State Dept Blocking Hillary’s Emails on TPP

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It was several months ago that there was a major controversy on the Transpacific Partnership Pact. Everyone was and sorta is against it, when no one especially knew why as none of the text has been released that spells out any controversy. It is quite curious that even the leader of WikiLeaks put out a reward for anyone to provide chapters of the trade pact. Many in Congress have not even seen the documents while others have to go to a special room and read under an ‘eyes only’ condition.

If Hillary has a position in electronic communications over the trade deal, it is a legitimate part of her vetting but now we have John Kerry the current Secretary of State apparently running interference for Hillary or….for the trade deal….or both. It appears this is once again a case where FOIA requests on certain topics and certain people are forwarded to the White House for pre-approval, so in this case, the Obama top leadership could have their fingerprints on this matter as well.

The other curious item is, are these emails part of a separate Hillary release that is unknown to us?

This is like trying to nail jello to a wall. Could it be that Hillary’s emails prove she is against the TPP?

State Department Blocks Release Of Hillary Clinton-Era TPP Emails Until After The Election

IBTimes: Trade is a hot issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. But correspondence from Hillary Clinton and her top State Department aides about a controversial 12-nation trade deal will not be available for public review — at least not until after the election. The Obama administration abruptly blocked the release of Clinton’s State Department correspondence about the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after first saying it expected to produce the emails this spring.

The decision came in response to International Business Times’ open records request for correspondence between Clinton’s State Department office and the United States Trade Representative. The request, which was submitted in July 2015, specifically asked for all such correspondence that made reference to the TPP.

The State Department originally said it estimated the request would be completed by April 2016. Last week the agency said it had completed the search process for the correspondence but also said it was delaying the completion of the request until late November 2016 — weeks after the presidential election. The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department documents.

Clinton’s shifting positions on the TPP have been a source of controversy during the campaign: She repeatedly promoted the deal as secretary of state but then in 2015 said, “I did not work on TPP,” even though some leaked State Department cables show that her agency was involved in diplomatic discussions about the pact. Under pressure from her Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Clinton  announced in October that she now opposes the deal — and has disputed that she ever fully backed it in the first place.

While some TPP-related emails have been released by the State Department as part of other open records requests, IBT’s request was designed to provide a comprehensive view of how involved Clinton and her top aides were in shaping the trade agreement, and whether her agency had a hand in crafting any particular provisions in the pact. Unions, environmental organizations and consumer groups say the agreement will help corporations undermine domestic labor, conservation and other public interest laws.

If IBT’s open records request is fulfilled on the last day of November, as the State Department now estimates, it will have taken 489 days for the request to be fulfilled. According to Justice Department statistics, the average wait time for a State Department request is 111 days on a simple request — the longest of any federal agency the department’s report analyzed. Requests classified as complex by the State Department can take years.

Earlier this year, the State Department’s inspector general issued a report slamming the agency’s handling of open records requests for documents from the Office of the Secretary. Searches of emails “do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness,” the inspector general concluded.

Last year, a Government Accountability Office report found that at the agencies it surveyed, there was not political interference in responding to open records requests. However, last month, a conservative group filed a lawsuit alleging that an Obama administration directive has deliberately slowed the response to open records requests that deal with politically sensitive material.

Nate Jones of the National Security Archive told IBT that whether or not the State Department’s move to delay the release of TPP-related correspondence is politically motivated, it reflects a systemic problem at the agency.

“In my opinion it is more incompetence than maliciousness, but either way, it is a gross error by FOIA processors to not get these documents out before the election,” said Jones, whose group helps journalists obtain government records. “Their inefficiency is doing great harm to the democratic process.”

 

Trump and the Baku Business Partner

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Just going to leave this here but with the question: Have the Trump voters really fully vetted him?

Tale of Trump and partner in Azerbaijan real estate project

WASHINGTON (AP) – Six months before he entered the presidential race, Donald Trump announced a new real estate project in Baku, Azerbaijan. His partner was the son of a government minister suspected by U.S. diplomats of laundering money for Iran’s military and described as “notoriously corrupt.”

Eighteen months later, and only weeks after daughter Ivanka Trump released a publicity video of the nearly finished project, references to the Baku project have disappeared from Trump’s website. Trump’s general counsel, Alan Garten, told The Associated Press that it was on hold for economic reasons.

Trump often talks of hiring the best people and surrounding himself with people he can trust. In practice, however, he and his executives have at times appeared to overlook details about the background of people he has chosen as business partners, such as whether they had dubious associations, had been convicted of crimes, faced extradition or inflated their resumes.

The Trump camp’s screening skills are important as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee turns to selecting a running mate. They would only become more crucial if he won the White House. Then, Trump would have to name more than 3,600 political appointees to senior government positions, including critical jobs overseeing national security and the economy.

In the Azerbaijani case, Garten said the Trump Organization had performed meticulous due diligence on the company’s partners, but hadn’t researched the allegations against the Baku partner’s father because he wasn’t a party to the deal.

“I’ve never heard that before,” Garten said, when first asked about allegations of Iranian money laundering by the partner’s father, which appeared in U.S. diplomatic cables widely available since they were leaked in 2010.

Garten subsequently said he was confident the minister alleged to be laundering Iranian funds, Ziya Mammadov, had no involvement in his son’s holding company, even though some of the son’s major businesses regularly partnered with the transportation ministry and were founded while the son was in college overseas. Ziya Mammadov did not respond to a telephone message the AP left with his ministry in Baku or to emails to the Azerbaijan Embassy in Washington.

Garten told the AP that Trump’s company uses a third-party investigative firm, which he did not identify, that specializes in background intelligence gathering and searches global watch lists, warrant lists and sanctions lists maintained by the United Nations, Interpol and others.

Trump has described his background research as presidential in quality. Asked in a 2013 deposition why he had not performed formal records of due diligence on a business partner – a man Trump later deemed “a dud” – Trump said he considered word-of-mouth inquiries to be adequate.

“We heard good things about him from a couple of different people,” he said of his partner in the deposition. “That’s true with the president of the United States. You get references and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s not so good.”

Trump’s lawyer, Garten, who was in the room at the time of Trump’s statement, told the AP that it was unreasonable to expect Trump to know the full range of the company’s diligence efforts.

Any American contemplating a business venture in Azerbaijan faces a risk: “endemic public corruption,” as the State Department puts it. Much of that money flows from the oil and gas industries, but the State Department also considers the country to be a waypoint for terrorist financiers, Iranian sanctions-busters and Afghan drug lords.

The environment is a risky one for any business venture seeking to avoid violating U.S. penalties imposed against Iran or anti-bribery laws under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Trump’s choice of partners in Baku was Anar Mammadov, the son of the country’s transportation minister. Anar Mammadov did not respond to AP’s emails or messages sent to his social media accounts or messages left with his company.

Garten said the Trump Organization had performed background screening on all those involved in the deal and was confident Mammadov’s father played no role in the project.

Experts on Azerbaijan were mystified that Trump or anyone else could reach that conclusion.

Anar Mammadov is widely viewed by diplomats and nongovernmental organizations as a transparent stand-in for the business interests of his father. Anar’s business has boomed with regular help from his father’s ministry, receiving exclusive government contracts, a near monopoly on Baku’s taxi business and even a free fleet of autobuses.

“These are not business people acting on their own – you’re dealing with daddy,” said Richard Kauzlarich, a U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s who went on to work under the Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration.

“Whatever the Trump people thought they were doing, that wasn’t reality,” Kauzlarich said.

Anar Mammadov, who is believed to be 35, has said in a series of interviews that he founded Garant Holdings’ predecessor – which is involved in transportation, construction, banking, telecommunications and manufacturing – in 2000, when he would have been 19. Anar received his bachelor’s degree in 2003 and a master’s in business administration in 2005 – both from a university in London.

Mammadov’s statement that he founded the business in 2000 appeared in a magazine produced by a research firm in partnership with the Azerbaijani government. In other forums, he has said he started the business in 2005, though several of its key subsidiaries predate that period.

Garten declined to discuss specific background research on Anar but said such checks were “comprehensive.” The file for the Baku project would not have included anything on Ziya Mammadov, Garten said, because the Trump Organization concluded that he would play no role in the project.

“The younger Mammadov did not build his business empire simply by delivering newspapers,” said Matt Bryza, a former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan. Bryza served on the National Security Council in George W. Bush’s administration and was appointed ambassador from 2010 to 2012 under President Barack Obama.

Ziya Mammadov was described in March 2009 in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables as “notoriously corrupt, even for Azerbaijan” and accused of working closely on government highway construction contracts awarded to a former senior Iranian military official in the Republican Guard, Kamal Darvishi. “We assume Mammadov is a silent partner in these contracts,” the State Department cable said.

Though the Baku hotel project has not been completed, it has earned Trump a significant payday. He earned between $2.5 million and $2.8 million in hotel management fees from a hotel that has never opened, according to the financial disclosures filed by his campaign. Trump licensing details generally involve the receipt of a significant minority stake in the property, too.

The Azerbaijani case is not the only one involving partners with unusual pasts.

At least twice, Trump has been involved in development deals with convicted criminals. In 2001, Trump announced he was partnering with developer Leib Waldman to build a massive condo and hotel tower in Toronto.

Two months later, Canadian newspapers revealed that Waldman had fled the United States after pleading guilty to bankruptcy fraud in the mid-1990s. His extradition sent the project into a tailspin. Another developer eventually stepped in: Alex Shnaider, a former Ukrainian metals trader who survived the often violent privatization of the post-Soviet steel industry in the 1990s.

“We heard fantastic things about (Shnaider),” Trump told Forbes in 2005. “But sometimes people say wonderful things whether they mean them or not.”

Trump and Shnaider’s development company are now in litigation. Trump alleges that Shnaider was an incompetent developer and was bilking condo owners; Shnaider wants to remove Trump’s name from the building.

In the early years of the last decade, Trump also struck an alliance with Bayrock Group LLC, an upstart property development firm that had recently moved into the Trump Tower.

As a partner, Bayrock didn’t have much of a track record. The firm was created in July 2001. Its two top officials were Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet hospitality minister whose previous development experience had been in Turkey, and Felix Satter.

Digging into the background of Satter wouldn’t have turned up much because Satter did not actually exist. But a man with a similarly spelled name, Felix Sater, had been sentenced to prison for stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass and barred for life from selling securities. A subsequent complaint by federal prosecutors named Sater as an unindicted co-conspirator, and prosecutors also disclosed that he had been convicted in a mafia-linked stock fraud scheme.

The New York Times revealed in 2007 that Satter was Sater and had historical ties to the Mafia. Trump pleaded ignorance.

“We do as much of a background check as we can on the principals,” Trump said.

Garten said Sater was merely an employee at Bayrock, not an owner. “There would have been no reason to perform any diligence on Mr. Sater,” Garten said, though Sater has described himself variously as Bayrock’s founder and a top executive.

Sater publicly separated from Bayrock in 2008, but Trump named him a senior adviser and gave him an office in Trump Tower in 2010.

“I don’t see Felix as being a member of the Mafia,” Trump said in a 2013 deposition in a case over a failed Fort Lauderdale, Florida, condo deal in which Sater had been involved. “I don’t think he was connected to the Mafia.”

“Do you have any evidence or documentation to back that up?” the lawyer taking the deposition asked.

“I have none,” Trump responded. Trump said he did not recall having asked Sater about it.

In addition to possible oversights related to his real estate partners’ background, Trump has sometimes brought people with shaky pasts into Trump-branded business ventures. In 2006, Trump helped launch Trump Mortgage, an ill-fated attempt to sell subprime loans. Trump appeared on stage alongside E.J. Ridings, billed by Trump Mortgage as formerly “a top executive at one of Wall Street’s most prestigious investment banks.”

Ridings’ actual resume was more modest. He had been an entry-level broker at Morgan Stanley, for a total of six days, as Money Magazine first reported. Ridings resigned. He did not return a message from AP that was left on his cellphone or respond to contacts on active social media accounts.

Similar problems affected hires for Trump University, a defunct real estate investing seminar company. Though the instructors were supposedly “hand-picked” by Trump, he left the selection to others, who didn’t successfully vet all of them, either.

Some of the instructors had filed for bankruptcy protection. Others were unqualified.

“He defrauded us, OK?” Trump said of one former instructor’s declaration that he knew little about real estate.

Garten said Trump’s organization performed background checks on every instructor, mentor and employee it hired for Trump University, and said some instructors were affiliated with a third-party licensee.

In the deposition, Trump was sanguine about his hiring process.

“In every business, people slip through the cracks,” he said. “No matter how well-run a business, people come in and they’re not good, and you wonder, you know, how did they get there, et cetera.”

___

Associated Press writer Desmond Butler contributed to this report.

Time to Challenge Separation of Church and State

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He is 7 years old. The schools don’t know the law. Political correctness has our country completely sideways. Beyond schools, how many other places are Constitution free zones?

Click here to see how this phrase of separation of church and state came to be.

Elementary School Calls Police on 7-Y-O Boy for Sharing Bible Verses

ChristianNews: First grader Adam Kotzian (C) does a spelling drill with classmates in his classroom at Eagleview Elementary school in Thornton, Colorado, March 31, 2010.

A California public school called a Los Angeles Deputy Sheriff in Palmdale to reprimand a 7-year-old student for handing out Bible verses, warning that such actions are “offensive.”

Santa Monica Observer reported that the student, who attends Desert Rose Elementary, had been handing out Bible verses given to him in the form of short notes from his mother, Christina Zavala, alongside his lunch.

The young boy distributed the Bible verses while standing on a public sidewalks outside the school.

He also shared other verses and short Bible stories among his friends, until a first-grade teacher saw one of those notes. The teacher reportedly publicly rebuked the boy, and then called his parents, warning them that such actions go against the separation of church and state.

The boy, however, allegedly continued to distribute Bible verses out at the school gate, and subsequently he and his parents were told by the school’s principal that what they were doing is not permitted.

Later that day, a Los Angeles deputy sheriff went to the family’s home to inform the parents that Desert Rose Elementary School had filed a report against the child for sharing Bible verses.

The Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit litigation organization which specializes in defending religious freedom, has since sent a letter to the Palmdale School District to inform the administration of the correct interpretation of the clause establishing separation of church and state, arguing that pupils have the right to exercise freedom of speech through printed materials.

“Therefore, it was improper to ban student religious discussion during lunchtime. The district cannot suppress and censor this discussion, or the one-page notes consisting of Bible stories and verses placed by C’s mother in C ‘s lunch for his own personal enjoyment and edification; which he voluntarily chose to share with his little friends during non-instructional time; which interested classmates were free to accept or refuse, at their own discretion,” the letter stated.

“The additional copies requested by C from his mother, for his friends (who had specifically requested them from him), are likewise protected, and fall into no classification of material that might be lawfully prohibited by the school district,” it added.

“The consigning of C’s speech to the ‘schoolhouse gate,’ and then the prohibition of it even there, is unconstitutional, and must fall. Finally, if being censured for religious expression by one’s First Grade teacher in front of one’s classmates is not intimidating and humiliating enough, the message of hostility to a child’s religious expression is underscored by the District calling law enforcement for a ‘follow-up visit ‘ to his house.”

Public schools in America often face questions regarding the separation of church and state when it comes to Bible verses used on school campus.

Some compromises include allowing the distribution of biblical material have allowed other groups to hand out their religious, or anti-religious material, such as atheist handbooks, and satanist pamphlets.

 

IRS Targeting List, Much Worse than Reported

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What say you when it is proven that a government agency does go after individuals and organizations for their beliefs and there is no consequence? It is tyranny but does anyone care anymore?

Congressman Jason Chaffetz, the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been on an assertive mission to impeach the IRS Commissioner with good reason, but in truth there are many more that need to be in that impeachment net beyond John Koskinen.

   

Where is the outrage? Has this report been turned over to the FBI? Will the Department of Justice seek any prosecutions? This matter is in our hands, what are you willing to do about it? Anything?

IRS finally reveals list of tea party groups targeted for extra scrutiny

WashingtonExaminer: More than three years after it admitted to targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny, the IRS has finally released a near-complete list of the organizations it snagged in a political dragnet.

The tax agency filed the list last month as part of a court case after a series of federal judges, fed up with what they said was the agency’s stonewalling, ordered it to get a move on. The case is a class-action lawsuit, so the list of names is critical to knowing the scope of those who would have a claim against the IRS.

But even as it answers some questions, the list raises others, including exactly when the targeting stopped, and how broadly the tax agency drew its net when it went after nonprofits for unusual scrutiny.

The government released names of 426 organizations. Another 40 were not released as part of the list because they had already opted out of being part of the class-action suit.

That total is much higher than the 298 groups the IRS‘ inspector general identified back in May 2013, when investigators first revealed the agency had been subjecting applications to long — potentially illegal — delays, and forcing them to answer intrusive questions about their activities. Tea party and conservative groups said they was the target of unusually heavy investigations and longer delays,

Edward D. Greim, the lawyer who’s pursuing the case on behalf of NorCal Tea Party Patriots and other members of the class, said the list also could have ballooned toward the end of the targeting as the IRS, once it knew it was being investigated, snagged more liberal groups in its operations to try to soften perceptions of political bias.

“As we have identified in our filings in this case, important questions still exist regarding changes to the IRS‘ case listings that occurred after the IRS learned that the [inspector general] and congressional investigations had begun,” he said. “Based on these changes, which to date remain unexplained, a very real possibility — if not probability — exists that the IRS modified its targeting in light of the investigations, packing its own internal lists of targeted groups to support its preferred narrative, including by adding ideologically diverse groups.”

He said if that did happen, it would have “tainted” the list the IRS has now released.

The IRS declined to comment, saying its filing spoke for itself.

A series of investigations found the IRS did ask intrusive questions and did delay applications for years, in violation of policy. But so far no investigation has found any order from the White House to conduct the targeting.

‘Tea’ and ‘patriot’ groups

 

Sixty of the groups on the list released last month have the word “tea” in their name, 33 have “patriot,” eight refer to the Constitution, and 13 have “912” in their name — which is the monicker of a movement started by conservatives. Another 26 group names refer to “liberty,” though that list does include some groups that are not discernibly conservative in orientation.

Among the groups that appear to trend liberal are three with the word “occupy” in their name.

And then there are some surprising names, including three state or local chapters of the League of Women Voters — a group with a long history of nonprofit work.

Some of the most active and prominent tea party groups snared in the targeting aren’t on the class-action list. At least some of them opted not to be part of the joint legal action to preserve their own lawsuits.

 

Congressional Republicans say IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who was brought in by President Obama to clean up the agency after the targeting scandal, has failed — and even misled Congress during the investigation. Some Republicans are even pursuing impeachment against Mr. Koskinen, accusing him of defying a subpoena for former senior IRS executive Lois G. Lerner’s emails by allowing computer backup tapes to be destroyed.

Even outside of impeachment, the House GOP has proposed a new round of budget cuts for the IRS, aimed at trying to deliver a message that Mr. Koskinen’s tenure has been unacceptable.

And the tax agency is still defending itself in a series of court cases. In addition to the NorCal class action case, the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., is currently considering an appeal by tea party groups who argue the targeting is still going on.

“One thing remains clear: Continued litigation is the only way to force the IRS‘ hand in order to expose its targeting scheme that was coordinated with the help of the DOJ and other federal agencies so that we can obtain justice for those patriotic Americans who were unconstitutionally targeted by their own government,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, which is representing some of the plaintiffs in the appeals case.

In yet another case, the conservative group Cause of Action has been pursuing the IRS to turn over documents the group believed would show White House officials requesting secret taxpayer information on conservatives.

But in a filing Friday, the IRS said it has conducted a final search and can’t find any evidence that the White House either asked for or received protected information.

Phoenix: The DHS Madness/Corruption Continues

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In January of this year, this site published an article about Serco and the DHS government contractor mentioned in this piece below has an interesting relationship with Serco. The scandal centered in the United Kingdom. But read on, it is business as usual for the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS Quietly Moving, Releasing Vanloads of Illegal Aliens Away from Border

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents, Border Patrol sources tell Judicial Watch. The government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road.
OTM6-2016The OTMs are from Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala and Border Patrol officials say this week’s batch was in custody for a couple of days and ordered to call family members in the U.S. so they could purchase a bus ticket for their upcoming trip from Phoenix. Authorities didn’t bother checking the identity of the U.S. relatives or if they’re in the country legally, according to a Border Patrol official directly involved in the matter. American taxpayers pick up the fare for those who claim to have a “credible fear,” Border Patrol sources told JW. None of the OTMs were issued official court appearance documents, but were told to “promise” they’d show up for a hearing when notified, said federal agents with firsthand knowledge of the operation.

 

A security company contracted by the U.S. government is driving the OTMs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector where they were in custody to Phoenix, sources said. The firm is called G4S and claims to be the world’s leading security solutions group with operations in more than 100 countries and 610,000 employees. G4S has more than 50,000 employees in the U.S. and its domestic headquarters is in Jupiter, Florida.

Judicial Watch is filing a number of public records requests to get more information involving the arrangement between G4S and the government, specifically the transport of illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to other parts of the country. The photo accompanying this story shows the uniformed G4S guard that transported the OTMs this week from Tucson to Phoenix.

Related reading: G4S Corruption Globally

Outraged Border Patrol agents and supervisors on the front lines say illegal immigrants are being released in droves because there’s no room to keep them in detention. “They’re telling us to put them on a bus and let them go,” said one law enforcement official in Arizona. “Just move those bodies across the country.” Officially, DHS denies this is occurring and in fact earlier this year U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske blasted Border Patrol union officials for denouncing this dangerous catch-and-release policy. Kerlikowske’s scolding came in response to the congressional testimony of Bandon Judd, chief of the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union that represents line agents. Judd told lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee that illegal immigrants without serious criminal convictions can be released immediately and disappear into the shadows. Kerlikowske shot back, telling a separate congressional committee: “I would not stand by if the Border Patrol was — releasing people without going through all of the formalities.”OTM6-2016-2

Yet, that’s exactly what’s occurring. This report, part of an ongoing Judicial Watch investigation into the security risks along the southern border, features only a snippet of a much broader crisis in which illegal aliens are being released and vanishing into unsuspecting American communities. The Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest addressed this issue just a few weeks ago in a hearing called Declining Deportations and Increasing Criminal Alien Releases – The Lawless Immigration Policies of the Obama Administration. Judd, the Border Patrol Union chief, delivered alarming figures at the hearing. He estimated that about 80% of apprehended illegal immigrants are released into the United States. This includes unaccompanied minors who are escorted to their final destination, family units and those who claim to have a credible fear of persecution in their native country. Single males that aren’t actually seen crossing into the U.S. by Border Patrol agents are released if they claim to have been in the country since 2014, Judd added.

***** G4S:

G4S supports the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CPB), with its operations at the U.S. Mexico border and with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to transport illegal immigrants in selected urban areas. Annually, our G4S fortified buses log millions of miles and transport hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, while freeing up front line CPB and ICE personnel for other essential services.

Related reading: G4S Website and the scandal of the CEO.