Obama Lies, has Jack Lew Doing the Same on Debt Crisis

Ted Cruz is right, but there is a caveat, a White House cartel inside the Washington cartel.

EXCLUSIVE: Secret Fed Docs Show Obama Misled Congress, Public During Debt Limit Crises

 Pollock/DCNF: Federal Reserve Bank of New York officials secretly conducted real-time exercises during the 2011 and 2013 debt-limit crisis that demonstrated the federal government could function during a temporary shutdown by prioritizing spending, even as Treasury Secretary Jack Lew publicly claimed many times that such efforts were “unworkable,” according to a new report by the House Financial Services Committee obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The staff report, to be released Tuesday, charges that Lew and other Obama administration officials deliberately misled Congress and the public during the federal budget and debt limit showdowns in both years. The committee will convene a public hearing on the report Feb. 2.

The report also states that the Obama administration crafted actual contingency plans to pay for Social Security and veterans benefits, as well as principal and interest on the national debt if the government was temporarily unable to borrow more money. The Committee concludes that over the last two years the Treasury Department has “obstructed” congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the administration’s real-time policy during the two showdowns.

The Constitution stipulates that only Congress can determine how much money the federal government can borrow. Presidents thus cannot unilaterally spend beyond congressional debt ceiling limits set. The committee — chaired by Republican Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas — charged that during both confrontations, the Obama administration held the country’s creditworthiness “hostage” by claiming default was the only possibility if the debit ceiling was not raised.

“These internal documents show the Obama Administration took the nation’s creditworthiness and economy hostage in a cynical attempt to create a crisis so the president could get what he wanted during negotiations over the debt ceiling,” Hensarling said in a statement to be released with the report Tuesday.

 

The report also revealed that the Treasury Department did not publicly divulge its plans to prioritize payments “for the express purpose of creating market uncertainty in an effort to pressure Congress to acquiesce in the administration’s ‘no negotiation’ posture on the debt ceiling.”

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy, the financial services panel’s oversight subcommittee chairman, said the administration “manufactured a crisis to put politics ahead of economic stability.”

The massive, 322-page report chronicles frank, behind-the-scenes discussions among Federal Reserve Board and Federal Bank of New York officials as Congress debated whether to keep existing debt limits or allow Treasury to borrow more money. The House committee and the Treasury Department have been fighting a bitter, two-year battle over Federal Reserve documents.

The report states that “Treasury apparently directed the New York Fed not to answer valid congressional oversight inquiries because Treasury knew the answers would expose the dishonesty of the administration’s public statements.”

A Treasury Department spokesman told TheDCNF, “Treasury has been committed to working cooperatively with the Committee to provide it with the information it needs,” including providing it with the New York Fed documents. The report is based on 3,878 pages of internal documents the committee eventually acquired despite Treasury’s opposition. The panel finally obtained the documents by subpoena. The report contains 41 separate appendices.

The revelations will likely add new intensity to the long-running public debate on the proper level of federal spending as the 2016 election campaign accelerates with Monday’s Iowa presidential caucus and next week’s New Hampshire presidential primary. Obama administration officials repeatedly declared that a complete government shutdown with no partial or interim payments was the only alternative to congressional approval of an increased debt ceiling.

In testimony Oct. 13, 2013, before the Senate Finance Committee, for example, Lew said the government could not “pick and choose” the funding of individual government programs once the debt limit ceiling was reached.

“I do not believe there is a way to pick and choose on a broad basis. The system was not designed to be turned off selectively,” Lew said.

The Federal Reserve documents revealed in the report show the Obama administration was in fact prepared to pick and choose which payments to make “in order to protect the creditworthiness of the United States.”

An internal e-mail from an official in the New York Fed’s Financial Institution Supervision Group states that regardless of the congressional outcome, “Treasury is adamant they will make [Principal and Interest] payments. Not considering possibility of missing debt payments.”  The P&I payments are made to Treasury bond holders.

“At the same time that Treasury was insisting to Congress and the American people that prioritization is unworkable, Treasury and New York Fed officials were working behind the scenes on a prioritization plan,” the report charges.

In private, Federal Reserve Board Federal Reserve Bank of New York officials vigorously denounced the administration’s secrecy over its contingency planning, one calling it “crazy, counter-productive, and add[ing] risk to an already risky situation.”

Federal Reserve Governor Jerome H. Powell, for example, complained that the administration tactics were part of political brinkmanship. “Treasury wants to maximize pressure on Congress by limiting communications on contingency planning,” he said in an email.

The report noted that both the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Bank of New York had “grave concerns with Treasury’s political decision not to inform the public of the administration’s debt ceiling contingency plans.”

The Federal Reserve Board staff “strongly encouraged Treasury to reveal its plan in advance” so that the private sector could prepare properly for a debt ceiling event but Treasury officials were “very reluctant to do so,” according to the report.

The Federal Reserve documents also depict officials at the Federal Bank of New York twice engaging in intense “tabletop exercises” about how government agencies could operate under a spending limit.

A March 16, 2011, table-top exercise included an hour-by-hour simulation of how 29 governmental agencies and market players would react when the federal government reached its debt limit.

At the time, the federal government would be within $25 million of its $14.3 trillion budget limit. The Secretary of the Treasury would invoke the Federal Reserve Debt Ceiling Crisis procedures, which provide that the “The President and the Secretary of the Treasury meet with the Fed Chairman at noon and agree that the Federal Reserve should pursue actions to honor and settle SSI, veterans benefits and P&I payments.”  SSI refers to Social Security and disability payments.

A similar April 9, 2013, debt ceiling table-top exercise focused on a “scenario” in which “Treasury begins controlling the flow of payments” and in which ”SSI, veterans benefits and P&I payments [would] be prioritized over all other governmental obligations.” The debt ceiling was $16.3 trillion at the time of the second exercise.

The procedures also state that “based on direction from the President, Treasury will pay only selected type of payments and withhold other government payments.”

Both Moody’s and Goldman Sachs publicly suggested during the 2013 crisis that it was possible the government could assure markets by pledging to pay principal and interest, Social Social and veterans benefits.

When contacted by TheDCNF, the Treasury Department did not directly address the issue of prioritizing payments but forwarded an October 16, 2015 blog, which stated in part, “The New York Fed’s system would be technologically capable of continuing to make principal and interest payment,” but added, “this approach would be entirely experimental and create unacceptable risk to both domestic and global financial markets.”

Multiple think tanks, including the Mercatus Center, have released reports suggesting numerous alternatives to default if the debt limit ceiling is not increased.

The national debt limit has tripled under Obama and now stands at $18.9 trillion.

The ARK in Kentucky, no Really

CP: Answers and Genesis has declared a major victory in its legal case against the state of Kentucky after a federal judge ruled Monday that officials violated the group’s First Amendment rights by denying it participation in a sales tax incentive worth millions.

The Miami Held reported that U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove ruled in his decision that Kentucky’s Tourism Cabinet cannot exclude the Ark Encounter from the tax incentive because of its “religious purpose and message.”

Following the decision, AiG CEO and President Ken Ham declared “victory for the free exercise of religion in this country.”

“Atheist organizations and other secular groups have been falsely claiming that AiG/Ark Encounter should not receive a facially neutral tax incentive in Kentucky because of our Christian message,” Ham said in a follow up message on Facebook.

“They have also been wrongly stating that AiG would be breaking the law if we used a religious preference in our hiring at the future Ark. AiG has responded many times to their bogus claims, charges which are nothing more than the secularists’ blatant desire to see religious discrimination be practiced against AiG. Such discrimination against Christianity is growing across America,” he added, directing readers to more information about the issue on the AiG website.

The Ark Encounter, which is a life-sized Noah’s Ark theme park, is set to open July 7 in Williamstown, and cost nearly $90 million to construct.

AiG sued Kentucky in February 2015 after state officials denied it participation in the sales tax tourism incentive that could have been worth up to $18 million, arguing that the Ark Encounter would be an extension of AiG’s Creationist ministry.

Van Tatenhove explained in his decision that the tourism incentive “is neutral, has a secular purpose, and does not grant preferential treatment to anyone based on religion, allowing (Answers in Genesis) to participate along with the secular applicants cannot be viewed as acting with the predominant purpose of advancing religion.”

Ham, who is also the CEO and President of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, said that his organization took the state to court “for the sake of Christian freedom in the nation.”

“AiG wanted to ensure that the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion would be upheld. The federal judge ruled late Monday, and it’s a victory for AiG. Really, this court decision is precedent-setting and a triumph for the First Amendment’s promise of the free exercise of religion in America,” he added.

Groups such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State put pressure on the state last year to keep denying the Ark Encounter the tax incentives, arguing that it wants to “prevent taxpayer dollars from being used to unconstitutionally finance a religious ministry.”

Ham has denied those suggestions as well, insisting that “absolutely no unwilling taxpayers will see a single penny of their tax dollars go toward the Ark Encounter.”

Hey Obama Hey Kerry, It’s Iran Stupid

Rights group: Shiite militias behind Iraq revenge attack

SandS: BAGHDAD — Human Rights Watch said Sunday that powerful Iraqi Shiite militias were behind revenge attacks against Sunnis earlier this month that erupted after the Islamic State group bombed a cafe frequented by militiamen.

The New York-based rights group issued a report saying the Badr Brigades and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, two Iran-backed militias, carried out the Jan. 11 retaliation attacks in the town of Muqdadiyah, northeast of Baghdad in the mixed Diyala province. The attacks came after a double suicide bombing at the cafe killed at least 32 people.

Citing unnamed residents, HRW said the militiamen killed at least a dozen people and demolished Sunni mosques, homes and shops. It described the attacks as “heinous” and called for the prosecution of those responsible.

Spokesmen for the militias, who have denied previous accusations of wrongdoing, could not immediately be reached.

Shiite militias led the fight against IS in Diyala and took over much of the province’s security after it was declared liberated in early 2015. Many Iraqis who initially fled IS say security concerns continue to prevent them from returning home. Sunnis make up the vast majority of those displaced by the fighting in Iraq.

The government said Sunday it needs $1.6 billion to respond to the nationwide humanitarian crisis. It said more than 3 million people have been forced from their homes by violence since IS overran the country’s second largest city, Mosul, and large swaths of the north and west in the summer of 2014.

Iraq is also facing a severe financial crisis exacerbated by plunging oil prices. Oil revenue makes up nearly 95 percent of the national budget.

“What (the Iraqi government is) really saying is our back is against the wall, we need help,” said Lise Grande, the U.N.’s deputy envoy to Iraq.

“We’re fighting ISIL on behalf of the international community, but we just don’t have the resources to look after our own people as well and we need international assistance,” she said, using an acronym for IS.

Even before the IS onslaught and the plunge in oil prices, Iraqi authorities struggled to maintain aging infrastructure and provide basic services like electricity. Earlier this month, Iraq was ranked one of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International, an international monitoring group.

***

Going back to 2015, the White House has been in denial but that is due likely to the Iran P5+1 nuclear talks. Meanwhile, people are dying as John Kerry and Barack Obama could care less. A chilling tale from first hand experience.

Iran’s Shiite Militias Are Running Amok in Iraq


Where Have all the Refugee Children Gone

Government does not do anything well, that includes Europe as well as America. In Italy there is the mafia, in the United States there is the mafia…not in the historical sense but quite the same disgusting operational crimes.

Both nations lie, make terrifying decisions and people suffer.

10,000 refugee children are missing, says Europol

It’s another tragic aspect of the migrants’ crisis: at least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared over the past two years after arriving in Europe, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency.

Many of these children are feared to have fallen into the hands of criminal groups.

In an interview with the Observer, the sister publication of the Guardian, Europol’s chief of staff, Brian Donald, said half of the missing children disappeared in Italy.

According to the agency, minors accounted for 27 percent of the refugees who arrived in Europe last year.

Europol warns that unaccompanied children are especially vulnerable to traffickers who exploit them for sex work and slavery.

Obama administration placed children with human traffickers, report says 

The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children, and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations, according to a 56-page investigative report released Thursday.

And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.


“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Portman said in a written statement. “What makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”

The report concluded that administration “policies and procedures were inadequate to protect the children in the agency’s care.”

HHS spokesman Mark Weber said in a statement that the agency would “review the committee’s findings carefully and continue to work to ensure the best care for the children we serve.”

The report was released ahead of a hearing Thursday before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which Portman co-chairs with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). It detailed nearly 30 cases where unaccompanied children had been trafficked after federal officials released them to sponsors or where there were “serious trafficking indicators.”
“HHS places children with individuals about whom it knows relatively little and without verifying the limited information provided by sponsors about their alleged relationship with the child,” the report said.

For example, one Guatemalan boy planned to live with his uncle in Virginia. But when the uncle refused to take the boy, he ended up with another sponsor, who forced him to work nearly 12 hours a day to repay a $6,500 smuggling debt, which the sponsor later increased to $10,900, the report said.

A boy from El Salvador was released to his father even though he told a caseworker that his father had a history of beating him, including hitting him with an electrical cord. In September, the boy alerted authorities that his father was forcing him to work for little or no pay, the report said; a post-release service worker later found the boy was being kept in a basement and given little food.

The Senate investigation began in July after federal prosecutors indicted six people in connection with the Marion labor-trafficking scheme, which involved at least eight minors and two adults from the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala.

One defendant, Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, 33, used associates to file false applications with the government agency tasked with caring for the children, and bring them to Ohio, where he kept them in squalid conditions in a trailer park and forced them to work 12-hour days, at least six days a week, for little pay. Castillo-Serrano has pleaded guilty to labor-trafficking charges and awaits sentencing in the Northern District of Ohio in Toledo.

The FBI raided the trailer park in December 2014, rescuing the boys, but the Senate investigation says federal officials could have discovered the scheme far sooner.

In August 2014, a child-welfare caseworker attempted to visit one of the children, who had been approved for post-release services because of reported mental-health problems, according to the report.

The caseworker went to the address listed for the child, but the person who answered the door said the child didn’t live there, the report added. When the caseworker finally found the child’s sponsor, the sponsor blocked the caseworker from talking to the child.
Instead of investigating further, the caseworker closed the child’s case file, the report said, citing “ORR policy which states that the Post Release Services are voluntary and sponsor refused services.”

That child was found months later, living 50 miles away from the sponsor’s home and working at the egg farm, according to the report. The child’s sponsor was later indicted.

***

EU officials find that most of the ‘refugees’ are not refugees. What a mess

Even EU officials are now finally admitting that a lot – or, rather, most – of the people we have been calling ‘refugees’ are not refugees. They are economic migrants with no more right to be called European citizens than anybody else in the world. Even Frans Timmermans, Vice President of the European Commission, made this point this week. In his accounting, at least 60pc of the people who are here are economic migrants who should not be here –  are from North African states such as Morocco and Tunisia. As he told Dutch television:-

“These are people that you can assume have no reason to apply for refugee status.”
Swedish officials are coming to a similar conclusion, saying that as many as 80,000 of the mainly young men who have gone to Sweden as ‘refugees’ in the past year alone are no such thing.

Now there are the usual attempts to crowd-please from certain politicians and officials who are talking about how they might have to deport these people. But they won’t, will they? Does anybody honestly believe that the Swedish authorities are currently preparing to deport 80,000 fake asylum seekers from their country?

Or let us assume that the 60pc figure is correct for Germany and that 60pc of the people who have arrived in Germany in the past year alone should not be there. Given that it has taken in more than a million people in the last twelve months, is Germany now going to deport as many as three quarters of a million fake asylum seekers from its territory? Of course not. They will not even attempt it. Everybody in Europe knows that. And everybody following events and weighing up their chances from outside Europe knows that.

Everybody on earth now knows that Europe’s present leaders lack either the will or the means to enforce their own laws. So more people will come next year, and the year after that and the year after that. All in the knowledge that once you’re in, you’re in. If the facts were otherwise then Sweden, Germany and other countries across the continent would currently be preparing to ship hundreds of thousands of people out of Europe and back to their countries of origin. But they’re not.

And so the numbers coming in will increase, and the politicians will keep posing, and the European peoples will rightly get more and more enraged at the fact that their continent is being taken away from them. Eventually perhaps even the constant bogeyman warnings about the ‘far-right’ will lose their capacity to scare. Not good times ahead, I’d say.

Still, at least we all listened to Benedict Cumberbatch.

 

CNN: Hillary, Republicans are not her Problem, the FBI is

NYT Reporter: Clinton’s Problem is the FBI, Not Republicans

FreeBeacon: New York Times reporter Peter Baker rebuked Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric over the weekend about Republicans politicizing her private email scandal, suggesting on CNN Sunday that it was the FBI that should be really on Clinton’s mind.

The Obama administration announced Friday it could not release 22 of Clinton’s emails from her private server because they were top-secret, while Clinton maintained her line that those emails were not marked classified when they were sent or received, a statement columnist Ron Fournier remarked was “irrelevant.” The Washington Free Beacon reported Clinton signed a non-disclosure agreement laying out criminal penalties for any mishandling of classified information as secretary of state.

“I take classified information really seriously,” Clinton said on Saturday. “I just think that if the Republicans want to use this for political purposes, that’s their decision.”

King pointed out this was an Obama administration decision, and MSNBC legal correspondent Ari Melber noted on Friday that the administration has prosecuted people for mishandling classified material. Also, the Inspector General of the intelligence community is not a Republican appointee.

“Her problem at this point is not the Republicans,” Baker said. “Her problem is the FBI and the Obama Justice Department. What Democrats are quietly, absolutely petrified about is that come summer, you find an indictment of people around her, of her, a request for a special prosecutor, something that just basically turns this into a complete disaster for the Democrats in which it’s too late to change horses.”

***

Those who came before Hillary and her willful decisions on classified material and lying about it, in part from the WashingtonTimes:

JOHN DEUTCH

Deutch was CIA director from May 1995 until December 1996. He came under Justice Department investigation after his resignation when classified material was found on his home computer in Maryland.

An internal CIA investigation found that he stored and processed hundreds of files of highly classified material on unprotected home computers that he and family members also used to connect to the Internet, making the information potentially vulnerable to hackers.

A report by the Defense Department inspector general found that Deutch had failed to follow “the most basic security precautions” and faulted him for rejecting Pentagon requests that security systems be installed on his home computers.

Deutch apologized for his actions and was pardoned by President Bill Clinton before the Justice Department could file a misdemeanor plea deal for mishandling government secrets.

SANDY BERGER

Berger was the national security adviser during Bill Clinton’s second term. After leaving office, he found himself in trouble for destroying classified documents.

Berger, who died in December at age 70, pleaded guilty in 2005 to illegally sneaking classified documents from the National Archives by stuffing papers in his suit. He later destroyed some of them in his office and lied about it. The materials related to terror threats in the United States during the 2000 millennium celebration.

He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, and though he avoided prison time, he lost access to classified material for three years.

A judge fined him $50,000, higher than the amount recommended by prosecutors.

Berger called his actions a lapse in judgment that came as he was preparing to testify before the Sept. 11 commission that examined the events leading up to the 2001 attacks.

“I let considerations of personal convenience override clear rules of handling classified material,” he said at the time.

BRYAN NISHIMURA

Nishimura, a former Naval reservist in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008 and a regional engineer for the U.S. military, was investigated for downloading and storing classified information on his personal electronic devices.

Prosecutors say he carried the materials with him off-base in Afghanistan and took classified Army records to his home in Folsom, California, after his deployment ended.

His lawyer, William Portanova, said Nishimura never intended to break the law but was a “pack rat” who thought nothing of warehousing Army records at home alongside personal belongings.

FBI agents who searched his home found classified military records, both in hard copy and digital form. Nishimura also admitted to investigators that he had destroyed some of the information.

Nishimura pleaded guilty in July to unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials. A judge fined him $7,500, and he was ordered to surrender his security clearance.

The violation was a technical and unintentional one, Portanova said, but one that the Justice Department nonetheless thought it needed to punish “to make its point.”

DAVID PETRAEUS

The best-known recent prosecution involves the former CIA director who pleaded guilty last year to a misdemeanor count of unlawful removal and retention of classified materials. He was spared prison as part of his plea and was given two years’ probation by a judge who faulted him for a “serious lapse in judgment.”

The retired four-star Army general admitted that he loaned his biographer, Paula Broadwell, with whom he was having an affair, eight binders containing highly classified information regarding war strategy, intelligence capabilities and identities of covert officers. FBI agents seized the binders from an unlocked desk drawer at his home, instead of a secure facility that’s required for handling classified material.

One critical distinction is that while Clinton has repeatedly said she didn’t send or receive anything that was classified at the time – something the State Department now says it’s investigating – the Petraeus plea deal makes clear that he knew the information he provided was classified. He told Broadwell in a recording revealed by prosecutors that the binders had “code-word stuff in there.”

When questioned by the FBI, he denied having given Broadwell classified information, though he avoided being charged with making a false statement.