Category Archives: Hillary Clinton email

DOJ is the Legal Agent for the Clinton Foundation

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hillary-doj

Controls in place at the DoJ…uh huh and it is part of the Executive Branch..uh huh again.

So, what we have here are political operatives that have established a covert governmental mafia operation that works the system by a limitless team of lawyers, damage control organizations and by manipulating media, all of which are willing accomplices. While most that are paying attention consider the missing Hillary emails relate to Benghazi, it is more likely the larger inventory of communications deal with the Clinton Foundation of which the Department of Justice is a government funded operation protecting RICO collusion. Andy McCarthy describes it all in a perfect summary.

Why is Lynch rushing the search for classified e-mails but blocking the pay-to-play corruption probe?
The Wall Street Journal’s report that, for over a year, the FBI has been investigating the Clinton Foundation for potential financial crimes and influence peddling is, as Rich Lowry said Monday, a blockbuster.
As I argued over the weekend, the manner in which the State Department was put in the service of the Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary is shocking. It is suggestive of a pattern of pay-to-play bribery, the monetizing of political influence, fraud, and obstruction of justice that the Justice Department should be investigating as a possible RICO conspiracy under the federal anti-racketeering laws.
The Journal’s Devlin Barrett buries the Clinton Foundation lede in the 14th paragraph of his report. Even more astonishing are his final three paragraphs:
In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information. Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. [FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe, these people said, told them no and added that they couldn’t “go prosecutor-shopping.”
Not long after that discussion, FBI agents informed the bureau’s leaders about the Weiner laptop, prompting Mr. Comey’s disclosure to Congress and setting off the furor that promises to consume the final days of a tumultuous campaign. Let me unpack this. Readers are unlikely to know that the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn is not just any United States attorney’s office. It is the office that was headed by Attorney General Loretta Lynch until President Obama elevated her to attorney general less than two years ago. It was in the EDNY that Ms. Lynch first came to national prominence in 1999, when she was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bill Clinton — the husband of the main subject of the FBI’s investigations with whom Lynch furtively met in the back of a plane parked on an Arizona tarmac days before the announcement that Mrs. Clinton would not be indicted. Obama reappointed Lynch as the EDNY’s U.S. attorney in 2010. She was thus in charge of staffing that office for nearly six years before coming to Main Justice in Washington. That means the EDNY is full of attorneys Lynch hired and supervised. When we learn that Clinton Foundation investigators are being denied access to patently relevant evidence by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, those are the prosecutors — Loretta Lynch’s prosecutors — we are talking about.
Recall, moreover, that it was Lynch’s Justice Department that: refused to authorize use of the grand jury to further the Clinton e-mails investigation, thus depriving the FBI of the power to compel testimony and the production of evidence by subpoena; consulted closely with defense attorneys representing subjects of the investigation; permitted Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson — the subordinates deputized by Mrs. Clinton to sort through her e-mails and destroy thousands of them — to represent Clinton as attorneys, despite the fact that they were subjects of the same investigation and had been granted immunity from prosecution (to say nothing of the ethical and legal prohibitions against such an arrangement); drastically restricted the FBI’s questioning of Mills and other subjects of the investigation; and struck the outrageous deals that gave Mills and Samuelson immunity from prosecution in exchange for providing the FBI with the laptops on which they reviewed Clinton’s four years of e-mails.
That arrangement was outrageous for three reasons:
1) Mills and Samuelson should have been compelled to produce the computers by grand-jury subpoena with no immunity agreement; 2) Lynch’s Justice Department drastically restricted the FBI’s authority to examine the computers;
and 3) Lynch’s Justice Department agreed that the FBI would destroy the computers following its very limited examination.
As I have detailed, it was already clear that Lynch’s Justice Department was stunningly derelict in hamstringing the bureau’s e-mails investigation. But now that we know the FBI was simultaneously investigating the Clinton Foundation yet being denied access to the Clinton e-mails, the dereliction appears unconscionable. It had to be screamingly obvious that the Clinton State Department e-mails, run through a server that also supported Clinton Foundation activities, would be critically important to any probe of the Foundation. Consider, for example, the issue of criminal intent, over which much has been made since Director Comey stressed the purported lack of intent proof in recommending against an indictment of Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information.

I believe, to the contrary, that there is abundant intent evidence. The law presumes that people intend the natural, foreseeable consequences of their actions: When you’re the secretary of state, and you systematically conduct your government business on private, non-secure e-mail rather than the government’s secure servers, you must know it is inevitable that classified information will be transmitted through and stored on the private server.
Still, even though Clinton’s misconduct was thus willful and grossly negligent, no sensible person believes she was trying to harm the United States; the damage she did to national security was an easily foreseeable consequence of her scheme, but that damage was not what motivated her actions. In such circumstances, it is a common tactic of defense lawyers to confound motive and criminal intent. Every criminal statute has an intent element (i.e., a requirement to prove that conduct was knowing, willful, intentional, or grossly negligent). Prosecutors, however, are virtually never required to prove motive. To be sure, they usually do introduce evidence of motive, because establishing a motive often helps to prove intent. But motive can sometimes confuse matters, so proving it is not mandatory. A common, concrete example is helpful here: the guy who robs a bank because he is strapped for cash and his mom needs an operation. Although it was not the robber’s purpose to petrify the bank teller, proving that he had a desperate need for money helps demonstrate that his theft of money was quite intentional — not an accident or mistake. So even though we can all agree that our bank robber did not have a motive to do harm, his benign motive does not absolve him of guilt for the bank robbery he fully intended to commit.
Yet, such absolution is exactly what Comey offered in claiming there was insufficient proof of criminal intent to charge Clinton with mishandling classified information. It was a rationale that echoed public comments by President Obama and Lynch’s Justice Department. They would have you believe that because Clinton was not motivated by a desire to harm national security she cannot have intended to violate the classified-information laws. It is sleight-of-hand, but it was good enough for Democrats and the media to pronounce Clinton “exonerated.” Now, however, let’s consider the Clinton Foundation. While Clinton may not have been motivated to harm our national security, she was precisely motivated to conceal the corrupt interplay of the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
That was the real objective of the home-brew server system: Mrs. Clinton wanted to shield from Congress, the courts, and the public the degree to which she, Bill, and their confederates were cashing in on her awesome political influence as secretary of state. That is exactly why she did business outside the government system that captures all official e-mails; and, critically, it perfectly explains why she deleted and attempted to destroy 33,000 e-mails — risibly claiming they involved yoga routines, Chelsea’s wedding, and the like. While knowing the purpose of the private server system may not advance our understanding of the classified-information offenses, it greatly advances our understanding of the scheme to make the Clinton Foundation a State Department pay-to-play vehicle.
Consequently, the Clinton e-mails generated in the course of this scheme are apt to be highly probative of public-corruption offenses. With that in mind, let’s go back to the Journal’s account of why Loretta Lynch’s EDNY prosecutors have blocked the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigators from examining the Clinton e-mails found on the laptop computers of Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson: Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information.
The Journal’s report says the FBI’s Clinton Foundation team was “dissatisfied” with this explanation — as well they should have been. The grants of immunity and limited-use agreements were disgraceful for the reasons outlined above. Significantly, however, the limitations imposed on the classified-information investigation should not, in the main, be binding on the Clinton Foundation investigation. Of course, the immunity grants to Mills and Samuelson must be honored even though they should never have been given in the first place. But those agreements only protect Mills and Samuelson. They would not prevent evidence found on the computers and retained by the FBI from being used against Hillary Clinton or any other possible conspirator.
Clearly, that is why agents on the FBI’s Clinton Foundation team wanted to get their investigation out of the EDNY’s clutches and move it to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York (my office for many years, as well as Jim Comey’s). The SDNY has a tradition of relative independence from the Justice Department and a well-earned reputation for pursuing political-corruption cases aggressively — a reputation burnished by U.S. attorney Preet Bharara’s prosecutions of prominent politicians from both parties. Alas, the Clinton Foundation agents were said to be barred from “prosecutor shopping” by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe — the official whose wife’s Virginia state senate campaign was infused with $675,000 in cash and in-kind contributions by political committees controlled by Governor Terry McAuliffe, a notorious Clinton fixer and former Clinton Foundation board member.
Because of Democratic and media furor over Director Comey’s reopening of the Clinton e-mails investigation last week, the FBI is now under enormous pressure to review tens of thousands of e-mails stored on the laptop shared by Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. The point is to hound the bureau into announcing before Election Day (seven days from now) whether any new classified e-mails have been found. If none are found, this outcome will be spun as yet another “exoneration” of Hillary Clinton.
Here, however, is the real outrage: Beneath all this noise, Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department is blocking the FBI from examining Clinton e-mails in connection with its investigation of the Clinton Foundation — an investigation that is every bit as serious. Were it not for the Clinton Foundation, there probably would not be a Clinton e-mail scandal. Mrs. Clinton’s home-brew communications system was designed to conceal the degree to which the State Department was put in the service of Foundation donors who transformed the “dead broke” Clintons into hundred-millionaires.

At this point, the reopened classified-information investigation is a distraction: Under the Comey/DOJ “insufficient intent evidence” rationale, there would be no charges even if previously undiscovered classified e-mails were found on the Abedin/Weiner computer. Instead, what is actually essential is that the FBI’s Clinton Foundation investigators get access to all the thousands of Clinton e-mails, including those recovered from the Mills and Samuelson laptops. The agents must also have the time they need to piece together all the Clinton e-mails (from whatever source), follow up leads, and make their case. No one seems to notice that they are being thwarted. Hillary hasn’t even been elected, but already we are benumbed by Clinton Scandal Exhaustion Syndrome.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

Final Report: How Latinos have Reshaped the Electoral Map

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Mexican-Americans Are Reshaping the Electoral Map In Arizona — And The U.S.

By

Graphics by Ella Koeze

Irma Maldonado in her dorm room at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix.
Irma Maldonado in her dorm room at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix.

All photographs by Caitlin O’Hara

 

PHOENIX — In an office suite not far from the airport, Irma Maldonado, 18, expertly role-played what she’d be doing on the city’s streets in half an hour: knocking on the doors of residents and exhorting them to vote. But not everything was a game. Before a group of young canvassers headed out for the day, a team leader at the community organizing group LUCHA mentioned that someone had earlier pulled a gun on two members of the team.

“Everything was OK,” the organizer said, but Maldonado and the 15 or so other teens and 20-somethings were given safety whistles before hitting the streets.

Maldonado has a personal stake in America’s immigration debate, which has been making headlines throughout the election, particularly because of Donald Trump’s description of Mexicans as rapists and his desire to have Mexico pay for a border wall.

 

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“Before going into high school — it was the summer of 2012 — my mother decided to self-deport to Mexico” with her two youngest children, Maldonado said. Maldonado, who was born and grew up in New Mexico, had a hard time adjusting to life in Nayarit, Mexico, a small state on the Pacific coast north of Puerto Vallarta, especially given that she hadn’t known her family’s status. “I think it was right when we had to move when I actually realized that my mom wasn’t actually legal here in the United States, when I was 14 years old,” she said. Her father, who has a green card, continues to work in New Mexico; Maldonado now is a first-year nursing student and lives with her 23-year-old sister in Arizona. Her mother and brother remain in Mexico.

Mexican-Americans such as Maldonado may help determine the political future of Arizona — and the nation — in a landmark election year. In an August survey, respondents were asked if Trump and Clinton made their respective parties more welcoming or more hostile to Latinos. Nine percent of Mexican-Americans said Trump made the GOP more welcoming; 74 percent said he made it more hostile. By contrast, 59 percent said Clinton made the Democratic party more welcoming; 9 percent said more hostile. An October poll by Latino Decisions found that 17 percent of Latino voters nationwide said they support Trump or are leaning toward him; 70 percent supported Clinton.

 

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In Arizona, a state long dominated by Republicans, Clinton and Trump are in a virtual tie, according to a Monmouth University Poll released last week. Latino voters, who make up a fifth of the state’s electorate, are supporting Clinton over Trump by 35 percentage points. And critical to the electoral vote, only 9 percent of Latino voters who support Trump are in battleground states. Overall, 13 percent of the eligible voters in battleground states are Latino.

Arizona “was this strong, powerful red,” said Pita Juarez, 29, the communications director for the One Arizona coalition, an umbrella group of 14 advocacy groups, including LUCHA, that is working to boost Latino voter turnout. “Just today, we saw on FiveThirtyEight … it’s a light blue. And that’s something that I thought, really, I would never see.” (Arizona has gone back and forth between light blue and light red in FiveThirtyEight’s forecast over the last few weeks. Currently, Trump has a slight edge in the state’s forecast.)

Gabriel Sanchez, a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico and a principal at the opinion research firm Latino Decisions, said Latinos are more enthusiastic about voting this year than in 2012, having been mobilized by Trump’s comments targeting Mexicans. He added that the Republican Party will have a hard time winning over Mexican-Americans in subsequent elections unless it supports comprehensive immigration reform.

Like black millennials, younger Latinos show much weaker enthusiasm for Clinton than their elders. According to the October GenForward survey, conducted over the first half of the month, 44 percent of Latinos ages 18-30 plan to vote for Clinton and 8 percent will vote for Trump, with 10 percent going to third-party candidates. Nineteen percent said they didn’t plan to vote, and 12 percent were undecided.1GenForward, a survey by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, queries 18- to 30-year-olds and oversamples for Latino and nonwhite respondents, in this case with a total cohort of 1,832 respondents.

 

Irma Maldonado in math class and walking to her dorm room at Grand Canyon University.
Irma Maldonado in math class and walking to her dorm room at Grand Canyon University.

 

Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center, said that much of the growth in the Latino electorate in coming years will be from U.S.-born Latinos entering adulthood. Like other cohorts of younger voters they tend to be more supportive of bigger government, in contrast to older Mexican-Americans, who are more likely to hold conservative views. “Mexican-Americans are more likely to be Catholic than other groups of Latinos,” he said. “They are also more likely to be third or higher generation than other U.S. Latino groups and as a result to have served in the military. Both of these characteristics correlate with conservative views on many issues.” He noted that George W. Bush won at least 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004.

 Mexican-Americans constitute 63 percent of the 57 million U.S. Latinos. Some Mexican-Americans can trace their heritage in New Mexico and other regions later acquired as U.S. territory back to the 1600s and earlier, while others are recent immigrants. Of the 35.8 million people of Mexican descent in the U.S., 68 percent are native born, and more than a quarter of those born in Mexico have become U.S. citizens. Separate estimates from the Pew Research Center indicate there were 5.8 million unauthorized Mexican citizens in America in 2014, 52 percent of the total unauthorized immigrant population. The Census Bureau considers Latinos in the U.S. to be an ethnicity, not a race, and thus Latino respondents can also mark any or multiple races; about a quarter identify as Afro-Latino. But only 1 percent of the population of Mexico is Afro-Latino, according to a recent census in that nation, the first to count the category.2The Census surveys of the diverse Latino population continue to evolve. One experimental survey design for the 2020 Census avoids using the terms race and ethnicity in the phrasing of the question entirely.

Nationwide, 11 percent of eligible voters are Latino, but in Arizona, 22 percent of eligible voters are. The state is currently going through a fierce local battle involving Sheriff Joe Arpaio that is arguably fanning the fires of Latino voter turnout as much as the national election.

Arpaio is an outsize figure who has served as Maricopa County sheriff for 23 years; run jails where the men must wear pink underwear and striped uniforms; and organized citizen border patrols with actor Steven Seagal. Arpaio also has a December court date on a contempt charge for violating a 2011 injunction against stopping people on the suspicion that they were not in the country legally. (He alleges the prosecution is politically motivated because of his support for Trump.) And just one week from now, Arpaio faces perhaps an even bigger challenge: a re-election bid with polls showing him trailing his challenger by 15 points.

LUCHA’s canvassers are campaigning against Arpaio, and there are indications that his presence on the ballot is motivating new voters. In Maricopa County, Democratic voter rolls rose by 13 percent since 2012, according to figures released in August, compared to a 7.6 percent increase for Republicans. And many Latinos register as independents but lean Democratic.

Some of the young activists who are canvassing for LUCHA are undocumented, according to One Arizona’s Juarez, and in other areas around the country with significant Latino populations, immigrants who are not yet on a path to citizenship are playing a role in the political process. One of them is Yessica Vasquez Moctezuma, 25, a bank teller, who will graduate this fall with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has been in the United States for 19 years, which means she was undocumented until 2012, at which point an executive order qualified her for temporary but renewable DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status.

Vasquez Moctezuma is frank in her assessment of her family’s legal status, since her parents are not eligible for DACA and continue to work without documentation.

“We are breaking some laws just by being here illegally, but we bind to the laws here,” she said. “We pay our taxes every year, like any other citizen would.” She worries that her parents, who have paid into the Social Security system — which receives an estimated $12 billion a year from undocumented immigrants and their employers — will never receive benefits and will never be able to truly retire. Still, she said, “This is why I studied political science, because I love the government here. I feel like in so many ways it’s so great.”

For her part, Irma Maldonado said she is excited about voting in her first presidential election. After remaining undecided until early October, she decided to vote for Clinton. But she added, “Honestly, this election, a lot of people are not that pumped to vote. It’s really kind of sad.” The number of Mexican-American and Latino voters who show up on Nov. 8 could determine the outcome in her state, and possibly in the nation.

‘Zap Lanny out of our Universe’: Demonstrates ‘intent’

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DoJ Just Entered the Huma Email Case and the Next Scandal

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John Podesta’s Best Friend At The DOJ Will Be In Charge Of The DOJ’s Probe Into Huma Abedin Emails

Zerohedge: Now that the FBI has obtained the needed warrant to start poring over the 650,000 or so emails uncovered in Anthony Weiner’s notebook, among which thousands of emails sent from Huma Abedin using Hillary Clinton’s personal server, moments ago the US Justice Department announced it is also joining the probe, and as AP reported moments ago, vowed to dedicate all needed resources to quickly review the over half a million emails in the Clinton case.

The Associated Press  

✔ @AP

BREAKING: Justice Dept. says it’ll dedicate all needed resources to quickly review emails in Clinton case.

In the letter to Congress, the DOJ writes that it “will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” assistant attorney General Peter J. Kadzik writes in letters to House and Senate lawmakers.

Just the Facts‏@JTF_News 3h3 hours ago

Senior DOJ official sends letter to lawmakers responding to request for more information about email review.

So far so good, even if one wonders just how active the DOJ will be in a case that has shown an unprecedented schism between the politically influenced Department of Justice and the FBI.

And yet, something felt odd about this.

Kadzik… Kadzik… where have we heard that name

Oh yes. Recall our post from last week, “Clinton Campaign Chair Had Dinner With Top DOJ Official One Day After Hillary’s Benghazi Hearing” in which we reported that John Podesta had dinner with one of the highest ranked DOJ officials the very day after Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony?

It was Peter Kadzik.

In other words, the best friend of John Podesta, Clinton’s Campaign char, at the DOJ will be in charge of a probe that could potentially sink Hillary Clinton.

For those who missed it, this is what we reported previously:

The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign chairman met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, who is currently a top official at the US Justice Department serving as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs.

 

The post-Benghazi dinner was attended by Podesta, Kadzik, superlobbyist Vincent Roberti and other well-placed Beltway fixtures. The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the Wikileaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant.  The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just one day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.

 

Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows. Another email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.

As the Daily Caller noted, the dinner arrangement “is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices.” As one former U.S. Attorney tells told the DC, the exchanges are another example of the Clinton campaign’s “cozy relationship” with the Obama Justice Department.

The hacked emails confirm that Podesta and Kadzik were in frequent contact. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.

“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.

“It’s the kind of thing the American people are frustrated about is that the politically powerful have insider access and have these kind of relationships that ultimately appear to always break to the benefit of Hillary Clinton,” he added, comparing the Podesta-Kadzik meetings to the revelation that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met in private with Bill Clinton at the airport in Phoenix days before the FBI and DOJ investigating Hillary Clinton.

Kadzik’s role at the DOJ, where he started in 2013, is particularly notable Kadzik, as helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.

It gets better because, as we further revealed, if there is one person in the DOJ who is John Podesta’s, and thus the Clinton Foundation’s inside man, it is Peter Kadjik.

Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office. That history is cited by Podesta in another email hacked from his Gmail account. In a Sept. 2008 email, which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign. Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”

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Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal. As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky. In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.

Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.

Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time. “He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe. Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.

Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.

Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon. To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001. A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”

The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon. On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon. She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.

Kadzik’s current role

In his current role as head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation. The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.

But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress. Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.

In a Feb. 1, 2016 letter in response to Kadzik, Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis noted that Kadzik had explained “that special counsel may be appointed at the discretion of the Attorney General when an investigation or prosecution by the Department of Justice would create a potential conflict of interest.”

DeSantis, a Republican, suggested that Lynch’s appointment by Bill Clinton in 1999 as U.S. Attorney in New York may be considered a conflict of interest. He also asserted that Obama’s political appointees — a list which includes Kadzik — “are being asked to impartially execute their respective duties as Department of Justice officials that may involve an investigation into the activities of the forerunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.”

It is unknown if Kadzik responded to DeSantis’ questions.

Kadzik’s first involvement in the Clinton email brouhaha came in a Sept. 24, 2015 response letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley in which he declined to confirm or deny whether the DOJ was investigating Clinton. Last month, Politico reported that Kadzik angered Republican lawmakers when, in a classified briefing, he declined to say whether Clinton aides who received DOJ immunity were required to cooperate with congressional probes.

Kadzik also testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the issue of classifications and redactions in the FBI’s files of the Clinton email investigation.

* * *

And now it seems that Kadjik will be in charge of the DOJ’s “probe” into Huma Abedin’s emails. Which is why we are a little skeptical the DOJ will find “anything” of note.

Peter Kadzik, with lobbyist Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta.

WikiLeaks: Hillary/Podesta and Army Discussions Include Destroy GOP

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*****

Working document:

To: Interested parties

RE: DNC Structure

 

 

STRUCTURE

I would suggest you consider two staffing structures for the DNC:

  1. CEO onlyIf this is the chosen structure, I would recommend finding a new CEO.
  3. Under this scenario, the CEO would be accountable for all functions of the DNC—money, general election, and party/convention affairs. She or he would need to hire a General Election Director to help with general election planning and programs, but would remain ultimately accountable to the Chair for everything in the building.
  4. CEO and General Election DirectorI would then suggest hiring a General Election Director, who would report directly to the Chair on all general election matters (a job scope is attached), including all budgeting, spending, and cash flow for the joint fundraising committee with the campaign. This would be “your person” at the DNC and she or he would work directly with your campaign manager on organizing a general election strategy and getting battleground state parties and the DNC up to snuff. This person would be the final decision maker at the DNC on how the joint committee money is spent and would do so in coordination with your campaign.
  5. In this scenario, I would suggest keeping Amy Dacey as CEO and make her responsible for all party affairs and meetings, the convention, and basic DNC operations (compliance, the building, etc). I suggest keeping Amy because she is already familiar with the rhythm and functions of the DNC, such as the Rules and Bylaws process, the quarterly party meetings, and the convention. These functions are important to the DNC as an institution, especially to the DNC members, but they aren’t particularly important to you if you decide to run. Keeping Amy at the DNC would also allow White House to have someone in the building to look after their needs, such as polling.

Recommendation: I would recommend the second option, since party affairs and the convention are incredibly time consuming and would probably distract from general election planning (i.e. you don’t want the person in charge of figuring out how to win Florida and Ohio taking a week to look at convention sites). You also don’t want the politics of the DNC itself to disrupt or derail your general election effort.

 

STAFFING OPTIONS

Options for Chair

  • Stephanie Shriock, President of EMILY’s List
  • Jennifer Granholm, former Governor of Michigan
  • Ted Strickland, former Governor of Ohio
  • NEED OTHER OPTIONS

CEO or General Election Director

  • Kelly Ward, current Executive Director of DCCC
  • Mitch Stewart, 270 Strategies, former Battleground States Director for OFA 12
  • Jeremy Bird, 270 Strategies, former Field Director for OFA 12
  • Marlon Marshall, former Dep. Field Director for OFA 2012
  • Buffy Wicks, current ED of Priorities, USA

Other key staff:

  • Finance Director: recommend keeping Jordan Kaplan
  • Data and Technology Director: recommend keeping Andrew Brown
  • Communications and Research: recommend assessment; potentially bring in some enhanced research capacity
  • Voter protection director: recommend a new Voter Protection Director
  • Political Director: recommend a new Political Director

TIMING

I would suggest aiming to have a General Election Director in place by the beginning of December, so he or she can attend immediately to some urgent voter protection and research matters. The role could be announced at the December Executive Committee meeting.

A new Chair is slightly less urgent in my opinion. I would certainly make the change by the February DNC meeting, but would probably defer to the White House on what timing they prefer.

  • Executive Committee    December 5-6, Hollywood, FL

 

  • Full Meeting                      Week of Feb 18 (tent), Washington, DC

General Election Director

Job Scope

  • General election analytics and planning
    1. Analytics and polling in each battleground state to identify the actual battleground map
    2. Identify off year-work (probably voter registration) that should be done to support the 2016 strategy
    3. Start creating turnout and support models for the general election
  • General election data hygiene and systems
    1. Analytics capability for matched data (user capacity, candidate confidentiality)
    2. VAN/NGP technical updates
    3. Update key tools: make a plan, commit to vote, voter registration, polling place look up, etc.
    4. Coordination with campaigns on who is completing what engineering projects; ensuring that all systems will be compatible in the general election
  • Opposition research
    1. Identify next steps on opposition research
    2. Ensure all collection and record request work has been completed
    3. Setting up a permanent tracking structure (whether that involves purchasing tracking or doing it in house)
  • Technology and digital
      1. Update key online GOTV tools
      2. Ensure updates to the voter file are completed on time
      3. Ensure all DNC data systems can synch perfectly with the campaign
  • Complete all necessary updates to internal database tools like voter protection incident tracking
    1.  
  • Coordination with allies
    1. Coordination on state ballot referenda
    2. Aligning around general election goals/plan/targeting/best practices
    3. Ensuring data systems will be compatible, where possible
  • Identifying staff for general election field and state organizations

 

    1.  
  • Ironing out state party operational issues
    1. Helping
    2. Transfer down MOUs for battleground states completed in the off year
      1. Indemnification
      2. Approval of direct mail
      3. Administrative overhead
      4. Using SPP for accountability re: the items above?
    3. Aligning state party staff with critical projects (voter protection, registration, etc)
  • Joint fundraising account money management and supervision

 

  • Voter registration projects in battleground states (where needed)
      1. Directly oversee development of any state strategy
      2. Hire project leader
      3. Oversee progress to goals
  • Oversee budget for the program
    1.  
  • Coordination with Voting Rights Trust on litigation
  • Florida
  • North Carolina
  • Wisconsin
  • Ohio
  • Nevada (Reid coordination)
  • Michigan?
    1.  
  • Coordination with voter protection ballot referenda program
    1. Ohio (State Director and team)
    2. Florida (State Director and team)
    3. Michigan?
    4. Colorado?
    5. Missouri?
    6. Arizona?
  • Political and research work for voter protection
    1. State FOIA project
    2. Plaintiff recruitment
    3. Earned media and political advocacy management (esp. Florida)
    4. Coordinating with Perkins Coie staff on state legislative threat monitoring
      1. Voting law changes
      2. Electoral vote allocations (esp PA and WI)

 

*****

To: Interested parties

Re: Threat assessment

 

PRIMARY ELECTION

  • Message
    1. Higher concerns
      1. Authenticity
        1. Emily’s List: “Panelists have about whether HRC is personally trustworthy: tells the truth, levels with people, is sincere in her motivations”.
      2. “Relatability”
        1. Emily’s List: “When voters think about HRC’s positives, they do not instinctively think about what she cares about…when pressed panelists say they do not necessarily think of HRC as “relatable” and tend to describe her personally as more ‘cold’ than ‘warm’”. But respondents are quick to say they do not have a feel HRC as a person. They are intrigued by details like ‘she shops at Target’”.
        2. Emily’s List: “The focus groups make clear, however, that winning the voters’ trust on the economy is not only a matter of having a plan. A successful candidate must also show that s/he personally understands the struggles and concerns voters experience in today’s economy and that s/he is on their side”
      3. Not a clear/credible vision, including clarity on Obama
        1. Emily’s List: “It will be essential for her to articulate a more specific economic agenda that translates these normative values and broad policy directions into a credible plan of action.
      4. Wall Street/elitism
        1. Policy and rhetoric on Wall Street (Emily’s List: 22% “Hillary Clinton won’t stand up to the big banks”)
        2. Personal income and finances
        3. Foundation fundraising and business connections
        4. Campaign finance; superpac affiliation
      5. How to respond to superpac attacks
        1. Do you need to respond?
        2. How do you respond when there is no opponent?
        3. Role of outside groups vs. campaign
    2. Lower concerns
      1. Benghazi (only because of upcoming hearings)
        1. Emily’s List: “Benhgazi raises questions about HRC that relate more to lingering questions about her candor than about the event itself. Voters do not know the details of the incident (other than the fatal outcome) and are not especially eager to learn all the complicated facts…Benghazi can serve as a proxy character issue”.
      2. Immigration
        1. Need to be firm and unequivocal
        2. Will there be a compromise that is unpopular with Hispanics?
      3. Use of military force: remains very unpopular with Democrats
        1. Need Simas numbers
      4. Grand bargain: what if Obama cuts a budget deal that’s unpopular with Democrats?

 

  • Timing
    1. Oxygen for competitors
      1. Waiting too long gives competitors time to get the media spotlight and build credibility
      2. Risk of a reactionary launch
    2. Lack of infrastructure to manage GOP attacks in Q1 and Q2
    3. Losing talent to other campaigns/jobs
      1. People will start to accept other jobs after Thanksgiving
      2. New DCCC and DSCC leadership and senior staffs; many attractive Senate and House races
    4. Losing time on technology
      1. Long term projects like mobile canvassing tools, volunteer engagement ap, etc.
    5. Fundraising opportunity cost: losing time in Q2
  • Geography
    1. Iowa
      1. Starting out on the right foot will be key to ice out the competition. This could be challenging if opponents get in early and pick up any steam.
      2. Potential for caucus goes to want to “make it a race” if there’s a perception that the campaign is not fully invested. Primary opponents will always be more accessible and exciting to the left no matter what.
    2. South Carolina and early southern primary states: if there’s an African American primary opponent
  • Demography
    1. African Americas (if there’s an African American primary opponent)
    2. The 2008 Obama primary coalition: younger, better educated, less partisan primary, male voters are less supportive, but still very winnable

 

Source:

Emily’s List Dec 2013

 Support HRC Regardless Consider others, but prefer HRC Consider HRC, but prefer others Likely to support others
Men 29% 39% 15% 6%
Women 40% 46% 6% 5%
18-34 23% 45% 19% 5%
35-49 37% 45% 11% 3%
50-64 36% 44% 6% 7%
65+ 43% 39% 6% 5%
Whites 33% 46% 9% 5%
AA 42% 41% 10% 3%
Hisp 40% 36% 10% 6%
Strong D 42% 43% 8% 3%
Weaker D 22% 42% 14% 9%

 

  • Political
    1. Potential opponents: Biden, Warren, Patrick, O’Malley, Sanders
    2. Clumsy launch politics
    3. Messy labor endorsement process
  • Operational
    1. Clear leadership and decision making; clarity on who speaks for the campaign
    2. Unhelpful chatter and leaks

 

 

GENERAL ELECTION

  • Message
    1. Same issues as the primary, as well as…
    2. A better GOP candidate than Romney (better profile, more credibly moderate)
      1. Risk of losing more downscale whites in places like PA and OH
    3. National environment (largely not controllable)
      1. President Obama’s approval rating/direction of the country
      2. Perceived success/failure of foreign policy at the time
  • DemographySince we don’t have a lot of polling, it’s most helpful to look at the breakdown of Obama’s vote and figure out how to offset likely changes. Big picture, we have to assume slightly lower performance and turnout among the key “Obama coalition” groups (young people and minorities), which will need to be made up with stronger performance among whites.

 

  2. Obama won by driving up turnout and support among key minority groups and getting enough whites to break 50%. Your math to 50% could look similar, but one potential “threat” is that you match Obama’s performance with white voters but don’t achieve his level of turnout or support with other groups.
  1. White voters: Obama was the first president to win the presidency with less than 40% of the white vote (39%). This was possible because whites are shrinking as a proportion of the electorate, but also because he organized very strong African American turnout and boosted traditionally high levels of support even higher. These proportions with African Americans will likely dip for you, meaning that you will need over 40% of the white vote nationally.
  2. The GOP candidate will also be a key factor in this equation: Romeny’s profile as a defender of Wall Street and outsourcer helped to suppress support among downscale whites in Pennsylvania, for example. His positions on abortion helped to move persuadable white women to Obama. All these variables will need to be accounted for in determining the win number in each state.
  3. African Americans: African American performance is a key factor in states like Ohio and Florida , where Obama pushed turnout disproportionately high. We have to anticipate 89% African American support, whereas Obama was in the mid 90s. We also have to anticipate a drop in African American turnout. Romney would have won Ohio, for example, if African American turnout had been at “normal” levels.
  5. Hispanics: Hispanics are equally key in some states for determining the win number. They performed at or above 70% for Obama nationally. We have to anticipate closer to 65%, although the rhetoric and immigration stance of the GOP candidate will be a major factor.   Correctly predicting Hispanic turnout in Colorado, for example, will determine how much we need to worry about a potential rightward swing in the Denver suburbs.
  7. Young people: level of support and turnout are both major unknowns and need to be examined early. Your level of support is softest with young people, but that could just be because they know the least about you. Extreme GOP views on gay marriage, global warming, and/or birth control could swing and motivate young voters.
  8. That said, we have to assume a drop in performance and turnout among young voters. The Emily’s List general election poll from last year predicts that you can get 50% or more of voters 65 and older, while Obama only got 44%, which could make up the difference.
  9. Asians: exit polls showed that Asians performed 70/30 for Obama, but this could move closer to 60% next year since their level of support for Democrats appears to have dipped in 2014. This needs to be researched further.
  • Geography
    1. Lean Democratic states to watch
      1. Wisconsin: was harder for Obama in 2012 due to Paul Ryan, but Walker’s performance was higher than expected last week. This requires further research.
      2. Pennsylvania: probably stable, but should be monitored, since downscale whites could sour even more depending on the national mood.
    2. Battlegrounds to watch
      1. Colorado: Denver suburbs troubling, GOP carried Jefferson Co. this year.
      2. Virginia: African American turnout appeared to be disproportionately high last week, but Warner still performed poorly in suburban counties like Loudon, Prince William, Chesterfield.
      3. Iowa: rural and white, could get worse depending on performance with whites overall and national mood.
      4. Ohio: Obama won with black turnout in 2012; need to identify a path to winning more whites.

 

    1. The 2016 electorate will look completely different than 2014, which was even lower than 2010. That’s why states like Nevada, where Democrats were beaten badly this year, remain favorable for 2016. The breakdown of the battleground has been covered in other documents, but I’ve noted a few states below that could become harder next year based on what we saw in last week’s election returns.
  • Changing rules
    1. Harsher voting restrictions in GOP controlled battleground states
      1. Florida (Gov has announced a bill already), Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan
    2. Changes in electoral vote allocations (there are only rumors now)
      1. Ohio, Michigan, Florida
  • Financial
    1. Full concentration of GOP resources from Day One
    2. GOP general election spending begins earlier than

 

****

To: Cheryl Mills

Re: Legal Options for launching a potential campaign

 

 

SUMMARY

If you decide to run, a number of core functions need to be in place for a successful campaign launch, which have been outlined in previous materials.  Ideally, every aspect of the campaign will ramp up as quickly as possible, but three tasks will take a particularly long time and will drive the overall timeline:

  1. Researching and testing your message
  2. Developing a brand and logo
  3. Designing and testing your website and mobile ap

All three tasks are highly intertwined and contain a series of constituent steps, which should be carefully sequenced.   As demonstrated by the attached timeline, they will collectively take approximately 19 weeks to complete. The first five weeks can take place do not require any funding or structure, but the last 14 will require some sort of funding mechanism. I would recommend that a CTO, Digital Director, and Media Director are hired within the first four weeks to help shepherd the process.

The launch will require a full leadership team, as well as staff in the early 4 primary states and support staff at headquarters. The attached timeline has them starting a month before the launch and I suggest a formal exploratory be set up a month out to pay for them (and the equipment and overhead that will come with them!).

 

WHAT NEEDS TO BE ACCOMPLISHED

Message

As we have discussed before, a campaign is fundamentally an organization built to do one thing—communicate a message. The proposed message development process is a series of focus groups, polls, and web tests to develop a narrative, messages, responses to attacks, and even a tagline for the campaign. This process will allow you to hear directly from voters about their mood and what they want from a president. It will also allow you to explore how you can articulate your vision and policy proposals. Lastly, it will help us to put together a path to victory in the primary and general, including key target groups.

Branding and Logo

Based on how you decide to present your candidacy based on the research process, we will engage design firms to develop a logo and branding scheme for all campaign materials that reflect the kind of candidate you are and the audiences we are trying to reach. The brand will dictate what colors, fonts, and moods should be used to design the site and mobile ap.

Website and Mobile Ap Design

Four separate firms will each create three designs for your site using the branding and logo concepts. We will choose one design (or an amalgamation of many) and go through a cycle of edits and feedback to get it exactly right. We will probably want to do some sort of photo shoot and record a video for the site as well.

 

WHEN TO START

Attached are three alternative timelines. The first begins in December, the second in January and the third in February. All three have the same 19-week timeline and sequence.

I would suggest establishing a date you want to launch and then work back from there. For example, if you want to launch your campaign at the beginning of the second quarter, you should start the ramp up process in December.

Keep in mind that this process will take over four months, which is a long time to keep potential opponents iced out. For example, the winter DNC meeting (which will take place in mid February) traditionally includes a beauty pageant for declared or prospective candidates. You will undoubtedly be asked to speak and we have to assume for planning purposes that Sanders and/or O’Malley will be declared and actively running by that time. Once a launch date is set, it will be worth thinking of what can be done from a communications standpoint to keep the opposition frozen out, even if you won’t declare for a few months.

 

BUDGET AND SPENDING

As described above, candidate-specific design work will begin in the fifth week of the ramp up process, at which point you will need either personal resources, or an exploratory committee to fund work.

If personal funds are used, spending can be limited to polling, focus groups, web tests, design firms, and some modest staff overhead.   The budget below is approximately $1.3 million, but I would assume this will cost $2-3 million due to unforeseen expenses.

Polling and Focus Groups:            $800,000

Logo and branding                           $100,000

Digital design:                                    $200,000

Staff Overhead                                 $200,000

 

Even if personal funds are used, there will inevitably need to be an exploratory period of about a month for the sole purpose of hiring staff and getting them ready to execute the launch plan. On the day you declare your candidacy, the campaign will need a fully functioning finance, communications, political, and operations/compliance staff. There should also be skeletal staff in the four early states. Overhead for the last month will likely be $3-4 million.

****

More here including the timeline.

Another item to destroy the GOP and includes SEIU operatives:

From:[email protected] To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] more [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Date: 2007-12-03 19:20 Subject: Revised PowerPoint