Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion

October 6 & 22, Benghazi Cmte, Popcorn Buttered?

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More emails surface in Hillary Clinton Benghazi probe

Politico: More previously-undisclosed State Department emails related to Benghazi have surfaced in a federal court filing, offering a public accounting of at least some of the records still being sought by congressional investigators.

The filing Monday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative group Citizens United describes about a dozen Benghazi-related emails that were withheld in whole or in part as State responded to one of the group’s requests seeking information about contacts between a top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and officials with the Clinton Foundation.
Most of the documents also appear to have been withheld from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is investigating State’s response to the attack. The committee is scheduled to take public testimony from Clinton on Oct. 22.

A panel spokesman said he could not immediately confirm which of the documents had been turned over to the committee, but Citizens United President David Bossie told reporters staffers at the House panel told the group State never produced the records to Congress.

“To the best of their knowledge, the do not have these documents either, even though they are under subpoena for an extended period of time,” Bossie told reporters outside U.S. District Court in Washington after a hearing on the suit.

State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach told POLITICO there is no effort to impede congressional probes.

“The Department has made every effort to cooperate with the Benghazi Committee, providing 32 witnesses for interviews and over 70,000 pages of documents, including over 20,000 pages in the last month alone,” Gerlach said. “We will continue to respond to the Benghazi Committee’s requests, but as they mount and modify over time, so too must we plan accordingly for the time and resources they consume.”

In the new court filing, State Department official John Hackett said nearly all the Benghazi-related emails involved in the FOIA lawsuit involve deliberations among State officials about how to respond to Benghazi-related congressional inquiries.

In several high profile cases, including the ill-fated Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning investigation, the Obama Administration has defended its right to keep confidential its internal discussions about House and Senate investigations. The administration has also sought to extend that confidentiality to cover responses to media inquiries prompted by congressional probes.

In June, while producing records to congressional committees, the State Department confirmed it was holding back some Benghazi documents.

“A small number of documents implicate important Executive Branch institutional interests and are therefore not included in this production,” Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affiairs Anna Frifield wrote in a letter to the House Benghazi panel.

However, House staffers said the diplomatic agency has repeatedly rebuffed requests for a log of documents State is withholding. The FOIA lawsuits provide a vehicle to force the agency to identify those emails, although the substance of the messages is not disclosed.

At the court hearing Tuesday, a federal judge pressed the State Department to move more quickly to process documents requested by Citizens United and others who have been demanding records relating to Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state .

“I think there has to be some reallocation of resources, because these are atypical cases,” U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said. “This case is important to the public. The public is clamoring for information. Everyone is clamoring for information.”

After Sullivan derided State’s approach as “business as usual,” Justice Department attorney Elizabeth Shapiro insisted that State’s 63.5-member FOIA processing staff has been working long hours and weekends in “demoralizing” conditions to publish emails from Clinton’s account as well as records sought in about 100 pending FOIA lawsuits and thousands of pending FOIA requests.
“I just want to assure the court that it’s not business as usual,” Shapiro declared. “The State Department’s being crushed by obligations.”

Much of the hearing was spent discussing why the State Department failed to complete searches of emails provided by former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin by a court-ordered deadline of September 13.

Sullivan seemed to waver on how culpable State was for delays, sometimes suggesting that the agency had to wait for the cooperation of its former employees and at other points suggesting that State was being sluggish.

The judge initially attributed the delay to “foot-dragging” by Mills and Abedin in response to requests from their former agency. However, he quickly withdrew that accusation.
“So, there was foot-dragging on their part–well, there was delay. I can’t say there was foot-dragging,” Sullivan said.

Justice Department attorney Caroline Anderson insisted that the State Department was only obliged to produce records in its possession at the time the search began, so records turned over later by Mills and Abedin were not technically covered by the FOIA requests filed last year for records of contacts between top Clinton aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a private consulting firm with connections to former President Bill Clinton.

“The State Department is in compliance with every order of this court,” Anderson said.

Anderson proposed that State have until December 9 to locate and process relevant records from Mills’ and Abedin’s accounts, but eventually said it was just “the State Department’s hope” to get it done by then. That seemed to irritate Sullivan.

“How long does it take you to run a computer search?” the judge asked. “Someone pushes a button. I’m not minimizing it, but it’s a computer search.”

Citizens United attorney Matthew McGill insisted that State knew or should have known weeks ago if it was going to have trouble meeting the deadline. “They should have come to the court then….Instead, they waited,” McGill said. “That was a tactical decision on their part. It was meant to delay.”

Anderson asked that State have a month to finish the computer-based searches and then more time to review the content of the documents for sensitive national security information and other details subject to withholding. But the judge said a shorter timeline was necessary.

Sullivan ordered State to finish the searches by October 2 and set a hearing four days later.

Bossie said State’s sluggish response was part and parcel of an effort to benefit Clinton’s Democratic presidential bid by kicking the issue down the road.

“Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills have taken the specific strategy and tactics just like they did in the 90s–the same people the same strategies–to drag these efforts out, to drag out congressional committees, to frustrate justice and to frustrate the American people from getting information so that people ask questions like: ‘This has been going on for three years and don’t we know everything and isn’t this a rehash?” the conservative activist said. “That is their deliberate strategy. They’ve been doing this for 20 years…..the same Clinton playbook is played over and over and over again.”

Clinton campaign spokesmen and attorneys for Abedin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mills’s lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, called Bossie’s claim of deliberate delay “untrue.”

 

 

 

 

 

Bernie Sanders Donors: Labor and Shady

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The top donors for Bernie Sanders are labor unions and organizations.

PACs rule campaigns today, of this there is no exception. Candidates are called to tow their lobby line for money and access. Bernie loyalists have a dark side, a criminal side.

New filing raises more questions about shady pro-Bernie Sanders group

Sanders campaign has decried Americans Socially United super PAC

PublicIntegrity: Americans Socially United, a super PAC that recently received nearly $50,000 from James Bond actor Daniel Craig, has submitted its first official campaign finance report to the Federal Election Commission.

And it’s a mess: The report from the group that claims to support presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders is riddled with anomalies and raises as many questions as it answers.

The filing by Americans Socially United — whose founder, Cary Lee Peterson, has a history of financial and legal problems and is a wanted man in Arizona — came nearly seven weeks after the mandatory report was due and a week after the Center for Public Integrity raised questions about the super PAC’s operations.

The money from Craig appears to have come at a critical time for Americans Socially United, as the super PAC’s new report states it ended June about $50,000 in the red.

The new report further indicates Americans Socially United had raised about $100,000 from its formation in February through the end of June, although the exact amount is unclear.

That’s because one section of the report lists the super PAC’s total receipts as about $91,000, while other figures indicate it collected about $114,000.

Americans Socially United also states in its report that it refunded a significant portion of the money it collected. But the exact amount is again unclear.

One section of the report states the super PAC refunded about $54,000 in total to donors. Yet another indicates that that number is higher — nearly $80,000 — including $50,000 from a foreign national identified as Alejandro Fernandez of La Paz and $25,000 from a second foreigner simply identified as Anthony Rice.

Only U.S. citizens and green card holders are allowed to donate to federal candidates and political committees.

The report includes the names of about 30 donors but failed to provide federally required information about their addresses, employers and occupations.

Other donations were returned because Peterson’s super PAC got the money by mistake. Some contributions were intended for Sanders’ official campaign, the filing indicates.

Until recently, Americans Socially United listed the names of more than 500 people on its website who had donated, or pledged to give, to the group.

When contacted by the Center for Public Integrity, several of them said they thought they were contributing to the official campaign committee of Sanders, who has himself disavowed all super PAC support as he challenges Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

The Sanders campaign — which has itself collected $2,700 from Craig — even sent Americans Socially United a cease and desist letter in June demanding that Peterson curtail his operation.

Peterson has largely ignored the letter’s demands, which include taking down his social media pages and websites, which include BetonBernie.com, BetonBernie2016.com, PledgeSanders2016.com and SociallyUnited.org.

Among the super PAC’s biggest expenses during its first months of existence? Media, although the filing doesn’t offer many details.

Americans Socially United paid a company called EMW Services about $24,500 for “media services,” according to the report.

Two other donors — one from Naples, Florida, and one from Montreal — are listed as making in-kind contributions to cover five-figure media expenses.

Americans Socially United also paid $4,875 to Peterson’s own company — Robert Peterson Fields Associates — for unspecified “professional services” and spent about $2,500 on airline tickets, rental cars and hotels.

Reached via email, Peterson declined to comment for this story.

In a statement included with his super PAC filing, Peterson said he has been a “target of cyber-industrial sabotage and alleged acts of criminal syndicalism committed by specific financial service providers, a financial institution, web service providers and independent contractors.”

Earlier this month, Peterson declined to comment about the two active warrants out for his arrest in Arizona. Both stem from Peterson failing to appear in court for misdemeanor cases, including a disorderly conduct charge and an “extreme DUI” conviction.

Peterson has also routinely run afoul of creditors, as the Center for Public Integrity recently reported.

He most notably stiffed Dow Jones & Co. out of nearly $170,000 after one of his companies failed to pay for advertisements in the Wall Street Journal.

Moreover, Peterson’s been evicted twice from apartments in Texas in recent years for failing to pay rent.

Peterson told the Center for Public Integrity earlier this month that his past run-ins with the law were not relevant to the work he’s doing now — and that he started Americans Socially United because he’s just a fan of Sanders.

“You don’t need to look back on my past,” Peterson said. “I’m going out there trying to make a difference.”

Campaign finance watchdogs have raised concerns about Peterson’s activities, and the FEC has already told him that his group could face “civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action” for his tardy campaign finance filing.

Ann Ravel, the Democrat who currently serves as the FEC’s chairwoman, told the Center for Public Integrity that she couldn’t speak directly to the actions of Peterson or his super PAC, as the agency does not comment on organizations that it might be actively investigating.

But she expressed general concerns about what she calls “sham PACs,” which primarily exist not to support a political candidate or cause, but the personal bank accounts of the people running the super PACs.

She also issued a warning to people to people considering making a contribution to a super PAC they don’t know much about.

“Make sure the organization you’re giving to is fulfilling the purpose for which you’re giving money,” Ravel said. “It would behoove people to talk to the actual candidate’s committees first” if they’re unsure about a super PAC purporting to support the candidate.

Matthew Petersen, the FEC’s Republican vice chairman, said that in general, people who want to contribute to a candidate’s campaign committee should take care to ensure they’re sending their money to the correct place.

“You really need to be sure to read the disclaimers that indicate whether a committee is an authorized committee” of a particular candidate, Petersen said.

He also said the FEC itself could also review the effectiveness of its regulations and guidance on how unauthorized committees may — or may not — incorporate political candidates’ names into their own.

Save for a few narrow exceptions, super PACs and other political committees are barred from using candidates’ names.

But the FEC hasn’t aggressively enforced these provisions, and a number of groups — chief among them pro-Carly Fiorina super PAC Conservative, Authentic, Responsive Leadership for You and for America, which routinely goes by CARLY for America — have seemingly danced on the fuzzy line between what’s legal and what’s not.

Peterson has also created seven other political committees this year, including several with seemingly official sounding names such as the Congressional Committee on Cuban Affairs and the Congressional Committee on Eurasian Affairs.

None of those groups have yet to file their mandatory mid-year campaign finance reports that were due on July 31.

***

When it comes to standing with government employees, Bernie Sanders in solidarity of increasing the minimum wage. He joined the strike.

Damascus Airport Renamed Putin International

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Just kidding on that title, well rather, tongue in cheek. Syria has always been a military base for Russia and now more so with Hezbollah in the lead for the ground game directed by GRU forces redeployed from Ukraine.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his military team met with Putin this week to come to an accommodation on the role and threat risk of Hezbollah vs. Israel.

Israel will continue to conduct strikes on weapons locations, transfer routes and smuggling which was formally agreed to by both Israel and Moscow. Meanwhile the United States is completely out of the equation mostly due to ineptness and deference, fully isolating the United States.

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Only John Kerry is making demands that at some time during these Russian/Iranian operations, Bashir al Assad will be removed from power…..yawn.

Pro-Hezbollah daily says party
in Syria pact with Russia

Al-Akhbar claimed that Russian troops will fight alongside Hezbollah in Syria

BEIRUT – A leading pro-Hezbollah daily claimed on Tuesday that the party has joined a new counter-terror alliance with Moscow and that Russia will take part in military operations alongside the Syrian army and Hezbollah.

 

Al-Akhbar’s editor-in-chief Ibrahim al-Amin wrote that secret talks between Russia, Iran, Syria and Iraq had resulted in the birth of the new alliance, which he described as “the most important in the region and the world for many years.”

 

“The agreement to form the alliance includes administrative mechanisms for cooperation on [the issues of] politics and intelligence and [for] military [cooperation] on the battlefield in several parts of the Middle East, primarily in Syria and Iraq,” the commentator said, citing well-informed sources.
“The parties to the alliance are the states of Russia, Iran, Syria and Iraq, with Lebanon’s Hezbollah as the fifth party,” he also said, adding that the joint-force would be called the “4+1 alliance” – a play on words referring to the P5+1 world powers that negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran.

 

The Al-Akhbar article came hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly reached an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow over the latter country’s major military build-up in Syria.

 

Following their meeting, Netanyahu announced that Russia and Israel had agreed to “a joint mechanism for preventing misunderstandings between our forces,” and reiterated that Tel Aviv’s commitment to preventing weapon transfers from Syria to Hezbollah.

 

Putin, in turn, told Netanyahu that the Syrian regime was in “no position” to open a new front against Israel, which has conducted regular airstrikes in Syria targeting weapon transfers as well as in retaliation to cross-border rocket fire.

 

 

 

Despite the reported agreement between Tel Aviv and Moscow, Al-Akhbar’s editor-in-chief said that Russian forces were coordinating with Hezbollah in Syria.

 

“[Several] days ago, Russian officers accompanied by specialists… from the Russian forces arriving in Syria toured a number of positions in Hama’s Al-Ghab Plain area and carried out a field survey accompanied by Syrian Army and Hezbollah officers,” Amin claimed.

 

“Similar tours took place in the [areas] around Idlib and in the mountain range overlooking Latakia.”

 

“It has become clear that the Russian force is made up of various specializations, from air force [units] to units specialized in sniper operations and artillery officers, as well as survey and observation teams.”

 

He also made the startling claim that Russia will “play a prominent role on the ground and will participate in combat on the battlefield with their advanced weaponry by leading operations and taking part in artillery shelling, air [raids] and otherwise, alongside the Syrian army and Hezbollah.”

 

“The Russians have also set up a coordination process with Kurdish forces and parties,” the article said.

 

“A Russian military delegate paid a secret visit to a number of Kurdish military commanders in Hasakeh and inspected areas of confrontation between the YPG and the armed groups.”

RT= Russia Today=Bigger Propaganda

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I have always been suspect of this site….you?

UK watchdog raps RT for biased reports

LONDON — RT, the state-owned Russian news channel, was reprimanded by Britain’s communications watchdog Monday for airing biased and misleading reports on Ukraine and Syria.

Ofcom found “significant” breaches of U.K. broadcasting rules in three separate programs screened by RT last year. It ordered the news channel to broadcast statements correcting two of the reports, but stopped short of imposing a fine.

With the latest findings, RT has been found in breach of U.K. regulations 14 times since it began broadcasting a decade ago.

RT, formerly Russia Today, has been increasingly prominent in Britain in recent years, advertising itself as an alternative to the dominant news providers.

Some lawmakers and broadcasters are nervous about its growing influence, amid concerns that it peddles the Kremlin’s view on foreign policy matters.

Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, said the network was “shocked and disappointed” at Ofcom’s findings. RT had submitted lengthy defences of the programs.

One of the breaches related to a program screened in July last year, The Truthseeker: Genocide of Eastern Ukraine, which aired claims that Ukraine’s government and military were committing atrocities in the east of the country, where the government is in conflict with pro-Russian separatists.

The 14-minute report drew parallels between Ukraine’s military and the Nazis. It concluded with a denial from Ukrainian officials that the government had committed atrocities, but this was insufficient for the program overall to appear impartial, Ofcom found.

Another episode of RT’s Truthseeker series, broadcast in March last year, which accused the BBC of “stunning fakery” in a report on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, was also found to be in breach of U.K. regulations.

RT misled viewers by implying that an official public investigation into the BBC report had uncovered wrongdoing, Ofcom said. The BBC was not treated fairly or given a chance to respond to the allegations, the regulator found.

“Ofcom found that RT broadcast content that was either materially misleading or not duly impartial,” the regulator said. “These are significant failings and we are therefore requiring RT to broadcast two clear statements on our decision which correct these failures.”

*** The next question is what about al Jazeera? In 2011, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media penned a piece on RT. In part:

Russia Today, an English-language channel provided in the U.S. and other Western countries, is funded by the Moscow regime of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, and recently hired an alleged Russian spy who is in the process of being deported from Britain.

Her first “story” for RT was to complain that Western governments have a “habit of lashing out at other countries for not listening to their people, while blithely ignoring public opinion on their own doorsteps.”

Russia Today has been described by Konstantin Preobrazhensky, himself a former Soviet KGB officer who defected to the West, as “a part of the Russian industry of misinformation and manipulation” designed to mislead foreign audiences about Russian intentions. He says Russia Today television utilizes methods of propaganda that are managed by Directorate “A” of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. He explains, “The specialty of Directorate ‘A’ is deceiving world public opinion and manipulating it. It has got a lot of experience over decades of the Cold War.”

In trying to attract and confuse an American audience, RT regularly features Marxist and radical commentators in the U.S. such as Noam Chomsky, Gloria La Riva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and 9/11 “inside job” advocate and radio host Alex Jones.

Hey Vegas, Seen this Clintonista at a Casino Lately?

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Primer:

Charlie Trie’s and Ng Lap Seng’s Laundered Contributions to the DNC Introduction
Former Little Rock, Arkansas, restaurateur Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie and Macau-based businessman Ng Lap Seng collaborated in a scheme to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign funds to the DNC. Ng wired over one million dollars from accounts he maintains in Macau and Hong Kong to accounts maintained by or accessible to Trie in Little Rock and Washington, D.C. Although Trie held himself out as an international trader (and, in fact, actively sought to develop an international trading business he called Daihatsu International Trading Corporation), he was never successful. Trie’s bank records and tax returns reveal that he received little or no income from sources other than Ng Lap Seng.
Although he failed to establish a successful, income-generating international trading business, Trie, his wife and his businesses managed to contribute a total of $220,000 to the DNC between 1994 and 1996. Trie and Ng also reimbursed the contributions made by a number of other DNC contributors who were recruited by Trie in order to further disguise the ultimate source of the contributions. As Trie earned little money through his own business activities, the Committee concludes that Trie used the foreign-source funds wired from Ng to make his (and his wife’s and businesses’) DNC contributions and to reimburse the conduit contributors. The Justice Department indicted Trie for these illegal activities on January 28, 1998. More here.

Over this past weekend:

Chinese Businessman Arrested For Sneaking $4.5M in Cash into US

Previously accused of illegally funneling money to DNC in ’Donorgate’

FreeBeacon: A Chinese businessman accused of illegally funneling foreign money to the Democratic National Committee ahead of Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996 has been arrested for sneaking upwards of $4.5 million into the United States.

The New York Post reported that 68-year-old Ng Lap Seng, a real estate developer, and interpreter Jeff Yin were arrested Saturday for smuggling millions in cash from China to U.S. airports over two years, Manhattan federal court records indicate.

Ng smuggled the total of more than $4.5 million in cash into the U.S. over roughly 10 trips between China and the states between 2013 and 2015, according to the criminal complaint.

The businessman and his interpreter were scooped up by authorities after they told Customs and Border Patrol that the $400,000 in cash they had on hand was for gambling and purchasing paintings and then brought the money to Queens, N.Y.

It is unclear what has happened to the rest of the money.

Though never ultimately charged, Ng played a role in the “Donorgate” scandal before the 1996 elections that resulted in Clinton ally Charlie Trie pleading guilty to violating campaign finance laws in 1999.

Ng transferred approximately $1.4 million to Trie, also a Chinese businessman, who then gave the funds to the DNC before Bill Clinton’s reelection.