Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion

The Vatican, the White House, the Migrants, Millions

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Catholic Bishops Financial statement (see page 10 for description summary)

In an NTEB Special Report, we have recently received information that the Catholic Church received payments totalling $79,590,512.00 to facilitate the flow of undocumented and illegal immigrants into the United States in 2014. This is six million dollars more than they were paid in 2013. Now y0u know why Pope Francis is so eager to push Obama’s insane flood of illegal migrants, he’s getting paid millions to do it!

In the face of President Obama’s veto threat, the House passed a bill to slow Syrian refugees. But the Republican Congress also has the power to hold hearings into the millions of taxpayer dollars being funneled through Catholic and other church groupsto bring them here. Many Catholics and non-Catholics alike would like to know how “religious compassion,” using federal money, is increasing the potential terrorist threat to America.

You may recall that Pope Francis promoted the Obama administration’s pro-immigration policies during his visit to the U.S. Left unsaid was the fact that the American branch of the Roman Catholic Church is getting millions of taxpayer dollars to settle refugees. According to their financial statement for 2014, the latest year for which figures are available, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops received over $79 million in government grants to provide benefits to refugees.

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Soros: Hey Refugees, AmericaisBetter.org

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A group masquerading as conservative but backed by left-wing foundations including George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society (FPOS) has launched an online advertising campaign in defense of bringing Syrian refugees to the United States.

http://action.immigrationforum.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=21750

Breitbart: The banner ads bear tag lines like, “Support freedom, not fear,” and, “America is better when we welcome refugees.” They lead to a microsite located at Americaisbetter.org with Old Glory-clothed, American flag-waiving young people, with a light-skinned blonde leading the way for others who appear to be ethnic minorities partially or fully obscured behind her.

The site in turn quotes conservative icon former president Ronald Reagan, saying, “America is better when we embrace President Reagan’s ‘shining city … teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace.’”

The site derides “who would make us react in fear of those different from us.” It continues, “As commander in chief, Reagan kept America safe. At the same time, he was the world’s ‘Great Liberator,’ in the words of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He welcomed refugees from the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere.”

“From a faith perspective,” (emphasis in the original) the site argues, “we must not blame victims who are fleeing the evil from which we also seek to protect ourselves. We are called to love our neighbor as ourselves, not slam the door in his face.”

Ironic considering that Mr. Soros is an avowed atheist who has said he “grew up in a Jewish, anti-semitic home,” that his parents were “uncomfortable with their religious roots,” and whose foundations have supported Planned Parenthood and other ultra-liberal organizations.

The site likewise quotes unnamed “security experts” as supporting the screening process. The quote in fact comes from John Sandweg, Former Acting Director, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a former criminal defense attorney “whose appointment to the post raised eyebrows because of his scant law enforcement experience,” and who resigned after just five months on the job.

At the time of his appointment, Rep. John Carter (R-TX) , R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, reacted with horror: “I am deeply disappointed by this appointment and believe it is disrespectful to the thousands of dedicated professionals at ICE who are working tirelessly to enforce our laws and provide for our security…I urge the administration to re-think this appointment and promptly appoint a qualified, confirmable applicant for this essential post.”

Members of Congress also derided the choice as an example of the “blatant politicization” of ICE under President Obama. As a criminal defense attorney, Sandweg represented “accused and convicted murderers, sex offenders and pedophiles and fought for the release of violent convicted offenders.”

The site also shamelessly claims that “we know that refugees are not a burden, but instead represent a valuable, hardworking community of grateful residents who enrich our communities and help our businesses,” in spite of the fact that nearly 70% of refugees were on welfare and over 90% were on food stamps between 2008 and 2013, according to data drawn from the Obama Administration’s own Office of Refugee Resettlement.

The site concludes with, “Conservative Voices” including well-known moderates former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Tex., former Amb. Ryan Crocker, currently the dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, and Michael Gerson and Kathleen Parker, both columnists at the Washington Post.

In spite of its transparent attempt to ape conservative rhetoric, funding for the National Immigration Forum comes overwhelmingly from left-wing foundations including not just Soros’ FPOS, but the Carnegie Corporation of New York, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.

The truth is that, as the overwhelming bipartisan U.S. House vote indicated today, not even a majority of Democrats in the public still back President Obama’s suicidal plan to bring 10,000 Syrians to America.

The truth is, it’s the furthest-left forces in America, who for 50 years have systematically worked to bring what they hope will be future leftist voters into the country, that are using a sock-puppet front group to try to persuade conservatives to leave themselves open to a Paris-style attack.

 

What About Screening the TSA Employees for Terror?

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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.

House Refugee Measure, First of Many

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Per testimony before the Senate, certain details have been provided.

  1.  Only 1 in 5 refugee applicants are denied, 23,000 have currently been screened and approved and referred to the United States.
  2. It is much easier to get into the United States thru the visa waiver program or thru the student visa program than thru the resettlement program.
  3. Per the FBI, there is currently 51 cases of the 900+ that requires special 24 hour surveillance. This is very labor intensive, meaning it takes up to 60 man units per person for surveillance.
  4. The European screening process is weak at best and the Schengen Zone Agreement makes it almost impossible to share background and data with the United States on migrants or other questionable individuals.
  5. While people are focused on Syrians and Islamic State, there is a building risk that other terror groups will benefit from the lack of attention with regard to resettlement and terror plots including al Qaeda and al Shabaab.

The House of Representatives ignored Barack Obama’s veto threat on legislative measures regarding refugee resettlement and passed the first of many measures in the pipeline.

Republican Campaign Against Refugees Is Just Beginning

 

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Bloomberg: The House passed a bill Thursday to severely restrict the admission of refugees from Syria and Iraq. President Barack Obama has promised to veto it. Behind the scenes, Republicans are preparing several bills that are more drastic, aiming to close American borders to asylum seekers. These measures set up a much longer political battle.

The most severe of the Republican proposals would suspend all U.S. government support for resettling refugees in the U.S. and would aim to guard against certain refugees entering the U.S. through the southern border who are suspected of ties to terrorism, designating them “special interest aliens.”

The four sponsors said in a press release that all services in the Office of Refugee Resettlement should be suspended, including the health services, legal services and social services “that help refugees become self-sufficient as quickly as possible after their arrival in the United States.”

One senior Republican House aide told me that if lawmakers are concerned about radicalization in the U.S., then cutting off refugee resettlement is the most counterproductive step they could take.

Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said she and the other sponsors want to include their proposal in the omnibus spending bill that will be needed next month to fund the government. Democrats are urging their Republican colleagues not to risk a government shutdown by tying the funding bill to the refugee issue. The White House can easily veto standalone bills, but a government funding bill is too important to reject easily.

There are at least half a dozen other bills on their way that could be attached to the omnibus bill, all of which aim to restrict the flow of refugees.

Representative Steve Stivers, Republican of Ohio, has been circulating a letter this week that urges Obama to stop accepting any refugees from Iraq or Syria. As of Monday, the letter had dozens of lawmakers’ signatures.

Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, has introduced a separate piece of legislation that would change the law to allow governors to refuse admission to refugees the federal government wants to resettle in their states. Twenty-seven governors have come out publicly to say they would refuse new refugees from Syria, but in a conference call this week, top White House officials told governors they did not currently have that right.

“Given that more than half of the US states have already indicated their desire to opt out, it is imperative that Congress ensure that our states have this choice,” Poe’s office said in a letter to his colleagues.

Ted Yoho, Republican of Florida, introduced a bill similar to the Poe legislation, to give governors the right to refuse refugees and to require FBI background checks for refugees. His Florida colleague Dennis Ross introduced a bill to stop all federal funding to admit Syrian refugees. Florida Republicans Tom Rooney and Curt Clawson have anti-refugee bills of their own.

The House passed the main bill on Thursday afternoon with some Democratic support. The measure, to be vetoed by Obama if it passes the Senate, is sponsored by Michael McCaul, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified this week the bill’s requirement that he personally certify each Syrian and Iraqi refugee as safe was “hugely cumbersome” and not a good use of his time.

Not all Republicans want to put up roadblocks against refugees, but the leadership is on board and the presidential candidates are amplifying the anti-refugee message.

The administration has found some unlikely allies. Retired Gen. Jack Keane, a harsh critic of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy, implored Republicans to resist the rhetoric against Muslims and refugees.

“Come on, this is America. We can do this right,” he testified. “We are smart enough to bring thousands of people into this country and make sure they are not going to hurt us.”

Obama, speaking in the Philippines, said that the Republicans’ rhetoric was a “potent recruitment tool for ISIS.” But recent polls show that most Americans are leaning toward the Republican way of thinking. The administration will have to be more savvy, and more substantive, if it wants to continue to welcome Syrian refugees. The fight is just getting started.

Clinton Foundation Private Fund in Columbia

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Document is here but it is in Spanish.

Clinton Foundation Running Private Equity Fund in Colombia

Watchdogs criticize lack of transparency in Clinton Foundation backed effort
FreeBeacon:

The Clinton Foundation is operating a $20 million private equity firm in Colombia, raising concerns from government and consumer watchdog groups who say the practice is unusual and could pose a significant conflict of interest.

The Bogota-based company, Fondo Acceso, could also lead to uncomfortable questions for Hillary Clinton as she criticizes the private equity industry on the campaign trail.

Fondo Acceso was founded by Bill Clinton, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, and mining magnate Frank Giustra in 2010, financed with a $20 million joint contribution from the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative and the SLIM Foundation.

According to the firm’s Spanish-language website, Fondo Acceso is “a Private Equity Fund that seeks investment opportunities in the small and medium Colombian compan[ies] with the purpose of obtaining economic and social returns.”

However, the line between the firm and the Clinton’s nonprofit world is hazy. Fondo Acceso is run out of the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office and staffed by foundation employees, a representative at the office told the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday.

The firm is managed by Carolina Botero, who is also chief financial officer at the Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership. It lists various Clinton Foundation and CGEP officials as directors in its corporate filings. The Clinton Foundation’s tax returns list Fondo Acceso as a related corporation in which the foundation holds a 50 percent stake.

Colombian companies that want to apply for venture funding from the Fondo Acceso must also sign a contract turning over financial and internal information to both the private equity firm and the Clinton Foundation.

“The Company acknowledges that this letter of authorization or consent is given for the benefit of the FUND and of the CLINTON FOUNDATION and, therefore, cannot be repealed, or the authorization contained herein altered or modified, without the prior and written consent of the FUND and/or the CLINTON FOUNDATION,” says the contract on the Acceso website.

Fondo Acceso’s financial entanglements are also unclear. Vanessa Jimenez, chief administrator at the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office, answered the phone number listed for the private equity fund on Tuesday. She said she was not allowed to talk about Fondo Acceso’s investments.

Jimenez said Fondo Acceso was based out of the office, but employees there technically worked for the Clinton Foundation.

“[Fondo Acceso] does not have any employees,” she said. “Nobody is hired by Acceso. … In Colombia, we work for the company, but only the Clinton Foundation is our employer.”

Jimenez directed questions to Fondo Acceso’s legal representative Monica Varela, who is also a Clinton Foundation official. Varela did not respond to request for comment.

Fondo Acceso director Christy Louth, who is also an official at the Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership, declined to comment and directed questions to the partnership’s press office. A spokesperson for the Clinton Foundation also directed questions to the CGEP.

CGEP is a Canadian organization founded by Clinton and Giustra. The group contracts its economic development projects to the Clinton Foundation and does not disclose its donors.

The CGEP press office declined to provide the Free Beacon with a full list of companies that Fondo Acceso has invested in.

The group has been more willing to discuss some of Fondo Acceso’s projects privately and in the Colombian media.

Fondo Acceso managerBotero laid out the company’s strategy in July 2012 and disclosed some of its investments in a presentation to the Cartagena Chamber of Commerce.

The presentation said Fondo Acceso was looking to invest in local companies in the agriculture, production, and labor industries with “high growth potential” that had annual sales between $500,000 and $10 million. In exchange for financing, the firm would become a shareholder in the companies.

According to the presentation, Fondo Acceso’s portfolio included at least two companies at the time. It gave $1.5 million to a Barranquilla-based fruit pulping company Alimentos SAS in 2011 and $250,000 to the Bogota-based telecom company Fontel in 2012, in exchange for shareholding agreements.

These investments are a small fraction of the $20 million that Clinton, Giustra, and Slim committed to Fondo Acceso in 2010, and it is unclear where the rest of the money has gone.

The Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership press office said Fondo Acceso has invested in various CGEP “enterprises” in Latin America, which are companies founded and co-owned by CGEP and the Clinton Foundation.

The lack of clear disclosure raises questions about Fondo Acceso’s transparency, according to watchdog groups.

A charitable foundation running a private equity fund is “not something one hears about commonly” and is “very concerning,” according to Craig Holman, the government affairs lobbyist at the watchdog group Public Citizen.

“Private equity firms invest and take over various companies as social services for a period of time and its intent and its purpose is to provide a reasonable return for shareholders,” said Holman. “If you’ve got a tax-free foundation getting involved in running a private equity firm, I just find that very troubling.”

Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, said the lack of transparency was a troubling. He said the public has a right to know whether any of Fondo Acceso’s companies received U.S. government support while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

“At the minimum, the Clinton Foundation should disclose every company that received investment funds from them, because the public is entitled to know whether those companies benefited from any State Department foreign aid programs,” said Boehm.

The Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment.