Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway

Phoenix: The DHS Madness/Corruption Continues

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In January of this year, this site published an article about Serco and the DHS government contractor mentioned in this piece below has an interesting relationship with Serco. The scandal centered in the United Kingdom. But read on, it is business as usual for the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS Quietly Moving, Releasing Vanloads of Illegal Aliens Away from Border

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents, Border Patrol sources tell Judicial Watch. The government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road.
OTM6-2016The OTMs are from Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala and Border Patrol officials say this week’s batch was in custody for a couple of days and ordered to call family members in the U.S. so they could purchase a bus ticket for their upcoming trip from Phoenix. Authorities didn’t bother checking the identity of the U.S. relatives or if they’re in the country legally, according to a Border Patrol official directly involved in the matter. American taxpayers pick up the fare for those who claim to have a “credible fear,” Border Patrol sources told JW. None of the OTMs were issued official court appearance documents, but were told to “promise” they’d show up for a hearing when notified, said federal agents with firsthand knowledge of the operation.

 

A security company contracted by the U.S. government is driving the OTMs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector where they were in custody to Phoenix, sources said. The firm is called G4S and claims to be the world’s leading security solutions group with operations in more than 100 countries and 610,000 employees. G4S has more than 50,000 employees in the U.S. and its domestic headquarters is in Jupiter, Florida.

Judicial Watch is filing a number of public records requests to get more information involving the arrangement between G4S and the government, specifically the transport of illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to other parts of the country. The photo accompanying this story shows the uniformed G4S guard that transported the OTMs this week from Tucson to Phoenix.

Related reading: G4S Corruption Globally

Outraged Border Patrol agents and supervisors on the front lines say illegal immigrants are being released in droves because there’s no room to keep them in detention. “They’re telling us to put them on a bus and let them go,” said one law enforcement official in Arizona. “Just move those bodies across the country.” Officially, DHS denies this is occurring and in fact earlier this year U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske blasted Border Patrol union officials for denouncing this dangerous catch-and-release policy. Kerlikowske’s scolding came in response to the congressional testimony of Bandon Judd, chief of the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union that represents line agents. Judd told lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee that illegal immigrants without serious criminal convictions can be released immediately and disappear into the shadows. Kerlikowske shot back, telling a separate congressional committee: “I would not stand by if the Border Patrol was — releasing people without going through all of the formalities.”OTM6-2016-2

Yet, that’s exactly what’s occurring. This report, part of an ongoing Judicial Watch investigation into the security risks along the southern border, features only a snippet of a much broader crisis in which illegal aliens are being released and vanishing into unsuspecting American communities. The Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest addressed this issue just a few weeks ago in a hearing called Declining Deportations and Increasing Criminal Alien Releases – The Lawless Immigration Policies of the Obama Administration. Judd, the Border Patrol Union chief, delivered alarming figures at the hearing. He estimated that about 80% of apprehended illegal immigrants are released into the United States. This includes unaccompanied minors who are escorted to their final destination, family units and those who claim to have a credible fear of persecution in their native country. Single males that aren’t actually seen crossing into the U.S. by Border Patrol agents are released if they claim to have been in the country since 2014, Judd added.

***** G4S:

G4S supports the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CPB), with its operations at the U.S. Mexico border and with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to transport illegal immigrants in selected urban areas. Annually, our G4S fortified buses log millions of miles and transport hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, while freeing up front line CPB and ICE personnel for other essential services.

Related reading: G4S Website and the scandal of the CEO.

 

Damn Hillary, What the Heck?

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So exactly how does the Hillary team and all her Democrat friends keep defending this? Maybe some questions need to be asked what violations of the Espionage Act is in their respective history.

What does Dianne Feinstein know? Are they emails between George and Amal Clooney and Hillary?

Off the shelf encryption software, unprotected mobile phone calls, text messages on foreign communications networks, and then has anyone asked if she shredded the hardcopies she always asked to be printed and delivered to her personally?

Hillary Clinton posted and shared the names of concealed U.S. intelligence officials on her unprotected email system.

Breitbart: Federal records reveal that Clinton swapped these highly classified names on an email account that was vulnerable to attack and was breached repeatedly by Russia-linked hacker attempts. These new revelations — reminiscent of the Valerie Plame scandal during George W. Bush’s tenure — could give FBI investigators the evidence they need to make a case that Clinton violated the Espionage Act by mishandling national defense information through “gross negligence.”

Numerous names cited in Clinton’s emails have been redacted in State Department email releases with the classification code “B3 CIA PERS/ORG,” a highly specialized classification that means the information, if released, would violate the Central Intelligence Act of 1949.

The State Department produced a document to Judicial Watch in April 2014 that identifies different types of “(b)(3)” redactions, including “CIA PERS/ORG,” which it defines as information “Specifically exempted from disclosure by statute … Central Intelligence Act of 1949.”

“That’s what it suggests,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Breitbart News, referring to the indication that Clinton disclosed the names of CIA-protected intelligence sources, based on the B3 redactions.

The CIA justifies “(b)(3)” redactions with this description: “(b)(3) Applies to the Director’s statutory obligations to protect from disclosure intelligence sources and methods, as well as the organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency, in accord with the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949, respectively.”

The State Department declined to comment. “Per the colleague who handles this issue, we are not speaking to the content of emails,” State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson told Breitbart News.

 

Here are some examples of (b)(3) redactions;

Naming the defense attaché in Malta

On October 16, 2011, recent U.S. Ambassador to Malta Douglas Kmiec sent an email to Cheryl Mills with the subject line “TIME SENSITIVE AND CONFIDENTIAL – Malta Trip Backgrounder for the Secretary – Confidential.”

Kmiec wrote to Mills, “I know from current events that your life must be a whirlwind. I know that if there ever was someone who could tame the whirlwind, it would be you. Just read the news report of the Secretary’s stop in Malta next week. Thank you for arranging this. This letter and the accompanying clips I believe will help make the Secretary’s visit a highly successful and well received one.”

In the memo, Kmiec revealed the name of a top defense attaché in the country. That name was later classified by the State Department with three different classifications: 1.4 (D) to connote “Foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources,” B1 to connote “Information specifically authorized by an executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy,” and “B3 CIA PERS/ORG.”

“The largest part of our US team in the embassy is the navy/coast guard/ ncis contingent that has established a Maritime training program with the AFM to good success. The defense attaché there now is new [REDACTED] beloved and hardworking – and to good effect, patrolling the waters and the ports for [illegible] traffickers and terror related figures,” Kmiec wrote.

Mills forwarded the memo directly to Clinton’s private email account at clintonemail.com with the note “Fyi background.”

Clinton replied to Mills and CC’ed Huma Abedin with the confidential information, writing, “I need enough time there to meet. Hague is there today and doing all the right meetings. So, I’m copying Huma to reinforce my desire to squeeze more out of a too quick trip.”

When he sent the memo to Mills, Douglas Kmiec had been out of his Ambassador to Malta job for several months. Kmiec was a big supporter of President Obama. He garnered criticism in a 2011 inspector general report for ignoring directives from Washington and for spending too much time writing articles about religion.

Naming the guest in her office 

On December 15, 2011, Clinton’s office manager Claire Coleman sent out Clinton’s daily schedule to Clinton’s private email account and to Abedin and others.

The schedule included a five-minute Presidential Daily Briefing in the Secretary’s office between 8:35 AM and 8:40 AM.

“Note: Official Photo following w/ [Redacted]” the schedule read, blanking out the name of the person who Clinton was taking a photo with. That redaction was marked “B3 CIA PERS/ORG” in addition to other redactions.

Clinton’s public schedule released for that day begins at 9 AM, after the classified photo op.

Petraeus’ chief of staff

On March 14, 2012, a redacted name sent Cheryl Mills an email with the subject line “URGENT — From Dave Petraeus’s Chief of Staff…”

The sender’s name was marked with a “B3” redaction to connote violation of the CIA statute.

“Dear Cheryl,” the email began, followed by a vast section of redacted material. Those paragraphs were marked with several classifications including “B3 CIA PERS/ORG.”

The email’s closing paragraphs were also marked with B3 redactions.

“Does all of that sound ok to you?” the message continued. “If so, may I please ask you to get word around immediately [B3 Redaction] only in those circumstances where he deems that to be appropriate and the best way forward? Thanks much and cheers, [B3 Redaction].”

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

On September 15, 2012, a B3 redacted name sent an email to Jake Sullivan numerous redacted names with a redacted subject line, most of text redacted, “Per the discussion at Deputies, here are the revised TPs for HPSCI [The Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence].”

The email was later forwarded to Clinton, who told an aide, “PLs print.”

“Iran Insights”

On September 2, 2009, Jackie Newmyer of Long Term Strategy Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts sent an email directly to Clinton’s private account with the subject line “Iran Insights From [Redacted]” that included the B3 redaction code:

Secretary Clinton,

Last week I traveled to Israel [REDACTED] in an Iran-related seminar and simulation exercise with the IDF general who is likely to become Israel’s next chief of military intelligence and his team and, separately, [REDACTED]. Yesterday, [REDACTED] Iran workshop in Washington involving DoD and think tank experts. Despite the fact that the meetings were with defense [REDACTED] personnel, there was universal sentiment that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be counterproductive, on the one hand, and that incremental measures would be perceived by Iran as an indication of weakness, on the other.

The email included sensitive information including the following:

If Iran acquires a nuclear capability, no single American/allied countermeasure will be adequate. Something like the “flexible response” posture from the Cold War will be required, necessitating a range of actions from enhancing the US deterrent presence — nuclear submarines carrying ballistic missiles in the Arabian Sea — to bolstering regional actors’ defenses.

Israeli leaders should be able to contain the damage to the Israeli population’s morale from an Iranian bomb, but this will require careful management of public statements. There is a tension between building up support for action against the Iranian nuclear program now and delivering the kind of reassurance that will be necessary once the capability has been acquired.

Clinton replied that she would like to discuss the matter with Jackie.

Jackie replied:

I will be in Washington for a day-long meeting on Thursday this week [B3 REDACTED] and my travel plans are flexible, so I could meet you any time on Wednesday afternoon, after 5 pm on Thursday, or any time on Friday morning. If those times do not work, I would be happy to come down at your convenience.

Clinton and Jake Sullivan then set up a meeting with Jackie.

Naming someone at the ‘Pre-Brief’

On November 11, 2011, Clinton’s special assistant Lona J. Valmoro sent an email directly to Clinton’s private email address with the subject line “Pre-Brief.”

Valmoro wrote:

“MS — Kurt said that he has no reservations about Toria joining the pre-brief so I will confirm.

The manifest for the meeting will be:

Kurt Campbell

Jake Sullivan

Evan Mederios, NSS

Admiral Willard

Kin Moy

Toria Nuland

[REDACTED] per Kurt’s request”

That last name on the list was redacted with “B6” and also “B3 CIA PERS/ORG” classifications.

‘See Traffic’

On March 14, 2012, Mills sent an email to then-U.S. Ambassador to Algeria Henry Ensher with the subject line “Connecting.”

“I hope your visit to DC is going well,” Mills said before writing a chunk of text that is redacted with 1.4 (D), B1, and also “B3 CIA PERS/ORG” redactions.

Mills’ redacted text clearly included a name because she then wrote, “B/f I could respond w/our protocol he advised that the matter had been resolved. Can you advise as to what accommodation was worked out?”

Ensher replied, “Sorry. Had not seen this until en route back to post. Accommodation was to have elizabeth go to a dinner meeting, but not the next day session with senior counterpart. Bare objectives of visit were achieved but we blew an opportunity to make the larger point about civ control of mil, which is critical in dealing with algerian leaders.”

Ensher’s next paragraph is redacted with 1.4 (D), B1, and also the “B3 CIA PERS/ORG” redactions.

“Good work on com conf. Thx,” Ensher concluded.

After sending another email to Ensher, Mills forwarded the chain to Clinton’s private email account and said “See traffic.”

The departing diplomat

On December 12, 2011, Mills sent an email to Clinton’s private email account with the subject line “FW: Thank you for your time today.”

“[REDACTED] last day is Thursday,” Mills wrote, adding that “Lona” would arrange a photograph for the man with Clinton and his daughter and asking Clinton for feedback on the employee. The redacted portion had a B6 and a “B3 CIA PERS/ORG” redaction.

“He did a good job,” Clinton replied.

The Taliban

On March 25, 2012, Jake Sullivan forwarded to Clinton’s private email address a chain involving a meeting involving Pakistan and the Taliban that had a “B3 CIA PERS/ORG” redaction in it. The subject line was “Fw: MG-Z in Dushanbe.”

Hill testimony

On January 23, 2013, Mills forwarded to Clinton’s private email address a transcript of Clinton’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with the subject line “Fw: Testimony as Prepared for Delivery to SFRC & HFAC.”

The chain included an email that a person with a redacted name sent to Mills saying, “You know, she’s pretty damned good.”

The chain also included an email that Mills sent with the transcript to various people including White House adviser Ben Rhodes and various individuals with redacted names, including two people whose names are blotted out with “B3 CIA PERS/ORG” redactions.

CC’s

On July 25, 2010, Jake Sullivan forwarded Clinton a long email chain with the subject line “Fw: Digest from NyTimes and Guardian [Full E-Mail List].”

The highly redacted email chain was at one point forwarded to “[Full E-Mail List]” and includes on multiple occasions an individual whose name is blotted out with a “B3 CIA PERS/ORG” redaction.

The Silent Heroes in Iraq, Saving the Girls

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(CNN)The bidding opens at $9,000. For sale? A Yazidi girl.

She is said to be beautiful, hardworking, and a virgin. She’s also just 11 years old.
 
This advertisement — a screengrab from an online marketplace used by ISIS fighters to barter for sex slaves — is one of many Abdullah Shrem keeps in his phone.
Each offers vital clues — photographs, locations — that he hopes will help him save Yazidi girls and young women like this girl from the militants holding them captive.

Shrem was a successful businessman with trade connections to Aleppo in Syria when ISIS came and kidnapped more than 50 members of his family from Iraq’s Sinjar province, a handful of the thousands of Yazidis seized there in 2014.

Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled their homes and clambered up Mount Sinjar in an attempt to escape the fighters; hundreds were massacred, while thousands of women and girls were abducted and sold into slavery.

Sold into sex slavery

Desperate — and angered at what he saw as a lack of support from the international community — he began plotting to save them himself, recruiting cigarette smugglers used to sneaking illicit produce in and out of ISIS territory to help his efforts.

“No government or experts trained us,” he explains when we meet in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. “We learned by just doing it, over the last year and a half, we gained the experience.”
 The Shariya camp opened six months ago and now 4,000 tents line the dusty ground, providing shelter to thousands of refugees.

 Shariya camp with 4000 tents
 
So far, he says, his network has freed 240 Yazidis; it hasn’t been easy, or cheap — he’s almost broke, having spent his savings paying smuggling fees.
For those who venture into ISIS territory, the stakes are even higher — a number of the smugglers have been captured and executed by ISIS while trying to track down Yazidi slaves.
But Shrem insists the risks are worth it: “Whenever I save someone, it gives me strength and it gives me faith to keep going until I have been able to save them all.”
In some cases, the smugglers follow clues in the adverts or other tidbits of information they’re able to gather to find the Yazidis. In others, the hostages themselves reach out and plead for help, offering key details as to their location; a province or town they’ve overheard mentioned, or a local landmark they’ve been able to spot.
Once they manage to make contact, the prisoners are told when and where to go to meet the smugglers who wait for them in a nearby car. Depending on the circumstances of the rescue, it can take days or even weeks to get safely out of ISIS territory, switching from vehicle to vehicle, and waiting in safe houses.

Children as bomb-makers

Dileen (not her real name) is one of those rescued by Shrem and his team of smugglers.
She was separated from her husband when ISIS militants overran Sinjar province. The last time she saw him he was being marched away, hands up, with the other men from their village.
She and her children were taken to Mosul with the women and girls. “They separated the ones who were really pretty, and made us remove our headscarves to see the prettiest ones,” she says.

 
 
They were moved from place to place within ISIS territory: Mosul, Tal Afar, Raqqa, and finally to Tishrin where, she says, she was sold to an ISIS fighter, who raped her repeatedly.
“They forced me, and they threatened my children,” she says, recalling the five months she spent trapped in his home.
ISIS claims the Quran justifies taking non-Muslim women and girls captive, and permits their rape — a claim vociferously denied by Islamic scholars.
While Dileen was used as a sex slave, her daughter Aisha (not her real name), who is just seven years old, was forced to work late into the night, in the basement of their apartment building, assembling IEDs for ISIS.
“I used to make bombs,” says Aisha, quietly, playing with her hair. “There was a girl my age and her mother. They threatened to kill [the girl] if I wouldn’t go and work with them,” she told CNN.
“They would dress us in all black and there was a yellow material and sugar and a powder, and we would weigh them on a scale and then we would heat them and pack the artillery.”
An ISIS militant, she says, would then add the detonation wires.

Escapees ‘can’t forget’

The Yazidis have long suffered persecution, with many Muslims referring to them as devil worshipers. The ISIS storming of Sinjar created a humanitarian crisis as some fled into the mountains and were trapped without food or water.
Dileen was terrified Aisha would be blown up, or that — if the family was still being held captive by her next birthday — she too would be sold as a sex slave. So when the ISIS fighter she now belonged to left to go on a military operation, she spotted a chance to escape. She called Shrem and asked him to help them flee.
“We got to a phone with the help of another woman; we got in touch with Abdullah.”

  
Shrem’s phone number — memorized by his relatives before their phones were confiscated by ISIS — has been passed around among captured Yazidis, who know he will help them if he can.
“I begged him to hurry up and get us before my daughter turned eight, because they would take her.”
Shrem told her to meet someone from his network at a nearby mosque the following day, then spirited her and her children out of ISIS territory.

A year on from their rescue, Dileen — now living in a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan — says she is still haunted by what they went through: “I can’t forget what happened.”
Her husband is still missing, feared dead, but Dileen insists that “for my children, I have to survive.”

DHS Approves/Admits 4700 Syrians + 7900?

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4,700 Syrian refugees approved resettlement to U.S.: Homeland Security chief

Reuters: The United States has approved 4,700 Syrian refugees who are awaiting resettlement to the country, while an additional 7,900 are awaiting security review, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said on Thursday.

Syrian refugee children play as they wait with their families to register their information at the U.S. processing centre for Syrian refugees, during a media tour held by the U.S. Embassy in Jordan, in Amman, Jordan, April 6, 2016. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed

Johnson, speaking to a homeland security advisory panel at the Department of Homeland Security, was defending against critics who say the Obama administration is falling behind meeting its goal of bringing in 10,000 Syrian refugees into the country by the end of fiscal year 2016.

Meanwhile:

Sanctioned Syrian Official Invited To D.C. Event Delivers Outrageous Defense Of Assad

There is no moderate opposition and nobody is starving in Syria, according to Bouthaina Shaaban.

HuffPo: WASHINGTON — A panel discussion that had been billed as an effort to create a global alliance to defeat the so-called Islamic State spiraled downward Thursday into a tense two-and-a-half hour event dominated by a top Syrian official who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government. She insisted that her country’s brutal crackdown on its own people is just part of the war on terrorism.

Khaled al-Hariri/Reuters
Bashar Assad spokeswoman Bouthaina Shaaban was invited to speak via Skype despite facing U.S. sanctions.

“There is no such thing as moderate opposition,” Bouthaina Shaaban, spokeswoman for Syrian President Bashar Assad, said during the event hosted by an obscure group called the Global Alliance for Terminating ISIS/al-Qaeda (GAFTA).

In a lengthy pre-recorded speech, which was aired at the National Press Club event, Shaaban blasted Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Western countries for backing Syrian opposition fighters in her country’s civil war. She accused them of directly aiding both the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda offshoot.

During a subsequent question-and-answer session, Shaaban sparred with reporters via Skype, dismissing accusations that the Assad regime had blocked humanitarian groups from delivering food to besieged areas of Syria and had aided ISIS by releasing its members from prison and purchasing oil from the terrorist group.

“It is a very fertile land. Nobody is starving in Daraya,” Shaaban said, despite well-documented reports of the Assad regime’s “surrender or starve” tactics in areas like Daraya and Madaya.

In 2011, the U.S. sanctioned Shaaban, along with Assad and a handful of other regime officials, in response to the Syrian government’s violent repression of its people. The sanctions froze any assets the officials had in the U.S. and prohibited Americans from providing “financial, material, or technological support” to them.

It is unclear whether GAFTA, a Florida-based nonprofit, violated the sanctions by hosting Shaaban electronically. Ghassan Mansour, GAFTA’s treasurer, claimed that the group did not know about the sanctions until the day before the event.

A Treasury spokeswoman declined to comment on the specific case, only vaguely suggesting that the arrangement could be problematic. “Transactions with designated persons are generally prohibited,” she told The Huffington Post.

GAFTA founder Ahmad Maki Kubba, speaking at the event, defended the invitation to Shaaban as part of an effort to hear from all parties involved in the fight against ISIS and claimed that the group has no allegiance to either side. But the Thursday discussion was decidedly one-sided, and there are indications that GAFTA itself is sympathetic to Assad and his allies.

The organization’s Facebook page contains numerous news stories that frame the Assad regime and its ally Russia in a flattering light. Mansour himself was previously accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of participating in a money-laundering operation to aid the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah, which has fought on behalf of Assad in Syria. Mansour denies the 2011 allegation.

“We are not associated with [Shaaban] or anybody,” he told HuffPost in a phone interview. “We’re trying to fight an evil. Is there sanctions against that?”

 

In the lead-up to the panel discussion, critics of the Assad regime accused GAFTA of providing a propaganda platform for a top-level Syrian official in violation of the spirit of the sanctions, if not the law itself.

“The point of sanctioning someone is to change their behavior, isolate them and force them to reconsider the actions they were taking. This is not in line with that,” one House Republican aide said of inviting Shaaban.

Mansour said his group has reached out to members of Congress but has had little luck securing meetings in Washington.

 

Others accused GAFTA of undermining the United Nations-led peace process by giving Assad’s spokeswoman a direct line to a U.S. audience. “She is regularly the one who speaks for the regime,” said Joseph Bahout, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “She’s been propagandizing, denying the use of chemical weapons, denying massacres.”

Bahout rejected GAFTA’s argument that hearing from the Syrian regime at Thursday’s event was part of an effort to resolve the civil war.

“I’m sorry to be blunt, but this is the classical, usual bullshit used every time someone is trying to open a channel with the regime. If you want to negotiate with the regime, there are proper channels in Geneva,” Bahout said, referring to the U.N.-led talks.

 

The Syrian American Council, a U.S.-based group that has lobbied for more support for the Syrian opposition, said that it had pushed the National Press Club to remove Shaaban from the event, but as of Wednesday evening, had not heard back from Bill McCarren, executive director of the club. McCarren also did not respond to a request for comment from HuffPost.

“This is supposed to be about combating ISIS, and the Assad regime is directly responsible for not only fueling the rise of ISIS, but for supporting it financially through lucrative oil deals,” said Mohammed Ghanem, director of government relations for the Syrian American Council. “It’s unacceptable for a prestigious venue such as the National Press Club to be turned into a platform to spew propaganda.”

Judge Orders More Hillary Emails to be Released

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Judge orders Obama administration to release new Clinton emails

TheHill: A federal judge has ordered the Obama administration to release new emails connected to Hillary Clinton before Democratic National Convention in July.

In an order late on Wednesday, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson told the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to hand over to the Republican National Committee (RNC) whatever records it could as part of an RNC’s open-records lawsuit on July 11.

After that, USAID will need to consult with the State Department about hundreds of other pages of documents, which could be released at some point in the future.

The RNC sued the aid agency in March, seeking two sets of communications: those between USAID officials and former aides at the State Department, as well as those between USAID and private domain names associated with Clinton, former President Bill Clinton and others including the Clinton Foundation. The effort appeared to be related to allegations that the former secretary of State’s family foundation had undue influence on USAID.

The RNC lawsuit was one of several it has filed seeking records connected to Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, in a preview of a battle sure to last through the general election.

Before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, USAID has claimed that it has discovered approximately 3,300 pages of records that it might be able to hand over to the Republican Party organization. But roughly 2,600 of those reportedly need to be cleared with the State Department before they can be released.

In her order on Wednesday, Jackson said USAID should release to the RNC what it can by July 11 and determine a schedule for releasing the rest.

The time frame would put the release of the first batch of emails just one week before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 18 and two weeks before the Democratic convention begins on July 25.

Critics of Clinton, however, will likely be wary of the State Department, which is notoriously slow at responding to Freedom of Information Act requests and has been buried underneath a barrage of demands related to Clinton’s email history in recent months.

Separately late on Wednesday, the Obama administration filed a motion trying to kill a different RNC open-records lawsuit targeting the State Department. That suit is seeking email messages from a slew of Clinton’s former top aides.

***** 

WashingtonTimes: Hillary Clinton used a personal email account for official business during her tenure in the U.S. Senate and carried the practice over once she was at the helm of the State Department, an aide to the presumptive Democratic nominee for president said in sworn testimony released Tuesday.

Cheryl Mills, Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff during the White House hopeful’s four-year stint with the State Department, said her former boss relied on a personal email account provided by AT&T for about three months after being sworn in as secretary of state by President Obama in January 2009.

“Secretary Clinton continued a practice that she was using of [sic] her personal email,” Ms. Mills testified Friday, according to a transcript of her remarks released this week by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group currently suing the State Dept. over Mrs. Clinton’s use of a nongovernmental email system while in office.

Ms. Mills’ admission comes amid an active FBI probe launched to investigate Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email account while secretary of state, in addition to the Judicial Watch lawsuit. Leaked emails released to the media in 2013 first indicated that Mrs. Clinton used an account hosted at “clintonemail.com” in lieu of a government-provided account, raising questions regarding security concerns and, as argued by some, possible efforts to conceal correspondence from Freedom of Information Act requests.

As revealed through Friday’s sworn testimony, however, Mrs. Clinton relied on a separate, nongovernmental account through as late as April 2009 before she abandoned her AT&T account and began communicating through the clintonemail.com account.

“So Secretary Clinton used — always used one email account when she was using an email account,” Ms. Mills testified. “So when she initially arrived [at the State Dept.] she was continuing to use the AT&T accounts, and then transitioned to the .Clinton email, or Clintonemail.com account. And during her tenure those were the two addresses, if you will, that she used.”

“I don’t know that I could articulate that there was a specific discussion as opposed to her continuation of the practice she had been using when she was a senator. … I don’t have a specific memory of the conversations that may or may not have occurred. I know that I understood she was going to be using her personal email and that’s what she did,” Ms. Mills testified.

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, tweeted Wednesday that Mrs. Clinton’s was likely not the only lawmaker on Capitol Hill to use personal email accounts for official business, but said it nevertheless poses “a huge cybersecurity problem.”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, acknowledged last year that his personal Gmail address is listed on his congressional business card in lieu of a government-provided email account, but explained to ABC News at the time that members of Congress are not subject to the Federal Records Act.

Mr. Chaffetz, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform, has overseen the federal investigation concerning the 2011 terrorist attack in Benghazi, and he has been among the most vocal critics in Congress with respect to Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email account in communicating official business in the immediate aftermath of the assault.