When the U.S. Justice System is Bought by Soros

Posted on August 30, 2016August 30, 2016 by Denise Simon

Maybe the FBI as well given Hillary? Spooky dude and his billons have twisted the system across the country. Perhaps he reached the White House as well, given the commuted sentences of criminals where Obama used his pen to release hundreds of felons. Is Soros paying senators on the Judiciary Committee for votes on Supreme Court Justice nominations?

It is no wonder violent felons never serve out their prison terms much less do the District Attorneys bother with the cases to begin with as noted by criminals on the streets with case files that are a mile long only to offend again.

NYMag

George Soros’ quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system

Politico: Progressives have zeroed in on electing prosecutors as an avenue for criminal justice reform, and the billionaire financier is providing the cash to make it happen.

While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system.

The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.

His money has supported African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial. It is by far the most tangible action in a progressive push to find, prepare and finance criminal justice reform-oriented candidates for jobs that have been held by longtime incumbents and serve as pipelines to the federal courts — and it has inspired fury among opponents angry about the outside influence in local elections.

“The prosecutor exercises the greatest discretion and power in the system. It is so important,” said Andrea Dew Steele, president of Emerge America, a candidate-training organization for Democratic women. “There’s been a confluence of events in the past couple years and all of the sudden, the progressive community is waking up to this.”

Soros has spent on district attorney campaigns in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas through a network of state-level super PACs and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each named a variation on “Safety and Justice.” (Soros has also funded a federal super PAC with the same name.) Each organization received most of its money directly from Soros, according to public state and federal financial records, though some groups also got donations from nonprofits like the Civic Participation Action Fund, which gave to the Safety and Justice group in Illinois.

The Florida Safety and Justice group just poured nearly $1.4 million — all of which came from Soros and his 527 group — into a previously low-budget Democratic primary for state attorney in Central Florida before Tuesday’s vote. The group is backing Aramis Ayala, a former public defender and prosecutor, in her campaign against incumbent Jeff Ashton, whose jurisdiction covers over 1.6 million people across two counties in metro Orlando.

One TV ad from Florida Safety and Justice boosts Ayala, touting her “plan to remove bias so defendants charged with the same crime receive the same treatment, no matter their background or race.” The Soros-funded group is also attacking Ashton with ads saying he “got rid of protections that helped ensure equal treatment regardless of background or race. … Take two similar traffic incidents that happened on the same night. A white man got off with a slap on the wrist, while the black man faces prison.”

Opponents of Soros’ favored candidates have laced into the billionaire, saying that his influence has wildly tipped the scales of local elections and even charging that he made residents less safe.

“As a candidate and citizen of Caddo Parish, if an outsider was that interested in the race, I wanted to know exactly what he had in mind for the criminal justice system if he were to win,” said Dhu Thompson, a Louisiana attorney who lost a district attorney race to a Soros-backed candidate, James Stewart, in 2015. Soros gave over $930,000 — more than 22 times the local median household income — to the group boosting Stewart.

“I know some of his troubling opinions on social issues, especially the criminal justice system,” Thompson said. “I’ve never known him as an individual who was very strong on some of our crime and punishment issues. I felt it was very detrimental to the safety of Caddo Parish, and that’s why I took such a strong stand against him.”

A Soros representative declined to comment on his involvement in the DA races.

Progressive operatives and activists say that the recent uptick in news coverage of racial justice issues, especially police-involved deaths of African-Americans, helped sparked intense new interest in the powerful role of district attorneys, who did not indict officers in some high-profile cases. So has the longer-term reform push to shrink the U.S. prison population and promote treatment over punishment for drug users.

Reform groups have spent years advocating criminal justice policies and legislation that would reduce incarceration rates. Liberal donors have long given to policy-focused nonprofits; the Soros-chaired Open Societies Foundation, for example, works on drug policy and criminal justice reform and has supported other reform groups like the California-based Alliance for Safety and Justice — which, despite its similar name, has had no involvement in district attorney races, a spokeswoman said.

Prosecutorial discretion gives district attorneys a huge say in the charges and sentences that defendants face. But reform efforts have not traditionally focused on harnessing that power.

“They are often a very invisible part of the criminal justice system and the political system,” said Brenda Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an arm of the progressive Women Donors Network. “Many people can’t name their district attorney. It’s not an office people think about a lot.”

Carter’s group commissioned research in 2015 that found that 95 percent of elected local prosecutors in the U.S. are white and three-quarters overall are white men. It also highlighted a Wake Forest University study that found that a vast majority of prosecutors — 85 percent — run for reelection unopposed.

“I found that to be shocking, and I think people are waking up to the untapped potential for intervention in these seats to really change the day-to-day realities of criminal justice,” Carter said. “It’s been really gratifying for us to see the research taken up and run with by different groups around the country.”

Armed with that knowledge, progressive groups including Color of Change began researching potentially interesting district attorney races around the country, multiple sources said. (The organization declined to comment.)

“It’s hard to find this information!” exclaimed Steele, the Emerge America president. “You can’t just Google ‘hot DA races.’ So part of the issue is identifying what potential races there are.”

Soros’ spending started on these races about a year ago, when he put over $1 million into “Safety and Justice” groups that helped elect two new district attorneys in Louisiana and Mississippi and reelect a third — Hinds County, Miss., DA Robert Shuler Smith — who has since been charged by the Mississippi attorney general with improperly providing information to defendants.

The other Mississippi district attorney Soros’ spending helped elect, Scott Colom, has now represented a four-county stretch of the eastern part of the state for eight months. Colom said in an interview that he has focused on prosecuting violent crime in his new position while trying not to burden local prisons with first-time, low-level drug offenders.

“I’ve expanded the charges eligible for pre-trial diversion,” Colom said, adding that the number of people in the program in his jurisdiction has doubled since he took office seven months ago. “It’s all focused on the individual person, on trying to find a plan with the best chance possible of avoiding criminal behavior.”

“I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think prison is too nice and we need to spend more on it,” Colom continued. “But it seems like a large majority of people out there get it and realize there have to be priorities. Just because a fella commits a crime doesn’t mean the best outcome is sending them to jail. … As much as possible, I want to take people from being tax burdens to taxpayers.”

After the Louisiana and Mississippi races, Soros next piled money into two of the biggest jurisdictions in the country: Houston’s Harris County (his lone losing effort so far) and Chicago’s Cook County, where he funded one of several groups that helped Kim Foxx defeat incumbent state’s attorney Anita Alvarez in a high-profile primary campaign dominated by the 13-month delay between the police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the indictment of the police officer involved.

In late spring, $107,000 from a Soros-funded New Mexico super PAC helped Raul Torrez win his Democratic district attorney primary by a 2-to-1 margin in Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County. Torrez’s Republican opponent dropped out of the general election soon after, citing the potentially exorbitant cost of opposing the Soros-backed candidate in the general election.

While Soros has spent heavily in 2015 and 2016, a broader national push into local prosecutor campaigns is expected to intensify in the next few years, thanks to longer-term planning and candidate recruitment. A Safety and Justice group has already organized in Ohio, according to campaign finance filings there. But it has not yet disclosed raising or spending any money.

“There’s been a realization that there’s not very much we can do this year, when you’re coming up to an election,” said Steele. “You have to have the right candidates. That’s a big piece of the puzzle and why I’m part of this conversation. … A lot of the conversations I’m having are about 2017 and 2018, about looking forward to next year in Virginia and other places.”

That means more local candidates should prepare for the shock of one of the biggest donors in American politics flooding their neighborhoods with ads.

Colom, the Mississippi prosecutor, says he has never met Soros — like other district attorney candidates supported by the Democratic billionaire this year. He said there was no hint that hundreds of thousands of dollars were coming to aid his campaign until advertising started pushing the same criminal-justice reform message that Colom had been touting — albeit on a much cheaper scale.

“The first I heard of it, someone told me they liked my radio ad, and I was thinking, that doesn’t sound like one of mine,” Colom said.

New Documents, Watergate: Declassified

Posted on August 30, 2016August 30, 2016 by Denise Simon

Teach this younger generation about Deep Throat and include the new names, a double agent and real roles in the break-in.

At left, President Richard Nixon is shown in the Oval Office in Oct. 13, 1973; at right, Eugenio R. Martinez, a CIA mole involved in the Watergate break-in.

The 158 page draft report is found here.

Watergate: CIA withheld data on double agent

FNC/Rosen: EXCLUSIVE: An internal history of the Watergate scandal prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency – intended to help the Agency make a clean breast of its own wrongdoing and kept in classified vaults for more than four decades – reveals how the spy service used a double agent to keep tabs on the burglars whose arrests ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and withheld information about the agent from federal prosecutors.

Entitled “Working Draft – CIA Watergate History,” the 155-page study was largely written by John C. Richards, a CIA officer who died in December 1974, and was brought nearly to completion by unnamed Agency colleagues who built on Richards’ typed draft and handwritten annotations.

Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the government to turn the document over to Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog, which had sued for access under the Freedom of Information Act. The group finally received the declassified report in July and shared it with Fox News.

Even in draft form, the document represents CIA’s fullest narrative treatment of the Watergate affair, which first surfaced publicly in the predawn hours of June 17, 1972. That’s when Washington police, dressed in plain clothes and responding to a call from a private security guard, arrested at gunpoint five burglars inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington.

The arrested men were wearing business suits and rubber gloves and carrying electronic eavesdropping devices. Investigation swiftly revealed that one of them was employed by the president’s re-election campaign committee, and that four of the five boasted past ties to CIA. But one of the arrested men, it turns out, was still on Langley’s payroll at the time of the arrests, and had been feeding information about the break-in team to his CIA case officers the entire time.

That CIA mole was Eugenio R. Martinez, a Cuban Bay of Pigs veteran who was recruited to the break-in team by E. Howard Hunt, the legendary former CIA officer and spy novelist who had helped plan the Bay of Pigs operation in the Kennedy era and had gone on to work as a consultant on covert projects at the Nixon White House. Along with re-election committee lawyer G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, Hunt masterminded the doomed break-in and surveillance operation at the DNC; he and Liddy would be indicted along with the five arrested men and both would serve lengthy sentences in federal prison.

While Watergate scholars have previously reported that Martinez was a CIA informant during the time he was working for Hunt and Liddy – the wiry operative known as “Musculito” provided Langley with a steady stream of information about the Cuban exile community in Miami, from where he and three of the other burglars hailed, for $100 a month (about $575 today) – the newly declassified CIA document fleshes out the relationship in greater detail and shows how highly the Agency prized it.

In October 1973 – by which point the months-long effort of the Nixon White House to cover up the origins of the DNC break-in had collapsed, and President Nixon was struggling in vain to stave off impeachment – attorneys from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force met with the CIA’s top lawyer and sought access to documents concerning Martinez. In particular, the draft report states, the WSPF lawyers wanted to review a previous report prepared by one of Martinez’s case officers in Miami and a copy of Martinez’s “roundup of his discussions with Hunt” from April 1972, the month before the burglars first penetrated the DNC suite.

CIA General Counsel John S. Warner adamantly refused. “Warner stated that under no circumstances would the Agency give up all records relating to the Agency’s relationship with Martinez,” the report stated. “Warner explained why such a request was difficult for the Agency – the breaching of trust of an agent.”

The document marks the first known reference by CIA to Martinez as “an agent,” as opposed to an informant, and exposes how valuable an asset the Agency considered him to be. Among several-dozen passages of the report still redacted today, more than four decades after the events in question, are the names of two CIA case officers to whom Martinez reported.

Elsewhere the report chronicles how top CIA officials, including then-Director Richard Helms, withheld data about Martinez from the FBI at the very outset of its investigation of the break-in.

On June 19, 1972, the first business day after the burglars were arrested, the report notes that Helms received a briefing from CIA’s Director of Security at the time, Howard Osborn, who provided “biographic details” for each of the arrested men. Yet three days later, the report states, Helms told the Bureau’s acting director, L. Patrick Gray III, that “none [of the arrested men] had worked for the Agency in the past two years.” That was untrue where Martinez was concerned.

“This CIA Watergate report is an extraordinary historical document,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement to Fox News. “Given that it disclosed direct CIA involvement in Watergate, it is no surprise it took forty-two years and a Judicial Watch lawsuit to force its release.”

Now 94 and believed to be living in Miami, Martinez has granted virtually no interviews. He has long fascinated Watergate scholars, both because of his dual role on the break-in team and because the FBI determined that a key that Martinez was carrying at the time of the arrests — and struggled unsuccessfully to conceal from the police — fit the desk of DNC secretary Ida “Maxie” Wells, whose telephone was the only one wiretapped in the ill-fated operation. No other burglar had such a key and it has never been satisfactorily explained as to how or why Martinez came into possession of it.

Jim Hougan, author of Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, a landmark study of the break-in published by Random House in 1984, called the declassified draft “an artifact in its own right” but said it carries “a musty fragrance, brought on by having been squirreled away for so long that its narrative has begun to rot.”

Hougan pointed to numerous aspects of Watergate – all of which involved CIA – that are unmentioned in the Agency’s ostensibly comprehensive mea culpa. These omissions include, among other things, the destruction of Watergate-related documents shortly after the arrests by a CIA officer named Lee Pennington and the activities of Robert F. Bennett, later a U.S. senator from Utah, who as a CIA asset in the early 1970s sent his superiors a memorandum – first published in Hougan’s book – boasting of how he had been feeding Bob Woodward of the Washington Post story leads that led him and the newspaper away from Agency involvement in Watergate. For this, Bennett said in the 1973 memorandum, the reporter was “suitably grateful for the fine stories and by-lines which he gets.”

One area where the CIA draft report appears willfully to have steered clear of further implicating the Agency was in its reference to a CIA officer named Rob Roy Ratliff, the Agency’s liaison on the National Security Council.

In a 1974 affidavit filed with the House Judiciary Committee when it was weighing articles of impeachment against President Nixon, Ratliff swore that E. Howard Hunt, while ostensibly retired from CIA and working as a consultant in the Nixon White House, was using secure Agency couriers to send sealed pouches to CIA Director Helms on a regular basis, continuing right up until shortly before the Watergate arrests.

Sources familiar with the matter said the pouches contained “gossip” of a sexually graphic nature about White House officials that could be used for the purpose of constructing psychological profiles of them – a violation of the Agency’s charter. Hunt had already played a lead role in getting CIA prepare such a profile of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

The draft report mentions Ratliff by name and notes the existence of his affidavit – but otherwise makes no mention of its explosive contents, which suggested that Hunt had never really retired from CIA and was spying on the Nixon White House for Langley at a level even higher than Martinez.

James Rosen joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in 1999. He currently serves as the chief Washington correspondent and hosts the online show “The Foxhole.” His latest book is “Cheney One on One: A Candid Conversation with America’s Most Controversial Statesman” (Regnery, November 2, 2015).

Germany: Merkel, What the Heck?

Posted on August 29, 2016August 29, 2016 by Denise Simon

Cant make this up, and it is an attitude and policy that is infectious especially with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

German army wants security checks for recruits after admitting more than 60 Isil suspects in its ranks

German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen (CDU) speaking with soldiers

Telegraph: The German army has said it wants tougher security checks on recruits after admitting that more than 60 Islamists are suspected of infiltrating its ranks.

In a draft amendment seen by German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, senior Bundeswehr officials said all applicants should be screened by the intelligence services for jihadist links before they begin basic training.

And they disclosed that 64 Islamists are already feared to have embedded themselves within the armed forces, along with 268 right-wing extremists and six left-wing extremists.

Terrorists are attracted to the army because they can use the training to plot future terror attacks in Germany, the document added.

“The German army trains all of its members in the handling and usage of weapons of war,” it said, “[terrorists] could use those skills acquired in the army to carry out well-prepared acts of violence at home or abroad.”

**

The proposals would lead to a major overhaul of the country’s recruiting policy as under the current system soldiers are only checked for Islamist ties once they have enlisted.

They would also require an extra 90 military officials to be hired in order to carry out a further 20,000 checks per year.

The reforms, which would cost an estimated 8.2 million euros (£6.9m) per year, are expected to be approved by German commanders next week, Welt am Sonntag reported.

A Defence Ministry spokesman said the government was still in the process of debating the law, which if approved would come into force in July 2017.

Germany is on high alert following a spate of deadly attacks last July, two of which were claimed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

On July 18 an Afghan refugee attacked passengers with an axe on a regional train in southern Germany, injuring four people before he was shot by police.

Officials said they found an Isil flag in the 17-year-old’s room and it later emerged that he had pledged allegiance to the group in a video posted online.

A week later, on July 25th, a Syrian refugee blew himself up in the southern town of Ansbach, killing himself in the blast and wounding 12 others.

**

When police raided his flat they found violent videos, bomb making materials and a message on his mobile phone in which he said he carried out the attack on behalf of Isil leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Thomas de Maziere, the German Interior Minister, has already called for tougher security measures which would include a ban on the burka and legal reforms that would make it easier to deport terror suspects.

He is also in favour of a Europe-wide proposal to force the developers of encrypted messaging services such as Telegram to hand over data to the security services.

Telegram has attracted controversy in the past for being popular among Isil fighters, who use the network to trade weapons and plot attacks while remaining anonymous.

Well there is more….Merkel is out of her mind…

Merkel ‘Underestimated’ Migrant Challenge: Vice Chancellor

Newsweek: German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said in an interview on Saturday that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives had “underestimated” the challenge of integrating a record migrant influx.

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

Gabriel is also leader of the Social Democrats (SPD)—the junior coalition partner in Merkel’s government—and his comments come as campaigning gets underway for a federal election next year and for regional elections in Berlin and the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants flocked to Germany from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere last year. Concerns about how to integrate them all into German society and the labor market are now rife and support for the anti-immigrant party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has grown.

“I, we always said that it’s inconceivable for Germany to take in a million people every year,” Gabriel said in extracts of an interview with broadcaster ZDF released on Saturday.

The head of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees told newspaper Bild am Sonntag that Germany took in less than one million migrants last year and said he expected a maximum of 300,000 refugees to arrive in Germany this year.

At a separate news conference on Sunday, Gabriel said: “There is an upper limit to a country’s integration ability.”

He said Germany had 300,000 new schoolchildren due to the migrant influx and added that the country could not manage to integrate so many into the school system every year because there would not be enough teachers.

In the ZDF interview, Gabriel also criticized Merkel’s catchphrase “Wir schaffen das,” meaning “We can do this,” which she adopted during the migrant crisis last summer and has repeatedly used since.

Merkel used the phrase at a news conference she held in late July after a spate of attacks on civilians in Germany, including two claimed by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), that have put her open-door migrant policy in the spotlight. Her popularity has slipped since those attacks.

Gabriel said repeating that phrase was not enough and the conservatives needed to create the conditions for Germany to be able to cope, adding that the conservatives had always blocked opportunities to do that.

Merkel’s migrant policy also drew criticism from Markus Soeder, a senior member of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).

“Even with the best will in the world, we won’t manage to integrate so many people from totally different cultures,” Soeder told German magazine Der Spiegel.

Soeder said Germany needed to send several hundred thousand of refugees back in the next three years rather than bring their families here.

The CSU tends to talk tougher on immigration than the CDU and the two allies have often been at odds over how to respond to the migrant influx.

C’mon Hillary and Bill, Really?

Posted on August 24, 2016August 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

Hillary State Dept. Helped Jailed Clinton Foundation Donor Get $10 Mil from U.S. for Failed Haiti

The new batch of emails showing that the State Department gave special access to top Clinton Foundation donors while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state brings to mind the case of a shady Miami businessman serving a 12-year prison sentence after scamming the government out of millions. His name is Claudio Osorio, a Clinton Foundation donor who got $10 million from the government after the Clinton State Department reportedly pulled some strings.

Osorio got the money from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a federal agency that operates under the guidance of the State Department, to build houses in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. The OPIC supposedly promotes U.S. government investments abroad to foster the development and growth of free markets. Osorio’s “Haiti project” was supposed to build 500 homes for displaced families in the aftermath of the earthquake. The project never broke ground and Osorio used the money to finance his lavish lifestyle and fund his illicit business ventures. He also ran a fraudulent international company with facilities in the U.S., United Arab Emirates, Germany, Angola and Tanzania that stole millions from investors. Some of the OPIC Haiti money was used to repay investors of his fraudulent company (Innovida), according to federal prosecutors. In September 2013, Osorio was sentenced to 150 months imprisonment and three years of supervised release.

Not surprisingly, the Department of Justice (DOJ) never mentioned Osorio’s Clinton connections and seemed to downplay the $10 million scam of taxpayer funds by focusing on the “victims” that invested in his bogus company. More here.

The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire

In part from WashingtonPost: The foundation now includes 11 major initiatives, focused on issues as divergent as crop yields in Africa, earthquake relief in Haiti and the cost of AIDS drugs worldwide. In all, the Clintons’ constellation of related charities has raised $2 billion, employs more than 2,000 people and has a combined annual budget of more than $223 million.

As donations have surged, particularly as her bid for the Democratic nomination grew closer, she has been forced to answer for whether those supporters have been not merely giving to a charity but also paying to curry favor with a former secretary of state and a would-be president.

Sights on something big

In the beginning of it all, Bill Clinton was feeling unfulfilled.

More photos here.

In the months after he left the White House in 2001, he was living at his family’s new home in Chappaqua, N.Y. His wife was in the Senate. His daughter was away, first at Stanford, then at Oxford. He stewed about leftover legal bills and bad press over last-minute pardons.

To pass the time, he turned to TiVo.
No sign of that pesky server though.

At the same time, Clinton did more formal planning with aides. He was just 56. He would be an ex-president for a long time. He wanted to do something big. And something international. He wanted to stay out of domestic policy, so it didn’t look as though he was meddling in the domain of the president who had succeeded him. Or the senator he was married to.

Ira Magaziner, a longtime aide, had an idea that fit both criteria.

New drugs were available to fight the progress of HIV and AIDS, but in Africa the drugs were too expensive for many people. Magaziner wanted to lower the cost. He knew Clinton didn’t have the money to help, because he was still fundraising for the library and his own legal bills.

But, Magaziner told Clinton, he had a name brand with limitless value.

“We should use that reputation and your contacts for something big. If we succeed at this, we can help save millions of lives,” Magaziner wrote in a memo he handed to Clinton at an AIDS conference in 2002. “If we are not so successful, we still might help save tens of thousands of lives which would not be so bad.”

Expanding in all directions

“Now here’s something else in my hot little hand,” Clinton said, standing on a stage at the Sheraton Times Square, according to media reports. “My old friend Carlos Slim Helú here has just said he’s willing to develop a cellphone network for Gaza and link it to Jordan’s network. Why, thanks, Carlos. Come up here and be recognized.”

It was September 2005. A year and a half after Band’s brainstorm, the first meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative was a smashing success. Some Clinton aides had been skeptical that it would work, but Clinton had shrewdly timed it to coincide with a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly — when New York was already chockablock with world leaders looking for something more interesting than a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

This is quite the story so please read it in full here. There are stunning connections, people, agendas, timelines, money and access. A real picture has emerged on the collusion and the work of Hillary and Bill’s circle of friends. This is hardly the whole story but it does begin to explain why they had at least 2 private servers and refused FOIA requests.

Last year, the Washington Post offer an early comprehensive summary:

The Post identified donations from roughly 336,000 individuals, corporations, unions and foreign governments in support of their political or philanthropic endeavors — a list that includes top patrons such as Steven Spielberg and George Soros, as well as lesser-known backers who have given smaller amounts dozens of times. Not included in the count are an untold number of small donors whose names are not identified in campaign finance reports but together have given millions to the Clintons over the years.

The majority of the money — $2 billion — has gone to the Clinton Foundation, one of the world’s fastest-growing charities, which supports health, education and economic development initiatives around the globe. A handful of elite givers have contributed more than $25 million to the foundation, including Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, who is among the wealthy foreign donors who have given tens of millions.

Keep reading here as it is full of names and under-handed requests and access.

AP’s Report on Access to Hillary After the Checks Cashed

Posted on August 24, 2016August 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

Hillary’s top people are calling this comprehensive report by Associated Press cherry-picking. Given the vast list of names, organizations and timeline, it is hardly cherry-picking. Hat tip to AP.

We cant know at this point the wider implications when it comes to government money authorized and spent via the State Department and other agencies as a result of requests from donors and collusion stemming from the Clinton Foundation and policy coming out of the White House and the State Department. Another question is how much was known by the White House and approved?

Foreign governments, organizations and leaders knew and know what we have not, in order to get a meeting or a phone call, just write a check first. No wonder we are hated due to RICO and yet we fret over Davos and the Bilderbergers. Sheesh….We fret over the money that went into the Foundation(s) but not much if at all is reported about charity distributions.

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It’s an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.

At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.

Donors who were granted time with Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Clinton’s help with a visa problem; and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm’s corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.

The meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.

The AP’s findings represent the first systematic effort to calculate the scope of the intersecting interests of Clinton Foundation donors and people who met personally with Clinton or spoke to her by phone about their needs.

The 154 did not include U.S. federal employees or foreign government representatives. Clinton met with representatives of at least 16 foreign governments that donated as much as $170 million to the Clinton charity, but they were not included in AP’s calculations because such meetings would presumably have been part of her diplomatic duties.

Clinton’s campaign said the AP analysis was flawed because it did not include in its calculations meetings with foreign diplomats or U.S. government officials, and the meetings AP examined covered only the first half of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

“It is outrageous to misrepresent Secretary Clinton’s basis for meeting with these individuals,” spokesman Brian Fallon said. He called it “a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump fiercely criticized the links between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department, saying his general election opponent had delivered “lie after lie after lie.”

“Hillary Clinton is totally unfit to hold public office,” he said at a rally Tuesday night in Austin, Texas. “It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins. It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office.”

Last week, the Clinton Foundation moved to head off ethics concerns about future donations by announcing changes planned if Clinton is elected.

On Monday, Bill Clinton said in a statement that if his wife were to win, he would step down from the foundation’s board and stop all fundraising for it. The foundation would also accept donations only from U.S. citizens and what it described as independent philanthropies, while no longer taking gifts from foreign groups, U.S. companies or corporate charities. Clinton said the foundation would no longer hold annual meetings of its international aid program, the Clinton Global Initiative, and it would spin off its foreign-based programs to other charities.

Those planned changes would not affect more than 6,000 donors who have already provided the Clinton charity with more than $2 billion in funding since its creation in 2000.

“There’s a lot of potential conflicts and a lot of potential problems,” said Douglas White, an expert on nonprofits who previously directed Columbia University’s graduate fundraising management program. “The point is, she can’t just walk away from these 6,000 donors.”

Former senior White House ethics officials said a Clinton administration would have to take careful steps to ensure that past foundation donors would not have the same access as she allowed at the State Department.

“If Secretary Clinton puts the right people in and she’s tough about it and has the right procedures in place and sends a message consistent with a strong commitment to ethics, it can be done,” said Norman L. Eisen, who was President Barack Obama’s top ethics counsel and later worked for Clinton as ambassador to the Czech Republic.

Eisen, now a governance studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that at a minimum, Clinton should retain the Obama administration’s current ethics commitments and oversight, which include lobbying restrictions and other rules. Richard Painter, a former ethics adviser to President George W. Bush and currently a University of Minnesota law school professor, said Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton should remove themselves completely from foundation leadership roles, but he added that potential conflicts would shadow any policy decision affecting past donors.

Fallon did not respond to the AP’s questions about Clinton transition plans regarding ethics, but said in a statement the standard set by the Clinton Foundation’s ethics restrictions was “unprecedented, even if it may never satisfy some critics.”

State Department officials have said they are not aware of any agency actions influenced by the Clinton Foundation. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Tuesday night that there are no prohibitions against agency contacts with “political campaigns, nonprofits or foundations — including the Clinton Foundation.” He added that “meeting requests, recommendations and proposals come to the department through a variety of channels, both formal and informal.”

Some of Clinton’s most influential visitors donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and to her and her husband’s political coffers. They are among scores of Clinton visitors and phone contacts in her official calendar turned over by the State Department to AP last year and in more-detailed planning schedules that so far have covered about half her four-year tenure. The AP sought Clinton’s calendar and schedules three years ago, but delays led the AP to sue the State Department last year in federal court for those materials and other records.

S. Daniel Abraham, whose name also was included in emails released by the State Department as part of another lawsuit, is a Clinton fundraising bundler who was listed in Clinton’s planners for eight meetings with her at various times. A billionaire behind the Slim-Fast diet and founder of the Center for Middle East Peace, Abraham told the AP last year his talks with Clinton concerned Mideast issues.

Big Clinton Foundation donors with no history of political giving to the Clintons also met or talked by phone with Hillary Clinton and top aides, AP’s review showed.

Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering low-interest “microcredit” for poor business owners, met with Clinton three times and talked with her by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign from the bank’s board. Throughout the process, he pleaded for help in messages routed to Clinton, and she ordered aides to find ways to assist him.

American affiliates of his nonprofit Grameen Bank had been working with the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative programs as early as 2005, pledging millions of dollars in microloans for the poor. Grameen America, the bank’s nonprofit U.S. flagship, which Yunus chairs, has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the foundation — a figure that bank spokeswoman Becky Asch said reflects the institution’s annual fees to attend CGI meetings. Another Grameen arm chaired by Yunus, Grameen Research, has donated between $25,000 and $50,000.

As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton, as well as then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and two other senators in 2007 sponsored a bill to award a congressional gold medal to Yunus. He got one but not until 2010, a year after Obama awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Yunus first met with Clinton in Washington in April 2009. That was followed six months later by an announcement by USAID, the State Department’s foreign aid arm, that it was partnering with the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit charity run by Yunus, in a $162 million commitment to extend its microfinance concept abroad. USAID also began providing loans and grants to the Grameen Foundation, totaling $2.2 million over Clinton’s tenure.

By September 2009, Yunus began complaining to Clinton’s top aides about what he perceived as poor treatment by Bangladesh’s government. His bank was accused of financial mismanagement of Norwegian government aid money — a charge that Norway later dismissed as baseless. But Yunus told Melanne Verveer, a long-time Clinton aide who was an ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, that Bangladesh officials refused to meet with him and asked the State Department for help in pressing his case.

“Please see if the issues of Grameen Bank can be raised in a friendly way,” he asked Verveer. Yunus sent “regards to H” and cited an upcoming Clinton Global Initiative event he planned to attend.

Clinton ordered an aide: “Give to EAP rep,” referring the problem to the agency’s top east Asia expert.

Yunus continued writing to Verveer as pressure mounted on his bank. In December 2010, responding to a news report that Bangladesh’s prime minister was urging an investigation of Grameen Bank, Clinton told Verveer that she wanted to discuss the matter with her East Asia expert “ASAP.”

Clinton called Yunus in March 2011 after the Bangladesh government opened an inquiry into his oversight of Grameen Bank. Yunus had told Verveer by email that “the situation does not allow me to leave the country.” By mid-May, the Bangladesh government had forced Yunus to step down from the bank’s board. Yunus sent Clinton a copy of his resignation letter. In a separate note to Verveer, Clinton wrote: “Sad indeed.”

Clinton met with Yunus a second time in Washington in August 2011 and again in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka in May 2012. Clinton’s arrival in Bangladesh came after Bangladesh authorities moved to seize control of Grameen Bank’s effort to find new leaders. Speaking to a town hall audience, Clinton warned the Bangladesh government that “we do not want to see any action taken that would in any way undermine or interfere in the operations of the Grameen Bank.”

Grameen America’s Asch referred other questions about Yunus to his office, but he had not responded by Tuesday.

In another case, Clinton was host at a September 2009 breakfast meeting at the New York Stock Exchange that listed Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman as one of the attendees. Schwarzman’s firm is a major Clinton Foundation donor, but he personally donates heavily to GOP candidates and causes. One day after the breakfast, according to Clinton emails, the State Department was working on a visa issue at Schwarzman’s request. In December that same year, Schwarzman’s wife, Christine, sat at Clinton’s table during the Kennedy Center Honors. Clinton also introduced Schwarzman, then chairman of the Kennedy Center, before he spoke.

Blackstone donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Eight Blackstone executives also gave between $375,000 and $800,000 to the foundation. And Blackstone’s charitable arm has pledged millions of dollars in commitments to three Clinton Global aid projects ranging from the U.S. to the Mideast. Blackstone officials did not make Schwarzman available for comment.

Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder. The meeting occurred before an announcement about a State Department partnership to raise money to finance AIDS education and prevention. The public-private partnership was formed to fight gender-based violence in South Africa, the State Department said at the time.

The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. That same year, the fund partnered with two other organizations to beef up a USAID program in Malawi and Ghana. And in 2011, the fund was one of eight organizations to pledge a total of $2 million over a three-year period to help girls in southern Africa. The fund has not made a commitment to CGI since 2011.

Estee Lauder executive Fabrizio Freda also met with Clinton at the same Wall Street event attended by Schwarzman. Later that month, Freda was on a list of attendees for a meeting between Clinton and a U.S.-China trade group. Estee Lauder has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. The company made a commitment to CGI in 2013 with four other organizations to help survivors of sexual slavery in Cambodia.

MAC AIDS officials did not make Mahon available to AP for comment.

When Clinton appeared before the U.S. Senate in early 2009 for her confirmation hearing as secretary of state, then- Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, questioned her at length about the foundation and potential conflicts of interest. His concerns were focused on foreign government donations, mostly to CGI. Lugar wanted more transparency than was ultimately agreed upon between the foundation and Obama’s transition team.

Now, Lugar hopes Hillary and Bill Clinton make a clean break from the foundation.

“The Clintons, as they approach the presidency, if they are successful, will have to work with their attorneys to make certain that rules of the road are drawn up to give confidence to them and the American public that there will not be favoritism,” Lugar said.

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