Author Archives: Denise Simon

The Denise Simon Experience – Radio Show – 02/19/15

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Hosted by DENISE SIMON, the Senior Research / Intelligence Analyst for Foreign and Domestic Policy for Stand Up America US as well as the aide de camp for MG Paul E. Vallely, US ARMY (ret.)

HOUR 1:  THE INTERVIEW WITH CRISIS NEGOTIATOR & COUNTER TERRORISM EXPERT DR. STEVE MOYSEY

DR. STEVE MOYSEY is an internationally recognized expert in the field of conflict and crisis negotiation, counter intelligence and counter terrorism with a specialization in the area of armed barricade standoff situations.

HOUR 2:  THE UNFILTERED INTERVIEW WITH ADMIRAL JAMES “ACE” LYONS

ADMIRAL JAMES “ACE” LYONS, JR. is a retired Admiral in the United States Navy who served as Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet from 1985-87.

Admiral Lyons served in the U.S. Navy for thirty-six years, including as Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Senior U.S. Military Representative to the United Nations and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations.

He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and has received post graduate degrees from the U.S. Naval War College and the U.S. National Defense University.

BROADCAST LIVE WORLDWIDE:  THURSDAYS – 9:00PM (eastern) / 6:00pm (pacific) on WDFP – Restoring America Radio , Red State Talk Radio, American Agenda, and on Nightside Radio Studios

For Hillary, it all Happens at Whitehaven

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Just a few days ago, Hillary invited her nemesis Elizabeth Warren to Whitehaven. Campaign manager David Plouffe has been there too. The people like Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, even Diane Sawyer have been to Whitehaven. The dining room is the conference room and Bill is not even a common visitor to ‘her’ house.

Perhaps we should wonder if A.T. Smith has been to Whitehaven. Who is he? Well Smith was the former director of the Secret Service who was just forced out and has taken yet another position at DHS, where it appears Hillary had major influence on that transfer. Why would that be? Well, back during Hillary’s days as First Lady, A.T. was head of her security detail. Ah, so he DOES know where the bodies are buried.

Continuing to wield her power, Hillary has proven to be successful in tapping foreign powerbrokers for money. That Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Foundation is not at all what is written on paper when it comes to philanthropy. Take a deeper dive here. Hat tip to Kimberly Strassel,

The Clinton Foundation Super PAC

It’s past time to drop the fiction that the Clinton Foundation is a charity.

Republican presidential aspirants are already launching political-action committees, gearing up for the expensive elections to come. They’ll be hard-pressed to compete with the campaign vehicle Hillary Clinton has been erecting these past 14 years. You know, the Clinton Foundation.

With the news this week that Mrs. Clinton—the would-be occupant of the White House—is landing tens of millions from foreign governments for her shop, it’s long past time to drop the fiction that the Clinton Foundation has ever been a charity. It’s a political shop. Bill and Hillary have simply done with the foundation what they did with cattle futures and Whitewater and the Lincoln Bedroom and Johnny Chung—they’ve exploited the system.

Most family charities exist to allow self-made Americans to disperse their good fortune to philanthropic causes. The Clinton Foundation exists to allow the nation’s most powerful couple to use their not-so-subtle persuasion to exact global tribute for a fund that promotes the Clintons.

Oh sure, the foundation doles out grants for this and that cause. But they don’t rank next to the annual Bill Clinton show—the Clinton Global Initiative event—to which he summons heads of state and basks for a media week as post-presidential statesman. This is an organization that in 2013 spent $8.5 million in travel expenses alone, ferrying the Clintons to headliner events. Those keep Mrs. Clinton in the news, which helps when you want to be president.

It’s a body that exists to keep the Clinton political team intact in between elections, working for the Clintons’ political benefit. Only last week it came out that Dennis Cheng, who raised money for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 bid, and then transitioned to the Clinton Foundation’s chief development officer, is now transitioning back to head up Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 fundraising operation. Mr. Cheng has scored $248 million for the foundation, and his Rolodex comes with him. The Washington Post reported this week that already half the major donors backing Ready for Hillary, a group supporting her 2016 bid, are also foundation givers.

How much of these employees’ salaries, how much of Mrs. Clinton’s travel, was funded by the Saudis? Or the United Arab Emirates, or Oman, or any of the other foreign nations that The Wall Street Journal Tuesday reported have given millions to the foundation this past year? How many voters has Mrs. Clinton wooed, how many potential donors has she primed, how many influential people has she recruited for her campaign via the Clinton Foundation?

The foundation claims none, but that’s the other Clinton stroke of brilliance in using a charity as a campaign vehicle—we can’t know. Poor Jeb Bush has to abide by all those pesky campaign-finance laws that require him to disclose exact donor names, and dates and amounts. And that also bar contributions from foreign entities.

Not a problem for Team Clinton. The foundation does divulge contributors—after a fashion—but doesn’t give exact amounts or dates. Did Mrs. Clinton ever take any oddly timed actions as secretary of state? Who knows? Not the Federal Election Commission.

The foundation likes to note that it adopted self-imposed limits on foreign contributions during the period when Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department. Which is nice. Then again, that ban wasn’t absolute, and it isn’t clear it encompassed nonprofits funded by foreign governments, or covered wealthy foreigners, or foreign corporations. Nothing is clear. This is the Clintons. That’s how they like it.

This is the baseline scandal of the Clinton Foundation—it’s a political group that gets to operate outside the rules imposed on every other political player. Then comes the ethical morass. Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short summed it up perfectly in a Wednesday WSJ story: “When that 3 a.m. phone call comes, do voters really want to have a president on the line who took truckloads of cash from other countries?”

The nation’s ethics guardians have gently declared the Clintons might clear this up with more disclosure, or by again limiting the foundation’s acceptance of foreign money. What about the amounts already banked? The damage is done. If this were Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a likely GOP candidate, he’d be declared disqualified for office. The benefit of being a Clinton is that the nation expects this, and the bar for disqualification now sits in the exosphere.

Democrats might nonetheless consider how big a liability this is for their potential nominee. It’s hard to label your GOP opponent anti-woman when the Clinton Foundation is funded by countries that bar women from voting and driving like Saudi Arabia. It’s hard to call your GOP opponent a heartless capitalist—out of tune with middle-class anxieties—when you owe your foundation’s soul to Canadian mining magnates and Ethiopian construction billionaires. And it’s hard to claim you will fix a burning world when you owe foundation gratitude to countries holding the fossil-fuel blowtorches.

Mrs. Clinton won’t let that stop her. So Democrats have to decide if they want to once again put their ethics in the blind Clinton trust.

Community Organizing, Back to the Future

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The White House just wrapped up a 3 day summit on violent extremism. The platform of the summit was ending the cycle of hate, in other words, it was a collaboration of anger management classes. Barack Obama told his audience that scaling back on the tensions was not meant for Islamists, but rather to every common citizen worldwide to be gentle going forward with Muslims.

The invitees were hand chosen and those not in attendance were also notable. Were leaders in the fields of intelligence, counter-terrorism, Christians or Jews invited? Well now so much. Imagine the Director of the FBI, James Comey who has open cases in 49 American states not attending.

When it comes to those that did attend standing for ‘human rights’, those representatives come from countries whose own human rights come into question.  “There is a very profound conceptual disagreement about whether the best way to counter violent extremism is through human rights and civil society or through an iron fist,” said Marc Lynch, director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. The Obama administration wants “to project the human rights side, but you look at the people they’re working with and fighting alongside, and there’s a lot more to it than that.”

Elisa Massimino, president of the advocacy group Human Rights First, attended Thursday’s meeting and was struck by the juxtaposition of rhetoric and reality: “We’re sitting in that room with representatives of governments that are part of the problem,” she said. “If the president believes what he’s saying, then the actions that these governments are taking are undermining our supposedly shared agenda.”

From the outside, however, the summit appears hastily organized and fraught with gaps. As of Friday, neither the White House nor the State Department had announced the names of any attendees, an agenda or what specifically the summit is designed to achieve. The summit is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, Feb. 18, and Thursday, Feb. 19.

“It’s bizarre,” says Naureen Shah, a former legislative counsel with the ACLU who recently became the security and human rights director at Amnesty International. “On the one hand they’ve been touting this summit and trying to showcase the U.S. and global efforts to combat violent extremism. But on the other hand, they’re not providing any information about what’s going to happen.”

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declined to comment last week on whether Russia would be participating in the summit, saying she did not currently have the list of invitees. She anticipated that, in the days before the summit, “we’ll do a briefing on the plans for the summit, what we hope to accomplish, et cetera.”

The takeaway was Barack Obama’s edit to reach out to governance in Muslim countries and require them to be more sensitive to the plight of those in poverty that would build programs generating educational access and later jobs. This is where the ‘community organizing’ comes into play.

Michelle Malkin says it best, laying it out for required reading.

Instead of killing jihadists, keeping them off our soil, locking up their poisonous spiritual agitators, and shutting off their terror-funding pipelines, President Obama called on America and the world to “invest” in unnamed immigrant “communities” vulnerable to unnamed extremism. Some of the most generous welfare states on the planet have suffered horrific jihad attacks this year. Liberal Denmark’s soft-on-jihad rehab program has been a disaster. But that hasn’t stopped State Department spokes-babbler Marie Harf from mewling incessantly about “combating poverty” to combat ISIS. Vice President Joe Biden opened the convention of jihad-coddlers on Tuesday by emphasizing the need for “respect” (cha-ching) and “a sense of community.” White House senior aides spoke generically about terrorists of “all shapes and sizes,” as they studiously avoided the precise nature and identity of the perpetrators of evil that precipitated the meeting. Screw that. Muslim jihadists chopped off the heads of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya last weekend. Muslim jihadists launched deadly shooting sprees in Copenhagen at a cartoonists’ free-speech event and a synagogue. Muslim jihadists murdered Jews at a kosher deli in Paris and slaughtered the entire staff of Charlie Hebdo over their drawings. Muslim jihadists caged and burned alive Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh. Muslim jihadists threw gays off buildings in Iraq. Muslim jihadists beheaded journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, humanitarian workers Alan Henning and Peter Kassig, and Japanese nationals Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto Jogo. Muslim jihadists have kidnapped and slaughtered thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Nigeria. The solution, the Obama administration wants the 60 nations that sent representatives to D.C. to learn, is a super-sized community-organizing campaign. It’s Jobs for Jihad Delinquents! No, this is not a Saturday Night Live anniversary skit. Politically correct public officials from L.A., Boston, and Minnesota are holding seminars on their “outreach” efforts to disaffected yoots as shining counterterrorism models. In Minneapolis, where al-Shabaab recruiters have metastasized, the U.S. attorney has bought into Muslim grievance-mongers’ complaints that “immigrant youngsters remain marginalized, without access to adequate education, employment, and other opportunities.” Social-justice warriors are united: Less “marginalization.” More midnight basketball. What a bloody crock. States like Minnesota and Maine have bent over backward to resettle thousands upon thousands of Somali refugees — putting their demands for halal-food freebies, taxpayer-funded foot baths, and “cultural sensitivity” over the safety and well-being of native-born citizens and taxpayers struggling to make ends meet. While grandmothers and disabled soldiers and breastfeeding moms must submit to invasive TSA screening, Muslim leaders in Minneapolis have the feds groveling in apology over increased scrutiny of some Somalis. I mean, it’s not like dozens of young male members of their “community” are flying off to the Horn of Africa and the Middle East to take up arms for jihad after benefiting from America’s blind generosity. Oh, wait. They are. The persistent left-wing myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist is absolute madness. How many times do we have to remind the clueless kumbaya crowd that al-Qaida mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri had a medical degree, as did Hamas bigwig Abdel al-Rantisi and the seven upper-crust doctors who helped plan the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings? Or that al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis. Terror architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed earned a mechanical-engineering degree at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta majored in urban planning at a German technical university. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh attended the London School of Economics before abducting and murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl. And Osama bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb (Colorado State Teachers College) had plenty of exposure to wealth and Western studies. The “root cause” of their evildoing is not a lack of employment, education, community centers, iftar dinners at the White House, or publicly funded “opportunities.” When will these fools in high office learn that you can’t bribe these adherents of Stone Age ideology to behave? They don’t want jobs. They want blood. Revenge. Islamist dominance. Ruthless extermination of Jews, gays, Coptic Christians, Christian aid workers, cartoonists, journalists, apostates, and infidels of all shapes and sizes. The M****m j*******s are not victims of Islamophobic intolerance and Western callousness. We are the victims of our own leaders’ bleeding-heart overindulgence and reckless refusal to deal with reality.

Winning the hearts and minds of jihad….riiiiight….. maybe including Obamacare, Obama phones, the SNAP cards and Section 8 housing will work too.

Ask the Clinton’s About These Foreigners Please

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How about the HSBC bank that is embroiled in a major scandal? How long have the Clinton’s known the Brit Richard Caring? Have Hillary and Bill describe their relationship with Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnet. Then of course there is Huma Abedin, the Dubai Foundation, Friends of Saudi Arabia, Hani Masri, Oman, Saban Family Foundation and the Soros Foundation, just handful of the Clinton’s foreign friendly network.

So, where does all this lead? Foreign friends, NGO’s, foundations and powerbrokers buy presidential candidates and Hillary is no exception. She using the same page out of the money playbook that Barack Obama used.

Foreign Government Gifts to Clinton Foundation on the Rise

Donations raise ethical questions as Hillary Clinton ramps up expected 2016 bid

The Clinton Foundation has dropped its self-imposed ban on collecting funds from foreign governments and is winning contributions at an accelerating rate, raising ethical questions as Hillary Clinton ramps up her expected bid for the presidency.

Recent donors include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.

In 2009, the Clinton Foundation stopped raising money from foreign governments after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state. Former President Bill Clinton, who ran the foundation while his wife was at the State Department, agreed to the gift ban at the behest of the Obama administration, which worried about a secretary of state’s husband raising millions while she represented U.S. interests abroad.

The ban wasn’t absolute; some foreign government donations were permitted for ongoing programs approved by State Department ethics officials.

The donations come as Mrs. Clinton prepares for an expected run for the Democratic nomination for president, and they raise many of the same ethical quandaries. Since leaving the State Department in early 2013, Mrs. Clinton officially joined the foundation, which changed its name to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, and has become a prodigious fundraiser as the foundation launched a $250 million endowment campaign, officials said.

A representative for Hillary Clinton referred all questions to the Clinton Foundation.

A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation said the charity has a need to raise money for its many projects, which aim to do such things as improve education, health care and the environment around the world. He also said that donors go through a vigorous vetting process.

One of the 2014 donations comes from a Canadian agency promoting the proposed Keystone pipeline, which is favored by Republicans and under review by the Obama administration. The Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development agency of Canada, a first-time donor, gave between $250,000 and $500,000. The donations, which are disclosed voluntarily by the foundation, are given only in ranges.

One of the agency’s priorities for 2014-2015 was to promote Keystone XL “as a stable and secure source of energy and energy technology,” according to the agency’s website. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department was involved in approving the U.S. government’s initial environmental-impact statement. Since leaving State, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly declined to comment on Keystone.

The Canadian donation originated from an agency office separate from the one that advocates for Keystone XL, a Foundation spokesman said.

While the Canadian donation didn’t appear in a Clinton Foundation online database of donors until recently, the donation of about $480,000 was announced in June in Cartagena, Colombia, where the program provides job training for youths.

Kirk Hanson, director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California, said the Clintons should immediately reimpose the ban, for the same reasons it was in place while Mrs. Clinton led U.S. foreign policy.

“Now that she is gearing up to run for president, the same potential exists for foreign governments to curry favor with her as a potential president of the United States,” he said.

If she becomes president and deals with these nations, “she can’t recuse herself,” added James Thurber, director of American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. “Whether it influences her decision making is questionable, but it is a legitimate thing to focus on by her political opposition.”

The donations weren’t announced by the foundation and were discovered by The Wall Street Journal during a search of donations of more than $50,000 posted on the foundation’s online database. Exactly when the website was updated isn’t clear. The foundation typically updates its website with the previous year’s donations near the beginning of the year. All 2014 donations were noted with asterisks.

At least four foreign countries gave to the foundation in 2013—Norway, Italy, Australia and the Netherlands—a fact that has garnered little attention. The number of governments contributing in 2014 appears to have doubled from the previous year. Since its founding, the foundation has raised at least $48 million from overseas governments, according to a Journal tally.

United Arab Emirates, a first-time donor, gave between $1 million and $5 million in 2014, and the German government—which also hadn’t previously given—contributed between $100,000 and $250,000.

A previous donor, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has given between $10 million and $25 million since the foundation was created in 1999. Part of that came in 2014, although the database doesn’t specify how much.

The Australian government has given between $5 million and $10 million, at least part of which came in 2014. It also gave in 2013, when its donations fell in the same range.

Qatar’s government committee preparing for the 2022 soccer World Cup gave between $250,000 and $500,000 in 2014. Qatar’s government had previously donated between $1 million and $5 million.

Oman, which had made a donation previously, gave an undisclosed amount in 2014. Over time, Oman has given the foundation between $1 million and $5 million. Prior to last year, its donations fell in the same range.

The Clinton Foundation has set a goal of creating a $250 million endowment, an official said. One purpose was secure the future of the foundation’s programs without having to rely so much on the former president’s personal fundraising efforts, the official said.

The Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Oman donations went to the endowment drive.

White House Counterfeiting Immigration Documents

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Why Obama’s Immigration Order Was Blocked

The injunction isn’t about prosecutorial discretion. It is about granting illegal aliens benefits not allowed by law.

The Obama administration argued that DAPA is a routine application of “prosecutorial discretion”—the authority of executive officials to set priorities for enforcement of the law and to refrain from enforcement in cases where the public interest is least urgent. The district court recognized, however, that prosecutorial discretion is limited to nonenforcement and doesn’t entitle the executive branch to grant affirmative benefits such as work permits and welfare without statutory authority and notice-and-comment rule-making.

As the court explained, “DHS has not instructed its officers to merely refrain from arresting, ordering the removal of, or prosecuting unlawfully-present aliens.” Instead the department “has enacted a wide-ranging program that awards legal presence, to individuals Congress has deemed deportable or removable, as well as the ability to obtain Social Security numbers, work authorization permits, and the ability to travel.”

Despite misleading claims by administration supporters that the order interferes with executive discretion to set enforcement priorities, the district court narrowly crafted its order not to touch on prosecutorial discretion. The administration remains free to decide which illegal aliens to deport and which to permit to remain in this country. The court order is explicitly confined to the grant of work authorization and affirmative benefits, which has never been part of prosecutorial discretion.

Ted Cruz: White House ‘Counterfeiting Immigration Documents’

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) — Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, believes that the Obama administration is “counterfeiting immigration documents” under the president’s immigration plan.

Speaking to Fox News following a federal judge’s decision to temporarily halt President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration, the potential Republican presidential contender said the commander in chief is ignoring federal law.

“One of the things it points out is the president has claimed, rather absurdly, that the basis of his authority is ‘prosecutorial discretion.’ That he’s simply choosing not to prosecute 4.5 million people here illegally,” Cruz told Fox News. “But what the district court concluded, quite rightly, is they’re doing far more than that. The administration is printing work authorizations. It is affirmatively acting in contravention of federal law. Basically, what its doing is counterfeiting immigration documents, because the work authorizations its printing are directly contrary to the text of federal law. It is dangerous when the president ignores federal law.”

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen’s decision late Monday puts on hold Obama’s orders that could spare from deportation as many as 5 million people who are in the U.S. illegally.

In a memorandum accompanying his order, Hanen said the lawsuit should go forward and that the states would “suffer irreparable harm in this case” without a preliminary injunction.

“The genie would be impossible to put back into the bottle,” he wrote, adding that he agreed that legalizing the presence of millions of people is a “virtually irreversible” action.

Talking to reporters in the Oval Office, Obama said he disagreed with the ruling by Hanen that the administration had exceeded its authority. But he said that, for now, he must abide by it.

“We’re not going to disregard this federal court ruling,” Obama said, but he added that administration officials would continue to prepare to roll out the program. “I think the law is on our side and history is on our side,” he said.

Cruz called it a “major victory for the rule of law.”

“It’s interesting, (Obama) said the law is on his side. There’s at least one person who calls himself a legal scholar who disagrees, and his name is Barack Obama,” Cruz said. “Twenty-two times President Obama has admitted he doesn’t have the authority to issue unilateral amnesty. Twenty-two times he says the constitution doesn’t allow it. He said, ‘This is not a monarchy.’ That’s his quote. And then after the last election, he said never mind and issued it anyway.”

Obama’s directives would make more than 4 million immigrants in the United States illegally eligible for three-year deportation stays and work permits. Mostly those are people who have been in the country for more than five years and have children who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Applications for the first phase were to begin Wednesday, when as many as 300,000 immigrants brought illegally to the country as children could begin applying for an expansion of Obama’s 2012 program aimed at the younger immigrants known as Dreamers.

Hanen’s ruling late Monday night, in a case brought by 26 states led by Texas, said that Obama and his Homeland Security Department lacked the authority to take the actions they did.

“No statute gives the DHS the discretion it is trying to exercise here,” wrote Hanen, and he issued a stay blocking the actions from taking effect. His order was not a big surprise from a Republican-appointed judge who has showed a hard line on border issues.

The Obama administration could seek a stay of his order in addition to appealing to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that the Justice Department was deciding its next move.

He said, “I’ve always expected that this is a matter that will ultimately be decided by a higher court — if not the Supreme Court then a federal court of appeals.”