What About Screening the TSA Employees for Terror?

TSA Says 73 Employees Were on Terror Watch List

Spectator: A few months ago, top TSA officials were forced to hand over their plastic badges and report for bin-stacking duty after it was discovered that 95% of the time, fake, planted “bombs” and “firearms” were able to make it swiftly through security at a bunch of American airports (just don’t wrap your face powder up in your underwear or they’ll spill out the contents of your luggage across the “security screening area” with abandon, before testing you and your laptop for explosives, because obviously you’re a terrorist, boarding a flight to that high-impact target Cleveland at an ungodly morning hour…not that I’m bitter).

Anyway, the malfeasance inside the TSA extends throughout the agency, apparently, from line workers, to top brass and even to HR. According to a report released this week, the TSA had 73 “aviation workers” on its payroll who also happened to be on the terror watchlist, something the TSA, in its extensive screening process, failed to discover.

A recent U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) report found that 73 aviation workers, employed by airlines and vendors, had alleged links to terrorism.

The report, published by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General on June 4, blamed bureaucratic mistakes. Though the TSA says it frequently cross-checks applications and employee lists with the DHS’s “Consolidated Terrorist Watchlist,” both are incomplete.

The TSA’s employee lists, which consist of thousands of records, “contained potentially incomplete or inaccurate data, such as an initial for a first name and missing social security numbers,” the report found. The DHS Consolidated Terrorist Watchlist was also incomplete because “[TSA] is not authorized to receive all terrorism-related categories under current interagency watchlisting policy.”

Well, that’s weird: the TSA, which is supposed to be the front line in protecting American travelers from terrorists, but has no access to the full terror watch list. Granted, the terror watch list is also overly inflated and has a bunch of names of ‘persons of interst’ who are relatives, close friends, roommates and other associates of actual people being watched for terror-related activities, but still. If you’re that close to someone with designs on blowing parts of America sky high, you probably shouldn’t be running the bodyscanner at your local airport. No offense, it’s just a thing.

The best part of Newsweek‘s coverage of the incident is the final paragraph of the story, where the writers of a major publication throw up their hands and claim that they have no idea if anything will even be done to correct the situations, whether people will be fired, or if anyone actually cares.

*** In 2010, the terror watch list gets upgrades.

Now a single tip about a terror link will be enough for inclusion in the watch list for U.S. security officials, who have also evolved a quicker system to share the database of potential terrorists among screening agencies; a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said that officials have now “effectively in a broad stroke lowered the bar for inclusion” in the list; the new criteria have led to only modest growth in the list, which stands at 440,000 people, about 5 percent more than last year; also, instead of sending data once a night to the Terrorist Screening Center’s watch list, which can take hours, the new system should be able to update the watch list almost instantly as names are entered

An upgraded, more comprehensive system // Source: wired.com

Now a single tip about a terror link will be enough for inclusion in the watch list for U.S. security officials, who have also evolved a quicker system to share the database of potential terrorists among screening agencies.

The master watch list of individuals with suspected links to terrorism is used to screen people seeking to obtain a visa, cross a U.S. border, or board a plane in or destined for the United States. Officials say they have made it easier to add individuals’ names to the watch list and improved the government’s ability to thwart terrorist attacks, the Washington Post reported.

Timothy Healy, director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which maintains the master list, said the new guidelines balance the protection of Americans from terrorist threats with the preservation of civil liberties.

He said the watch list today is “more accurate, more agile,” providing valuable intelligence to a growing number of partners that include state and local police and foreign governments.

Another senior counter-terrorism official told the Post that officials have now “effectively in a broad stroke lowered the bar for inclusion.” The measure comes a year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner. The U.S. government faced criticism for its failure to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the watch list despite his father warning U.S. officials of Abdulmutallab’s radicalisation in Yemen.

Sify news quotes senior counter-terrorism officials to say that since then, they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip, as long as it is deemed credible, can lead to a name being placed on the watch list, the daily said.

Civil liberties groups argued that the government’s new criteria has made it even more likely that individuals who pose no threat will be swept up in the nation’s security apparatus, leading to potential violations of their privacy and making it difficult for them to travel.

Officials insist, however, that they have been vigilant about keeping law-abiding people off the master list. The new criteria have led to only modest growth in the list, which stands at 440,000 people, about 5 percent more than last year. A vast majority are non-U.S. citizens.

Despite the challenges we face, we have made significant improvements,” Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a speech this month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And the result of that is, in my view, that the threat of that most severe, most complicated attack is significantly lower today than it was in 2001.”

The names on the watch list are culled from a much larger catch-all database that is housed at the National Counterterrorism Center and that includes a huge variety of terrorism-related intelligence.

The database, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), underwent a multimillion-dollar upgrade to streamline and automate the data so that only one record exists per person, no matter how many aliases that person might have.

Paris Terror Plotter Dead, Greece Abetting?

When it comes to the insurgency of immigrants and illegals into the United States, Mexico is a failed partner. When it comes to the insurgency of immigrants and illegals into Europe, Greece is the failed partner.

CNN:  Greece has become an unwitting crossroads — both for jihadists trying to reach Iraq and Syria from Europe, and for fighters returning home from the Middle East.

Greece’s long land and maritime boundaries, its proximity to Turkey, the explosion of illegal migration from Syria and the country’s dire financial situation make it an inviting hub for jihadist groups, according to multiple counterterrorism sources.

One source close to the Greek intelligence services told CNN there may be some 200 people in the country with links to jihadist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the al Nusra Front — the two groups that most Europeans join.
In 2011, Greek authorities detained nearly 50,000 illegal migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to police figures.

One analyst who has studied jihadist travel patterns says there are indications that militants are setting up logistical, recruitment and financial cells in Greece, in part to facilitate the travel of a growing number of would-be fighters traveling from Kosovo and Albania.

The suicide-vest-clad woman who killed herself during Wednesday’s raid in Saint-Denis has been identified by official sources in France as Hasna Ait Boulahcen.

Linking ISIS leadership and European jihadists

Intelligence agencies had identified him as a link between ISIS leadership in Syria and European terror cells, and he is believed to have moved between several European countries without being apprehended.

Abaaoud, in his late 20s, had been on the counterterrorism radar for some time and was targeted in French airstrikes on Syria last month, a French counterterrorism source told CNN.

He was believed to be close to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

French military forces carried out airstrikes in October targeting an ISIS training camp for foreign fighters in Raqqa, Syria, in an effort to kill Abaaoud, the French counterterrorism source said.

“He was the one training foreign fighters,” and he spent time at the camp, the source said, but it’s not clear if Abaaoud was there at the time of the airstrikes.

France’s former top counterterror judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto the Paris attacks were planned in Syria.

Bruguiere said Abaaoud would certainly have been in contact with Baghdadi about an attack like the one last week. In addition, Bruguiere said, this fits with Baghdadi’s vision of establishing the ISIS caliphate and then exporting the war to the West.

A personal connection also points to Abaaoud’s alleged involvement in planning the Paris attacks. Salah Abdeslam — the on-the-run suspected eighth attacker — is a longstanding associate of Abaaoud, with both men involved in gangs in Molenbeek, Belgium, that carried out robberies and other petty crimes.

AFP-Paris: Moroccan intelligence helped put French investigators on the trail of the Belgian jihadist suspected of orchestrating last week’s deadly attacks in Paris, police sources said Thursday.

A Moroccan tip-off, along with other information, helped police track Abdelhamid Abaaoud to an apartment block in a northern Paris suburb, where he was killed in a raid on Wednesday.

*** Islamic State is a tech savvy organization and quite advanced in protecting its military tactics and communications. This has proven difficult for counterterrorism professionals to trace and track their work, but it is clearly not impossible.

In part from TheHill: The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) uses a 34-page manual to instruct its followers on how to stay invisible on the Internet.

The Arabic document was translated and released this week by analysts at the Combating Terrorism Center.

Users are also directed to use Apple’s encrypted FaceTime and iMessage features over regular unencrypted text and chat features.

“This short guide ask God’s faithfulness in it, and we hope to be published and participation on a wider scale,” the document concludes.

French Prosecutor: 7 Hour Siege 5000 Rounds, Paris

A dead dog too, sadly that was instrumental to the investigation and raid.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Top Suspect in Paris Attacks, Not Arrested in Morning Raid

  • NYT: The police stormed the Paris suburb of St.-Denis and arrested eight. At least two people died, including one who blew herself up.
  • The prosecutor said that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, suspected of organizing Friday’s attacks, and another fugitive, Salah Abdeslam, were not among those arrested.
  • Everything we know about the attackers is here.
  • Here are profiles of some of the victims.

Details for Bataclan Attack Found on Cellphone in Paris Trash Can

A cellphone that could belong to one of the attackers was found in a trash can near the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, according to the French publications Le Monde and Mediapart.

Investigators found a detailed plan of the Bataclan assault and a text message sent at 9:42 p.m. on Friday that read, “On est parti on commence.” This can be translated as “Here we go, we’re starting,” or, more literally, “We have left, we’re starting.”

The identities of the sender and the recipient of the text message remained unclear.

Investigators told Le Monde that geolocation services on the phone led them to one of the places the attackers were last seen, in the Paris suburb of Alfortville.

French authorities kill 2, detain 7 terror suspects in violent raid

Here are the latest details related to the French police raid on suspected terrorists in a Paris suburb, as well as the larger fight involving ISIS and the West:

Latest developments:

• Officials have not yet identified the two dead in Wednesday’s raids in Saint-Denis, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said. Belgian state broadcaster RTBF reported that the woman who blew herself up during that operation is a cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader in Friday’s attacks in Paris.

Abaaoud and Salah Abdeslam, who also was allegedly involved in last week’s bloodshed, are not among the seven detained in connection with that Saint-Denis operation, the prosecutor said.

• The Saint-Denis shootout began at 4:20 a.m. local time (10:20 p.m. ET Tuesday) and lasted nearly an hour, according to Molins.

• Three coordinated teams of commandos committed Friday’s Paris attacks, arriving nearly simultaneously at three locations, Molins said. Authorities have been able to identify five of the seven terrorists killed in that bloodshed.

Full story:

For the second time in a week, gunfire and explosions ripped through France on Wednesday — this time in an hours-long ordeal that ended with two terror suspects dead, seven detained, new attacks potentially thwarted and further proof, according to French President Francois Hollande, that his country is “at war” with ISIS.

Authorities zeroed in on a building in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis after picking up phone conversations indicating that a relative of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of last week’s bloody attacks, might be there, a Belgian counterterrorism official said. French police also believed Abaaoud himself was then still in the country, though they didn’t know exactly where.

By late Wednesday, the new question was whether or not he is even alive. Investigators are using DNA to analyze the body parts found in the Saint-Denis building where a female suspect first blew herself up and then French forces used powerful munitions to combat others, which led to one floor of the building collapsing.

Hollande was among those who offered congratulations to French police on the raid. Yet he also stressed that his country’s fight against terrorists, specifically those linked to ISIS, is anything but over. In fact, the violent nature of Wednesday’s raid in Saint-Denis is further proof that “we are at war,” Hollande said.

“What the terrorists were targeting was what France represents. This is what was attacked on the night of November 13th,” he said. “These barbarians targeted France’s diversity. It was the youth of France who were targeted simply because they represent life.”

Given this threat, Hollande said that Wednesday evening he would present legislation to extend France’s state of emergency for three more months — a measure that, among other things, gives authorities greater powers in conducting searches, holding people and dissolving certain groups.

The French President also said he’d appeal to world leaders — including meetings next week with U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who have been at odds on what to do in the ISIS stronghold of Syria — to form a wider coalition to go after the savage Islamist extremist group.

“There is no more … divide. There are only men and women of duty,” he said. “… We must destroy this army that menaces the entire world, not just some countries.”

‘We could see the bullets’

As France learned Friday — when a series of coordinated attacks left a trail of horror, sorrow and questions, with 129 dead and hundreds more wounded — terrorists act with savagery on their own schedule.

And those in Saint-Denis were “about to move on some kind of operation” again, police sources told CNN, adding that the Wednesday raid happened “just in time.”

Some 110 police swarmed on the diverse, working-class area that is home to the Stade de France sports stadium — where three suicide bombings took place days earlier. They first went into one apartment that had been under surveillance since Tuesday, a Paris police source said. That raid led them to another apartment on the same street.

The French police met fierce resistance when they entered the building, including the female suicide bomber — who Belgian state broadcaster RTBF claimed was Abaaoud’s cousin. They answered with powerful munitions of their own, a fact that produced piles of rubble interspersed with body parts, according to the Belgian counterterrorism official.

“We could see the bullets,” a woman, who identified herself only as Sabrine, told CNN affiliate France 2 of the drama. “We could feel the building shaking.”

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said there could end up being more than the two suspected terrorist deaths. As of Wednesday afternoon, seven suspects — including three in one apartment, the person who loaned the apartment to the suspected terrorists and his friend — ended up in custody from this operation alone. Two of them are hospitalized, Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told France Info radio.

Five French officers, meanwhile, were slightly wounded, while a police dog died in the operation, according to police.

Saadana Aymen, a 29-year-old who lives one street down, couldn’t believe what was happening in his neighborhood.

“When you think of Saint-Denis, you don’t think of terrorists,” he told CNN. “I’m shocked! Why would the terrorists pick this neighborhood?”

Phones offer clues

Yet Saint-Denis wasn’t the only place where French authorities fanned out Tuesday night into Wednesday, as part of their security clampdown.

The Interior Ministry announced in a statement that 118 searches led to the detention of at least 25 people, the confiscation of 34 weapons and the discovery of illicit drugs in 16 instances. This is on top of hundreds of similar operations conducted in recent days, which have resulted in 64 people being held and 118 put under house arrest.

Authorities have not yet laid out what connection any of these arrests have to Friday’s attacks. Yet counterterrorism and intelligence officials say that investigators have uncovered what could be a big break: cell phones believed to belong to the attackers.

According to the officials, one of the phones contained a message, sent sometime before the Friday attacks began, to the effect of: OK, we’re ready.

But cracking into their communication won’t be easy.

Investigators have found encrypted apps on the phones, which appear to have left no trace of messages or any indication of who would have been receiving them, according to officials briefed on the French investigation.

‘These are not regular people’

Seven attackers died during Friday night’s wave of violence, and an international arrest warrant is out for one suspect, Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old Frenchman. The identity of the possible ninth suspect, seen in a video that shows two gunmen inside a black car and perhaps a third person driving the vehicle, is unknown.

Mohamed Abdeslam has urged his younger brother Salah, who was stopped but then let go en route to the Belgian border hours after the attacks, to turn himself into authorities. He acknowledged noticing Salah and another brother — 31-year-old Ibrahim, who is among the seven terrorists killed — had been adopting more radical views, though that didn’t mean the family isn’t shocked.

“My brother who participated in this terrorist act must have been psychologically ready to commit such an act. These are not regular people,” he told CNN.

“You cannot have the slightest doubt that they have been prepared, that they must not leave any trace which would cause suspicion that they might do such things. And even if you saw them every day, their behavior was quite normal.”

Official: Belgian authorities lost track of 2 suspects

Both Salah Abdeslam and Ibrahim were known to authorities: Belgian prosecutor Eric Van Der Sypt told CNN’s Ivan Watson police questioned the Abdeslam brothers in February. The brothers were released, the federal prosecutor said, after they denied wanting to go to Syria.

And Salah Abdeslam and Abaaoud served time together in a Belgian prison in 2011, when the former spent a month for an alleged theft, a Belgian federal prosecutor said.

Belgian authorities believe Abaaoud has spent previous months in Raqqa, the Syrian city that’s now the de facto capital of the Islamic State, or ISIS, a counterrrorism official in that European nation said. There, in Syria, Abaaoud is thought to have worked with several senior French figures in ISIS — members of the so-called Artigat network including Sabri Essid and Fabien Clain, whose voice can be heard on the claim of responsibility for the Paris attacks — to plot a series of attacks in France.

Already, Essid and Clain have been traced to an April plot to attack a Paris church and the August armed assault on an Amsterdam-to-Paris train that was thwarted by three Americans.

As to those behind the latest violence, Belgian authorities didn’t even know Abaaoud was back in Europe, according to the counterterrorism official. They’d also lost track of Salah Abdeslam.

And, the senior Belgian official said, the bombmaker who made the suicide vests used in Paris is also thought to still be at large.

What’s next for ISIS?

ISIS was born in Iraq and blossomed in Syria, taking advantage of the power vacuum from that country’s chaotic, years-long civil war. In the process, the militant group employed bold, ruthless and sometimes sadistic tactics — as evidenced by the taking of women and girls as sex slaves, broadcasting the beheading of journalists and aid workers, destroying centuries-old historic artifacts and massacring those who don’t subscribe to its twisted, extreme interpretation of Islam.

The group has managed to take over vast swaths of Iraq and Syria in this campaign. But it’s not content to stop there.

Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon and other nations have all been sites of ISIS-claimed attacks in recent months. The militant group has also boasted about bloodshed inside Europe, including January’s massacre on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

While some have faulted world leaders for not stepping up sooner, there has been a more concerted effort of late. The United States conducted airstrikes for months, which U.S. Army Col. Steven Warren estimated have killed at least one mid- to high-level ISIS figure every day since May. More recently, Russia has stepped into the fray, in part, to support its longtime ally Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s embattled President.

Then there’s Turkey, whose involvement has been complicated by the fact that its longtime adversaries, the Kurds, have been fighting against ISIS. On Wednesday, the semi-official Anadolu news agency reported that Turkish police had detained eight ISIS-linked suspects who’d arrived at an Istanbul airport from Casablanca. The eight Moroccans said they had booked a hotel in Turkey and were preparing to head to Germany — via Greece, Serbia and Hungary — the report added, pointing to a document — seized by police — that detailed the travel route.

France has been part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS for months. But it has enhanced its role — symbolically and in practice — in the wake of the latest Paris attacks. And Hollande says that the arrival of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle within striking distance of Syria will triple France’s capacity to conduct airstrikes.

And, despite their differing stances on Syria’s future and other matters, Russia’s armed forces are ready to organize joint military operations with the French navy “to combat terrorists in Syria,” Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported, citing army official Andrey Kartapolov.

ISIS Has 24 Hour Tech Savvy Jihad Help Desk

Using the Darkweb is not a new weapon for jihad cells, DARPA has been working the ISIS hidden internet world for quite some time, to what success is undetermined.

ISIS Has Help Desk for Terrorists Staffed Around the Clock

NBC News has learned that ISIS is using a web-savvy new tactic to expand its global operational footprint — a 24-hour Jihadi Help Desk to help its foot soldiers spread its message worldwide, recruit followers and launch more attacks on foreign soil.

Counterterrorism analysts affiliated with the U.S. Army tell NBC News that the ISIS help desk, manned by a half-dozen senior operatives around the clock, was established with the express purpose of helping would-be jihadists use encryption and other secure communications in order to evade detection by law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

The relatively new development — which law enforcement and intel officials say has ramped up over the past year — is alarming because it allows potentially thousands of ISIS followers to move about and plan operations without any hint of activity showing up in their massive collection of signals intelligence.

Authorities are now homing in on the terror group’s growing cyber capabilities after attacks in Paris, Egypt and elsewhere for which ISIS has claimed credit.

“They’ve developed a series of different platforms in which they can train one another on digital security to avoid intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the explicit purpose of recruitment, propaganda and operational planning,” said Aaron F. Brantly, a counterterrorism analyst at the Combating Terrorism Center, an independent research organization at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Brantly was the lead author of a CTC report on the Islamic State’s use of secure communications, based on hundreds of hours of observation of how the Jihadi Help Desk operates.

“They answer questions from the technically mundane to the technically savvy to elevate the entire jihadi community to engage in global terror,” Brantly said in an interview Monday. “Clearly this enables them to communicate and engage in operations beyond what used to happen, and in a much more expeditious manner. They are now operating at the speed of cyberspace rather than the speed of person-to-person communications.”

The existence of the Jihadi Help Desk has raised alarm bells in Washington and within the global counterterrorism community because it appears to be allowing a far wider web of militants to network with each other and plot attacks. A senior European counterterrorism official said that concerns about the recent development are especially serious in Europe, where ISIS operatives are believed to be plotting major attacks, some of them with direct assistance from ISIS headquarters in Syria.

At a congressional hearing in October, FBI Director James Comey said the FBI is extremely concerned about ISIS’ increasing ability to “go dark.” Comey told the House Judiciary Committee that the U.S. is ” confronting the explosion of terrorist propaganda and training on the Internet.”

“While some of the contacts between groups like ISIL and potential recruits occur in publicly accessible social networking sites,” said Comey, “others take place via encrypted private messaging platforms. As a result, the FBI and all law enforcement organizations must understand the latest communication tools and position ourselves to identify and prevent terror attacks in the homeland.”

Nick Rasmussen, director of the U.S. government’s multiagency National Counterterrorism Center, said in an interview with the Combating Terrorism Center’s in-house publication that the “agile use of new means of communicating, including ways which they understand are beyond our ability to collect,” is one of his greatest concerns when it comes to ISIS and other terrorist groups.

Brantly described the Jihadi Help Desk as “a fairly large, robust community” that is anchored by at least five or six core members who are technical experts with at least collegiate or masters level training in information technology. There are layers of other associates, living all around the world, who allow the service to operate — and respond to questions — at any time of the day or night. CTC researchers have spent a year or so monitoring the help desk — and its senior operatives — via online forums, social media and other means.

“You can kind of get a sense of where they are by when they say they are signing off to participate in the [Muslim] call to prayer,” which traditionally occurs at five specific times a day, Brantly said. “They are very decentralized. They are operating in virtually every region of the world.”

The help desk workers closely track all of the many new kinds of security software and encryption as they come online, and produce materials to train others in how to use them. The CTC has obtained more than 300 pages of documents showing the help desk is training everyone from novice militants to the most experienced jihadists in digital operational security.

ISIS also distributes the tutorials through Twitter and other social media, taking pains to link to versions of it that can be downloaded even after their social media sites are shut down.

And once the help desk operatives develop personal connections with people, ISIS then contacts them to engage them in actual operational planning — including recruiting, fundraising and potentially attacks.

“They will engage in encrypted person-to-person communications, and these are extremely hard to break into from a cryptographic perspective,” Brantly said.

“They also post YouTube Videos, going step by step over how to use these technologies,” Brantly said. “Imagine you have a problem and need to solve it and go to YouTube; they have essentially established the same mechanism [for terrorism].”

 

 

Gotta Love Those Clintons and Hired Criminals

Clinton Foundation Donor to Pay $95.5 Million Settlement to Justice Department

A for-profit educational corporation that has donated to the Clinton Foundation agreed to pay $95.5 million to the Obama administration as a settlement for a government lawsuit alleging that it was using illegal tactics to lure in prospective students.

The Education Management Corporation was sued by the Department of Justice in 2011 for multiple recruitment violations, including paying its recruiters based on the number of students it enrolled, and exaggerating the career opportunities that were available to graduates. The lawsuit argued that the violations made the corporation ineligible for the $11 billion in state and federal financial aid it has received since 2003.

On top of the $95.5 million settlement, the group also agreed to forgive more than $100 million in loans it made to former students, according to the Associated Press.

The Education Management Corporation contributed between $5,000 and $10,000 to the Clinton Foundation through Brown Mackie College, one of the largest of the group’s four divisions. Goldman Sachs, which owned a 43 percent stake until it sold off much of the company to creditors last summer, has also donated millions to the Clinton Foundation.

The lawsuit was filed based on information brought forth by whistle-blowers. It claimed that the corporation operated a “boiler-room style” sales team that was taught to “exploit applicants’ psychological vulnerabilities to convince them to enroll.

Among the applicants targeted by recruiters were individuals “who were unable to write coherently, who appeared to be under the influence of drugs, or who sought to enroll in an online program but had no computer,” according to the suit.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch praised whistle-blowers for revealing the group’s “deceptive practices.”

“This case not only highlights the abuses in the [Education Management Corporation’s] EDMC’s recruitment system; it also highlights the brave actions of EDMC employees who refused to go along with the institution’s deceptive practices,”said Lynch at a Monday news conference.

The lawsuit alleged that the group’s aggressive recruitment practices were geared toward raking in as much government aid as possible.

Although the group agreed to the settlement, it admitted no wrongdoing and said it agreed to pay the penalty based on a desire to put “these matters behind us” and focus on educating its students.

The Clinton Foundation did not respond to a request for comment on the settlement, but its ties to the for-profit education industry go beyond the Education Management Corporation.

The Laureate International Universities, a group of for-profit schools partially owned by the liberal billionaire George Soros, has also contributed millions to the Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton is paid an undisclosed salary to be “honorary chancellor” of the schools, and has been described as the “face” of the massive university group.

Also contributing to the Clinton Foundation is the Apollo Group, which operates the University of Phoenix, and has been criticized for aggressively targeting veterans with G.I. Bill money to spend on education. The University of Phoenix received more than $1 billion through the G.I. Bill between 2009 and 2014, but only 16 percent of its students graduate within six years.

Kaplan, which paid a $1.3 million settlement to the Justice Department in 2014 for using unqualified instructors, also contributes to the Clinton Foundation. It was specifically targeting “African-American women who were raising two children by themselves” in the hope that they would drop out after the federal funding based on their enrollment had already been received.

Despite the Clintons’ extensive ties, Hillary Clinton has spoken out against the for-profit industry on the campaign trail for targeting “service members, veterans, and their families with false promises and deceptive marketing.”

The Clinton campaign also did not return a request for comment. *** Don’t go away yet, there is more….more criminals.

FreeBeacon is still on the case….

Numerous former board members and trustees of a charity group cofounded by Bill Clinton have been accused of or convicted of insider trading, campaign finance violations, and other illegal schemes.

The American India Foundation is one of several nonprofit groups in Bill Clinton’s charitable orbit, although it has received less attention than the Clinton Foundation and its spin-offs.

The group was founded in 2001 “at the initiative of President Bill Clinton following a request from Prime Minister Vajpayee” in order to help with the recovery efforts after the Gujarat earthquake. It is currently run by CEO Ravi Kumar.

AIF was co-founded by Clinton and former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta in 2001. Clinton continues to serve as honorary chairman of the council of trustees, according to the website.

Gupta, a Clinton donor, was convicted of passing illegal trading tips to another former AIF trustee—Raj Rajarantam—in the highly-publicized 2011 case that took down the Galleon hedge fund. Gupta is currently serving out a two-year prison term and was last listed as co-chairman of the AIF board in 2010.

Gupta’s legal team highlighted his work with AIF and Bill Clinton during his sentencing.

“Rajat worked with former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Victor Menezes, former Senior Vice Chair of Citigroup, to found the American India Foundation (AIF),” said his attorneys in a sentencing memo. “Under their leadership, within its first year AIF raised millions of dollars to support earthquake relief efforts.”

However, Gupta is just one of many current or former members of AIF leadership who have been embroiled in headline-grabbing legal controversies over the years.

Rajarantam, the former head of Galleon and also an early member of AIF leadership, was sentenced to 11 years in prison—the longest sentence ever handed down in an insider trading case—in 2011 for allegedly using illegal stock tips to amass a $63 million fortune.

Former AIF trustee and hotelier Sant Chatwal, pled guilty in 2014 to a conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. He was accused of illegally funneling $180,000 through straw donors to political candidates, including Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Federal investigators reportedly recorded Chatwal talking to an informant about using contributions to influence politicians.

“Without that nobody will even talk to you. When they are in need of money…the money you give then they are always for you,” he said. “That’s the only way to buy them, get into the system. … What, what else is there? That’s the only thing.”

The Hampshire Hotels president was sentenced to three years probation and ordered to pay a $500,000 fine, according to his attorney. He is still listed as a New York trustee on the AIF website.

Chatwal’s son, Manhattan socialite Vikram Chatwal, has also been an AIF trustee. He was charged with felony drug trafficking in 2013 after police say he tried to board a plane carrying heroin, cocaine and illegal prescription pills. The charges were dismissed after he completed a yearlong rehab program.

Natel Engineering, a company owned by former AIF trustee Sudesh Arora, pleaded guilty to contract fraud in 1993. The company was ordered to pay a $1 million fine for neglecting to test computer parts in military equipment it sold to the U.S. military.

InfoUSA founder Vinod Gupta, a former early AIF board member, was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with misappropriating company funds in 2010. According to a lawsuit filed by InfoUSA shareholders in 2006, Gupta spent company money on private flights for the Clintons. Bill Clinton also reportedly earned over $2 million working as a consultant for Gupta’s company.

Gupta stepped down from InfoUSA and agreed to pay a $7.4 million settlement in 2010.

Tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, a former AIF trustee, was found to have violated insider trading laws in a civil suit in 2003 and ousted as CEO of InfoSpace.

A current AIF trustee, CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings Prem Watsa, is reportedly under a civil investigation in Canada for insider trading, along with others at the company. Fairfax said it is cooperating with the probe and denied any wrongdoing.

The foundation has also honored Ramalinga Raju, the head of the now-defunct Satyam Computer Services, a company that has been dubbed “India’s Enron.” Raju was sentenced to seven years in prison in April after he was convicted of carrying out one of the largest corporate frauds in India’s history. His sentence was suspended in May pending appeal.

AIF did not respond to an emailed request for comment. A spokesperson for Bill Clinton was reached and did not comment.

Attorneys for Vikram Chatwal, Arora, and Rajaratnam could not be reached. Sant Chatwal’s attorney confirmed the details of his sentencing; the others did not return requests for comment.

AIF brought in $6.9 million in 2013, and spent just over $7 million, according to tax records. It currently has a two out of four star rating from Charity Navigator.

The charity supports education initiatives, anti-poverty programs, and disaster relief efforts in India and says it has “chang[ed] the lives of more than 2.3 million of India’s less fortunate.”

Through its high-profile fundraising events, AIF has provided a networking platform for business leaders, Hollywood stars, and political figures.

Earlier this month, the group honored Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, a former Clinton aide, at a fundraising gala in Washington, D.C.