Category Archives: FBI

Hillary Asks, ‘Will the Libya War Interrupt my Vacay’?

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It must be noted that daily, when Hillary was at home at White Haven, her private residence that she DOES not share with Bill, a State Department driver would show up daily to deliver a package. Inside contents were usually her copy of the Presidential Daily Briefing, call sheets and other diplomatic operational actions, all in printed form. Note…PRINTED FORM. That is NOT protected material, just ask General Petraeus.

There are clear violations in the law in these emails with regard to her shadow intelligence point person, Sidney Blumenthal, known as the Logan Act, however, no one ever seems to be prosecuted under this law. The email exchanges also demonstrate that Syria was actually aiding Libya, an agreement Qaddafi made decades ago with Bashir al Assad’s father. Hummm.

Is there a shredder somewhere in this mess? Heh…read on. Did files and records get buried with Tyler Drumheller? Oh, has anyone interviewed Samantha Power, the current UN Ambassador? Well she was part of the Libya mess too.

Hillary’s team was particularly interested in a documentary:

 “The Oath of Tobruk,” Bernard-Henri Levy details how a self-promoting leftist intellectual persuaded a conservative French president to back the Libyan revolt.

Hillary Clinton Forwarded Huma Abedin Classified Info. for Printing

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released nearly 70 pages of State Department records that show that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides, Deputy Chiefs of Staff Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, received and sent classified information on their non-state.gov email accounts.  The documents, also available on the State Department website, were obtained in response to a court order from a May 5, 2015, lawsuit filed against the State Department (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)) after it failed to respond to a March 18 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking:

  • All emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-“state.gov” email address.

The new documents show that Hillary Clinton used the clintonemail.com system to ask Huma Abedin (also on a non-state.gov email account) to print two March 2011 emails, which were sent from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (using the moniker “aclb”) to Jake Sullivan on Sullivan’s non-state.gov email account.  The Obama State Department redacted the Blair emails under Exemption (b)(1) which allows the withholding of classified material.  The material is marked as being classified as “Foreign government information” and “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources.”

Another email shows that Clinton wanted to know how meetings in Washington, including a four-hour meeting concerning America’s war on Libya, would impact her Hampton vacation.  Responding to an email that details the sensitive meetings in DC, Clinton emails Abedin on August 26, 2011, “Ok. What time would I get back to Hamptons?”  Again, this email discussion takes place on non-state.gov email accounts.

The documents also include advice to Clinton on Libya from Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton Foundation employee who, according to a Judicial Watch investigative report, also had business interests in Libya.  Clinton wanted Blumenthal’s March 9, 2011, Libya memo to be printed “without any identifiers.”

The newly released Abedin emails include a lengthy exchange giving precise details of Clinton’s schedule using unsecured government emails. The email from Lona J. Valmoro, former Special Assistant to Secretary of State Clinton, to Abedin and Clinton reveals exact times (including driving times) and locations of all appointments throughout the day. Another itinerary email provides details about a meeting at the United Nations in New York at 3:00 on Tuesday, January 31, 2012, with the precise disclosure, “that would mean wheels up from Andrews at approximately 12:00pm/12:15pm.”

“These emails show that Hillary Clinton isn’t the only Obama official who should be worried about being prosecuted for mishandling classified information.  Her former top State aides (and current campaign advisers) Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan should be in the dock, as well,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  “The Obama State Department has now confirmed that Clinton, Abedin, and Sullivan used unsecured, non-government email accounts to communicate information that should now be withheld from the American people ‘in the interest of national defense or foreign policy, and properly classified.’ When can we expect the indictments?”

Obama’s Final Cyber Offense, Einstein?

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Sheesh, just the name points to a misguided failure since 2008. Einstein has a price tag, $ 5 billion. There are other questions to be asked like what does the NSA have to offer or the countless cyber security professionals in the private sector?

From the White House, there has been a 12 point plan and it has not advanced at all.

In May 2009, the President accepted the recommendations of the resulting Cyberspace Policy Review, including the selection of an Executive Branch Cybersecurity Coordinator who will have regular access to the President.

Meanwhile, hacks are real, dangerous and coming at mach speed. Using old software language such as COBOL speaks volumes as to how antiquated protections are and how dysfunctional all agencies are in maintaining crack-proof.

The Department of Homeland Security appears to be the lead agency for Einstein compliance, what could go wrong and has? The fact sheet from DHS is here.

Obama makes final push to cement cyber legacy

TheHill: President Obama on Tuesday made what is likely his last major push to bolster the government’s digital defenses before leaving office.

As part of the annual White House budget proposal, the Obama administration rolled out a sweeping plan to inject billions of extra dollars into federal cybersecurity funding, establish a new senior federal cyber official and create a presidential commission on cyber that will establish a long-term road map.

The move is likely to complete Obama’s cyber legacy, which will include an historic attention to digital security, unprecedented executive orders on the topic, and shepherding through Congress the largest-ever cyber bill, as well as numerous bruising hacks at federal agencies and allegations that government networks were woefully outdated.

In a release, the White House called the plan “the capstone of more than seven years of determined effort.”

“[Obama] is the first president that is making a big cybersecurity push and I think that’s tremendously important,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), one of Congress’s most prominent cyber voices, told The Hill.

The proposal aims to inject more than $5 billion in new funding across the government to strengthen network defenses that have been repeatedly infiltrated by suspected foreign government spies.

The ask is a 35-percent increase over last year’s allotment of $14 billion, and would put overall federal cyber spending at over $19 billion.

The budget request earmarks $3.1 billion for an “Information Technology Modernization Fund” that the White House described as a “down payment on the comprehensive overhaul” of federal IT systems.

Lieu said this fund could help solve one of the inherent budgeting problems when it comes to defending interconnected networks from hackers.

“What’s important about [the fund] is it can go across agencies and upgrade systems that touch more than one agency,” said Lieu, who sits on both the House Budget and Oversight committees.

Currently, each agency has its own individual cybersecurity budget that can be spent on its network, but that cannot necessarily be expended on portions of the agency’s IT infrastructure at other agencies.

Hackers have exploited this balkanized budgeting process.

Over the summer, suspected Chinese cyber spies cracked into the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), pilfering over 22 million people’s personal information in two separate hacks. The initial intrusion — which exposed roughly 4.2 federal workers’ personnel files — occurred at an OPM database that was housed at the Interior Department.

The OPM hacks also exposed the antiquated legacy systems the government relied on to run its networks.

Congress bashed OPM officials for not fully encrypting all their sensitive data. But the agency’s systems were simply too old to even accept modern encryption, they repeatedly explained.

The network also relied on the dated COBOL programming language, which initially became popular in the 1960s and is now eschewed by younger programmers.

A new federal official will oversee much of these update efforts.

As part of its proposal, the White House is establishing a federal chief information security officer, or CISO. The official will be housed within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and report to federal chief information officer, Tony Scott, who oversees government technology.

“This is the first time that there will be a dedicated senior official who is solely focused on developing, managing, and coordinating cybersecurity strategy, policy and operations across the entire federal domain,” the White House said.

Centralizing cybersecurity oversight is an attempt to help overcome the lack of agency-to-agency communication on the subject.

“For a while, I’ve seen the argument that there are too many lines of authority in the federal government on cybersecurity,” said Lieu. “Sometimes it’s not clear who is responsible for what.”

The CISO will also help monitor the government’s digital defense spending, which has been knocked as cost-ineffective.

Recently, a federal watchdog report concluded that the government’s main cyber defense system, known as “Einstein,” was largely ineffectual at thwarting sophisticated hackers. The report echoed long-standing criticism from security experts who say the program is a much-delayed boondoggle that is already obsolete.

Federal officials insist the system is in its final phase of implementation and will soon serve as a platform to add on leading cyber tools.

This budget infusion and new federal CISO will with these technology updates, the White House said.

The proposal also includes a robust research and public awareness component.

In a bid to build a bridge to the next administration, Obama is launching a “Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.”

The administration is directing a bipartisan group of lawmakers to appoint top industry representatives and leading technologists to the commission. The group will be tasked with taking the long view.

“The commission will make recommendations on actions that can be taken over the next decade to strengthen cybersecurity in both the public and private sectors while protecting privacy,” the White House said.

Security experts almost unanimously agree that one of these actions will be eliminating the traditional online password.

Since 2011, the White House has been trying to push people away from passwords. Tuesday’s plan includes a last bid to encourage stronger people to adopt stronger login practices.

The proposal creates a new public awareness campaign that includes leading tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

“By judiciously combining a strong password with additional factors, such as a fingerprint or a single-use code delivered in a text message, Americans can make their accounts even more secure,” the White House said.

The proposal is likely Obama’s concluding statement on cybersecurity.

During his presidency, cybersecurity has gone from a fringe issue to one that most leaders acknowledge is vital to national and economic security. The topic received an increasing amount of attention in all but Obama’s final State of the Union address.

In recent years, the U.S. has seen the dramatic rise of global cyber crime syndicates that have pillaged banks, department stores and hotels.

According to an October report from Hewlett Packard and the Ponemon Institute, cyber crime costs the average American firm $15.4 million annually, up 82 percent over the last six years. By 2019, it’s believed the cost of data breaches will reach $2.1 trillion globally.

Digital adversaries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have also swooped in unexpectedly, plundering health insurers, airlines, nuclear plants, government agencies and, most memorably, a major movie studio.

Even terrorist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are causing fears by hijacking high-profile twitter accounts and digitally defacing websites around the world.

These trends are bound to continue after Obama leaves the White House, but this ultimate cyber thrust could help cement his reputation as the first president to actively address the digital security challenge.

“If we can get this through, the funding, I think that would be very positive for his legacy,” Lieu said. “This is not just a federal government problem, it’s endemic in the private sector.”

Official FBI letter on Hillary’s Server Investigation

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Politico: Hillary and Bill Clinton are so dissatisfied with their campaign’s messaging and digital operations they are considering staffing and strategy changes after what’s expected to be a loss in Tuesday’s primary in New Hampshire, according to a half-dozen people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Clintons — stung by her narrow victory in Iowa — had been planning to reassess staffing at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters after the first four primaries, but the Clintons have become increasingly caustic in their criticism of aides and demanded the reassessment sooner, a source told Politico. More here.

*** Perhaps the real reason for the shake-up is noted below and Michael Bloomberg is looming yet again. ”

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he is considering running for U.S. president in 2016, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

The billionaire media mogul said he was “looking at all the options” when asked whether he was considering a run, the newspaper said.”

 

TheHill: The FBI formally confirmed that its investigation connected to Hillary Clinton’s private email server remains ongoing in a letter released on Monday.

The letter from FBI general counsel James Baker comes one day before the New Hamshire primary.

The message does not offer new details about the probe, which the bureau has been reluctant to discuss. However, it represents the FBI’s formal notification to the State Department that it is investigating the issue.
Since last September, “in public statements and testimony, the Bureau has acknowledged generally that it is working on matters related to former Secretary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server,” Baker wrote to the State Department.

“The FBI has not, however, publicly acknowledged the specific focus, scope, or potential targets of any such proceedings.

“Thus … we remain unable [to] provide [details about the case] without adversely affecting on-going law enforcement efforts,” he concluded.

The letter was sent on Feb. 2 but released on Monday as part of an ongoing lawsuit related to the disclosure of Clinton’s emails from conservative watchdog Judicial Watch.

FBI Director James Comey has previously referenced the FBI probe, which the bureau had previously declined to confirm or deny in court filings last year.

Key details about the probe remain unclear, such as whether it is tied to a possible criminal case or whether it has expanded beyond an initial security review.

Comey has previously said that bureau investigators “don’t give a rip about politics,” and would not be put off by the looming presidential campaign. Clinton, for her part, has downplayed the server issue.

“I am 100 percent confident [that the probe will not become criminal],” the former secretary of State said in a Democratic presidential debate last week. “This is a security review requested and carried out that will be resolved.”

The State Department has classified more than 1,500 emails from Clinton’s “homebrew” server before releasing them to the public, including 22 at the highest level of “top secret.” None of the messages were marked as classified at the time they were sent, the department has claimed.

 

show_temp by Julian Hattem

Was bin Ladin in the IRS Files for Obamacare?

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I remember very well saying a few years ago that any foreigner, including Usama bin Ladin could get Obamacare benefits. Never understood how true my conclusions were. Further, there was a movement in the House to impeach the IRS Commissioner. Then we learned that more hard drives have been destroyed, others were found in storage and billions in refunds went to a handful of same mail address locations in obscure places outside the United States.

Not only is Obamacare a failure itself, but it really does not become full law until 2017 and it is a law we can no longer begin to afford when the IRS cant recover bogus subsidies to illegals.

Fasten your seat belt.

Senate report: Illegal immigrants benefited from up to $750M in ObamaCare subsidies

FNC: Illegal immigrants and individuals with unclear legal status wrongly benefited from up to $750 million in ObamaCare subsidies and the government is struggling to recoup the money, according to a new Senate report obtained by Fox News.

The report, produced by Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, examined Affordable Care Act tax credits meant to defray the cost of insurance premiums. It found that as of June 2015, “the Administration awarded approximately $750 million in tax credits on behalf of individuals who were later determined to be ineligible because they failed to verify their citizenship, status as a national, or legal presence.”

The review found the credits went to more than 500,000 people – who are either illegal immigrants or whose legal status was unclear due to insufficient records.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services confirmed to FoxNews.com on Monday that 471,000 customers with 2015 coverage failed to produce proper documentation on their citizenship or immigration status on time – but stressed that this does not necessarily mean they’re ineligible.

“Lack of verification does not mean an individual is ineligible for financial assistance, but only that a Marketplace did not receive sufficient information to verify eligibility in the time period outlined in the law,” CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said.

The Senate report also accused the administration of lacking a solid plan to get that money back – and predicted that in the end, the IRS will be “unable to fully recoup the funds.”

“The information provided to the Committee by the IRS and HHS reveals a troubling lack of coordination between the two agencies … and demonstrates that the IRS and HHS neglected to consider how they would recover these wasteful payments,” the report says.

Under the law, the feds can dole out these payments on a temporary basis if a recipient’s legal status is unclear, but are supposed to cut off funding and coverage if the recipient does not later come up with the paperwork. Up to a half-million “ineligible” people, according to the report, applied in this way — with their credits paid in advance to the insurers. The IRS, though, is supposed to get overpayments back from the individuals themselves.

The Senate report, based on a review launched by committee Chairman Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., derisively describes this approach as “pay and chase.”

In other words, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services pays credits and subsidies to the insurance companies on behalf of the applicants – and the feds then “chase” after any overpayments to ineligible people once they are discovered.

“This ‘pay and chase’ model has potentially cost taxpayers approximately $750 million,” the report says. The 500,000 individuals in question have been removed from coverage, according to the findings, as the government seeks to get the money back.

The Senate report says the IRS and HHS initially failed to coordinate on a plan for recouping funds, and claimed that a subsequent plan from the IRS to recoup the money is still “ineffective and insufficient.”

In a July letter to Johnson, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen assured that the agency is “committed to identifying and efficiently addressing” improper payments. He reiterated that anyone “not lawfully present” who enrolls for ObamaCare coverage “must repay” the advance premium credit payments, and would be breaking the law if they don’t.

Hey Janet and Jeh, How do you Square This?

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May 2015, speech in part: DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, “The FBI continues to identify, investigate, interdict and help the Department of Justice prosecute attempted terrorist plots to the homeland. With the help of DHS, the FBI has also made a number of arrests of those who attempt to become foreign fighters, before they can get on an airplane and leave the country.

In reaction to terrorist groups’ public calls for attacks on government installations in the West, and following the attack last fall in Ottawa, I directed that our Federal Protective Service enhance its security and presence at federal office buildings around the country. This enhanced security remains in place.

In reaction to terrorists’ public calls for attacks on U.S. military installations and personnel, the Department of Defense has enhanced its security at bases in the U.S.

Given the new reality of the global terrorist threat — which involves the potential for small-scale homegrown attacks by those who could strike with little or no notice, we are working in closer collaboration with state and local law enforcement. Given the nature of the evolving threat, the local cop on the beat may actually be the first to detect a terrorist attack on the homeland.

So, as often as several times a week, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI share terrorist threat information and intelligence with Joint Terrorism Task Forces, state fusion centers, and local police chiefs and sheriffs.” Full speech here and note the some of the attendees.

Maybe we should be seeking a subpoena of Janet Napolitano and Jeh Johnson.

***

Enter Philip Haney, again:

DHS Official: I Was Ordered to Purge Records of Islamic Terror Ties
A veteran official with the Department of Homeland Security claims he and other staff were ordered to destroy records on a federal database that showed links between possible jihadists and Islamic terrorist groups.

“After leaving my 15-year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack,” the former employee, Patrick Haney, wrote in an explosive column that was published late Friday on The Hill website.

Haney alleges that the Obama administration has been “engaged in a bureaucratic effort” to destroy the raw material and intelligence the Department of Homeland Security has been collecting for years, leaving the United States open to mass-casualty attacks.

His story starts in 2009, when during the holiday travel season, a 23-year-old Nigerian Muslim,  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253, with explosives packed in his underwear and the hopes of slaughtering 290 travelers flying on Christmas Day from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Passengers subdued the jihadist and he was arrested, thwarting the plot.

After the attempt, Haney writes, President Barack Obama “threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to ‘connect the dots,’ saying that it was not a failure to collect the intelligence that could have stopped the attack, but rather “‘a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.'”

But most Americans were not aware that the Department of Homeland Security’s employees suffered enormous damage to their morale from Obama’s words, Haney said.

Further, many were infuriated “because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material — the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.”

Just one month before the attempted attack, Haney said, his DHS supervisors ordered him to either delete or modify the records for several hundred people tied to Islamist terror organizations, including Hamas, from the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, the federal database.

Those records give DHS the ability to “connect dots,” explained Haney, and every day, the agency’s Custom and Border Protection officials use the database while watching people who are associated with known terrorist affiliations seeking patterns that could indicate a pending attack.

“Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that,” said Haney.

“Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database,” he wrote.

And even weeks after the attempted Christmas Day attack, Haney said, he was still being ordered to delete and scrub terrorists’ records, making it more difficult to connect dots in the future.

The number of attempted and successful Islamic terrorist attacks kept increasing, notes Haney, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, conducted by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev; Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez’ shooting of two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee last year; the attack conducted by Faisal Shahzad in May 2010; Detroit “honor” killer Rahim Alfatlawi in 2011; Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol in 2012; and Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen in 2014.

He believes it is “very plausible” that one or more of those homeland incidents could have been prevented, if DHS subject matter experts had been allowed to keep doing their jobs.

“It is demoralizing — and infuriating — that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009,” Haney concluded.