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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Uh-Oh: Newly Released Email Was Marked Classified When It Hit Clinton’s Server By Debra Heine

Hillary Clinton has claimed from the very beginning of the email scandal that nothing she sent or received was marked classified at the time. As recently as Wednesday of this week, she told Fox News’ Bret Baier, “nothing that I sent or received was marked classified. And nothing has been demonstrated to contradict that. So it is the fact. It was the fact when I first said it. It is the fact that I’m saying it now.”

Unfortunately for Hillary, the State Department today released an email from 2012 that totally contradicts her “fact.” According to Catherine Herridge at Fox News, the email carries “a classified code known as a ‘portion marking’ – and that marking was on the email when it was sent directly to Clinton’s account.” (Not retroactively, as the Clinton camp likes to claim.)

The “C” – which means it was marked classified at the confidential level – is in the left-hand-margin and relates to an April 2012 phone call with Malawi’s first female president, Joyce Banda, who took power after the death of President Mutharika in 2012.

“(C) Purpose of Call: to offer condolences on the passing of President Mukharika and congratulate President Banda on her recent swearing in.”

Everything after that was fully redacted before it was publicly released by the State Department — a sign that the information was classified at the time and dealt with sensitive government deliberations.

A US government source said there are other Clinton emails with classified markings, or marked classified, beyond the April 2012 document.

A January 2014 federal government training manual, called “Marking Classified National Security Information,” provides a step-by-step guide for reviewing classified information, and allocating classified codes or “portion markings.”

“This system requires that standard markings be applied to classified information…Markings shall be uniformly and conspicuously applied to leave no doubt about the classified status of the information, the level of protection required, and the duration of classification.”

It adds, “A portion is ordinarily defined as a paragraph, but also includes subjects, titles, graphics, tables, charts, bullet statements, sub-paragraphs, classified signature blocks, bullets and other portions within slide presentations, and the like.”

“Portion markings consist of the letters “(U)” for Unclassified, “(C)” for Confidential, “(S)” for Secret, and “(TS)” for Top Secret.”

As has been pointed out too many times to count, whether an email is marked “classified” or not is completely irrelevant because it was her responsibility to ascertain whether the information shared through her private email server was classified. But Hillary kept using the excuse and will probably continue to do so because it’s all she’s got. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary’s Unsecured Emails Talked About DRONE STRIKES by Deborah Heine

The focus of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information is a series of emails between American diplomats in Pakistan and Washington about drone strikes, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. These emails are among the 22 top secret emails deemed too sensitive to ever be revealed to the American public.

Via Reuters:

The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the “low side” — government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters — as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a CIA drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law enforcement officials briefed on the FBI probe, the Journal said.

Some of the emails were then forwarded by Clinton’s aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said, according to the newspaper.

A day after she assumed office in 2009, Clinton signed a Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure Agreement that indicated it was her responsibility to ascertain whether information shared through her private email server was classified.

Most importantly, the agreement indicated that she understood there are criminal penalties for “any unauthorized disclosure” of classified information. CONTINUE AT SITE

American ISIS Fighter Says Life in Mosul is ‘Really, Really Bad’ By Tyler O’Neil

Mohamed Khweis, a non-descript Virginian who sporadically attended mosque, briefly joined the Islamic State (ISIS) but surrendered himself to Kurdish forces in March, saying he was glad to escape the radical Islamist terrorist group. He was flown back to the United States early Thursday morning to face trial. Charges have not yet been made public.

“My message to the American people is — the life in Mosul, it’s really, really bad,” Khweis told Kurdistan 24 News. “The people who control Mosul don’t represent a religion. Daesh [the Arabic name for ISIS] does not represent a religion. I don’t see them as good Muslims.”

Khweis told Kurdistan 24 the story of his brief flirtation with the terrorist organization. “I attended a mosque in America, but not that often … I left the States in the middle of December 2015 and went to Europe. I first went to the UK,” the man said.

He went from London to Amsterdam, and finally to Turkey. There, he met an Iraqi woman whose sister was married to an ISIS fighter. The two smuggled themselves to Syria and then to Mosul, a major city under control of the Islamic State. They arrived in Mosul on January 16.

Once in ISIS terroritory, Khweis was stripped of identification and was given the nickname “Abu Omar.” He lived with 70 foreign fighters in one house before being taken to Mosul.

Despite Khweis’ declaration that Islamic State militants are not good Muslims, they made him attend religion classes all day. “Our daily life was basically prayer, eating, and learning about the religion for eight hours,” he said.

Khweis did not agree with the teachings, however. “I didn’t complete the whole Sharia [the Islamic law]. I didn’t agree with their ideology. That’s when I wanted to escape.”

But his disagreements went beyond religion. “It is not like Western countries,” Khweis explained. “It is very strict and no smoking there. There are a lot of foreign fighters walking around with weapons, and many are from Central and South Asia.”

Khweis spent about a month in Mosul, and “found it very, very hard to live there. I decided to return home.” He found a friend who promised to take him to Turkey, but he could not go all the way. He crossed the Kurdish lines and contacted the Peshmerga forces. CONTINUE AT SITE

San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association appears to have a strong ‘pro-Mexico’ agenda By Sierra Rayne

According to FactCheck.org, “it’s not accurate to call the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association ‘very pro-Mexico’ or ‘very strongly pro-Mexican.'”

The same article claims that Donald Trump’s comments that U.S. district judge Gonzalo Curiel is a “member of a club or society very strongly pro-Mexican” are “an inaccurate description of a group for Latino lawyers and law students in San Diego.”

To clarify, membership in the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association also includes judges, in addition to lawyers and law students, and one could reasonably argue that not only is it inappropriate, but it also potentially runs contrary to federal statues and the common law for sitting judges to be members of such activist organizations.

Luis Osuna, president of the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, is quoted as saying “[w]e have no pro-Mexico agenda.”

That doesn’t appear to be what the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association’s social media feed shows.

On February 3, 2015, the organization tweeted, “Are you a member of House of Mexico? You can learn more about their great work below: http://fb.me/76CDut6Au.”

The House of Mexico, whose home page is the link the association tweeted, has a self-stated mission “to share, celebrate, educate and promote the rich art, culture, and history of Mexico.”

Then, on September 2, 2015, the organization tweeted, “SDLRLA supports House of Mexico San Diego” with an link to a Change.org petition to “Tell House of Pacific Relations that Mexico needs a stand-alone house in Balboa Park.” According to this petition being promoted by the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association:

The continued attacks on Mexico and Mexicans must end. We say, “Basta! Enough!” Mexico deserves its own house in a prominent location.

If this doesn’t reflect a “pro-Mexico agenda” by the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, it will interesting to hear what does.

American Charged With Aiding Islamic State Man accused of joining, then quitting group By Kate O’Keeffe

The Justice Department on Thursday unsealed charges against an American who had allegedly traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State terror group.

While federal prosecutors have been steadily charging people for helping Islamic State from the U.S., there are far fewer cases involving Americans who have allegedly traveled to the Middle East to join the group, become disenchanted, and returned.

Mohamad Jamal Khweis, a 26-year-old who last lived in Alexandria, Va., left the U.S. in December 2015 to join Islamic State, alleged the May 11 complaint, which charged him with providing material support to the terror group.

He lived in Islamic State safe houses in Syria and Iraq, told the terror group he would be willing to become a suicide bomber, and participated in Islamic State-directed religious training for nearly a month before leaving the group’s territory and surrendering in March to Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, the complaint alleges.

It wasn’t immediately known who Mr. Khweis’s attorney is. A U.S. relative of Mr. Khweis had earlier called him “a very respectful and quiet young man” who had “nothing to do” with Islamic State.

Mr. Khweis will have an initial appearance at the federal courthouse in Alexandria on Thursday afternoon, the Justice Department said.

Though Islamic State’s social media presence remains powerful, the number of Americans traveling to the Middle East to fight alongside the terror group has been dropping, James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told reporters in May at FBI headquarters.

Since August, one American a month has traveled or attempted to travel to the Middle East to join the group, compared with about six to 10 a month in the preceding year and a half, Mr. Comey said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump, the Judiciary and Identity Politics Making an issue of Judge Curiel’s ethnicity was squalid—and the other side of a coin that liberals have played for years. Michael Mukasey

Federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was born in Indiana to parents of Mexican origin and belongs to an association of lawyers of Mexican origin, is sitting on a case in the Southern District of California that charges fraud against Trump University. Donald Trump in recent days has attracted much attention by suggesting that Judge Curiel should be disqualified for bias because the judge’s rulings are adverse to Mr. Trump and because, in campaigning for the presidency, the candidate has criticized Mexicans and proposed building a wall on the southwest U.S. border.

Mr. Trump’s claim against Judge Curiel is both baseless and squalid, but some in the chorus of critics are not themselves entirely without fault.

First, let’s dispose of the recusal question. Two statutes bear on recusal of a federal judge; neither remotely supports Mr. Trump’s argument. One, and part of the other, treat recusal for bias in fact. To justify such a finding, the complainant must show that a judge has a financial interest in a case, or that the judge has a relationship with parties or lawyers in it. Sworn evidence of the judge’s personal bias or prejudice is another justification for recusal. No evidence of such bias—indeed no evidence at all—has been submitted to the court by Mr. Trump or his lawyers.
The remaining provision requires a judge to disqualify himself “in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” The provision doesn’t require a formal motion, but directs the judge to act, if necessary, on his own, as he would if he had a financial interest of which he was aware.

There is case law on what circumstances suggest that a judge’s impartiality “might reasonably be questioned”—the key word of course being “reasonably.” A judge is enjoined to weigh the importance of public confidence in the courts against the distinct possibility that someone questioning his impartiality might simply be seeking to avoid anticipated adverse consequences of his presiding over the case.

That is, parties shouldn’t use recusal as a device to judge-shop. Because the job of a judge is to rule, and rulings necessarily favor one party or the other, adverse rulings—even a disproportionate number—generally are not considered evidence of partiality.

Race, religion and even gender have been used as suggested bases for “reasonably” questioning a judge’s impartiality. Thus black judges, particularly those with professional histories before they took the bench that included civil-rights work, have been asked to recuse themselves in civil-rights cases. A female judge in the Southern District of New York in 1975 was challenged in a sex-discrimination case, as was a Mormon judge in a 1984 case that allegedly involved the “theocratic power structure of Utah.” These challenges were rejected. CONTINUE AT SITE

Michael Cutler Moment: Obama’s Refugees, Illegal Aliens and the Tsunami of Deadly Diseases in America

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Michael Cutler Moment with Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent.http://jamieglazov.com/2016/06/09/michael-cutler-moment-obamas-refugees-illegal-aliens-and-the-tsunami-of-deadly-diseases-in-america/

Mr. Cutler discussed Obama’s Refugees, Illegal Aliens and the Tsunami of Deadly Diseases in America, unveiling the lethal violation of the nation’s most basic public health protocols.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch The Michael Cutler Moment: Obama’s Pathway to the “Borderless World,” in which Mr. Cutler unveiled how the Radical-in-Chief is opening America to Islamic terrorists and transnational criminals.

A Moral Disability Dispiriting findings on long-term unemployment By Kevin D. Williamson

When I was a kid, I didn’t have any more appreciation for those “We Had It So Hard” stories you get from your parents and your grandparents than any other callow schoolboy does. But one of them stuck with me.

The elderly, highly regarded gentleman in question had moved to West Texas with his parents in the 1920s where they lived under what were essentially pioneer conditions, hunting rabbits for meat and foraging what other food they could, sometimes even eating green tumbleweeds. If you don’t know what the wind is like in West Texas, it will sound absurd, but, at one point, their house literally was blown away. There was no high school where they were — the place was called Sand — but there was one in a town 15 miles away, so he walked there and went to work at a filling station, a job he kept through high school. He was later accepted as a student at Texas Tech, the campus of which was a little more than 60 miles away. Again, he walked, not knowing where or how he’d live when he got there. The only business he knew was running a filling station, so he and another student started one, and he later used some of the money he made to open a movie theater. What followed was a successful business career and then a career in politics, culminating with his election as Texas governor Preston Smith.

We Americans have always been in motion. The pilgrims in their ships, the pioneers in their wagons, the Okies bound for California however they could get there, Preston Smith and his much-used shoes. It isn’t always great. But it isn’t all that bad, either, especially when you are young: I am sure that many of you reading this have had the experience of moving into an apartment you’ve never seen because you didn’t have the money to go scouting when relocating for a new job. Sometimes it’s better than expected, sometimes not—but it is always a surprise.

I am not among those who believe that poverty builds character — I can do without that kind of character — but I do sometimes almost feel sorry for those friends of mine who’ve always had it a little too good, who don’t have any funny stories about roadside misadventures caused by having a crappy 22-year-old car, the semester they spent semi-homeless, the people they met working on a farm or doing day labor. I don’t want to have those kinds of adventures now, and I didn’t want to have them at the time, either, but sometime between then and now I became glad that they had happened.

One Ohio Mosque Has Been at the Center of SIX Terror Cases By Patrick Poole

The website for Masjid Omar Ibn El Khattab, just a mile from the Ohio State University campus, proclaims itself “the Muslim Heart of Columbus.” And yet the mosque, described as one of the most ideologically hardline in the city, has grabbed the media spotlight once again: former attendees were recently reported as having joined the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria.

As mosque officials struggle to distance themselves from yet another resident terror cell, the recent news raises questions about the extensive history of this Ohio mosque as a turnstile for terrorism.

Just a few weeks ago, I reported here at PJ Media that three individuals who lived just yards from Masjid Omar for two years joined ISIS in Syria in July 2014. Rasel Raihan was killed in Syria in a U.S. airstrike. His older sister Zakia Nasrin and her husband Jaffrey Khan are still in Raqqa, according to internal ISIS documents which NBC News obtained from an ISIS defector.

In that NBC News report, the mosque’s president, Basil Gohar, tried to distance the trio from the mosque. He said that Jaffrey, despite living so close to the mosque for two years, had only attended the mosque for a few weeks and had kept to himself.

When a local TV station caught up with him a few days later, Gohar again tried to distance the mosque from the ISIS recruits — as well as from the previous convicted terrorists who had attended the mosque:

We share the shock and horror of these actions, and we wish that we could have found out or stopped them … It’s quite unfortunate what these people went and did, but the fact they attended has no bearing on their actions. Anyone can come to our mosque. We have an open door policy. It’s not possible for us to screen someone’s ideology.

NY Times Columnist Goes Bonkers Over Trump Comment about Black Supporter What the media omitted from their coverage of Trump’s remarks.Crystal Wright

Democrat New York Times columnist and certified Democrat water boy Charles Blow couldn’t wait to pounce on Donald Trump’s comment about a black supporter at a recent rally.

Blow tweeted:

If anyone ever says of me, “look at MY African-American,” I’m going ALL THE WAY off… ‪#YouDontOwnMeFool

Of course, Blow — who is black and has almost singularly focused his column on trashing Trump — is perfectly okay with being owned by Democrats and having candidates like Hillary mock him to his black face. Over the last 50-plus years of blacks showing slavish devotion to Democrats, blacks like Blow have received zero in return but insults. Hillary Clinton has again adopted a black dialect when talking to black audiences, like she did in her 2008 campaign. During a radio interview on an urban station, she even joked about carrying hot sauce in her bag — you know, like the blacks do.

But I never saw Charles Blow “go all the way off” on Hillary’s insults. Looks like somebody is the fool. I also don’t recall Blow being outraged when Bill Clinton blew up at Senator Ted Kennedy in 2008 when Kennedy endorsed then-Senator Barack Obama over Hillary. Clinton told Kennedy that not too long ago (black) Obama would have been fetching them (white men) coffee.

Back to Trump’s comment. The presumptive GOP nominee did single out a black person at a campaign event in California. But the liberal media mob, which includes Blow, took Trump’s comments out of context. What a shock.

First, Trump addressed violent protestors who tried to disrupt his recent rally in San Jose. Liberals far and wide blamed Trump for the violence. The GOP nominee said that he urges supporters not to fight protestors but smile if they punch you in the face “as your nose [is] pouring blood out of it.”

“Be very, very nice,” advised Trump.

Then, Trump went on to recount this story:

We had a case where we had an African-American guy, who was a fan of mine. Great fan, great guy. In fact I want to find out what’s going on with him. You know. . .

Look at my African-American over here, look at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I’m talking about? OK.