Category Archives: Clinton Fraud

Hillary, State of State and the Foundation

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One has to wonder how retired Admiral Kirby, the State Department spokesperson is gonna spin all the mess noted below.

Hillary Clinton last month signed a certification of all emails being turned over and back to the State Department. Now there is a signature and possible perjury condition.

Are the phone calls flying to the White House demanding ‘executive privilege’ for Hillary and her team?

In part from the DailyCaller and good research team: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official diplomatic business created many national security problems, but they may pale by comparison with the wreckage she left behind in her department’s main digital information security office.

Harold W. Geisel, the State Department’s acting Inspector General, issued eight scathing audits and investigation reports during Clinton’s tenure, repeatedly warning about worsening problems and growing security weaknesses within the Bureau of Information Resource Management, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.

Geisel’s critical comments about the deficiencies throughout IRM carry additional weight since he was not considered an “independent” IG.  Watchdog groups noted Geisel had served as a U.S. Ambassador for Hillary’s husband, President Clinton, and had never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

In fact, President Obama did not nominate an IG to the State Department during Clinton’s entire term. It was only in September 2013 that the Senate finally confirmed Geisel’s successor, Steve Linick, who currently occupies the the post.

After Clinton left the State Department in 2013, Linick quickly undertook remedial action to save the IRM. Barely two months after his Senate confirmation, he issued a “management alert” to State Department leadership, warning that IRM’s languishing security deficiencies since 2010 were still there.

“The department has yet to report externally on or correct many of the existing significant deficiencies, thereby leading to continuing undue risk in the management of information,” Linick said.

A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not respond Sunday to a request for comment.

Clinton put Bryan Pagliano, her 2008 presidential campaign IT director, in the IRM in early 2009 as a “strategic advisor” who reported to the department’s deputy chief information officer. Pagliano had no prior national security experience or a national security clearance.

The seriousness of Clinton’s failure was summarized in a 2012 audit that warned, “the weakened security controls could adversely affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information and information systems” used by U.S. officials around the world.

Geisel’s July 2013 inspection report issued after Clinton’s departure was so damning that the IRM became the butt of caustic comments throughout the IT world.

Network World, an IT review site, for example, headlined one of its articles on the issue with “FAIL: Your Tax Dollars at Play: the US State Department’s Bureau of Information of Resource Mis-Management.” The article charged that the IRM had become “a total joke.”

Another news outlet told its readers that the editors would “like to be able to tell you what the IRM does, but a new report from the Office of Inspector General concludes that it doesn’t really do anything.”

IRM “is evidently an aimless, over-funded LAN party with no real boss or reason to exist,” concluded reporter Jordan Brochette when the 2013 IG report was released.

Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, reviewed the IG reports for DCNF and concluded that “State’s IT security record is littered with questionable management, insecure systems, poor contract oversight, and inadequate training. The State IG’s reviews show a pattern of significant deficiencies and few, if any, corrections.”

Geisel issued his first audit of IRM in November 2009, eight months into Clinton’s term. It also was the first audit issued after Pagliano arrived at the bureau. Geisel identified many serious IT security deficiencies that year. Unfortunately, most of the problems would continue to be uncorrected throughout Clinton’s term.

One troubling observation early in Clinton’s secretaryship was that the IG found the State Department and even embassy chiefs of mission suffering from a lack of IT security training, including the lack of “security awareness training.”

The lack of IT security awareness by top State Department officials may partly explain why Clinton and her top aides saw no problems with the use of a personal email server. (RELATED: Fmr. CIA Head: Hillary’s Email Server Was Compromised By Foreign Intel Services)

Geisel also warned in late 2009 that at the IRM, he found “there were no Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for managing IT-related security weaknesses.”

In an audit about IRM in February 2010, the IG reviewed how well IRM officials were implementing Secretary Rice’s 2007 modernization and consolidation progam.

It was in this 2010 audit that the first hints emerged of poor management at the IRM. Geisel concluded the bureau’s leadership failed to satisfy vulnerable IRM field staff deployed at embassies and consulates.  He called them IRM’s “customers.”

The IG “found a significant level of customer dissatisfaction among bureaus about the quality and timeliness of IT services after consolidation.”

In November 2010 Geisel issued yet another warning about shortcomings within IRM. In this report, the IG repeated that IRM “needed to make significant improvements” to address “security weaknesses,”

Once again, he emphasized that IRM had failed in providing mandatory “security awareness training” to all top security personnel. He also noted a failure to require all contractors to undergo mandatory security authorization.

“The department did not identify all employees who had significant security responsibilities and provide specialized training,” the IG charged.

The IG discovered other worrisome problems in 2010. It found officials failed to provide corrective patches for security problems in a third of the cases examined by his office. The IG also pointed to more than 1,000 “guest” IT accounts within the department’s IT systems that could provide entry paths for hackers.

Geisel further reported that the IRM had 8,000 unused email accounts and that department officials never changed the passwords on 600 active email embassy and consulate accounts.

There were also “24 of 25 Windows systems tested [that] were not compliant with the security configuration guidance.”

The damning IG reports continued in July 2011 when Geisel detailed serious problems afflicting a new IRM program called eDiplomacy that Clinton unveiled earlier that year.

Geisel was blunt: “eDiplomacy lacks a clear, agreed-upon mission statement that defines key goals and objectives. With the absence of performance measurement process, management has few means to evaluate, control, budget, and measure the success of its projects.”

Geisel painted an alarmingly negative assessment in a November 2011 audit on the IRM’s overall information security program. Specific details were redacted but the report warned for the first time of “additional security breaches,” saying “we identified weaknesses that significantly impact the information security program controls. If these control weaknesses are exploited, the department could be exposed to additional security breaches. Collectively, these control weaknesses represent a significant deficiency.”

If the breaches weren’t quickly fixed, the consequences would be harmful to “the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information and information systems.” Complete summary here.

*** Then there is the Clinton Foundation and the proven interaction of the State Department with the Clinton Charity:

Clinton Aide Shared Classified Information With Foundation, Email Shows

Cheryl Mills sent information marked ‘confidential’ to Clinton Foundation in 2012

FreeBeacon: A member of Hillary Clinton’s staff at the Department of State emailed classified information about the government in Congo to a staffer at the Clinton Foundation in 2012, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, sent the email to the Clinton Foundation’s foreign policy director, Amitabh Desai, on July 12, 2012.

The message, which was originally obtained by the group Citizens United through a public records request, is partially redacted because it includes “foreign government information” that has been classified as “Confidential” by the State Department.

Although the information was not marked classified by the State Department until this past summer, intelligence sources tell the Free Beacon that it would have been classified at the time Mills sent it because “foreign government information” is considered classified from inception.

The message could add to concerns from congressional and FBI investigators about whether former Secretary Clinton and her aides mishandled classified information while at the State Department.

The email, which discussed the relationship between the governments in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, was originally drafted by Johnnie Carson, the State Department’s assistant secretary for African affairs, who sent it to Mills’ State Department email address.

Mills later forwarded the full message to Desai along with “talking points for Presient [sic] Clinton” shortly before Bill Clinton was scheduled to visit the region.

About half of the forwarded message was redacted due to its classified nature before the State Department released it to Citizens United last month. Although it is not clear what the redacted section includes, the State Department said in a court motion filed last week that it “concerns both foreign government information and critical aspects of U.S. foreign relations, including U.S. foreign activities carried out by officials of the U.S. Government.”

The State Department added that the “disclosure of this information has the potential to damage and inject friction into our bilateral relationship with African countries whose cooperation is important to U.S. national security.”

The Clinton Foundation and the State Department did not respond to request for comment about the email, or say whether Desai—a non-government employee who has worked at the foundation since 2007—would have been authorized to view “Confidential” information.

Mills currently sits on the board of the Clinton Foundation. She previously served on the board until a month after she joined the State Department in 2009.

An attorney for Mills said that she never knowingly transmitted classified information, and would presume that any information sent to her unclassified State Department email address—as opposed to through the department’s secure email system—was unclassified.

“When a subject matter sent the information on the unclassified system, [Mills] presumed it was unclassified,” said the attorney. ”She never knowingly transmitted classified information.”

Mills’ spokesperson also disputed the notion that the information would have been classified when it was sent. The attorney said that some information is not deemed classified until it is transmitted outside of the State Department.

“Information that is considered unclassified when discussed inside the State Department can later be deemed classified when it is being released outside of the Department,” said the attorney.

Intelligence experts have told the Free Beacon and other media outlets that “foreign government information” is one of the few categories of information that is automatically presumed classified from the time the U.S. government receives it, because it is so diplomatically sensitive.

Foreign government information is “born classified,” J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. Information Security Oversight Office, told Reuters in August.

The controversy over Clinton’s use of a private email server while at the State Department has been dogging her presidential bid since it was first revealed by the New York Times earlier this spring.

The Democratic frontrunner has turned over many of her emails in response to a State Department request and congressional inquiries. However, she has said that any emails that were deemed “personal” were deleted from her server.

The FBI is currently attempting to recover the deleted emails as part of an investigation into her server, according to reports.

Clinton declined to say whether the FBI investigation could uncover additional damaging revelations, during an interview with Chuck Todd of Meet the Press on Sunday.

“All I can tell you is that when my attorneys conducted this exhaustive process [of deleting personal emails], I did not participate,” said Clinton.

Clinton is scheduled to testify before Congress on the email issue in October.

Citizens United president David Bossie said the latest news reveals the ways in which the Clintons’s various interests intersect.

“The tangled web that is Clinton, Inc.—the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, and Teneo—is coming more and more into focus every day. Classified information moving from the State Department to the Clinton Foundation is extremely problematic—we’ll see if there’s a pattern here,” Bossie said.

 

 

 

Obama Admin uses Corrupt Brookings Inst. as Foreign Lobby

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There is some questionable history of the Brookings Institute:

Brookings had a cameo role in the Watergate saga. President Nixon reportedly told aides to rifle through the office of Brookings fellow Leslie Gelb, who had been a Department of Defense analyst with Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times and the Washington Post. One version of events says the break-in was foiled when a Brookings security guard, Roderick Warrick, stopped two men with attaché cases who were trying to sneak into the building on a summer evening in 1971. Additionally, the President of Brookings and a board member is Strobe Talbott. 

Stobe has an interesting history that includes Russian spies, a long friendship with the Clintons and…. Bill Clinton and Strobe Talbott;
 The former president lived with the former deputy secretary of state and journalist when Clinton was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University.

talbott clinton

Disclosure: Brookings Takes Millions from Foreign Governments
Documents reveal contributions from Qatar, UAE

FreeBeacon, Adam Kredo: The Brookings Institution, one of the country’s top left-leaning think tanks, has for the first time admitted to Congress that it receives millions of dollars every year from foreign governments, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, according to official disclosure forms obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The disclosure of these figures comes as a result of a recently implemented federal law mandating that those who testify before Congress reveal any potential conflicts created as a result of funding by foreign entities.

Brookings has come under intense scrutiny by reporters and others for not fully disclosing the large amounts of cash it receives from Middle Eastern governments.

The practice has led some to accuse Brookings and its most prominent scholars of pushing biased analyses aimed at making these foreign governments look good. The think tank’s relationship with Qatar has received particular attention due to the Middle Eastern country’s close relationship with the terrorist group Hamas and its ongoing funding of various terrorist entities.

The disclosure form, which is presented to Congress before an individual testifies, reveals that Brookings received nearly $15 million from the Embassy of Qatar between 2013 and 2015. Brookings also maintains a facility in the Qatari capital of Doha, where Hamas is known to operate freely.

The think tank received another $1,920,000 from the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates between those same years.

Several million dollars also have been donated over those years by the Norwegian and Swedish governments. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) also donated more than $250,000 to Brookings.

These disclosures came as a result of a Sept. 17 congressional hearing at which Suzanne Maloney, a Brookings senior fellow, offered testimony on Iran’s relationship with the terrorist group Hezbollah.

The forms further reveal that, in addition to the millions in foreign donations, Brookings has received federal grants.

Both the foreign donations and federal grants “were for independent research and analysis related to an number of subject matters,” according to Maloney. A “portion” of these funds may have been “related to the hearing,” which discussed the ways in which Hezbollah stands to profit from Iran in the wake of the recent nuclear deal.

When questioned about the foreign donations by the New York Times last year, Martin Indyk, a Brookings scholar who has also worked with the Obama administration, defended the practice and maintained that it does not bias his views.

“Our business is to influence policy with scholarly, independent research, based on objective criteria, and to be policy-relevant, we need to engage policy makers,” said Indyk, who reportedly received a $14.8 million check from Qatar.

Many experts have refuted Indyk’s claim and accused Brookings and Indyk of ignoring a clear conflict of interest.

“When an American think tank like Brookings accepts money from Middle Eastern regimes that sharply restrict free speech, it is saying it doesn’t care that its scholarship on the Middle East might at least appear to be compromised,” said Lee Smith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who has reported on Brookings’ funding. “It is saying it doesn’t care that there is at least the appearance if not the reality of a very obvious conflict of interest.”

This appearance of a conflict became acute when Indyk was selected by the Obama administration to mediate peace between Israel and the Palestinians, Smith said.

“The problem was further compounded when the Obama White House named Martin Indyk to serve as envoy to a peace process between two actors, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, that are both at war with Hamas—a terrorist organization that, like Brookings, is funded by Qatar,” Smith said. “That neither Indyk nor Brookings nor the White House ever saw this as a conflict of interest is evidence of an arrogance beyond compare.”

Josh Block, CEO of the Israel Project, said the new disclosure rules are necessary for transparency.

“The reason we supported this rule change is because the American people deserve to know what foreign governments are paying to influence U.S. policy by funding these ‘independent experts’ to the tune of millions of dollars—especially countries like Russia or Qatar with  long, sordid records of mischief or supporting terrorism against Americans and our allies and of rank hostility toward Israel,” Block said.

“Until now, the potential foreign financial conflicts of interests and the motives of those funding the experts testifying was totally hidden from view,” Block said. “This kind of transparency is good governance. We applaud those in Congress who adopted this rule for matters of foreign affairs and national security and would like to see its expanded use in other committees in both the House and Senate.”

Brookings did not respond to a request for comment on its foreign funding.

Why No Search Warrant for Hillary’s Mobile Devices?

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The revelation that Hillary had her own email server was a shocker. Then the forced and scheduled production of those emails was another shocker as they were produced. The Trey Gowdy House Benghazi Committee being stonewalled by the Clinton camp and by the State Department was another shocker as compared with Hillary’s own false pledges of cooperation. Several outside organizations have been forced to file FOIA requests and then were forced to file lawsuits for production of those FOIA requests. This is coupled with the subpoenas from the Gowdy commission.

We hear about the server and the emails, but to date, it seems any request for search warrants has been nil. We cannot overlook the fact that Hillary also had and may still have 3 mobile devices, a Blackberry, and iPhone and an iPad. What about the electronic data on those devices or the meta-data trail to either back up the server data or perhaps in addition to that cache the FBI is investigating?

To date, the general conclusion is the FBI is protecting Hillary at the behest of the Justice Department, which hardly seems to be the case. The FBI has assigned their ‘A’ team to this mission and they have a multi-track objective that includes global cyber- espionage, hacking and a meticulous investigation to determine just how many laws were broken beyond the scope of the one or two prevailing violations of protecting classified material. It must be mentioned here that the FBI was also a recipient from the normal intelligence distribution list, so the FBI has their own record of transmissions that went to Hillary and other intelligence or national security personnel.

It would also be a good time as well to include the fact that the Chinese hacked the Office of Personnel management and was able to capture files of all security clearance employees which included Hillary. It is estimate that the OPM hack was determined to have occurred in June of 2014, a year or so after Hillary left her position as Secretary of State, but that OPM hack date is an estimate. Further the depths of the stolen electronic files are still being realized and those numbers are growing exponentially. Were they other known foreign hacks the FBI has open case files on, beyond the OPM intrusion?

This is an important and perhaps a top concern for the FBI, the NSA and associated cyber agencies to determine other possible foreign hacks into Hillary’s electronic files and those of her inner circle personnel. This could in fact be the single reason why the White House or the Obama National Security Council has chosen to defer answers and comments on the Hillary server-gate scandal to either the Department of Justice or the FBI. There is a high probability of a deeper and more threatening security condition of classified material. There could be the likelihood of other cyber intrusions being investigated by the FBI that have not been made public for which Hillary and her team may have been victims.

Anyway, this is hardly a matter that will be solved soon, yet it is a sure bet that almost daily more will bubble to the surface. Meanwhile, Politico has published a fairly good summary as to why Hillary and her lawyers are white knuckled and in panic mode at this moment.

One also cannot omit the entire notion that violations on behalf of Hillary, Bill, Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and others at the Clinton Foundation or at the State Department could add to the building nightmares for those mentioned or for the Hillary legal team headed by David Kendall. Mixing government business with a private and global foundation where big big money moved back and forth could be the cherry on the banana split for this building scandal.

Hillary’s FBI nightmare

If the feds have Clinton’s personal emails, too, some of them are bound to come out — exactly as she feared.

The next question in the Hillary Clinton email matter is who will force the FBI to release any documents it may have retrieved from the 2016 presidential candidate’s homemade server — Congress or the courts?

The answer: A federal judge may decide to get aggressive and order the law enforcement agency to turn over any newly discovered records or at least preserve them pending further court action. But don’t expect congressional subpoenas to fly — or FBI director James Comey to get hauled to Capitol Hill anytime soon.

Key congressional committees investigating Clinton’s emails argue that the courts are better suited to force the release of federal documents. One GOP source familiar with the investigations said a congressional committee could “theoretically subpoena the FBI” to demand the contents of Clinton’s server, but judges are likely to wade into the issue first.

“I think the court is better positioned right now because of where the cases are in litigation,” the source said.

Court action, however, depends on the aggressiveness of federal judges who are now managing more than 30 Freedom of Information Act cases involving emails on accounts maintained by Clinton or her top aides.

The FBI has already rebuffed one judge’s effort to obtain messages the agency has recovered from Clinton’s server, prompting a stinging attack from Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

On Wednesday, key members of Capitol Hill expressed reluctance to dive in after a report surfaced that the FBI has successfully retrieved messages left on Clinton’s server. The FBI declined to confirm the Bloomberg report Wednesday.

House Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy — a former federal prosecutor — made clear through a spokesman that he has no intention to cross swords with the FBI.

“Chairman Gowdy has not asked the FBI about its investigation into Secretary Clinton’s unusual and unprecedented email arrangement, nor has the Bureau offered a briefing to the committee,” Benghazi panel spokesman Jamal Ware said.

“The chairman believes the FBI is the nation’s premier law enforcement agency and he is not willing to comment on its ongoing investigation into the mishandling of classified information in connection with Secretary Clinton’s server.”

Grassley said he was concerned by anonymous leaks cited in the Bloomberg story, noting that the FBI has not responded to congressional inquiries about the investigation.

“You know it is getting a little absurd when someone at the Justice Department is apparently leaking details to the press about an investigation that the department officially refuses to admit to Congress that it is conducting,” Grassley said.

“In light of the details reported in the media, the committee will be seeking more information about the State Department’s attempts to regain possession of the email records that should have remained at the State Department in the first place. The FBI should also provide clarity on how it will handle the emails now that they have been recovered from the server.”

Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he was “hopeful” that the results of the FBI inquiry will be made public. He promised to press his own inquiry but offered no specifics.

Regardless of what Congress decides to do, Hillary Clinton’s decision to have a tech firm she hired turn the server over to the FBI last month at its request greatly raises the potential that messages she has claimed to be private will eventually make it into the public domain, lawyers tracking the case said. Clinton has said that she had tens of thousands of emails deleted after determining that they contained personal information, but now the FBI appears to have at least some of those in its possession.

“This is enormously significant,” said Dan Metcalfe, a former top Justice Department official handling disclosure issues. “It’s one thing for the bureau to have taken control of the server itself, and when you add to that their technical capabilities to glean information from it, if there is information there that transcends what [Clinton] furnished to State, I think the odds are exceedingly high that that at least some if not all of that information will ultimately enter the public domain.”

While State and the National Archives have determined that about 1,500 of the 30,000 emails Clinton turned over last December are entirely personal records, that determination won’t render those messages or others entirely and indefinitely off limits under the Freedom of Information Act if they turn up in the FBI’s files after being extracted from Clinton’s server, Metcalfe said.

“Those are no longer merely personal records,” said Metcalfe, a former director of Justice’s Office of Information & Privacy who now teaches law at American University. “Anything that the bureau pulls off that server, old messages, new messages, Hillary’s allegedly personal messages, Hillary’s admittedly official records is now an agency record of the bureau’s law enforcement activities.”

Metcalfe said those records could be withheld by the FBI, but once its investigation ends, the documents would have to be processed if requested. That could lead to messages State viewed as entirely personal being published at least in part, he added.

Meanwhile, action continues in the courts. On Monday, the FBI turned down U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan’s invitation to explain where its investigation stands. The response led Grassley to blast the FBI for “behaving like it’s above the law.”

Sullivan has not yet signaled what other steps he will take, if any. The plaintiff in the case, the conservative group Judicial Watch, could ask the judge to issue a subpoena to the FBI for relevant records. It would be an unusual step and likely lead to legal fireworks.

“A subpoena served upon the FBI will be resisted by the U.S. attorney’s office,” predicted former federal magistrate John Facciola.

At a hearing earlier this month in another case, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton seemed uncomfortable with the idea that Clinton and her attorneys had the final call in determining that over 31,000 emails from her private account were purely personal.

“We’re not sure exactly what type of evaluation was made of that 31,000 messages,” the judge said.

Clinton’s lawyers have argued that government employees generally have the right to determine whether emails or other records are personal and delete them. The Justice Department backed Clinton — to a point — in a recent legal brief, while stopping short of saying that a former government employee such as Clinton has the right to independently make such a determination nearly two years after leaving the government.

Walton said the scenario that played out doesn’t really fit others the courts have previously addressed.

“This is sort of a unique situation,” the judge said. “The State Department never had possession of these records.”

Still, not all judges may be interested in delving into any Clinton files now in the possession of the FBI, particularly if it appears Congress is punting the issue to the courts.

“Congress has different and more powerful ways to obtain information from the State Department than a FOIA plaintiff,” Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in an order Monday rejecting one group’s arguments that it needed prompt access to Clinton-related emails to aid Congress in getting to the bottom of the Benghazi attacks.

Another challenge for Congress is that it could be disturbing precedent by trying to bring in an outside party to verify that Clinton has turned over all her official emails or even those relevant to the Benghazi attacks. Usually, the recipient of a subpoena turns over what he or she deems responsive, not a broader set of records for someone else to review. “The way we’ve always had is a process of self-production,” Facciola said.

In cases involving search warrants for electronic records, courts have sometimes appointed magistrates to go through the records and sift out what law enforcement really needs. But the question these days is more often about how the computer that does the sorting should be programmed and who gets to decide that.

“That’s the real battle going on,” Facciola said. “Oftentimes, the technicians who create these programs don’t even agree on one methodology. … How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?”

 

 

 

 

 

October 6 & 22, Benghazi Cmte, Popcorn Buttered?

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More emails surface in Hillary Clinton Benghazi probe

Politico: More previously-undisclosed State Department emails related to Benghazi have surfaced in a federal court filing, offering a public accounting of at least some of the records still being sought by congressional investigators.

The filing Monday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Citizens United describes about a dozen Benghazi-related emails that were withheld in whole or in part as State responded to one of the group’s requests seeking information about contacts between a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and officials with the Clinton Foundation.
Most of the documents also appear to have been withheld from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is investigating State’s response to the attack. The committee is scheduled to take public testimony from Clinton on Oct. 22.

A panel spokesman said he could not immediately confirm which of the documents had been turned over to the committee, but Citizens United President David Bossie told reporters staffers at the House panel told the group State never produced the records to Congress.

“To the best of their knowledge, the do not have these documents either, even though they are under subpoena for an extended period of time,” Bossie told reporters outside U.S. District Court in Washington after a hearing on the suit.

State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach told POLITICO there is no effort to impede congressional probes.

“The Department has made every effort to cooperate with the Benghazi Committee, providing 32 witnesses for interviews and over 70,000 pages of documents, including over 20,000 pages in the last month alone,” Gerlach said. “We will continue to respond to the Benghazi Committee’s requests, but as they mount and modify over time, so too must we plan accordingly for the time and resources they consume.”

In the new court filing, State Department official John Hackett said nearly all the Benghazi-related emails involved in the FOIA lawsuit involve deliberations among State officials about how to respond to Benghazi-related congressional inquiries.

In several high profile cases, including the ill-fated Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning investigation, the Obama Administration has defended its right to keep confidential its internal discussions about House and Senate investigations. The administration has also sought to extend that confidentiality to cover responses to media inquiries prompted by congressional probes.

In June, while producing records to congressional committees, the State Department confirmed it was holding back some Benghazi documents.

“A small number of documents implicate important Executive Branch institutional interests and are therefore not included in this production,” Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affiairs Anna Frifield wrote in a letter to the House Benghazi panel.

However, House staffers said the diplomatic agency has repeatedly rebuffed requests for a log of documents State is withholding. The FOIA lawsuits provide a vehicle to force the agency to identify those emails, although the substance of the messages is not disclosed.

At the court hearing Tuesday, a federal judge pressed the State Department to move more quickly to process documents requested by Citizens United and others who have been demanding records relating to Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state .

“I think there has to be some reallocation of resources, because these are atypical cases,” U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said. “This case is important to the public. The public is clamoring for information. Everyone is clamoring for information.”

After Sullivan derided State’s approach as “business as usual,” Justice Department attorney Elizabeth Shapiro insisted that State’s 63.5-member FOIA processing staff has been working long hours and weekends in “demoralizing” conditions to publish emails from Clinton’s account as well as records sought in about 100 pending FOIA lawsuits and thousands of pending FOIA requests.
“I just want to assure the court that it’s not business as usual,” Shapiro declared. “The State Department’s being crushed by obligations.”

Much of the hearing was spent discussing why the State Department failed to complete searches of emails provided by former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin by a court-ordered deadline of September 13.

Sullivan seemed to waver on how culpable State was for delays, sometimes suggesting that the agency had to wait for the cooperation of its former employees and at other points suggesting that State was being sluggish.

The judge initially attributed the delay to “foot-dragging” by Mills and Abedin in response to requests from their former agency. However, he quickly withdrew that accusation.
“So, there was foot-dragging on their part–well, there was delay. I can’t say there was foot-dragging,” Sullivan said.

Justice Department attorney Caroline Anderson insisted that the State Department was only obliged to produce records in its possession at the time the search began, so records turned over later by Mills and Abedin were not technically covered by the FOIA requests filed last year for records of contacts between top Clinton aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a private consulting firm with connections to former President Bill Clinton.

“The State Department is in compliance with every order of this court,” Anderson said.

Anderson proposed that State have until December 9 to locate and process relevant records from Mills’ and Abedin’s accounts, but eventually said it was just “the State Department’s hope” to get it done by then. That seemed to irritate Sullivan.

“How long does it take you to run a computer search?” the judge asked. “Someone pushes a button. I’m not minimizing it, but it’s a computer search.”

Citizens United attorney Matthew McGill insisted that State knew or should have known weeks ago if it was going to have trouble meeting the deadline. “They should have come to the court then….Instead, they waited,” McGill said. “That was a tactical decision on their part. It was meant to delay.”

Anderson asked that State have a month to finish the computer-based searches and then more time to review the content of the documents for sensitive national security information and other details subject to withholding. But the judge said a shorter timeline was necessary.

Sullivan ordered State to finish the searches by October 2 and set a hearing four days later.

Bossie said State’s sluggish response was part and parcel of an effort to benefit Clinton’s Democratic presidential bid by kicking the issue down the road.

“Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills have taken the specific strategy and tactics just like they did in the 90s–the same people the same strategies–to drag these efforts out, to drag out congressional committees, to frustrate justice and to frustrate the American people from getting information so that people ask questions like: ‘This has been going on for three years and don’t we know everything and isn’t this a rehash?” the conservative activist said. “That is their deliberate strategy. They’ve been doing this for 20 years…..the same Clinton playbook is played over and over and over again.”

Clinton campaign spokesmen and attorneys for Abedin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mills’s lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, called Bossie’s claim of deliberate delay “untrue.”

 

 

 

 

 

Hey Vegas, Seen this Clintonista at a Casino Lately?

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Primer:

Charlie Trie’s and Ng Lap Seng’s Laundered Contributions to the DNC Introduction
Former Little Rock, Arkansas, restaurateur Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie and Macau-based businessman Ng Lap Seng collaborated in a scheme to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign funds to the DNC. Ng wired over one million dollars from accounts he maintains in Macau and Hong Kong to accounts maintained by or accessible to Trie in Little Rock and Washington, D.C. Although Trie held himself out as an international trader (and, in fact, actively sought to develop an international trading business he called Daihatsu International Trading Corporation), he was never successful. Trie’s bank records and tax returns reveal that he received little or no income from sources other than Ng Lap Seng.
Although he failed to establish a successful, income-generating international trading business, Trie, his wife and his businesses managed to contribute a total of $220,000 to the DNC between 1994 and 1996. Trie and Ng also reimbursed the contributions made by a number of other DNC contributors who were recruited by Trie in order to further disguise the ultimate source of the contributions. As Trie earned little money through his own business activities, the Committee concludes that Trie used the foreign-source funds wired from Ng to make his (and his wife’s and businesses’) DNC contributions and to reimburse the conduit contributors. The Justice Department indicted Trie for these illegal activities on January 28, 1998. More here.

Over this past weekend:

Chinese Businessman Arrested For Sneaking $4.5M in Cash into US

Previously accused of illegally funneling money to DNC in ’Donorgate’

FreeBeacon: A Chinese businessman accused of illegally funneling foreign money to the Democratic National Committee ahead of Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996 has been arrested for sneaking upwards of $4.5 million into the United States.

The New York Post reported that 68-year-old Ng Lap Seng, a real estate developer, and interpreter Jeff Yin were arrested Saturday for smuggling millions in cash from China to U.S. airports over two years, Manhattan federal court records indicate.

Ng smuggled the total of more than $4.5 million in cash into the U.S. over roughly 10 trips between China and the states between 2013 and 2015, according to the criminal complaint.

The businessman and his interpreter were scooped up by authorities after they told Customs and Border Patrol that the $400,000 in cash they had on hand was for gambling and purchasing paintings and then brought the money to Queens, N.Y.

It is unclear what has happened to the rest of the money.

Though never ultimately charged, Ng played a role in the “Donorgate” scandal before the 1996 elections that resulted in Clinton ally Charlie Trie pleading guilty to violating campaign finance laws in 1999.

Ng transferred approximately $1.4 million to Trie, also a Chinese businessman, who then gave the funds to the DNC before Bill Clinton’s reelection.