I’m Not Sure If This Will Be The End Of This Story

Yesterday Mark Hemingway posted an article at Real Clear Investigations about an investigation into a scheme involving Hillary Clinton’s pal Sidney Blumenthal and his associates to profit from the deposing of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The article reports:

Records recently posted online by the FBI indicate that it did little to investigate allegations from private sources connected to Republicans about a scheme in which associates of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to exploit their connection to her to profit from the turmoil in Libya in 2011.

The FBI received the documents in June 2016, around the same time it launched an exhaustive, three-year investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia based, in part, on information from private sources connected to Democrats that in the main would prove to be false – the Steele dossier.

The bureau’s different responses to these documents also came during the same period when FBI Director James B. Comey controversially cleared Clinton, in his first of two exonerations, of criminal wrongdoing in the bureau’s probe of her unauthorized and insecure email setup.\

The documents, quietly released as part of the FBI’s case files for the “Midyear Exam,” its code name for the Clinton email investigation, revive a lingering mystery from Clinton’s tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat: Why did Sidney Blumenthal, the former journalist and Bill Clinton White House aide, send her a series of detailed memos and reports about Libya beginning in 2011?

The documents offer an answer. They allege that Blumenthal sent the emails as a “quid pro quo” to free up classified State Department financial intelligence to help Libya recover as much as $66 billion spirited offshore by slain strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

Out of that, Blumenthal and associates stood to gain a brokers’ cut of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.

The private Libya inquiry leaves important issues unsettled. The documents do not include emails or other original source material to support the allegations within. While claiming to possess evidence that Blumenthal and his associates had contracts and offshore accounts to repatriate the money, the documents say “no concrete evidence” was found suggesting Clinton acted to support the effort.

Yet if verified, the files might shed light on why Clinton kept her emails, tens of thousands of which have gone missing, out of normal government communication channels.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It asks many questions about why the FBI followed up on an investigation on Russian collusion when they knew that some of the leads they had were false and didn’t follow up on this investigation.

Hopefully, as the FBI becomes less political (which may or may not be happening), some of the loose ends left loose by the Obama administration will be revisited.

The Proof Is In The Emails

Judicial Watch released the following Press Release today:

Judicial Watch: State Department Emails Show Coordination Between Obama State Department and House Democrat Leader on Christopher Steele/Russia

JUNE 12, 2019

‘You’ve been a warrior on these issues, and I look forward to speaking further to preserve and wherever possible strengthen the important work you have done’ – Hoyer aide Daniel Silverberg to Victoria Nuland 

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation today released 16 pages of documents revealing former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer coordinating with then-House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer’s (D-MD) national security advisor, Daniel Silverberg to work on Russia dossier materials provided by Christopher Steele.

Steele is a former British spy and author of the anti-Trump dossier used to justify a series of FISA spy warrants targeting Carter Page. Winer is a former Obama State Department deputy assistant secretary who was implicated in working with Steele and Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal to circulate the anti-Trump dossier.

Judicial Watch obtained the documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on April 25, 2018 on behalf of itself and the Daily Caller News Foundation against the State Department after it failed to respond to three separate FOIA requests (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:18-cv- 00968)). The lawsuit seeks:

  • All records of communications between State Department officials, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, on the one hand, and British National Christopher Steele and/or employees or contractors of Steele’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence, on the other hand.
  • All records and/or memoranda provided by Christopher Steele and/or his firm Orbis Business Intelligence or by others acting on Steele’s/Orbis’s behalf, to State Department officials.
  • Any and all records in the custody of the State Department related to the provision of documents to British national Christopher Steele and/or his firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, or the receipt of documents from Steele or his firm.  Time period is January 20, 2009 through the present.
  • All records created in 2016 by Jonathan M. Winer relating to research compiled by Christopher Steele.

In an email exchange on September 19, 2016, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS asks Winer if he is “in town?” Winer replies “For a couple of hours.”

In an email exchange on September 26, 2016, Winer emails Nuland asking for “15 minutes of your time today if possible,” to discuss a “Russia related issue” from his “old O [Orbis Business Intelligence] friend.” Orbis was co-founded and run by Russia dossier author Christopher Steele. Nuland’s assistant suggests a secure call for the discussion and Winer asks his aide to postpone a meeting he was to have with the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) to accommodate.

In an exchange beginning in November 2016, Hoyer top-aide Silverberg emails a “thank you” to Nuland, calling her a “warrior on these issues” and stating that he looks forward to pursuing “some of the things we discussed yesterday, albeit on the system integrity side.” Nuland forwards this email to Winer who adds that he wants to talk about “some new info.”

From: Silverberg, Daniel [mailto:Daniel.Silverberg@mail.house.gov]
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2016 10:57 PM
To: Nuland, Victoria J
Subject: Thank you

Toria,

It was a delight to speak today, notwithstanding the context. You’ve been a warrior on these issues, and I look forward to speaking further to preserve and wherever possible strengthen the important work you have done. I’ll follow up regarding a possible working group meeting.

On Nov 29, 2016, at 10:07 AM, Nuland, Victoria J <nulandvi@state.gov> wrote:

Thanks, Daniel. I look forward to continuing our collaboration in whatever capacity life brings. Copied here is Jonathan Winer, who has some legal ideas that may be of interest to you and Cong. Hoyer.

From: Nuland, Victoria J
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:08 AM
To: Winer, Jonathan
Subject: RN: Thank you

They want to pursue some of the things we discussed yesterday, albeit on the system integrity side.

From: Winer, Jonathan
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:12 AM
To: Nuland, Victoria J
Subject: Re: Thank you

Want to talk briefly further. Some new info want you to be aware of. [Redacted] Phone call ok sometime this am? Five minutes is enough.

From: Nuland, Victoria J <nulandvj@state.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:23 AM
To: Winer, Jonathan <WinerJ@state.gov>
Subject: RE: Thank you

Of course, [redacted] Send me good number and time.

From: Silverberg, Daniel
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:52 AM
To: Nuland, Victoria J
Cc: Winer, Jonathan
Subject: Re: Thank you

Great. Jonathan, I am all ears.

From: Winer, Jonathan
Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2016 2:10 PM
To: Silverberg, Daniel <Daniel.Silverberg@mail.house.gov>
Subject: Re: Thank you

I’ve reached out per our call yesterday. Please call me to talk further at your early convenience. Weekend best but can also talk Monday.

In a November 2016 exchange with the subject line “Would like to catch up on something at your convenience,” Winer reaches out to Nuland for a meeting, which gets booked in the Truman building on November 28. 

In an email exchange dated December 12, 2016, Winer requests a brief meeting with Nuland saying, “Something new has come up of which I want you to be aware.” Nuland replies, “Ok,” and adds her assistant to the exchange. Winer’s assistant then emails Nuland’s assistant looking for a time to meet.

In February 2018, Winer wrote an op-ed claiming anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele and Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal approached him with separate dossiers. Winer wrote: “In the summer of 2016, Steele told me that he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials.” Also, “While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know …”

“Every day of digging reveals more and more political collaboration on this hit job, and at the highest levels. While so much of the media is content to chase Russian conspiracies, The Daily Caller News Foundation and the fantastic lawyers at Judicial Watch are going to keep doing the hard work of holding power accountable,” said Christopher Bedford, editor in chief of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“These documents further confirm the Obama State Department was obviously a way station for Steele’s smear dossier and other anti-Trump activism,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

Judicial Watch recently released 43 pages of documents from the State Department revealing that its “Special Coordinator for Libya,” Jonathan Winer, played a key role in facilitating Steele’s access to other top government officials, prominent international business executives. Winer was even approached by a movie producer about making a movie about the Russiagate targeting of President Trump.

Judicial Watch previously released two sets of heavily redacted State Department documents showing classified information was researched and disseminated to multiple U.S. Senators by the Obama administration immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The documents reveal that among those receiving the classified documents were Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN).

Also, Judicial Watch is suing the State Department for communications between Nuland and employees of Fusion GPS, as well as top ranking Department of Justice, FBI, and State Department officials.

Stay tuned. More information on the roots of the Russian collusion investigation will be coming out shortly. We already have enough information to realize that because President Trump was a political novice, professional politicians felt that they could easily set him up for disaster. Recent letters from the people involved in investigating the root of the Russia investigation indicate that people will be held accountable for the misuse of government agencies and the violation of the civil rights of Americans.

This Might Be The Reason The Investigation Is Taking So Long

Yesterday The Daily Caller reported that the State Department gave the House Select Committee on Benghazi 1,300 pages of new emails from Ambassador Chris Stevens. There have been seven Congressional committees that have investigated the attack in Benghazi, and this is the first time the State Department has turned over these emails. I don’t know if this sort of behavior is typical of the State Department, but it is definitely typical of the Obama Administration. We saw the same thing with the investigation into the politicalization of the Internal Revenue Service–stall, stall, and stall some more, and then claim that the investigation is dragging on because it is political or that the investigation is old news.

Unfortunately I believe that Hillary Clinton will walk away from her day in Congress unscathed. I believe that there is a reason she insisted on a public hearing. She is going to say that the investigation is political and cite as her proof the fact that thus far there is no smoking gun. Somehow the fact that the information needed to do the investigation has been withheld from the Committee will be overlooked.

The article concludes:

Gowdy (South Carolina U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the Select Committee) gave a different characterization of the emails during his interview on Sunday, however.

He said that Stevens’ communiques show that he began requesting additional security in June 2012, when he was appointed ambassador. Instead of receiving help, though, Gowdy said that State Department officials asked Stevens to help craft “public messaging advice” on the precarious situation in the north African country.

Gowdy said that other emails show that one of Clinton’s top aides, Jake Sullivan, asked Stevens to vet an intelligence report written by Clinton’s longtime friend, Sidney Blumenthal.

In a statement to TheDC, Benghazi Committee press secretary Matt Wolking says that the release of additional Stevens emails proves that the committee “is breaking new ground despite the Obama administration’s many delays.”

It is up to the voters to hold their elected officials accountable. The behavior of Hillary Clinton in regard to Benghazi is unacceptable. Remember–the only person to serve jail time for the attack on Benghazi was the person who made a video that had nothing to do with the attack and the Obama Administration lied about the role of the video in the attack.

Campaign Financing

When the Citizens United case was decided by the Supreme Court, a howl went up from Democratic politicians. “Take the money out of politics,” they said. “This will open the floodgates for corporations to buy elections.”

I have posted charts from opensecrets.org before. These charts show that the top spenders (before and after Citizens United) are still the unions. No one is talking about taking away the right of unions to donate to campaigns. Also, keep in mind that the people who pay union dues and provide the money for the donations don’t have a say in where the money is donated. At least the leaders of a corporation that donates to a PAC are accountable to their stockholders. The fact that government employee unions give political donations is also a bit questionable–they donate to the people they are going to negotiate contracts with. Is it possible to do that without a conflict of interest?

Any, here is one of the charts from opensecrets.org:

campaigndonationsSo why am I mentioning this? First of all, I firmly believe that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If unions are allowed to make campaign donations, corporations should also be allowed to make campaign donations. If you want to eliminate one, take them both away. Otherwise, you are creating an unbalanced situation where the government is suppressing free speech.

The National Review is reporting today that according to the Hillary Clinton emails, Mrs. Clinton was planning to reverse the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United as soon as possible.

The article reports:

Although President Obama came out swinging against the decision during his State of the Union address a few day later — prompting some Justices to boycott future speeches — Clinton remained largely silent on the issue for years. She didn’t openly declare her opposition to Citizens United until April 2015, after she’d already announced her candidacy. In May, she said she’d use opposition to Citizens United as a litmus test for any Supreme Court nominee.

The Ready for Hillary Super PAC — founded under the new Citizens United rules — raised $15 million for the Clinton campaign before it was disbanded early this summer following her presidential announcement.

Mrs. Clinton’s emails to Sidney Blumenthal show a desire to overturn the Citizens United decision, yet she was willing to take advantage of the law up until the time she ran for President. She disbanded the PAC before any low-information voters would learn about it. Also, there is the question of the money flowing through the Clinton Foundation that might have made the PAC unnecessary. Remember that most of the Clintons travel expenses are paid through the Foundation, and a large part of campaigning is travel. That may or may not be illegal, but it is questionable at best. The hypocrisy is amazing.

 

Sometimes Lying Just Gets Old

Yesterday CNN posted the transcript of an interview of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by Brianna Keilar, CNN’s Senior White House Correspondent.

The is part of the transcript:

KEILAR:  One of the issues that has eroded some trust that we’ve seen is the issue of your email practices while you were secretary of state.  I think there’s a lot of people who don’t understand what your thought process was on that.

Can you tell me the story of how you decided to delete 33,000 emails and how that deletion was executed?

CLINTON:  Well, let’s start from the beginning.  Everything I did was permitted.  There was no law.  There was no regulation.  There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.  Previous secretaries of state have said they did the same thing.  And people across the government knew that I used one device – maybe it was because I am not the most technically capable person and wanted to make it as easy as possible.

KEILAR:  But you said they – that they did the same thing, that they used a personal server and –

KEILAR:  – subpoena deleted emails from them?

CLINTON:  You know, you’re starting with so many assumptions that are – I’ve never had a subpoena.  There is – again, let’s take a deep breath here.  Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation.  I had one device.  When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system.

Now I didn’t have to turn over anything.  I chose to turn over 55,000 pages because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me because I knew the vast majority of everything that was official already was in the State Department system.

And now I think it’s kind of fun.  People get a real-time behind-the-scenes look at what I was emailing about and what I was communicating about.

KEILAR:  Wearing warm socks, you said to John Podesta.

CLINTON:  Exactly and – or, you know –

KEILAR:  Working a fax machine

CLINTON:  – yes, a secure fax machine, which is harder to work than the regular.

So yes, this is being blown up with no basis in law or in fact.  That’s fine.  I get it.  This is being, in effect, used by the Republicans in the Congress, OK.  But I want people to understand what the truth is.  And the truth is everything I did was permitted and I went above and beyond what anybody could have expected in making sure that if the State Department didn’t capture something, I made a real effort to get it to them.

And I had no obligation to do any of that.  So let’s set the record straight.  And those 55,000 pages, they will be released over the course of this year.  People  can, again, make their own judgments.

I know you say you were permitted.  I just am trying to understand some of the thought process behind it.  One former state attorney general, a Democrat, told CNN that they know of no lawyer who would advise someone, a client, facing the kind of scrutiny that you’ve been facing to wipe their server.

I mean, what do you say to that?

CLINTON:  Well, what I say to that is turned over everything I was obligated to turn over.  And then I moved on.  People delete their personal emails, their work-related emails, whatever emails they have on a regular basis.  I turned over everything that I could imagine.

I added the underlines and italics.

So what are the facts? The National Journal posted a picture of the subpoena that Hillary Clinton says she never got. The subpoena was sent to her in March:

SubpoenaOfHillaryClintonThe National Journal reports:

That (Hillary Clinton’s statement that she had never had a subpoena) drew a rebuke from Trey Gowdy, the GOP chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, who said the need to “correct the inaccuracy” led him to break with his practice of not releasing subpoenas the panel has issued.

“The committee immediately subpoenaed Clinton personally after learning the full extent of her unusual email arrangement with herself, and would have done so earlier if the State Department or Clinton had been forthcoming that State did not maintain custody of her records and only Secretary Clinton herself had her records when Congress first requested them,” Gowdy said in a statement.

The subpoena sought Clinton’s messages from 2011 and 2012 related to Libya and the 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound and CIA facility in Benghazi that killed four Americans.

Very few people have honorable reasons for wiping a computer hard disk clean–particularly after they have been subpoenaed.

On March 3, 2015, The Atlantic reported:

On January 13, 2009, Hillary Clinton attended her first confirmation hearing as a Secretary of State nominee. The same day, with Bush officials still under fire for using private email accounts to circumvent public records laws, someone registered Clintonemail.com, a domain that now appears to be at the center of a scandal. “Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department,” The New York Times reported in a story published late Monday. “Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.”

This was willful, flagrant disregard for public records rules.

Why does this matter? Other than the disregard for the Federal Records Act, it means that we will never have an accurate record of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. The record we do have will have omissions and changes, and we will have no way of knowing what is missing or what is edited. Evidently Mrs. Clinton did not feel that the law applied to her.

 

Oh, What A Tangled Web We Weave…

The real advantage to telling the truth is that you don’t have to remember what you said. As you get older, that matters. Today The Wall Street Journal posted an story by Kimberley Strassel showing how lies about her emails are becoming a problem for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Strassel notes that nothing Mrs. Clinton has previously stated about her emails has turned out to be true.

The article cites a few problem areas:

The Democratic presidential aspirant on March 10 held a press conference pitched as her first and last word on the revelation that she’d used a private email server while secretary of state. She told reporters that she’d turned over to the State Department “all my emails that could possibly be work-related.” And she insisted that she “did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”

Both of those statements have been proven to be false. Ms. Strassel points out that as a result the Benghazi probe, Sidney Blumenthal was forced to turn over his emails, which revealed work-related emails that had not been disclosed. Mr. Blumenthal’s emails also revealed that the emails Mrs. Clinton turned over had been altered–work related sentences and paragraphs had been removed.

Since Mrs. Clinton began turning over her emails, some of them have been designated ‘classified.’

The article points out:

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

From what we know so far, Mrs. Clinton is guilty of a crime. However, because she is not Richard Nixon and there is no contemporary Woodward or Bernstein who are going to inform the general public as to what is going on, she is not at risk of being held accountable. This is another example of the American media choosing not to do its job. Our nation needs a media that holds our leaders accountable. Right now we don’t have one.

This Is Not Really A Surprise

The hope of the Hillary Clinton for President campaign is that by the time Americans vote, they will be so tired of hearing about Benghazi and Mrs. Clinton’s private email server that they won’t even care. So far that strategy has been somewhat successful, but it’s success may be drawing to a close.

On Monday the Daily Caller posted a story about emails provided to a House Committee by Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton insider.

The article reports:

The new Blumenthal-Clinton correspondence was included in a batch of emails Blumenthal gave in response to a subpoena from the Benghazi committee. He will testify in a closed-door session in front of the panel on Tuesday.

It is unclear exactly why Blumenthal’s emails are only now being provided to the committee, though there are two likely explanations. Either Clinton failed to turn the records over to the State Department in December, or the State Department received the emails from Clinton but for some reason failed to turn them over to the Benghazi committee, which is led by South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy.

This, of course, is contrary to Mrs. Clinton’s claim in March that she had turned over all of her emails.

The article further reports:

Clinton said her handlers had sifted through her private email account to find her official emails. She said her personal emails were deleted. A private email server Clinton used to host the email account has also reportedly been wiped clean.

The rest of Clinton’s emails will be released in increments beginning at the end of the month.

This does matter. However, it will probably not matter to Mrs. Clinton’s supporters. I believe that there is no level of dishonesty that Mrs. Clinton could be guilty of that would derail her presidential campaign. That really does not say good things about the American voter.

 

A Private State Department?

The Wall Street Journal posted an article today about the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails released by the State Department. While there is no ‘smoking gun’ in the emails as such, the emails reveal a State Department that was not run according to the usual chain of command.

The article reports:

In the pre-Memorial Day weekend news dump, long-time Clinton plumber Sidney Blumenthal plays Maxwell Smart, passing along intel on Benghazi from half a world away. Secret Agent Blumenthal apparently derived this wisdom from his new business associates who were attempting to win contracts from Libyan nationals. Mrs. Clinton often circulates the memos among her top diplomats with comments like “useful insight” and “very interesting,” and they would often then push them down the chain of command, without identifying the source.

Mrs. Clinton was the Secretary of State, for heaven’s sake, one of the five most powerful national security positions in the U.S. government. She had the entire State Department intelligence division at her disposal, known as the Bureau of Intelligence and Research or INR, and presumably had access to the 16 other U.S. agencies that make up the intelligence community.

Yet she’s consuming and taking seriously information from an “analyst” who knows nothing about the subject. Mr. Blumenthal’s expertise is in political wet work and monetizing his connections to the Clintons. The imprimatur that Mrs. Clinton’s office put on Mr. Blumenthal’s outside improv offered him a way to influence policy even after the Obama White House had barred Mrs. Clinton from formally hiring him.

It is becoming very obvious that Mrs. Clinton ignored the advice of the White House and played by her own rules.

It is also interesting that the emails the State Department released had certain items redacted that were not redacted in the emails that the New York Times obtained. It is interesting to see what the State Department chose to redact. I strongly suggest following the link above to read the entire article in the Wall Street Journal.

It is obvious to me (and I suspect to any thinking person) that the Clinton emails had been well scrubbed before they were released. It is also obvious that they were released just before Memorial Day when the American public would be least likely to pay attention to them. This is typical of the past behavior of the Clintons and could be expected to be typical of any future behavior should Mrs. Clinton be successful in her bid for the presidency.

The article concludes:

The larger question isn’t Mr. Blumenthal’s faux life of danger. It’s why a potential Commander in Chief invested so much trust in such a figure. The Southern Gothic novel that is Clinton family political history—with its melodrama, betrayals and paranoia—has left them dependent on insular loyalists like Mr. Blumenthal whose opinions are never second-guessed. Voters should know they’d not only be electing Hillary, and Bill, and Chelsea, but this entire menagerie.