Peeling Back More Layers of Hillary’s Camp

Posted on June 15, 2015June 15, 2015 by Denise Simon

First, Hillary’s campaign operation is an approved list of journalists allowed access.

The Daily Mail’s David Martosko was reportedly denied access to the Hillary Clinton campaign as a pool reporter Monday morning, initiating yet another tussle between the Democratic candidate’s camp and the political press corps:

Martosko said a member of Clinton’s camp told him he had not been approved as a print pool reporter when he arrived to cover the campaign’s New Hampshire swing. He was then sent up various rungs until he got to Clinton press aide Nick Merrill, who issued several apparently contradictory explanations, including that the Daily Mail was a foreign publication, then that the campaign was taking a day off to discuss pool procedures, then that no pool reporter had been designated for the day.

Merrill later responded to Politico’s Dylan Byers, saying, “We want a happy press corps as much as the press corps does. And we work very hard to achieve that in tandem with them. It’s a long campaign, and we are going to do our best to find equilibrium and best accommodate interest from as many news outlets as possible, given the space limitations of our events.”

Second, the campaign is operating on thin dimes or no dimes.

Experienced, adult political operatives who want to do grassroots work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign currently have no choice but to work as unpaid, full-time interns, raising new questions about how the White House frontrunner runs her own labor force as she prepares to double down on young people’s role in the American economy.

The Clinton campaign is currently in the midst of what multiple Democratic sources described as a “hiring freeze” for paid organizing positions in the early campaign states where the former Secretary of State is laying the foundations of a massive national staff, with few if any paying jobs available for field operations.

Clinton’s camp has made headlines about its frugality and a hard sell on its fellowship program, which allows aspiring politicos between the ages of 18 and 24 to spend this summer as full-time campaign volunteers. The result, however, is the human-resources reality of a campaign – one scheduled to hold at least 26 fundraisers this month alone – that isn’t just taking on college students with political science degrees but expecting political veterans to gamble their careers on her without pay.

Third, she said she has lots of old friends and she is using them. As Hillary goes rogue leftists, her camp is exploiting those connections.

Senior policy advisor, Maya Harris hails from a family of female overachievers. Her late mother, Shyamala Harris, immigrated from India in the 1950s to obtain her PhD in endocrinology from U.C. Berkeley, and went on to make breakthrough discoveries in breast cancer research. Her big sister, Kamala Harris, is California’s attorney general, and is now running for U.S. Senate. At age 29, Maya herself became one of the nation’s youngest-ever law school deans when she took the reins of the Lincoln Law School of San Jose, a night school that prepares students for the California bar.

Then—as if choosing a spouse specially equipped to keep up with all this hard-charging ambition—Harris married fellow Stanford Law student (and her best friend) Tony West. West would go on to become the third-highest ranking official in the Obama Justice Department. Their friendship blossomed when Harris’ 4-year-old daughter Meena engaged West in games of hide-and-seek while her then-single mom was registering for classes. Following family tradition, Meena is now a Harvard law grad.

“It’s all justice all the time,” Harris laughs when asked about family dinner talk.

Harris’ mother, who mostly raised her girls alone (Harris’ Jamaican-born father was a Stanford economist), was swept up in the civil rights movement in and around Berkeley, so Harris grew up imbued with a healthy dose of activism. But the girls’ trailblazing mother also modeled a life of mentorship—always supporting her graduate students while also demanding high standards. “She was tough on them,” Harris recalls. “Until her dying day she never lost sight of this notion that if you’ve been able to walk through doors, you don’t just leave the doors open. You bring others along.” Many more details here.

Obama Favoring Mullahs with Cash Infusions

Posted on June 15, 2015June 15, 2015 by Denise Simon

The Mullahs of Iran have a new standard of confidence on the West lifting financial sanctions after the final deal on the nuclear program is completed. That date is slated for June 30, yet there are signs that date could slide. Who has given the Mullahs this concept of lifted sanctions? The White House.

TEHRAN — With a little more than two weeks before the deadline for a nuclear deal, Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said Saturday that he expected relief from economic sanctions within a “couple of months” after an agreement with six world powers was signed.

Mr. Rouhani echoed statements by other Iranian leaders hinting that the deadline might not be met. “We will not waste time, but we should also not restrict ourselves to a specific deadline,” he said.

The pace of sanctions relief is a sticking point. The Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on any nuclear deal, has demanded that all sanctions be lifted on the day the agreement is signed. Mr. Rouhani’s timetable would allow the United States, the European Union and the United Nations to wait to lift their sanctions until the day the deal takes effect. The United States and its negotiating partners want the sanctions lifted piecemeal, as Iran meets its obligations under the deal.

Mr. Rouhani also said Iran wanted the deal to be approved by the United Nations Security Council, as a hedge against a nullification move by a future leader of a negotiating country.

Mullahs see Obama’s favors for their benefit:

The U.S. makes more concessions to Iran in a prelude to a nuclear deal.

The Obama Administration has long insisted that any nuclear deal will have no effect on U.S. determination to stop Iran’s regional ambitions or support for terrorism. As the political desire for a deal grows more urgent, however, this claim is proving to be hollow. Consider Hayya Bina, or “Let’s Go,” a Lebanese civil-society initiative founded in 2005 by publisher and producer Lokman Slim. Hayya Bina works largely with Lebanon’s Shiites on a variety of health, environmental and citizenship issues, largely as a way to offer a moderate alternative to Hezbollah’s efforts to dominate that community.

The group has received modest funding from the State Department and groups like the International Republican Institute. But as the Journal’s Jay Solomon reported last week, the State Department sent Hayya Bina a letter, dated April 10, which “requests that all activities intended [to] foster an independent moderate Shiite voice be ceased immediately and indefinitely.” To underscore the point, the letter added that Hayya Bina “must eliminate funding for any of the above referenced activity.” Why cut funding? The State Department said the programs weren’t meeting expectations. But it hardly went unnoticed in Lebanon that the cuts came barely a week after the U.S. and Iran struck their framework nuclear agreement in Switzerland April 2. Hezbollah is Iran’s Lebanese subsidiary and has made a practice of going after its domestic opponents, including Mr. Slim.

The withdrawal of U.S. funding “is another desperate PR attempt by the Obama Administration to appease the Iranian regime in order to reach a nuclear deal,” says Ahmad El Assaad, a prominent Lebanese Shiite opponent of Hezbollah. Then there is the curious case of Buhary Seyed Abu Tahir, a Dubai-based Sri Lankan businessman who in 2004 was cited personally by President George W. Bush as the “chief financial officer and money launderer” for the nuclear-proliferation network of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. According to a 2004 investigation by Malaysian authorities, in 1994 or 1995 Mr. Khan asked Mr. Tahir to ship uranium centrifuges to Iran. “BSA Tahir organized the transshipment of the two containers from DUBAI to IRAN using a merchant ship owned by a company in Iran,” according to a Malaysian report. “BSA Tahir said the payment for the two containers of centrifuge units, amounting to about USD $3 million was paid in UAE Dirham currency by the Iranian. The cash was brought in two briefcases.” The Bush Administration put Mr. Tahir on the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list of sanctioned persons. But the Treasury Department removed his name from that list on April 3, exactly one day after the framework agreement was announced. We asked a Treasury spokesperson why Mr. Tahir’s name was removed and if there was any connection to the Iran deal, and she said the “delisting was based on a determinaton by OFAC that circumstances no longer warrant the blocking of Tahir pursuant to Executive Order 13382.” That order, signed by President Bush in 2005, is “aimed at freezing the assets of proliferators of weapons of mass destruction.” Mr. Tahir’s delisting strikes us as the equivalent of a backdated check intended to whitewash Iran’s illicit acquisition of centrifuges as having anything to do with a nuclear-weapons program. If the Administration wants to deny this, we suggest it explain the timing publicly. Then there is Iran’s ballistic missile program. Ballistic missiles have long been considered an integral part of Iran’s nuclear program as the most effective way to deliver a weapon, and the Administration pushed for U.N. sanctions on Iran’s missiles in 2010.

When it came time to negotiate, however, the Administration gave in to Tehran’s insistence that it would accept no missile limitations, thus separating the missile and nuclear programs. But now that a deal is near, the Administration is reversing itself again, claiming that for the purposes of sanctions Iran’s missile program is “nuclear-related,” meaning the U.S. is prepared to lift the missile sanctions. And there’s more. “Of the 24 Iranian banks currently under U.S. sanctions,” noted the Associated Press in a story last week, “only one—Bank Saderat, cited for terrorism links—is subject to clear non-nuclear sanctions.” In other words, once the “nuclear-related” sanctions go, so go all the rest, notwithstanding Administration promises. It may be too late to prevent President Obama from striking this deal. But as its contours become clearer, it looks increasingly like a betrayal of our friends, a whitewash of history—and a gift to a dictatorship.

Talking Points Against the Obama Immigrant Policy

Posted on June 14, 2015June 14, 2015 by Denise Simon

Cost of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Just in 2012

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the largest investigative agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). With more than 20,000 employees worldwide, ICE is a key component of the DHS layered defense approach to protecting the United States. ICE has requested an annual budget of more than $5.8 billion for FY 2012, with budget figures in key categories detailed below.

Salaries and Expenses

Homeland Security Investigations

ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) enforces trade and immigration laws through the investigation of activities, persons and events that may pose a threat to the safety or security of the United States and its citizens.

HSI’s Domestic Investigations investigates illegal trafficking in weapons (including weapons of mass destruction), the smuggling of narcotics and other contraband, human smuggling and trafficking, money laundering and other financial crimes, fraudulent trade practices, identity and benefit fraud, child pornography, child sex tourism, employers that hire illegal and undocumented workers, and health and public safety dangers.

HSI’s Office of International Investigations conducts investigative efforts in 69 Attaché offices in 47 foreign locations. The office works with foreign counterparts to identify and combat criminal organizations before they can adversely impact the United States, including the Visa Security Program, which focuses on high-risk visa-issuance locations to identify and interdict potential threats before they enter the United States.

Cost of Detention

Back in 2013: Keeping illegal immigrants behind bars costs $120 a day per inmate, or $2 billion a year. Congress has twice rebuffed White House budget requests to cut the quota so ICE can turn to less costly measures, such as ankle bracelets, to keep tabs on the immigrants it’s trying to deport. It’s “artificial,” Janet Napolitano, former secretary of Homeland Security, said at an April hearing. Without the mandate the agency could free low-risk offenders and put them on supervised release to ensure that detainees show up in court for deportation hearings, she said. “We ought to be detaining according to our priorities, according to public-safety threats, level of offense, and the like,” she said.

Getting Released

They are convicted rapists, child molesters, and kidnappers — among “the worst of the worst,” as one law enforcement agency put it. Yet the Globe found that immigration officials have released them without making sure they register with local authorities as sex offenders.

And once US Immigration and Customs Enforcement frees them, agency officials often lose track of the criminals, despite outstanding deportation orders against them. The Globe determined that Hernandez Carrera and several other offenders had failed to register as sex offenders, a crime. By law, police are supposed to investigate if such offenders fail to update their address within days of their release. But local officials said they did not learn that ICE had released the offenders until after the Globe inquired about their cases.

The following are some of the thousands of convicted criminals released by ICE in the US in recent years because their homelands refused to take them back.

“It’s chilling,” said Thomas H. Dupree Jr., a former deputy assistant US attorney general who led a 2008 federal court battle to keep Hernandez Carrera locked up. “These are dangerous and predatory individuals who should not be prowling the streets. In fact, they should not be in the United States at all.” Many more details here.

Street Protests and Fights

From the Daily Caller: A manhunt is underway in Fargo, N.D. after two separate groups of immigrants from unknown countries began waging what is being described as a “street war” against each other earlier this week.

According to Valley News Live, police are currently searching for Luke Goodrich and Isaac Nyemah for their involvement in an alleged armed home invasion that took place Wednesday morning.

The Fargo Police Department is asking for your assistance in locating two individuals of interest that are believed to…

Posted by Fargo Police Department on Wednesday, June 10, 2015

It is unclear how, but the two men are allegedly involved in trouble that began Sunday at a birthday party in a Fargo park.

A group of 70 people were gathered when an altercation of some sort ensued. Men affiliated with one immigrant group smashed out the window of a car with a crowbar. The same men vandalized another vehicle shortly after. Police were initially called to the park because a DJ had been hired and party-goers were drinking alcohol, in violation of park rules.

Russia China Pact with Snowden in the Middle

Posted on June 13, 2015June 13, 2015 by Denise Simon

Going beyond the major hack by China into the Office of Personnel Management that cultivated at least 14 million personnel files of government, intelligence and military, China is building a database of individuals in America. Would they share it with Russia? The wake of destruction is yet to be known and future predictions are impossible to imagine.

Russia is turning to China and likewise China is delighted for the relationship as proven by the Silk Road Economic objectives.

Putin’s vision of a ‘greater Europe’ from Lisbon to Vladivostok, made up of the European Union and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, is being replaced by a ‘greater Asia’ from Shanghai to St. Petersburg.

China's silk road

In part:

The rupture between Russia and the West stemming from the 2014 crisis over Ukraine has wide-ranging geopolitical implications. Russia has reverted to its traditional position as a Eurasian power sitting between the East and the West, and it is tilting toward China in the face of political and economic pressure from the United States and Europe. This does not presage a new Sino-Russian bloc, but the epoch of post-communist Russia’s integration with the West is over. In the new epoch, Russia will seek to expand and deepen its relations with non-Western nations, focusing on Asia. Western leaders need to take this shift seriously.

Russia’s Pivot to Asia
Russia’s pivot to Asia predates the Ukraine crisis, but it has become more pronounced since then. This is in part because China is the largest economy outside of the coalition that has imposed sanctions on Russia as a result of the crisis.

What was originally Moscow’s “marriage of convenience” with Beijing has turned into a much closer partnership that includes cooperation on energy trade, infrastructure development, and defense.

Putin’s vision of a “greater Europe” from Lisbon to Vladivostok, made up of the European Union and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, is being replaced by a “greater Asia” from Shanghai to St. Petersburg.

Russia is now more likely to back China in the steadily growing competition between Beijing and Washington, which will strengthen China’s hand.
Takeaways for Western Leaders
Russia’s confrontation with the United States will help mitigate Sino-Russian rivalries, mostly to China’s advantage. But this doesn’t mean Russia will be dominated by China—Moscow is likely to find a way to craft a special relationship with its partner.

With China’s economic might and Russia’s great-power expertise, the BRICS group (of which Russia is a part, along with Brazil, India, China, and South Africa) will increasingly challenge the G7 as a parallel center of global governance.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, due to include India and Pakistan this year, is on its way to becoming the principal development and security forum for continental Asia.

Through its enhanced relations with non-Western countries, Russia will actively promote a concept of world order that seeks to reduce U.S. global dominance and replace it with a broader great-power consensus. Much more detail here.

Enter Snowden

Confirmed: UK agents ‘moved over Snowden files’

Russia, China Decrypt Snowden Files

Russia and China have allegedly decrypted the top-secret cache of files stolen by whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to a report from The Sunday Times, to be published tomorrow.

The info has compelled British intelligence agency MI6 to withdraw some of its agents from active operations and other Western intelligence agencies are now actively involved in rescue operations. In a July 2013 email to a former U.S. Senator, Snowden stated that, “No intelligence service—not even our own—has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specializations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China).” Many in the intelligence agencies at the time greeted this claim with scepticism. Now, one senior British official said Snowden had “blood on his hands,” but another said there’s yet no evidence anyone was harmed. Snowden eventually fled to Russia via Hong Kong after downloading some 1.7 million documents from U.S. government computers and leaking them to journalists out of a desire to protect “privacy and basic liberties.” The revelations of mass spying outraged populations and governments around the world, at least temporarily damaged relations, and eventually led to changes in the mass surveillance policies of the NSA and British GCHQ.

Iran Supplies Cash and Weapons to Taliban

Posted on June 12, 2015June 12, 2015 by Denise Simon

No one can say for sure if the Taliban in designated as a terror group by the United States, other countries or by the United Nations. We do know that the Obama regime has declared that hostilities with the Taliban has terminated. Depending on the day and per the White House, the Taliban has a slippery designation. All the while peace talks continue with the Taliban so, deferring to both Pakistan and Afghanistan appears to be unsettled as the peace envoys are hosted in China.

Iran reportedly stepping up shipments of arms, cash to Taliban

The Iranian government reportedly has stepped up shipments of weapons and money to the Taliban in Afghanistan in recent months.

According to The Wall Street Journal, which cited Afghan and Western officials in its report, Iran’s motivations for stepping up support for the militants are to prevent ISIS from gaining a foothold in Afghanistan and providing a check on U.S. influence ahead of the planned withdrawal of most American troops by the end of 2016.

The report quotes a Taliban fighter as saying that the militants receive weapons from smugglers paid by Iran’s government who traffic the contraband through the remote border region where Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan meet. Among the weapons Taliban units allegedly receive are mortars, machine guns, rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades.

Iran has repeatedly denied providing financial or military aid to the Taliban. No Iranian officials immediately commented on the Journal’s report.

Republican critics of ongoing negotiations between Western powers and Tehran over the future of Iran’s nuclear program say that Iran’s support for the Taliban, Hezbollah, and other militant groups in the Middle East would only increase thanks to the possibility of relief from sanctions have throttled the country’s economy.

“This is further evidence of the administration’s continued willful disregard for the facts on the ground in light of Iranian aggression in the region,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told the Journal.

According to the paper, a report compiled by the Pentagon in October of last year says that Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps have been delivering weapons to the Taliban since at least 2007. The relationship between Tehran and the Taliban solidified in the summer of 2013 when a Taliban delegation was invited to participate in a conference on Islam.

For the past two years, Afghan officials and the Taliban fighter tell the Journal, Iran has been operating training camps for Taliban inside its territory. At least four of the camps are currently operating.

In at least one case, Iran is even supplying fighters for the Taliban by turning to Afghan immigrants who fled to Iran to escape Afghanistan’s ongoing turmoil. One of them, the Taliban fighter quoted in the report, says he was approached by an Iranian intelligence officer after being detained for working as an illegal laborer.

“At the beginning Iran was supporting [the] Taliban financially,” a senior Afghan official tells the Journal. “But now they are training and equipping them, too.”

***

While the United States continues to advance talks with Iran, Iran betrays all pledges and integrity at the negotiation table. John Kerry and the White House are fine with that. Iran has not given up a single position or any true information as the West gives up ground each day, to what end is still not clear.

U.S. and Western diplomats say they are willing to accept a nuclear deal with Iran that doesn’t require Tehran to immediately disclose alleged work on atomic weapons prior to 2003, when the program first came to light.

After a November 2013 interim accord, the Obama administration said a comprehensive solution “would include resolution of questions concerning the possible military dimension of Iran’s nuclear program.”

But officials told the Associated Press those questions won’t be answered by the June 30 deadline for a final deal, echoing an assessment by the U.N. nuclear agency’s top official earlier this week. Nevertheless, the officials said an accord remains possible. One senior Western official on Thursday described diplomats as “more likely to get a deal than not” over the next three weeks.

Western intelligence agencies say they don’t know the extent of Iran’s alleged work on warheads, delivery systems and detonators before 2003, or if Iran persisted in covert efforts. An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigation has been foiled for more than a decade by Iranian refusals to allow monitors to visit suspicious sites or interview individuals allegedly involved in secret weapons development.

Instead of resolving such questions this month, officials said the U.S. and its negotiating partners are working on a list of future commitments Iran must fulfill in an agreement setting decade-long curbs on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.

The suspension of some sanctions would be tied to Iran finally answering all questions, giving world powers greater leverage, said the officials, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the private discussions and demanded anonymity.