Category Archives: FBI

The Clinton’s and Panama Papers Friends

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There has been a constant recent argument that if you are a conservative and don’t vote Trump then you are effectively voting for Hillary. That is a straw man argument when the matter is twofold.

 

Newt Gingrich argued with Congressman Huelskamp over the weekend and admitted Trump is not a ‘Reagan conservative’ but he is better than Hillary. Of course that statement is true. The other matter is why are the Trump fans so fearful that Hillary will get the nomination? Of course she will. Are Republicans so terrified that Hillary cannot be defeated in the general election? If so, then where is the mettle and fire in the belly and force multiplier and a voting army defeat Hillary? If the will is there, the achievement can be so great such that no Democrat will successfully take over the Oval Office for perhaps up to 3 election cycles and it should that way given the last 8 years.

In case this argument needs more ammunition, here are some more political arrows for the quiver relating to the elitist circle of the Clintons. This demonstrates the alternate universe of collusion, money and favors.

Inside Panama Papers: Multiple Clinton connections

Washington/McClatchy:

Hillary Clinton recently blasted the hidden financial dealings exposed in the Panama Papers, but she and her husband have multiple connections with people who have used the besieged law firm Mossack Fonseca to establish offshore entities.

 

Among them are Gabrielle Fialkoff, finance director for Hillary Clinton’s first campaign for the U.S. Senate; Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnate who has traveled the globe with Bill Clinton; the Chagoury family, which pledged $1 billion in projects to the Clinton Global Initiative; and Chinese billionaire Ng Lap Seng, who was at the center of a Democratic fund-raising scandal when Bill Clinton was president. Also using the Panamanian law firm was the company founded by the late billionaire investor Marc Rich, an international fugitive when Bill Clinton pardoned him in the final hours of his presidency.

The ties are both recent and decades old, not surprising

for the Democratic presidential front-runner and her husband, who have been in public life since the 1970s.

Each is listed in the massive leak of data from Mossack Fonseca, a law firm with expertise in registering offshore companies, which can have legitimate business purposes, but can also be used to evade taxes and launder money. Several heads of state were found in the leak, leading to the departure of the leader of Iceland and investigations in several other countries.

McClatchy Newspapers and about 350 other journalists working under the umbrella of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have searched an archive containing more than 11.5 million Mossack Fonseca documents, including passports, financial records and emails. After a series of articles earlier this month revealed how business owners and politicians used offshores, authorities raided the law firm’s offices in Panama. The law firm has denied all accusations of wrongdoing.

Hillary Clinton condemned what she called “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting.”

“Now, some of this behavior is clearly against the law, and everyone who violates the law anywhere should be held accountable,” she said, speaking at the AFL-CIO convention recently. “But it’s also scandalous how much is actually legal.”

The Clintons themselves do not appear to be in Mossack Fonseca’s database, nor does it appear that their daughter, Chelsea, or her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, who co-founded a hedge fund, are listed. But Bill and Hillary Clinton’s connections to people who have used offshores is fuel for her Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders.

Clinton has struggled throughout her campaign to show that she can relate to working Americans, while Sanders has cast her as a wealthy out-of-touch Washington insider who has accepted hefty paychecks for speeches and received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from those tied to big businesses. Her connection to the Panama Papers, even if indirect, could magnify that perception.

Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in New York, said it would draw voters’ attention once again to Clinton’s ties to big money. “It certainly would play into Sanders’ narrative,” he said.

Sanders said Clinton’s support of a free-trade agreement between the U.S. and Panama – one that he claims has allowed the wealthy to avoid paying taxes – should disqualify her from being the Democratic nominee for president.

“I don’t think you are qualified if you supported the Panama free trade agreement, something I very strongly opposed, which has made it easier for wealthy people and corporations all over the world to avoid paying taxes owed to their countries,” Sanders said recently.

To be sure, a long life in politics has allowed the Clintons to accumulate relationships to wealthy people and businesses across the globe.

One such connection is to Jean-Raymond Boulle, a one-time diamond miner from the volcanic island nation of Mauritius whose company was once based in Bill Clinton’s hometown of Hope, Ark. In the mid 1990s, Boulle was listed as a director of Auk Limited, a British Virgin Islands offshore company, and Gridco Limited, a Bahamas offshore company.

After two meetings with Boulle, Bill Clinton, then-governor of Arkansas, signed legislation allowing his company to engage in exploratory mining in the state. Later, Boulle and his wife attended Clinton’s first inauguration. Boulle’s company did not respond to a message.

“Obviously there’s no wrongdoing – it’s a question of perception and values,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. “They’ve been in public life so long; when you enter that sphere you have these connections.”

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon declined to answer specific questions about her connections but referred to Clinton’s earlier comments that criticized the behavior last week. Bill Clinton’s office and the Clinton Foundation declined to comment.

Also among the Clinton connections is Fialkoff, now a senior adviser to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and director of the city’s Office of Strategic Partnerships. She, her brother, Brett, and her late father, Frank, are listed as shareholders of UPAC Holdings Ltd, a British Virgin Islands offshore company incorporated in June 2012.

Gabrielle Fialkoff said in an email that she has “no knowledge” of the company and referred questions to her brother.

Brett Fialkoff, who serves as chief operating officer at his family’s business, Haskell Jewels, a New York-based designer, marketer and distributor of costume jewelry, initially told McClatchy he didn’t know why his family would be in the documents. Later, he said that someone must have opened an account in their names.

Still, later, he said he set up an offshore company to export accessories from China to the United States. The documents indicate the company’s files are registered in Beijing.

But, he said, he abandoned the new business to give more attention to his family’s jewelry company. He said there’s no money in any bank account overseas and declined to provide details about his compliance with U.S. tax laws.

“I have news for you: There is no money,” he said in a phone interview. “We’re not like Vladimir Putin, trying to hide money.”

The most recent Mossack Fonseca information of December 2015 shows the company remains active, registered on behalf of the Fialkoffs in the British Virgin Islands by a Hong Kong-based consulting company on June 6, 2012. Brett Failkoff acknowledged the company is still “legally alive” but said it does not – nor has it ever – conducted any business.

Gabrielle Fialkoff, a longtime friend of de Blasio, was finance director for Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, which de Blasio managed. After serving as Haskell’s president and chief operating officer, she chaired de Blasio’s inauguration and led New York’s unsuccessful bid to host the Democratic National Convention in 2016.

She has been a regular donor to Democratic candidates, including Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics. She also donated between $250 and $1,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Her father donated to Clinton as well. Her brother contributed money to Republicans, including presidential candidates Ben Carson and Rand Paul.

Another connection is Giustra, the director of UrAsia Energy Ltd, a British Virgin Islands offshore company registered in May 2005.

The company wanted to “conduct uranium exploration, development, production and marketing operations and related activities in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan,” according to a draft of the shareholders’ agreement.

UrAsia, based in British Columbia, Canada, finalized a deal in September 2005 to buy uranium mines for $500 million in Kazakhstan, according to published reports.

The deal came after Giustra joined Bill Clinton in Kazakhstan for the launch of a Clinton Foundation health initiative and dined with him and Kazakhstan’s president, among others. The timing prompted questions about whether Bill Clinton played any role in the agreement. Giustra denied that, saying it came after months of negotiations.

The following year, Giustra, who is also involved in filmmaking and founded Lionsgate Entertainment, made a donation of more than $30 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to published reports.

In total, Giustra has committed $100 million to the foundation, according to at least one report, though foundation records don’t give an exact amount, saying only that he is one of the largest individual donors giving more than $25 million. In 2007, he started an affiliated charity that bears his name and initially kept its donors secret despite a 2008 agreement between the Clintons and the Obama administration to make public foundation contributors.

Bill Clinton has flown around the globe on Giustra’s plane, sometimes with him, including to Kazakhstan.

Giustra’s attorney David S. Brown wrote in a letter to McClatchy that his client “had no dealing with the law firm of Mossack Fonseca.”

He also said the use of a company such as UrAsia Energy Ltd. is common in international mining transactions and was used at the direction of an international accounting firm.

“Far from being secretive, opaque or clandestine, UrAsia Energy Ltd. BVI was fully disclosed to the public and to the applicable regulators in 2005 _ to be clear, there was absolutely nothing untoward in the use of this entity,” he wrote.

He declined to answer additional questions.

Former fugitive billionaire Marc Rich’s name doesn’t appear in the Panama Papers, but his company does. The Bahamas offshore Industrial Petroleum Limited was registered in 1992, established by the commodities firm Glencore International in Switzerland, inactivated in 2001.

The allegations against Rich, who died in 2013, ranged from tax evasion to trading with Iran despite bans to selling oil to South Africa’s apartheid government. He fled to Switzerland in 1983, but before the pardon, his ex-wife Denise made a $450,000 donation to Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock.

Rich’s business partners appear in the data too. And they also give generously to the Clinton Foundation.

Sergei Kurzin, a Russian engineer and investor, appears in a draft shareholders agreement in partnership with Giustra in the British Virgin Islands offshore UrAsia Energy Ltd. Kurzin worked closely with Rich in the 1990s looking for opportunities in the former Soviet Union when it was opened to mining and oil investment.

Kurzin, who has given the Clinton Foundation between $50,000 and $100,000, appears in the Panama Papers as the director and chairman of various oil companies. Kurzin was also a partner in the uranium deal involving Giustra.

In a 2009 interview with Forbes, the British-Russian dual citizen boasted of giving generously to a Clinton-Giustra initiative, noting: “I wrote a check for a million dollars. I don’t think you can call it a small amount.”

Messages left for Kurzin were not returned this weekend.

Also in the Panama Papers is Ronald Chagoury, who along with brother Gilbert leads the Chagoury Group, a Nigerian family-run construction business. The brothers were associated with Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, who died in 1998, and did business with Glencore and Rich, according to news reports.

Ronald Chagoury appears in the Panama Papers as the main shareholder of Echo Art Ltd. in the British Virgin Islands.

In 2009, the Chagoury Group pledged $1 billion in coastal erosion projects to the Clinton Global Initiative, an offshoot of the foundation, according to the initiative’s website.

The Chagoury Group is building Eko Atlantic, a peninsula city adjacent to Lagos that will be reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean. The company’s website cites the Clinton Global Initiative’s praise for it as an “environmentally conscious city” under construction.

Gilbert Chagoury’s ties to the Clintons stretch back years. He has given to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns and has donated between $1 million to $5 million to Clinton Foundation, foundation records show. In 2003 he organized a trip to the Caribbean where Bill Clinton was paid $100,000 for a speech.

Messages left for the Chagourys were not returned this weekend.

Another businessman in the Panama papers, Ng, is listed as a shareholder of two British Virgin Islands companies – South South News International Group Ltd in May 2010 and GOLUCK Ltd. in 2004.

He leads a real estate development company in Macau, China, and is one of the world’s wealthiest people. He was accused in 1996 of sending more than $1.1 million to a Little Rock restaurant owner who then contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee, according to a 1998 Senate committee investigation.

The restaurant owner, Charlie Trie, pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws. Ng was not charged. Another congressional report criticized Ng and others for failing to cooperate during the investigation.

Published reports say Ng visited the White House 10 times from 1994 to 1996, had his photograph taken with Bill and Hillary Clinton, sat beside Bill Clinton at an event at a Washington hotel, and rode in an elevator with Hillary Clinton.

Last year, Ng was charged with bribing a United Nations official and lying about what he was doing with $4.5 million in cash he brought into the U.S. over two years. Investigators say instead of spending it at casinos or on art, antiques or real estate, he used the money for bribes as he sought investments in Antigua and China. Another man listed in the same criminal complaint is president of the New York-based South South News, the same name of the British Virgin Islands company.

Ng’s lawyer, Kevin Tung, has said that his charges are based on a misunderstanding. Tung, Benjamin Brafman and Hugh Mo, two others who are or have represented Ng, did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2011, Sanders predicted in a Senate speech that the Panama trade deal would make it easier for the wealthy to hide their cash in Panama.

“I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared,” he said in a statement earlier this month.

Hillary Clinton had opposed the deal in 2008 when she was running for president. But later, as secretary of state, she helped push the agreement through Congress. Her supporters, however, say that the trade pact did not open the door to additional tax evasion.

A Democrat-controlled Senate approved the trade deal. In October 2012, then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., lauded the deal’s “strong language to crack down on tax evasion and money-laundering in Panama.”

Both Clinton and Sanders have vowed to go after Americans who try to hide their wealth.

Clinton said she would shut down what she called the private tax system for the wealthy while Sanders has said he would end the trade deal with Panama within six months and investigate U.S. banks, corporations and individuals stashing their cash in Panama to avoid taxes.

“We’re going after all these scams and make sure that everyone pays their fair share here in America,” she said. “I’m going to hold them accountable, and we’re going to have a special effort to track all these resources wherever they might lead.”

McClatchy has much more here and it is worth the long read to understand more not only on the Clintons but of the elites around the world that our own elites entertained, manipulated, approved of and how some laws and sanctions were waived.

80,000 More 9/11 Pages at Tampa FBI

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Like these journalists, I have been watching this for at least 4 years myself. Even more so, I used to live in Sarasota and came close to building a home in Prestancia.

I have one personal encounter with the Tampa FBI office several years ago, calling them to talk about a subject I was exploring on CAIR, the duty agent asked if I was an Islamophobe….what? He then hung up on me. Sheesh…Meanwhile, lets go beyond the 28 pages in question regarding the Saudis involved in the 9/11 plot and attack. There are more out there then were have been told and at least 80,000 are in the Tampa FBI field office. Hummmm…. to be sure however, there are thousands of foreign nationals who own and or rent houses in the United States. Some are here under a falsely applied diplomatic cover while others are here under that EB5 visa program or one of 38 others.

If memory serves me, 2 of the hijackers rented a home in Nokomis, just a few miles south of Sarasota and took flight lessons at the Venice, Florida airport, also within just a few miles. Both hijackers are well known, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi.

 

Further, Esam Ghazzawi, a longtime adviser to Sultan’s father, Prince Fahd, owned the Sarasota home and there were some flights before 9/11 and after 9/11 that included the original city of Lexington, Kentucky that flew to Saudi Arabia. More here.

 photo courtesy of Bill Warner

The FBI Is Keeping 80,000 Secret Files on the Saudis and 9/11

DailyBeast: The secret ‘28 pages’ are just the start. The FBI has another 80,000 classified documents, many of which deal with Saudi connections to the 9/11 terror plot. What’s the Bureau got?

The Obama administration may soon release 28 classified pages from a congressional investigation that allegedly links Saudis in the United States to the 9/11 attackers. A former Republican member of the 9/11 Commission alleged Thursday that there was “clear evidence” of support for the hijackers from Saudi officials.

But in Florida, a federal judge is weighing whether to declassify portions of some 80,000 classified pages that could reveal far more about the hijackers’ Saudis connections and their activities in the weeks preceding the worst attack on U.S. soil.

The still-secret files speak to one of the strangest and most enduring mysteries of the 9/11 attacks. Why did the Saudi occupants of a posh house in gated community in Sarasota, Florida, suddenly vanish in the two weeks prior to the attacks? And had they been in touch with the leader of the operation, Mohamed Atta, and two of his co-conspirators?

No way, the FBI says, even though the bureau’s own agents did initially suspect the family was linked to some of the hijackers. On further scrutiny, those connections proved unfounded, officials now say.

But a team of lawyers and investigative journalists has found what they say is hard evidence pointing in the other direction. Atta did visit the family before he led 18 men to their deaths and murdered 3,000 people, they say, and phone records connect the house to members of the 9/11 conspiracy.

The FBI did initially suspect something was off when their agents descended on the Sarasota house shortly after the attacks, tipped off by suspicious neighbors who had always found the family aloof.

Investigators found signs that the occupants had left in a hurry. Food was left on the counter and the refrigerator was stocked. Toys were still floating in the back-yard swimming pool. Dirty diapers were left in a bathroom. It also looked like the people who lived there weren’t coming back. The mail was piling up outside, and the door to an empty safe was wide open. Three cars remained parked in the garage and driveway.

The FBI later said it came up with reasonable answers to explain this odd behavior. But not until after the Tampa field office opened an investigation that claimed to find “numerous connections” between the family and the 9/11 hijackers.

The final answers about what really happened in Sarasota may lie somewhere in those 80,000 pages. To be sure, not all of them concern the FBI’s investigation of the Saudi family. The documents represent the entire case file of the 9/11 attacks at the Tampa field office. But some subset surely will reveal more about what the FBI knew, and when, and why it reached a different conclusion.

For the past two years, U.S. district court judge William Zloch has been going through the files, page-by-page, to determine what information that pertains to the Saudi case can be released.

But based on about three dozen pages that had been made public already under the Freedom of Information Act, and the work of the reporters, this is the picture that emerges of life at 4224 Escondito Circle, a three-bedroom house in an exclusive community called Prestancia, in the weeks before 9/11.

 photo courtesy Bill Warner

The house was occupied by a Saudi couple, Abdulazzi al-Hiijjii and his wife Anoud, and their three small children. Anoud’s father, Esam Ghazzawi, a financier and interior designer, owned the home, along with his American-born wife, Deborah.

The family largely kept to themselves. A neighbor told the Tampa Bay Times that Abdulazzi said he was a student, and that his wife was religious. “He would come over for a cigarette and a drink and to get away from that praying every two hours,” the neighbor said.

But the family’s behavior, and undoubtedly their national origin, drew new suspicion after the 9/11 attacks. In April 2002, “based upon repeated citizen calls,” the FBI opened an investigation, which “revealed many connections” between a member of the family “and individuals associated with the terrorist attacks,” according to one of the few released documents.

Those jaw-dropping claims remained largely unknown for years. In part, that’s because the FBI now says that the initial reports came from an agent who couldn’t support his suspicions. Investigators later interviewed members of the family and found they had left the U.S. because Abdulazzi had just graduated and gotten a new job in Saudi Arabia.

The Sarasota family also had no connections to the 9/11 terrorists, the FBI concluded. (Their names are redacted in the reports, for privacy, but they have been publicly confirmed.)

Case closed? Hardly. In 2011, a pair of Irish journalists, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, who were publishing a book on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, contacted Dan Christensen, a veteran Florida reporter. They’d heard about the Sarasota family and had a confidential source—an unnamed counterterrorism official—who claimed to have detailed knowledge of the FBI’s investigation into the couple, including analysis of phone records that showed calls to and from the house connected to the hijackers. What’s more, the source also said that visitor logs from the security gate of the community showed that Atta, along with co-hijacker Ziad Jarrah, had come to the house, and that those logs had been turned over to the FBI.

The journalists teamed up and published an exposé on Christensen’s independent news site, FloridaBulldog.org, and on the front page of the Miami Herald. The story was an instant sensation, prompting the FBI to publicly declare that the case had been investigated and found to have no merit.

Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who had led the congressional inquiry that produced those 28 pages on Saudi connections, was stunned by the Sarasota allegations. The FBI hadn’t given Graham’s committee any information about the family or their suspected ties to Atta and other hijackers. Even the initial reports the FBI later said proved wrong weren’t disclosed to congressional investigators, Graham said. The journalists findings “open[ed] the door to a new chapter of investigation as to the depth of the Saudi role in 9/11,” Graham said at the time.

The FBI continued to publicly knock down the Sarasota connection. Graham eventually confronted the bureau and asked to see files from the Tampa field office. As he told The Daily Beast’s Eleanor Clift for a forthcoming article, Graham saw records that did show alleged contacts between the family and three hijackers, and further lines of inquiry that investigators could follow.

Later, Graham himself was confronted by the FBI’s then deputy director, Sean Joyce, who told him, “Basically everything about 9/11 was known and I was wasting my time and I should get a life,” Graham said.

For his part, Christensen took the government to court, suing under the Freedom of Information Act for the files and records to substantiate—or refute—his sources’ claims.

Thomas Julin, Christensen’s lawyer, told The Daily Beast that initially the FBI claimed it had no records. But when Julin told officials that Graham was willing to testify that he’d actually seen some, the Justice Department admitted to having found 35 pages of material, which it released.

It’s those pages, many of which bear heavy redactions, that show the FBI agents’ initial suspicions, the fact that an FBI case was open, and that investigators had found “many connections” between the family and the hijackers. There are also letters and memos from FBI officials dismissing the 9/11 connection as unfounded.

Those 35 pages were all the FBI could find about the alleged Sarasota conspiracy, officials insisted.

Zloch, the judge in the case, was not persuaded. He ordered the FBI to conduct a new search of its files, using a method that Christensen and his lawyer suggested. This time, they hit the mother lode.

“The FBI found some additional responsive documents which it produced,” Julin said. “But it also found 80,266 pages of material in the Tampa Field Office of the FBI which had been marked with the file number for the FBI’s PENTTBOM investigation.”

 

PENTTBOM, which stands for Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing, is the codename for the FBI’s investigation of the 9/11 attacks.

The judge ordered the FBI to hand over all 80,000-plus pages on May 1, 2014. He is still going through them to determine which may be released and has given no indication when he might finish.

Zloch’s task is made all the more painstaking by the strict security rules governing review of classified documents, even for a sitting judge. The files are kept in a secure facility, and he can only remove a portion at a time.

It’s still not clear how many of the files from the Tampa field office relate to the investigation of the Saudi family and the house on Escondito Circle. But Christensen believes those files will reveal the underlying reasons for the FBI’s early suspicions. And he’s prepared to be proven wrong.

The FBI, for instance, says that phone records searches showed no links to the house and the hijackers. Christensen’s confidential source says the opposite is true. If the FBI is right, Christensen asks, then why not just release the information and put the dispute to rest?

“I’ve spent five years on this. I’ve got other things to do. If there’s nothing to this, then tell me,” Christensen told The Daily Beast.

The public record so far has hardly allayed Christensen and others belief that there’s more to the Sarasota story than the FBI is telling. Indeed, they say, the FBI is contradicting its own investigators. Graham told The Daily Beast that the FBI questioned the reliability of the agent who filed the first reports about the family and possible connections to the attackers. They said he was “not a good writer and should not be taken as the last word,” Graham said.

But that agent was reportedly promoted after the 9/11 attacks and assigned to a counter-intelligence task force. The bureau doesn’t usually give new jobs to agents who can’t do basic field work, particularly on the biggest case in FBI history.

As far as Christensen is concerned, the truth will out. But the FBI’s silence is telling.

Not to be content with just the 80,000 pages, though, Christensen has also been pressing to get those 28 pages from the congressional inquiry released. They currently have an appeal pending before the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, an obscure group within the National Archives that has the power to declassify the material, in whole or in part.

An Archives official wouldn’t comment on the appeal, except to say that the panel has yet to officially take it up. According to a public docket, the appeal was filed in July 2014.

President Obama could elect to declassify the pages himself. Or he could defer to the judgment of the panel. Doing so would give him some political cover. It would also allow the president to make good on his commitment to finally let the public see what those pages have to say.

If that day finally comes, credit will surely go to Graham, who has pressed for their release for years. But some share may also be claimed by Christensen and Julin, whose hunt for the Sarasota connection led them to shake loose the 28 pages, too.

Both men said that the release of that better-known material may ultimately help bring the Sarasota files to light.

“If the 28 pages are declassified, that might persuade the judge to move forward,” Julin said. He doesn’t think the congressional report has anything to say about Sarasota—because, after all, Graham has said the FBI gave his committee nothing on the case—but “the material might help Judge Zloch see the wider significance of the events in Sarasota and persuade him that some or all of the records have not been properly classified,” Julin said.

Christensen noted that the Obama administration didn’t publicly acknowledge that it might soon release the 28 pages until after Graham and other lawmakers appeared in a recent episode of 60 Minutes about the controversy. He said he hopes the judge saw the show, and that the “intense national interest” that’s brewing around Saudi connections to 9/11 might resonate with him.

Two years or waiting for the judge’s ruling may be close to an end. “I believe this is not a stalling tactic at all. The judge is doing what he he as to comply” with rules for handling classified information, Christensen said. “But I would urge him to speed it up.”

 

 

 

 

New Witnesses/Facts on Benghazi

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New witnesses admit more could have been done in Benghazi

New insight into the interagency response to the attacks; Adam Housley goes in depth for ‘Special Report’

See the video here explaining how many people were ready on the flight line, engines hot…just waiting for the GO order. It never came.

NRO: In a terse submission to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., the Obama Justice Department has announced that it will not seek the death penalty against Ahmed Abu Khatallah. He is the only terrorist charged in the Benghazi massacre of September 11, 2012, in which U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other American officials were killed in an attack carried out by dozens of jihadists. Government lawyers provided no explanation for this decision. If you are wondering whether politics played a role in it, you have good reason to be suspicious.

On the face of it, Khatallah is a textbook case for capital punishment. The Benghazi indictment alleges that he willfully and maliciously caused the death of Americans in a terrorist attack that he helped coordinate. The facts of his offense check several of the “aggravating factor” boxes in federal death-penalty law. There is, moreover, a national-security component, inherent not only in the Benghazi atrocity itself but in the perverse incentive that the government’s failure to seek an available death sentence would create for others considering mass-murder attacks against American installations overseas. In addition, terrorists imprisoned by the United States after being prosecuted for successful attacks against America become iconic figures in the jihad. As long as they live, they can and do inspire more attacks, recruitment, and fundraising. Thus, legal and national-security considerations militate in favor of seeking capital punishment. Remember, Mr. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. An attack on our ambassador and on sovereign American facilities abroad is an act of war against the United States. Since national security is the core responsibility of the federal government, there can be no federal offense more worthy of capital treatment. We are talking about the Obama administration, though, so there are always political considerations. And when it comes to Benghazi, they always take precedence.

 

A criminal trial is an opportunity for a defendant to challenge the government’s version of events. It is not like a press conference or a congressional hearing, at which administration officials can get away with spin and stonewalling. Presided over by an independent judiciary applying rigorous rules of due process, criminal trials arm highly capable defense lawyers with copious discovery of the government’s files and legal avenues to demand further disclosures. And because of the life-and-death stakes of death-penalty litigation, federal law gives no one more ample opportunity to test the government’s story than a death-penalty defendant. Unlike a normal trial, a death-penalty case is bifurcated. First comes the “guilt phase,” which is the familiar criminal trial, at which the defendant is found guilty or acquitted on the charges. Next, if the verdict is guilty, comes the “sentencing phase.” In it, the same jury decides whether the defendant should be put to death. (In a normal, non-capital criminal trial, the jury’s work is done when it reaches a verdict; the judge subsequently imposes sentence.) If the government seeks the death penalty in a case, it changes the trial dramatically.
In a normal case, the only real issue is whether the defendant is guilty of the offenses charged. In a death case, however, the question is not merely guilt; it is broadly about relative culpability: In the greater scheme of things, how responsible is the defendant for what has happened? It is possible that during the guilt phase of Khatallah’s trial, the prosecution would be able to narrow the scope of the trial to Khatallah’s own actions on the night of the attacks. But if the government had sought the death penalty, Khatallah would have been entitled, during the sentencing phase, to attempt to show that he was just a minor player; that there are other, more culpable actors who are not even being prosecuted, much less subjected to the death penalty; that the government’s own missteps — its own support of jihadists — played a role.
That is, a death-penalty prosecution would call into question many aspects of Benghazi that the Obama administration has long sought to keep under wraps: how Obama-administration policy empowered the jihadists who carried out the attack; how those jihadists were linked to al-Qaeda, which the president was then ludicrously claiming to have defeated; how those jihadists attacked Western targets in Benghazi several times before September 11, 2012; how, despite that fact, the State Department led by Hillary Clinton reduced security at its Benghazi facility; how there has been no explanation why the State Department had a facility in Benghazi, one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans; how there were American military assets in place that might have been able to rescue at least some of those killed and wounded in Benghazi, yet they were not used.

As pled in the Khatallah indictment, the Obama administration’s version of what happened in Benghazi is woefully incomplete and misleading. As I’ve previously explained: In the indictment against Khatallah, the Justice Department alleges that nothing of consequence happened until the day of the Benghazi attack, when [Khatallah] is said to have complained aloud that “something” had to be done about “an American facility in Benghazi” that he believed was an illegal intelligence operation masquerading as a diplomatic post. Suddenly, at 9:45 that night, “twenty armed men,” including “close associates of Khatallah” (not identified by prosecutors), “violently breached” the facility.

 

In the ensuing violence, the Americans were killed. Khatallah is alleged to have participated in the mayhem and to have prevented “emergency responders” from stopping it. Of course, there is far more to the story than the Justice Department has elected to tell. In the months preceding September 11, the “diplomatic facility” and other Western compounds in Benghazi were targeted in terrorist bombings and threats. September 11 would be the eleventh anniversary of the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans by al-Qaeda, which had every incentive to mark that occasion with a significant attack. American forces, moreover, had recently killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, al-Qaeda’s top Libyan operative; that prompted Ayman al-Zawahiri, the terror network’s leader, to call on fellow jihadists to avenge al-Libi — an incitement issued just a day before the Benghazi attack. So al-Qaeda was very much on the offensive. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail falsely assuring Americans that the terror network had been “decimated.” Obama’s decision to back Libyan “rebels” against Moammar Qaddafi had resulted in the arming of anti-American jihadists and the teetering of Libya on the brink of collapse. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail pronouncing his Libya policy a boon for regional stability.

As Obama next called for the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and reports surfaced of covert American support for the Syrian “rebels,” arms used by jihadists in Libya were shipped to jihadists in Syria by way of Turkey. Was that why we needed a “diplomatic facility” with a CIA annex in Benghazi, which was a transit point for some of these weapons? Was that why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi meeting with Turkey’s ambassador on September 11 despite the obvious peril? The Obama administration refuses to say. Throughout 2012, American personnel in Benghazi were under heightened terrorist threat. Despite their pleas for more protection, however, the State Department under Secretary Clinton actually reduced security. Finally, when the September 11 siege occurred, the Obama administration knew from the first moments that it was a terrorist attack of the sort that any competent assessment of the red-blinking intelligence would have predicted. Obama and Hillary Clinton, however, colluded in an elaborate scheme to convince the public that the atrocity was not an al-Qaeda-connected terrorist attack but a spontaneous protest run amok, provoked by an anti-Muslim video.

This last point is worth emphasizing. We now know, thanks to the belated disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, that even as she and the administration were fraudulently telling the American people that the attack was a video-inspired protest that spun out of control, she was frankly discussing with foreign government officials (and her daughter, Chelsea) that it was a terrorist attack involving al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists.

 

In a criminal trial — and especially in a death-penalty phase — there would be significant disclosure of communications between government officials during and after the attacks. In this case, it could become ever more embarrassingly clear that, for weeks, administration officials were knowingly telling the public things that were not true. By opting not to seek the death penalty, the Justice Department is in a stronger position to argue to the court that the only narrow issue for the jury is whether Khatallah’s conduct makes him guilty of the specific charges in the indictment. Prosecutors have a far better chance of preventing the trial from becoming a free-wheeling inquiry into what happened in Benghazi, and why. And now, if the administration could just get Khatallah to plead guilty to a count or two, maybe it could make the whole thing go away. — Andrew C. McCarthy is as senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

 

 

Teach Younger Voters Hillary’s History

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This will not be in any chronological order:

Paula Jones lawsuit

ChinaGate

TrooperGate

Mena Airport Drug Scandal

Rose Law Firm

WhiteWater and Savings and Loan

Hillary’s Radical Summer, Black Panthers

Hillary’s College Thesis, Saul Alinsky

White House TravelGate

Vince Foster is Dead

HillaryCare

Bill, Jeffrey, Planes and Sin Island

Yes, Bill was Impeached

Clinton did Steal White House Stuff

Clinton Showdown with FBI Liaison

Bill Clinton let bin Ladin Go

Bill Ordered Sandy to Stuff the Documents in his Pants

Need more? Okay, one more?

They Stole all the ‘W’s…. lots of damage

  

Whitewater: Twelve Versions of Hillary Clinton Draft Indictment, 451 Pages, Withheld By National Archives

JudicialWatch: New details continue to emerge from Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act fight with the National Archives over the release of draft indictments of Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater case. According to the Archives, release of the indictments—drafted by an independent counsel examining the Clintons’ relationship to a corrupt Arkansas S&L and an alleged cover-up—would violate grand jury secrecy and Mrs. Clinton’s personal privacy. FOIA request denied.

Judicial Watch declined to take “no” for an answer, and so off to court we went. The case is now in the hands of a federal judge.

In the course of litigation, new facts have come to light. Under FOIA, the Archives must produce a “Vaughn Index”—a tantalizing and at times maddening document. A Vaughn Index is the government saying: we are not giving you the documents, but here is an “index” of what we are not giving you, and why we are not giving it to you. Your tax dollars at work.

In the National Archives Vaughn Index for the case, we learn that the government is sitting on at least twelve versions of the the draft indictment of Mrs. Clinton, including one “listing overt acts.” From the public record, we know that the Whitewater case centered around whether Mrs. Clinton, while First Lady, lied to federal investigators about her role in the corrupt Arkansas S&L, concealed documents (including material under federal subpoena), and took other steps to cover-up her involvment. Prosecutors ultimately decided not to indict Mrs. Clinton, concluding that they could not win the complicated, largely circumstantial case against such a high-profile figure.

The draft indictments range from three to forty pages—the former likely excerpts or “scraps” from longer documents, the Vaughn Index indicates. Some of the drafts doubtless are copies but many clearly are not. A total of 451 pages of draft indictments are being withheld by the Archives.

In its final brief in the case, Judicial Watch took a wrecking ball to the Archives’ grand jury secrecy and personal privacy claims. Judicial Watch noted “the truly enormous quantities of grand jury material already made public” in the independent counsel’s final report. Judicial Watch provided the court with a detailed list of grand jury and non-grand jury material that had already been made public. If there ever was a valid claim to grand jury secrecy in this closely scrutinized case, it is long gone.

The Judicial Watch brief noted that the Archives “fails to identify a single, specific privacy interest Mrs. Clinton still has in the draft indictments” following publication of the independent counsel’s report and “hundreds of pages of grand jury materials, non-grand jury materials, and independent counsel legal theories and analysis that are already in the public domain.”

A typical FOIA privacy claim centers on unwarranted invasions of personal privacy. But in Mrs. Clinton’s case, the brief noted, the Archives “makes no claims that disclosure of the draft indictments will reveal any particular personal, medical or financial information about Mrs. Clinton, much less anything intimate or potentially embarrassing.”

Mrs. Clinton of course is one of the most famous women in the world, a former First Lady, senator and secretary of state, and the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president of the United States. The findings of an investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton told the truth to federal investigators and withheld evidence under subpoena while she was First Lady is clearly matter of public interest as voters weigh her suitability for the highest office in the land.

Clinton Cash, Coming to a Theater Near You

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‘Clinton Cash’ doc set to stir up controversy as it debuts at Cannes

MSNBC: CANNES, France — A massive police force will be guarding the Cannes Film Festival this year. But the only scuffle on the horizon may come in response to the right-wing producers of a devastating new documentary about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s alleged influence peddling and favor-trading. That film, “Clinton Cash,” screens here May 16 and opens in the U.S. on July 24 — just before the Democratic National Convention.

The allegations are as brazen as they are controversial: What other film at Cannes would come up with a plot that involves Russian President Vladimir Putin wrangling a deal with the alleged help of both Clintons, a Canadian billionaire, Kazakhstan mining officials and the Russian atomic energy agency — all of which resulted in Putin gaining control of 20 percent of all the uranium in the U.S.?

MSNBC got an exclusive first look at “Clinton Cash,” the flashy, hour-long film version of conservative author Peter Schweizer’s surprise 2015 bestseller, which The New York Times called the “the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle.” The Washington Post said that ”on any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta denounced the book as a bunch of “outlandish claims” with “zero evidence.”

The film portrays the Clintons as a greedy tag team who used the family’s controversial Clinton Foundation and her position as secretary of state to help billionaires make shady deals around the world with corrupt dictators, all while enriching themselves to the tune of millions.

The movie alleges that Bill Clinton cut a wide swathe through some of the most impoverished and corrupt areas of the world — the South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, India and Haiti among others — riding in on private jets with billionaires who called themselves philanthropists but were actually bent on plundering the countries and lining their own pockets.

In return, billionaire pals like Frank Giustra and Gilbert Chagoury, or high-tech companies like Swedish telecom giant Ericsson or Indian nuclear energy officials — to name just a few mentioned in the film — hired Clinton to speak at often $750,000 a pop, according to “Clinton Cash.” When a favor was needed at the higher levels of the Obama administration to facilitate some of the deals, Hillary Clinton was only willing to sign off on them, the movie reports.

As a film, it powerfully connects the dots —  whether you believe them or not — in a narrative that lacks the wonkiness of the book, which bore a full title of “The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.”

It packs the kind of Trump-esque mainstream punch that may have the presumptive GOP nominee salivating. He recently declared, “We’ll whip out that book because that book will become very pertinent.”

The hour-long documentary is intercut with “Homeland”-style clips of the Clintons juxtaposed against shots of blood-drenched money, radical madrassas, villainous dictators and private jets, all set to sinister music.

Produced by Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, with Schweizer as the film’s talking head, the documentary might be easy to dismiss as just another example of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” the former secretary of state referenced so many years ago.

But what complicates matters for Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that the book resulted in a series of investigations last year into Schweizer’s allegations by mainstream media organizations from The New York Times and CNN to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, many of which did not dispute his findings — and in some cases gathered more material that the producers used in the film. More recently, some information uncovered in the Panama Papers has echoed some of Schweitzer’s allegations in the movie and book.

The Clinton campaign loudly denounced the book as a “smear project” last year and Schweizer’s publisher, the Murdoch-owned Harper Collins, had to make some corrections to the Kindle version. But the changes, in the end, involved seven or eight inaccuracies, some of which were fairly minor in the context of the larger allegations, Politico reported.

Neither the Clinton campaign nor the Clinton Foundation responded to calls and emails requesting comment about the film Tuesday.

One of the most damning follow-ups to Schweizer’s most startling accusation — that Vladimir Putin wound up controlling 20 percent of American uranium after a complex series of deals involving cash flowing to the Clinton Foundation and the help of Secretary of State Clinton — was printed in The New York Times.

Like Schweizer, the Times found no hard evidence in the form of an email or any document proving a quid pro quo between the Clintons, Clinton Foundation donors or Russian officials. (Schweizer has maintained that it’s next to impossible to find a smoking gun but said there is a troubling “pattern of behavior” that merits a closer examination.)

But the Times concluded that the deal that brought Putin closer to his goal of controlling all of the world’s uranium supply is an “untold story … that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.”

“Other news outlets built on what I uncovered and some of that is in the film,” Schweizer, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, told NBC News Tuesday. “To me the key message is that while U.S. politics has long been thought to be a dirty game, it was always played by Americans. What the Clinton Foundation has done is open an avenue by which foreign investors can influence a chief U.S. diplomat. The film may spell all this out to people in a way the book did not and it may reach a whole new audience.”