RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lyndon Johnson did his best to block the Freedom of Information Act, but public opinion forced him to make government records available. The question now is how FOIA, which LBJ signed 50 years ago this month, survives the precedent Hillary Clinton set with her basement server intended to keep her emails hidden from public view.

Bill Moyers, LBJ’s press secretary at the time, recalled in a 2003 broadcast how FOIA nearly didn’t become law: The president “hated the very idea of a Freedom of Information Act, hated the idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official view of reality.”

LBJ relented and signed what he called “the damned thing” on July 4, 1966, but insisted on no fanfare. In the decades that followed, FOIA became an essential tool for government accountability.

No public official since LBJ has gone as far as Hillary Clinton to evade public-disclosure laws. In 2010 her adviser Huma Abedin recommended that she use a government email account, as the State Department required. “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible,” Mrs. Clinton responded in an email that has since come to light. She used a private email server for all her communications because this kept both official and personal communications off government servers, where they would have been subject to disclosure under FOIA.

FBI Director James Comey concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information in her emails didn’t meet the legal test for a crime because he couldn’t prove that she intended to disclose national secrets. But Mr. Comey testified to Congress last week that the FBI determined that Mrs. Clinton did violate the Federal Records Act, which makes his legal analysis of her intent incomplete. Her most relevant intention was to defy disclosure laws. Her actions had the incidental effect of mishandling confidential communications.

Mrs. Clinton stonewalled FOIA requests for years with her keep-no-records, produce-no-records strategy. In a deposition last month in a civil lawsuit challenging her personal email server, the State Department said its staffers in charge of records didn’t realize until 2014 that its former boss had used private email.

Appropriately enough, Mrs. Clinton’s explanation that she used a private email server to keep her records secret only became public in a lawsuit challenging the State Department’s insistence that it couldn’t respond to FOIA requests because it couldn’t locate her emails on its .gov server.

The State Department’s inspector general in May ruled that Mrs. Clinton broke record-keeping laws such as those requiring compliance with FOIA requests, never got permission for her home server and ignored numerous security warnings. CONTINUE AT SITE

Statistics don’t lie and those for black crime in the US are damning. When agitators and promoters of racial animosity note that African-Americans are hugely over-represented in prison populations, what they never acknowledge is that they also commit far more crimes. No wonder police are nervous.
The police shootings of two black men (Philando Castile in Flacon Heights, Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) look problematic to say the least, judging by the video recordings that I have seen on TV. But all of the facts aren’t in so it is wise to suspend judgement. Clearly more evidence will emerge to throw greater light on the incidents.

I don’t want to comment directly on these cases nor on the demonstration in Dallas which they prompted; during which five police officers were shot and killed and seven others and two bystanders wounded. It now appears that the shooter acted alone. Micah Johnston was a 25-year-old army veteran turned ‘black terrorist’ (for want of a better description) intent, as he said, on shooting white police officers. My comment primarily goes to public safety in America but it has application to Australia and to all societies living under the rule of secular law.

The reaction of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Dallas when they became aware that shots were being fired is instructive. They scattered in all directions crying out in fear and panic. The police ran towards the danger. There are two lessons to draw I think.

The first is that untrained unarmed people are no match for a trained gunman. This is so obvious why say it? It’s worth saying because we civilians, but particularly progressives and those intent on feminising society, have to realise that power does come out of the barrel of a gun. A few ruthless bad guys with guns can subjugate and enslave many unarmed people (otherwise called ‘sheep’) without any difficulty at all.

Our safety (the safety of us sheep) in Australia is totally dependent on the police and defence forces. In America it is a little different because many millions of citizens have the capacity to defend themselves. I like the American model better because the resurgence of militant Islam is making the world a more threatening place, but that is by the way.

The second lesson is that delegating our safety to police officers, as we must in the course of ordinary life whether we are personally armed or not, carries risks. One risk is that some police officers will at times act outside their authority; and sometimes brutally. But a second risk is likely to be realised much more often. That is that police officers may ‘overreact’ to perceived danger. Like us civilians, they don’t want to be harmed and have the same adrenalin reaction to danger as do we all. They are not a race apart.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent. He discussed The Hillary-FBI Fix, revealing the catastrophic damage to American national security interests.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch The Brigitte Gabriel Moment with Brigitte Gabriel, the founder of ACT for America, in which Brigitte discussesWhat is Really Driving the Terrorists, unveiling what is really inspiring jihadists — and why Obama and the media don’t want you to know it.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/07/10/the-hillary-fbi-fix-on-the-glazov-gang/

GOOGLE TRANSLATION

Everyone knows, except the deaf and blind, cynicism Barack Obama. This is not only the worst President of the United States: it is also the most coldly demagogue, most contemptuous vis-à-vis the institutions and the American people.

He choked multiple malpractice Hillary Clinton has, in itself, surprising. He himself violated the Constitution so often in eight years that he deserved a hundred times incapacity procedure, and he lied with such frequency that if the US mainstream media still doing their job, he would have left the house white long, covered with feathers and tar. Nevertheless, he crossed in recent days a few more steps, and showed that he really wanted to transform the United States into a banana republic.

The villainous behavior of Hillary Clinton is himself not to show this woman has literally skeletons in his closet, not just those dead in Benghazi. She is as sold to the highest bidder in recent years that his bank account, and the Clinton Foundation are now worthy of those of a villainous dictator of the Third World. It is so considered above the law it leaking state secrets through an email server that served to regulate small shadow between freedmen color business. She has herself to show that she was ready to lead the banana republic that Obama intends to leave a legacy.

The mainstream press has not reported all episodes of what may be a result if the Godfather Francis Ford Coppola Himself to make films, it is important to relate them here.

First episode: in April, Obama said Hillary was probably committed “negligence”, but it does not merit prosecution. The guideline to be followed by the FBI and the Department of Justice is drawn. Hillary Clinton delivers a truth-against sentence and appears serene: she knows, obviously it is safe.
Second episode: a few days ago, the Minister of Justice very docile Obama Loretta Lynch out and meets Bill Clinton on the runway at the Phoenix airport, and has a long conversation with her. They talk of children, golf and gardening, they say. What else could they talk about? In other times, a secret conversation between the Minister of Justice and a person was the subject of an FBI investigation (Bill Clinton was also involved in the FBI investigation) would have implied demand immediate resignation Minister of Justice and journalists have sneered if they were told that the conversation had focused on children, golf and gardening, but those were other times.
Third episode: Hillary Clinton questioned extensively by the FBI, to his delight, she said.She reported later that if elected President, Loretta Lynch will remain Minister of Justice.
Fourth episode: the FBI director paints a damning indictment against Hillary Clinton and describes very precisely all the reasons that should be worth to this indictment, but concluded that there are no material charges. Hillary, he said, had committed “serious negligence”, but that does not merit prosecution. The resemblance to the words spoken by Obama in April is not accidental.
Episode Five: Obama, in the moments following the declaration of the FBI director share countryside aboard Air Force one in Hillary company, and holds a meeting with her ​​in which he declares that it has all the qualities to succeed him.
Loretta Lynch closes the case.

President Barack Obama said Saturday that he shares the concerns of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey over the State Department’s handling of sensitive information.

Mr. Comey said last Tuesday that the FBI found evidence during an investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email use of a department “generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information that is found elsewhere in the U.S. government.”
Asked for the first time about the FBI’s findings during a news conference at the conclusion of an international summit in Poland, Mr. Obama said: “I am concerned.”

Mr. Obama declined to comment on Mr. Comey’s statements, such as that Mrs. Clinton and her colleagues had been what the FBI director said was “extremely careless” in handling classified information.

Tired of reading about Government Waste? go to http://www.openthebooks.com/
And please read this column:
To Reclaim America, Abolish the Federal Agencies By Michael Walsh May 17, 2016

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/2016/05/17/to-reclaim-america-abolish-the-federal-agencies/?singlepage=true

The decline of America, perhaps surprisingly, can be traced directly to the Nixon administration. Surprising, because the Left hated Tricky Dick with a passion that can only be compared with the passion that animates the never-Trump crowd: sheer, animal loathing. Surprising, because Nixon was the most domestically liberal, if not actually leftist, president we’ve had until Obama. Surprising, because to this day old Nixon-haters still foam at the mouth at the very thought of the man who took down the “pink lady,” Helen Gahagan Douglas, and saved Israel in 1973; a year later, of course, they finally sacked him over Watergate.

But it was during the first Nixon administration that the hideous monstrosity of the Environmental Protection Agency came into being by executive order, along with its ugly twin, the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Seemingly innocuous and well-intentioned at the time, both agencies have metastasized, their original missions completed and now forever on the prowl for something else to meddle with. They’re both unconstitutional, of course, but what’s even worse is that they’ve turned into rogue agencies, issuing edicts, orders and regulations largely devoid of congressional scrutiny — pure instruments of executive power, with none to gainsay them.

To get an idea of just how obnoxious and intrusive these do-gooder agencies have become, get a load of this from Lou Ann Rieley, who owns a farm in Delaware:

This week a young rancher in Wyoming, Andy Johnson, won a battle for private property rights against one of the bureaucratic entities that strikes fear in the hearts of farmers and ranchers nationwide, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Johnson fought back against a mandate from the EPA to dismantle a pond that he had built on his own land with the required state permits. Fines totaling $16 million were imposed before they were finally overturned in the wake of his court victory.

As I read about his ordeal I thought back through the years that I have managed our small family farm and the many times we have been harassed by government busy-bodies who thought it was in their purview to question us, investigate us, intrude on us, and regulate us.

Let’s stop right there. (You can read all about the Johnson case, which ought to outrage every real American, here.) Sixteen million dollars in fines? For what?

In 2009 and 2010, lawyers working at the United States Justice Department warned top Obama political appointees and other Justice Department officials about the dangerous threats of New Black Panthers to kill police officers and other whites. I was one of those lawyers who delivered those warnings.

Our warnings came in the context of the Voting Rights Act case I and other lawyers brought against the New Black Panthers on behalf of the United States in 2009, a case the Obama administration ultimately abandoned. Both top DOJ officials, including now Labor Secretary Tom Perez, as well as rank and file employees in the Civil Rights Division, were warned but did not take the New Black Panther threat seriously or otherwise considered the organization to be a laughable joke.

Allies in the media echoed the narrative that the defendants in the voter intimidation case were harmless clowns.

Among the information presented to top officials was a video produced by the New Black Panthers entitled “Training Day.” The video proposes killing police officers by ambush. I wrote about the video:

Another New Black Panther posing in the above photo and kneeling with a shotgun is “Field Marshal” Najee Muhammad. As I wrote in my book Injustice: One of them was Panther “Field Marshal” Najee Muhammad, who is seen in a Panther video called “Training Day” in which he encourages blacks in DeKalb County, Georgia, to don ski masks, lie in wait behind shrubs, and kill police officers with AK-47s. Following that exhortation he mocks the hypothetical victims’ grieving widows.

Thursday night’s attack in Dallas marks the deadliest day for American law enforcement since September 11, 2001. An ambush that started just before 9 p.m. local time, toward the end of a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration, left four members of the Dallas Police Department and one member of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit authority police department dead, and seven other officers and two civilians injured. The gunman, 25-year-old Micah X. Johnson, who told a hostage negotiator that he “wanted to kill white people, especially police officers,” was so successful only because of the bravery of Dallas’s finest, who spent the evening monitoring Black Lives Matter protesters, then rushed to shield demonstrators when shots rang out. On a week marked by intense hostility against our law enforcement, Dallas police reminded us of the courage and selflessness displayed by the vast majority of America’s men and women in uniform.

Police have yet to release the identities of the three suspects in custody, who are believed to have conspired in planning the attack. But about the motivations behind this episode there can be little doubt. Dallas police chief David Brown has said that the perpetrators clearly “planned to injure and kill as many law-enforcement officers as they could.” Johnson, who appears to have been the lone gunman, was a Facebook fan of the African American Defense League, which regularly called for violence against cops. Recent posts encourage readers to “ATTACK EVERYTHING IN BLUE EXCEPT THE MAIL MAN” and “sprinkle Pigs Blood.”

Responsibility for this vicious, cowardly act lies solely with the killer. But this tragedy is another reminder that the temperature should be lowered in the debate over policing and race.

Of course, Black Lives Matter almost exists to do the opposite, and a poisonous minority of it has even encouraged violence against police. In New York City in late 2014, protesters chanted: “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now.” Not long after, Ismaaiyl Brinsley assassinated two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, in their patrol vehicle.

The reactions to the recent officer-involved shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., which prompted the demonstrations in Dallas and elsewhere, have been typically inflammatory. It is far from clear whether the officers acted justifiably, and the available evidence raises serious questions. We understand the passions evoked by these tragic encounters, partially captured in graphic videos. Nonetheless, Black Lives Matter activists immediately labeled the deaths “murder,” and appropriated them to a well-known narrative of an “epidemic” of police violence against black Americans. Meanwhile, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton blamed Castile’s shooting partly on “racism,” and President Obama decried “racial disparity in the justice system.” Events in Ferguson and Baltimore, where the facts did not support the instant Black Lives Matter narrative, have shown the imprudence of these sorts of knee-jerk pronouncements.

In a quarter century in law enforcement, I never encountered anyone more confident, or with more reason to be confident, than Jim Comey. The former Bush Justice Department deputy attorney general turned Obama Justice Department director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has earned bipartisan plaudits for a reason: He is as able as it gets. The nation got to see that this week: first, in his tour de force press conference both damning and clearing Hillary Clinton; then, just 48 hours later, in his deft jousting with a Republican-led House committee rankled by his decision to give a pass to the Democrats’ putative presidential nominee.

So well did Director Comey perform that you barely noticed his rationale withering away.

In arguing that Mrs. Clinton should not face felony charges of grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, the director illustrated that Mrs. Clinton is overwhelmingly guilty of grossly negligent mishandling of classified information. It made me wonder how many dozens — scores? hundreds? — of defendants Comey, in his 15 stellar years as a federal prosecutor, had convicted on a bare fraction of the proof he outlined against the former secretary of state.

Comey piled fact upon fact showing intentional misconduct — the setting up of a non-government, non-secure e-mail server system for the conduct of official business, in violation of guidelines Clinton was obliged not only to follow but to enforce; the transmission of classified information (including some of the government’s most closely guarded intelligence secrets) — information Clinton had to know was classified at the time it was sent, some of which was even marked classified (notwithstanding her serial denials of that tell-tale fact); the herculean effort to destroy any trace of thousands of government files, notwithstanding over a year’s worth of vows that no government-related information had been included in the 32,000 e-mails she attempted to delete rather than surrender to the State Department.

On and on Comey went: shredding one Hillary lie after another; all but guaranteeing that her “extreme carelessness” had resulted in the penetration of her communications by foreign intelligence services; pointedly rebuking Clinton’s recklessness in discussing top-secret intelligence via a homebrew system so amateurishly unsecure she’d have been better off using your teenager’s Gmail account.

In the end, nevertheless, he let her off the hook. Bursting with pride over the bureau’s forensic prowess and investigative energy, he left the listener certain his agents had built the slam-dunk case to end all slam-dunk cases, only to conclude with a thud that the case was too weak to charge. Not only too weak but so wanting, he proclaimed, that no reasonable prosecutor could think otherwise.

Turns out there are a lot of unreasonable prosecutors. Can it be that too many of them are retired and cranky, that from up here in the peanut gallery, the job looks a lot easier than it is?

Maybe . . . but I don’t think so.