Category Archives: Failed foreign policy

Not Just Hillary Who Ignored .Gov Emails

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Heck America….ask every employee if they use or have used outside secret emails to do the business of government. It seems it began with Lisa Jackson at the EPA. What about secret emails to other secret email accounts? There is no .gov record and there is law on this. So back to lil miss Hillary…

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Maybe Hillary’s covert and cover-up agenda started back at TravelGate.

The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails – on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state – traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account – [email protected], which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym – for official State Department business.

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking. Read more here and then lets track down Sidney Blumenthal and see what he has to say.

Source: Top Clinton Aides Used Secret Email Accounts at State Dept.

by J.K. Trotter

Hillary Clinton is defending her use of a private email address, hosted at ClintonEmail.com, to conduct official State Department business by claiming that her emails were captured by official @state.gov accounts that other agency employees were instructed to use to contact her. But according to a knowledgeable source, at least two other top Clinton aides also used private email accounts to conduct government business—placing their official communications outside the scope of federal record-keeping regulations. “Her top staffers used those Clinton email addresses” at the agency, said the source, who has worked with Clinton in the past. The source named two staffers in particular, Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, who are said to have used private email addresses in the course of their agency duties. Reines served as deputy assistant secretary of state, and Abedin as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. Both rank among Clinton’s most loyal confidantes, in and out of the State Department.

We were able to independently verify that Abedin used a ClintonEmail.com address at some point in time. There are several email addresses associated with Abedin’s name in records maintained by Lexis-Nexis; one of them is [email protected]. An email sent to that address today went through without bouncing.

In an email to Gawker, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill denied that Reines was ever given, or ever used, a ClintonEmail.com address. “He has never had one, not for communicating with anyone about anything,” he wrote.Merrill did not respond, however, to questions about whether Reines used a private account at a different provider, such as Yahoo! or Gmail, to conduct official agency business. He also refused to address multiple questions regarding how Abedin used her ClintonEmail.com address.

The use of private email addresses may explain the State Department’s puzzling response to several FOIA requests filed by Gawker in the past two years. One of our requests, in September 2012, sought correspondence between Reines and a variety of reporters, including former BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings, who engaged in a profanity-flecked exchange with Reines in 2012. That request was confoundingly denied on the grounds that the State Department had no record of Reines—whose job it was to communicate with reporters—emailing Hastings or any other journalists (Gawker is currently appealing the rejection). Another request in June 2011 sought Abedin’s email correspondence; the State Department rejected that one as well, although we could not immediately locate the denial letter to determine on what grounds.

“It pokes a big hole in her explanation,” the source added, referring to spokesman Nick Merrill’s statement to Business Insider. “Like Secretaries of State before her,” Merrill told the site, she used her own email account when engaging with any Department officials. For government business, she emailed them on their Department accounts, with every expectation they would be retained.”

Jeremy Bird in Violation of the Logan Act?

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Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein rejected Wednesday a Likud party petition to disqualify the left-wing V15 group, which was accused by the ruling party of violating election law through its alleged ties with the Zionist Union list. In a press conference last week, Likud lawmakers claimed that the group was being financed illegally, and called for an investigation into alleged dealings with the Zionist Union, which merges the Labor and Hatnua parties, and is headed by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni.

Are there any Federal funds being used for Jeremy Bird of V15 being used to oust Netanyahu as the Prime Minister of Israel? Is Jeremy Bird being empowered by the White House as it agent working against our Middle East ally, Israel?

The clear intent of this provision [Logan Act] is to prohibit unauthorized persons from intervening in disputes between the United States and foreign governments

WASHINGTON — Jeremy Bird, the architect of the grass-roots and online organizing efforts that powered President Obama’s presidential campaigns from Chicago, is advising a similar operation in Tel Aviv. But this time it is focused on ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

His consulting work for the group V15 — an independent Israeli organization that does not support specific candidates but is campaigning to replace Israel’s current government — has added yet another political layer to the diplomatic mess surrounding Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to address a joint meeting of Congress next week on Iran.

The White House has argued that Mr. Netanyahu’s plan to deliver the speech on March 3, two weeks before the Israeli elections, is harming the United States-Israel relationship by injecting partisanship. Republicans contend it is Mr. Obama who is playing politics and cite the work of Mr. Bird as proof that the president is quietly rooting for the defeat of his Israeli counterpart.

A founder of V15, the organization behind that effort. Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

American strategists have for decades signed on to work in Israeli political campaigns, with Democrats usually aligned with the Labor Party and Republicans often backing Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party. There is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Obama or any of his senior aides had anything to do with the move by his former top campaign official, who has never worked at the White House, to join the effort to defeat Mr. Netanyahu.

But Mr. Bird’s involvement in the elections is drawing attention when tensions between the two countries are so acute that what is usually considered standard practice for American political consultants in Israel is now seen as a provocation.

“It’s clearly a data point that people are looking to that indicates how the relationship has deteriorated,” said Matthew Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He added that Mr. Bird reflects “the hypocrisy of this White House, which wants to stand on the notion that they’re not playing politics when in fact their fingerprints are all over this.”

The White House has repeatedly said its highest priority is keeping partisanship out of the relationship between the United States and Israel, citing that principle as Mr. Obama’s rationale for refusing to meet with Mr. Netanyahu during his visit.

Asked about the suggestion that Mr. Obama was tacitly backing an effort to oust Mr. Netanyahu, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said, “The long tradition of bipartisan support for the U.S.-Israel relationship has served both our countries well for generations, and President Obama will continue to go to great lengths to shield our alliance from the smallness of party politics.”

Mr. Bird, who was Mr. Obama’s national field director in 2012 and is a founding partner of the political consulting firm 270 Strategies, declined to be interviewed. But he said through a spokeswoman that V15 and its partners had asked him and his firm “to share best practices in organizing so they can maximize their impact both online and on the ground.”

“We’re witnessing something special happening in Israel right now: There’s a groundswell of organic energy as more than 10,000 supporters are coming together to have a voice in their country,” Mr. Bird said through the spokeswoman. V15’s “efforts are already paying off as they have reached out to more than 200,000 targeted voters, both in person and on the phone, about the need for change in Israel.”

Administration allies scoff at the accusation that Mr. Bird’s involvement is inappropriate, saying it is particularly galling given Mr. Netanyahu’s move to work with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, to arrange a speech without telling the White House. Many Democrats see the speech as a move that would undercut Mr. Obama’s efforts to forge a nuclear deal with Iran.

“It is eye-rolling for Netanyahu to complain about former Obama aides working against him when he cooked up a speech to Congress with Boehner and didn’t tell the White House,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council aide to Mr. Obama. “He has removed his ability to complain about playing politics by openly meddling in U.S. politics. The notion that Jeremy and the 270 team were sent there with the blessing of President Obama is just silly.”

Mr. Bird’s work in Israel started in November 2013, when he began consulting with OneVoice, an organization pressing to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He signed on with V15 in December 2014, after Mr. Netanyahu called the March 2015 elections. Last month, the Israel arm of OneVoice became a partner with V15 to mobilize voters.

The effort has angered Mr. Netanyahu and his allies in Israel, who unsuccessfully sought a court injunction against V15, arguing it was violating Israeli election law by accepting foreign donations. Likud withdrew the request last week, citing difficulty in proving the charge.

Republicans in Congress have criticized Mr. Bird’s involvement and the work of OneVoice, which has received grants from the State Department. In a letter to the department last month that prominently mentioned Mr. Bird and his ties to Mr. Obama, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, both Republicans, said they were concerned that American taxpayer money was being used to influence the Israeli elections and unseat Mr. Netanyahu.

“It is deeply troubling that President Obama’s national field director is helping run the campaign to defeat the democratically elected leader of one of our closest friends and allies, the nation of Israel,” Mr. Cruz said in an interview on Friday.

In a response to the lawmakers, Julia Frifield, the State Department’s assistant secretary for legislative affairs, said in a statement that OneVoice’s Israel branch received a $233,500 grant in September 2013 to support peace negotiations by Mr. Netanyahu’s government. The grant was paid in installments, with the final one paid in August 2014, before elections were called.

“There is absolutely no basis to claims that the Department of State has funded efforts to influence the current Israeli election campaign,” Ms. Frifield wrote.

Mr. Bird is the latest in a long line of Americans who have worked on foreign political campaigns, particularly in Israel. In December, Mr. Netanyahu hired John McLaughlin, a Republican pollster; Likud has brought on Vincent Harris, a campaign aide to Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. Former aides to Mr. Obama have also worked for the prime minister, including Bill Knapp and Josh Isay.

Former campaign strategists to Bill Clinton, including his pollster Stanley B. Greenberg and strategist James Carville, went to Israel in 1999 to help Ehud Barak defeat Mr. Netanyahu.

Why Nemtsov was Murdered

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Breaking: (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Saturday Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered because he planned to disclose evidence of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine’s separatist conflict.

Poroshenko paid tribute to Nemtsov, who was shot dead late on Friday, and said the fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin had told him a couple of weeks ago that he had proof of Russia’s role in the Ukraine crisis and would reveal it.

“He said he would reveal persuasive evidence of the involvement of Russian armed forces in Ukraine. Someone was very afraid of this … They killed him,” Poroshenko said in televised comments during a visit to the city of Vinnytsia.

More than 5,600 people have been killed since pro-Russian separatists rebelled in east Ukraine last April, after the ousting of a Moscow-backed president in Kiev and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula.

Kiev and its Western allies say the rebels are funded and armed by Moscow, and backed by Russian military units. Moscow denies aiding sympathizers in Ukraine, and says heavily armed Russian-speaking troops operating without insignia there are not its men.

And there is more as noted below.

Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov said he feared Vladimir Putin would have him killed just days before he was gunned down in front of his Ukrainian model girlfriend.
The former deputy Prime Minister, 55, and fierce critic of the Russian leader said ‘I’m afraid Putin will kill me’ in an interview shortly before he was killed in a ‘politically motivated’ attack.


Nemtsov, a married father-of-four, was shot four times by assailants in a white car as he walked across a bridge in central Moscow with Anna Duritskaya on Friday night, but the model was unhurt.
Just hours before his death he accused Putin of pushing Russia into a crisis through his ‘mad, aggressive and deadly policy of war against Ukraine’ and was due to attend an protest on Sunday.
Nemtsov had been working on a report presenting evidence he believed proved Russia’s direct involvement in the separatist rebellion that erupted in eastern Ukraine last year, For a full background of events leading up to the hit job, click here.

In part from Foreign Policy: Given these recent events, most Russian opposition leaders have given up hoping that Obama will be able to change much inside Russia. Opposition activist Boris Nemtsov met with Obama in Moscow back in 2009, but this time around he didn’t see any point to a meeting with the U.S. president.

“Obama is a Hollywood actor, a weak man with no balls,” Nemtsov said, cutting to the point. “Nobody should ever expect him to help Russians seeking civil freedom.”

While Nemtsov initially backed Putin’s presidential run, calling him “responsible and honest”, he swiftly changed his mind and became one of his bitterest foes.

He was one of the founders of Russia’s Union of Right Forces liberal party, and its leader in the early 2000s, serving as an opposition lawmaker in the parliament where he criticised Putin’s initial steps to curb political freedoms.

Always tanned and flashing smiles, Nemtsov had a quasi rock-star image, wearing designer jeans and often wearing his shirt with an extra button open. He was known for his colourful love life and popularity with women.

Along with other opposition leaders, Nemtsov unsuccessfully sued Putin after he said Nemtsov and others “wreaked havoc” in Russia during the 1990s, pillaging it of billions of dollars.

Hate figure for pro-Kremlin groups

With the Kremlin’s rhetoric focused on discrediting the political climate of the 1990s, Nemtsov became one of the most reviled faces among the opposition and pro-Kremlin groups routinely put him on their lists of “traitors” in recent years.

He had been a victim of hacking and wiretapping, and pro-Kremlin websites had written reports about his personal life and alleged affairs.

A physicist by education, Nemtsov worked in a research institute in the late Soviet era as a young man and was among a wave of academics and scientists to be swept up by the political upheaval of the perestroika reform movement, becoming a deputy in Russia’s first post-Soviet lawmaking body.

Like most others in the opposition, Nemtsov was a prolific user of social networks, calling on Muscovites to attend an opposition rally on Sunday in his most recent blog entry.

In recent years he compiled a series of pamphlets exposing corruption under Putin, zooming in on the gas behemoth Gazprom, the residences allegedly owned by Putin, and most recently the misappropriations and graft during preparations for Russia’s Olympic Games in Sochi last year.

Though he continued to be a key figure in opposition events in Moscow, Nemtsov gradually withdrew over the past decade as a younger generation of opposition leaders such as charismatic lawyer Alexei Navalny appeared.

His most recent post was as a regional lawmaker in the city of Yaroslavl north of the capital.

 

The Killer was in America Under Obama’s DACA

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — She was a Serbian-born model and self-described “wild-child” who said she began walking runways in her new North Carolina hometown at age 12.

But a blossoming career in modeling for Mirjana Puhar, who reached national attention on “America’s Next Top Model,” ended tragically when police found her body and two others in a house in Charlotte this week.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police say 19-year-old Emmanuel Jesus Rangel-Hernandez is charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of the 19-year-old Puhar and two other victims. Authorities have said the killings were drug-related, but have not said how the three were killed.

 

The Charlotte Observer reported on Puhar’s emerging career in a story published in 2014. She told the newspaper that her family fled Serbia after the Kosovo War and moved to North Carolina a decade later.

*** This led Senator Grassley, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee to ask in written form of Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson if Hernandez was in the United States under the White House, Barack Obama DACA program. Several days later, the answer is YES.  From Daily Caller: “Mr. Rangel-Hernandez allegedly applied for and received deferred action under the President’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program,” Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, wrote to Johnson.

There are more chilling facts in this case. He’s also being charged with a murder in Matthews, North Carolina, that occurred on February 22 at a hotel. WCNC reports that the victim in that shooting is named Rosool Jaleel Harrell. Cops in Matthews say that Rangel has been charged along with a man named Edward Sanchez, who is also charged with murder and Emily Isaacs, who is charged with accessory after the fact. Both of those suspects were arrested in Harris County, Texas.

Until just a week ago when a Federal judge ordered a suspension of DAPA, DACA continues and is the program is defined below:

What Is DACA

On June 15, 2012, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced that certain people who came to the United States as children and meet several guidelines may request consideration of deferred action for a period of two years, subject to renewal. They are also eligible for work authorization. Deferred action is a use of prosecutorial discretion to defer removal action against an individual for a certain period of time. Deferred action does not provide lawful status. NOTE: On November 20, 2014, the President made an announcement extending the period of DACA and work authorization from two years to three years.

Border Surge, Crime Fighting, Chilling Report

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Border surge harming crime fighting in other parts of Texas, internal report finds

To download the report, click here.

AUSTIN – The deployment of additional state police and Texas National Guard troops to the southern border last June has reduced illegal border crossings but cost more than $100 million and compromised the Department of Public Safety’s ability to combat crimes elsewhere, according to an internal DPS assessment prepared for Gov. Greg Abbott and lawmakers. “The Department of Public Safety is understaffed throughout the state, and a sustained deployment of personnel to the border region reduces the patrol and investigative capacity in other areas of the state that are also impacted by transnational crime,” according to the report, which was distributed late last month on the condition that it not be publicly released.

The 68-page assessment, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, largely cast the border surge ordered by state leaders last summer as a success, citing the reductions in illegal border crossings and cartel activity in the operation zone.

The report also said that millions spent to bring state police officers and guardsmen to the border and give them time to develop relationships with local law enforcement helped push the cost of Operation Strong Safety II beyond $100 million.

“The permanent assignment of a sufficient number of troopers, agents and Texas Rangers to the border region is more effective and efficient than short-term deployments from around the state,” the report found.

The current deployment, which began last June in response to a spike of unaccompanied children crossing the border that quickly subsided, has now stretched to eight months. The guardsmen have been on the border to support the mission for six months, drawing increasing criticism from some state lawmakers and prompting a search for a long-term solution.

Among other recommendations, the report said the state should immediately fund 320 more patrol vehicles for the operation and eventually replace the deployed guardsmen with technology and 500 Department of Public Safety officers – a suggestion that mirrors the plan Abbott announced last week.

Abbott has named border security as an emergency item, allowing bills related to it to be passed in the first 60 days of the legislative session. Both the state House and Senate have also prioritized the issue, proposing budgets with unprecedented levels of spending on border security.

By this summer, the state will have spent nearly $1 billion on border enforcement since 2008, nearly half of that in the two-year budget period that ends Aug. 31.

A key question is how long the guardsmen should stay on the border. Abbott has called for them to remain until his proposed 500 extra officers arrive. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also supports a continued deployment, but state House Speaker Joe Straus is more skeptical.

The internal report did not directly mention the issue but said the guardsmen should be replaced “as resources become available.”

Overall, the document mostly provided a more detailed version of what Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw and Texas National Guard Adjutant General John Nichols have said at a series of committee hearings during the early part of this session, including at a Monday meeting in which several state senators called for the operation to have more defined goals.

While the report gave more detail than has been publicly released about the claim often made by Patrick and other state leaders that the deployment has reduced crime, it focused on illegal crossings and cartel activity in the operation zone, providing less detail about local crimes and leaving open the possibility that criminals have simply shifted their efforts elsewhere.

Cartel arrests

In addition to the steep reduction in crossings since the mission began, which some experts have attributed to other factors, the report said that encounters with gang members in the operation area have dropped by 38 percent, pursuits in Hidalgo and Starr counties have dipped by 29 percent and documented human stash homes have plummeted by two-thirds.

Documented drug stash houses have slightly increased, said the assessment, which found that 150 tons of illegal drugs have been seized as part of the operation.

The report also said the chiefs of the Mission and McAllen police departments have credited the deployment with decreased local crime.

The mission has also led to the arrest of several high-profile cartel leaders, according to the assessment.

In its detailed cost breakdown, the report found that the Department of Public Safety has spent about $22 million on salaries, $21 million on overtime payments, $5 million on vehicle fuel and maintenance, $2.5 million on flight costs and $7 million on “travel,” presumably for officers to get to and from the operation.

Among other costs, the Texas Military Department has spent $16 million on wages, $550,000 on food for undocumented immigrants, $181,000 on fuel, $78,000 on building rent and $16 million on “operating expenses.”