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New Batch of Hillary Clinton Emails Show Blurred Lines With Foundation Contacts Conservative group Judicial Watch points to request for diplomatic passport for charity official’s trip to North Korea By Byron Tau and Peter Nicholas

Posted By on September 2nd, 2016

WASHINGTON—A new set of Hillary Clinton emails shows how politics, diplomacy and philanthropy would periodically converge during her tenure as secretary of state, with top aides drawing on Clinton Foundation contacts to cope with crises facing the U.S. government overseas.

A batch of emails released Thursday by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch, which received the documents from the State Department under a court order, includes an exchange from July 2009 involving Clinton Foundation official Douglas Band. In the exchange, Mr. Band asked Mrs. Clinton’s senior deputy, Huma Abedin, for diplomatic passports for himself and two others, saying theirs had lapsed. Ms. Abedin wrote back, “OK” and “will figure it out.”

Officials on Thursday said the passports were tied to a humanitarian mission: former President Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea later that summer to help free captive journalists. The passports were never granted. Instead, the North Koreans agreed not to stamp the passports of Mr. Clinton and the aides, including Mr. Band, who traveled with him to help free Euna Lee and Laura Ling. A person familiar with the matter cited concerns about having a North Korean stamp on individual passports.

A previous cache of emails released last month showed Mr. Band seeking a meeting between Mrs. Clinton and the crown prince of Bahrain, calling him a “good friend of ours.” The Kingdom of Bahrain has donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to the foundation.

Critics have said such contacts underscore how the Clinton Foundation enjoyed special access to the highest reaches of the State Department during Mrs. Clinton’s watch. Now, in the final stretch of the presidential bid, Mrs. Clinton is facing growing scrutiny over the entanglements between the foundation and her work as the nation’s top diplomat.

Mrs. Clinton has been forced to defend arrangements in which key aides played overlapping roles. At various times during Mrs. Clinton’s four-year tenure, for example, Ms. Abedin worked for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a private New York-based consulting firm co-founded by Mr. Band in 2011. Ms. Abedin is now co-chair of Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“The idea that the State Department would even consider a diplomatic passport for Clinton Foundation executives is beyond belief,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

In reply, Clinton allies say the foundation has been driven solely by its charitable mission. They see the criticism as unfounded, citing the foundation’s work combating AIDS and easing poverty. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Security Debate Draws Attention to U.S. Border With Canada U.S. strengthens surveillance at northern border By Chester Dawson

Posted By on September 2nd, 2016

WESTBY, Mont.—The U.S. border with Canada is attracting greater scrutiny as debate rages in the U.S. presidential campaign about security on its southern border with Mexico, and concern grows over global terrorism and vulnerability to illegal crossings.

The U.S. government has been steadily beefing up surveillance of the northern border with new technology designed to help monitor areas too remote for round-the-clock patrols by field agents. Much of the change comes from the gradual rollout of new technologies that were promised in the aftermath of a security reassessment following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D., N.D.) this year called on the Department of Homeland Security to pay closer attention to the northern border and not view it as an “afterthought.” Last year, she co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R., N.H.) to step up funding for recruiting more border agents to specifically target more remote areas along the border with Canada.

Some lawmakers in northern border states cite Canada’s greater willingness to accept refugees from war-torn areas such as the Middle East as a potential threat to the U.S. In particular, they note the Canadian government has resettled more than 25,000 Syrians since November 2015, more than double the 10,000 Syrian refugees that the U.S. has agreed to take in by September. A U.S. Senate homeland security hearing addressed the topic in February, but there have been no reported U.S. border incidents involving Canada’s Syrian refugees.

“I do worry about it,” said Mike Cuffe, a state legislator in Montana who lives about 4 miles from the border in the town of Eureka.

Mr. Cuffe harbors concerns about the possibility of terrorist infiltration from the north, but says that must be balanced with other issues such as the hit to commerce and road congestion caused by backups at a border crossing with Canada that once was guarded by little more than wooden sawhorses at night.

“A threat to one country is a threat to the other,” said Christine Constantin, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Embassy in Washington, adding that Canada has a “zero tolerance” policy for refugees with security concerns.

“No terrorists have been successful in attacking the homeland coming through America’s northern border,” she said. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Loopholes for the Mullahs Secret side deals allow Iran to skirt limits in the nuclear deal.

Posted By on September 2nd, 2016

Socrates is rumored to have said that the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing, and maybe we should adopt a version of the Greek philosopher’s motto when it comes to the nuclear deal with Iran. To wit, we are learning again that what the Obama Administration says Iran can do under the agreement, and what Iran is allowed to do, are almost never the same.

The latest discrepancy was revealed Thursday in a report by David Albright and Andrea Stricker of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a think tank in Washington D.C. that specializes in nuclear issues. The agreement specifies that Iran is to limit its stockpile of reactor-grade, low-enriched uranium (LEU) to no more than 300 kilograms for 15 years. Tehran shipped more than 11 tons of LEU to Russia last year, and the Administration has trumpeted the Islamic Republic’s supposed compliance with the deal as a way of justifying wider sanctions relief.

But as Mr. Albright and Ms. Stricker note, Iran‘s “compliance” came about thanks to a series of secretive exemptions and loopholes that the Administration and the deal’s other signatories created for the mullahs sometime last year. Had those exemptions and loopholes not been created out of thin air, the authors report, “some of Iran’s nuclear facilities would not have been in compliance” with the deal.

Among the exemptions: Iran was allowed to keep more than 300 kilos of low-enriched uranium provided it was in various “waste forms.” The deal was also supposed to cap Iran’s production of heavy water at 130 tons, but another loophole now allows Iran to exceed that. In a third exemption, Iran was allowed to maintain 19 large radiation containment chambers, or hot cells, which are supposed to be used for producing medical isotopes but can be “misused for secret, mostly small-scale plutonium separation efforts.”

The White House has waved off the ISIS report by insisting it “did not and will not allow Iran to skirt” its commitments. The non-denial would be more credible if the Administration hadn’t last year agreed to a secretive process in which Iran was allowed to inspect its own nuclear-related military facilities.

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FBI’s Clinton email probe found evidence of effort to evade federal records law by John Solomon and Kellan Howell

Posted By on September 2nd, 2016

http://circa.com/politics/accountability/fbis-hillary-clinton-email-probe-found-evidence-of-effort-to-evade-federal-records-law

New government sources have come forward to say that the former Secretary of State’s email abuse was “systemic and intentional” and began as soon as she took office in 2009 – according to a new report by John Solomon at Circa News. The FBI was building a solid case that Clinton violated the federal records law numerous times, but ultimately there was a decision to hide the email scandal that raises significant questions about the decision not to indict. Secretary Clinton kept the private server in order to avoid public scrutiny under the FOIA. When asked to turn over all private emails, sources confirm that about 15,000 emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account were not given up. Of course, intentionally concealing, removing or destroying federal records violates the Federal Records Act and carries a fine and imprisonment up to three years. More than that: Violators “shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.” The decisions to hide the private email server were intentional and meant to go around the Federal Records Act.

The abuse was so bad that witnesses in the FBI investigation were forced to plead the fifth to avoid self-incrimination. John’s confirmed an agent was “scolded” by a supervisor and told never to raise the issue again.

THIS IS THE REPORT

Though it was not their primary mission, FBI agents who investigated Hillary Clinton’s email collected significant evidence suggesting she and her team violated federal record-keeping laws, including persisting to use a private Blackberry and server to conduct State Department business after being warned they posed legal and security risks, government sources tell Circa.The evidence was compelling enough to convince FBI Director James Comey that the Clinton team had not complied with record-keeping laws and to cause at least one witness to raise their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during an investigative interview, the sources said.

In public, the FBI recommended not filing criminal charges against Clinton on national security grounds. But in private, the Bureau chose to defer to the State Department on whether to recommend anyone to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution on records law violations, the sources said, speaking only on condition of anonymity.

Each email transmission of a government document that was not preserved or turned over to the State Department from Mrs. Clinton’s tenure could theoretically be considered a violation of the Federal Records Act, the main law governing preservation of government records and data.

Other federal laws make it a felony to intentionally conceal, remove or destroy federal records as defined under the Act, punishable with a fine and imprisonment of up to three years. A single conviction also carries a devastating impact for anyone looking to work again in government because the law declares that any violator “shall forfeithis office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”

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The Art of the Steal By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on September 2nd, 2016

Hillary doesn’t want a fair fight. Or even an unfair fight. She wants to cripple the GOP so it can’t fight at all. It’s the ultimate rigged election….

We’re a little more than two months from the November 8th election and everyone knows that all Democrats, a good number of Republicans and conservatives, and almost the entire media have been agonizing over and militating against the fact that billionaire businessman Donald Trump is the last man standing in a contest that pits him against Crooked Hillary for the presidency of the United States.

But why are no professional political commentators—on TV, radio, or in print—explaining exactly why Mr. Trump is such a mortal threat? After all, he has proven himself to be an upright citizen, a wildly successful businessman, the bestselling author of over a dozen books, a philanthropist, the father of five respectful and loving children the eldest of whom are also impressively contributory members of society, the representative of every value Republicans and conservatives traditionally stand for—low taxes, fewer regulations, secure borders, a strong military, strict conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, et al—and significantly a person who has never been accused of being complicit in the deaths of U.S. servicemen, under the ominous investigation of the FBI, or operating an international money-laundering slush fund that compromises the national security of the United States.

Here is the answer: It’s all about the deal!

Underneath the veneer of “service” our elected politicians purport to be driven by, underneath the “ethical standards” our financial centers pretend to operate, and underneath the gauzy illusion of objectivity the media pretend they represent, the so-called culture of the D.C.-Wall St.-media complex is all about cozy arrangements that inevitably line the pockets of those engaged in the following kinds of local, regional, national and international deals, to name but a few:

under-the-table deals
pay-to-play deals
greasy-palm deals
foundation slush-fund deals (sound familiar?)
mutual back-scratching deals
hush-hush deals
access-to-power deals
good-stories-in-the-media deals (sound familiar?)
bad-stories-in-the-media-about-your-political-enemies deals (yep)
sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll deals
immense wealth-producing lobbyist deals
On and on…

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UN NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS (NGOS): INCITING HATRED, ANTISEMITISM AND VIOLENCE FROM THE WORLD STAGE

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/site/documents/?d=15720
CLICK HERE FOR FULL REPORT

Our ground-breaking report exposes the shocking antisemitism and incitement to violence that is occurring at the United Nations by means of UN-accredited non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The UN is enabling groups to spread hatred, encourage terrorism, and promote the destruction of the Jewish state from the world stage.

Democratic states, led by the United States, control the purse strings of the United Nations either from within the UN bureaucracy or through domestic policy. Getting serious about combating gross intolerance and violent extremism means putting an immediate stop to the use and abuse of the United Nations to broadcast and support antisemitism and bigotry and the lethal consequences.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Latest email disclosure is just more proof that Clinton lied By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

On Tuesday, The Post’s Daniel Halper broke the news that Hillary Clinton continued recklessly mishandling classified information even after stepping down as secretary of state. The revelation is bracing — but hardly surprising.

We already knew Clinton’s email practices remained a national security vulnerability after she left the State Department at the end of President Obama’s first term.

For nearly two years, she maintained the servers through which her unauthorized, non-secure homebrew communication system had operated. As we now know, about 62,000 emails were stored on those servers, over 2,000 of which contained classified information, including some of the most sensitive national defense secrets — and the highly classified sources and methods for acquiring those secrets — maintained by our government.

The latest classified email disclosure is a joke. The document is so chockablock with classified information — meaning it is so thoroughly redacted — that the State Department might just as well have issued a blank page. This reminds us of how cynically the Democrats’ presidential nominee looked the American people in the eye and assured us, for over a year, that she never sent or received classified information.
When this preposterous claim was exploded, she tried Clintonian parsing: None of the emails, we were told, was “marked classified.” But the latest email discovery illustrates how farcical this talking point has always been.

Officials with security clearances know the categories of information that are classified pursuant to an executive order — whether they’re “marked” as such or not. Clinton not only knew the rules, she was in charge of enforcing them throughout her department.

And in any event, as FBI Director James Comey conceded, Clinton did send and receive some emails with classified markings.

We are also reminded that Clinton repeatedly vowed she’d surrendered every single government business-related email upon the State Department’s request.

This was an extraordinary lie: She hoarded and attempted to destroy thousands of emails which, like the one The Post describes, involved government business — some of it highly sensitive and significant (such as the 30 emails related to the Benghazi massacre that the FBI recovered but the State Department has yet to disclose). Converting government records to one’s own use and destroying them are serious crimes, even if no classified information is involved.

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The Secession of French Muslims by Yves Mamou

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

In the French republic, state schools were built to fight the grip of the Catholic church on the whole of French society. The thinking was that Darwin is better at explaining the origin of the human race than the Bible. To build a country of free citizens: knowledge first; belief only if you insist, and even then, only by yourself.

“If the hijab or burkini had anything to do with modesty or piety, the Islamic fundamentalists would have sought private beaches, not insisted on forcing themselves on the public. … If the hijab becomes an accepted public phenomenon, a modern society cannot teach its future generations that a woman’s dress is not an excuse for rape”. — Hala Arafa, writing in The Hill.

A French Muslim society that often seems to feel as if it still belongs to its country of origin, appears to have decided that the game of secularism and “living together” should be over. With veils, burkinis and guns, various Islamists groups seem to be trying to embed the same message: We remain Muslims first and have decided to pay no attention to the culture of countries in which we are living.

For many today, French secularism is an anti-human rights ideology, a kind of moral deformity close to racism.

How can a free country, they ask, even think of doing such a thing as trying to ban a veil or a burkini — the full body covering for women to wear on the beach? How, they ask, can the French Republic call itself free and remain free when many of its citizens would like to rob Muslim women, peacefully obeying their own religion, of the freedom to choose their own clothes?

The current radicalization in France is not like that of the recent migration of Muslims to other European countries. Muslims have been coming to France in large numbers since the French left Algeria in 1962. The French never made any distinction between the French of “Gaul” and the French of North Africa. The current radicalization is not of those who came then, but of the younger generation — of French Muslims. They were born in France, speak French, were schooled in France — but they are not at ease with the values of France.

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The $50 Billion Illinois Favor Factory Hums Along by Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

It’s been two years since Illinois state government had a full-year budget. Now, more than 70,000 vendors are owed $8.2 billion. Yet, despite the legislative deadlock and seemingly fiscal insolvency, more than $50 billion in state payments flowed to providers and other entities in FY2016.

So, who actually got paid and for how much while others waited in the long line of unpaid bills?

Recently, our organization at American Transparency (website: OpenTheBooks.com) filed our annual Freedom of Information Act request with Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger (R) for the state’s checkbook payments. Here’s what we found: 56,738 recipients received fast-tracked payments of $50,125,427,171.

We plotted the recipients by ZIP code – review your neighborhood or look across the entire country. Just zoom-in, click a ZIP code pin, and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart below the map.

The top 25 accounts paid by the Comptroller received $21.8 billion. The vast majority of the payments were for social safety-net healthcare providers ($5.9 billion); the Teachers Retirement System pension payment ($3.224 billion); Cook County ($2.7 billion); Chicago Board of Education ($2.1 billion); Regional Transportation Authority ($1.7 billion); and transfer payments to the state treasurer or banks.
Here are some of the entities receiving the large state payments in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2016:

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Terrorist Threat from the Southern ‘Border’ Trump and his supporters should stress the life-and-death aspect of illegal immigration. By Deroy Murdock

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

Donald J. Trump met today with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and later flies to Arizona for a much- anticipated speech on immigration. On these and similar occasions, it would behoove the Republican presidential nominee to go beyond the usual concerns about Mexican and Central American migrants crossing America’s southern “border.” Trump should focus, privately and publicly, on what U.S. officials call “Other Than Mexicans.”

OTMs consist of all sorts of people who break into the United States from countries all around the world. These include such colorful locales as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

In fact, federal agents in 2014 apprehended 4,930 individuals who hailed from the four nations that Washington listed as “state sponsors of terrorism,” plus the ten countries that the Transportation Safety Administration had designated as “of interest.” Foreigners who arrive legally from those places are subject to enhanced passenger screening. A total of 69,599 people from those 14 countries were arrested while trying to enter America illegally, from fiscal years 2005 through 2014, according to the 2014 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, published this month by the Department of Homeland Security.

While these figures involve all of America’s frontiers, among the 486,651 illegal aliens caught entering the United States, 479,371 (or 98.5 percent) were nailed along the southern Boundary. It probably is safe to assume that a similar proportion of illegal aliens from these worrisome nations also were captured waltzing in from Mexico.