RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Clinton Foundation has confirmed it accepted a $1 million gift from Qatar while Hillary Clinton was U.S. secretary of state without informing the State Department, even though she had promised to let the agency review new or significantly increased support from foreign governments.

Qatari officials pledged the money in 2011 to mark the 65th birthday of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton’s husband, and sought to meet the former U.S. president in person the following year to present him the check, according to an email from a foundation official to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta. The email, among thousands hacked from Podesta’s account, was published last month by WikiLeaks.

Clinton signed an ethics agreement governing her family’s globe-straddling foundation in order to become secretary of state in 2009. The agreement was designed to increase transparency to avoid appearances that U.S. foreign policy could be swayed by wealthy donors.

If a new foreign government wished to donate or if an existing foreign-government donor, such as Qatar, wanted to “increase materially” its support of ongoing programs, Clinton promised that the State Department’s ethics official would be notified and given a chance to raise any concerns.

Clinton Foundation officials last month declined to confirm the Qatar donation. In response to additional questions, a foundation spokesman, Brian Cookstra, this week said that it accepted the $1 million gift from Qatar, but this did not amount to a “material increase” in the Gulf country’s support for the charity. Cookstra declined to say whether Qatari officials received their requested meeting with Bill Clinton.

She added that in her view, based on what she saw during the primaries, the DNC is “so corrupt, it’s not worthy of our votes.”Susan Sarandon explains why she’s not backing Hillary Clinton: ‘I don’t vote with my vagina’

Susan Sarandon has had a troubled relationship with Hillary Clinton, and the actress has confirmed she won’t be voting for the Democratic nominee in the presidential election.

“I don’t vote with my vagina,” Sarandon told BBC’s Evan Davis of her decision not to vote for Clinton. She has said she’s voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, after supporting Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary process.

She added that she thinks it’s important to get votes for third-party candidates above the 5% mark, and that whether Clinton or Trump is elected, “it doesn’t matter” to her.

“This is bigger than that and I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about Trump and Hillary because that’s not why I’m here. This is bigger than who wins this election,” she said.

Sarandon said she believes Clinton is “almost certainly going to win” because of support from “every neocon, all the press, all the networks, all the newspapers, everyone behind her.”

“I am worried about the wars, I am worried about Syria, I am worried about all of these things that actually exist. I’m worried about fracking,” Sarandon said. “I’m worrying about the environment. No matter who gets in they don’t address these things because money has taken over our system.”

During the last days of her campaign Hillary Clinton is making a real push…the Dems have sent a note around “What would you like to say to Hillary Clinton?
Here is the response I would love to hear:

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”

‘Drain the swamp!” GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has insisted before huge crowds increasingly confident of a well-deserved, sorely needed, come-from-behind victory.

But this slogan doesn’t quite capture the urgency of the moment. This one does:

“Flush the toilet!”

Washington’s corruption under Barack Obama and the Clintons has devolved to fetid depths suggestive of the days before indoor plumbing. Step back and shudder at today’s unsanitary state of public affairs.

The Cosa Nostra–like tone that Hillary Clinton has set for herself and her associates suggests a preview for a new film: The Godmother.

As word emerged on March 2, 2015, that Hillary maintained an outlaw e-mail system in her Chappaqua mansion’s basement, WikiLeaks reports, her campaign chairman, John Podesta, e-mailed her top aide, Cheryl Mills: “We’re going to have to dump all those e-mails.” Podesta now claims that the meaning of the word “dump” is to “release, distribute, or otherwise publicize.” This might be plausible, except that Team Clinton then erased some 33,000 “private” e-mails and used BleachBit software to guarantee that Hillary’s server, at least digitally, sleeps with the fishes. Hillary’s aides demolished her 13 communications devices — not the single one that she lied about having, for “convenience” — some with hammers.

Most of this happened while these public records were under congressional subpoena. This is called obstruction of justice.

Bryan Pagliano, the computer whiz who managed Hillary’s clandestine server, initially took the Fifth Amendment while under congressional scrutiny. But he twice couldn’t be bothered to show up in September, despite being subpoenaed by the House Government Oversight Committee.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett published another eye-opening report about the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigation. It elaborates on the pitched battle between FBI agents who believe they are building a strong case and Justice Department prosecutors who have thrown cold water on it, erecting roadblocks that have made the agents’ work much more difficult.

For reasons worth pausing over, the locus of that battle is the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which is headquartered in Brooklyn.

As I explained earlier this week, that is the office that Attorney General Loretta Lynch ran for several years after being appointed by President Obama during his first term — up until Obama appointed her U.S. attorney general. That was Ms. Lynch’s second tenure running the EDNY. She was launched into national prominence when President Bill Clinton made her the EDNY’s U.S. attorney in 1999. So the Clinton Foundation investigation is being overseen by the prosecutors’ office to which Lynch is closest — filled with prosecutors she hired, trained, and supervised.

Is it any wonder, then, that the EDNY seems to have broadened its territorial reach?

There are 93 federal districts in the United States. Some states are small enough to be single districts; others are big enough to be carved into two districts or more. The federal law of venue (i.e., the district in which a criminal case may be prosecuted) is very elastic. In theory, a case may be brought in any district where some of the criminal conduct, however minimal, took place. In practice, though, the FBI customarily runs its investigation, and the Justice Department files any indictment, in the district where most of the criminal activity occurred.

Anchoring an investigation in the district that is the epicenter of the conspiracy, or is at least the locus of significant criminal conduct in the case, is obviously practical. It also serves the Sixth Amendment mandate that criminal cases be tried in the “district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

Hillary Clinton deleted an email she sent to her daughter Chelsea in 2009, a new batch of email messages released by the State Department shows. State released 285 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails on Friday as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act request.

The email chain in question contained information that was upgraded to the confidential level of classification when it was released about a year ago.

clinton-classified-email-to-chelsea

Via The Daily Caller:

The Dec. 20, 2009 email chain, entitled “Update,” started with a message from Michael Froman, who served as a deputy assistant to President Obama and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs.

The email, which is redacted because it contains information classified as “Confidential,” was sent to Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s foreign policy adviser at the State Department, and several Obama aides. Sullivan sent it to Hillary Clinton who then forwarded it to Chelsea, who emailed under the pseudonym “Diane Reynolds.”

All of the text in the body portion of the classified emails is redacted because it contains foreign government information.

The State Department labeled the email a “near duplicate,” indicating that it was mostly similar to other emails that the agency has released from the trove of emails that Clinton turned over in Dec. 2014.