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Thomas Lambert Cranmer: Re: Corruption of Public Officials: The Clinton Family, Foundation & Affiliates, and State Department Employees

Posted By on June 12th, 2016

Amicus Brief Supporting FBI’s Quest in Identifying Corrupt Public Officials

Dear Director Comey:

The FBI’s recent radio ads asked public assistance in identifying public corruption. This amicus brief is in response to your request, based on my experience as a State Department employee with a top secret clearance and decades of work in corrupt countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. Therefore, I am alarmed by the steady decline of integrity among U.S. government and public official.

I studied law at Yale, Columbia, and New York University, but I am not a practicing lawyer. I worked as an international planner and a treasurer in Mobil Oil Corporation, a manager in the State Department, with a Top Secret clearance, and an international consultant, evaluating legal issues, studying corruption, proposing remedies and negotiating solutions. I am a fellow at the American Center for Democracy.

My letter is based on publicly available sources concerning what I believe to be one of the most astounding corruption cases involving a politician who wishes to lead my beloved country.

I understand that a large number of your agents are carrying out a criminal investigation of these cases, and I hope my enclosed analysis would help your efforts.

Public statements by federal government officials, and journalists indicate that either they do not understand, or refuse to acknowledge that serious laws were broken, not just a bunch of silly rules.

But the Rasmussen Report on a February 3, 2016, survey of 1,000 likely voters showed 81% “strongly believe the federal government is crooked.” Gallup reported on September 19, 2015, in a survey of 1,000 adults, 75% “perceived corruption as widespread in the country’s government.” In 2007, 67% responded the same way.

The U.S. international reputation is similarly appalling. Freedom House listed the U.S. as being perceived by 75% of respondents as one of the most corrupt countries of the world. Only 12 countries of the world were regarded as worse.

Transparency International (TI) says on their website that 72% of people surveyed believe the U.S. government’s efforts to fight corruption are ineffective. Other TI ratings for the U.S. are:

– 16th for corruption index out of 168 countries in 2015;

– 10th in bribe payers’ index out of 28 countries in 2011;

– 5% reported paying a bribe in 2010;

– 86th percentile in control of corruption;

– 5th in financial secrecy index out of 71 countries.

These perceptions are most disturbing. I hope you and the DOJ would not further this corrupt image by allowing political pressure to cover up and obfuscate the facts of your investigations. Our law enforcement agencies must show that politically powerful famous current and former officials are treated as ordinary citizens when they break the law. A failure to indict and prosecute the Clintons and their enterprise will encourage more corruption and the disclosure of more classified information, further endangering the U.S.

You have the reputation of being honest, competent and diligent, and I hope you will soon refer recommendations and backup research for criminal prosecution of the Clintons and their staff to the DOJ. That would ameliorate the decline in the public’s respect for the rule of law. If the DOJ refuses to impanel a grand jury or to prosecute, I hope you and many FBI agents resign in protest. The integrity of the U.S. government and America’s national security are at stake.

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Obama legacy will be power blackouts. By Larry Bell

Posted By on June 12th, 2016

President Obama is burning his so-called bridges to a “green energy” future that will leave America’s families and industries powerlessly impoverished.

Any notions that generously subsidized solar and wind will significantly compensate capacity losses from shuttered coal plants and overregulated oil and natural gas suppliers are scientifically and economically delusional.

And as for any prospects that truly clean non-fossil nuclear or hydropower can make up the slack, forget about that too.

Let’s start with some simple arithmetic. If you have heard some USenergy2015really exciting news that the Obama Administration has already doubled the amount of total U.S. energy derived from “renewable alternative” sources (solar, wind, and biofuels), that would be true.

Thanks largely to $150 billion in generous federal subsidies, combined total renewables (not including hydropower) grew from supplying slightly more than 2% of our “primary fuel” (including electricity) to a whopping 4% today.

Meanwhile over the same period, the total increase of non-subsidized oil and gas also doubled, but added eight times more energy than the total growth of wind, solar, and biofuels combined. Oil and gas now supply about 63% of all U.S. primary fuel. Coal provides another 19%.

BilLGatesBill Gates, a leading “green energy proponent,” candidly discussed false industry narrative in a November 2015 Atlantic magazine article titled “We Need an Energy Miracle.”

Referring to “self-defeating claims of some clean-energy enthusiasts,” he said, “They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbons. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements.

What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what?”

As Gates pointed out, “The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this [economical energy technology] thing is. So false solutions like divestment or ‘Oh, it’s easy to do’ hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated.”

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The House strikes a blow against political correctness By Rick Moran

Posted By on June 12th, 2016

There is no better example of leftist doublespeak than referring to illegal aliens as “undocumented workers” or, as the Library of Congress was proposing, “noncitizens.”

In a rare show of defiance, the House voted to order the Library to continue using the term “illegal alien” – just as it appears in the law.

Washington Times:

The library earlier this had proposed changing, saying that despite being used in law, the term had “become pejorative” and needed to be axed. Instead the library said it would use “noncitizen” to refer to illegal immigrants, and “unauthorized immigration” to refer to the broader issue.

Republicans revolted against the change, and demanded in the annual legislative branch funding bill that the library use terms that reflect federal law. The code repeatedly refers to foreigners as aliens, including those here both legally and illegally, so that would force the library to maintain the term “illegal alien.”

Democrats balked and forced a vote, but the GOP prevailed on a 237-170 party-line vote.

“The words ‘illegal alien’ will be retired. This will change, whether it’s now or six months from now or 10 years from now,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, Texas Democrat. “The question for all of us is whether we today will do the right thing or whether a few years from now will apologize.”

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June 1944: The summer when a 15-year-old played ball By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Posted By on June 12th, 2016

Most Americans were consumed with World War II in June 1944. It started with D-Day and the daily reports of Allied forces marching into France. It was personal for most families, because every street had one or two young men fighting in Europe or the Pacific.

The baseball season went on, as President Roosevelt desired. However, the teams had to get very creative to fill their rosters. They could not rely on Latin players as they do today, and African Americans could not play anyway. I should add that a lot of Cuban young men served in World War II in support of U.S. forces.

On June 10, 1944, the Cincinnati Reds gave the ball to Joe Nuxall, and history was made:

In 1942, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt wrote to Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to ask that baseball continue even though the United States was going to war:

“I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. And that means they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.”

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The Facts Keep Undermining Hillary’s E-mail Tales It’s outrageous that she might emerge unscathed even so. By David French

Posted By on June 11th, 2016

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal revealed that the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information was zeroing in on “a series of e-mails between American diplomats in Islamabad and their superiors in Washington about whether to oppose specific drone strikes in Pakistan.” The Journal noted that the e-mails were “vaguely worded” and sent within the “often-narrow time frame” when State Department officials had an opportunity to object to CIA drone strikes.

Before we go on, let’s revisit Clinton’s words from August 26, 2015. Back then, she declared that, “I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified, which is the way you know whether something is.”

This was a classic Clintonian defense, resting as it did on a largely irrelevant straw man – if she did not receive information “marked” or “designated” classified, and such designations are “the way you know” something is classified, then she never knowingly mishandled classified information. Yet as I (and many others) have pointed out before, Clinton’s actual legal obligation was to safeguard marked and unmarked classified information, and to fulfill that obligation she would necessarily have to know the classification of everything she handled, whether it was marked or not.

That isn’t always a particularly difficult task. When it comes to drone strikes and many other sensitive issues, it is remarkably easy to determine whether information is or should be classified. And as you read the Journal article, it becomes quite clear that all parties knew drone-strike information was classified, yet they were doing their best to evade classification requirements for the sake of speed and convenience.

The picture the Journal paints is appalling. For example, in one instance an ambassador sent a “short, cryptic note” just before Christmas indicating a drone strike was imminent, triggering a conversation among Clinton advisers “over the next few days, in which it was clear they were having the discussions in part because people were away from their offices for the holiday and didn’t have access to a classified computer.” (Emphasis added.)

No doubt it’s inconvenient to disturb Christmas festivities for the sake of national security, but the idea that classification rules should be bent to accommodate holiday plans is absurd, and it mocks the sacrifice of countless service members and other members of the national-security establishment who actually observe the rules. To substitute the use of classified computers for unsecured communications using ad hoc vague wordings as some form of primitive code is dangerously amateurish and very likely criminal.

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A ‘Special Prosecutor’ Is Still a Bad Idea in a Criminal Investigation of Clinton Such an appointee would enable Clinton and Obama to bury the scandal. : Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on June 11th, 2016

You can set your watch by it: Whenever a scandal arises or intensifies in the scandal-plagued Obama administration, alarms go off calling for a “special prosecutor,” and I am constrained to respond (see, e.g., here) that this well-intentioned idea is a bad one. So it is with what even the Obama White House now concedes is the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.

Here at National Review, Dan McLaughlin renews the call for President Obama to appoint a “special prosecutor” to take over the criminal investigation of the former secretary of state and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Echoing the Transom’s Ben Domenech, he contends that Obama’s endorsement of Clinton’s candidacy, announced on Thursday, is somehow a game changer.

While I have great respect for both of these thoughtful commentators, I could not disagree more. Special prosecutors are unconstitutional if truly independent, and counterproductive if not so. They are a poor excuse for avoiding the Constitution’s remedy for corrupt public officials: impeachment and disqualification. Moreover, it is simply not true that Obama’s endorsement of Clinton meaningfully ratchets up his conflict of interest; that conflict was already profound because we have known for months that Obama is implicated in Clinton’s lawlessness.

Any Prosecutor Appointed by Obama Would Not Be Credibly Independent
To their credit, Messrs. McLaughlin and Domenech avoid the fatal error usually made by “special prosecutor” enthusiasts — the error that explains the scare quotes around the term. When commentators call for a “special prosecutor,” they usually mean an independent prosecutor — as in: independent of the executive branch. As we shall see, however, such an office would be unconstitutional, because prosecution is an executive function.

McLaughlin and Domenech concede that this is a problem but convince themselves that it can be gotten round if President Obama, in a display of great integrity, appoints a credible lawyer who, though technically subordinate to the president, would be given de facto independence to conduct a thorough, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may investigation. It would be hard to fathom a suggestion more removed from reality.

Obama has not only presided over a Justice Department so corrupt and politicized it would make the Nixon administration blush. He is, to repeat, complicit in Mrs. Clinton’s misconduct (a point we’ll cover in a bit). It is simply preposterous to believe that, after governing lawlessly for seven and a half years, Obama would suddenly transform into a pillar of rectitude who unleashes a credible, truly independent investigation of Clinton that could cost his party the presidency while besmirching his legacy.

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

Posted By on June 11th, 2016

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

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

Posted By on June 11th, 2016

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

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Nick Turner Brexit, Part II: Faith in Oneself

Posted By on June 11th, 2016

When the asylum is on fire and management is arguing about regulating the volume of fire buckets, even the saddest inmate will grasp that making for the door is good idea. On June 23, in a plebiscite none but the brave or foolish would presume to predict, the UK will take the measure of its sanity.
The folly of the Euro has been discussed ad nauseam. For our purpose, let us just look at the outcomes: Far from harmonising, the most efficient economies, the newly reunified Germany to the fore, reaped the benefits while the least efficient economies, led by France, were left horribly exposed when the whole house of cards collapsed after the financial crisis of 2008. Trying to run a currency union by relying on monetary policy and adherence to the rules alone was always an ill-starred project. Interest rates that suited historically stable German deutschemarks were never suitable for Italy and their inflated Lire.

Where did this leave the EU? Paralysed. The Franco-German axis has tipped. It used to be Merkozy[1], now it’s just Merkel. Her CDU party hold the balance of power in the European Parliament[2]; she herself dominates the Council of Ministers, leaving just the Commission. Their own frustrations with the supposedly democratic arms of EU government were neatly summed up by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, back when he had to worry about such things, quipping, “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it”[3]. While the Euro crisis unfolded it became increasingly clear that Angela Merkel was the de facto head of the EU and that the énarques had become little more than her EUnuchs while she cautiously adopted a Grand Wait & See policy.

The status quo, before the migrant crisis at least, suited Merkel very well. Like France pre-enlargement and the Euro, Germany benefits the most from the state of affairs. While the governance of Europe was French, the finances are quintessentially German. The new Members to the east have cultural and economic ties, smoothing their path into the German supply line. Historically however, Germany has never been powerful enough to completely dominate Europe and she is uncomfortable in the role now. The old German Question has resurfaced, namely: How does she deal with the lesser powers surrounding her? Fortunately, while a hundred years ago the question revolved around the military, nowadays it’s the economy[4]. Germans increasingly resent having to pay for the weaker Members who share the Euro and worry that they will club together to make them do so. They themselves see Germany’s trade and budget surpluses rise while theirs’ seem to fall in an inverse proportion and resent German economic growth at what they perceive as their expense[5].

The Euro crisis has brought up all the old European fault lines and the EU’s reaction to the migrant crisis has only deepened those divisions. After trying to ignore the crossings into Italy, the numbers choosing the much shorter route into Greece has led to extraordinary measures. While the Commission came up with a plan to distribute the refugees equally among Member States the Balkan nations, followed by the central European ones, put up fences with an alacrity that Donald Trump would envy. The EU’s passport free Schengen zone has effectively been ended[6] and while the Commission has tried its usual pan-European model that only answers the questions nobody else is asking, the Member States typically fell out over it. Merkel’s response was, against all European treaties, protocols and conventions, to invite a million into her country with no concern as to how they would get there. In doing so she has alienated her central and eastern allies.
The Brexit Countdown: Part I

The rights and wrongs of the migrant crisis will not concern us here. The British model of helping refugees closer to their homes seems eminently sensible if one is furthest away and has a moat to hide behind. The EU has fewer options and little experience in implementing them. The effects have been added political unrest amongst the citizenry and threats to social order unseen in the EU’s, but not Europe’s history. Merkel’s policy, while undoubtedly heartfelt, has undermined her authority and led to a rise in support for ultra-nationalist and xenophobic parties. Her recent Turkish deal and the backlash over the prosecution of the German comedian Jan Böhmermann, who dared exercise his right to free speech by insulting the Turkish president, has diminished her further.

The Empire Strikes Back

Merkel’s loss is the Commission’s gain. The Five Presidents’ Report[7] plots out the short, medium and long-term future of the EU. Progress must be made “towards a genuine Economic Union” – building on that “successful and stable” currency; “towards a Financial Union” which “increases risk-sharing with the private sector” – does anyone remember Moral Hazard? “towards a Fiscal Union” that somehow will deliver “fiscal sustainability” and “fiscal stabilisation” – or in other words, “harmonised” (high) tax rates; “finally, towards a Political Union” that will give the proceeding Unions “legitimacy” – which in the UK is known as the ‘Cart Before the Horse Strategy’. It promises to do all this by creating several new layers of bureaucracy with undoubtedly untold numbers of committees to help form new “Authorities” within Member States to help them towards “harmonised policies”. These Authorities would then form various “Boards” which would then work with the other EU institutions to achieve “convergence and further pooling of decision making on national budgets”. It also looks at “significant policy areas” such as “digital and capital markets” which as yet the EU has not stuck its beak into. The idea of a “Euro area treasury” is also floated. Buried at the back in Annex 3 (on the last page, where else) it has the almost obligatory catch-all that not withstanding the above the Commission reserves the right to ignore all the new levels of bureaucracy and Boards which represent Member States, so long as it can explain itself. To whose satisfaction it must justify its actions is unclear. What the report, and the whole Euro elite for that matter, seemed to have missed in building their harmonious ‘United States of Europe’ is that the United States of America works because traditionally there is variety between the states; if you don’t like the tax or regulatory regime in New York you can move to Texas…

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Israel’s Odysseus vs the seductive Sirens Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on June 11th, 2016

In 850 BC, the legendary Greek author, Homer, introduced the mythical king of Ithaca, Odysseus, as a role model of leadership. Sailing home from the battlefield, Odysseus overcame sweeping temptations to dwell on wishful-thinking rather than reality. Odysseus overcame supreme seduction to stray away from the proper course of navigation, and join the beautiful Sirens, who lured sailors with their seductively hypnotizing voices, music and looks to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.

In 2016, the modern day Sirens of the Western media and policy-making try to divert (and confuse) Israel from the proper course of combatting terrorism, contending that “one’s terrorist is someone else’s freedom fighter;” that Palestinian terrorism is reaction to occupation; that Palestinian terrorists are “lone wolves” not institutional; and that Islam is a religion of peace, not terrorism. However, contrary to freedom fighters, Palestinian terrorism – a branch of the 1,400-year-old inherent Islamic terrorism – has targeted Jewish and mostly Arab non-combatants (sometimes hitting combatants) deliberately, institutionally and systematically, as prescribed by the Quran, the Palestinian Covenant and Palestinian hate-education in schools, mosques and the media.

Moreover, Palestinian terrorism has plagued the Middle East since the 1930s – before the 1948 establishment of Israel and the 1967 Six Day War – focusing on Israel’s existence, not “occupation;” triggering civil wars, subversion and terrorism in Egypt (1950s), Syria (1960s), Lebanon (1970s and 1980s) and Kuwait (1990); assisting Saddam Hussein’s and Assad’s repression of Iraq and Syria; and systematically siding with anti-US and anti-Western rogue regimes, such as North Korea and Iran.

In 2016, Israel’s leadership is cajoled by modern-day Sirens from Israel, the US, Europe and Arab countries to stray away from its national security course of navigation, which has been charted by costly geo-strategic experience, security constraints and requirements, historical reality and commitments made to constituents.
The modern-day Sirens attempt to allure Israel to join a tempting, seemingly-unprecedented regional peace-for-our-time initiative, pampered by peaceful Arab talk, US and NATO security guarantees, possibly Western troops on Israel’s borders and a lavish economic package. Israel is enticed to accept a demilitarized Palestinian state on its borders, the re-division of Jerusalem, the uprooting of Jewish communities in the Land of Israel, and the miniaturization of its size – in the increasingly tectonic Middle East – to a 9-15-mile-sliver along the Mediterranean, over-towered by the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria, which are the “Golan Heights” of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Israel’s only (Ben Gurion) international airport, Israel’s major freeway (#6) and 80% of Israel’s population and infrastructure.

The contemporary Sirens try to smog Israel’s critical requirements of strategic depth for (routine) Middle East stormy days such as potential upheavals in Jordan and Egypt, which would cause havoc domestically, regionally and globally, posing a survival threat to the Jewish state. Middle Eastern realism requires security contingencies for future – rather than present day – lethal threats, emerging dramatically, unpredictably and frequently.