Clinton Aides, Signed Documents and Everything is Evidence

Posted on June 8, 2016June 8, 2016 by Denise Simon

Clinton aides signed forms agreeing classified info is ‘marked or unmarked’

WashingtonExaminer: Hours before Hillary Clinton was set to deliver a major foreign policy address Thursday, the Republican National Committee released copies of classified nondisclosure agreements signed by a pair of Clinton’s top aides.

The agreements, obtained by the RNC through the Freedom of Information Act, indicated both Clinton staffers had been specifically instructed on how to handle “marked or unmarked” classified material upon their arrival at the State Department in early 2009.

Jake Sullivan, former director of policy planning, and Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s former information technology specialist, both signed the classified information nondisclosure forms.

By signing the document, Sullivan acknowledged that “negligent handling” of classified information could carry consequences. Sullivan reportedly sent the highest number of now-classified emails through Clinton’s private server.

Pagliano’s involvement in setting up and maintaining Clinton’s email network has come under fire in the months since reports surfaced of his simultaneous employment by the State Department and by the Clintons as a personal aide.

Pagliano has invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer questions about the server in a closed-door congressional hearing and ahead of a deposition slated for Monday.

“Hillary Clinton endangered our national security and created a culture where top staffers went rogue, silenced career officials and hid a reckless email scheme that placed her political ambitions above all else,” Reince Priebus, chairman of the RNC, said of the nondisclosure forms. “These records show that like Clinton, her closest aides did not meet their responsibilities to protect classified information regardless of whether it was marked.”

Clinton has repeatedly argued that because nothing she sent or received was “marked” classified, she did not break any laws governing the treatment of sensitive government material. She maintains that the more than 2,000 emails from her server that have been classified by the State Department were only considered classified after they were written.

*****

FBI: Everything on Clinton is ‘evidence’ or ‘potential evidence’

TheHill: The FBI is treating everything on the private server used to run former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal email account as evidence or possible evidence as part of the federal investigation connected to the machine, the bureau said in a court filing this week.

“[A]ll of the materials retrieved from any electronic equipment obtained from former Secretary Clinton for the investigation are evidence, potential evidence, or information that has not yet been assessed for evidentiary value,” the FBI said in the filing.

Release of any of that additional information “could reasonably be expected to interfere with the pending investigation,” it added.
The FBI refused to publicly confirm other details of its investigation, and in the Monday evening filing declined to outline what, if any, laws it believes may have been broken to prompt its investigation. It also would not say who the target of the investigation is or confirm reports that multiple senior Clinton aides had been interviewed as part of the probe.

Still, the claim that all material is being treated as current or potential evidence could bode poorly for Clinton, who this week clinched the role of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

The FBI months ago took control of Clinton’s server, which was used to run her private email setup from her New York home throughout her time as secretary of State.

The federal bureau’s filing was made in a motion trying to kill an open-records lawsuit from Vice News journalist Jason Leopold.

In addition to that filing, the FBI asked the court for permission to offer another secret declaration outlining the steps it had taken to search Clinton’s machine for documents related to Leopold’s request.

Migrants linked to 69,000 would-be or actual crimes in Germany

Posted on June 8, 2016June 8, 2016 by Denise Simon

Inviting in people of unknown backgrounds under the banner of humanitarian objectives is a dangerous policy, when innocent citizens are victims. This is occurring in the United States with wild abandon, yet apathy reigns and there are no real grass-roots efforts to demand and restore order or security.

Even if cases go to court, the judicial systems in Europe and in the United States render feeble sentences which is worse and almost no one is deported. Discretionary application of the law for the sake of an alleged culture, humanity and for refugee/asylum conditions with grow instability, clog and corrupt processes and cause illness or death.

Below, in the case of Germany the publication of this condition translate to a situation that is likely worse than actually being reported especially when Merkel had control over a media blackout.

Migrants linked to 69,000 would-be or actual crimes in Germany in first three months of 2016: police

Reuters: Migrants in Germany committed or tried to commit some 69,000 crimes in the first quarter of 2016, according to a police report that could raise unease, especially among anti-immigrant groups, about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal migrant policy.

Immigrants are escorted by German police to a registration centre, after crossing the Austrian-German border in Wegscheid near Passau, Germany, October 20, 2015.

There was a record influx of more than a million migrants into Germany last year and concerns are now widespread about how Europe’s largest economy will manage to integrate them and ensure security.

The report from the BKA federal police showed that migrants from northern Africa, Georgia and Serbia were disproportionately represented among the suspects.

Absolute numbers of crimes committed by Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis – the three biggest groups of asylum seekers in Germany – were high but given the proportion of migrants that they account for, their involvement in crimes was “clearly disproportionately low”, the report said.

It gave no breakdown of the number of actual crimes and of would-be crimes, nor did it state what percentage the 69,000 figure represented with respect to the total number of crimes and would-be crimes committed in the first three months of 2016.

The report stated that the vast majority of migrants did not commit any crimes.

It is the first time the BKA has published a report on crimes committed by migrants containing data from all of Germany’s 16 states, so there is no comparable data.

The report showed that 29.2 percent of the crimes migrants committed or tried to commit in the first quarter were thefts, 28.3 percent were property or forgery offences and 23 percent offences such as bodily harm, robbery and unlawful detention.

Drug-related offences accounted for 6.6 percent and sex crimes accounted for 1.1 percent.

In Cologne at New Year, hundreds of women said they were groped, assaulted and robbed, with police saying the suspects were mainly of North African and Arab appearance. Prosecutors said last week three Pakistani men seeking asylum in Germany were under investigation after dozens of women said they were sexually harassed at a music festival.

The number of crimes committed by migrants declined by more than 18 percent between January and March, however, according to the report.

Mystery Navy Flights to Jam GPS for 1 Month

Posted on June 7, 2016June 7, 2016 by Denise Simon

ZH: Starting today, and continuing for the next month, the FAA has warned airplane pilots that GPS signals on on the West Coast, and especially over California and Nevada, may be impacted.

The reason why is not exactly clear, but as Gizmodo notes, the US military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS signals for six hours each day. Officially the tests were announced by the FAA but are centered near the US Navy’s largest installation in the Mojave Desert, China Lake, located “just down the road” from Area 51. The Navy has kept silent about the nature of the tests.

An aerial view of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake

As Gizmodo adds, the FAA issued an advisory warning pilots on Saturday that global positioning systems (GPS) could be unreliable during six different days this month, primarily in the Southwestern United States. On June 7, 9, 21, 23, 28, and 30th the GPS interference testing will be taking place between 9:30am and 3:30pm Pacific time. But if you’re on the ground, you probably won’t notice interference.

The dates and times of potential GPS outages per the FAA are shown below:

7 JUN 16 1630Z – 2230Z
9 JUN 16 1630Z – 2230Z
21 JUN 16 1630Z – 2230Z
23 JUN 16 1630Z – 2230Z
28 JUN 16 1630Z – 2230Z
30 JUN 16 1630Z – 2230Z

The testing will be centered on China Lake, California—home to the Navy’s 1.1 million acre Naval Air Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert. The potentially lost signals will stretch hundreds of miles in each direction and will affect various types of GPS, reaching the furthest at higher altitudes. But the jamming will only affect aircraft above 50 feet. As shown in the FAA map below, the jamming will almost reach the California-Oregon border at 4o,000 feet above sea level and 505 nautical miles at its greatest range.

The FAA map showing the GPS jamming that will occur at different altitudes this month

“We’re aware of the flight advisory,” Deidre Patin, Public Affairs specialist for Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division told Gizmodo but she couldn’t give any further details about whether there was indeed GPS “jamming,” nor whether it had happened before. Patin added, “I can’t go into the details of the testing, it’s general testing for our ranges.”

Embraer Phenom 300 business jets are specifically being told to avoid the area completely during the tests.

THIS NOTAM APPLIES TO ALL AIRCRAFT RELYING ON GPS. ADDITIONALLY, DUE TO GPS INTERFERENCE IMPACTS POTENTIALLY AFFECTING EMBRAER PHENOM 300 AIRCRAFT FLIGHT STABILITY CONTROLS, FAA RECOMMENDS EMB PHENOM PILOTS AVOID THE ABOVE TESTING AREA AND CLOSELY MONITOR FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEMS DUE TO POTENTIAL LOSS OF GPS SIGNAL.

This means that billionaires flying into Santa Monica will have to find alternative routes in the affected intervals, due to the FAA’s warning that the jamming test could interfere with the business jet’s “aircraft flight stability controls.”

As Gizmodo’s Matt Novak writes, “GPS technology has become so ubiquitous that cheap jamming technology has become a real concern for both military and civilian aircraft. And if we had to speculate we’d say that these tests are probably pulling double duty for both offensive and defensive military capabilities. But honestly, that’s just a guess.”

Readers who have more information on the nature of these tests are welcome to write in or comment. The full FAA Advisory is attached below.

CHLK 16-08 GPS Flight Advisory by zerohedge

Red Flags Due to Hillary’s Email Team

Posted on June 7, 2016June 7, 2016 by Denise Simon

Has Hillary explained this to Debbie?

EXCLUSIVE: Emails Show State Dept. Officials Were Warned Of Hillary Clinton Email Spin

Ross/DailyCaller: Newly released State Department emails show that in the days after Hillary Clinton’s exclusive personal email use made international news, officials with the agency’s legal department were urged by the former head of that division to make it clear that the bureau did not sign off on the former secretary of state’s arrangement.

But that advice, which came from John Bellinger, the State Department’s Legal Adviser during the George W. Bush administration, appears to have gone unheeded, at least publicly. The State Department never publicly clarified that Clinton self-approved her personal email system.

While the agency’s information technology, diplomatic security and legal adviser divisions were not made aware of the setup, those facts only came to light in an inspector general’s report that was published last month.In delaying saying whether Clinton’s email system was approved by the State Department, the agency created the perception that the Democratic presidential candidate’s email system was allowed. Clinton herself has made the same claim. The IG report thoroughly debunked that notion, however.

On March 3, 2015, Bellinger, now an attorney with Arnold & Porter, emailed principal deputy legal adviser Mary McLeod and deputy legal advisor Richard Visek of the State Department’s office of legal affairs raising several concerns with how spokeswoman Marie Harf was spinning the scandal.

He took issue with Harf’s implication that the office of the legal adviser signed off on Clinton’s email system and that her email practices were similar to past secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

“I’m sorry you guys are getting put through the wringer today,” Bellinger wrote in his first email, which The Daily Caller received as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department.

The watchdog group Cause of Action filed the suit on TheDC’s behalf.

Bellinger offered two suggestions to McLeod and Visek.

“Please make sure that Marcie [sic] Harf doesn’t keep saying that Secretary Rice did the same thing. As you know, that is not correct, and Secretary Rice has corrected the record,” wrote Bellinger, who continues to serve as Rice’s personal counsel.

During her March 3 daily press briefing Harf defended Clinton’s email arrangement saying that she “was following what had been the practice of previous secretaries.”

The implication was that Clinton’s immediate predecessors, Rice and Powell, used email in the same way Clinton did. Harf did clarify later that Rice did not use personal email while Powell sometimes did.

Bellinger also bristled at the implication that the office of the legal adviser had approved of Clinton’s foolhardy setup.

Related reading: State Dept.: 75-year wait for Clinton aide emails

“I’m getting calls from people (press and former USG lawyers) asking whether State lawyers actually approved letting Secretary Clinton use a State [BlackBerry] for official business using a personal email account, and then to keep the emails,” he continued.

“Marcie [sic] Harf is implying that State approved this practice (and this suggests that L approved it, though she didn’t say so specifically). As someone who wants to defend L’s reputation, I would urge you to defend the credibility of L as good and careful administrative lawyers, and don’t let the spokesman give L a bad name. I can’t believe that L would have approved this, and you shouldn’t let Marcie Harf imply that you did.”

“L” refers to the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser which, according to its website, “furnishes advice on all legal issues, domestic and international, arising in the course of the Department’s work.”

The emails were released to TheDC just as the State Department’s press shop is facing intense scrutiny after spokesman John Kirby admitted that an agency official ordered the excision of eight minutes of video from a Dec. 2, 2013 press briefing discussing nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

The State Department has refused to conduct a detailed investigation of the matter, leaving the identity of the official who ordered the deletion to remain a mystery.

As the two top agency spokeswomen at the time, Harf and her colleague Jen Psaki have been suggested as being behind the order. Both have denied any involvement in the deletion.

Visek responded to Bellinger’s advice, writing: “Thanks for the heads up. I’ll reach out to PA and try to make sure they understand.”

“PA” is a reference to the bureau of public affairs.

“Marcie [sic] hasn’t specifically said that L approved the practice, but she’s strongly suggested that it’s all fine which is why people are calling me to ask ‘Did L really approve this’? And I have responded, I can’t believe they did — they are careful lawyers,” Bellinger wrote back.

In those initial days after Clinton’s email practices were revealed, Harf and her fellow spokeswoman Jen Psaki led a clear-cut effort to downplay the burgeoning scandal.

At one point during the March 3, 2015 daily press briefing, Harf, who now serves as senior advisor for communications for Sec. of State John Kerry, exclaimed that “I was a little surprised — although maybe I shouldn’t have been — by some of the breathless reporting coming out last night.”

She came under criticism from many in the press for her dismissive responses to questions about the email setup.

State Department officials declined for months to answer questions about who may have approved Clinton’s email setup.

The arrangement was managed by Bryan Pagliano, who was hired by the State Department as an information technology specialist in May 2009.

The questions of whether any State Department sub-agencies signed off on the Clinton email setup was finally answered last month in a State Department inspector general’s report.

The watchdog found that Clinton did not seek approval for the system from anyone at the department. The report also noted that officials with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security would not have okayed the system even if Clinton had asked for permission to use it.

The office of the legal adviser also had no input on the system. The report did note, however, that a State Department official named John Bentel told two information technology staffers not to ask questions about Clinton’s server. He allegedly told the staffers that the legal adviser had approved the system. Reached by email for comment, Bellinger said he would let his emails speak for themselves.

State Department Office of Legal Adviser emails by Chuck Ross

Former US attorney: Clinton aides’ legal strategy is ‘red flag’

FNC: Four central figures in the FBI’s criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices are all using the same lawyer, a move described as a “red flag” by a former U.S. attorney who now runs a government watchdog group.

Lawyer Beth Wilkinson is representing: Clinton former chief of staff Cheryl Mills; policy adviser Jake Sullivan; media gatekeeper Philippe Reines; and former aide Heather Samuelson, who helped decide which Clinton emails were destroyed before turning over the remaining 30,000 records to the State Department.

“I think it would be a real red flag,” Matthew Whitaker, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, or FACT, told Fox News, in reference to the legal defense. He suggested having a single lawyer would help the four Clinton aides align their stories for FBI interviews.

“The benefit is to have one lawyer’s brain have all the knowledge of the various pieces and parts, and so each of those potential targets or subjects of the investigation get to share information across that same attorney — and quite frankly get their story to sync up and understand what other people know of the situation,” he said.

Wilkinson is a well-respected Washington, D.C., attorney who successfully argued in favor of the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing case. Wilkinson has deep ties in Washington and is married to former NBC “Meet the Press” host David Gregory, who is now a regular political commentator on CNN.

Asked for comment, there was no immediate response from Wilkinson’s office. It has been their practice not to respond to press inquiries on this case.

Whitaker was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa by President George W. Bush in June 2004 and held the position until November 2009, when President Obama’s appointed replacement was confirmed. He said the legal set-up presents challenges for FBI investigators in the Clinton probe.

“All you’re trying to do is seek the truth, and when someone is sharing a lawyer, you worry that the interview that you just did an hour ago with that attorney has been shared with the next witness and they can fix or reconcile their story to be the same,” Whitaker explained.

While apparently unusual, the legal representation has not been openly challenged by Justice Department officials.

A different perspective, presented by a leading defense attorney who asked not to speak on the record, is that the four Clinton aides plan to present a united front and do not fear criminal liability.

Politico first reported in April on the legal representation; since then, Mills and Wilkinson blocked questions about Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano – another key figure in the probe – during a civil suit deposition in Washington. Pagliano, who struck an immunity deal with the Justice Department last year, is now seeking to assert his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions in the same Judicial Watch proceedings.

Clinton told ABC News on Sunday that her email practices were in line with those of her predecessors. In a Friday radio interview with KNX 1070, Clinton said there is “absolutely no possibility” she’d be indicted.

Whitaker’s group FACT also is seeking the emails of Dennis Cheng, Clinton’s former deputy chief of protocol at the State Department, whose records may reveal a great deal about the possible intersection between Clinton Foundation work and Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Cheng was the point person for senior foreign government officials. Only a handful of Cheng emails were among the more than 30,000 pages made public by the State Department.

According to his State Department biography, Cheng also served as Clinton’s national finance director when she was a senator, her New York finance director for her 2008 presidential campaign, and as a consultant to the William J. Clinton Foundation.

The FBI probe into Clinton’s email use is not the first time her record-keeping has faced federal scrutiny. Long before she became a secretary of state, Clinton’s billing records and documents tied to her work as a partner in the Rose Law Firm on behalf of the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and Capital Management Services came under question. Those missing records from her work as a lawyer were at the crux of investigations by three separate federal agencies which cost taxpayers $65 million. A special committee’s report on the matter (page 155) said it received computer printouts of the billings in January 1996, “discovered under mysterious circumstances in the Book Room of the White House Residence.”

Clinton is still represented by the same lawyer who defended her throughout the in the 1980’s and 1990’s, David Kendall.

SITREP Afghanistan: Taliban, Contractors, Troop Levels

Posted on June 7, 2016June 7, 2016 by Denise Simon

Two members of an NPR news crew, David Gilkey and Zabihullah Tamanna, were killed on Sunday while traveling in southern Afghanistan.

CNN: “They were traveling with an Afghan army unit when the convoy came under fire. Their vehicle was struck by shell fire,” according to a statement by NPR.

Two other NPR crew members, correspondent Tom Bowman and producer Monika Evstatieva, “were in a following vehicle,” NPR head of news Michael Oreskes told CNN. “Tom and Monika were not hurt.”

Sunday’s attack marks the first time in the 46-year history of NPR that one of its journalists has been killed on assignment.

Gilkey, 50, was an award-winning staff photographer and video editor for NPR. In the 15 years since the 9/11 attacks, he returned time and time again to Afghanistan and other conflict zones.

“David was profoundly committed to coverage of both Afghanistan and Iraq,” Oreskes said. “He wanted to know what was happening to the people there. I think that’s why he kept going back — because he wanted to understand what was happening to the soldiers and civilians.”

Watchdog: Afghanistan’s lapis lazuli is a ‘conflict mineral’

FNC: KABUL, Afghanistan – An international anti-corruption watchdog says Afghanistan’s war is being fueled by the country’s mining sector, with armed groups — including the Taliban — earning $20 million from illegal mining of lapis lazuli.

A report by Global Witness released on Monday says that lapis lazuli, a blue stone almost unique to Afghanistan, should be classified as a “conflict mineral.”

It says the northern Badakhshan province where lapis lazuli is concentrated has been “deeply destabilized” by violent competition for control of the mines between local strongmen, law makers and the Taliban.

Badakhshan is a microcosm of what is happening across Afghanistan, with mining being the Taliban’s second biggest source of income, after drugs.

The Taliban insurgency is in its 15th year.

Afghanistan’s mineral assets are believed to be worth billions of dollars.

How Obama’s Afghanistan plan is forcing the Army to replace soldiers with contractors

WaPo: Current restrictions on U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan and a heavy reliance on civilian contractors are eroding the skills and cohesion of units deployed to the country, according to information from the Army given to the House Armed Services Committee and provided to The Washington Post.

According to an Army document, the use of civilian labor in one of the Army’s combat aviation brigades, or CABs, in Afghanistan has had negative side effects because the contractors are being used in lieu of the brigade’s maintenance soldiers. Those soldiers should be deploying with their units, but are not because of the “constrained troop level environment” in Afghanistan, the document says.

[Obama faces what is likely his last major decision on the Pentagon’s role in Afghanistan]

“Aviation maintainers not deploying with their [brigades] results in an erosion of skill and experience essential to soldier and leader development,” Army officials said in the document. “The atrophy of these critical skills erodes the brigade’s ability to deploy in the future and sustain itself in an expeditionary manner to locations that may not permit the deployment of contractors.”

According to the Army document, three CABs have deployed to Afghanistan since 2013 with reduced maintenance staffs. A typical CAB usually deploys with 1,500 soldiers but can swell above 2,500 depending on the mission. In 2013, a brigade deployed with 1,900 troops, but as U.S. forces were reduced in Afghanistan, a brigade of only 800 deployed in 2015. Despite the reduction in troop levels, the brigade was still expected to maintain and fly its roughly 100 aircraft.

Currently, the 4th Infantry Division’s CAB is deployed to Afghanistan and provides “country-wide aviation support,” according to a breakdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan that was compiled by the Institute for the Study of War. It primarily provides rotor-wing support in the form of helicopter gunships and transports.

According to the Army document, only 6 percent of the 4th’s CAB is dedicated to maintaining aircraft. That small number is specifically for recovering aircraft that land or crash in a hostile environment. Instead, 427 civilian personnel — at a cost of $101 million annually — are maintaining the CAB’s fleet of helicopters. Through 2014 and 2015, 390 contractors maintained both the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions’ aircraft for $86 million when their CABs were deployed to Afghanistan.

While U.S.-led combat operations in Afghanistan officially ended in 2014, last fall, as the Taliban gained momentum throughout the country, President Obama agreed to keep about 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan through 2016, and 5,500 into 2017.

Although the troop levels are low compared to the 45,000 deployed at the start of 2014, the number of uniformed service members in Afghanistan is only part of the U.S. war effort there. As of April, 26,000 Pentagon contractors are in Afghanistan, about half of whom are assigned to logistics and maintenance duties, according to publicly available reports.

[In Afghanistan, a series of attacks on Americans during ‘non-combat’ operations]

Although the number of contractors has almost always exceeded the number of uniformed troops in Afghanistan, the ratio of civilian employees compared to U.S. military personnel has more than doubled in the past two years, from 1.34 to 2.92.

“I am not at all convinced that the only units affected are the combat aviation brigades,” Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a recent interview. “Aside from financially … is there a potential that it increases the risk that our folks face just because of these political limits? Those questions are certainly worthy of a significant deep dive on the part of the committee.”

***** Obama being asked about force levels:

Washington, DC- Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and nine members of the Senate Armed Services Committee sent a letter to President Obama regarding U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan. “A timely decision on U.S. force levels is necessary so that our allies and partners can generate forces and make appropriate pledged for the Resolute Support Mission beginning in January 2017,” the bipartisan group of senators wrote. “We urge you to announce any changes to our current planned force levels ahead of the relevant NATO conferences, giving the strong consideration to the assessment of your military commanders and to conditions on the ground.”

The letter was signed by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE), Senator Joe Donnelly (D-IN), Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Senator Angus King (I-ME).

The text of the letter can be found below. Additionally, click here to read the letter.

Dear President Obama:

We appreciate your continued willingness to consider adjustments based on the security situation in Afghanistan to preserve and build upon the hard fought gains achieved over the past 14 years. In recent months, the Senate Armed Services Committee has heard from General Nicholson, General Campbell, and General Votel – the senior military commanders closest to the fight – that the security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating, which challenges the ability of the Afghan government to provide stability and security for its people.

We understand that General John Nicholson is in the process of completing his assessment of the capabilities and associated troop levels he believes will be necessary in Afghanistan to confront a resurgent Taliban, a reviving Al Qaida, and a rising Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, and will make recommendations in the near future. As the Commander on the ground, we believe that his recommendations should be given extraordinary weight. We also believe that the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan should be based on conditions on the ground and that considerations on troop levels should be driven first by what capabilities are needed to protect our national security interests in Afghanistan, and second by the number of troops it takes to enable those capabilities.

Furthermore, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will hold its Force Generation Conference beginning on June 8th and the NATO Summit in Warsaw will begin on July 8th. It is important that our allies and partners understand any changes to our planned force levels for Afghanistan before those key events to determine and plan for the number of troops they will commit to operations in Afghanistan in 2017. As has long been the case, we believe our NATO Allies and partners will follow our lead in Afghanistan. In February, General Campbell testified to Congress that “If our number continues to go down, NATO will absolutely reduce their commitment to Afghanistan.” Additionally, we do not think we are going to learn anything in the next several months that we do not know now. Should you decide to revise the planned number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan for 2017, we urge you to announce such a decision before the relevant NATO conferences convene and inform our partners and allies of that decision so they can plan accordingly.

In summary, a timely decision on U.S. force levels is necessary so that our allies and partners can generate forces and make appropriate pledges for the Resolute Support Mission beginning in January 2017. We urge you to announce any changes to our current planned force levels ahead of the relevant NATO conferences, giving the strongest consideration to the assessment of your military commanders and to conditions on the ground.

Sincerely,

Senator John McCain

Senator Joe Manchin

Senator Kelly Ayotte

Senator Jeanne Shaheen

Senator Deb Fischer

Senator Joe Donnelly

Senator Tom Cotton

Senator Tim Kaine

Senator Lindsey Graham

Senator Angus King