Bergdahl Pled Guilty, Obama Swapped 5 Taliban for Him

Posted on October 16, 2017October 16, 2017 by Denise Simon

Let THAT sink in… Plus…we have no clue where those 5 Taliban commanders are in the world, or do we?

As many as 90 Obama administration officials knew about plans to swap five captured Taliban leaders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The National Defense Authorization Act requires Obama to inform Congress about a prisoner swap 30 days in advance.

Humm…

Only a handful of people knew about Saturday’s extraction, Hagel told reporters traveling with him.

“We couldn’t afford any leaks anywhere, for obvious reasons,” he said.

“We found an opportunity. We took that opportunity,” Hagel said later on Meet the Press. “I’ll stand by that decision.”

The Taliban handed Bergdahl over to special operations forces in eastern Afghanistan, and later in the day the detainees were flown from the Guantanamo detention center to Qatar.

Hagel said the special operations forces conducting the mission took every precaution, using intelligence gathering, surveillance, well-positioned security assets and a lot of helicopters to ensure that things did not go wrong.

***

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) — Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl told a military judge on Monday that he’s pleading guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.

“I understand that leaving was against the law,” Bergdahl said.

“At the time, I had no intention of causing search and recovery operations,” Bergdahl added, saying that now he does understand that his decision to walk off his remote post in Afghanistan in 2009 prompted efforts to find him.

Bergdahl, 31, is charged with endangering his comrades by walking away from his post. Despite his plea, the prosecution and defense have not agreed to a stipulation of facts in the case, according to one of his lawyers, Maj. Oren Gleich, which is an indication that they did not reach a deal to limit his punishment.

The misbehavior charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison, while the desertion charge is punishable by up to five years. He appears to be hoping for leniency from the judge, Army Col. Jeffery R. Nance.

The guilty pleas bring the highly politicized saga closer to an end eight years after his disappearance in Afghanistan set off search missions by scores of his fellow service members. President Barack Obama was criticized by Republicans for the 2014 Taliban prisoner swap that brought Bergdahl home, while President Donald Trump harshly criticized Bergdahl on the campaign trail.

The serious wounds to service members who searched for Bergdahl are still expected to play a role in his sentencing. The guilty pleas allow him to avoid a trial, but he still faces a sentencing hearing that’s expected to start on Oct. 23. Bergdahl’s five years of captivity by the Taliban and its allies also will likely factor into what punishment he receives.

Bergdahl, who’s from Hailey, Idaho, previously chose to have his case heard by a judge alone, rather than a jury.

Legal scholars have said that several pretrial rulings against the defense have given prosecutors leverage to pursue stiff punishment against Bergdahl. Perhaps most significant was the judge’s decision in June to allow evidence of serious wounds to service members who searched for Bergdahl at the sentencing phase. The judge ruled that a Navy SEAL and an Army National Guard sergeant wouldn’t have wound up in separate firefights that left them wounded if they hadn’t been searching for Bergdahl.

The defense also was rebuffed in an effort to prove President Donald Trump had unfairly swayed the case with scathing criticism of Bergdahl, including suggestions of harsh punishment. The judge wrote in a February ruling that Trump’s campaign-trail comments were “disturbing and disappointing” but did not constitute unlawful command influence by the soon-to-be commander in chief.

Defense attorneys have acknowledged that Bergdahl walked off his base without authorization. Bergdahl himself told a general during a preliminary investigation that he left intending to cause alarm and draw attention to what he saw as problems with his unit. He was soon captured.

But the defense team has argued that Bergdahl can’t be held responsible for a long chain of events that included many decisions by others on how to conduct the searches.

The military probe of Bergdahl began soon after he was freed from captivity on May 31, 2014, in exchange for five Taliban prisoners. Facing Republican criticism, Obama noted that the U.S. doesn’t leave its service members behind.

Bergdahl has been assigned to desk duty at a Texas Army base while his case unfolds.

***

6 Died looking for Bergdahl:

Staff Sergeant Clayton Bowen, 29, of San Antonio, Texas, and Private 1^st Class Morris Walker, 23, of Chapel Hill, N.C., were killed by a roadside bomb in Paktika province on Aug. 18, 2009, while trying to find Bergdahl. Like Bergdahl, they were part of the 4^th BCT from Fort Richardson, Alaska.

Bowen’s mother last heard from her son the night before he died. “Clay called me around midnight to tell me I

wouldn’t hear from him for a few days,” she said. She never heard from him again, although she can still hear his voice in the two CDs he recorded with the 82nd Airborne All-American Chorus. “He was the only bass in the group,” she said, “so you could always hear him.”

“What I think of first when I think of Morris is his smile because he was always smiling,” his junior-high teacher,

Wanda Bordone, told the Associated Press after he died. “He had a great sense of humor, lots of friends.”

Staff Sergeant Kurt Curtiss, 27, of Murray, Utah, died Aug. 26 in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when he was shot while his unit was supporting Afghan security forces during an enemy attack. Like Bergdahl, Bowen and Walker, he was part of the 4^th BCT.

“I’ll never forget you Kurt,” Adrian Ramirez a fellow soldier from Fort Richardson, posted on a memorial site. “You were my first team leader from the beginning and my squad leader to the end. I will miss you and all the memories I have shared with you.”

2nd Lieutenant Darryn Andrews, 34, of Dallas, Texas, died Sept. 4 in Paktika Province when enemy forces attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device and a rocket-propelled grenade. Like Bergdahl, Bowen, Walker and Curtiss, Andrews was part of the 4^th BCT.

“We grew up with an enormous amount of pride for our nation,” Andrews’ mother, Sondra, told the Amarillo Globe-News. That was understandable: his father. grandfather and uncle had served in uniform. “We passed it on to our children, never thinking we would pay the ultimate sacrifice.”

Staff Sergeant Michael Murphrey, 25, of Snyder, Texas, died Sept. 6 in Paktika province after being wounded by an IED. Like Bergdahl, Bowen, Walker, Curtiss and Andrews, Murphrey was part of the 4^th BCT.

“On his 17th birthday his family took him skydiving and after that,” his obituary read, “he decided he wanted to be an Army paratrooper.”

On Sept. 4, 2009, Private 1^st Class Matthew Martinek, 20, of DeKalb, Ill., was seriously wounded in Paktika province when Taliban forces attacked his vehicle with an improvided explosive device, a rocket-propelled grenade and small-arms fire.

The U.S. military rushed him to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany—the same medical facility where Bergdahl is now being treated.

Bergdahl is expected to fly home to the U.S. soon for additional care and counseling.

Martinek never got that chance. He died a week after the attack—on Sept. 11.

Martinek “tried not to talk too much about what he was doing, but he said he liked helping people,” his brother, Travis Wright, told the AP.

Like Bergdahl, Bowen, Walker, Curtiss, Andrews and Murphrey, Martinek was part of the 4^th BCT.

The diversion of these men and their units to the hunt for Bergdahl thinned the ranks of U.S. troops elsewhere in the region, contributing to several more American KIAs, U.S. soldiers who were there at the time believe.

Military justice can be swift and merciless, although that appears unlikely in this case. But the past cannot be erased, and it’s that legacy that gives the troops involved a markedly different view of Bergdahl and his rescue than that of most Americans sitting at home, paying scant attention to the nation’s only soldier missing in action in Afghanistan until Saturday.

The reason, for anyone who has been in combat, is pretty simple. Soldiers never forget. Civilians rarely remember.

Trump Decertifying and Re-tooling Iran Nuclear Deal

Posted on October 13, 2017October 13, 2017 by Denise Simon

The Iran Deal (JCPOA) has taken an inordinate amount of attention away from all of the other ways Iran destabilizes and attempts to dominate the region. The Trump team will now take a holistic approach to Iran that uses all aspects of US power and engages our allies in the effort as well. The goal is to roll back Iranian use of their proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere to extend Iranian influence toward eventual hegemony. It will also address Iranian support of terrorism and violations of other international agreements such as US Security Council Resolutions.

This will take many forms, one of which is the President declining to certify that the JCPOA as it currently exists is in the national interest. It most certainly is not and it’s time to either fix it or forget it. The entire reason to do a deal was to ensure Iran never got nuclear weapons, the JCPOA actually paved Iran a path to them with “sunset clauses” that remove all prohibitions after no more than 15 years.

Iran’s ballistic missile program was specifically excluded from the JCPOA in a stunning case of national security malfeasance. There is no use for these other than to deliver a nuclear warhead and allowing Iran to continue their development cannot be tolerated. This will be another area where the US will focus all elements of our influence on ensuring Iran will be unable to deliver any payload to our shores.

It remains to be seen if a better deal can be made, but we need to make the effort. That will require some leverage and another piece of the plan will be designating all of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization. They are and recognizing this will make it much tougher for them to use the many businesses and front groups they have developed to conduct and support terror operations worldwide.

There will also be actions to rein in the Iranian-led militias operating across Iraq and Syria. While they may be mostly made up of Iraqi citizens, too many have loyalty to the Mullahs in Tehran. These Shia militias now control large swaths of territory in the Sunni areas of Iraq that were just liberated from ISIS. They conducted amounts of massive sectarian slaughter during the counter-ISIS operations and it is still going on. They must be moved out.

Hezbollah is another Iranian proxy which has sent tens of thousands of fighters into Syria. They are flush with some of the hundreds of millions of dollars Iran has given them out of the cash bonanza from the Iran Deal. They have been receiving US funds which were given to the Lebanese Armed Forces and then funneled to Hezbollah. This will come to a stop under the new plan. More here.

photo

Related reading: JCPOA as published by the John Kerry State Department

(Reuters) – President Donald Trump is likely to take a major step against the international nuclear deal with Iran on Friday, laying out a more aggressive approach to Iranian activities in the Middle East that risks upsetting U.S. relations with European allies.

“It is time for the entire world to join us in demanding that Iran’s government end its pursuit of death and destruction,” Trump said in a White House statement that flagged key elements of the strategy.

He is to present his plan in a 12:45 p.m. EDT (1645 GMT)speech at the White House, the product of weeks of internal discussions between him and his national security team.

U.S. officials said Trump was expected to announce that he will not certify the 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and six world powers, one he has called the “worst deal ever” as it was not, in his view, in the U.S. national interest.

Trump found himself under immense pressure as he considered de-certifying the deal, a move that would ignore warnings from inside and outside his administration that to do so would risk undermining U.S. credibility abroad.

He had formally reaffirmed it twice before but aides said he was reluctant to do so a third time.

De-certification would not pull the United States out of the deal but would give the Congress 60 days to decide whether to reimpose sanctions on Tehran that were suspended under the pact, negotiated during the administration of President Barack Obama.

U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul told Reuters he thinks Trump “is likely to not completely pull out of the deal, but decertify compliance.”

IRANIAN WARNING

If Washington quits the deal, that will be the end of it and global chaos could ensue, Iran’s influential parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, was quoted by the Russian news agency TASS as saying during a visit to St Petersburg on Friday.

U.N. nuclear inspectors say Iran is in compliance with the accord, which limited the scope of Iran’s nuclear program to help ensure it could not be put to developing bombs in exchange for a lifting of international sanctions on Tehran.

Trump says Tehran is in violation of the spirit of the agreement and has done nothing to rein in its ballistic missile program or its financial and military support for the Lebanese Shi‘ite movement Hezbollah and other militant groups.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said on Thursday the U.S. approach toward Iran is to work with allies in the Middle East to contain Tehran’s activities.

“We have footprints on the ground, naval and Air Force is there to just demonstrate our resolve, our friendship, and try to deter anything that any country out there may do,” Kelly told reporters.

European allies warn of a split with the United States over the nuclear agreement, in part because they are benefiting economically from a relaxation of sanctions.

A variety of European allies, including the leaders of Britain and France, have personally appealed to Trump to re-certify the nuclear accord for the sake of allied unity.

Germany’s government pledged on Friday to work for continued unity if Trump de-certified the deal as Berlin remain convinced the agreement was an important tool to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel underscored German views in a telephone call with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson late on Thursday, his spokeswoman Maria Adebahr told reporters.

Gabriel said on Thursday U.S. behavior was driving a wedge between Europe and its close ally United States and bringing Europeans closer to Russia and China. “It’s imperative that Europe sticks together on this issue,” said Gabriel.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on Friday that if the United States withdrew from the deal, “this will damage the atmosphere of predictability, security, stability and non-proliferation in the entire world”.

U.S. MOVE AGAINST REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS

McCaul said he expected Trump also to announce some kind of action against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s most powerful security force. Trump is under a legal mandate to impose U.S. economic sanctions on the Revolutionary Guards as a whole by Oct. 31 or waive them.

U.S. sanctions could seriously hurt the IRGC as it controls large swaths of Iran’s economy. The Guards’ foreign paramilitary and espionage wing, the Quds Force, is under U.S. sanctions, as is the Quds Force commander, other officials and associated individuals and entities.

The 2015 nuclear agreement, signed by the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, the European Union and Iran, has been denounced by Trump as “an embarrassment” and “the worst deal ever.”

Trump’s EO Halting Insurance Subsidies Comes from Boehner

Posted on October 13, 2017October 13, 2017 by Denise Simon

photo

CNBC: The Trump administration will immediately stop making critically important payments to insurers who sell Obamacare health plans, a bombshell move that is expected to spike premium prices and potentially lead many insurers to exit the marketplace.

The decision to end the billions of dollars worth of so-called cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments came after months of threats by President Donald Trump to do just that. The news came only hours after Trump signed an executive order that Obamacare advocates said could badly harm the individual insurance marketplaces.

Advocates, along with insurers, health-care provider groups, patient groups and officials in many states, have expressed concerns for months that the cost-sharing reimbursements would be cut off by Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., sharply criticized Trump in a series of Twitter posts late Thursday.

Two months ago, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that individual health plan premiums would be 20 percent higher than originally projected if the payments ceased. It also projected that premiums would be 25 percent higher than they otherwise would be by 2020, and that the federal deficit would be increased by almost $200 billion if the subsidies ended.

The payments, worth $7 billion or so to insurers this year and up to $10 billion or more next year, reimburse insurers for discounts in out-of-pocket health costs they give to low-income Obamacare customers. The discounts must be offered by law.

However, congressional Republicans successfully challenged in a lawsuit the Obama administration’s decision to make the reimbursement payments to insurers without getting the express budgetary authorization from Congress.

Now, both California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said they would file lawsuits seeking to prevent Trump from ending the subsidies.

The two were part of a group of 18 state attorneys general who were given permission this year to intervene in the pending appeal of the federal court decision that had ruled the payments were illegal given their lack of congressional authorization.

*** While the democrats are crying sabotage, they refuse to tell you that there is a legal ruling that says this funding is illegal. The Obama administration via the Treasury Department essentially stole money from various government agencies to subsidize insurance providers since Congress did not appropriate the funds.

In part it played out this way:

When House Republicans first came up with the idea to take the president to court nearly two years ago, they planned to sue the administration over a completely different part of Obamacare. Then-Speaker John Boehner was, as usual, facing pressure from conservatives who were frustrated at Obama’s liberal use of executive authority and their inability to derail the hated health-care law. So he and his leadership team hatched a plan to file a lawsuit accusing the president and his administration of exceeding their authority by unilaterally delaying the implementation of the employer mandate in Obamacare. The requirement that businesses with more than 50 employees provide insurance to their workers had long been a big target for Republicans and one of the more contentious policies in the law. It was the middle of the mid-term congressional campaigns, and Republicans suspected the administration was delaying the mandate to put off the political pain of compliance until after the election.

“The president changed the health-care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it,” Boehner said in a statement at the time. “That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own.” The irony was that House Republicans had repeatedly assailed the employer mandate as a jobs killer, and yet here they were suing to force the administration to implement it faster. Read more here.

Facebook Scrubbed Data, Possible Obstruction of Investigation

Posted on October 12, 2017October 12, 2017 by Denise Simon

Blame ‘crowdtangle’ among others. As noted on their site: ‘the easiest way to keep track of what’s happening of social media. Other sites such as meltwater broadcasts that they are ‘influencers’ and then leaderboards are created such that real or hoax operations become a trending topic.

Lots of fake news gets blamed on bloggers posing as official media outlets while quoting unnamed sources and rightly so. Some of those blogs are concoctions of Moscow while others websites repeated fake stories stoking issues and divisions within the United States from Russia media outlets such as Sputnik News and RT.

Facebook is the location of choice for millions to park links and fake items resulting in Facebook often being referred to as Fakebook.

Moscow, along with out social media tech software in the United States created algorithms that counted ‘likes and ‘shares’ which then manifested unreliable stories and questionable sources. These analytic tools have become the norm across the world and consequentially having credibility and reliance on issues or stories has fallen.

It all boils down to communication, collaboration, branding, feedback and scoring results. You are the sheep, money is made from your activity on social media with every keystroke and you don’t get paid a dime….secret financial extortion, meaning without your knowledge unless you read ALL the mice type. Facebook is a master and frankly a player where you are being punked.

This is yet another form of cyber-warfare….

Facebook scrubbed potentially damning Russia data before researchers could analyze it further

Facebook scrubbed thousands of posts shared during the 2016 campaign by accounts linked to Russia.

The removals came as a Columbia University researcher was examining their reach.

Facebook says the posts were removed to fix a glitch.

BI: Facebook removed thousands of posts shared during the 2016 election by accounts linked to Russia after a Columbia University social media researcher, Jonathan Albright, used the company’s data analytics tool to examine the reach of the Russian accounts.

Albright, who discovered the content had reached a far broader audience than Facebook initially acknowledged, told The Washington Post on Wednesday that the data had allowed him “to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle” of Russia’s election interference.

“Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing,” he said.

Facebook confirmed that the posts had been removed, but said it was because the company had fixed a glitch in the analytics tool — called CrowdTangle — that Albright had used.

“We identified and fixed a bug in CrowdTangle that allowed users to see cached information from inactive Facebook Pages,” said Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman.

Facebook’s decision to remove the posts from public view raised questions about whether the company could be held liable for suppressing potential evidence, given its role in the wide-ranging investigation of Russia’s election interference.

Albright told Business Insider that “because this is clearly a legal and imminent justice-related matter, I can’t provide much critical insight at this stage.

“I feel like my 10 rounds with the $500 billion dollar tech juggernaut are over,” he said.

Legal experts and scholars on the subject say scrubbing the data Albright used for his research is Facebook’s prerogative as long as it isn’t knowingly removing content sought under a court order or by government request.

“If Facebook has no reason to think that it should retain the data (subpoena, court order), then it can make choices about what appears on its platform,” said Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Maryland, where she teaches and writes about information privacy.

Citron said Facebook and other private tech companies have in the past argued, successfully, that they have free speech interests and enjoy immunity from liability for the content posted by their users — immunity that extends to their ability to remove it if it violates their terms of service.

Albert Gidari, the director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said it’s likely that Facebook has kept copies of “anything at issue as part of its preservation obligation” in light of special counsel Robert Mueller’s search warrant and the House and Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenas.

Gidari said that because there hasn’t been any allegation against Facebook itself, the company has no obligation, absent a court order, to maintain information “that later may be evidence.”

But the question becomes more complicated when considering the ethical obligations of a company whose tools were exploited by a foreign adversary to try to influence a US election.

Gidari, for his part, said he doesn’t think “any platform has an independent or ethical obligation to run a research playground for third-party data analysts.”

But Tom Rubin, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, said that Facebook’s “credibility as a global social platform and its responsibility as an internet giant require it to fully embrace an independent, urgent and public review of the facts.”

“Facebook’s Russia predicament is of its own doing — it controls the platform, runs the ads, and profits mightily,” said Rubin, who previously served as the assistant US Attorney in New York heading investigations and prosecutions of computer crimes.

“The investigation here is as serious as it gets: illegal and hostile foreign influence on the US presidential election,” Rubin said. “The issue confronting Facebook is the extent to which it should commit to complete transparency, and the answer to that is straightforward.”

Citron agreed.

“For transparency’s sake and for our broader interest in our democracy, people should know the extent to which they have been played by the Russians and how a hostile state actor has interfered with, manipulated, and generally hacked our political process,” she said.

That is what Albright said was his mission when he downloaded the last 500 posts shared by six accounts that Facebook has confirmed were operating out of Russia. Those accounts — Blacktivists, Being Patriotic, Secured Borders, Heart of Texas, LGBT United, and Muslims of America — were among the 470 pages Facebook shut down in September as part of its purge of “inauthentic accounts” linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

The data Albright obtained using CrowdTangle showed that the Russians’ reach far exceeded the number of Facebook users they were able to access with advertisements alone — content including memes, links, and other miscellaneous postings was shared over 340 million times between the six accounts.

The other 464 accounts closed by Facebook have not yet been made public. If they are, an analysis of their combined posts would likely reveal that their content was shared an estimated billions of times during the election.

FBI Deployed Again to Puerto Rico over Corrupt Officials

Posted on October 12, 2017October 12, 2017 by Denise Simon

FBI in Puerto Rico investigating if corrupt local officials are ‘withholding’ or ‘mishandling’ crucial supplies

FNC: FBI agents in Puerto Rico have been receiving calls from “across the island” with residents complaining local officials are “withholding” or “mishandling” critical FEMA supplies — with one island official even accused of stuffing his own car full of goods meant for the suffering populace.

The accusations come in the aftermath of deadly Hurricane Maria, which devastated the U.S. territory last month.

“The complaints we’re hearing is that mayors of local municipalities, or people associated with their offices, are giving their political supporters special treatment, goods they’re not giving to other people who need them,” FBI Special Agent Carlos Osorio told Fox News.

Osorio, an agent with the FBI in San Juan, said the bureau was investigating the allegations.

“The U.S. attorney has made it clear if anyone is caught mishandling FEMA supplies, they will be prosecuted and could end up facing anywhere from five to 20 years in prison,” Osorio said.

Some of the claims have come by phone and others have poured in over social media, but the allegations stretch across the island.

Osorio told of one allegation where a party official is accused of pulling his own car around the back of a government building and driving off after loading it full of FEMA supplies.

“We’re going out and investigating these claims,” Osorio said. “We don’t know yet if they’re accurate or not…but yes we have received many similar allegations from people in many different parts of the island.”

The allegations of misconduct come amid a pitched back-and-forth between island officials and President Trump over the federal response to Maria.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, a frequent Trump foil, reportedly accused Trump on Thursday of “genocide” for not doing more to aid in the relief efforts.

Cruz sent the accusation in a text message to Rep. Luis V. Gutirrez, D-Ill., who is of Puerto Rican heritage, The Washington Times reported.

Trump on Twitter has accused Cruz of poor management.

“…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help…” Trump wrote.

The president raised eyebrows Thursday morning by tweeting that federal agencies, military officials and first responders couldn’t stay “in P.R. forever!”

Earlier Thursday, the Daily Caller reported the FBI was aware of misappropriation allegations in six of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities.

Rosa Emilia Rodriguez, a U.S. federal prosecutor on the island, told a local Puerto Rican radio station Monday she was investigating officials in the government — including mayors — regarding the misappropriation of supplies. Rodriguez, however, declined to name the government officials being looked at.

“Anybody that engaged in that kind of action whether civilian or representative should be looked at seriously because that’s unforgivable,” Rep. Adriano Espillat, D-N.Y., a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told The Daily Caller.

***

It is not the first time the FBI has been dispatched to the island. Just last year:

SAN JUAN – The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has allegedly requested documents from investment firms as part of a probe into the $3.5 billion general-obligation bond issue of 2014 and a $600 million bond issue by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (Prepa) in 2013, according to sources with links to Wall Street.

The sources alleged investigators subpoenaed documents from Barclays PLC, Morgan Stanley and RBC Capital Markets regarding the two bond issues.

Barclays, Morgan Stanley and RBC Capital Markets served as joint lead managers for the $3.5 billion bond offering in March 2014, with Barclays acting as lead book-running manager, according to the Government Development Bank (GDB). The bonds will mature in 2035 and were issued at an 8% coupon and an 8.727% yield.

The power company of Puerto Rico is state owned and has been bankrupt for years and due to money issues, the stability of power is questionable at best. Brown-outs were common and lasted days. Then also in 2016:

The NYT’s reported in part:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has identified possible suspects in its long-running investigation into the murder of a banker in Puerto Rico, but it is now asking the public for help in solving the 2011 killing.

Five years ago this week, Maurice Spagnoletti, a top executive at Doral Financial, the holding company that owned a Puerto Rico bank, was gunned down on his way home from work in San Juan.

In 2010: In the biggest crackdown on police corruption in the FBI’s 102-year history, authorities charged a total of 133 individuals in Puerto Rico Wednesday as the result of a probe into whether police provided protection for drug dealers.

photo

Wonder what the 17,000 U.S. military personnel on the island providing humanitarian aid including medical, power and food will have to report when their job is complete….