
Hillary Clinton corrupted the State Department – as well as the FBI and the Department of Justice. And the press.
The Washington Examiner gives a summary account of how the State Department became frantically preoccupied with devising ways to cheat and deceive, in order to support Hillary Clinton’s lies which she concocted to conceal her criminal activity:
High-level State Department officials worked behind the scenes last year in several key ways to ensure the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails inflicted as little damage as possible on the Democratic nominee, according to notes made public by the FBI on Monday.
Patrick Kennedy, State’s undersecretary for management, was at the center of efforts to prevent the FBI from upgrading Benghazi-related emails to a classified level.
Although the State Department quickly denied wrongdoing on the part of Kennedy and dismissed GOP calls for his removal on Monday, themFBI notes prompted fresh scrutiny of the administration’s approach to the Clinton email probe.
The 100 pages of “302s”, or summaries of interviews conducted by theFBI, that were released this week shed light on the quiet push to manipulate the handling of Clinton’s emails amid multiple investigations into her record-keeping.
Outsiders tampered with document reviews
Unnamed people who were given “special appointments” in order to assist career State Department officials with the review of Clinton’s emails raised suspicions among some observers, who called their involvement in the process “abnormal”.
Their employment histories “appeared to create a conflict of interest”, the FBI said. The Freedom of Information Act review process is typically confined to career officials in order to prevent political bias from affecting decisions about which records are withheld or redacted.
Officials manipulated redactions
At least one of the people brought in to work on Clinton’s emails “was possibly involved in the Lois Lerner, Internal Revenue Service situation”, referring to the tax agency’s targeting of conservative nonprofit groups ahead of the 2012 election.
Multiple witnesses told the FBI they felt agency leadership circumvented normal procedures when preparing emails, particularly those mentioning Benghazi and Libya, for release to Congress and the public. At least one of the 296 Benghazi-related emails made public last summer was released in full despite the fact that it contained classified information, the FBI said. In other emails, the names of public officials were redacted even though FOIA requirements stipulate that those names should have been released.
Some record-keeping officials said they felt “intimidated” each time they proposed upgrading and redacting part of an email because it was classified. Those officials described the “immense pressure” they felt to avoid classifying anything within the 296 Benghazi documents.
After reviewing the Benghazi-related emails last year, career officials in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs suggested classifying “four or five” of the documents.
However, an unnamed State Department official said he was “frustrated” with the move and instead lobbied the bureau to redact the classified portions of those emails under a different exemption, which is typically used to withhold internal conversations about government decision-making.
Kennedy tried to block classifications
The State Department’s undersecretary for management [Patrick Kennedy] made repeated attempts to convince the FBI not to classify a Benghazi-related email as his agency prepared to hand over hundreds of documents to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
Kennedy offered a “quid pro quo” to the FBI if agents ruled against upgrading one email to the “secret” level.
Actually, that’s badly expressed. Kennedy wanted the FBI agents to downgrade it from the secret level – as the the following makes clear.
An unnamed witness told investigators that Kennedy attempted “to influence the FBI to change its markings” and asked FBI agents if they could “see their way to marking the email unclassified.”
Later, an FBI agent who has since retired offered to “look into the e-mail matter” if Kennedy would agree to approving the FBI’s request to send additional personnel to posts in Iraq.
The FBI said the deal never came to fruition and said in a statement Sunday that the FBI agent who responded favorably to Kennedy’s overtures was no longer with the bureau.
So he or she was fired. Scapegoated. But Patrick Kennedy retains his job!
Some emails disappeared
Clinton’s legal team at first informed the State Department that it had prepared 14 banker boxes of printed emails for production to the government. However, when officials arrived at her lawyer’s office to retrieve the emails, they found only 12 boxes.
“Officials were unsure what happened to the other two boxes,” the FBI wrote.
The 12 boxes that did end up in State Department custody contained 52,455 pages of emails, packed into the boxes “with no folders or known method of organization.”
The idea was, plainly, to make it as difficult, arduous, and time-consuming a task as possible to get them into useful order.
Clinton’s lawyers knew emails contained “Top Secret” intel
Katherine Turner, an attorney at the law firm representing Clinton, told FBI agents in August of last year that she had obtained six laptops from Clinton’s staff, each of which likely contained “Top Secret classified information”.
But at a meeting with agents in her office, Turner “declined to provide consent to search the laptops” and pushed for her clients’ protection of what they considered “privileged communication”.
Ultimately, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two of the aides involved in sorting Clinton’s work-related emails, received immunity deals to turn over their laptops. Those agreements provided for the destruction of those laptops after agents reviewed their contents.
A promise to destroy evidence so there can be no future review of it! Could the criminality of the Obama administration be demonstrated more strikingly?
‘Shadow Government’ tried to stop email releases
A group of high-ranking State Department officials, dubbed the “Shadow Government” by witnesses who spoke to the FBI, pushed to release all 30,000 of Clinton’s emails at the same time, in Jan. 2016, rather than over the course of several months starting in summer 2015. The powerful group met every Wednesday afternoon to discuss how to handle FOIA requests for Clinton’s emails. Regular attendees included Secretary John Kerry’s chief of staff and Kennedy.
“Shadow Government” members argued the release of Clinton’s emails should happen all at once to facilitate “coordination”. The move would have overwhelmed reporters with thousands of email chains and prevented the controversy from lingering over the course of the proposed rolling releases.
Ultimately, the career record-keeping officials won out, and the emails were released in batches stretching from May 2015 to Feb. 2016.
As if “reporters” would have actually reported any wrong-doing! As if they would have done anything voluntarily to spark “controversy”!
President Obama and the Clintons have taken the government of the United States into deep criminality.
The corruption of the FBI 129
The FBI has been corrupted by the Clintons.
Specifically, the FBI’s director, James Comey, has been corrupted by the Clintons.
It is good to learn that there are FBI agents who hate the corruption and are prepared to say so publicly. Unfortunately, they are all retired.
Paul Sperry writes at the New York Post:
Veteran FBI agents say FBI Director James Comey has permanently damaged the bureau’s reputation for uncompromising investigations with his “cowardly” whitewash of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information using an unauthorized private e-mail server.
Feeling the heat from congressional critics, Comey last week argued that the case was investigated by career FBI agents, “So if I blew it, they blew it, too.”
But agents say Comey tied investigators’ hands by agreeing to unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers for Clinton and her aides that limited their investigation. “In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews,” said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer-investigations unit.
Instead of going to prosecutors and insisting on using grand jury leverage to compel testimony and seize evidence, Comey allowed immunity for several key witnesses, including potential targets.
The immunity agreements came with outrageous side deals, including preventing agents from searching for any documents on a Dell laptop owned by former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills generated after Jan. 31, 2015, when she communicated with the server administrator who destroyed subpoenaed e-mails.
Comey also agreed to have Mills’ laptop destroyed after the restricted search, denying Congress the chance to look at it and making the FBI an accomplice to the destruction of evidence. Comey’s immunized witnesses nonetheless suffered chronic lapses in memory, made unsubstantiated claims of attorney-client privilege upon tougher questioning and at least two gave demonstrably false statements.
And yet Comey indulged it all. What’s more, Comey cut a deal to give Clinton a “voluntary” witness interview on a major holiday, and even let her ex-chief of staff sit in on the interview as a lawyer, even though she, too, was under investigation. Clinton’s interview, the culmination of a yearlong investigation, lasted just 3 ½ hours. Despite some 40 bouts of amnesia, she wasn’t called back for questioning; and three days later, Comey cleared her of criminal wrongdoing.
“The FBI has politicized itself, and its reputation will suffer for a long time,” Hughes said. “I hold director Comey responsible.”
Agreed retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello: “Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization.” The accommodations afforded Clinton and her aides are “unprecedented,” Biasello added, “which is another way of saying this outcome was by design”. He called Comey’s decision not to seek charges “cowardly”.
“Each month for 27 years, I received oral and computer admonishments concerning the proper protocol for handling top secret and other classified material, and was informed of the harsh penalties, to include prosecution and incarceration” for mishandling such material, [Biasello] pointed out. “Had myself or my colleagues engaged in behavior of the magnitude of Hillary Clinton, as described by Comey, we would be serving time in Leavenworth.”
Former FBI official I.C. Smith knows a thing or two about Clinton corruption. After working at FBI headquarters as a section chief in the National Security Division, he retired as special agent in charge of the Little Rock, Ark., field office, where he investigated top Clinton fund-raisers for public corruption and even Chinese espionage. “FBI agents upset with Comey’s decision have every reason to feel that way,” Smith said. “Clearly there was a different standard applied to Clinton. I have no doubt resourceful prosecutors and FBI agents could have come up with some charge that she would have been subject to prosecution,” the 25-year veteran added. “What she did is absolutely abhorrent for anyone who has access to classified information.”
What’s needed is a revolt within the FBI. Resignations. Protests. Statements of fact and opinion to those few media who are not subjects of the Clinton imperium and will publish them.
But hope that that will happen is fading.
The tragic fall of James Comey 291
It is not unreasonable for immunity from prosecution to be granted to a lesser offender if that person’s testimony – though self-incriminating – can lead to the successful prosecution of a greater offender.
But in the case of Hillary’ Clinton’s multiple and extremely serious crimes, the granting of immunity to all the most important potential witnesses against her was plainly done IN ORDER TO SAVE HER FROM PROSECUTION.
And the intricate plan was also designed to save her from prosecution IN THE FUTURE. The proof of this is that the offender-witnesses who were granted immunity were also permitted to DESTROY EVIDENCE.
Breitbart reports:
The FBI agreed to destroy two Clinton aides’ laptops after granting them immunity as part of a “side agreement”, according to a letter from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Goodlatte alleges that the FBI promised to destroy the laptops of Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, and Heather Samuelson, an ex-campaign staffer and deputy to Mills, after conducting its search.
Fox News cites unnamed sources in a report saying that the FBI’s search was also limited in scope, in order to “[prevent] the bureau from discovering if there was any evidence of obstruction of justice.” Investigators could not review documents created after January 31, 2015:
The side deals were agreed to on June 10, less than a month before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency would recommend no charges be brought against Clinton or her staff. Judiciary Committee aides told FoxNews.com that the destruction of the laptops is particularly troubling as it means that the computers could not be used as evidence in future legal proceedings, should new information or circumstances arise.
Committee aides also asked why the FBI and DOJ would enter into a voluntary negotiation to begin with, when the laptops could be obtained condition-free via a subpoena.
The letter also asked why the DOJ agreed to limit their search of the laptops to files before Jan. 31, 2015, which would “give up any opportunity to find evidence related to the destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State”.
Aides expressed shock at the parameter, saying it is especially troubling as Mills and Samuelson already had immunity from the consequences of whatever might be on the laptop.
Goodlatte wrote a scathing series of questions to Lynch on the subject:
Like many things about this case, these new materials raise more questions than answers …
Why did the FBI agree to destroy both Cheryl Mills’s and Heather Samuelson’s laptops after concluding its search? [Emphasis in original.]
Doesn’t the willingness of Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson to have their laptops destroyed by the FBI contradict their claim that the laptops could have been withheld because they contained non-relevant, privileged information? If so, doesn’t that undermine the claim that the side agreements were necessary?
Have these laptops, or the contents of these laptops, in fact been destroyed, thereby making follow-up investigations by the FBI, or Congressional oversight, impossible? …
Why was this time limit necessary when both Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson were granted immunity for any potential destruction of evidence charges?
Goodlatte also demanded to know how many classified documents were found on Mills’ and Samuelson’s laptops.
Beth Wilkinson, a D.C.-based lawyer who is married to former Meet The Press host and Clinton donor David Gregory, reportedly negotiated the “side agreements” for the two former aides. Wilkinson has represented four of Clinton’s aides.
Greater self-abasement is no law-enforcement officer capable of than to lay down his honor and self-respect for a powerful criminal.
James Comey will be forever remembered as a man who used his position of trust to do just that.
Loretta Lynch is equally compromised, of course. But who expected anything better of her?
In the case of James Comey, who had a reputation as a man of probity, there is something classically tragic about his fall.
The roles of Mills 113
The corrupt Department of Justice (is there a federal agency that has not been corrupted by the Obama administration?) allowed Cheryl Mills, who was an accessory to the criminal acts of Hillary Clinton and was herself therefore under investigation, to act as Hillary Clinton’s lawyer when that infamous liar was questioned by the FBI.
The Clinton gangsters are always up to dirty tricks. And the great machinery of state that is supposed to administer the law lets them get away with it time after time.
The questioning of Crooked Hillary by the FBI, it turns out, was a charade. The fix was in from the start. A little pretense of investigation, a couple of hours chatting, and an announcement would then be made that there was nothing she had done that was criminally wrong.
Shannen Coffin writes at the Weekly Standard:
The FBI’s notes confirm that her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, was among the several lawyers representing Clinton in her FBI interview. Mills was hip-deep in the events at the heart of the FBI’s criminal investigation and was herself a material witness who had previously sat for her own interview. Yet not only was she allowed by the Department of Justice to participate as counsel in Clinton’s interview, her communications with Clinton and other material witnesses also were actively protected by the Department of Justice throughout the criminal and civil investigations.
Typically, the DOJ would look askance where a material witness sought to act as a lawyer for the subject of a federal criminal investigation. In Mills’s case, Justice lawyers went out of their way to accommodate this highly unusual dual-hat role. For those who wonder whether Clinton’s FBI interview was all for show, Mills’s participation as a lawyer should be Exhibit A. …
Mills’s dual role as fact witness and lawyer posed considerable obstacles to uncovering the truth about Clinton’s email scheme. In a civil deposition ordered by a federal judge, Mills frequently invoked the attorney-client privilege to avoid answering questions about Clinton’s email setup. When asked about the email setup and in particular conversations that she might have had with Clinton’s IT specialist, Bryan Pagliano — who invoked the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination to avoid testifying — Mills refused to answer, claiming those conversations were privileged attorney-client communication.
Mills’s knowledge of facts learned while serving in a non-legal capacity at the State Department could not possibly be protected by an attorney-client privilege.
To fix that problem, Mills conveniently claimed that she did not know anything about Clinton’s email setup during her tenure at the State Department and only learned of relevant facts in her later capacity as Mrs. Clinton’s personal lawyer. Mills’s implausible claim she was unaware of the nature of Clinton’s email setup during her tenure at State is undermined by documents showing that Mills was deeply involved as chief of staff in resolving questions regarding Clinton’s email use. …
So Mills told one whopper of a lie after another, and everyone involved knew she was lying, and the FBI and the DOJ supported the deception.
Even more specious is Mills’s assertion that certain facts she became aware of as Clinton’s chief of staff — such as why she knew that Clinton had transitioned her email to a clintonemail.com address very early in her tenure — were off-limits because she had “refreshed her recollection” as to those facts during her time representing Clinton in the private sector. Mills could only “refresh” her recollection because she had knowledge of those facts during her tenure as Clinton’s chief of staff, putting those facts well beyond the protection of any privilege.
In fact, she was committing a crime even as she was speaking:
Especially given its criminal investigation into Clinton’s email use, the Department of Justice had every reason to challenge an overbroad assertion of attorney-client privilege by a critical fact witness such as Mills. Indeed, Mills’s very representation of Clinton in the criminal investigation raises question under both legal ethics standards and federal criminal law. 18 U.S.C. 207(a) makes it a crime for any former government employee to communicate with the government on certain matters “in which the person participated personally and substantially while in government”.
But –
Rather than contest Mills’s questionable privilege claims, the Justice Department actually supported them.
One FBI agent made a timid effort to ask a pertinent question:
… When the FBI interviewers broached the question in her May interview of how the email server was set up, Mills and her lawyer walked out. Clinton and her lawyers had demanded that that topic be off-limits to the FBI because of Mills’s more recent role as Clinton’s lawyer.
Clinton demanded. Mills walked out. Because whatever Mills had done before she was Clinton’s lawyer, now she was Clinton’s lawyer so she had attorney-client privilege. So there!
The FBI gave in. And –
The Justice Department apparently agreed. Department lawyers were reportedly taken aback that their FBI colleague had ventured beyond what was anticipated.
The Department of Justice agreement to limit the scope of a criminal interview based on untested claims of attorney-client privilege is, at the very least, unusual. For the more conspiracy minded, it’s downright outrageous.
Yet it pales in comparison to the conduct of a Department of Justice lawyer in Mills’s civil FOIA deposition. On two occasions in that deposition, a lawyer from the Department of Justice’s Civil Division, which represents the State Department in the FOIA cases, invoked Mrs. Clinton’s personal attorney-client privilege to object to questions about Mills’s knowledge of the email setup. When Mills was asked what Brian Pagliano had told her about the setup of the server, a Department of Justice lawyer objected that those conversations had taken place “during the time that [Mills] was representing Secretary Clinton”.
If such a privilege existed, it certainly was not the place of the Department of Justice to invoke it to protect Mills from testifying.
On the whole, the Department of Justice’s accommodating of Cheryl Mills’s dual-hat role as lawyer and witness is mystifying, and it raises significant conflict of interest issues for the department.
On one hand, DOJ was purportedly investigating Clinton, and perhaps even Mills, for the mishandling of government information, including over 2,000 classified emails. On the other, the same Department of Justice was shielding Mills from accounting for her role in the email scandal. Is it any wonder that the FBI and Department of Justice came to the conclusion that they did?
Hillary’s FBI. Hillary’s Department of Justice. They were allowed to put on a little show to bamboozle the stupid public, but there wasn’t the remotest chance that Hillary herself or Cheryl Mills or Bryan Pagliano or any member of the Clinton gang would be brought to trial or found guilty of anything.
The Clinton gang can imperil national security, put the lives of secret agents at risk, plan and prosecute war in Libya, ignore messages from an ambassador and let him be suffocated to death, sell favors to foreign potentates and tycoons in return for vast sums of money paid to a phony charity for the personal enrichment of the Clintons – and the Obama government will protect them from having to answer for any of it.
And what is more, half the voters of America want to put them in charge of the government and give them supreme command of US military power.
In the damned emails of Hillary Clinton 2
… high minded skulduggery and narrow minded illusion.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton considered a secret plan created by her then-advisers to foment unrest among Palestinian citizens and spark protests in order to push the Israeli government back to the negotiating table, according to emails released as part of the investigation into the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s private email server.
In a Dec, 18, 2011, email, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering suggested that Clinton consider a plan to restart then-stalled peace negotiations by kickstarting Palestinian demonstrations against Israel.
Pickering described the effort as a potential “game changer in the region”, recommending that the United States undertake a clandestine campaign to generate unrest. …
“What will change the situation is a major effort to use non-violent protests and demonstrations to put peace back in the center of people’s aspirations as well as their thoughts, and use that to influence the political leadership,” Pickering wrote.
“This is far from a sure thing, but far, in my humble view, from hopeless,” he continued. “Women can and ought to be at the center of these demonstrations. Many men and others will denigrate the idea. I don’t and I don’t think that was your message.”
Palestinian women, he noted, are less likely than men to resort to violence.
“It must be all and only women. Why? On the Palestinian side the male culture is to use force,” Pickering wrote, comparing the effort to the protests in Egypt that deposed former leader Hosni Mubarak. “Palestinian men will not for long patiently demonstrate — they will be inclined over time and much too soon to be frustrated and use force. Their male culture comes close to requiring it.”
So Palestinian men, in the “humble” view of this presumptuous man, cannot be expected to demonstrate non-violently because “much too soon” they will use force. Indeed, “their male culture comes close to requiring it”.
And yet he thinks it perfectly possible to put “peace back in the center” of their “aspirations”?
They have shown no sign of wanting peace for 68 years, but if the women can be stirred up to protest against something-or-other, suddenly peace will pop into their minds?
Pickering noted that the administration must keep its role in the demonstration a secret, so as not to aggravate ties with Israel.
And he thought Mossad would never find out that the Obama administration was once again up to its dirty tricks in the land (like its efforts to influence elections, which were not kept secret for long)?
“Most of all the United States, in my view, cannot be seen to have stimulated, encouraged or be the power behind it for reasons you will understand better than anyone,” he wrote, suggesting that the government enlist liberal non-profit groups in Israel. “I believe third parties and a number of NGOs [non-government organizations] on both sides would help.”
Cannot be seen to be doing it, but do it without compunction. Because – you see, Hillary, who will understand this better than anyone – it is for the great good of reviving a non-existent “peace process”, and such high-minded goodness can be allowed to resort to low-down duplicity and subterfuge.
To the Left, the ends always justify the means, though the ends may be unrealistic, and the means predictably foul.
As relations with Israel remained tense, another Clinton confidant, Anne Marie Slaughter, sent a staff-wide email to Clinton staffers recommending that they undertake a “Pledge for Palestine” campaign aimed at convincing US millionaires and billionaires to donate significant portions of their wealth to the Palestinian cause.
The effort, Slaughter wrote in the September 2010 email, could help shame Israel.
“Shame Israel”. There’s a high minded plan.
“Such a campaign among billionaires/multi-millionaires around the world would reflect a strong vote of confidence in the building of a Palestinian state and could offset the ending of the moratorium for Palestinians,” Slaughter wrote. “There would also be a certain shaming effect re Israelis, who would be building settlements in the face of a pledge for peace.”
A pledge, that is, on the part of “millionaires and billionaires” around the world, not the Palestinians.
Slaughter, who described the effort as a “crazy idea”, suggested tapping the “Clinton fundraising network” in order to raise the money needed.
“With even 30 calls to the right people in the Clinton fundraising network it should be possible to generate a substantial enough amount quickly enough to capture the public imagination,” she wrote in the email, which was sent to top Clinton staffers, including Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.
Note the assumption that “the public imagination” is readily stirred for the Palestinians. These plotters round Hillary Clinton, like the whole of the Obama administration, seem to have been marvelously insulated from public opinion.
We have to assume that either these plots were not put into effect, or they were tried and failed. And we can see why Hillary, having such advisers and given such advice on top of being the ideologically twisted being that she is, failed totally as Secretary of State to achieve anything good for her country, but did a great deal of continuing harm.