Ban the AR-15….heh….right Val Gal…. This is a White House full of ahem….experts that think AR stands for Automatic Rifle…sheesh…The Federal ‘Assault’ Weapons ban happened in 1994.
Valerie Jarrett’s war on guns
Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security
Exemptions and Waivers Rubber Stamped in DC
Anyone remember Richard Windsor…ooops Lisa Jackson at the EPA? By the way, lil miss Lisa is a Board member of the Clinton Foundation.
Jeh Johnson granted special waiver on first day of official ban.
Practice Continued Even After Clinton Email Revelations.
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today announced it obtained 693 pages of Department of Homeland Security records revealing that Secretary Jeh Johnson and 28 other agency officials used government computers to access personal web-based email accounts despite an agency-wide ban due to heightened security concerns. The documents also reveal that Homeland Security officials misled Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) when Perry specifically asked whether personal accounts were being used for official government business.
The records were obtained in response to a February 2016 court order by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia following a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:15-cv-01772)).
The Judicial Watch lawsuit was filed in October 2015 after the Department of Homeland Security failed to comply with a July 2015 FOIA request seeking the following:
- All requests (in any form) submitted by senior DHS officials for waivers to use personal Web-based email accounts on government-owned computers.
- Copies of all waivers granted to senior DHS officials to use personal Web-based email accounts on government-owned computers.
Judicial Watch sought the documents following a Bloomberg News report revealing that 29 high-level Homeland Security officials, including Johnson, obtained exemptions from a February 2014 agency-wide ban on the use of web-based email systems due to increased security concerns. The waivers were granted despite security officials’ warning of the risks of malicious attacks and data exfiltration from webmail use.
Included among the records is a February 19, 2014 memorandum from security officials at the Department of Homeland Security strongly warning: “According to the Office of the Chief Information Officer, access to webmail using DHS networks is responsible for almost half of all attempts to compromise DHS network security.” The memo explains that webmail use resulted in 14 Trojan-Horse attacks in August 2013 and 25 attacks in December 2013 on Homeland Security computer networks.
As a result, in the same memo, Department of Homeland Security officials imposed a total ban on employee use of web-based email systems:
New restrictions are being implemented that will no longer allow employee access to personal webmail sites from government computers [Emphasis added]. This action is being taken to strengthen cybersecurity and enhance protection of the Department’s computer networks. Effective tonight, access to webmail sites like AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, Gmail, Yahoo, and other email services will be prohibited.
The records reveal that despite this strict prohibition, Johnson was given an exemption from the ban on the first day of its implementation simply because he liked to check his personal email from the office everyday. In an April 7, 2014 email, DHS Deputy Director for Scheduling and Protocol Mary Ellen Brown wrote to DHS Chief of Staff for the Under Secretary for Management Vincent Micone: “Hi Vince – I wanted to flag that S1 [Secretary Johnson] accesses his [redacted] account every day and I didn’t know if we could add his computer to the waiver list? Let us know at your convenience. Thanks! ME”
Micone responds several minutes later: “ME, This will be done… no problem. Thanks, Vince”
The documents also reveal that on April 29, 2014, Connie LaRossa, then- director of legislative affairs for Homeland Security, was granted a waiver to use her web-based email account for official government business. The justification LaRossa used for requesting access to Yahoo email was that some congressional staffers wanted to send her “political information” that they “do not want to transmit via government mail.”
Despite LaRossa’s waiver, in an April 7, 2014, seems to contradict answers prepared Rep. Scott Perry in response to his query about the use of personal email accounts for official business, Homeland Security explicitly denied it was being done. In one question, Rep. Perry asked: “Are DHS officials permitted to maintain private email accounts that are used to conduct official business? If so, who and under what circumstances?”
Homeland Security officially responded: “To date, no requests have been approved to use a private email account for official business.”
Others Homeland Security officials included among those receiving waivers permitting them to use personal, web-based email on government computers despite the official ban included:
ANMS2 [Alejandro N. Mayorkas, deputy secretary]
Bunnell, Stevan E. [general counsel]
Chavez, Richard [director of the Office of Operations Coordination]
Gottfried, Jordan [Chief of Staff]
JCJ [Jeh Charles Johnson, secretary of Homeland Security]
Kronisch, Matthew [associate general counsel (Intelligence)]
Marrone, Christian [chief of staff]
Meyer, Jonathan [deputy general counsel]
Rosen, Paul [deputy chief of staff]
Shahoulian, David [deputy general counsel]
Silvers, Robert [deputy chief of staff]
Taylor, Francis X [undersecretary for intelligence and analysis]
Veitch, Alenandra [acting deputy assistant secretary]
Waters, Erin [director of strategic communication]The use of personal email accounts on Homeland Security computers continued for more than a year after the official ban was put in place in April 2014, until July 2015 – over four months after revelations about Hillary Clinton’s controversial email practices. In a July 20, 2015 email, Luke McCormack, then-Chief Information Officer of the Justice Department, ordered Jeanne Etzel, Executive Director of Homeland Security’s Next Generation Program, to “pull down” the personal “webmail” email accounts of the 29 Department of Homeland Security executives previously approved to use personal email accounts, except for that of Secretary Jeh Johnson [“S1”].
McCormack ordered this at the “DUSM’s direction.” (Deputy Undersecretary for Management, Charles Fulghum.) This order came the same day a Bloomberg story was published regarding Homeland Security officials’ “bending the rules” on personal email use on government computers. The next day, Secretary Johnson’s webmail access also was blocked.
“Jeh Johnson and top officials at Homeland Security put the nation’s security at risk by using personal email despite significant security issues,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And we know now security rules were bent and broken to allow many these top Homeland officials to use ‘personal’ emails to conduct government business. This new Obama administration email scandal is just getting started. If the waivers were appropriate, then they wouldn’t have been dropped like a hot potato as soon as they were discovered by the media.”
Obama’s Retribution Against Florida, Orlando Terror Attack
Shameful…yet this administration knows no shame. Reprehensible….
FEMA denies request for emergency declaration following Pulse shooting
OrlandoSentinel: A request to the federal government to declare an emergency for the state of Florida following the Pulse nightclub shooting was denied today, according to statement from Gov. Rick Scott‘s office.
“Because your request did not demonstrate how the emergency response associated with this situation is beyond the capability of the State and affected local governments… your request for an emergency declaration is denied,” W. Craig Fugate, administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in a letter to Scott.
On Twitter, Scott called the denial “disappointing” and “unthinkable.”
If grated, the formal declaration of emergency would have made available $5 million in federal funding.
Scott said the money would have been used to cover the expense of provisions for health and safety measures and managing, controlling and reducing the immediate threat to public health and safety.
“It is incredibly disappointing that the Obama Administration denied our request for an Emergency Declaration,” Scott said on Twitter. “It is unthinkable that (the president) does not define the Orlando terror attack, the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, as an emergency.
“We’re committing every state resource possible to help the victims and the community heal and we expect the same from the federal government.”
Scott’s office has 30 days to appeal the denial.
Despite the denial, the federal government will allocate $253,000 to pay for overtime for the first responders who assisted the victims of the Pulse shooting, Scott’s office said.
Here is One That Should Have Received a Visa, But…
The US Army offers its Afghan translators the right to request the Special Immigration Visa (SIV). It’s a program initiated by the US to help certain foreign employees leave their home countries and get on a path to permanent residency in the states—usually for protection from groups like the Taliban. For the last four years, the program has been renewed in the National Defense Authorization Act. This year, however, both the House of Representatives and the Senate failed to vote for the allocation of more visas, which could imperil remaining applicants.
Through that program, Muhammad, a former US Army translator in Afghanistan that I met in the port of Piraeus, Greece, should already be in the US. But like several other forgotten Afghan translators who served the United States, his visa has not come through. After being laid off by his army base in 2014, Muhammad fell into a bureaucratic gap between the United States’ promises to its employees in Afghanistan, and its rocky attempt to withdraw from the country.
Muhammad applied for the SIV in 2014. He was rejected in May 2015. According to the rejection email, his application was ruled invalid on the grounds of “Lack of faithful and valuable service.” Muhammad says that’s because he was fired—but not for lack of faithfulness or value. 2014 was simply the year that the Obama administration started closing army bases, in an early phase of withdrawal from Afghanistan. With fewer bases and fewer troops, fewer translators were needed. Muhammad was downsized by government contractor Mission Essential.
So in January 2016, he decided to make a go of it on his own. He paid $5,500 in smuggling fees to be trafficked from Afghanistan to Iran, from Iran to Turkey, and then from Turkey to Greece. By the time he arrived in the port of Piraeus in March, the 22-year-old’s life had been reduced to the phone in his pocket, the clothes on his back, and a sheaf of papers from his job with the United States Army.
His service and his perfect English together, in theory, put him in a better position than most refugees, but because he is Afghan, he isn’t even eligible for any of the expedited European relocation measures that the Syrian and Iraqi refugees sheltering in the port can claim.
Today he lives in limbo in a tent outside the port’s E1 terminal, where he can watch the Greek ferries come and go, bearing tourists to their summer holidays.
A life-threatening profession
Muhammad says that he was well aware his job translating between US and Afghan forces in the city of Khost came with a death sentence from Taliban insurgents, who oppose the current government and US intervention. He never told anyone, not even his family, what he did for a living.
“I was trying to keep a low profile,” he says, sitting cross-legged next to a ship bollard in the port. He forks a clump of rice from crinkled plastic tray on the ground in front of him. If anyone asked about his work in Afghanistan, he says, he told them he was going to school. These days, he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen.
In an Oct. 2014 episode of Last Week Tonight, US comedian John Oliver highlighted the bureaucratic nightmare that Iraqi and Afghan translators have to deal with in applying for an SIV—and the US system’s inability to take into account individual circumstances and dangers. One Afghan translator interviewed by Oliver had to wait three years and four months between applying for his SIV and arriving in the United States. In that time, the Taliban killed his father and kidnapped his younger brother.
In April 2016, Muhammad met someone who nearly met a similar fate: another former Afghan translator for the US army named Ahmad. Until Jan. this year, 25-year-old Ahmad worked for the US army in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Knowing the dangers of his job, he applied for his SIV in 2014, but the paperwork moved slowly. He went back to work on the base.
In Dec. 2015, Ahmad’s family in Kabul received a letter from the Taliban, which threatened to kill his parents if he kept working for American troops. The next month, in January 2016, Ahmad decided he could not wait for a visa any longer, and decided to flee Afghanistan with his younger brother. They paid smugglers nearly $11,000, and got as far as Piraeus. Like Muhammad, the two brothers now camp in the port. Ahmad has not yet tried to restart his visa application process.
The SIV process has five basic steps, which include several phases of petition and permission before actually applying for the visa. The State Department estimates that this entire process takes 357 business days—but clearly, it can also take much longer.
“The single biggest cause for delay is security checks,” says Betsy Fisher, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), which provides legal assistance to refugees. A puzzling problem, considering that anyone who has worked as a translator on a US army base in a conflict zone, has already undergone extensive security checks, including periodic polygraph tests.
Those who make it to the United States…
With patience, some Afghan translators do make it to the United States. Hamed, who asked to go by his first name only, is a former translator who worked for the US Army in the provinces of Khost and Paktika between 2010 and 2015. He began his SIV application in 2012. His application was approved the next year, but he did not receive his visa until early 2015. Luckily, he and his family survived the wait.
“I told them I want to leave as quick as possible,” Hamed told Quartz about the sense of urgency he felt after multiple threats due to his work for the Army. When he got word one night that he was finally cleared to leave, he says, he was so overcome with joy that he couldn’t sleep. In May 2015, he and his family boarded a plane to the United States.
But their departure has not had an entirely happy ending. In Afghanistan, Hamed’s wife was in her last semester of law school in Afghanistan, but they left before she could finish. Hamed has a degree in information technology, but in Woodbridge, Virginia, where they now reside, he has only been able to find a job in fast food.
…and those who don’t
Today, fewer than 4,000 SIV visas are still available, according to Fisher. Roughly 10,000 SIV applicants are currently waiting for a decision.
With the Balkan route that saw a million refugees work their way into Europe in 2015 effectively shut down, Muhammad and Ahmad’s only options are to wait, apply for asylum in Greece, or go home again. Asylum in Greece is not an option, says Muhammad. “This is not a country which can bear refugees,” he says of its record-high unemployment and the economically paralyzing effects of austerity. “Greeks already have too many problems.”
Despite being stonewalled by US immigration authorities, he carries with him at all times proof of his years of army service: copies of letters of recommendation from two sergeants he worked for, as well as certificates commending his work—just in case they might come in handy.
“I have no idea what to do,” he says.
What the DoJ Wont Tell you About Mateen’s Father
IPTNews: by Abha Shankar
The father of Orlando mass shooter Omar Mateen has longstanding connections to prominent Islamist groups in the U.S., a document discovered by the Investigative Project on Terrorism shows. Seddique Matin is listed as president of a then-new American Muslim Alliance (AMA) chapter in Fort Pierce in a July 1997 announcement archived by the IPT.
The AMA sponsored several radical conferences in the U.S. and its leader, Agha Saeed, has spoken in defense of convicted terrorists, including Aafia Siddiqui (a.k.a “Lady al-Qaida”), Palestinian Islamic Jihad board member Sami Al-Arian, and Pakistani intelligence lobbyist Ghulam Nabi Fai.
The Fort Pierce chapter is among 10 new AMA chapters opened, the announcement in an AMA bulletin says.
AMA was incorporated as a nonprofit organization in California in 1994 “to educate the Muslim community and others on the history and laws of the United States and on affirmative participation in civic activities on a non-partisan basis.” AMA’s political activist wing, the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council (AMPCC), includes leading Islamist organizations in the U.S. including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and the American Muslim Council (AMC).
AMA no longer exists as a registered nonprofit and it last filed tax returns in 2010. But the organization continues to maintain an active Facebook account. In its posts, the AMA refuses to consider any Islamist motivation for the attack and lays the blame for Omar Mateen’s massacre which killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub solely on the country’s lax gun laws.
The organization has a history of working with radical Islamist groups and has issued statements in support of several terrorists later convicted in the U.S. The FBI cut off outreach communication with CAIR, for example, after uncovering evidence placing the organization and its leaders in a U.S.-based Hamas-support network.
In October 2000, AMA co-sponsored a rally in Washington’s Lafayette Park where AMC’s then-executive director Abdurahman Alamoudi announced his support for Hamas and Hizballah.
In 2004, Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years in prison for illegal financial dealings with Libya. He also confessed to taking part in a Libyan plot to assassinate then-crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
In 2003, Saeed testified on Al-Arian’s behalf, describing the man who ran “the active arm” of Palestinian Islamic Jihad as “my friend and during the last ten years we have worked together to mainstream American politics. We have worked together to replace the culture of despair with culture of hope and the culture of bullet with the culture of ballot.” AMA’s website also featured a section entitled “Valiant Civil Rights Struggle of Dr. Sami Al Arian.”
Saeed also penned an op-ed along with CAIR’s then-national board chairman Parvez Ahmed that called for Al-Arian’s release from prison during a subsequent contempt case. The op-ed criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts claiming “the saga of Dr. Sami Al-Arian is a repeat of past incidents in American history in which our government targeted individuals using unconstitutional and un-American tactics.”
Saeed advocated “armed resistance” at a 1999 Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) in Chicago: “United Nations has a resolution…which says… people in Palestine have the right to resist their oppression by using all means including armed resistance….” Saeed was featured as a guest speaker at Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) conventions. Evidence unearthed in a Hamas-financing trial in Dallas, showed IAP served as a propaganda machine for the terrorist group in the U.S.
At AMA’s 7th Annual National Convention in October 2002, Agha Saeed indirectly blamed the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks. Osama bin Laden was contemptible, he said. “But I would like to say very respectfully, who brought Osama bin Laden from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan? Who gave him million[s] of dollars? Who trained him in [the] science of war, death and destruction, deception and deceit? Who gave protection to his cause and diplomatic coverage to his enterprise? Was it not President Reagan, when he had to see mujahideen at the White House, he said, ‘When I meet you I feel as if I am in the company of the founding fathers of this country?'”
Years after working with AMA and its Islamist allies, the senior Mateen, who hosts the Durand Jirga Show from California on the YouTube channel Payam-e-Afghan, has been reported to be an ideological supporter of the Taliban. He can be seen in one video declaring his candidacy for the Afghan presidency. In another video, Mateen can be seen praising the Afghan Taliban and referring to the terrorist group as “our warrior brothers,” the Washington Post reports.
While little information is known about Seddique Mateen’s work with the AMA, the 1997 newsletter shows the Orlando shooter’s father has worked for years with some of the most visible and radical Islamists in the United States.