Readout: Senate Meeting at WH on N. Korea

Image result for senate at white house north korea WaPo

Joint Statement by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats

Press Operations

Past efforts have failed to halt North Korea’s unlawful weapons programs and nuclear and ballistic missile tests. With each provocation, North Korea jeopardizes stability in Northeast Asia and poses a growing threat to our allies and the U.S. homeland.

North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is an urgent national security threat and top foreign policy priority. Upon assuming office, President Trump ordered a thorough review of U.S. policy pertaining to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Today, along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford, we briefed members of Congress on the review. The president’s approach aims to pressure North Korea into dismantling its nuclear, ballistic missile, and proliferation programs by tightening economic sanctions and pursuing diplomatic measures with our allies and regional partners.

We are engaging responsible members of the international community to increase pressure on the DPRK in order to convince the regime to de-escalate and return to the path of dialogue. We will maintain our close coordination and cooperation with our allies, especially the Republic of Korea and Japan, as we work together to preserve stability and prosperity in the region.

The United States seeks stability and the peaceful denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. We remain open to negotiations towards that goal. However, we remain prepared to defend ourselves and our allies.

***

North Korea Threatens Indo-Asia-Pacific Region, Harris Tells Legislators
WASHINGTON, April 26, 2017 — North Korea remains the most immediate threat to the security of the United States and its allies in the Indo-Asia-Pacific, Navy Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told the House Armed Services Committee today.


Addressing security challenges in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region, the commander noted how North Korea threatened Australia in the past week with a nuclear strike.

“[It’s] a powerful reminder to the entire international community that North Korea’s missiles point in every direction,” Harris said. “The only nation to have tested nuclear devices in this century, North Korea has vigorously pursued an aggressive weapons test schedule with more than 60 listed missile events in recent years.”
Sense of Urgency

With every test, Kim Jong Un moves closer to his stated goal of a pre-emptive nuclear strike capability against American cities, and he’s not afraid to fail in public, the admiral said.

“Defending our homeland is my top priority, so I must assume that Kim Jong Un’s nuclear claims are true; I know his aspirations certainly are. And that should provide all of us a sense of urgency to ensure Pacom and U.S. Forces Korea are prepared to fight tonight with the best technology on the planet,” he said.

Threats from North Korea are why the United States has deployed its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system to South Korea, put the USS Carl Vinson carrier strike group back on patrol in Northeast Asia and introduced the newest and best military platforms in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region, the admiral said.

And they are also why the U.S. is emphasizing trilateral cooperation between Japan, South Korea and calling on China to exert its “considerable economic influence to stop Pyongyang’s unprecedented weapons testing,” Harris said.

“As [President Donald J. Trump] and [Defense Secretary Jim Mattis] have made clear, all options are on the table. We want to bring Kim Jong Un to his senses, not to his knees,” the commander said.

Advancing Partnerships

The admiral named Russia, China and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria as the other global and regional threats, but emphasized U.S. regional partnerships.
“We’ve strengthened America’s network of alliances and partnerships, working with like-minded partners on shared security threats like North Korea and ISIS. It’s a key component to our regional strategy,” he said.

Harris said he continues to rely on Australia for its advanced military capabilities and global operations leadership, and noted that last week’s trips by Vice President Mike Pence and Mattis to Northeast Asia emphasized U.S. alliances with South Korea and Japan.

The United States has also advanced its partnerships with regional powers such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, Harris said. Such partnerships, he said, reinforce “the rules-based security order that has helped underwrite peace and prosperity throughout the region for decades.”

Confronting Challenges

But more work remains to be done, he cautioned.

“We must be ready to confront all challenges from a position of strength and with credible combat power,” Harris told legislators.

He added, “So I ask this committee to support continued investment to improve our military capabilities. I need weapons systems of increased lethality, precision, speed and range that are networked and cost-effective [without] restricting ourselves with funding uncertainties [that] reduce our warfighting readiness. So I urge the congress to repeal sequestration and improve the proposed Defense Department budget.”

Janet Napolitano Took DC Fraud Tactics With Her

Hello FBI, when you get a chance…how about dispatching a few agents to visit Nappy….got any agents available?

Primer: Using a visa loophole to fire well-paid U.S. information technology workers and replace them with low-paid immigrants from India is despicable enough when it’s done by profit-making companies such as Southern California Edison and Walt Disney Co.

But the latest employer to try this stunt sets a new mark in what might be termed “job laundering.” It’s the University of California. Experts in the abuse of so-called H-1B visas say UC is the first public university to send the jobs of American IT staff offshore. That’s not a distinction UC should wear proudly. More here.

Image result for janet napolitano university of california NBC

The corruption continues –>

Napolitano’s UC hid $175 million while demanding money, audit says

FNC: The University of California hid a stash of $175 million in secret funds while its leaders requested more money from the state, an audit released on Tuesday said.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the audit found that the secret fund ballooned due to UC Office of the President overestimating how much is needed to run the school system that includes 10 campuses in the state. Janet Napolitano, the former Department of Homeland Security chief, is in charge of the school system.

Napolitano denied the audit’s claim. She reportedly said the money was held for any unexpected expenses. Her office also denied the amount in the fund.

“The true amount is $38 million, which is roughly 10 percent of (the office’s) operating and administrative budget, a prudent and reasonable amount for unexpected expenses such as cybersecurity threat response and emerging issues like increased support for undocumented students and efforts to prevent sexual violence and sexual harassment,” her office said in a statement.

Elaine Howle, the state auditor who came up with the report, found that from 2012 to 2016 the office looked to raise more funding by inflating estimates. Howle also said that a top staff member in Napolitano’s office improperly screened confidential surveys that were sent to each campus. Howle said answers that were critical of Napolitano’s office were deleted or changed before being sent to auditors.

“I’ve never had a situation like that in my 17 years as state auditor,” Howle said. “My attorneys are looking at whether any improper government activities occurred.”

The UC Board of Regents is now hearing calls to overturn its decision to increase tuition this fall by 2.5 percent.

Howle said Napolitano also overcharged the system’s 10 campuses to fund its operations, paid its employees significantly more than state employees and interfered in the auditing process.

“Taken as a whole, these problems indicate that significant change is necessary to strengthen the public’s trust in the University of California,” Howle wrote in the report.

The audit found that over the course of four years, the UC’s central bureaucracy amassed more than $175 million in reserve funds by spending significantly less than it budgeted for and asking for increases in future funding based on its previous years’ over-estimated budgets rather than its actual expenditures.

“In effect, the Office of the President received more funds than it needed each year, and it amassed millions of dollars in reserves that it spent with little or no oversight,” the report said.

Napolitano argues the amount accounts for 10 percent of the operating and administrative budget. She called it “a modest amount for an organization our size.”

The office argued it did not need to disclose its reserves because the regents had approved the spending in previous years’ budgets. Howle said the undisclosed funds included $32 million collected from campuses that could have been spent for other purposes.

University employees and lawmakers, who requested the audit, expressed outrage over the audit’s findings.

“Today we learned that after squandering millions of public dollars on bloated management and unaccountable ‘initiatives,’ (the Office of the President) has effectively been operating a slush fund that shields hundreds of millions of public dollars from public scrutiny,” Kathryn Lybarger, president of UC’s largest employee union, said in a statement.

She criticized the office’s “skyrocketing executive pay,” a reference to the audit’s finding that the 10 executives in the office were paid a total of $3.7 million in the 2014-15 fiscal year — over $700,000 more than the combined salaries of their highest paid state employee counterparts.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and member of the UC Board of Regents, said the audit calls into question the university’s decision to raise this fall’s tuition for the first time in six years when it has money available. The decision in January increases the cost of tuition and fees for California residents, who currently pay $12,294 a year, to $12,630.

“It is outrageous and unjust to force tuition hikes on students while the UC hides secret funds, and I call for the tuition decision to come back before the Board of Regents for reconsideration and reversal,” he said.

Among her recommendations for reforms, Howle suggested that state lawmakers should increase oversight of the office.

However, she said the office’s attempt to interfere with the audit process by reviewing surveys auditors sent to the campuses “cast doubt on whether it will make a genuine effort to change.”

In 2012, the director of the California Parks Department resigned after it came to light that the department hid $54 million in parks funding for more than a decade, at the same time the state threatened to close dozens of parks to save money amid a state budget crisis. The state auditor recommended new accounting methods, which were later adopted.

 

The Even Darker side of the Downward Spiral, Venezuela

Primer: It is just a few days ago, that Russia was muscling the United States with regard to policy in Venezuela. Really Moscow?

Image result for venezuela protests ABC

Russia Warns Against US Interference in Venezuela, Calls for Dialogue

Russia’s foreign ministry voiced its concern over violence by right-wing protests in Venezuela while rebuking recent threats by the U.S. Southern Command, saying these would only stoke violence and ultimately act against U.S. interests. More here.

Meanwhile: Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDVSA, sent a tanker in October to the Caribbean with the expectation that its cargo of crude would fetch about $20 million – money the crisis-stricken nation desperately needs.

Instead, the owner of the tanker, the Russian state-owned shipping conglomerate Sovcomflot, held the oil in hopes of collecting partial payment on $30 million that it says PDVSA owes for unpaid shipping fees.

Despite a longstanding alliance between Venezuela and Russia, Sovcomflot sued PDVSA in St. Maarten, a Dutch island on the northeast end of the Caribbean.

“The ship owners … imposed garnishment on the aforementioned oil cargo,” reads a March decision by the St. Maarten court.

Five months after crossing the Caribbean, the NS Columbus discharged its cargo of crude at a storage terminal on St. Eustatius, an island just south of St. Maarten, under a temporary decision by the court. Another tribunal in England will decide if Sovcomflot will ultimately take the oil.

***

Update: Reuters: A prison riot in Venezuela’s eastern state of Anzoategui has left at least 12 people dead and 11 wounded, a spokesman at the Prisons Ministry said on Wednesday, the latest incident in the crisis-hit country’s overcrowded and violent jail system.

Venezuela’s public prosecutor’s office said it was investigating the deaths of “several” inmates on Tuesday during a shootout between the prisoners at the Jose Antonio Anzoategui prison.

Critics have said that Venezuela’s prisons are controlled by gangs with ready access to machine guns and even hand grenades.

“There are 12 people dead, nine shot, two due to drug overdoses, and one due to multiple injuries,” the spokesman told Reuters, asking not to be identified by name because he was not authorized to speak to media about the riot.

“It’s a prison that was going through a transition … the clashes were between those who wanted it and those who didn’t,” the official said in reference to a government push to end overcrowding and weapons in jails.

Further details were not immediately available. It was not immediately clear if all the dead were inmates.

Venezuela is one of the world’s most violent countries and inmates often plan kidnappings and robberies from their cells.

 Dark Times in Venezuela Signal Bright Future for Organized Crime

Venezuela Today

The social unrest in Venezuela over the last two weeks has been the most widespread since Leopoldo López, the opposition leader, was arrested and subsequently imprisoned by the administration of President Nicolás Maduro in 2015.

The latest anti-government demonstrations were sparked by a decision by the country’s Supreme Court, which is controlled by the regime, to nullify the National Assembly, which is dominated by the opposition. The Supreme Court later backtracked, but it was too late — critics of the regime had been emboldened once again by the audacious move. Luisa Ortega Díaz, the country’s attorney general and traditionally a supporter of Maduro, also condemned the Supreme Court’s attempt to consolidate power, further eroding Maduro’s legitimacy.

Their indignation was stoked by the move a few days later to ban Henrique Capriles, a prominent member of the opposition, from politics for 15 years. Capriles, who has run twice as a presidential candidate, is one of the opposition’s strongest hopes for winning presidential elections against Maduro’s United Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela – PSUV) at the end of 2018.

A chronic economic recession in Venezuela has provoked sky-high inflation, shortages of basic foods and goods, and a collapse in the health and education systems. Maduro’s popularity has dropped steadily, yet the Venezuelan people have so far showed incredible tolerance for what many of them have been reduced to — searching for food in the trash, waiting for hours in line to buy basic goods, often at inflated prices, and scouring the country for black market medicines as they watch their family members suffer and even die.

But the current economic and social predicament has had another sinister consequence: It has fed the growth of criminality and organized crime to unprecedented levels.

Venezuela’s homicide rate is one of the highest in the world, and Caracas is now the deadliest city on earth. New forms of organized crime have emerged in the country’s prisons, within its armed forces and on its streets in the form of megabandas since Hugo Chávez took power in 1999. Drug trafficking has penetrated the highest levels of the current regime, all the way up to the family of President Maduro. Armed, civilian groups known as colectivos, which were embraced and nurtured by Chávez as defenders of the revolution, have gone rogue and are increasingly supporting themselves through criminal earnings. Unbridled corruption has allowed for kleptocrats to plunder the country’s public coffers via artificial exchange rates and the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PdVSA).

Below, we look at some possible future scenarios and their implications for organized crime.

The Regime Remains or Renews

Criminal elements within the regime and outside it would like nothing more than to maintain the status quo.

The armed forces are the muscle and political backbone of the sitting government. Out of Maduro’s 32 government ministers, 11 of them are acting or retired military officers. Some have been sanctioned or indicted by the United States for their links to drug trafficking (see graphic below). The armed forces have deepened their role in transnational cocaine trafficking since 1999, in part as a direct result of political decisions by Hugo Chávez, and profit from other criminal incomes such as the sale of government-subsidized contraband petrol on the Colombian border and the process of food distribution, of which they are in charge. The National Guard controls the nation’s borders, airports and ports and has been implicated in some of the biggest cocaine seizures in recent years.

Venezuela-Gov Drugs insightcrime

Criminality isn’t just limited to military members of the government. Vice President Tareck El-Aissami was recently sanctioned by the United States for his alleged role in drug trafficking, dating back to his time as governor of the state of Aragua.

Should Maduro decide to fall on his sword, El Aissami is in line to replace him as president. That could result in a political shakeup and give the regime a chance to renew itself with some internal changes and shifts. If El Aissami changed tack on the regime’s economic policies and reversed some of the damage done in recent years, he could improve the PSUV’s chance of winning presidential elections at the end of next year — something that Maduro almost certainly couldn’t pull off at this stage.

It is unclear, however, which way El Aissami, a party hardliner, would go if he became president, and his status as a suspected drug trafficker might not inspire new confidence in Venezuelans already sick of corruption and the abuse of power within the current system.

For other criminal elements, maintaining the status quo remains the best option. The armed pro-government colectivos, many of which are perceived as violent thugs by those living in territories they control, depend utterly on the socialist regime for their survival. InSight Crime investigations in the 23 de Enero neighborhood of Caracas, once a bastion of Chavismo, show that these groups are increasingly profiting from criminal activities such as extortion and micro-trafficking.

They are also involved in anti-crime raids, known as Operation Liberation and Protection of the People (Operación de Liberación y Protección del Pueblo – OLP), in which they work alongside state security forces to supress criminal groups and megabandas.

Those raids were instigated as the result of the government’s failed “peace zone” policy, which handed swathes of territory over to the criminal gangs that occupied them. In effect, the plan made megabandas the de facto law in those areas, because security forces were prohibited from entering without prior permission. Many of those peace zones still exist. Although the megabandas openly attack patrols and headquarters of Venezuelan security forces, and have been forced to regroup following the elimination of many of their original leaders, they continue to run their criminal economies that include extortion, kidnapping, contract killing and micro-trafficking.

As for the country’s prisons, criminal business has never been so good, even though violence and overcrowding are serious human rights problems. The creation in 2011 of a Ministry of Penitentiary Services effectively handed governance of the country’s jails to the powerful bosses on the inside, known as “pranes,” who now run them like their own fiefdoms. Violence remains one of the main means of maintaining control.

The Regime and the Opposition Form a Joint Government

The decision to reverse the Supreme Court ruling to annul the National Assembly could be a sign that the Maduro administration is faltering. The Miami Herald reported this week that the president has secretly offered the opposition a deal that would result in regional elections supposed to take place this year, in which the opposition looks set to win a strong foothold.

Given the hostility between the government and the opposition, and the failure of Vatican-monitored talks at the end of last year, this seems like the least likely scenario. Should it happen, it is likely to be thwarted by infighting and disagreement between the different sides. The coalition would have to come to an agreement on long-term and fundamental issues such as the role of the military in the country, security, the prison system and economic controls.

In this unlikely scenario, the main casualty could be the colectivos, which the Maduro administration might be forced to call to heel as a condition of a joint government. They may have limits put on their weapons as well as their role as repressors of the media and critical protests. Other than that, there would be little change on the ground in the short term as far as criminal dynamics are concerned.

Armed Forces Stage a Coup or Force Maduro into a Political Transition

The importance of the support of the armed forces for President Maduro and the regime cannot be overstated. But factions have turned against the regime before, as was seen in the failed coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002, which removed him from power for a couple of days.

In the short term, the colectivos and the military itself would be the criminal elements most impacted by a move by parts of the military to force Maduro’s hand. The armed forces would want to assure their place at the table in the new government, and might offer the colectivos — who are despised and feared by the opposition — as a sacrificial lamb.

“Colectivos really imagine themselves as being put on the offing block as sacrificed pawns in a negotiated context,” Alejandro Velasco, author of the book Barrio Rising, told InSight Crime. “They very much imagine that the struggle to come is going to be a struggle, not against the opposition, but really against the military in the context of survival. Both of them are kind of in a maneuvre for survivability in a transition context.”

Should this scenario arise, the political uncertainty it could generate might push the reality on the streets in Venezuela to get worse before improving. It would have little immediate negative impact on the megabandas or the criminal enterprises being run in the prisons. If anything, criminality and impunity would only increase, giving these elements more freedom of movement. Longer-term, an administration capable of governing could take steps to curb their criminal freedoms and fiefdoms.

SEE ALSO: Venezuela News and Profiles

The military, as broker and mediator, would have to make some concessions of its own. Should the armed forces be involved in brokering or forcing this potential transition, implicit in its negotiations would be the continuation of its stewardship of the country’s ports, borders and airports — a fundamental element of its role in profiting from transnational organized crime.

The amount of coca and cocaine being produced in neighboring Colombia is booming, and the network of Venezuelan military officials involved in the drug trade, known loosely as the Cartel of the Suns, would want to keep its interests safe.

But heads would have to roll as part of a change in government, and many on the chopping block would be those military officials seen as being the most corrupt and most loyal to the socialist regime. There is little doubt, however, that they would be replaced with others equally willing to profit from their power and position in this key transit nation in the global cocaine trafficking industry.

Comey’s FBI and Operation ‘Midyear’ on Hillary

 Loretta_Lynch_and_Bill_Clinton_meet_in_P_0_41315067_ver1.0_640_480

Primer: This summary places events in a timeline and context. There are some additional details and the text appears to be fair. Further, when Loretta Lynch refers to the investigation as a ‘matter’, it for the most parts tells us all we need to know.

Comey Tried to
Shield the F.B.I. From
Politics. Then He
Shaped an Election.

As the F.B.I. investigated Hillary Clinton and the Trump
campaign, James B. Comey tried to keep the bureau out
of politics but plunged it into the center of a bitter election.

New York Times/WASHINGTON — The day before he upended the 2016 election, James B. Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, summoned agents and lawyers to his conference room. They had been debating all day, and it was time for a decision.

Mr. Comey’s plan was to tell Congress that the F.B.I. had received new evidence and was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton, the presidential front-runner. The move would violate the policies of an agency that does not reveal its investigations or do anything that may influence an election. But Mr. Comey had declared the case closed, and he believed he was obligated to tell Congress that had changed.

“Should you consider what you’re about to do may help elect Donald Trump president?” an adviser asked him, Mr. Comey recalled recently at a closed meeting with F.B.I. agents.

He could not let politics affect his decision, he replied. “If we ever start considering who might be affected, and in what way, by what we do, we’re done,” he told the agents.

But with polls showing Mrs. Clinton holding a comfortable lead, Mr. Comey ended up plunging the F.B.I. into the molten center of a bitter election. Fearing the backlash that would come if it were revealed after the election that the F.B.I. had been investigating the next president and had kept it a secret, Mr. Comey sent a letter informing Congress that the case was reopened.

For Mr. Comey, keeping the F.B.I. out of politics is such a preoccupation that he once said he would never play basketball with President Barack Obama because of the appearance of being chummy with the man who appointed him. But in the final months of the presidential campaign, the leader of the nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency shaped the contours, if not the outcome, of the presidential race by his handling of the Clinton and Trump-related investigations.

An examination by The New York Times, based on interviews with more than 30 current and former law enforcement, congressional and other government officials, found that while partisanship was not a factor in Mr. Comey’s approach to the two investigations, he handled them in starkly different ways. In the case of Mrs. Clinton, he rewrote the script, partly based on the F.B.I.’s expectation that she would win and fearing the bureau would be accused of helping her. In the case of Mr. Trump, he conducted the investigation by the book, with the F.B.I.’s traditional secrecy. Many of the officials discussed the investigations on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

Mr. Comey made those decisions with the supreme self-confidence of a former prosecutor who, in a distinguished career, has cultivated a reputation for what supporters see as fierce independence, and detractors view as media-savvy arrogance.

The Times found that this go-it-alone strategy was shaped by his distrust of senior officials at the Justice Department, who he and other F.B.I. officials felt had provided Mrs. Clinton with political cover. The distrust extended to his boss, Loretta E. Lynch, the attorney general, who Mr. Comey believed had subtly helped play down the Clinton investigation.

His misgivings were only fueled by the discovery last year of a document written by a Democratic operative that seemed — at least in the eyes of Mr. Comey and his aides — to raise questions about her independence. In a bizarre example of how tangled the F.B.I. investigations had become, the document had been stolen by Russian hackers.

The examination also showed that at one point, President Obama himself was reluctant to disclose the suspected Russian influence in the election last summer, for fear his administration would be accused of meddling.

Mr. Comey, the highest-profile F.B.I. director since J. Edgar Hoover, has not squarely addressed his decisions last year. He has touched on them only obliquely, asserting that the F.B.I. is blind to partisan considerations. “We’re not considering whose ox will be gored by this action or that action, whose fortune will be helped,” he said at a public event recently. “We just don’t care. We can’t care. We only ask: ‘What are the facts? What is the law?’”

But circumstances and choices landed him in uncharted and perhaps unwanted territory, as he made what he thought were the least damaging choices from even less desirable alternatives.

“This was unique in the history of the F.B.I.,” said Michael B. Steinbach, the former senior national security official at the F.B.I., who worked closely with Mr. Comey, describing the circumstances the agency faced last year while investigating both the Republican and Democratic candidates for president. “People say, ‘This has never been done before.’ Well, there never was a before. Or ‘That’s not normally how you do it.’ There wasn’t anything normal about this.”

‘Federal Bureau of Matters’

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Mr. Comey during a news conference in Brooklyn in May 2015. Both had been federal prosecutors in New York, Mr. Comey in Manhattan and Ms. Lynch in Brooklyn. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times 

The F.B.I.’s involvement with Mrs. Clinton’s emails began in July 2015 when it received a letter from the inspector general for the intelligence community.

The letter said that classified information had been found on Mrs. Clinton’s home email server, which she had used as secretary of state. The secret email setup was already proving to be a damaging issue in her presidential campaign.

Mr. Comey’s deputies quickly concluded that there was reasonable evidence that a crime may have occurred in the way classified materials were handled, and that the F.B.I. had to investigate. “We knew as an organization that we didn’t have a choice,” said John Giacalone, a former mob investigator who had risen to become the F.B.I.’s top national security official.

On July 10, 2015, the F.B.I. opened a criminal investigation, code-named “Midyear,” into Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information. The Midyear team included two dozen investigators led by a senior analyst and by an experienced F.B.I. supervisor, Peter Strzok, a former Army officer who had worked on some of the most secretive investigations in recent years involving Russian and Chinese espionage.

There was controversy almost immediately.

Responding to questions from The Times, the Justice Department confirmed that it had received a criminal referral — the first step toward a criminal investigation — over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information.

But the next morning, the department revised its statement.

“The department has received a referral related to the potential compromise of classified information,” the new statement read. “It is not a criminal referral.”

The Justice Department knew a criminal investigation was underway, but officials said they were being technically accurate about the nature of the referral. Some at the F.B.I. suspected that Democratic appointees were playing semantic games to help Mrs. Clinton, who immediately seized on the statement to play down the issue. “It is not a criminal investigation,” she said, incorrectly. “It is a security review.”

In September of that year, as Mr. Comey prepared for his first public questions about the case at congressional hearings and press briefings, he went across the street to the Justice Department to meet with Ms. Lynch and her staff.

Both had been federal prosecutors in New York — Mr. Comey in the Manhattan limelight, Ms. Lynch in the lower-wattage Brooklyn office. The 6-foot-8 Mr. Comey commanded a room and the spotlight. Ms. Lynch, 5 feet tall, was known for being cautious and relentlessly on message. In her five months as attorney general, she had shown no sign of changing her style.

At the meeting, everyone agreed that Mr. Comey should not reveal details about the Clinton investigation. But Ms. Lynch told him to be even more circumspect: Do not even call it an investigation, she said, according to three people who attended the meeting. Call it a “matter.”

Ms. Lynch reasoned that the word “investigation” would raise other questions: What charges were being investigated? Who was the target? But most important, she believed that the department should stick by its policy of not confirming investigations.

It was a by-the-book decision. But Mr. Comey and other F.B.I. officials regarded it as disingenuous in an investigation that was so widely known. And Mr. Comey was concerned that a Democratic attorney general was asking him to be misleading and line up his talking points with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, according to people who spoke with him afterward.

As the meeting broke up, George Z. Toscas, a national security prosecutor, ribbed Mr. Comey. “I guess you’re the Federal Bureau of Matters now,” Mr. Toscas said, according to two people who were there.

Despite his concerns, Mr. Comey avoided calling it an investigation. “I am confident we have the resources and the personnel assigned to the matter,” Mr. Comey told reporters days after the meeting.

The F.B.I. investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email server was the biggest political story in the country in the fall of 2015. But something much bigger was happening in Washington. And nobody recognized it.

While agents were investigating Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic National Committee’s computer system was compromised. It appeared to have been the work of Russian hackers.

The significance of this moment is obvious now, but it did not immediately cause alarm at the F.B.I. or the Justice Department.

Months passed before the D.N.C. and the F.B.I. met to address the hacks. And it would take more than a year for the government to conclude that the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, had an audacious plan to steer the outcome of an American election.

 Missing Emails

Despite moments of tension between leaders of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, agents and prosecutors working on the case made progress. “The investigative team did a thorough job,” Mr. Giacalone said. “They left no stone unturned.”

They knew it would not be enough to prove that Mrs. Clinton was sloppy or careless. To bring charges, they needed evidence that she knowingly received classified information or set up her server for that purpose.

A Hot Tarmac

A chance encounter set those plans in motion.

In late June, Ms. Lynch’s plane touched down at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport as part of her nationwide tour of police departments. Former President Bill Clinton was also in Phoenix that day, leaving from the same tarmac.

Ms. Lynch’s staff loaded into vans, leaving the attorney general and her husband on board. Mr. Clinton’s Secret Service agents mingled with her security team. When the former president learned who was on the plane, his aides say, he asked to say hello.

Mr. Clinton’s aides say he intended only to greet Ms. Lynch as she disembarked. But Ms. Lynch later told colleagues that the message she received — relayed from one security team to another — was that Mr. Clinton wanted to come aboard, and she agreed.

When Ms. Lynch’s staff members noticed Mr. Clinton boarding the plane, a press aide hurriedly called the Justice Department’s communications director, Melanie Newman, who said to break up the meeting immediately. A staff member rushed to stop it, but by the time the conversation ended, Mr. Clinton had been on the plane for about 20 minutes.

Ms. Lynch said she would not step aside but would accept whatever career prosecutors and the F.B.I. recommended on the Clinton case — something she had planned to do all along.

The script had been edited and revised several times, former officials said. Mr. Strzok, Mr. Steinbach, lawyers and others debated every phrase. Speaking so openly about a closed case is rare, and the decision to do so was not unanimous, officials said. But the team ultimately agreed that there was an obligation to inform American voters.

Mr. Comey’s criticism — his description of her carelessness — was the most controversial part of the speech. Agents and prosecutors have been reprimanded for injecting their legal conclusions with personal opinions. But those close to Mr. Comey say he has no regrets.

By scolding Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey was speaking not only to voters but to his own agents. While they agreed that Mrs. Clinton should not face charges, many viewed her conduct as inexcusable. Mr. Comey’s remarks made clear that the F.B.I. did not approve.

At the Justice Department, frustrated prosecutors said Mr. Comey should have consulted with them first. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said that Mr. Comey’s condemnations seemed to make an oblique case for charging her, undermining the effect of his decision.

In the days after the announcement, Mr. Comey and Ms. Lynch each testified before Congress, with different results. Neither the F.B.I. nor the Justice Department normally gives Congress a fact-by-fact recounting of its investigations, and Ms. Lynch spent five hours avoiding doing so.

“I know that this is a frustrating exercise for you,” she told the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Comey discussed his decision to close the investigation and renewed his criticism of Mrs. Clinton.

And with both parties angry at him, he had proved yet again that he was willing to speak his mind, regardless of the blowback. He seemed to have safely piloted the F.B.I. through the storm of a presidential election.

But as Mr. Comey moved past one tumultuous investigation, another was about to heat up.

Russia Rising

Days after Mr. Comey’s news conference, Carter Page, an American businessman, gave a speech in Moscow criticizing American foreign policy. Such a trip would typically be unremarkable, but Mr. Page had previously been under F.B.I. scrutiny years earlier, as he was believed to have been marked for recruitment by Russian spies. And he was now a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump.

“Russia, if you’re listening,” he said, “I hope you’ll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

In late July, the F.B.I. opened an investigation into possible collusion between members of Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. Besides Mr. Comey and a small team of agents, officials said, only a dozen or so people at the F.B.I. knew about the investigation. Mr. Strzok, just days removed from the Clinton case, was selected to supervise it.

In late August, Mr. Comey and his deputies were briefed on a provocative set of documents about purported dealings between shadowy Russian figures and Mr. Trump’s campaign. One report, filled with references to secret meetings, spoke ominously of Mr. Trump’s “compromising relationship with the Kremlin” and threats of “blackmail.”

Mr. Steele had been a covert agent for MI6 in Moscow, maintained deep ties with Russians and worked with the F.B.I., but his claims were largely unverified. It was increasingly clear at the F.B.I. that Russia was trying to interfere with the election.

As the F.B.I. plunged deeper into that investigation, Mr. Comey became convinced that the American public needed to understand the scope of the foreign interference and be “inoculated” against it.

The president replied that going public would play right into Russia’s hands by sowing doubts about the election’s legitimacy. Mr. Trump was already saying the system was “rigged,” and if the Obama administration accused Russia of interference, Republicans could accuse the White House of stoking national security fears to help Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Comey argued that he had unique credibility to call out the Russians and avoid that criticism. After all, he said, he had just chastised Mrs. Clinton at his news conference.

But John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was so concerned about the Russian threat that he gave an unusual private briefing in the late summer to Harry Reid, then the Senate Democratic leader.

Mr. Comey knew the investigation of the Trump campaign was just underway, and keeping with policy, he said nothing about it.

Mr. Reid’s letter sparked frenzied speculation about what the F.B.I. was doing. At a congressional hearing in September, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, pressed Mr. Comey for an explanation, citing his willingness to give details about his investigation of Mrs. Clinton.

But Mr. Comey never considered disclosing the case. Doing so, he believed, would have undermined an active investigation and cast public suspicion on people the F.B.I. could not be sure were implicated.

“I’m not confirming that we’re investigating people associated with Mr. Trump,” Mr. Comey said to Mr. Nadler. “In the matter of the email investigation, it was our judgment — my judgment and the rest of the F.B.I.’s judgment — that those were exceptional circumstances.”

Even in classified briefings with House and Senate intelligence committee members, Mr. Comey repeatedly declined to answer questions about whether there was an investigation of the Trump campaign.

To Mr. Comey’s allies, the two investigations were totally different. One was closed when he spoke about it. The other was continuing, highly classified and in its earliest stages. Much of the debate over Mr. Comey’s actions over the last seven months can be distilled into whether people make that same distinction.

The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I. would pay him $50,000 for his efforts, according to two people familiar with the offer. Ultimately, he was not paid.

But by fall, the gravity of the Russian effort to affect the presidential election had become clear.

The D.N.C. hack and others like it had once appeared to be standard Russian tactics to tarnish a Western democracy. After the WikiLeaks disclosures and subsequent leaks by a Russian group using the name DCLeaks, agents and analysts began to realize that Moscow was not just meddling. It was trying to tip the election away from Mrs. Clinton and toward Mr. Trump.

At their second meeting, Mr. Comey argued that it would look too political for the F.B.I. to comment so close to the election, according to several people in attendance. Officials in the room felt whiplashed. Two months earlier, Mr. Comey had been willing to put his name on a newspaper article; now he was refusing to sign on to an official assessment of the intelligence community.

That night, WikiLeaks began posting thousands of hacked emails from another source: the private email account of John D. Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign.

The emails included embarrassing messages between campaign staff members and excerpts from Mrs. Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street. The disclosure further convinced the F.B.I. that it had initially misread Russia’s intentions.

“You may be aware that your emails have been hacked,” an agent told him.

Mr. Podesta laughed. The same agency that had so thoroughly investigated Mrs. Clinton, he said, seemed painfully slow at responding to Russian hacking.

“Yes,” he answered. “I’m aware.”

Supplementing the Record

The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, was first with the salacious story: Anthony D. Weiner, the former New York congressman, had exchanged sexually charged messages with a 15-year-old girl.

F.B.I. agents in New York seized Mr. Weiner’s laptop in early October. The investigation was just one of many in the New York office and was not treated with great urgency, officials said. Further slowing the investigation, the F.B.I. software used to catalog the computer files kept crashing.

Eventually, investigators realized that they had hundreds of thousands of emails, many of which belonged to Ms. Abedin and had been backed up to her husband’s computer.

Neither Mr. Comey nor Ms. Lynch was concerned. Agents had discovered devices before in the Clinton investigation (old cellphones, for example) that turned up no new evidence.

Then, agents in New York who were searching image files on Mr. Weiner’s computer discovered a State Department document containing the initials H.R.C. — Hillary Rodham Clinton. They found messages linked to Mrs. Clinton’s home server.

And they made another surprising discovery: evidence that some of the emails had moved through Mrs. Clinton’s old BlackBerry server, the one she used before moving to her home server. If Mrs. Clinton had intended to conceal something, agents had always believed, the evidence might be in those emails. But reading them would require another search warrant, essentially reopening the Clinton investigation.

The election was two weeks away.

Mr. Comey learned of the Clinton emails on the evening of Oct. 26 and gathered his team the next morning to discuss the development.

Seeking a new warrant was an easy decision. He had a thornier issue on his mind.

Back in July, he told Congress that the Clinton investigation was closed. What was his obligation, he asked, to acknowledge that this was no longer true?

It was a perilous idea. It would push the F.B.I. back into the political arena, weeks after refusing to confirm the active investigation of the Trump campaign and declining to accuse Russia of hacking.

The question consumed hours of conference calls and meetings. Agents felt they had two options: Tell Congress about the search, which everyone acknowledged would create a political furor, or keep it quiet, which followed policy and tradition but carried its own risk, especially if the F.B.I. found new evidence in the emails.

“In my mind at the time, Clinton is likely to win,” Mr. Steinbach said. “It’s pretty apparent. So what happens after the election, in November or December? How do we say to the American public: ‘Hey, we found some things that might be problematic. But we didn’t tell you about it before you voted’? The damage to our organization would have been irreparable.”

Conservative news outlets had already branded Mr. Comey a Clinton toady. That same week, the cover of National Review featured a story on “James Comey’s Dereliction,” and a cartoon of a hapless Mr. Comey shrugging as Mrs. Clinton smashed her laptop with a sledgehammer.

Congressional Republicans were preparing for years of hearings during a Clinton presidency. If Mr. Comey became the subject of those hearings, F.B.I. officials feared, it would hobble the agency and harm its reputation. “I don’t think the organization would have survived that,” Mr. Steinbach said.

The assumption was that the email review would take many weeks or months. “If we thought we could be done in a week,” Mr. Steinbach said, “we wouldn’t say anything.”

The spirited debate continued when Mr. Comey reassembled his team later that day. F.B.I. lawyers raised concerns, former officials said. But in the end, Mr. Comey said he felt obligated to tell Congress.

“I went back and forth, changing my mind several times,” Mr. Steinbach recalled. “Ultimately, it was the right call.”

That afternoon, Mr. Comey’s chief of staff called the office of Ms. Yates, the deputy attorney general, and revealed the plan.

When Ms. Lynch was told, she was both stunned and confused. While the Justice Department’s rules on “election year sensitivities” do not expressly forbid making comments close to an election, administrations of both parties have interpreted them as a broad prohibition against anything that may influence a political outcome.

Ms. Lynch understood Mr. Comey’s predicament, but not his hurry. In a series of phone calls, her aides told Mr. Comey’s deputies that there was no need to tell Congress anything until agents knew what the emails contained.

Either Ms. Lynch or Ms. Yates could have ordered Mr. Comey not to send the letter, but their aides argued against it. If Ms. Lynch issued the order and Mr. Comey obeyed, she risked the same fate that Mr. Comey feared: accusations of political interference and favoritism by a Democratic attorney general.

If Mr. Comey disregarded her order and sent the letter — a real possibility, her aides thought — it would be an act of insubordination that would force her to consider firing him, aggravating the situation.

Document

Letter to Congress From F.B.I. Director on Clinton Email Case

In the letter, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that new emails had surfaced in a case unrelated to the closed investigation into whether Hillary Clinton or her aides had mishandled classified information, and that the messages “appear to be pertinent to the investigation.”

So the debate ended at the staff level, with the Justice Department imploring the F.B.I. to follow protocol and stay out of the campaign’s final days. Ms. Lynch never called Mr. Comey herself.

The next morning, Friday, Oct. 28, Mr. Comey wrote to Congress, “In connection with an unrelated case, the F.B.I. has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.”

His letter became public within minutes. Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, a Republican and a leading antagonist of Mrs. Clinton’s, jubilantly announced on Twitter, “Case reopened.”

‘This Changes Everything’

The Clinton team was outraged. Even at the F.B.I., agents who supported their high-profile director were stunned. They knew the letter would call into question the F.B.I.’s political independence.

Mr. Trump immediately mentioned it on the campaign trail. “As you might have heard,” Mr. Trump told supporters in Maine, “earlier today, the F.B.I. … ” The crowd interrupted with a roar. Everyone had heard.

Polls almost immediately showed Mrs. Clinton’s support declining. Presidential races nearly always tighten in the final days, but some political scientists reported a measurable “Comey effect.”

“This changes everything,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Comey explained in an email to his agents that Congress needed to be notified. “It would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record,” he wrote.

But many agents were not satisfied.

At the Justice Department, career prosecutors and political appointees privately criticized not only Mr. Comey for sending the letter but also Ms. Lynch and Ms. Yates for not stopping him. Many saw the letter as the logical result of years of not reining him in.

Mr. Comey told Congress that he had no idea how long the email review would take, but Ms. Lynch promised every resource needed to complete it before Election Day.

At the F.B.I., the Clinton investigative team was reassembled, and the Justice Department obtained a warrant to read emails to or from Mrs. Clinton during her time at the State Department. As it turned out, only about 50,000 emails met those criteria, far fewer than anticipated, officials said, and the F.B.I. had already seen many of them.

Mr. Comey was again under fire. Former Justice Department officials from both parties wrote a Washington Post op-ed piece titled “James Comey Is Damaging Our Democracy.”

At a Justice Department memorial for Mr. Margolis, organizers removed all the chairs from the stage, avoiding the awkward scene of Mr. Comey sitting beside some of his sharpest critics.

Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, eulogized Mr. Margolis for unfailingly following the rules, even when facing unpopular options. Audience members heard it as a veiled critique of both Mr. Comey and Ms. Lynch.

On Nov. 5, three days before Election Day, Mr. Strzok and his team had 3,000 emails left to review. That night, they ordered pizza and dug in. At about 2 a.m., Mr. Strzok wrote an email to Mr. Comey and scheduled it to send at 6 a.m. They were finished.

A few hours later, Mr. Strzok and his team were back in Mr. Comey’s conference room for a final briefing: Only about 3,000 emails had been potentially work-related. A dozen or so email chains contained classified information, but the F.B.I. had already seen it.

And agents had found no emails from the BlackBerry server during the crucial period when Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department.

Nothing had changed what Mr. Comey had said in July.

That conclusion was met with a mixture of relief and angst. Everyone at the meeting knew that the question would quickly turn to whether Mr. Comey’s letter had been necessary.

That afternoon, Mr. Comey sent a second letter to Congress. “Based on our review,” he wrote, “we have not changed our conclusions.”

Political Consequences

Mr. Comey did not vote on Election Day, records show, the first time he skipped a national election, according to friends. But the director of the F.B.I. was a central story line on every television station as Mr. Trump swept to an upset victory.

Many factors explained Mr. Trump’s success, but Mrs. Clinton blamed just one. “Our analysis is that Comey’s letter — raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be — stopped our momentum,” she told donors a few days after the election. She pointed to polling data showing that late-deciding voters chose Mr. Trump in unusually large numbers.

Even many Democrats believe that this analysis ignores other factors, but at the F.B.I., the accusation stung. Agents are used to criticism and second-guessing. Rarely has the agency been accused of political favoritism or, worse, tipping an election.

For all the attention on Mrs. Clinton’s emails, history is likely to see Russian influence as the more significant story of the 2016 election. Questions about Russian meddling and possible collusion have marred Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in the White House, cost him his national security adviser and triggered two congressional investigations. Despite Mr. Trump’s assertions that “Russia is fake news,” the White House has been unable to escape its shadow.

Mr. Comey has told friends that he has no regrets, about either the July news conference or the October letter or his handling of the Russia investigation. Confidants like Mr. Richman say he was constrained by circumstance while “navigating waters in which every move has political consequences.”

But officials and others close to him also acknowledge that Mr. Comey has been changed by the tumultuous year.

Early on Saturday, March 4, the president accused Mr. Obama on Twitter of illegally wiretapping Trump Tower in Manhattan. Mr. Comey believed the government should forcefully denounce that claim. But this time he took a different approach. He asked the Justice Department to correct the record. When officials there refused, Mr. Comey followed orders and said nothing publicly.

“Comey should say this on the record,” said Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council spokesman in the Obama administration. “He’s already shattered all norms about commenting on ongoing investigations.”

Mr. Richman sees no conflict, but rather “a consistent pattern of someone trying to act with independence and integrity, but within established channels.”

“His approach to the Russia investigation fits this pattern,” he added.

But perhaps the most telling sign that Mr. Comey may have had enough of being Washington’s Lone Ranger occurred last month before the House Intelligence Committee.

Early in the hearing, Mr. Comey acknowledged for the first time what had been widely reported: The F.B.I. was investigating members of the Trump campaign for possible collusion with Russia.

Yet the independent-minded F.B.I. director struck a collaborative tone. “I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm,” he began, ushering in the next phase of his extraordinary moment in national politics.

Mr. Comey was still in the spotlight, but no longer alone.

 

 

 

French Report Confirms Assad Regime Ordered CW Attack

The official report is found here. Sorry Russia, cant blame the United States for this report.

Chemical Attack in Syria – National Evaluation presented by Jean-Marc Ayrault following the Defense Council Meeting (26 April 2017)

 

France says analysis shows Syria regime behind sarin attack

PARIS (AP) — France said Wednesday that the chemical analysis of samples taken from a deadly sarin gas attack in Syria earlier this month “bears the signature” of President Bashar Assad’s government and shows it was responsible.

Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said France came to this conclusion after comparing samples from a 2013 sarin attack in Syria that matched the new ones. The findings came in a six-page report published Wednesday.

Russia, a close ally of Assad, promptly denounced the French report, saying the samples and the fact the nerve agent was used are not enough to prove who was behind it. Assad has repeatedly denied that his forces used chemical weapons and claimed that myriad evidence of a poison gas attack is made up.

But Ayrault said France knows “from sure sources” that “the manufacturing process of the sarin that was sampled is typical of the method developed in Syrian laboratories.”

“This method bears the signature of the regime and that is what allows us to establish its responsibility in this attack,” he added, saying that France is working to bring those behind the “criminal” atrocities to international justice.

France’s Foreign Ministry said blood samples were taken from a victim in Syria on the day of the April 4 attack in the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun, which killed more than 80 people.

Environmental samples, the French ministry said, show the weapons were made “according to the same production process as the one used in the sarin attack perpetrated by the Syrian regime in Saraqeb” on April 29, 2013.

Ayrault said French intelligence showed that only Syrian government forces could have launched such an attack — by a bomber taking off from the Shayrat air base, which was later targeted in a retaliatory U.S. missile strike.

France’s presidency said the country’s intelligence services presented evidence showing the Syrian government “still holds chemical warfare agents, in violation of the commitments to eliminate them that it took in 2013.” It said that information will be made public, without offering details.

It’s thought that Assad’s government still has a stockpile of tons of chemical weapons, despite saying it had handed over all of them.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia’s position on the attack is “unchanged,” and that “that the only way to establish the truth about what happened… is an impartial international investigation.”

Russia has previously called for an international probe, and Peskov expressed regret that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, has turned down the Syrian government’s offers to visit the site of the attack and investigate.

The French minister’s comments came as the OPCW, which is investigating the April 4 attack, held a ceremony in The Hague marking the 20th anniversary of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

In a video message to the ceremony, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the organization’s progress over two decades seeking to eliminate chemical weapons is now under threat.

“In the Middle East, belligerents are breaking the norm against chemical weapons,” he said. “The recent attack in Syria was a horrific reminder of the stakes. There can be no impunity for these crimes.”

The United States has also blamed Assad’s government for the April 4 attack. The Trump administration ordered the cruise missile attack on the air base and issued sanctions on 271 people linked to the Syrian agency said to be responsible for producing non-conventional weapons. Syria has strongly denied the accusations.

Earlier Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the U.S. strike damaged the prospects of a political settlement for the war-torn country.

Lavrov told a security conference in Moscow the U.S. response “pushes the prospect for a wide international front on terror even further away.”

He also dismissed claims that international experts cannot visit the site in Khan Sheikhoun because of security precautions and criticized the OPCW for failing to go there. Lavrov says claims that the experts were warned by a U.N. body against traveling to the location because it’s unsafe are “lies,” adding that Moscow went back to the U.N. and found out that there was no such warning.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia had to boost security measures at its air base in Syria after the U.S. strike at the Syrian base. Russia has been waging an air campaign since 2015 to help Assad’s forces in the civil war.

In other developments, U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces asked for the U.S.-led coalition to provide air cover over northern Syria, to protect them from Turkish and Syrian government air raids.

A series of Turkish airstrikes on Tuesday killed 20 Syrian Kurdish fighters in attacks that Ankara said targeted Kurdish rebel positions in Syria and Iraq.

Syrian Kurdish officials escorted an American officer to some of the sites targeted in the attack, as large crowds from the area followed them around, according to photos and video from the scene. Redur Khalil, the spokesman for the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, confirmed the visit to The Associated Press.

Khalil said the airstrikes were followed Wednesday by Turkish army shelling of Syrian villages along the border area. The shelling prompted an exchange of fire between Kurdish and Turkish border posts, Khalil said.

The YPG form the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the main U.S. partner in the battle against the Islamic State group in northern Syria. NATO member Turkey considers the YPG an extension of an insurgency within its own borders. The SDF includes Arab fighters.

Khalil said the Turkish escalation would “obstruct the war” against IS.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned the airstrikes. The SDF and the Syrian government have largely avoided confrontations with each other over the course of the civil war. No Syrian government forces were targeted in the attack.