Category Archives: FBI

Fleecing Taxpayers, $137 Billion

Posted on by

GAO Report: Federal Government Paid $136.7 Billion in Improper Payments

IndependentJournal: The United States federal government spent $136.7 billion in improper payments last year, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

In the report released Wednesday, the GAO outlines how 121 different government programs doled out a record amount of improper payments, according to 22 different agencies.

The report further notes that only three programs accounted for three-fourths of the improper payments:

“While these 121 programs span various agencies across the federal government, improper payment estimates for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit accounted for more than 76 percent of the governmentwide estimate…”

According to the GAO, $32.3 billion, or 23.6 percent, of the improper payments were from other government programs.

Source: GAO

Source: GAO

This is just the latest report of improper payments, which remains an increasing problem. Since 2003, the GAO has reported the cumulative increases, which have risen more than $100 billion in the past 13 years.

The GAO wants to curb the massive streak of improper payments. Their report included specific suggestions:

“[The GAO has] identified various strategies and recommendations that could help to reduce improper payments in these key programs, including requiring states to conduct audits of payments to and by Medicaid managed care organizations.”

The report also claims that efforts are under way to address the various problems, but there is still a long way to go.

“Until the federal government has implemented effective processes to determine the full extent to which improper payments occur and has taken appropriate actions across entities and programs to effectively reduce improper payments, it will not have reasonable assurance that the use of federal funds is adequately safeguarded,” the report noted.

A report was produced in 2014 where millions were paid to federal employees to stay home and not work.

Examiner: The federal government has shelled out more than $700 million in paid leave to more than 57,000 employees who were home from work for time periods stretching from one month to three years, a Government Accountability Office report has found.

In a 62-page report published Monday, the GAO analyzed why so many federal employees were home and getting paid for such long periods of time and they discovered a variety of reasons.

In many cases, employees were home awaiting the outcome of investigations into alleged misconduct and criminal actions. Some racked up paid leave for “physical fitness activities,” and others were away from work seeking professional development. Employees also took paid leave for “recuperation” from overseas work.

Hundreds of federal employees remained at home, collecting a paycheck, for years.

If you are so inclined to go deeper, how about this well researched summary noting the collusion and blurred lines of federal employees working on official time versus union time. Thanks to Capital Research for this one.

Summary: Few Americans are aware that, through their tax dollars, they finance labor unions through a practice known as “official time” or “release time.” The cost to taxpayers is skyrocketing, while—thanks to Obama administration stonewalling—accountability is declining. Fortunately, reformers are working to rein in this costly, corrupt practice.

The NYT’s Doing the WH Work to Close Gitmo

Posted on by

Hundreds of Convicted Terrorists
Are Already Held in U.S. Prisons

By HANNAH FAIRFIELD and TIM WALLACE

NYT’s Republican leaders have blocked the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because they say they do not want terrorists held on United States soil. But American prisons currently hold 443 convicted terrorists, far more than the 89 men who remain imprisoned in Cuba.

The New York Times was able to confirm locations for about a third of the terrorists, shown on the map above. The Department of Justice would not release the names or locations of the other prisoners who had been convicted of terrorism.

The most notorious terrorists are being held in the maximum security sections of just a few federal prisons. But many others, serving lesser sentences for crimes like financing attacks or bomb hoaxes, are at facilities across the country.

Florence, Colo.

At least 30 convicted terrorists in the SuperMax

Many of the most well-known convicted terrorists are at the highest security prison in the country: the supermax in Florence, Colo., about 100 miles south of Denver.

Zacarias Moussaoui, a member of Al Qaeda who was directly linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is there, as is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers. Richard Reid, known as the shoe bomber, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, are also held there.

Terre Haute, Ind., and Marion, Ill.

Medium security prison At least 12 convicted terrorists

 

Medium security prison At least 11 convicted terrorists

 

At least 25 convicted terrorists are held in two federal prisons in Indiana and Illinois that have special Communications Management Units, designed to isolate certain prisoners from other inmates and limit contact with the outside world.

Mail and telephone calls are restricted. Prisoners in the units are not allowed to have any physical contact with visitors or family members. The majority of prisoners in the units, which were opened in 2006 and 2008, are Muslims.

Other Prisons Across the Country

The Hazelton, W. Va., complex has four separate prisons. Inmates here include Hawo Mohamed Hassan, one of only seven female convicted terrorists The Times was able to locate.

The low security prison on Terminal Island, at the Port of Los Angeles, houses Mohammad El-Mezain, who was convicted of providing material support to Hamas in 2009.

This multilevel security prison in Brooklyn, New York, houses two inmates with Qaeda ties and one linked to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

Hundreds of other convicted terrorists are held in prisons around the country. Many of these are for lesser crimes and shorter sentences.

Sabri Benkahla, who is held at a federal prison in Washington, D.C., was convicted in 2007 of perjury, obstructing justice and giving false statements to the F.B.I. He had denied visiting an overseas jihad training camp eight years prior, and denied knowing that several of his contacts were suspected of being terrorists.

The Rising Number of Convicted
Terrorists in American Prisons

400

300

International

200

100

Domestic

0

2007

2009

2011

2013

2015

The New York Times|Source: Federal Bureau of Prisons

The number of convicted terrorists in American prisons has increased by more than 150 inmates since 2007. The number of domestic terrorists, some of whose crimes are related to white supremacy or eco-terrorism, has fallen in recent years, but the number of convicted terrorists who are not American citizens continues to rise.

How a Terrorist Thinks

Posted on by

مركز المسبارal Mesbar Studies and Research Center

*****

   The Grey Zone:  Giulio Meotti writes on the April 4, 2016 Gatestone Institute website about the disturbingly high support among young European Muslims for suicide bombings and the Islamic State’s pursuit of establishing a new Caliphate.  Mr. Meotti writes that “among young European Muslims, support for suicide bombings range from 22 percent in Germany, to 29 percent in Spain, 35 percent in Britain, and 42 percent in France,” according to a recent PEW Research poll.  “In Britain, one in five Muslims have sympathy for the Caliphate; and, today, more British Muslims join ISIS than the British Army.  In the Netherlands,” the PEW Research poll showed that “80 percent of the Dutch Turks see “nothing wrong,” in ISIS.”  And, according to a ComRes report, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 27 percent of British Muslims have sympathy for the terrorists who attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris.  An ICM poll, released by Newsweek, revealed that 16 percent of French Muslims support ISIS; and, the number rises to 27 percent among those aged 18-24.  In dozens of French schools, the “minute of silence,” was interrupted by Muslim pupils who protested it,” Mr. Meotti wrote.

”How deep is ISIS’s popularity in Belgium?,” Mr. Meotti asks.  “Very deep,” he warns.  “The most accurate study is a report from The Voices From the Blogs, which highlights the high degree of pro-ISIS sympathy in Belgium.  The report monitored and analyzed more than two million Arabic messages around the world via Twitter, FaceBook, and blogs regarding ISIS’s actions in the Middle East.”

“The most enthusiastic comments about ISIS come from Qatar at 47 percent, then Pakistan at 35 percent, third overall was Belgium — where 31 percent of the tweets in Arabic on the Islamic State are positive — more than Libya (24%), Oman (25%), Jordan (19%), Saudi Arabia (20%), and Iraq (20%).”

    Overall, some 42 million people in the Arab world sympathize with the Islamic State, according to polling data examined by The Gatestone Institute.

     As Mr. Meotti notes, “even if these polls and surveys must be taken with some caution, they all indicate a deep, and vibrant “gray zone,” which is feeding the Islamic Jihad in Europe and the Middle East.  We are talking about millions of Muslims who show sympathy, understanding, and affinity with the ideology and goals of the Islamic State.”

     The shockingly high support for the Islamic State among the youth of Europe is a foreboding sign.  As eminent British historian Max Hastings recently wrote, the influx of millions of Muslim migrants into Britain and the rest of Europe, may fundamentally alter the character and culture of Europe — and, not necessarily for the better.  While Mr. Hastings appreciates and understands that Britain and the rest of Europe and the West need to accept a large number of these displaced refugees as new citizens — he has this recent warning in London’s The Daily Mail Online:  “If any significant fraction of the hundreds of millions suffering hardship, persecution and famine in Africa and the Middle East succeed in transferring themselves to Europe, I fear that our civilization will be transformed in ways most of us cannot endorse, nor even find tolerable.”

     “How many [more] Muslims will this ISIS virus be able to infect in the vast European “gray zone?” Mr. Meotti asks.  “The answer will determine our future,” he adds.

There is more from IPTNews:

For weeks, Farid Bouamran, a Dutch-Moroccan immigrant who has lived 30 years in Amsterdam, watched as his son Achraf became increasingly radicalized, tuning in to videos and Twitter accounts online. Within two months, Achraf had traded in his jeans for a dishdasha, or robe, grown a beard, and begun spending time online with Belgian youth his father once called “men with long Arabic names: Abou this and Abou that.”

Panicked, Bouamran took every measure he could think of to intervene: he brought Achraf to his own mosque to hear the imam speak of a peaceful Islam. He canceled his son’s Internet account, forbid him to see his radical Muslim friends, and even followed him when he went out at night.

It was no use. Just after Christmas 2013, Farid Bouamran sat in his living room with officers from Dutch intelligence agency AIVD and told them he believed Achraf was about to leave for Syria to join in the jihad. Please, he begged them. Take his passport. Stop him.

Not to worry, the officers assured him, he won’t get past our borders.

But he did get past, flying out of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport the next night to Turkey, and from there, making his way to the Islamic State.

A year later, disillusioned by the realities of the life he found there, Achraf determined to return home. But en route to the Netherlands in January 2015, a U.S. missile attack on Raqqa took his life. He was 17 years old. More on the post is here.

 

Any Americans in the Panama Papers?

Posted on by
Headlines coming soon courtesy of media as noted by McClatchy
Mossack Fonseca worked with oil firms owned by Iranian state despite sanctions

Documents show law firm at centre of Panama Papers leak carried on doing business with companies after learning of their real owners

Guardian: The law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers leak acted for an Iranian oil company that had been blacklisted by the US, the documents reveal.

Mossack Fonseca realised it was working for Petropars Ltd in 2010 only when another client accidentally fell foul of the US sanctions that had been imposed on the energy firm.

Petropars and the other client had been assigned the same PO box in the British Virgin Islands by Mossack Fonseca, and the address had been flagged by banks as linked to a blacklisted company.

The episode highlights the perils of giving the same address to thousands of shelf-companies – and the lack of rigour in Mossack Fonseca’s due diligence procedures.

This was acknowledged by the firm’s managing partner, Jürgen Mossack, who sent an angry email complaining about the lack of background checks, the documents show. “Everybody knows that there are United Nations sanctions against Iran, and we certainly want no business with regimes and individuals from such places! Not because of OFAC [the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the US Treasury department that deals with sanctions] but out of principle.”

Mossack Fonseca discovered it had been acting for the Iranian firm when the head of its Geneva office requested that a client be given a new mailing address in the British Virgin Islands (BVI).

PO box 3136 in Road Town, Tortola, was shared by a multitude of other shelf companies on the law firm’s books, including Petropars.

Petropars had been designated by the US Treasury in June that year as an oil company ultimately owned by the Iranian state. With offices in Dubai and London, it played a key role in securing foreign investment for the South Pars natural gas field. The largest in the world, the field lies in the Persian gulf and is shared with Qatar.

Putting Petropars on the official OFAC sanctions list was intended to sap financial support for Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes.

After a flurry of checks, Mossack Fonseca discovered it was acting for Petropars and two other companies in which it held stakes: Drilling Company International Limited and Venirogc Limited, a joint venture with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA, which would itself be blacklisted by the US the following year.

Three months after the blacklisting, Mossack Fonseca’s compliance team recommended resigning from Petropars and “all its associated companies”. By then, not only OFAC but the United Nations had issued sanctions against the Middle Eastern state.

Mossack Fonseca duly stood down and Petropars was recorded as inactive from May 2011, as were its two subsidiaries. But another Iranian company remained on the books.

Despite resolving to cut ties with Iran, Mossack Fonseca continued servicing an outfit called Petrocom. It shared the same London accountant as Petropars, and gave its address as Sepahbod Gharani Avenue in Tehran.

The relationship was managed through London, where a separately owned business holds the exclusive UK rights to market Mossack Fonseca’s services.

Mossack Fonseca in the BVI produced a certificate of good standing (often requested by banks or trading partners), stamped by the office of the Virgin Islands deputy governor on 14 September 2010; papers approving the appointment of a new chairman and managing director; and others for the creation of a joint venture.

Mossack Fonseca’s BVI office did carry out checks on the company. A request for the name of the ultimate beneficial owner of Petrocom elicited the following reply from Mossack Fonseca’s UK franchise: “I think we could assume that would be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unless I’m mistaken.”

While Iran’s then-president was unlikely to have actually held shares in these offshore entities, the comment makes it clear Mossack Fonseca’s UK office knew it was continuing to act for state-owned companies.

In June 2013, the US imposed sanctions on Petrocom’s parent OIIC, describing it as part of a network of 37 front companies set up to manage the Iranian leadership’s commercial holdings. OIIC was allegedly controlled by a holding company called Eiko, which stands for The Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order.

“The purpose of this network is to generate and control massive, off-the-books investments, shielded from the view of the Iranian people and international regulators,” a US Treasury press release stated.

The most recent data, from December 2015, shows Petrocom remains on the firm’s books. A certificate of good standing was issued as recently as April 2015.

Mossack Fonseca said: “We have never knowingly allowed the use of our companies by individuals having any relationship with North Korea, Zimbabwe, Syria and other countries or individuals sanctioned by the United States or European Union. We routinely resign from client engagements when ongoing due diligence and/or updates to sanctions lists reveals that a party to a company for which we provide services has been either convicted or listed by a sanctioning body.”

Emmanuel Cohen, who runs Mossack Fonseca’s UK franchise, said in a letter from his lawyer that he had been “in the forefront of undertaking due diligence checks over the years”, and that “he takes the obligations of reporting extremely seriously and files any suspicious activity” with the National Crime Agency. Regarding Petropars, Mossack Fonseca UK “was working through a professional client in the UK and was not responsible for any due diligence”. He added that the UK business was under no obligation to follow US sanctions.

Petrocom and Petropars did not respond to requests for comment.

In January 2016, the US removed Petropars and OIIC from its blacklist, following the nuclear deal with Iran.

Panama Papers reporting team: Juliette Garside, Luke Harding, Holly Watt, David Pegg, Helena Bengtsson, Simon Bowers, Owen Gibson and Nick Hopkins

Did China Connect with Hillary’s Email?

Posted on by

The clue is in the details. Dates matter, events matter and travel itinerary matters. Additionally, Hillary and her team are already attempting to limit the scope of questions during the upcoming and scheduled interrogatories.

Was an Asian government reading Hillary Clinton’s emails in February 2009?

WaPo: I continue to be fascinated by the very early chapters of the Hillary Clinton homebrew email saga. For one simple reason:  the clintonemail.com server apparently didn’t have the digital certificate needed to encrypt communications until late March 2009 — more than two months after the server was up and running, and after Secretary Clinton’s swearing-in on January 22.

Two questions are raised by this timing:  First, why didn’t the server have encryption from the start? And second, why did it get encryption in March, at a time when Clinton should have been extraordinarily busy getting up to speed at State, not messing with computer security protocols?

The simplest answer to the first question is that the lack of a certificate was just a mistake.  But what about the second?  What inspired the Secretary to get an encryption certificate in March when her team hadn’t bothered to get one in January or February?

The likely answer to that  question is pretty troubling.  There now seems to be a very real probability that Hillary Clinton rushed to install an encryption certificate in March 2009 because the U.S. intelligence community caught another country reading Clinton’s unencrypted messages during her February 16-21, 2009, trip to China, Indonesia, Japan, and S. Korea.

 

Thanks to FOIA lawsuits, the State Department has released a few documents from this early period.  They show that Clinton began using the clintonemail.com server as early as January 28, 2009, just after her inauguration.  Other messages from Cheryl Mills used the server in early February.

Even as she kept her homebrew server, Clinton and her staff were fighting to hang on to their Blackberries, just like President Obama. That provoked resistance from the State Department’s top security official, Assistant Secretary Eric Boswell.  On March 2, he sent the Secretary a memo — “Use of Blackberries on Mahogany Row” —declaring that  “the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the use of Blackberries in Mahogany Row [the State Department’s seventh floor executive offices] considerably outweigh their convenience.”

On March 11, at a staff meeting, Clinton seemed to throw in the towel on her Blackberry, telling Boswell that she had read the memo and “gets it.” We know this from correspondence among Boswell’s staff.

But what’s fascinating and troubling is something else in the correspondence.  One staff message says that during Clinton’s conversation with Boswell, “her attention was drawn to a sentence that indicates we [the diplomatic security office] have intelligence concerning this vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia.”

I am struck by the mix of delicacy and insistence in that phrasing.  It seems likely that Clinton’s attention was drawn to that sentence because the intelligence was about Secretary Clinton’s own communications security, something a discreet diplomat would not want to say directly in written communications.  Clinton certainly acted like the intelligence concerned her.  She asked Boswell to get her “the information.”On March 11, Boswell is told by his staff that the report is already on the classified system, and he is reminded that he had already been briefed on it. Presumably he conveyed it to Clinton soon after March 11.

Eighteen days later, Clinton’s server acquires a digital certificate supporting TLS encryption, closing the biggest security hole in her server.

I suppose this could all be coincidence, but the most likely scenario is that the Secretary’s Asia trip produced an intelligence report that was directly relevant to the security of Clinton’s communications.  And that the report was sufficiently dramatic that it spurred Clinton to make immediate security changes on her homebrew server.

Did our agencies see Clinton’s unencrypted messages transiting foreign networks?  Did they spot foreign agencies intercepting those messages?  It’s hard to say, but either answer is bad, and the quick addition of encryption to the server suggests that Clinton saw it that way too.

If that’s what happened, it would raise more questions.  Getting a digital certificate to support encryption is hardly a comprehensive response to the server’s security vulnerabilities. So who decided that that was all the security it needed?  How pointed was the warning about her Asia trip?  Does it expand the circle of officials who should have known about and addressed the server’s insecurity? And why, despite evidence that Clinton was using the server in connection with work in January and February, did Clinton turn over no emails before March 18?

We don’t know the answers to those questions, and they may have perfectly good answers.  But they do suggest that the investigation should be focusing heavily on who did what to clintonemail.com in January through March of 2009.

State Department: Don’t Ask Hillary Aides About Classified Info in Lawsuit

DailyBeast: Lawyers object to any attempt to ask Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and others about how information was handled—and are dead set against Clinton testifying.

Lawyers for the State Department want to limit the types of questions that a watchdog group can ask former aides to Hillary Clinton, and potentially the former secretary of state herself, about her creation and use of a private email system while she was in office.

The department asked a federal judge Tuesday night to grant “limited discovery” to Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that wants to depose some of Clinton’s closest associates and staffers.

State’s lawyers proposed that the group only be allowed to ask questions about “the reasons for the creation of the clintonemail.com system,” and not about how classified information was handled on the system or any issues related to protecting it from hackers.

The State Department lawyers also indicated that they may object to any attempt to depose Clinton. Judicial Watch hasn’t proposed to depose the Democratic presidential front runner, but has said it wants to interview Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s closest aides and a personal friend; Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff; Patrick Kennedy, a senior State Department official; and others who were involved in discussions among State Department officials about Clinton’s email usage.

Based on the schedule that both State Department and Judicial Watch lawyers have proposed, interviews with ex-Clinton aides could begin in the weeks heading into the Democratic presidential nominating convention in July.

The questions that State wants to put off limits have been at the center of multiple inquiries by inspectors general and the FBI about how Clinton handled classified information and whether she or her staff violated any laws or rules about maintaining government records. Investigators have found that some of the emails in Clinton’s server contained classified information when they were sent, though she has maintained they were never marked as such.

The lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch is one of dozens by activists and journalists seeking information about Clinton’s private email system, which was run out of a “homebrew” server in her house in New York. It’s unusual, however, in that it’s only one of two cases in which a federal judge has agreed to allow discovery, including potential examination of government documents and interviews with current or former officials.

Judicial Watch brought the suit in an effort to obtain information about the government’s employment agreement with Abedin, a key member of Clinton’s inner circle who simultaneously held four jobs for a six month period in 2012: at the State Department, at the Clinton family’s foundation, in Hillary Clinton’s personal office, and at a private consulting firm with connections to the Clintons.

The group also wants to depose Bryan Pagliano, who reportedly maintained Clinton’s email server. Pagliano has been granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation with FBI investigators, and State’s lawyers asked the judge to prevent Judicial Watch from asking questions about the bureau’s investigation.

Meanwhile, FBI Director James Comey told reporters in Buffalo on Monday that he was in no rush to complete the investigation, which he said could extend past the Democratic and Republican conventions.

“The urgency is to do it well and promptly,” Comey said. “And ‘well’ comes first.”

Clinton said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that FBI agents had yet to contact her for an interview but that she is willing to sit down with them.

The State Department had fought to keep Judicial Watch from conducting discovery at all, arguing that the group sought to expand the question about Abedin’s employment situation “into a far-ranging inquiry” about whether records laws had been broken.

But U.S. district judge Emmet Sullivan expressed his frustration in a hearing last February over the fragmentary way that new revelations and disclosures about Clinton’s email system have come to light. He concluded that discovery, which is rare for cases like this one brought under the Freedom of Information Act, was warranted.

“This is a constant drip, a declaration drip. That’s what we’re having here, you know, and it needs to stop,” Sullivan said, before ordering that limited discovery could proceed.

The lack of a complete explanation for why Clinton had set up a private email system gave rise to “a reasonable suspicion of bad faith” on the part of State Department officials, who may have been trying to thwart transparency laws, Sullivan said. There was no question that senior officials working for Clinton knew she was using a private email server, he noted.

“It appears that no one took any steps to ensure that agency records on Clintonemail.com were secured within the State Department’s record systems” in order to respond to records requests in the future, Sullivan said. “How in the world could this happen?”

At one point, Sullivan asked rhetorically, “Was the system created to accommodate the former secretary? Was the system created to thwart [Freedom of Information Act] compliance?” Until those questions are answered, he said, the court can’t determine whether the government had fully and adequately searched for records in the underlying case.

“We’re talking about a cabinet-level official who was accommodated by the government for reasons unknown to the public,” Sullivan said.

In the other case in which a judge has granted discovery, U.S. district court judge Royce Lamberth ruled last week that “where there is evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith…”

That case, which was also brought by Judicial Watch, is about government talking points that officials crafted following the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.