Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway

Delivered Documents Go Deeper on Clintons’

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There is no longer doubt that certain personnel at the State Department were in collusion with the Clintons, but this time on the Foundation side and with regard to Bill giving speeches for big money.

Each time there was a speech request for Bill, the procedure was to pass the full speech application request to the State Department to determine if the sponsors were acceptable and approved. A database is maintained at State for diplomatic purposes on global and domestic corporations such that the speech requests would be only somewhat investigated. This also gives rise to the fact that government and especially corporations use the State Department and likewise in reverse to advance mutual relationships, agendas and of course money is always involved. Thanks to Judicial Watch for their tireless work as noted below.

 

Clinton Cash Connections Exposed – New Docs Raise Questions On Clinton Conflicts of Interest

 

The Clinton email scandal is serious enough. Nonetheless, it is useful to remember what exactly Mrs. Clinton was trying to hide before our litigation forced the disclosure of her separate email system. You can bet that the cover up of the depth of her abuse of office for private gain is one thing about which she does not want you to know the full truth. Judicial Watch is in the lead in uncovering these Clinton cash abuses. This week, we released 789 pages of State Department “ethics” review documents concerning former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, revealing that at least one speech by Bill Clinton appeared to take place without the required State Department ethics approval. The documents also include a copy of Bill Clinton’s draft consultant agreement with Laureate Education, Inc., which was submitted for ethics review by the State Department. But the State Department redacted the information regarding compensation and the specific services Bill Clinton was hired to provide to the controversial “for profit” education company. The documents were released as a result of a federal court order in our history-making Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department on May 28, 2013, (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-00772)). The documents include heavily redacted emails from 2009 about the review of a speech Bill Clinton was set to give to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI). An April 1, 2009, email from then-State Department Senior Ethics Counsel Waldo W. “Chip” Brooks notes that the ethics review approval of the speech “was in the hands of Jim [Thessin] and Cheryl Mills. They were to discuss with Counsel to the former President. I do not know if either ever did.” A follow-up September 1, 2009, email to Brooks from a colleague asks, “[W]as there ever a decision on the Clinton request involving scrap recycling? Below is the last e-mail I have on it – I assume it just died since I don’t’ have an outgoing memo approving the event …” Brooks responds two minutes later:

“I think the decision was a soft call to Clinton’s attorney and the talk did not take place. You might want to send an email to [Clinton Foundation Director of Scheduling and Advance] Terry [Krinvic] and tell her that you have a gap in your records because you were gone and wanted to know if the President ever did talk before ISRI?

In fact, Bill Clinton spoke to the scrap recycling group on April 30, 2009, for a reported fee off $250,000. The documents also include a request from Doug Band of the Clinton Foundation for an ethics review of Mr. Clinton’s proposed consulting arrangement, through WJC LLC, with Laureate Education, Inc. The Obama State Department redacted key terms of the attached May 1, 2010, draft agreement, including Mr. Clinton’s fees and the nature of Mr. Clinton’s services. Laureate Education, Inc. is the world’s largest, for-profit, international higher education chain and reportedly uses many of the same practices that spurred a 2014 regulatory crackdown by the Obama administration on for-profit colleges in the United States. In 2010, according to The Washington Post, the company hired former President Clinton to serve as its honorary chancellor, and since that time the former president has made more than a dozen appearances in countries such as Malaysia, Peru, and Spain on the company’s behalf. Since 2010, the former president reportedly has been paid more than $16 million from the company for his services. The Clinton-Laureate connection is rich. The Daily Caller did some digging into the Clinton tax returns that were highly revealing:

Clinton signed on as the honorary chancellor of Laureate International Universities, a subsidiary of Laureate Education, in 2010. Despite the honorary nature of his position, that didn’t stop the company from paying him on average approximately $3 million a year. The investment likely paid off, though, as Clinton has lent Laureate significant legitimacy and has served as an advocate for the company overseas, making appearance in countries like Peru and Malaysia to praise it. In addition to these direct payments, Laureate also donated to the Clinton Foundation and has cooperated with the Clinton Global Initiative.

The latest State Department documents also show some push-back by ethics officials concerning proposed Clinton speeches to Chinese government-linked entities. State Department officials, for example, had several questions about a proposed 2009 speech to a subsidiary of the Shanghai Sports Development Corporation, a Chinese “quasi-government” agency. Rather than answer the questions, the Clinton Foundation representative emailed “we are not going to proceed with this.” State Department ethics official “Chip” Brooks commented on the withdrawal of the Chinese speech in December 2009 to then-Deputy Legal Adviser Jim Thessin, “Cooler heads have prevailed.” The documents show the State Department approved scores of requests by former President Bill Clinton to appear as the featured speaker at events sponsored by some of the world’s leading international investment and banking firms, including J.P. Morgan, Barclays, Merrill Lynch, Sweden’s ABG, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Brazil’s Banco Itau, Vista Equity Partners, Goldman Sachs, Vanguard Group (described as “one of the world’s largest investment management companies”), Canada’s Imperial Bank of Commerce, and Saudi Arabia’s SAGIA conglomerate (which claims to be the “gateway to investments in Saudi Arabia”). While the majority of the documents do not contain the fees that Clinton charged for his speaking services, those that are disclosed reveal that the former president routinely received six-figure honorariums for his advice to the international investment counseling firms and banking institutions, including:

  • Barclays Capital Singapore – $325,000 • Needham Partners South Africa – $350,000 • Cumbre de Negocios (sponsored by Nacional Financiera and El Banco Fuerte de Mexico) – $275,000 and $125,000) • NTRPLC (which describes itself as “developing a new investment portfolio of wind projects in Ireland and the UK”) – $125,000

The documents reveal that between 2009 and 2011, former President Clinton spoke to more than two dozen leading international investment firms and banking institutions, many of them on more than one occasion. At least one of the documents shows that Hillary Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills used a non-governmental email account for the Clinton ethics reviews. Mills reportedly negotiated the “ethics agreement” on behalf of the Clintons and the Foundation that required the Clintons to submit to rigorous conflict-of-interest checks. Despite this, and in apparent violation of Obama administration ethics rules, the documents reveal that Bill Clinton’s requests for speaking engagement approval were invariably copied to Mills, who was involved in ethics reviews as chief of staff for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department. The documents also include the demands that Bill Clinton’s speakers bureau, The Harry Walker Agency, laid out for a speech sponsor in Slovenia. Notably, the documents require that press be kept in a “designated, roped off area in the back of the room with a staff escort” and that the “press should not be given access to any area where the President likely may be.” This JW lawsuit broke open the Clinton cash scandal by forcing the disclosure of documents that provided a road map for over 200 conflict-of-interest rulings that led to at least $48 million for the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State. Previously disclosed documents in this lawsuit, for example, raise questions about funds Clinton accepted from entities linked to Saudi Arabia, China and Iran, among others. This and other JW lawsuits on Benghazi were the key pressure that forced the disclosure of the Clinton email system. Judicial Watch’s litigation to obtain these conflict of interest records is ongoing. The State Department has yet to search the email records Mrs. Clinton purportedly turned over to the agency last year, despite Judicial Watch’s first requesting these records in 2011 and filing this lawsuit in 2013. The State Department also has yet to explain why it failed to conduct a proper, timely search in the 20 months between when it received our request on May 2, 2011, and February 1, 2013, when Secretary Clinton left office. Judicial Watch also is pressing the State Department to conduct a reasonable search for records, including any emails on the Hillary Clinton email server. On September 3, Judicial Watch filed a request with the court for discovery from the State Department and/or Mrs. Clinton in order to find these records so they might finally be searched as the law requires. Specifically, Judicial Watch’s attorneys ask the court to take steps to obtain the records directly:

To the extent Secretary Clinton or her agents or vendors continue to have access to this agency system of records, or any records from the system that have migrated or been transferred to any new servers, storage devices, or back-up systems, Judicial Watch respectfully submits that a constructive trust must be imposed on any such records and systems so that the State Department can access and search them for records…

Accordingly, Judicial Watch asks the court to order the State Department:

To identify, either through declarations or discovery, all information in its possession or control about the transfer of any data from the “clintonemail.com” server to Secretary Clinton’s vendor and whether any such data is still available or otherwise recoverable from the vendor’s server, storage devices, or back-up systems. If the State Department asserts that it does not have this information or cannot obtain it, limited third-party discovery of Secretary Clinton and/or her vendor should be authorized to enable the Court to obtain the information, which is necessary to remedy the State Department’s failure to search the server during Secretary Clinton’s tenure in office, its further failure to secure all federal records on the server when Secretary Clinton left office, and Secretary Clinton’s wrongful retention of these records after she left office.

Judicial Watch’s court filing details how it was “wrongful and in violation of federal law and State Department regulations” to allow Hillary Clinton “to retain exclusive access to this agency system of records (Clinton’s separate email server) and the official State Department communications and records it contains after she left office on February 1, 2013.” In short, we’re asking the court to allow us to figure out where the Clinton documents are and to take steps to make sure they are preserved and searched as the law requires. These records show that the “ethics reviews” of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s potential conflicts of interest was a joke. JW supporters should be proud of how their support resulted in a lawsuit that helped force the disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s separate email system. And now we hope that it results in getting all the Clinton emails searched to find out what else Hillary Clinton didn’t want the American people to see about her shady dealings. Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuit has become particularly noteworthy because it has been reported that the Clinton Foundation, now known as the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, accepted millions of dollars from at least seven foreign governments while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation has acknowledged that a $500,000 donation it received from the government of Algeria while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of State violated a 2008 ethics agreement between the foundation and the Obama administration. Some of the foreign governments that have made donations to the Clinton Foundation include Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman, have questionable human rights records. Links to the full production of documents can be found here: May 4, 2015; June 15, 2015; July 27, 2015 and September 4, 2015. Feel free to review the documents and let us know if you find anything important that we might have missed!

Hello FBI, What about this $125 Billion?

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Where is the U.S. Department of Treasury? Where is the White House? (rhetorical)

By the hour scandals come out of the Federal government where the reaction is: ‘it is under investigation’ or we have created a task force to advise on how to correct the issue or it was due to a computer glitch.

Never do we hear that someone is going to prison for malfeasance or theft or obstruction.

So how about putting pressure on the White House to call in the FBI, build the case and then move to a criminal case? Sounds great huh? Maybe even House of Cards will do a whole series on the waste, fraud and corruption, after all it is revenue generating right? Oh…one more thing, whistleblowers have a very short life and career span in Washington DC, but there are laws where Federal employees must comply and report waste, fraud and abuse….well so it goes.

Well back to the $125 billion, while that was only LAST year.

In part: What GAO Found

A number of strategies, including implementing preventive controls and addressing GAO’s prior recommendations, can help agencies reduce improper payments, which have been a persistent, government-wide issue. The improper payment estimate, attributable to 124 programs across 22 agencies in fiscal year 2014, was $124.7 billion, up from $105.8 billion in fiscal year 2013. The almost $19 billion increase was primarily due to the Medicare, Medicaid, and Earned Income Tax Credit programs, which account for over 75 percent of the government-wide improper payment estimate. Federal spending in Medicare and Medicaid is expected to significantly increase, so it is critical that actions are taken to reduce improper payments in these programs. Moreover, for fiscal year 2014, federal entities reported estimated error rates for 10 risk-susceptible programs that exceeded 10 percent. Recent laws and guidance have focused attention on improper payments, but incomplete or understated estimates and noncompliance with criteria listed in federal law hinder the government’s ability to assess the full extent of improper payments and implement strategies to reduce them. For example, for fiscal year 2014, 2 federal agencies did not report improper payment estimates for 4 risk-susceptible programs, and 5 programs with improper payment estimates greater than $1 billion were noncompliant with federal requirements for 3 consecutive years. Identifying root causes of improper payments can help agencies target corrective actions, and GAO has made numerous recommendations that could help reduce improper payments. For example, strengthening verification of Medicare providers and suppliers could help reduce improper payments. GAO has stated that continued agency attention is needed to (1) identify susceptible programs, (2) develop reliable estimation methodologies, (3) report as required, and (4) implement effective corrective actions based on root cause analysis. Absent such continued efforts, the federal government cannot be assured that taxpayer funds are adequately safeguarded. The full report is here.

Government burns $125B in improper payments, GAO says

FederalTimes:

A Government Accountability Office report found that the federal government racked up more than $124 billion in improper payments in 2014, $19 billion above the previous year.

The Oct. 1 report found that the surge in payments came almost exclusively from Medicare, Medicaid, and Earned Income Tax Credit programs, which account for 75 percent of improper payments across the federal government.

“Federal spending in Medicare and Medicaid is expected to significantly increase, so it is critical that actions are taken to reduce improper payments in these programs,” the report said.

Improper payments include things like overpayments, underpayments or payments made for goods and services not received.

GAO estimated that since agencies began reporting improper payments in 2003, $1 trillion in federal funding has been lost to the issue.

The report called for greater compliance from government agencies, citing findings that five federal programs with more than $1 billion in improper payments were noncompliant with federal law for three years.

U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro testified before the Senate Committee on Finance on Oct. 1 to address the report’s findings as well as GAO’s recommendations.

“Reducing improper payments is critical to safeguarding federal funds and could help achieve cost savings and improve the government’s fiscal position,” Dodaro said in testimony.

The report noted that Medicaid and Medicare accounted for $77.4 billion in improper benefits in 2014. To fix the problem, GAO suggested the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid improve Medicare automated audits, track postpayment recovery audit activities, remove Social Security numbers from Medicare cards to help prevent fraud and other reforms.

GAO recommended improving efficiency and oversight for Medicaid, including tracking liability for third-party insurers. CMS concurred with the recommendations and, in some cases, was already working on implementation plans for them.

The other big source of improper payments identified in the report was from the Earned Income Tax Credit, a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income earners, particularly those with children.

The report identified $17.7 billion in improper payments related to EITC, largely to due to the credit being incorrectly claimed on tax returns.

“As we have reported, a root cause of EITC noncompliance is that eligibility is determined by taxpayers themselves or their tax return preparers and that IRS’s ability to verify eligibility before issuing refunds is limited,” the report said.

Dodaro said that while the some fraud could play a role in improper EITC payments, the complexity of tax law has led to mistaken applications, which perpetuate improper payments.

“Complexity is definitely the heart of the problem here with the error rates,” he said. “We’re not suggesting they be made more complex. What we are suggesting is that Congress regulate paid tax preparers.”

Dodaro cited Oregon’s practice of regulating paid tax preparers, which originated in the 1970s, and pointed to a 2008 study that found Oregon tax returns are 72 percent more likely to be accurate than a comparable return from paid preparers in other states.

Read the report here.

 

More TPP, Transpacific Partnership Pact Facts

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During Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, she was for the TPP and now, well she has flipped on that position.

This is yet another shot across the bow of the White House where she is separating herself from Barack Obama, but is she really?

Hillary Clinton announced Wednesday that she opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

“I’m continuing to learn about the details of the new Trans-Pacific Partnership, including looking hard at what’s in there to crack down on currency manipulation, which kills American jobs, and to make sure we’re not putting the interests of drug companies ahead of patients and consumers,” she said in a statement. “But based on what I know so far, I can’t support this agreement.”

At the end of the segment of Senator Rand Paul this week with Bret Baier on Fox, Paul describes some of the classified maneuvers of the TPP.

One particular group, left leaning for sure is WikiLeaks, who has been an interesting champion of trying to get all the details on the Transpacific Partnership Part.

TPP leaked: Wikileaks releases intellectual property chapter of controversial internet and medicine-regulating trade agreement

Bolton of Independent:

Wikileaks has released the Intellectual Property Rights chapter of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which they claim contains rules and regulations that would have “wide-ranging effects on internet services, medicines, publishers, civil liberties and biological patents.”

The idea behind the TPP is free trade – amongst the member states, it aims to lower trade barriers, create a common standard for intellectual property, enforce labour and environmental law standards and promote economic growth.

The agreement has come under severe criticism and scrutiny, however, for the policy of total secrecy during the years-long negotiations.

Others have criticised the more stringent intellectual property laws it would introduce, which could extend copyright terms and mean harsher penalties for file-sharers.

A number of trade unions and economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz, have said the agreement “serves the interest of the wealthiest”, and caters to the needs of corporations rather than the citizens of member nations.

Concerns have also been raised over the effect it could have on the cost of medicines – by extending the intellectual property rights of certain branded drugs, delays in the development of cheaper, ‘generic’ versions of these drugs could ensue, potentially leading to poorer people having to wait much longer than the wealthy to get access to the newest medicines.

The chapter on these intellectual property issues is what has been leaked by Wikileaks, and is one of the more controversial chapters in the whole agreement.

Peter Maybarduk, the program director at Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines, said that if the TPP is ratified, “people in the Pacific-Rim countries would have to live by the rules of this leaked text.”

“The new monopoly rights for big pharmaceutical firms would compromise access to medicines in TPP countries. The TPP would cost lives.”

The document, dated 5 October, was apparently produced on the day it was announced that the 12 member states to the treaty had reached an agreement after five and a half years of negotiations.

The nations of Vietnam, Peru, Mexico, Malaysia, Japan, Canada, Australia, USA, Singapore, New Zealand, Chile and Brunei are all prospective member states to the free-trade agreement, between them representing over 40 per cent of the world economy.

Despite the leak, the final text of the TPP is reportedly being held until after the Canadian general election, on 19 October.

While, as Wikileaks says, there still needs to a be a final “legal scrub” of the document before it is finished, negotiations on the document between signatories have now ended.

 

Susan Rice Inspires Obama to be Anti-Israel

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Proof in this video, begin at the 11:00 mark for the nuggets.

 

WaPo: Jeffrey Goldberg has quoted an anonymous Obama Administration official as calling Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a “chickenshit” because Bibi refuses to make bold moves for peace that might endanger his electoral prospects.  Putting aside the incorrect use of the word chickenshit (which is not synonymous with “a chicken”), and the fact that it’s foolish to base a diplomatic strategy on assuming politicians won’t act like politicians, I think the underlying dynamic here reflects not just the general antipathy the Obama and Netanyahu administrations have for each other, but the continuing fallout from the Obama Administration’s initial gross misreading of the Israeli political scene.

Very succinctly, the Obama Administration came in to office thinking it could either force Netanyahu to make concessions, or force his government to fall.  Both the Shamir and the first Netanyahu governments made concessions and ultimately got tossed out by the voters after tensions rose with the U.S., so this was not a completely unreasonable  assumption.

However, Obama and his advisors missed several contrary factors.  The Israeli public never liked Obama, never trusted him due to his well-known associations with various anti-Israel leftists such as Rashid Khalidi.

Ex-Adviser to Obama Says Susan Rice Accused Israeli Leader of Racism

NYT: WASHINGTON — Dennis B. Ross, the former Middle East adviser to President Obama, faults Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, for exacerbating tensions with Israel during the talks that led up to the recent nuclear accord with Iran and quotes her accusing Israel’s prime minister of racism.

In a new book on Israeli-American relations, Mr. Ross — who has worked on Middle East diplomacy for presidents of both parties — concludes that Ms. Rice’s “combative mind-set” worsened an already troubled relationship with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who feared that negotiations would leave Iran a threshold nuclear state.

Written Sword by Trey Gowdy to Elijah Cummings

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Full letter is found here.

The Blaze: Trey Gowdy Calls Out Ranking Dem on Benghazi Committee in Scathing 13-Page Letter: ‘This Information Could Have Only From Democrat Members’

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, sent a scathing 13-page letter to Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) on Wednesday, urging him to “rise above the political pressure” being put on him by Democrats and keep the “promises” made to the families of the American heroes who died in Libya.

Gowdy scolded Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi Committee, for putting on a “public posture” that is “quite the opposite” from the one he has taken during private discussions.

“Not once in any of these conversations have you ever questioned the motivations of the Committee’s work or questioned our mission to uncover the facts surrounding the Benghazi terrorist attacks,” Gowdy wrote. “Your Democrat colleagues and you have contributed nothing substantively to the Committee’s investigation over the past seventeen months—you have not requested a single new witness interview nor have you made one single document request to any Executive Branch Agency.”

The fiery South Carolina congressman then accused Cummings and Democrats of “selectively” leaking information about the Benghazi Committee’s probe “to promote your own false narrative.”

Cummings and other Democrats wrote their own letter on Monday accusing the Republicans of using Benghazi as a political weapon and revealed they plan to release the transcript of an interview with Cheryl Mills to “correct the public record.”

“This is glaringly obvious—no testimony has been disclosed from people interviewed who were on the ground or from national security professionals,” he added .”Instead, the only leaks have been regarding Democrat political figures, and the initial stories have all selectively disclosed testimony to fit with Democrat political narratives.”

He provided a specific instance where information appeared to be intentionally leaked:

House Benghazi Committee

Gowdy concluded his letter by vowing to finish the Benghazi Committee’s investigation.

“While it is unfortunate that for over seven months the State Department withheld nearly 1,900 pages of Secretary Clinton’s emails responsive to this Committee’s request, our work must go on,” he wrote. “Simply because you have chosen to play politics with this Committee and the State Department has chosen to play politics by shielding its former Secretary at the expense of the truth does not mean that this Committee was founded on politics, is based on politics, or will veer off course due to the political actions and allegations of others.”

Read the last things he had to say before he signed his name:

House Benghazi Committee

The full letter can be found here.