Final Report: How Latinos have Reshaped the Electoral Map

Posted on November 1, 2016November 1, 2016 by Denise Simon

Mexican-Americans Are Reshaping the Electoral Map In Arizona — And The U.S.

Irma Maldonado in her dorm room at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix.

All photographs by Caitlin O’Hara

PHOENIX — In an office suite not far from the airport, Irma Maldonado, 18, expertly role-played what she’d be doing on the city’s streets in half an hour: knocking on the doors of residents and exhorting them to vote. But not everything was a game. Before a group of young canvassers headed out for the day, a team leader at the community organizing group LUCHA mentioned that someone had earlier pulled a gun on two members of the team.

“Everything was OK,” the organizer said, but Maldonado and the 15 or so other teens and 20-somethings were given safety whistles before hitting the streets.

Maldonado has a personal stake in America’s immigration debate, which has been making headlines throughout the election, particularly because of Donald Trump’s description of Mexicans as rapists and his desire to have Mexico pay for a border wall.

“Before going into high school — it was the summer of 2012 — my mother decided to self-deport to Mexico” with her two youngest children, Maldonado said. Maldonado, who was born and grew up in New Mexico, had a hard time adjusting to life in Nayarit, Mexico, a small state on the Pacific coast north of Puerto Vallarta, especially given that she hadn’t known her family’s status. “I think it was right when we had to move when I actually realized that my mom wasn’t actually legal here in the United States, when I was 14 years old,” she said. Her father, who has a green card, continues to work in New Mexico; Maldonado now is a first-year nursing student and lives with her 23-year-old sister in Arizona. Her mother and brother remain in Mexico.

Mexican-Americans such as Maldonado may help determine the political future of Arizona — and the nation — in a landmark election year. In an August survey, respondents were asked if Trump and Clinton made their respective parties more welcoming or more hostile to Latinos. Nine percent of Mexican-Americans said Trump made the GOP more welcoming; 74 percent said he made it more hostile. By contrast, 59 percent said Clinton made the Democratic party more welcoming; 9 percent said more hostile. An October poll by Latino Decisions found that 17 percent of Latino voters nationwide said they support Trump or are leaning toward him; 70 percent supported Clinton.

In Arizona, a state long dominated by Republicans, Clinton and Trump are in a virtual tie, according to a Monmouth University Poll released last week. Latino voters, who make up a fifth of the state’s electorate, are supporting Clinton over Trump by 35 percentage points. And critical to the electoral vote, only 9 percent of Latino voters who support Trump are in battleground states. Overall, 13 percent of the eligible voters in battleground states are Latino.

Arizona “was this strong, powerful red,” said Pita Juarez, 29, the communications director for the One Arizona coalition, an umbrella group of 14 advocacy groups, including LUCHA, that is working to boost Latino voter turnout. “Just today, we saw on FiveThirtyEight … it’s a light blue. And that’s something that I thought, really, I would never see.” (Arizona has gone back and forth between light blue and light red in FiveThirtyEight’s forecast over the last few weeks. Currently, Trump has a slight edge in the state’s forecast.)

Gabriel Sanchez, a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico and a principal at the opinion research firm Latino Decisions, said Latinos are more enthusiastic about voting this year than in 2012, having been mobilized by Trump’s comments targeting Mexicans. He added that the Republican Party will have a hard time winning over Mexican-Americans in subsequent elections unless it supports comprehensive immigration reform.

Like black millennials, younger Latinos show much weaker enthusiasm for Clinton than their elders. According to the October GenForward survey, conducted over the first half of the month, 44 percent of Latinos ages 18-30 plan to vote for Clinton and 8 percent will vote for Trump, with 10 percent going to third-party candidates. Nineteen percent said they didn’t plan to vote, and 12 percent were undecided.¹GenForward, a survey by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, queries 18- to 30-year-olds and oversamples for Latino and nonwhite respondents, in this case with a total cohort of 1,832 respondents.

Irma Maldonado in math class and walking to her dorm room at Grand Canyon University.

Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center, said that much of the growth in the Latino electorate in coming years will be from U.S.-born Latinos entering adulthood. Like other cohorts of younger voters they tend to be more supportive of bigger government, in contrast to older Mexican-Americans, who are more likely to hold conservative views. “Mexican-Americans are more likely to be Catholic than other groups of Latinos,” he said. “They are also more likely to be third or higher generation than other U.S. Latino groups and as a result to have served in the military. Both of these characteristics correlate with conservative views on many issues.” He noted that George W. Bush won at least 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004.

Mexican-Americans constitute 63 percent of the 57 million U.S. Latinos. Some Mexican-Americans can trace their heritage in New Mexico and other regions later acquired as U.S. territory back to the 1600s and earlier, while others are recent immigrants. Of the 35.8 million people of Mexican descent in the U.S., 68 percent are native born, and more than a quarter of those born in Mexico have become U.S. citizens. Separate estimates from the Pew Research Center indicate there were 5.8 million unauthorized Mexican citizens in America in 2014, 52 percent of the total unauthorized immigrant population. The Census Bureau considers Latinos in the U.S. to be an ethnicity, not a race, and thus Latino respondents can also mark any or multiple races; about a quarter identify as Afro-Latino. But only 1 percent of the population of Mexico is Afro-Latino, according to a recent census in that nation, the first to count the category.²The Census surveys of the diverse Latino population continue to evolve. One experimental survey design for the 2020 Census avoids using the terms race and ethnicity in the phrasing of the question entirely.

Nationwide, 11 percent of eligible voters are Latino, but in Arizona, 22 percent of eligible voters are. The state is currently going through a fierce local battle involving Sheriff Joe Arpaio that is arguably fanning the fires of Latino voter turnout as much as the national election.

Arpaio is an outsize figure who has served as Maricopa County sheriff for 23 years; run jails where the men must wear pink underwear and striped uniforms; and organized citizen border patrols with actor Steven Seagal. Arpaio also has a December court date on a contempt charge for violating a 2011 injunction against stopping people on the suspicion that they were not in the country legally. (He alleges the prosecution is politically motivated because of his support for Trump.) And just one week from now, Arpaio faces perhaps an even bigger challenge: a re-election bid with polls showing him trailing his challenger by 15 points.

LUCHA’s canvassers are campaigning against Arpaio, and there are indications that his presence on the ballot is motivating new voters. In Maricopa County, Democratic voter rolls rose by 13 percent since 2012, according to figures released in August, compared to a 7.6 percent increase for Republicans. And many Latinos register as independents but lean Democratic.

Some of the young activists who are canvassing for LUCHA are undocumented, according to One Arizona’s Juarez, and in other areas around the country with significant Latino populations, immigrants who are not yet on a path to citizenship are playing a role in the political process. One of them is Yessica Vasquez Moctezuma, 25, a bank teller, who will graduate this fall with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has been in the United States for 19 years, which means she was undocumented until 2012, at which point an executive order qualified her for temporary but renewable DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status.

Vasquez Moctezuma is frank in her assessment of her family’s legal status, since her parents are not eligible for DACA and continue to work without documentation.

“We are breaking some laws just by being here illegally, but we bind to the laws here,” she said. “We pay our taxes every year, like any other citizen would.” She worries that her parents, who have paid into the Social Security system — which receives an estimated $12 billion a year from undocumented immigrants and their employers — will never receive benefits and will never be able to truly retire. Still, she said, “This is why I studied political science, because I love the government here. I feel like in so many ways it’s so great.”

For her part, Irma Maldonado said she is excited about voting in her first presidential election. After remaining undecided until early October, she decided to vote for Clinton. But she added, “Honestly, this election, a lot of people are not that pumped to vote. It’s really kind of sad.” The number of Mexican-American and Latino voters who show up on Nov. 8 could determine the outcome in her state, and possibly in the nation.

Illegals are Covered Under Obamacare, Words Matter

Posted on November 1, 2016November 1, 2016 by Denise Simon

7 Years ago, Barack Obama delivered a speech declaring that Obamacare would not insure those that are here illegally. Congressman Joe Wilson yelled, ‘you lie’. Well Joe Wilson was right all along, so he deserves the apology.

CRS: The degree to which foreign nationals (noncitizens/aliens)1 should be accorded access to certain benefits as a result of their presence in the United States, as well as the responsibilities of such persons given their legal status (e.g., immigrants, nonimmigrants, unauthorized aliens), often figures into policy discussions in Congress. These issues become particularly salient when Congress considers legislation to establish new immigration statuses or to create or modify benefit and entitlement programs.

The 111th Congress enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (P.L. 111-148), which has been amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-152) and several other bills. (ACA refers to P.L. 111-148 as amended by P.L. 111-152 and the other legislation.)2 The ACA created new responsibilities (e.g., the requirement that most people in the United States obtain health insurance) and new benefits (e.g., tax credits to help certain people purchase health insurance), and it addressed the eligibility and responsibility of foreign nationals for these provisions. One issue that has arisen during debates to amend provisions in the ACA and during discussions of immigration reform is the eligibility of foreign nationals for some of the ACA’s key provisions.

This report opens with a discussion of several different statutory and regulatory definitions of lawfully present. On the surface, alien eligibility for provisions under the ACA appears straightforward. In general, those who are lawfully present are eligible, and those who are not lawfully present are not eligible. However, due to differing definitions of “lawfully present” and the interaction between the treatment of noncitizens under tax law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the ACA, the eligibility of individuals with certain immigration statuses for these provisions can become more complicated.

This report then analyzes the eligibility of foreign nationals for key provisions in the ACA that have restrictions based on immigration status: the requirement to maintain health insurance, the ability to purchase insurance through an exchange, and eligibility for the premium tax credit and cost-sharing subsidies.3 It includes consideration of the implementing regulations and the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.4 This report concludes with information on the alien-status verification process.

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Treatment of Noncitizens Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)

The following section discusses alien eligibility for the following provisions under the ACA: the health insurance mandate, the exchanges (the Marketplace), and premium tax credits and cost-sharing subsidies. In general, aliens are separated into two groups for eligibility purposes under the ACA: aliens who are “lawfully present in the United States” are eligible for these provisions, while aliens who are not “lawfully present in the United States” are ineligible.

Definition of Lawfully Present

One of the complexities of alien eligibility for the ACA stems from the difficulty of defining who is considered lawfully present. The regulations implementing the ACA define lawfully present to include immigrants, asylees/refugees, nonimmigrants, and most other noncitizens who are known to the U.S. government and have been given some type of permission to remain temporarily in the United States. (For the full list, see Appendix A.) “Lawfully present” was first defined by regulation in this context for the purposes of eligibility for the high risk pools for uninsured people with pre-existing conditions.5 Since then, all regulations regarding the ACA have referenced that definition for the health insurance mandate, the exchanges, and the premium credit and cost-sharing subsidies.6 The definition of lawfully present for the ACA is identical to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) policy definition of “lawfully residing” for Medicaid and CHIP eligibility7 and is similar to the definition of “lawfully present” for Social Security eligibility.8

Nonetheless, “lawfully present” is not a term that is widely used within the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The INA divides foreign nationals into two general types of legal statuses for admission to the United States: immigrants and nonimmigrants. Under the INA, other aliens may have permission to be in the United States, but they do not have an immigration status. The term “lawfully present” in the INA is only defined in regards to noncitizen eligibility for Social Security.9 The INA also defines the term “unlawfully present” specifically for purposes of determining inadmissibility, but that definition is not equivalent to the definition of “lawfully present” for purposes of the ACA.

There are noncitizens who have temporary permission to remain in the Unites States under narrowly defined circumstances such as those with temporary protected status (TPS),11 withholding of removal,12 Deferred Enforced Departure,13 and parole14—often referred to as the “quasi-legal population.” This “quasi-legal” population is counted by researchers at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and at the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project—the two main entities that estimate the unauthorized alien population—as part of the unauthorized (illegal) population. Although these “quasi-legal” migrants comprise a small percentage of the total noncitizen population, most are considered “lawfully present” for the purposes of the ACA.15 (For a discussion of these estimates, see Appendix B, “Estimates of the Noncitizen Population in the United States.”)

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Tax Treatment of Noncitizens

For purposes of the ACA, understanding the U.S. income tax treatment of noncitizens may be important for several reasons, including that any noncitizen who is a nonresident alien—which is a tax law term—is not subject to the individual mandate.22 Also, some might be interested in understanding the tax liability of noncitizens in light of the fact that the IRS may face difficulty in enforcing the mandate against any taxpayer (citizen or resident alien) who does not receive a tax refund.

For federal tax purposes, foreign nationals are classified as resident or nonresident aliens.23 These terms are used in the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) but do not exist in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).24 As a result, the specific immigration statuses under the INA do not align directly with the terms resident and nonresident alien.25

In general, an individual is a nonresident alien unless he or she meets the qualifications under either residency test:

 Green card test: the individual is a lawful permanent resident of the United States at any time during the current year, or

 Substantial presence test: the individual is present in the United States for at least 31 days during the current year and at least 183 days during the current year and previous two years (counting all the qualifying days in the current year, one-third of the days in the prior year, and one-sixth of the days in the earliest year).

There are several situations in which an individual may be classified as a nonresident alien even though he or she meets the substantial presence test. For example, an individual will generally be treated as a nonresident alien if he or she has a closer connection to a foreign country than to the United States, maintains a “tax home” in the foreign country, and is in the United States for fewer than 183 days during the year.27 Another example is that an individual in the United States under an F-, J-, M-, or Q-visa—students, teachers, trainees, and cultural exchange visitors—may be treated as a nonresident alien if he or she has substantially complied with visa requirements.28 This treatment generally applies to foreign students (most foreign students are on F visas) for their first five years in the United States and to teachers and trainees for the first two years. (You can read the full report here if you can stand it.)

Russian Operations Inside the United States

Posted on November 1, 2016November 1, 2016 by Denise Simon

This site has posted countless articles on Russia clandestine operations around the world and the blueprint for what Putin’s ultimate objective may be. Putin not only affects the United States but the UK spy chief is declaring the same thing.

MI5 head: ‘increasingly aggressive’ Russia a growing threat to UK

Exclusive: In first newspaper interview given by a serving spy chief, Andrew Parker talks of terror, espionage and balance between secrecy and privacy

Andrew Parker said Russia was ‘using its whole range of state organs and powers to push its foreign policy abroad in increasingly aggressive ways’. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

Denial is a dangerous conditions and facts matter.

During the last months of the United States presidential campaigns, much has been investigated and written about how Moscow has injected itself into the process least of which is hacking….and the Kremlin does have global hacking operations without dispute.

Hillary and her team are targeting Donald Trump for his Russian connections and that is followed by Harry Reid saying the same. Intelligence briefings are given weekly to key members of Congress that have chairman positions on certain committees and Trump has been included in those. Two media outlets, Slate and the New York Times have provided some deep summaries of investigations between Trump and a Russian bank surrounding a server. White Hats performed these studies.

Then there is Hillary herself and at least two events for which she colluded with Russia. Secretary Clinton approved the Open Skies Treaty with Moscow but worse she was the marshal of the agreement with the Kremlin and an IT company called Skolkovo. This company is a high tech espionage operation. Due to WikiLeaks we cannot leave out Hillary chief campaign architect, John Podesta for his investments with Russian oligarchs.

Do we have such a short memory that we have deported countless Russian spies back to the motherland?

Brooklyn Resident And Two Russian Nationals Arrested In Connection With Scheme To Illegally Export Controlled Technology To Russia Defendants Used Brooklyn-Based Front Companies to Procure Sophisticated Military and Satellite Technology on Behalf of Russian End-Users

It must be noted with distinction that the FBI is the only agency that assigns agents to run covert operations to track foreign operatives. It is also noted that James Comey has stopped short of his own declaration as to whether Russia is involved in missions inside the United States when several other agencies have published statements that Russia has operations inside the United States. What Comey may be covering is a real time and ongoing mission to track and trace more than one case dealing with Russian intrusion and he does not want that cover blown. That is how it works.

Two U.S. Diplomats Drugged In St. Petersburg Last Year, Deepening Washington’s Concern

2015: FBI: We Busted A Russian Spy Ring In New York City

Ex-aide to Putin died of blunt force trauma at D.C. hotel, medical examiner says

Now, lets go back to Putin himself and the recent changes he has made to his own intelligence agencies, obviously we need reminders.

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Vladimir Putin resurrects the KGB

The new agency revives the name of Stalin’s secret police and will be larger and more powerful than today’s FSB.

By Owen Matthews

Politico/MOSCOW — Soon after he was first appointed prime minister back in 1999, Vladimir Putin joked to an audience of top intelligence officers that a group of undercover spies, dispatched to infiltrate the government, was “successfully fulfilling its task.”

It turns out Putin doesn’t do jokes. Over Putin’s years in power, not just the Kremlin but almost every branch of the Russian state has been taken over by old KGB men like himself.

Last week news broke that their resurgence is soon to be topped off with a final triumph — the resurrection of the old KGB itself. According to the Russian daily Kommersant, a major new reshuffle of Russia’s security agencies is under way that will unite the FSB (the main successor agency to the KGB) with Russia’s foreign intelligence service into a new super-agency called the Ministry of State Security — a report that, significantly, wasn’t denied by the Kremlin or the FSB itself.

The new agency, which revives the name of Stalin’s secret police between 1943 and 1953, will be as large and powerful as the old Soviet KGB, employing as many as 250,000 people.

The creation of the new Ministry of State Security represents a “victory for the party of the Chekists,” said Moscow security analyst Tatyana Stanovaya, referring to the first Bolshevik secret police. The important difference is that, at its core, the reshuffle marks Putin’s asserting his own personal authority over Russia’s security apparatus.

Putin, who in 2004 said that “there is no such thing as a former KGB man,” has always had a complicated relationship with the FSB.

On the one hand, Putin has allowed the FSB to absorb pieces of the old KGB, chopped off when Boris Yeltsin tried to dismantle the once all-powerful Soviet security apparatus in the early 1990s. Under Putin, the FSB regained control over Russia’s borders, border troops, and electronic intelligence gathering. At the same time, former KGB men began their takeover of every institution of state, as well as Russian businesses.

But at the same time, Putin has made several attempts to reform and control the FSB. In 2007 he put his close ally Viktor Cherkesov in charge of the Federal Anti-Drug Agency and tasked it with investigating the murky business dealings of top FSB officers. When Cherkesov’s clean-up failed, Putin built up another rival security agency, the Investigative Committee, and tasked it, rather than the FSB, with investigating high-profile political murders like those of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and opposition politician Boris Nemtsov.

“The aim in all cases seems to be to replace old-guard Putin allies with younger, more loyal and less independent figures.”

Now, however, Putin seems to have put that divide-and-rule policy into reverse and is instead consolidating power into a pair of super-agencies: the National Guard — created in July, that united internal security troops under the Kremlin’s control — and now the new Ministry of State Security. Putin will personally control these super-agencies.

“On the night of September 18 to 19 … the country went from authoritarian to totalitarian,” wrote former liberal Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov on his Facebook page.

Further evidence of Putin’s gathering of power into his own hands is an ongoing purge launched over the summer that has already claimed the heads of the Federal Narcotics Service, Federal Protection Service (Putin’s bodyguard), the Federal Migration Service and Russian Railways, as well as the president’s Chief of Staff and personal confidant Sergei Ivanov.

The aim in all cases seems to be to replace old-guard Putin allies with younger, more loyal and less independent figures. The same pattern has been repeated among regional governors — four of whom have recently been sacked, and two replaced by Putin’s personal bodyguards.

Protect the regime

The creation of the Ministry of State Security is part of a “project aimed at replacing old allies with new ones,” said independent Moscow-based analyst Stanislav Belkovsky. Putin “dislikes being surrounded by people who feel untouchable because of their personal closeness to him. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with his old friends, he wants people who can execute his will.”

He’s even selected a hatchet man — Sergei Korolev, head of the FSB’s economic security department — to prosecute and eliminate any independent voices in the new Security Ministry, said Belkovsky.

The deeper significance of all these purges and reshuffles goes beyond just Kremlinology. They are clear signs of a regime bracing for trouble. Ever since oil prices began to tumble in 2013, the Kremlin has been preparing for unrest and discontent — primarily with the help of distractions such as annexing Crimea and the campaign in Syria. But Putin is preparing an iron fist too.

“I can’t remember a time when so many security service guys ascended to power at once” — Dmitry Gudkov, State Duma

“The KGB, it should be remembered, was not a traditional security service in the Western sense — that is, an agency charged with protecting the interests of a country and its citizens,” wrote security analyst Andrei Soldatov, founder of the Agentura.Ru website. “Its primary task was protecting the regime. Its activities included hunting down spies and dissidents and supervising media, sports, and even the church. It ran operations both inside and outside the country but, in both spheres, the main task was always to protect the interests of whoever currently resided in the Kremlin.”

That’s precisely what the Kremlin needs today as inflation remains in double digits and Russian business remains cut off from international financial markets and investment by Western sanctions over Ukraine.

“I can’t remember a time when so many security service guys ascended to power at once,” Dmitry Gudkov, an independent State Duma deputy, wrote of the summer’s purges on his Facebook page. “We don’t know anything about these people’s management expertise. Preparing the guns for battle, closing ranks — this is what these appointments are all about. [The Kremlin] can’t trust anyone but those in uniform.”

‘Terminator 2’

And there’s a final, more personal reason for Putin’s purge and revival of the Ministry of State Security.

“In some ways, this is a sign of Putin’s strength, because he feels confident enough to full, personal, authoritarian rule,” said Belkovsky, who advised the Kremlin in the mid-2000s. “It’s also a sign of weakness because the reason behind it is to defuse the possibility of a palace coup.” Putin is a “man of systems and institutions” according to Belkovsky and, as such, knows his allies are also the greatest threats to his rule.

In creating the super ministry, Putin is completing a full 25-year circle. When Boris Yeltsin came to power in 1991 in the wake of a hardline coup against Mikhail Gorbachev largely sponsored by the KGB and its boss, Vladimir Kryuchkov, Russia’s new leader attempted to create a security agency that would not meddle in politics or society and confine itself strictly to law enforcement.

Yeltsin failed. According to Soldatov, by the mid-1990s “various component parts and functions of the old KGB had begun to make their way back to the FSK, like the liquid metal of the killer T-1000 android in “Terminator 2” … slowly reconstituting itself after having been blown to bits.”

Now those bits have finally coalesced into a full-fledged replica of the original — but with one important difference. The new Ministry of State Security has been designed specifically as a guarantor of Putin’s rule.

Whoever heads the new ministry will certainly be an important political player — but it’s clear that the true head of both the Russian state and its new, consolidated security organs will be Putin himself.

That hasn’t happened since the rule of Yuri Andropov, KGB head-turned general secretary between 1982-84. He presided over a collapse in oil prices, a war in Afghanistan designed to boost the regime’s popularity that quickly turned disastrous, and finally an accelerating economic crisis that no amount of repression or propaganda could prevent from snowballing into collapse and revolution.

Putin is hoping that this time round, harsher repression and smarter propaganda will save him from the same fate.

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Moscow Rules of Espionage Go Global—If You Think It’s KGB, It Is

As Russian spies play rough, ignoring Putin’s war against the West will only make it nastier

DoJ Just Entered the Huma Email Case and the Next Scandal

Posted on October 31, 2016October 31, 2016 by Denise Simon

John Podesta’s Best Friend At The DOJ Will Be In Charge Of The DOJ’s Probe Into Huma Abedin Emails

Zerohedge: Now that the FBI has obtained the needed warrant to start poring over the 650,000 or so emails uncovered in Anthony Weiner’s notebook, among which thousands of emails sent from Huma Abedin using Hillary Clinton’s personal server, moments ago the US Justice Department announced it is also joining the probe, and as AP reported moments ago, vowed to dedicate all needed resources to quickly review the over half a million emails in the Clinton case.

The Associated Press

✔ @AP

BREAKING: Justice Dept. says it’ll dedicate all needed resources to quickly review emails in Clinton case.

4:16 PM – 31 Oct 2016

In the letter to Congress, the DOJ writes that it “will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” assistant attorney General Peter J. Kadzik writes in letters to House and Senate lawmakers.

Just the Facts‏@JTF_News 3h3 hours ago

#BREAKING Senior DOJ official sends letter to lawmakers responding to request for more information about email review.

So far so good, even if one wonders just how active the DOJ will be in a case that has shown an unprecedented schism between the politically influenced Department of Justice and the FBI.

And yet, something felt odd about this.

Kadzik… Kadzik… where have we heard that name

Oh yes. Recall our post from last week, “Clinton Campaign Chair Had Dinner With Top DOJ Official One Day After Hillary’s Benghazi Hearing” in which we reported that John Podesta had dinner with one of the highest ranked DOJ officials the very day after Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony?

It was Peter Kadzik.

In other words, the best friend of John Podesta, Clinton’s Campaign char, at the DOJ will be in charge of a probe that could potentially sink Hillary Clinton.

For those who missed it, this is what we reported previously:

The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign chairman met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, who is currently a top official at the US Justice Department serving as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs.

The post-Benghazi dinner was attended by Podesta, Kadzik, superlobbyist Vincent Roberti and other well-placed Beltway fixtures. The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the Wikileaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant. The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just one day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.

Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows. Another email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.

As the Daily Caller noted, the dinner arrangement “is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices.” As one former U.S. Attorney tells told the DC, the exchanges are another example of the Clinton campaign’s “cozy relationship” with the Obama Justice Department.

The hacked emails confirm that Podesta and Kadzik were in frequent contact. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.

“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.

“It’s the kind of thing the American people are frustrated about is that the politically powerful have insider access and have these kind of relationships that ultimately appear to always break to the benefit of Hillary Clinton,” he added, comparing the Podesta-Kadzik meetings to the revelation that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met in private with Bill Clinton at the airport in Phoenix days before the FBI and DOJ investigating Hillary Clinton.

Kadzik’s role at the DOJ, where he started in 2013, is particularly notable Kadzik, as helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.

It gets better because, as we further revealed, if there is one person in the DOJ who is John Podesta’s, and thus the Clinton Foundation’s inside man, it is Peter Kadjik.

Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office. That history is cited by Podesta in another email hacked from his Gmail account. In a Sept. 2008 email, which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign. Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”

Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal. As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky. In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.

Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.

Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time. “He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe. Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.

Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.

Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon. To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001. A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”

The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon. On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon. She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.

Kadzik’s current role

In his current role as head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation. The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.

But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress. Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.

In a Feb. 1, 2016 letter in response to Kadzik, Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis noted that Kadzik had explained “that special counsel may be appointed at the discretion of the Attorney General when an investigation or prosecution by the Department of Justice would create a potential conflict of interest.”

DeSantis, a Republican, suggested that Lynch’s appointment by Bill Clinton in 1999 as U.S. Attorney in New York may be considered a conflict of interest. He also asserted that Obama’s political appointees — a list which includes Kadzik — “are being asked to impartially execute their respective duties as Department of Justice officials that may involve an investigation into the activities of the forerunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.”

It is unknown if Kadzik responded to DeSantis’ questions.

Kadzik’s first involvement in the Clinton email brouhaha came in a Sept. 24, 2015 response letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley in which he declined to confirm or deny whether the DOJ was investigating Clinton. Last month, Politico reported that Kadzik angered Republican lawmakers when, in a classified briefing, he declined to say whether Clinton aides who received DOJ immunity were required to cooperate with congressional probes.

Kadzik also testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the issue of classifications and redactions in the FBI’s files of the Clinton email investigation.

* * *

And now it seems that Kadjik will be in charge of the DOJ’s “probe” into Huma Abedin’s emails. Which is why we are a little skeptical the DOJ will find “anything” of note.

Peter Kadzik, with lobbyist Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta.

Terrifying Immigration Numbers, and Court Decision

Posted on October 31, 2016October 31, 2016 by Denise Simon

Hundreds of Migrants Pitch Tents on Paris Streets as Calais Camp Shuts

(REUTERS) – The number of migrants sleeping rough on the streets of Paris has risen by at least a third since the start of the week when the “Jungle” shanty town in Calais was evacuated, officials said on Friday.

Along the bustling boulevards and a canal in a northeastern corner of Paris, hundreds of tents have been pitched by migrants – mostly Africans who say they are from Sudan – with cardboard on the ground to try and insulate them from the autumn chill.

While the presence of migrants there is not new, it has grown substantially this week, Colombe Brossel, Paris deputy mayor in charge of security issues, told Reuters.

“We have seen a big increase since the start of the week. Last night, our teams counted 40 to 50 new tents there in two days,” Brossel said, adding there was now a total of 700 to 750.

This means there are some 2,000-2,500 sleeping in the area, up from around 1,500 a few days before, she said.

“It’s not a huge explosion in numbers but there is a clear increase,” she said. “Some of them come from Calais, others from other places.”

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty

After years as serving as an illegal base camp for migrants trying to get to Britain, the “Jungle” at Calais was finally bulldozed this week and the more than 6,000 residents of the ramshackle camp near the English channel were relocated to shelters around France. More here.

Sessions: ‘Critical alert,’ 817,740 illegals crossed last year

In a bid to put the issue of illegal immigration back into the presidential debate, outspoken critic Sen. Jeff Sessions on Monday issued a “Critical Alert” warning of a potentially historic surge of over the border.

“We are simply overwhelmed,” his statement said. In it he estimated the Fiscal Year 2016 illegal crossings at 817,740.

“There is a crisis at our southwest border — one that in many ways exceeds the crisis we saw just two years ago, one that further undermines the integrity of our immigration system, but one that the most of the media has elected to ignore,” said Sessions, an advisor to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is currently detaining more than 40,000 aliens, with internal predictions indicating that the number could reach 47,000 in the coming months.

In fiscal 2016, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 408,870 illegal aliens at the southern border; a number 23 percent higher than in fiscal 2015.

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, was quoted as saying just half of illegals are caught crossing the border.

Calculating illegal entries based on that formula, 408,870 illegal aliens evaded detection in fiscal 2016, for a total of approximately 817,740 illegal entries into the United States last year.

Sessions said the border crisis demands a new president and approach to reforming immigration starting with a closed border.

*****

In part from Breitbart: Border Patrol Agent and NBPC President Brandon Judd spoke exclusively with Breitbart Texas and condemned the leadership of the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), for allegedly “keeping this information secret” ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“We are at breaking point. We have the highest number of illegal aliens in custody in history in Border Patrol’s RGV Sector and this information has been kept from the American public,” said Agent Judd. “The talk of amnesty has once again created pull factors and encouraged people from all over the world to cross Mexico and then cross our porous southern border to illegally enter the U.S. We are simply overwhelmed.” (See CBP’s response below.)

Agent Judd told Breitbart Texas that Americans should vote their conscience, but they should do so with all of the information available. “This is an issue of the federal government restricting crucial information from the public ahead of a presidential election and it is unacceptable. Americans deserve to know the truth. Our Border Patrol agents deserve for Americans to know what they are really facing. Too many Border Patrol agents have given their lives and left loved ones to grieve for CBP leadership to play these types of political games ahead of such an impactful election.”

Agent Cabrera said CBP were in fact concealing the gravity of the current border crisis. “One side in this coming election is downplaying illegal immigration and concealing this information only serves to help that agenda,” said Agent Cabrera.

Breitbart Texas reached out to the RGV Sector PIO for the Border Patrol and did not receive a response, though not much time was given to the agency. (See update below. A strong denial of the agents’ claims was issued by CBP to Breitbart Texas after publication.)

Historically, CBP, Border Patrol’s parent agency, has had to correct false assertions and denials. Perhaps the most glaring example occurred in June 2014 when an official CBP Twitter account directly accused this reporter of publishing a false report, only to later admit the report was accurate and true.

CBP has released numbers indicating near-record apprehensions; however, the assertions from the agents in the NBPC pertain to people who illegally entered the U.S. and are currently in custody in Border Patrol facilities. Agent Judd stated, “There is a significant difference between apprehension numbers and numbers in custody in our facilities. These record numbers in custody indicate that these are people who are not voluntarily returning. This indicates that these people will, under current policy, be released into our communities and given amnesty. This record number of people currently in detention is significant because the RGV Sector is dealing with the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels. This means our agents are busy babysitting record numbers in facilities instead of patrolling the border and stopping these murderers, kidnappers, and drug smugglers.” More here.

*****

Judge rebukes administration over few admissions for Syrian Christian refugees

FNC: A federal judge has rebuked the Obama administration over the lack of Syrian Christians being admitted from the war-zone, calling it a “perplexing discrepancy” that only 56 of 11,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S. in fiscal 2016 were Christian.

The rebuke came in a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals opinion on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center – a liberal human rights group that advocates for immigrants and asylum-seekers — seeking information on certain terror groups.

As first reported by attorney and former FEC member Hans von Spakovsky for The Daily Signal, while the court found in favor of the government, Judge Daniel Manion addressed the refugee issue and took aim at the Obama administration over how few Christians had been admitted to the U.S.

“It is well‐documented that refugees to the United States are not representative of that war‐torn area of the world. Perhaps 10 percent of the population of Syria is Christian, and yet less than one‐half of one percent of Syrian refugees admitted to the United States this year are Christian,” he wrote.

According to government figures, of the almost 11,000 Syrian refugees admitted to the United States in fiscal 2016, only 56 were Christian.

RELATED: ‘GROSS INJUSTICE’: OF 10,000 SYRIAN REFUGEES TO THE US, 56 ARE CHRISTIAN

“To date, there has not been a good explanation for this perplexing discrepancy,” Manion noted.

The numbers are disproportionate to the Christian population in Syria, estimated last year by the U.S. government to make up roughly 10 percent of the population. Since the outbreak of civil war in 2011, it is estimated that between 500,000 and 1 million Christians have fled the country, while many have been targeted and slaughtered by the Islamic State.

Manion qualified his remarks by saying that his point “is not to suggest that any refugee group is more or less welcome: quite the contrary” but warned the Obama administration against failing to provide states with enough data on the people coming in.

In the case, the NIJC was requesting the identities of Tier III terrorist organizations, which are not publicly available. The administration argued that Tier III terrorist organizations “tend to be groups about which the U.S. government does not have good intelligence, making it essential that [DHS] be able to obtain information about them during screening interviews that are as focused and complete as possible.”

Manion noted that potential ties to a Tier III organization like a Christian militia may be why the government is not letting in as many Christians, but that it was impossible to tell since the information is not publicly available.

“It is at least possible that incidental affiliation with some Christian militia could lead an immigration officer to deny entry to Syrians on this basis. That would be a dubious consequence,” he wrote.

A State Department spokesperson told FoxNews.com in September that religion was only one of many factors used in determining a refugee’s eligibility to enter the United States.