Over One Year Later, State Department Finally Turns Over Records; Committee Still Waiting for Others
Washington, D.C.— Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (SC-04) released the following statement after the committee today received from the State Department a production of more than 1,100 pages of records, including files stored on network folders used by senior employees within the Office of the Secretary, and emails from Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin, Susan Rice, and Patrick Kennedy:
“It is deplorable that it took over a year for these records to be produced to our committee, and that our Democrat colleagues never lifted a finger to help us get them. Shame on them and everyone else who has demanded this committee to give up before gathering all of the facts. This investigation is about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, and it could have been completed a lot sooner if the administration had not delayed and delayed and delayed at every turn. For example, the committee still does not have records we requested over a year ago, and we are still waiting for some witnesses to be made available for interviews. As soon as possible, we will release our report and interview transcripts so everyone can see the evidence for themselves, and I’m confident the value and fairness of our investigation will then be abundantly clear to everyone.”
Today’s production is responsive to a request made by the Select Committee in November 2014, and subpoenas issued in March 2015 and August 2015, and includes work-related emails from the personal email accounts of Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, and Huma Abedin, which the State Department has had since summer 2015.
Prior to today’s production, the Select Committee had already obtained and reviewed more than 72,000 pages of documents never before seen by a congressional committee. Just recently, the Select Committee received more than 1,600 pages of documents from the Office of the Secretary of State and gained access to crucial CIA records it sought for nearly a year. After months of negotiations with the White House, the Select Committee was finally able to question both Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes, which no other congressional committee had done.
Yesterday the Select Committee interviewed its 90th witness: General Philip Breedlove, former Commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa. This was the 71st witness who had never before been interviewed about Benghazi by a congressional committee, and the 35th witness interviewed since the Select Committee’s public hearing in October 2015.
**** Another item, this blog asked the question earlier in the week if the matter of Guccifer otherwise known as Marcel Lehel Lazar, that Romanian that hacked the emails of Colin Power, GW Bush and Sidney Blumenthal, being extradited to the U.S. was purposeful. Turns out, the FBI as part of the Hillary email investigation went to Romania to visit the hacker and brought him back to the United States. This was part the FBI mission and no coincidence.
Category Archives: Failed foreign policy
He Did it, He Turned Over the Fast and Furious Documents
Maybe the whistleblowers will receive some vindication like Sharyl Attkisson.
Obama relents in fight over Fast and Furious documents
Politico: Four years after asserting executive privilege to block Congress from obtaining documents relating to a controversial federal gun trafficking investigation, President Barack Obama relented Friday, turning over to lawmakers thousands of pages of records that led to unusual House votes holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt in 2012.
In January, a federal district court judge rejected Obama’s executive privilege claim over records detailing the Justice Department and White House’s response to Operation Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigation that may have allowed as many as 2,000 firearms to pass into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not turn down Obama’s privilege assertion on the merits. Instead, she said authorized public disclosures about the operation in a Justice Department inspector general report essentially mooted the administration’s drive to keep the records secret.
Both sides had until midnight Friday to file an appeal. Instead, the Obama administration turned over a set of documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“In light of the passage of time and other considerations, such as the Department’s interest in moving past this litigation and building upon our cooperative working relationship with the Committee and other Congressional committees, the Department has decided that it is not in the Executive Branch’s interest to continue litigating this issue at this time,” Justice Deparment legislative liaison Peter Kadzik wrote in a letter Friday to House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).
Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush confirmed that the administration does not plan to appeal. He argued that Jackson’s ruling validated Obama’s initial claim of privilege.
“The Department of Justice is pleased that the district court … continued to recognize that the deliberative process component of the executive privilege exists and was a valid basis for the Department to withhold certain documents when requested by the House in 2011. Although the Department disagrees with the district court’s conclusion that the privilege was overcome in this particular case by disclosures and statements made in other contexts, the Department has decided not to appeal the court’s judgment and has provided a production of documents to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,” Rodenbush said in a statement.
While the House largely won in the January decision, it did file an appeal earlier Friday afternoon, apparently unaware of the administration’s plans to comply with the judge’s order. The appeal suggested that House leaders were dissatisfied with aspects of Jackson’s rulings that narrowed the set of documents the administration had to turn over.
“As we’ve long asserted, the Committee requires and is entitled to these documents,” Chaffetz said in a statement. “They are critical to the Committee’s efforts to complete meaningful oversight. The Committee has a duty to understand and shine light on what was happening inside DOJ during the time of this irresponsible operation. Yet DOJ has obstructed our investigative work for years.”
After getting word that the Justice Department was turning over records, Chaffetz updated his statement, indicating that the House plans to press its appeal to get records beyond the ones the administration is providing.
“Today, under court order, DOJ turned over some of the subpoenaed documents. The Committee, however, is entitled to the full range of documents for which it brought this lawsuit. Accordingly, we have appealed the District Court’s ruling in order to secure those additional documents,” Chaffetz said.
Guns sold by dealers or informants used in the ATF operation wound up at numerous crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. In December 2010, two of the weapons were found at the scene of the murder of a Border Patrol agent in Arizona.
Obama’s privilege claim in the Fast and Furious fight was broad-ranging, seeking to cover not only internal deliberations about how to respond to congressional inquiries but also discussions about media strategy related to the congressional probes.
The June 2012 claim in the Fast and Furious case was the only formal assertion of executive privilege by Obama to try to defeat a congressional demand for records or testimony, though the administration has raised executive privilege concerns when declining to comply with other congressional inquiries. Most of those were resolved through negotiations. The administration has also asserted executive privilege in response to a variety of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.
Could Poland be Getting it Right After Decades?
Poland to demolish about 500 Soviet monuments
UAToday: Russia’s Foreign Ministry compares removal to ISIL’s destruction in Palmyra
Poland plans to demolish about 500 Soviet monuments throughout the country like this one in Warsaw. Polish authority wants to remove all reminders of Soviet invasion and subsequent decades-long political dominance from the streets.
The decision was announced by the Institute of National Remembrance. It’s responsible for investigating crimes against the Polish nation. According to the head of the Institute, the preservation of the monuments was “a fatal mistake” and they should have been demolished in the early 1990s. Polish authority also announced the streets connected with the Communist past of the country must disappear from the Polish cities.
But Polish government will continue to care for the graves of the Soviet soldiers located in Poland.
Andrzej Zawistowski, head of the department of the Institute of national remembrance: “It’s hard to imagine how a monument to Hitler, Goering or other Nazi criminals can stand in Europe. Why should the monuments to Lenin stand? He also had blood on his hands and built a totalitarian state, which lasted much longer than Hitler’s one. This is one reason. Another one is that we want to be masters of our land and decide what we want to do.”
Read also Ukrainian Ministry of Culture gives way to demolishing about 800 Soviet monuments
Each removal of Soviet monuments brings a new round of angry statements from the Russian officials. They accuse Poland of erasing history and threaten the removals “won’t remain unanswered.”
Maria Zakharova, Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson: “We have just spoken about how ISIS terrorists planted mines inside the monuments of Palmyra. They did this for ideological reasons. The Polish authorities express a desire to tear down memorials to Soviet soldiers for precisely ideological reasons. We demand the preservation of history and its symbols. The authorities in Warsaw should understand that the implementation of plans for a large-scale demolition of Red Army memorials will not go unanswered.”
Read also Google Maps replaces Soviet place names in Ukraine
Poland is not backing down. The monuments are set to be removed by the next year and transferred to museums to become a “witness of hard times.”
*** Going back to 2015:
FILE – In this April 30, 2001 file photo taken in Pieniezno, Poland, graffiti reading “Murderer”, “Shame” and others is seen on the memorial to Soviet General Ivan Chernyakhovsky, who is considered a symbol of the imposition of communism in Poland, but a national hero in Russia. Russian authorities are threatening serious consequences over the gradual dismantling of the monument that started on Thursday, Sept.17, 2015. (AP Photo/Wojtek Jakubowski) POLAND OUT
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WARSAW, Poland (AP) — In a new dispute exposing the complexity of Poland’s relations with Russia, Moscow is threatening Warsaw with “most serious consequences” for dismantling a monument to a Soviet World War II general.
The removal of the 1970s memorial to Gen. Ivan Chernyakhovsky began Thursday in the northern town of Pieniezno, where the general died of wounds in February 1945. He is buried in Russia.
Local authorities argue that Chernyakhovsky crushed units of Poland’s clandestine Home Army during the war and also symbolizes the imposition of communism on Poland.
Poland’s ambassador has been summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, while Russia’s embassy in Warsaw has issued a “strong protest” and has expressed “deep indignation” over the dissembling of the concrete-and-metal memorial, which it called a “blasphemous act.”
The statement said that Russia has “warned the Polish side many times” that removing such monuments cannot continue “without the most serious consequences.” It did not specify the consequences.
Poland’s Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna insisted Friday that the action is in line with bilateral agreements.
The authorities in Pieniezno want to send Charnyakhovsky’s monument to Russia, where he is a national hero. The Red Army’s role, along with the Allies, in defeating Nazi Germany remains a source of deep national pride in Russia. Some 600,000 Russian troops lost their lives fighting the Nazis on Polish territory. But in Poland the Red Army is associated with the brutal oppression that followed and cost thousands of lives.
The dispute comes as ties are strained over the conflict in Ukraine, where pro-Russian insurgents are waging a separatist struggle. Poland says Moscow is supporting the rebels.
Islamic State Radio, Just Another App
FNC: The Islamic State is harnessing apps and websites in an effort to distribute its radio station, Al-Bayan, via the Internet, the Middle East Media Research Institute warns.
ISIS has released three versions of its radio app on the Android platform, MEMRI says in a report seen by FoxNews.com. The first two were “experimental,” and the most recent version was released in February of this year.
Related:Pro-ISIS hacking group CCA returns to secure messaging app Telegram
MEMRI says that the original links to download these apps were at one point posted on a website called the Internet Archive. A screenshot of the app provided by MEMRI shows a straightforward interface that reportedly gives users the choice between streaming content in either high- or low-quality.
The report also states that ISIS has created six websites to stream its radio content so far, with the most recent version created on April 2. (The first website was launched in July of last year.) The makers of the current version use a service called WhoisGuard to mask information about the site, as well as CloudFlare to protect its website from cyber attacks and to hide details about the server, according to MEMRI.
Related:ISIS made up to $200M last year from seized Palmyra artifacts
WhoisGuard is based in Panama, and CloudFlare has offices in both the United States and abroad.
Speaking to Fox Business last year on a related issue, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince defended the service, saying that they work with domestic and international law enforcement agencies, and that these agencies actually sometimes prefer that terrorist-related sites use CloudFlare because it can make the sites easier to monitor.
WhoisGuard and the Internet Archive have not yet responded to a request for comment on this story from FoxNews.com.
Related:First-of-its-kind UN conference on violent extremism underway
On the ground, the ISIS radio station, Al-Bayan ( ‘to illustrate’ or ‘to uncover’ in English) is broadcast over FM frequencies in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The radio station’s topics include religious content and military news. The app version of the Al-Bayan radio station and the Web version of the stations are said to feature the same streaming content.
Islamic State already has local radio and television in the region but now goes global using mobile device apps.
Afghanistan has been part of the reach of the Islamic State media division for several months.
It Continues, Panama Papers Proves the Elite’s Dark World
Panama Papers: How German Biz May Have Empowered Venezuela to Forge Passports for Hezbollah
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The massive legal firm data leak known as the Panama Papers have exposed business dealings that allowed the government of Venezuela under Hugo Chávez to use Cuban money to purchase advanced passport technology from Germany. Venezuela would later be accused of falsifying passports for Hezbollah terrorists.
Breitbart: The revelation surfaced as part of the 11.5 million documents leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, later handed over for aid in analysis to a number of journalistic outlets, most prominently the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ has set up a website to help parse the information in these documents, and one website specifically for the revelations surfacing on the government of Venezuela.
It is there that the ICIJ has revealed in a Spanish-language report that Mossack Fonseca helped the governments of Cuba and Venezuela establish a shell corporation to engage a German technology company to buy state-of-the-art passport printing technology.
According to the report, late dictator Hugo Chávez established a project in 2005 to update the Venezuelan passport system, which would first require identifying a seller of the appropriate technology to approach. Venezuela, then as now, enjoying patronage from the government in Havana, would use Cuban money to buy the new technology. This made the purchase much more difficult, as few respectable corporations would feel comfortable doing business with the communist dictatorship.
Venezuela found a vendor: the German company Bundesdrukerei. In an email surfacing as part of the Panama Papers, a representative of that corporation makes clear: “the fundamental reason why this company does not want to sell to Cuba and Venezuela directly is because of the reputational issue. They fear their competition will create adversarial propaganda against them for selling to totalitarian governments.”
Mossack Fonseca then stepped in to design an elaborate currency exchange system to disassociate Cuba with the funding, a system known in Latin America as a “financial bicycle,” because the money is peddled through so many different currencies as to render its origins barely recognizable. Many corporations use this system to generate income, switching into cheaper currencies with higher interest rates and waiting for the money to grow before returning the money to its original form. In this case, Mossack Fonseca cycled the money through the currencies of at least four countries in addition to Cuba and Venezuela, then put the money in a shell corporation: Billingsley Global Corp. Billingsley bought the technology after receiving an influx of 64 million euros.
Venezuela got its passports, and Cuba retained the right to access and control the software that creates the passports.
Like most of the known revelations in the Pentagon Papers, this exchange is of questionable legality at worst, completely acceptable for a global banking lawyer at best. What makes this particular discovery notable is the years of evidence mounting that Venezuela and Cuba used the Venezuelan passport system to fabricate false documents for Hezbollah terrorists.
A 2015 report estimated that the government of Venezuela has issued over 500 passports to members of the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah. The terrorists would then use the passports to travel more freely through the Western Hemisphere, as their real identities and nationalities would trigger more thorough investigations into their backgrounds. Spanish reporter Emili Blasco found evidence that current Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro met with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2007 to discuss an agreement for distributing the fake passports.
A former diplomat in Venezuela’s Baghdad embassy, Misael López Soto, testified before fleeing the embassy in a video posted online that he was forced to flee after receiving multiple death threats for attempting to notify Caracas that his embassy was distributing dozens of falsified birth certificates, passports, and other government documents to known members of Hezbollah. The terrorists would pay between $5000 and S15000 for each document.
A report in February at the UK-based Asharq Al-Awsat cited a former Venezuelan diplomat as alleging that a “Cuban company” had made an agreement with Venezuela to issue the contracts. No details were provided, but such an agreement fits the Panama Papers description of the incident.
The governments of either nation have yet to remark on this particular allegation.
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The Dark Art World, remember the movie the Monuments Men? Seems the art that was looted but some was never recovered or was it?
This is a long yet quite detailed summary of the art world where owner’s names are never mentioned or buried in layers of obscure companies all performed by the Mossack Fonseca law firm. Below are but a few paragraphs. To read the whole summary, go here.
- Panama Papers provides unprecedented look at connection between international art trade and offshore secrecy
- Billionaire art dealers use offshore company to shield painting allegedly looted by Nazis
- Identity revealed of the man secretly behind the 20th century’s most important modern art auction
ICIJ in part: When high-dollar art changes hands, it often lands in a free trade zone known as a freeport. As long as art is housed in the freeport, owners pay no import taxes or duties. Critics worry the freeport system can be used to dodge tax or launder money since precise inventories and transactions are not tracked. According to the international professional services firm Deloitte, 42 percent of art collectors it surveyed said they would likely use a freeport. The oldest freeport, with the most art, is in Geneva. Its complex of storage facilities is said to contain enough treasure to rival any museum in the world.
The Nahmads began as a banking dynasty of Sephardic Jews from Aleppo, Syria. In 1948, Hillel Nahmad relocated his wife and eight children to Beirut.
Three of his sons — Giuseppe, David and Ezra — eventually moved to Milan and, by the early 1960s, had become active art dealers. Giuseppe, the patriarch of the family, had a taste for expensive sports cars and, according to his brother David, once dated Rita Hayworth. He also pioneered treating the art business like a stock market, buying and holding paintings until exactly the right time to sell to maximize profit.
He died in 2012. David assumed the mantel of family leader. He and his older brother Ezra both named their sons Hillel after their grandfather. The two sons both go by Helly. Together the four continue the family business.
The two surviving brothers are worth a combined $3.3 billion, according to Forbes. They live in Monaco, among other locales. In addition to currency trading and art dealing, David Nahmad is also a championship backgammon player. Each son has a namesake gallery. Ezra’s son has the Helly Nahmad Gallery in London and David’s offspring, an identically named one in New York.
The Mossack Fonseca records indicate the Nahmads were early adopters of the benefits of offshoring art.
Fine art dealer and billionaire David Nahmad. Photo: AP Photo / Lionel CironneauGiuseppe Nahmad registered International Art Center S.A. in 1995 through the Swiss bank UBS and the Geneva office of Mossack Fonseca. It may have existed in another form prior to that date. A document in the Mossack Fonseca files mentions International Art Center acquiring the pastel “Danseuses” by Edgar Degas in October 1989.