Ethics?

ABC News is reporting today that all sales of Hunter Biden’s artwork will be handled through an art gallery that will set prices independently and keep the identities of buyers confidential, including from the president and administration officials. Yeah, right.

The article reports:

White House officials were involved in creating the arrangement, according to the source, as a way to avoid any suggestion of preferential treatment or conflict of interest.

According to the Washington Post, which first reported the story, Berges has said Hunter Biden’s artwork could be priced anywhere from $75,000 to $500,000.

But ethics experts are raising concerns about the agreement.

“This arrangement is problematic. The best disinfectant, in this case, would have been to have a publicly open process. The public could see who the purchasers are, and then it would be incumbent upon the Bidens to bear the burden of saying why it isn’t a conflict,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics.

“The White House went the absolute opposite way they should have gone. The only people, in the end, who won’t know who the buyers are is the public. By going the shadow direction, this raises more questions than answers,” she said.

Based on the past history of Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family, could we have expected anything less? This is almost as good as the finances of the Clinton Foundation. I am sure that it was simply an incredible coincidence that when Hillary Clinton no longer had power and influence in Washington, the donations to the Clinton Foundation dried up. Likewise, I suspect that the demand for Hunter Biden’s artwork will shrink drastically when Joe Biden is no longer President.

Judicial Watch Uncovers More Lying Under Oath

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article about the interview notes of the FBI’s interview with Hillary Clinton’s attorney Heather Samuelson. Those notes have been uncovered due to the efforts of Judicial Watch. There are some problems with the facts as stated by Ms. Samuelson.

The article reports:

In the interview Samuelson states to the FBI’s Peter Strzok that she was assigned the duty of reviewing Hillary’s emails and in doing so, Samuelson reviewed the emails on her laptop both at her apartment and in Cheryl Mills’ office.

…Samuelson was assigned the task of obtaining Hillary’s emails for her tenure as Obama’s Secretary of State. After making a request for Hillary’s emails from Platte River Networks (PRN), the firm that administered Hillary’s personal email system, Samuelson reviewed them and noticed that some of Hillary’s emails were missing.

Samuelson stated that she believed that Hillary’s emails that were missing for the period between January 2009 through March 2009 must have not been backed up.

The article then notes that the government email system is such that there is no way that emails from a Secretary of State would not have been backed up.

The story continues:

Next Samuelson makes another shocking remark.  She states that after Clinton left the State Department she started using another domain for her emails (@hrcoffice.com).  But she states that no old emails were transferred from the clintonemail.com domain to the new domain.  She also stated that she didn’t know how Clinton or her close assistant Huma Abedin obtained her old emails once the new domain was established.

The article states the problem with Ms. Samuelson’s statement:

And here is where Samuelson lays an egg!  Samuelson noticed during her review that Hillary’s emails were displayed as hrod17@clintonemail.com,  but this address was not even created until after Hillary was Secretary of State. 

The article notes:

You can’t send emails from an account that is not created or in place!

The only reasonable explanations for the receipt of emails from a domain that was not yet in place is, 1)  the source name in the emails had been doctored and updated to an email account not yet in service, or 2) a utility was used to copy the emails in bulk from one account to another and in the process change some of the fields including the original email source.

Why would Hillary do this?  The only explanation that makes sense is that the Hillary team was trying to eliminate or strip out all the classified markings in her emails, and in the process, they stripped out the old email addresses, and since that account didn’t exist anymore, their process added the new address.

To put it plainly – Hillary attempted to doctor (i.e. change) her emails for some reason and in so doing she inadvertently changed her email address.

Clearly if Hillary was caught editing her emails by the FBI, then former FBI Director James Comey knew very well that Hillary intended to break the law!  Three years ago Jim Comey lied to America!

Please follow the link to read the entire article. This scandal is complicated because of the technical aspects involved. The bottom line is simple–Hillary Clinton set up a secret server in order that many of her emails would not become public. We have a very limited idea of what is in those missing emails.

In October 2016, Charles Krauthammer (who died in 2018) stated:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: This brings us back full circle to the beginning. The question was originally: Why did she have the private server? She said convenience, obviously that was ridiculous…

It was obvious she was hiding something.

And think about it, she set it up in 2009, before becoming Secretary of State. So, she anticipated having exchanges that she would not want anyone to see. So, we’ve been asking ourselves on this set for a year almost, what exactly didn’t she want people to see?

Well, now we know.

And as we speculated, the most plausible explanation was the rank corruption of the Clinton Foundation, and its corrupt — I don’t know if it’s illegal, but corrupt relationship with the State Department.

And her only defense as we saw earlier– the Democrats are saying, well, there was nothing she did… that was corrupted by donations. You can believe that if you want, but there’s a reason that people give donations in large amounts, and that’s to influence the outcome of decisions. So, this — we are getting unfolding to us, exactly what she anticipated having to hide, and it is really dirty business.

He was obviously ahead of his time in his thinking.

The Deep State Continues To Fight

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article yesterday with the following headline, “Judicial Watch Forced to Delay Clinton Email Deposition After DOJ and State Dept Defy Court-Ordered Deadline.”

Judicial Watch is a nonpartisan group that was founded in 1994. They have held both Republican and Democrat politicians accountable through the Freedom of Information Act, which was passed in 1966 and went into effect in 1967.

The article at The Gateway Pundit reports:

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch was scheduled to take the deposition of John Hackett, a State Department records official “immediately responsible for responding to requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act” on Friday, April 5th.

The government watchdog group was forced to delay its Clinton email deposition because the Deep State DOJ and Department of State failed to comply with a deadline.

“Turns out we had to delay today’s Clinton email deposition because the State and Justice Departments failed to comply with the court-ordered deadline for needed documents,” JW president Tom Fitton said in a tweet Friday evening.

The article concludes:

If not for Judicial Watch, Americans wouldn’t even know about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server which she set up to avoid FOIA oversight of her Clinton Foundation pay-to-play while she was the head of the Department of State.

Judicial Watch blew the story wide open and their FOIA lawsuits also revealed Hillary Clinton was sending classified information over her private server.

A name of a clandestine CIA agent was even found in a tranche of emails uncovered by Judicial Watch — classified Hillary emails were found on pervert Anthony Weiner’s laptop after his wife, Huma Abedin, who happened to be Clinton’s aide, appeared to sync Hillary’s emails to her computers at home.

This is the second time in recent days the DOJ and State Department tried to derail Judicial Watch’s scheduled deposition of Obama-era-Clinton aides.

A couple weeks ago, Obama’s speech writer-turned-Iran-echo-chamber Ben Rhodes defied a court order to provide written answers, under oath to Judicial Watch and the State Department and Justice Department objected to Judicial Watch who sought an in-person interview with Mr. Rhodes.

The deep state is alive and well and continuing its attempt to preserve its power until President Trump is out of office.

Anatomy Of A Smear

Yesterday John Solomon posted an article at The Hill that details the role the Clinton campaign played in creating a situation where a Special Counsel needed to be appointed. It is a sobering tale of how a group of people can manipulate the government for nefarious purposes.

The article reports:

When at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s what Hillary Clinton’s machine did in 2016, eventually getting the FBI to bite on an uncorroborated narrative that Donald Trump and Russia were trying to hijack the presidential election.

Between July and October 2016, Clinton-connected lawyers, emissaries and apologists made more than a half-dozen overtures to U.S. officials, each tapping a political connection to get suspect evidence into FBI counterintelligence agents’ hands, according to internal documents and testimonies I reviewed and interviews I conducted.

In each situation, the overture was uninvited. And as the election drew closer, the point of contact moved higher up the FBI chain.

It was, as one of my own FBI sources called it, a “classic case of information saturation” designed to inject political opposition research into a counterintelligence machinery that should have suspected a political dirty trick was underway.

Ex-FBI general counsel James Baker, one of the more senior bureau executives to be targeted, gave a memorable answer when congressional investigators asked how attorney Michael Sussmann from the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, came to personally deliver him dirt on Trump.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is further proof that the government wittingly or unwittingly put its thumb on the scale during the 2016 election cycle. Thank God their efforts did not work. However, every person who willingly used the power of their government position to undermine President Trump needs to be immediately fired. Most of them have been, but I suspect there are still people in our government who are working against the President and against the American people.

The article describes an escalation of the efforts to get the FBI to respond to the political opposition research of the Clinton campaign:

But the bureau apparently did not initially embrace Steele’s research, and no immediate action was taken, according to congressional investigators who have been briefed.

That’s when the escalation began.

During a trip to Washington later that month, Steele reached out to two political contacts with the credentials to influence the FBI.

Then-senior State Department official Jonathan Winer, who worked for then-Secretary John Kerry, wrote that Steele first approached him in the summer with his Trump research and then met again with him in September. Winer consulted his boss, Assistant Secretary for Eurasia Affairs Victoria Nuland, who said she first learned of Steele’s allegations in late July and urged Winer to send it to the FBI.

(If you need further intrigue, Winer worked from 2008 to 2013 for the lobbying and public relations firm APCO Worldwide, the same firm that was a contractor for both the Clinton Global Initiative and Russia’s main nuclear fuel company that won big decisions from the Obama administration.)

When the State Department office that oversees Russian affairs sends something to the FBI, agents take note.

But Steele was hardly done. He reached out to his longtime Justice Department contact, Bruce Ohr, then a deputy to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Steele had breakfast July 30, 2016, with Ohr and his wife, Nellie, to discuss the Russia-Trump dirt.

(To thicken the plot, you should know that Nellie Ohr was a Russia expert working at the time for the same Fusion GPS firm that hired Steele and was hired by the Clinton campaign through Sussmann’s Perkins Coie.)

Bruce Ohr immediately took Steele’s dirt on July 31, 2016, to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

When the deputy attorney general’s office contacts the FBI, things happen. And, soon, Ohr was connected to the agents running the new Russia probe.

Around the same time, Australia’s ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, reached out to U.S. officials. Like so many characters in this narrative, Downer had his own connection to the Clintons: He secured a $25 million donation from Australia’s government to the Clinton Foundation in the early 2000s.

Downer claims WikiLeaks’s release of hacked Clinton emails that month caused him to remember a conversation in May, in a London tavern, with a Trump adviser named George Papadopoulos. So he reported it to the FBI.

The Clintons had been involved in government long enough to know how to set the wheels in motion to undermine Candidate Trump and later President Trump. It is a shame they didn’t direct their focus to something more constructive.

The Only People Actually Conducting A Real Investigation Of Federal Misconduct Are Judicial Watch

Yesterday The Washington Examiner posted an article about a recent Freedom of Information Act Request filed by Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch is an impartial government watchdog agency–they have gone after Clintons, Bushes, Obamas, etc.

The article reports:

A conservative watchdog group announced Friday it had filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking communications records that relate the FBI’s investigation into whether Hillary and Bill Clinton’s charity organization participated in pay-to-play schemes or other improper behavior with the U.S. government.

The latest lawsuit by Judicial Watch related to the Clintons, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the FBI denied their FOIA request and appeal this fall, targets the offices of prominent Obama-era officials, including former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former FBI Director James Comey, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Specifically, Judicial Watch demands the DOJ do a search, and “demonstrate that it employed search methods reasonably likely to lead to the discovery,” for “[a]ll records of communication, including but not limited to e-mails (whether sent or received on .gov or non-.gov e-mail accounts), text messages, or instant chats, sent between officials in the offices of the FBI Director, Deputy Director and General Counsel on the one hand, and officials in the offices of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General and or Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General on the other hand, regarding the closure or possible closure of an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.”

The article concludes:

The watchdog also singled out the DOJ inspector general’s report released in April in which McCabe described a “very dramatic” call he had with another high-level department official about the handling of the Clinton Foundation probe. That same inspector general’s report, which led to McCabe’s firing, found McCabe ” lacked candor” on four separate occasions, including three times while under oath, in connection with the disclosure to the Wall Street Journal leak to push back on a report about large donations McCabe’s wife received from Democrats during her bid for the Virginia state Senate — a leak that effectively confirmed the existence of the Clinton Foundation probe.

“The record shows the Obama Justice Department suppressed a public corruption investigation into the Clinton Foundation,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement. “It’s time for the DOJ to stop shielding the Clintons and produce records on this miscarriage of justice.”

It may be that the Clintons are totally innocent of any wrongdoing. However, much of their past behavior definitely calls their honesty into question.

This Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone

On Friday, Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial about the Clinton Foundation. The editorial deals with the drop in donations to the Foundation after Hillary Clinton lost her bid for the Presidency.

The editorial reports:

Controversy over the foundation erupted after Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book — “Clinton Cash” — suggested that the foundation served as a way for donors to curry favor with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And, indeed, the multitude of connections that slowly turned out became hard to dismiss as coincidental. There was the fact that 85 of the 154 private interests who’d met with Clinton during her tenure at state were Clinton Foundation donors.

Emails turned up showing how the foundation intervened to arrange a meeting between Clinton and the Crown Prince of Bahrain, a country that had been a major foundation donor. A Chicago commodities trader who donated $100,000 to the foundation got a top job on a State Department arms control panel, despite having no experience in the area. On and on it went.

The editorial concludes:

But the most glaring indictment of the Clinton Foundation came from what happened last year, after Hillary Clinton lost the election — and effectively ended her political career.

First, the Clinton’s almost immediately shuttered the Clinton Global Initiative and laid off 22 employees.

Now, fresh financial documents show that contributions and grants to the Clinton Foundation plunged since Hillary lost her election bid. They dropped from $216 million in 2016 to just $26.5 million in 2017 — a stunning 88% fall. Throughout Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, the foundation pulled in an average of $254 million a year. (See chart below for a timeline.)

If the Clinton Foundation was as good as defenders claimed, why did all its big-time donors suddenly lose interest? The only reasonable explanation is that donors weren’t interested in what the foundation supposedly did for humanity. They were interested in the political favors they knew their money would buy.

In April 2015, The New York Post reported:

The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.

The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.

On its 2013 tax forms, the most recent available, the foundation claimed it spent $30 million on payroll and employee benefits; $8.7 million in rent and office expenses; $9.2 million on “conferences, conventions and meetings”; $8 million on fundraising; and nearly $8.5 million on travel. None of the Clintons is on the payroll, but they do enjoy first-class flights paid for by the foundation.

In all, the group reported $84.6 million in “functional expenses” on its 2013 tax return and had more than $64 million left over — money the organization has said represents pledges rather than actual cash on hand.

Some of the tens of millions in administrative costs finance more than 2,000 employees, including aid workers and health professionals around the world.

But that’s still far below the 75 percent rate of spending that nonprofit experts say a good charity should spend on its mission.

At one time there was an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. I have no idea whether or not it is ongoing. However, just looking at the amount of money spent on overhead and the rapid drop in donations when Hillary was not elected President, I think there are some obvious conclusions that anyone paying attention can draw about the Foundation.

Strange People In Stranger Places

Yesterday LifeZette posted an article about alleged Russian spy Maria Butina.

The article reports:

Butina has been accused of working with a top Russian official and two unidentified U.S. citizens to infiltrate a pro-gun rights organization in the U.S., along with attempting to influence America’s foreign policy toward Russia, as CNBC.com and others reported.

This is all part of the efforts to accuse President Trump of colluding with the Russians. However, there is a problem with those who are attempting to use this accusation against President Trump.

The article reports:

Alleged Russian spy Maria Butina was involved in high-level meetings with two senior U.S. officials in the Obama administration and a Russian official before the 2016 election, according to multiple sources and a Washington, D.C., think tank, as The Daily Wire and other outlets reported.

The meetings — “disclosed by several people familiar” with them, noted Reuters, and also by a report prepared by the think tank that arranged the meetings — involved Stanley Fischer, then Federal Reserve vice chairman, and Nathan Sheets, who was then the Treasury undersecretary for international affairs.

Butina reportedly came into the U.S. in April 2015 with then-Russian Central Bank Deputy Governor Alexander Torshin to participate in “separate meetings with Fischer and Sheets, to discuss U.S.- Russian economic relations during Democratic former President Barack Obama’s administration.”

The think tank involved in the meetings is the Central for the National Interest (CNI), a group that advocates for improved U.S.- Russia relations, as CBS reported.

Whoops.

So let’s back up a bit and see what we actually know. Russia was a major player in getting the Iran deal put together and approved by European countries. Russia had the ability to make or break that deal. President Obama desperately wanted that deal (for reasons that will be debated for a long time–see Ben Rhodes statements in The New York Times here). Because of his desire to keep Russia on his side regarding the Iran deal (and because he was sure Hillary Clinton would be elected) President Obama ordered a stand down on the investigation into Russian cyberattacks on the 2016 election (story here). We also know that the Russian cyberattacks did not impact the 2016 election. Logically, Clinton would have been the Russian’s preferred candidate–they had enough information from her private server to control her totally–I am sure they have all the dirt on the Clinton Foundation and the money that flowed in and out of the Foundation. So why was President Obama meeting with this supposed Russian spy? It could be totally innocent–he might have had no idea who she really was or what she was up to. However, the efforts to connect her to the Trump campaign after President Obama met with her are sort of ridiculous to anyone who is paying attention.

This Sums Up The Past Two Or Three Years

On Friday, a website called American Greatness posted an article about the abuses and misdeeds of the ruling class in Washington in recent years.

The article has a good summary of where we have been:

Bureaucratic Collusion
Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and their collaborators in the FBI, Department of Justice, and CIA did anything but professional law enforcement. Their contempt for the rule of law is plain. In reality, they appear to have colluded to:

The article concludes:

Andrew McCarthy sums it up: “…we have collusion all right: the executive branch’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus placed by the Obama administration in the service of the Clinton campaign. To find that, you don’t need to dig. You just need to open your eyes . . . After nearly two years with no corroboration, a fair-minded commentariat would . . . be asking why the FBI and Justice Department presented unverified information to a federal court in order to spy on Americans.”

A rogue ruling class has successfully undermined the constitutional foundation of America, a crime far worse than Watergate. They remain a fundamental threat to our civil liberties.

The Inspector General’s report is supposed to come out May 8. It will be interesting to see how much of it is made public. There is enough information out there already to convince most Americans that certain parts of their government are corrupt. If that corruption is not dealt with and those responsible held accountable, then America will have lost the concept of equal justice under the law.

Evidently The Swamp Has Been Busy For A While

Investor’s Business Daily posted an article today detailing some of the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in recent years. Evidently the ‘deep state’ has been busy for a while.

The article deals with the efforts to protect Hillary Clinton from the consequences of having a private email server and also notes the efforts to derail an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

The article reports:

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe may be the worst off. In addition to possible charges for lying under oath for denying that he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal (in large part dfto answer swirling rumors in the journalistic community), it’s alleged that he ordered FBI agents working on the Clinton Foundation investigation to stand down.

Now, evidence suggests he told the FBI’s Washington field office to also “stand down” from its investigation of Clinton’s private-email server. That investigation followed a New York Times piece that appeared in 2015, detailing Hillary Clinton’s possible illegal use of an unsecured, home-brew email server for her official business as secretary of state. It appears to be a clear violation of the law.

“Multiple former FBI officials, along with a Congressional official, say that while there may have been internal squabbling over the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation at the time, there was allegedly another ‘stand-down’ order by McCabe regarding the opening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of her private email for official government business,” wrote independent journalist Sarah Carter.

On August 26, 2016, Fox News posted the following quote from Charles Krauthammer:

Charles Krauthammer said that after a year of speculation and diversion, the issue of what Hillary Clinton’s email scandal was about is finally clear.

“The issue we’ve always asked ourselves here is, why was she hiding this in the first place? Why did she have a private server? Obviously, she was concealing; what was she concealing?”

He said that the “most obvious possible answer” was the Clinton Foundation.

We need Charles to get well soon–we miss his insight. It is becoming obvious that the Clinton Foundation was a charity that simply enriched the Clintons and the donations to the Foundation influenced American foreign policy. The American people were victims of the pay-for-play, but the Haitian people were victims of the corruption. It is time that the truth come out and the appropriate people bear the consequences of that truth.

The article at Investor’s Business Daily concludes:

Ironic, isn’t it, that the real “collusion” all along seems to be among those who are themselves investigating Trump.

Fortunately, the Justice Department‘s Inspector General Michael Horowitz has a team of investigators looking into not only McCabe’s lies, but also how the FBI conducted itself in the Clinton email server scandal. Horowitz’ group already issued a report on McCabe, and referred his case for possible prosecution. Next up: In May, it’s expected Horowitz will release a report on Clinton’s email server use.

Increasingly, the supposed case of “Trump-Russia collusion” is morphing into a case of “FBI-Justice Department-Clinton collusion.” With the many elements finally coming together just as the mid-term congressional elections get underway, we could be in for a bumpy ride this summer.

Be assured that if the Democrats win Congress in November, all investigations into wrongdoing by the Department of Justice and FBI will end, and no one will be held accountable for their corruption. That is a scary thought. At that point the deep state will simply become deeper, and equal justice under the law will be permanently lost in America.

More Fallout From The Inspector General’s Report

Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article about information included in the Inspector General‘s report.

The article reports:

Tucked inside the inspector general’s report on former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was the story of an August 2016 phone call from a high-ranking Justice Department official who Mr. McCabethought was trying to shut down the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clintonwas running for president.

The official was “very pissed off” at the FBI, the report says, and demanded to know why the FBI was still pursuing the Clinton Foundation when the Justice Department considered the case dormant.

Former FBI officials said the fact that a call was made is even more stunning than its content.

 James Wedick, who conducted corruption investigations at the bureau, said he never fielded a call from the Justice Department about any of his cases during 35 years there. He said it suggested interference.

“It is bizarre — and that word can’t be used enough — to have the Justice Department call the FBI’s deputy director and try to influence the outcome of an active corruption investigation,” he said. “They can have some input, but they shouldn’t be operationally in control like it appears they were from this call.”

Although the inspector general’s report did not identify the caller, former FBI and Justice Departmentofficials said it was Matthew Axelrod, who was the principal associate deputy attorney general — the title the IG report did use.

The article continues with some very curious events surrounding the investigation into the Clinton Foundation. During the time of the investigation, McCabe’s wife was running for office in Virginia and received a $700,000 donation from an organization linked to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of the Clintons.

The article concludes:

Those familiar with Justice Department operations said they don’t believe the principal associate deputy attorney general would have made the McCabe call without consulting with his supervisor, which would have been Ms. Yates.

“In my experience these calls are rarely made in a vacuum,” said Bradley Schlozman, who worked as counsel to the PADAG during the Bush administration. “The notion that the principle deputy would have made such a decision and issued a directive without the knowledge and consent of the deputy attorney general is highly unlikely.”

Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official who is now a legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the proper chain of command for the Justice Department to follow up on an investigation would involve the head of the Criminal Division, not the PADAG, calling the FBI.

“There is no way I would have ever called the FBI on my own unless I raised concerns with my boss or my boss told me to do so,” he said. “I have a hard time believing this guy did this without consulting with Sally Yates unless he was a complete lone ranger and off the reservation.”

The inspector general is examining the way the FBI and Justice Department handled investigations into Mrs. Clinton during the election.

The report on Mr. McCabe was a separate matter, stemming from questions about a media leak he made to try to protect his reputation, the inspector general said.

There is another Inspector General’s report due out shortly. It is my hope that the corruption that is attached to the Clintons and possibly others high up in our government will be revealed and dealt with.

Some Of The Fallout From The Inspector General’s Report Has Begun

Andrew McCarthy posted an article at National Review reporting that the Justice Department’s inspector general has referred Andrew McCabe to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., for a possible false-statements prosecution. Andrew McCarthy points out that the important fact here is not that Andrew McCabe lied, but what he lied about. Andrew McCabe leaked a conversation in which the Obama Justice Department pressured the FBI to stand down on the Clinton Foundation investigation. He later lied about leaking the information.

The article reports:

The report concludes that the former deputy director “lacked candor,” the standard for internal discipline at the FBI, from which McCabe was fired. It is a charge similar to those spelled out in the federal penal code’s false-statements and perjury laws. Specifically, the report cites four instances of lack of candor; more comprehensively, McCabe is depicted as an insidious operator.

About two weeks before Election Day 2016, the then–deputy director was stung by a Wall Street Journal story that questioned his fitness to lead an investigation of Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ nominee. McCabe’s wife had received $675,000 in donations from a political action committee controlled by the Clintons’ notorious confidant, Virginia’s then–governor Terry McAuliffe — an eye-popping amount for a state senate campaign (which Mrs. McCabe lost). It was perfectly reasonable to question McCabe’s objectivity: The justice system’s integrity hinges on the perception, as well as the reality, of impartiality.

The reporter on the story, Devlin Barrett (then with the Journal, now at the Washington Post), soon had questions for the Bureau for a follow-up he was working on: Back in July, according to Barrett’s sources, McCabe had instructed agents to refrain from making overt moves that could alert the public that Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ nominee, was yet again on the FBI’s radar — this time, owing to a probe of the Clinton Foundation.

The article concludes:

The Obama Justice Department “guidance” about the Clinton Foundation probe reminds us of their approach to the Clinton emails caper — call it a “matter” not an investigation; do not use the grand jury; instead of subpoenas, try saying “pretty please” to obtain evidence; do not ask the co-conspirators hard questions because they’re lawyers so that might infringe attorney–client privilege; let the witnesses sit in on each other’s interviews; let the suspects represent each other as lawyers; if someone lies, ignore it; if someone incriminates himself, give him immunity; have the attorney general meet with the main subject’s former-president husband on the tarmac a few days before dropping the whole thing; oh, and don’t forget to write up the exoneration statement months before key witnesses — including the main subject — are interviewed. 

With the Clintons, though, enough is never enough. Obama Justice Department officials, figuring they were only a few days from succeeding in their quest to become Clinton Justice Department officials, decided to try to disappear the Clinton Foundation investigation, too. (The underline is mine.)

After nearly two years of digging, there is still no proof of Trump-campaign collusion in Russian election-meddling. But we have collusion all right: the executive branch’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus placed by the Obama administration in the service of the Clinton campaign. To find that, you don’t need to dig. You just need to open your eyes.

The picture here is becoming very clear–Hillary was going to be elected, and all criminal investigations regarding the Clintons were going to disappear. We were very close to becoming a country where justice was not blind–it was well-funded and biased. Hopefully we can get some of the swamp drained in a reasonable amount of time. It took us a long time to get here–it is going to take a while to reinstate equal justice under the law.

 

The Questions I Haven’t Heard The Media Ask

Scott Johnson at Power Line posted an article today that included a portion of a Wall Street Journal article by Kimberley Strassel. The article at The Wall Street Journal is behind the subscriber wall, so I am not linking to it.

Kimberley Strassel listed a number of questions she would like to hear James Comey answer.

Power Line listed six of these questions:

  • You admit the Christopher Steele dossier was still “unverified” when the FBI used it as the basis of a surveillance warrant against Carter Page. Please explain. Also explain the decision to withhold from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the dossier was financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
  • You say you knew the dossier was funded by a “Democrat-aligned” group but that you “never knew” which one. Why not? Didn’t the FBI have a duty to find out?
  • Please explain the extraordinary accommodations the FBI provided Team Clinton during the email investigation. Why was Cheryl Mills —whose emails suggest she had early knowledge of the irregular server as Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff—allowed to claim attorney-client privilege and represent Mrs. Clinton at her interview? Why did that interview happen only at the end? Especially since you say any case hung entirely on her “intent”?
  • You’ve surely now read the texts between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. That happened on your watch. Is this appropriate FBI behavior? Should we believe such behavior is limited to them? In addition to overt political bias, the texts prove the FBI took politics into account—worrying, for instance, about how much manpower to put into investigating the woman who could be our “next president.” Why should the public have any faith in the integrity of the Clinton or Trump investigation?
  • The texts ridicule former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s decision to step aside from the Clinton probe, “since she knows no charges will be brought.” This was before the FBI even interviewed Mrs. Clinton. And it contradicts your claim at the start of your July 2016 press conference that no one at the Justice Department knew what you were about to say. Please explain.
  • You dismiss Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo as nothing but a “pretext” to fire you. Yet you don’t address its claims. Please point to the internal policies or regulations that gave you the authority to announce that Mrs. Clinton was being cleared and why. Please provide any examples of similar announcements by FBI directors. Please address the criticisms of the prior attorneys general and deputy attorneys general from both parties cited in the Rosenstein memo.

Works for me.

 

This Is The Beginning

Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about the Inspector General‘s report that was released Friday. There are more Inspector General’s reports due out in the very near future. I would like to note that one theory on why we have Special Prosecutor Mueller is to distract from all the corruption that went on in the upper levels of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ) during the Obama Administration. The activities continued with the understanding that Hillary Clinton would be elected President, and no one would ever know about them. Unfortunately, if the Democrats succeed in taking control of Congress in November, these activities will be reburied (probably never to surface again). The time to drain the swamp is limited, and it may come to an end in November.

The article lists the highlights of the report:

  • The Department of Justice Inspector General released a report Friday claiming “lack of candor” by former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe
  • The report also details Justice Department’s influence to close a multi-state investigation into the Clinton Foundation
  • The IG claims McCabe leaked DOJ’s pressure to end the Clinton investigation to battle claims he was partial to the Clintons

The article explains the attempted shutdown of the investigation into the Clinton Foundation:

The inspector general (IG) confirmed in its long-awaited report released Friday that in 2016 the FBI had ongoing field investigations of the Clinton Foundation in New York, Los Angeles, Little Rock, Arkansas and Washington, D.C. The multi-city investigation was launched when agents found “suspicious activity” between a foreign donor and Clinton Foundation activity in the Los Angeles area, as TheDCNF reported in August 2016.

The report, authored by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, an Obama appointee, chronicles the Justice Department’s effort to to shut down the FBI’s investigation on Aug. 12, 2016. The pressure allegedly came in the form of a phone call to McCabe from a Justice Department principal associate deputy attorney general (PADAG) who pressed McCabe on the continuing investigation. The IG did not identify which PADAG made the call.

It was important the pressure for ending the investigation was issued in a phone call and not in a written document, former FBI assistant Director Ronald Hosko told TheDCNF.

“They did it in a phone call, which is maybe a little more difficult to serve up as evidence,” he told TheDCNF in an interview. Hosko said that by giving a verbal order, the Justice Department “chose not to document it by design.”

Other items of note detailed in the article:

McCabe was worried about an Oct. 23, 2016 Wall Street Journal article, which appeared to have damaged his reputation for impartiality because the journalist, Devlin Barrett, reported McCabe’s wife received a campaign donation of nearly a half million dollars from Clinton friend and political ally Terry McAuliffe for her run for a Virginia state seat.

The article concludes:

McCabe’s decision to leak the information about the FBI’s probe of the foundation was not an attempt to be open and transparent, but to salvage his own reputation, according to the IG report.

“Had McCabe’s primary concern actually been to reassure the public that the FBI was pursuing the CF Investigation despite the anonymous claims in the article, the way that the FBI and the Department would usually accomplish that goal is through a public statement reassuring the public that the FBI is investigating the matter,” the IG wrote. The IG stated his leak was “directed primarily at enhancing McCabe’s reputation at the expense of PADAG.”

“McCabe’s disclosure was an attempt to make himself look good by making senior department leadership, specifically the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, look bad,” the IG claimed.

The question is how much additional pressure did the Obama administration apply upon the FBI to end its investigation of the Clinton Foundation. The IG’s report is silent on this point.

The IG is expected to shortly release other reports about potential FBI misconduct.

Stay tuned–there is much more to come.

 

News From The Coming Week

Clarice Feldman posted an article at The American Thinker today highlighting things that will be in the news in the coming week. That’s not as much of a challenge as it sounds as many of these stories were breaking late Friday and early Saturday.

The first story deals with the recent budget fiasco.

The article reports:

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, unhampered because of the filibuster rule, which allows them to block any budget not supported by a Senate supermajority of 60, and aware of the desperate need of our military for funding, publicly rejoiced that they were able to force through Congress a ridiculously extravagant budget.  Fiscal conservatives were furious, but the president had little choice but to sign the bill into law.  “He who laughs last laughs best” is the saying, and in this case, there may be no joy in Demville.  James Freeman at the Wall Street Journal explains:

The political left is getting nervous because a virtuous and lawful reduction in federal spending is suddenly looking much more likely.  This column is told that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.) is now on board.

Specifically, Mr. Ryan likes the idea of paring back the huge spending hikes in the recently enacted budget bill.  While the budget required 60 votes in the Senate and therefore Democratic support, a “rescission” bill to repeal the spending increases needs only a simple majority in each house.

If the Republicans plan to remain in the majority, they have no choice but to cut this budget. Otherwise the conservative wing of the party will happily vote them out of office for reneging on every promise they made while running for office.

The second story to watch for will be the beginning of criminally prosecuting illegal aliens as they cross the border. Crossing the border is no longer going to be taken lightly.

The third story is the end of the standoff between Congress and the FBI and DOJ.

The article reports:

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse broke the welcome news early Saturday morning.

Until today the only people allowed to review the full Title-1 FISA application were Trey Gowdy, Adam Schiff, Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Rep John Ratcliffe.

In an interesting development, the Department of Justice has responded to HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes notifying him the DOJ will allow all members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees full access to review the unredacted FBI/DOJ FISA application used to gain a Title-1 surveillance warrant against U.S. citizen Carter Page.

According to CNN: ‘Separately, Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior said the department on Monday will supplement its document production to the House Judiciary Committee by producing another 1,000 pages of materials in response to a subpoena issued by committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte.’

This will probably lead to the declassification of the FISA applications. That will probably tell us all we need to know about the Russian collusion investigation and its roots.

The final news article for the coming week will be information about the investigation of the Clinton Foundation.

The article reports:

The story of the Clintons’ misuse of charity solicitation, reporting, and accounting laws begins in 1997 and continues on past Clinton’s term as president where people familiar to us in the present DOJ-FBI investigations failed to prosecute the Clintons for obvious charity fraud and violation of federal and state law on charitable solicitations.  The most recent investigation of the Clinton foundation took place under Rod Rosenstein, then U.S. attorney for Baltimore.  He utterly flubbed the task, as Ortel (Charles Ortel, a retired investment banker) notes.

…At the moment, some state attorneys general are investigating Clinton foundation fraud and illegality.  So are some foreign governments whose laws were violated by the foundation.  While in the U.S. opportunities to prosecute longstanding frauds may be barred by the passage of time and the statute of limitations, this latest Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund transaction seems not to be.  If I were to speculate, I’d suggest that it is not unlikely (now that the Clintons are fairly politically neutered) that whistleblowers inside the foundation, the donors’ offices, and the government – particularly the IRS – may come forward, at long last, to expose the frauds which Rosenstein, Mueller, and Comey seem to have lacked the integrity and guts to do.

This week may be the week that some of the swamp gets drained.t

If You Ever Wondered What The Problem Was With Higher Education, This Might Be Your Answer

On Thursday, The Hill reported that on May 25th the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University was going to present Hillary Clinton an award that recognizes individuals who have had a “transformative impact” on society. I assume the award may be conditional based on whether or not she is in jail by then.

The article reports:

“Hillary Clinton’s life and career are an inspiration to people around the world,” Radcliffe Institute Dean Lizabeth Cohen, who teaches American studies at Harvard, said in the press release.

“Whether in Arkansas, Washington, D.C., New York state or traveling around the globe as secretary of State,” Cohen said in the statement. “Secretary Clinton has provided a model of what it takes to transform society, often under scrutiny — tireless effort, toughness amid the political fray, and an enduring capacity to envision a better future.”

The event in May will feature a tribute to Clinton delivered by friend, former secretary of State and fellow Radcliffe medalist Madeleine Albright, according to the release, as well as a conversation between Clinton and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (D).

Clinton, who ran unsuccessfully against President Trump in 2016, was the first woman to secure a nomination for president from a major political party in the United States.

In the statement, Radcliffe added that Clinton was a “skilled legislator,” and “an advocate of American leadership to create a world in which states live up to their responsibilities.”

“We commend Secretary Clinton for her accomplishments in the public sphere as a champion for human rights and the welfare of all,” Cohen said.

Yes, Mrs. Clinton was the first woman to run for President. Based on what? She was elected a Senator from New York on the basis of her husband’s popularity. She rigged the Democratic primary election to become the candidate. The jury is still out on the corruption in the Clinton Foundation (although that may come to a head very soon). She obviously mishandled classified information in a way that would have put other people in prison. The list of scandals that has followed the Clintons since the 1990’s is almost endless. And this is the woman Harvard is choosing to honor.

I will admit that Hillary Clinton has been transformative in that she has transformed the meaning of the word ethical.

When It Hits The Fan, Who Do You Throw Under The Bus?

The investigation into the unlawful surveillance on the Trump campaign and transition team is beginning to uncover the things the deep state did to keep Donald Trump from becoming President and to hinder his presidency after he was elected. Other Clinton scandals have also surfaced—Uranium One, relief to Haiti, the Clinton Foundation and pay-to-play, etc. So what is the logical conclusion to all of this investigating?

Tuesday night I had the chance to hear a conservative speaker who belongs to a watchdog group speak about the deep state. At the end of his presentation, a person in the audience asked him if he thought anyone involved in the deep state efforts against Donald Trump would ever go to jail. He said he didn’t think so. The person then asked if there are no consequences for illegal deep state activity, how do we end such activity. The speaker then reminded us that the purpose of the deep state was to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President and to remove him from office if he did become President. The speaker stated that he felt that if those efforts failed, it would discourage those in the deep state from trying this again. I really did not like that answer. Frankly, I would like to see some people go to jail, but I am not sure I am being realistic.

The history of Special Prosecutors is that someone goes to jail. The person who goes to jail does not have to be someone directly involved in whatever initial crime was involved, but can be someone tangentially related to whatever is being investigated.

In Watergate, this is the tally:

  • H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman (White House staff), resigned 30 April 1973, subsequently jailed
  • John Dean (White House legal counsel), sacked 30 April 1973, subsequently jailed
  • John Mitchell, Attorney-General and Chairman of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), jailed
  • Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy (ex-White House staff), planned the Watergate break-in, both jailed
  • Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, jailed
  • James McCord (Security Director of CREEP), jailed

 

In Whitewater, these are the convictions:

The Clintons were never charged with any crime. Fifteen other persons were convicted of more than 40 crimes, including Jim Guy Tucker, who was removed from office.

As you can see, Special Prosecutors tend to send people to jail. It will be interesting to see if things have changed.

So, if someone is to be thrown under the bus for spy gate, Uranium One gate, or the other scandals involving the Obama Administration and the Clintons, who will it be? It needs to be someone considered unlikely to turn state’s evidence—someone who will limit the damage to President Obama and Hillary Clinton. If the Clinton’s follow their past pattern, it will be someone who will be appreciative of financial support for their family magically appearing while they are in jail.

Stay tuned.

 

Evidently The Wheels Of Justice Turn Really Slowly

On April 22, 2015, The New York Times posted an article about the Uranium One deal.

The article stated:

Uranium investors’ efforts to buy mining assets in Kazakhstan and the United States led to a takeover bid by a Russian state-owned energy company. The investors gave millions to the Clinton Foundation over the same period, while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s office was involved with approving the Russian bid.

The article included the following graphic:

Yesterday, according to an article posted at The Hill, Douglas Campbell, an FBI informant, testified to three congressional committees via a written statement.

The Hill reports:

An FBI informant connected to the Uranium One controversy told three congressional committees in a written statement that Moscow routed millions of dollars to America with the expectation it would be used to benefit Bill Clinton‘s charitable efforts while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quarterbacked a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations.

The informant, Douglas Campbell, said in the statement obtained by The Hill that he was told by Russian nuclear executives that Moscow had hired the American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide specifically because it was in position to influence the Obama administration, and more specifically Hillary Clinton.

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems as if Mr. Campbell’s statement simply reiterates what The New York Times told us almost three years ago. The Democrats, of course, will be trying to discredit what Mr. Campbell has said, but again I don’t see how they will have any credibility because of the New York Times article.

The article at The Hill states:

But Campbell said he was gratified when the FBI in 2016 gave him a $50,000 reward check celebrating his undercover work, directly answering Democrats criticisms that federal prosecutors didn’t trust him as a witness.

“My FBI handlers praised my work. They told me on various occasions that details from the undercover probe had been briefed directly to FBI top officials. On two occasions my handlers were particularly excited, claiming that my undercover work had been briefed to President Obama as part of his daily presidential briefing,” he said.

In the end, though, he told lawmakers he remains disturbed that the Obama administration made so many favorable decisions benefiting the Russian nuclear industry when the evidence of wrongdoing and ill intent was so extensive.

“I was frustrated watching the U.S. government make numerous decisions benefiting Rosatom and Tenex while those entities were engaged in serious criminal conduct on U.S. soil,” he wrote. “Tenex and Rosatom were raking in billions of U.S. dollars by signing contracts with American nuclear utility clients at the same time they were indulging in extortion by using threats to get bribes and kickbacks, with a portion going to Russia for high ranking officials.”

He said he never got a satisfactory answer from the FBI.

“I remember one response I got from an agent when I asked how it was possible CFIUS would approve the Uranium One sale when the FBI could prove Rosatom was engaged in criminal conduct. His answer: ‘Ask your politics,’ ” Campbell said.

This is a troubling list of events. It sounds as if even The New York Times was willing to post an article about what was going on. This is another situation where the Clinton Foundation received donations related to matters involving the government at critical times. The events also raise some questions about the FBI–why weren’t they shouting from the rooftops when this was going on? Isn’t their oath to America–not to any one administration?

Insight Into Some Questionable Actions By The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Andrew McCarthy posted an article at National Review today that explains what went on behind the scenes regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server. There are a lot of details in the article, so I strongly suggest that you follow the above link and read the entire article. I will try to list the highlights.

The article reports:

From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton–emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call — not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) The decision was inevitable. Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.

These emails must have involved some classified information, given the nature of consultations between presidents and secretaries of state, the broad outlines of Obama’s own executive order defining classified intelligence (see EO 13526, section 1.4), and the fact that the Obama administration adamantly refused to disclose the Clinton–Obama emails. If classified information was mishandled, it was necessarily mishandled on both ends of these email exchanges.

Since President Obama was running the Justice Department during the investigation, it stands to reason that Mrs. Clinton was not going to be charged. Particularly since President Obama was also involved in the mishandling of classified information. The Obama Justice Department was not really known for its justice.

Some insight from the article:

…According to Senator Johnson, a draft dated June 30, 2016 (i.e., five days before Comey delivered the final version), contained a passage expressly referring to a troublesome email exchange between Clinton and Obama. (I note that the FBI’s report of its eventual interview of Clinton contains a cryptic reference to a July 1, 2012, email that Clinton sent from Russia to Obama’s email address. See report, page 2.) The passage in the June 30 draft stated:

We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary. [Emphasis added.] Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.

The article explains that “according to a Strzok–Page text, a revised draft of Comey’s remarks was circulated by his chief of staff, Jim Rybicki. It replaced “the President” with “another senior government official.”

The powers that be involved in the investigation then realized that the change would not be enough–the press might ask who the senior government official was.

The article continues with what happened next:

Consequently, by the time Comey delivered his remarks on July 5, the decision had been made to avoid even a veiled allusion to Obama. Instead, all the stress was placed on Clinton (who was not going to be charged anyway) for irresponsibly sending and receiving sensitive emails that were likely to have been penetrated by hostile intelligence services. Comey made no reference to Clinton’s correspondent:

We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. [Emphasis added.] Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

So it was okay to let Hillary Clinton take the fall since she was not going to be held accountable anyway.

The article concludes:

On July 2, with the decision that she would not be indicted long since made, Mrs. Clinton sat for an interview with the FBI — something she’d never have done if there were a chance she might be charged. The farce was complete with the Justice Department and FBI permitting two subjects of the investigation — Mills and Clinton aide Heather Samuelson — to sit in on the interview as lawyers representing Clinton. That is not something law enforcement abides when it is serious about making a case. Here, however, it was clear: There would be no prosecution.

All cleaned up: no indictment, meaning no prosecution, meaning no disclosure of Clinton–Obama emails. It all worked like a charm . . . except the part where Mrs. Clinton wins the presidency and the problem is never spoken of again.

I think Congress has wasted an awful lot of money investigating the wrong people. I also think that the Mueller investigation was set up to make sure that the information that is coming out now would never see the light of day. The talking point will be that all of the corruption at the highest levels of the Obama Administration is just being brought out now to distract from the Mueller investigation. Actually, based on the evidence in each investigation, it is pretty obvious that it is the other way around. The Mueller investigation may be the insurance policy that was discussed in the emails between Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok. Time will tell.

This Might Be The Reason Government Investigations Take So Long

It’s hard to get the job done when the person you are investigating won’t talk to you! The following video posted at YouTube is of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick testifying before the House Oversight Committee on July 7th, 2016, in which he revealed Hillary Clinton refused an interview request related to her email investigation.

This is part of the testimony as posted at The Gateway Pundit today:

Chaffetz: Were you able to interview Hillary Clinton?

Linick: we were not.

Chaffetz: Why not?

Linick: Well, we asked to interview secretary Clinton. We interviewed all of the secretaries. We looked at five Secretaries of State going back to Madeleine Albright and her, through counsel, she declined to meet with us.

Chaffetz: Did she indicate a reason why she would refuse to meet with the inspector general?

Linick: Her counsel informed our staff that she had — that all of the information about the e-mail was on the FAQ she published by her campaign.

The article at The Gateway Pundit further reports:

Howard Krongard, the State Department Inspector General from April 2005 to January 2008, told Fox News last May that Clinton did not follow standard practices in respect to private email usage.

“Certainly to my knowledge at least, Secretary Rice did not have a personal server. I certainly never either sent an email to one or received an email from one,” Krongard told Fox News

“I would have been stunned had I been asked to send an email to her at a personal server, private address. I would have declined to do so on security grounds and if she had sent one to me, I probably would have started an investigation,” added Krongard.

From what I have seen, I suspect that the emails are the least of Hillary Clinton’s worries about the Inspector General’s report. It is very obvious that laws were broken in Ms. Clinton‘s handling of classified information. It is also very obvious that an ordinary citizen would be in jail for similar crimes. I don’t necessarily wish Ms. Clinton jail time, but it would be nice to see her admit that she broke the law. If her email account was used to funnel money to the Clinton Foundation in return for political favors, she should be heavily fined and forced to return the money.

The Inspector General’s report is due out in January. It should be very interesting.

Following The Money

Yesterday The Hill posted an article detailing some of the recent research done by

The article reports:

The Clinton Foundation’s donor disclosure site vastly understated support that the Clinton Global Initiative received from APCO Worldwide, a global communications firm that lobbied on behalf of Russia’s state-owned nuclear company.

The site, created to detect conflicts of interest for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because of her family’s various charitable efforts, shows APCO gave between $25,000 and $50,000 over the last decade.

But according to interviews and internal documents reviewed by The Hill, APCO was much more generous and provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro-bono services and in-kind contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) between 2008 and 2016.

For instance, an internal CGI document prepared in fall 2011 lists APCO’s in-kind contribution at $275,000 for that year alone. And APCO’s annual report on its global charitable efforts boasted of a large jump in support for CGI in 2011.

“In 2011, APCO significantly increased its pro-bono support for CGI and, for the first time, our team managed the press around CGI’s America meeting, as well as its global Annual Meeting,” APCO stated in a report submitted to the United Nations Global Compact.

The increase in the contributions came as APCO was paid $3 million in 2010 and 2011 to work for Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear company. Rosatom paid APCO to lobby the State Department and other federal agencies on behalf of its Tenex subsidiary, which sought to increase its commercial uranium sales in the United States.

In 2010 and 2011, APCO made more than 50 contacts with federal and congressional figures for Tenex, including at least 10 at the State Department, its foreign agent disclosure reports show.

It seems as if there was an awful lot of money changing hands for this to be an ordinary business transaction.

Undercover FBI informant William Campbell helped uncover the transporting of some of the uranium outside of the United States. He is expected to be interviewed in the near future by multiple Congressional committees. One can only hope that he stays safe until those interviews take place.

Please follow this link to read the entire article. It is a shining example of what the Washington swamp looks like. Also, please understand that if Hillary Clinton had been elected, all of this information would have remained buried. What we are watching now–the Uranium One scandal and the fall of many prominent news anchors and other public figures is the result of the Clinton family losing power and influence. The Clintons can no longer protect their former allies. It remains to be seen if the Clintons can even protect themselves.

This Really Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone

Breitbart posted an article today about donations to the Clinton Foundation since the 2016 election.

The article reports:

The latest tax filings released by the foundation a week ago showed that contributions dropped 42 percent in 2016 from $108 million to $63 million—right around the time Clinton lost last year’s presidential election, according to the New York Post.

Donations tanked by 37 percent in 2015 after the organization tried to fend off allegations that Clinton had used the foundation to engage in pay-to-play schemes with foreign governments.

The former 2016 Democratic presidential nominee allegedly used the charity to solicit millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments and corporations in exchange for giving these entities favorable treatment while she served as Secretary of State.

The Justice Department announced Monday that the agency is weighing whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate the millions of dollars in Clinton Foundation donations tied to the Uranium One deal, whereby the Obama administration permitted a Canadian company called Uranium One to sell one-fifth of America’s uranium to Russia in 2010.

I don’t wish anyone ill, but the rumors of misuse of funds in the foundation have been around for years. In September 2015, Politico posted an article about the Clinton Foundation’s activities in Haiti.

Anyone who has done some basic research quickly discovers connections between donations to the Clinton Foundation and State Department decisions. There is reason to believe that if Hillary Clinton had become President those connections would have appeared at the executive level of our government. Therefore, it is not a surprise that as the influence of the Clinton family is waning, the donations to the Clinton Foundation are dropping. That’s not really rocket science.

Oops!

Regardless of your stand on whether or not the Uranium One sale is a problem, you probably agree that it’s a bad idea to ship uranium that can be upgraded for weapons use out of America. One of the talking points the left is using to say that the Uranium One deal is not a problem is to say that since the uranium is not allowed to leave America, it really doesn’t matter who owns it. Well, it seems as if that is not the case.

Yesterday The Hill reported that uranium that can be upgraded for weapons use did leave the country.

The article reports:

“No uranium produced at either facility may be exported,” the NRC declared in a November 2010 press release that announced that ARMZ, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned Rosatom, had been approved to take ownership of the Uranium One mining firm and its American assets.

A year later, the nuclear regulator repeated the assurance in a letter to Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican in whose state Uranium One operated mines.  

…Yet NRC memos reviewed by The Hill show that it did approve the shipment of yellowcake uranium — the raw material used to make nuclear fuel and weapons — from the Russian-owned mines in the United States to Canada in 2012 through a third party. Later, the Obama administration approved some of that uranium going all the way to Europe, government documents show.

The article further reports:

NRC officials told The Hill that Uranium One exports flowed from Wyoming to Canada and on to Europe between 2012 and 2014, and the approval involved a process with multiple agencies.

Rather than give Rosatom a direct export license — which would have raised red flags inside a Congress already suspicious of the deal — the NRC in 2012 authorized an amendment to an existing export license for a Paducah, Ky.-based trucking firm called RSB Logistics Services Inc. to simply add Uranium One to the list of clients whose uranium it could move to Canada.

The license, reviewed by The Hill, is dated March 16, 2012, and it increased the amount of uranium ore concentrate that RSB Logistics could ship to the Cameco Corp. plant in Ontario from 7,500,000 kilograms to 12,000,000 kilograms and added Uranium One to the “other parties to Export.”

The move escaped notice in Congress.

Please follow the link above to The Hill to read the entire article. It details how things were done to avoid attracting the attention of Congress and to avoid Congress exercising the oversight role it should have played in this series of transactions.

Smile, You Are Being Manipulated

This story is based on an article today at Yahoo News, but the information contained can be found pretty much anywhere on the Internet.

It was leaked Friday that Robert Mueller was going to arrest someone on Monday. Why do you think that leak came out Friday after we have heard nothing for so long? Is the timing suspicious to you? Well, last week the news was full of Uranium One and GPS Fusion. The major media gave as little time as possible to both of these stories, but the news still got out. Both of these stories look very bad for both Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Unless someone changes the narrative, these stories will have to be covered in the mainstream media. Ergo, Robert Mueller is going to arrest someone.

In May 2015 the book Clinton Cash was published. The book explores the method the Clintons used to go from millions of dollars in debt due to legal expenses to earning over $230 million. Uranium One was one item mentioned in the book. There are also some real questions about how the money the Clinton Foundation raised for Haiti was spent. Although the news largely ignored the book, much of it has already been proven as true.

The Uranium One scandal and Fusion GPS were the news of the week last week. In order to take those stories off the front pages of objective or conservative media, a bigger story has to occur. Robert Mueller and the mainstream media are creating that story.

Smile, you are being manipulated.

Keeping The Facts From The American People

If you still depend on the mainstream media for a large portion of your news, you are now a low-information voter. Newsbusters is reporting today that seven days after The Hill published its article about the Unranium One scandal, the 24-hour cable news giant CNN had produced less than five minutes (3 minutes, 54 seconds) of actual news coverage about the case.

The article reports:

From 7am ET October 17 through 7am ET October 24, CNN’s reporters and anchors only mentioned the scandal twice: first, on October 19, after President Trump scolded reporters for failing to cover the story, anchor Wolf Blitzer offered a 19-second explanation of what Trump was talking about. 

Then, on October 20, Blitzer’s 5pm Situation Room included an interview with an ex-Obama administration official, Jake Sullivan, who told Blitzer that Trump’s charge of corruption against the Bill and Hillary Clinton “had no basis in fact.” Blitzer, to his credit, at least pushed back, asking Sullivan about how “some of these Russians who were involved were giving the Clinton Foundation thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Bill Clinton was going to Russia to deliver speeches for huge speaking fees?”

That interview lasted a total of 3 minutes, 35 seconds. CNN also aired live coverage of a Wednesday morning hearing in which Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley discussed the case for 4 minutes, 53 seconds, without any additional comment by CNN. Additionally, the network carried live coverage of President Trump on Thursday talking about the need for more attention — his remarks on this subject totaled 61 seconds, followed by Blitzer’s short comment.

The Uranium One scandal is something that should have been reported when it happened. The media will continue to ignore it until it becomes impossible to ignore. Hillary Clinton will describe it as ‘old news’ hoping that it will disappear before anyone figures out what went on. When the media finally acknowledges the scandal, they will accuse Congress of being partisan by investigating it. We have seen this movie before. I still have a hard time believing the Clintons will ever be held responsible for any of their misdeeds.

An Investigation Of These Russian Ties Is Needed

The Hill posted a very disturbing article today about a deal with Russia that was made during the Obama Administration. Evidently the Department of Justice slow walked an investigation that had been done by the FBI and did not brief Congress on the investigation in a timely manner.

The article reports:

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

The racketeering scheme was conducted “with the consent of higher level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, one agent declared in an affidavit years later.

Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.

The first decision occurred in October 2010, when the State Department and government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States unanimously approved the partial sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom, giving Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply.

It pays to donate to the Clinton Foundation. Or at least it did.

It gets worse:

The Obama administration and the Clintons defended their actions at the time, insisting there was no evidence that any Russians or donors engaged in wrongdoing and there was no national security reason for any member of the committee to oppose the Uranium One deal.

But FBI, Energy Department and court documents reviewed by The Hill show the FBI in fact had gathered substantial evidence well before the committee’s decision that Vadim Mikerin — the main Russian overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansion inside the United States — was engaged in wrongdoing starting in 2009.

Then-Attorney General Eric Holder was among the Obama administration officials joining Hillary Clinton on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States at the time the Uranium One deal was approved. Multiple current and former government officials told The Hill they did not know whether the FBI or DOJ ever alerted committee members to the criminal activity they uncovered.

This is the swamp that needs to be cleaned out. Anyone involved in this investigation and the fact that it was kept secret from Congress needs to be unemployed immediately. Please follow the link to the article and read the entire story and review the documents involved. This story is an example of government corruption and that corruption needs to have consequences for those involved.