Red Flags Due to Hillary’s Email Team

Posted on June 7, 2016June 7, 2016 by Denise Simon

Has Hillary explained this to Debbie?

EXCLUSIVE: Emails Show State Dept. Officials Were Warned Of Hillary Clinton Email Spin

Ross/DailyCaller: Newly released State Department emails show that in the days after Hillary Clinton’s exclusive personal email use made international news, officials with the agency’s legal department were urged by the former head of that division to make it clear that the bureau did not sign off on the former secretary of state’s arrangement.

But that advice, which came from John Bellinger, the State Department’s Legal Adviser during the George W. Bush administration, appears to have gone unheeded, at least publicly. The State Department never publicly clarified that Clinton self-approved her personal email system.

While the agency’s information technology, diplomatic security and legal adviser divisions were not made aware of the setup, those facts only came to light in an inspector general’s report that was published last month.In delaying saying whether Clinton’s email system was approved by the State Department, the agency created the perception that the Democratic presidential candidate’s email system was allowed. Clinton herself has made the same claim. The IG report thoroughly debunked that notion, however.

On March 3, 2015, Bellinger, now an attorney with Arnold & Porter, emailed principal deputy legal adviser Mary McLeod and deputy legal advisor Richard Visek of the State Department’s office of legal affairs raising several concerns with how spokeswoman Marie Harf was spinning the scandal.

He took issue with Harf’s implication that the office of the legal adviser signed off on Clinton’s email system and that her email practices were similar to past secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

“I’m sorry you guys are getting put through the wringer today,” Bellinger wrote in his first email, which The Daily Caller received as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department.

The watchdog group Cause of Action filed the suit on TheDC’s behalf.

Bellinger offered two suggestions to McLeod and Visek.

“Please make sure that Marcie [sic] Harf doesn’t keep saying that Secretary Rice did the same thing. As you know, that is not correct, and Secretary Rice has corrected the record,” wrote Bellinger, who continues to serve as Rice’s personal counsel.

During her March 3 daily press briefing Harf defended Clinton’s email arrangement saying that she “was following what had been the practice of previous secretaries.”

The implication was that Clinton’s immediate predecessors, Rice and Powell, used email in the same way Clinton did. Harf did clarify later that Rice did not use personal email while Powell sometimes did.

Bellinger also bristled at the implication that the office of the legal adviser had approved of Clinton’s foolhardy setup.

Related reading: State Dept.: 75-year wait for Clinton aide emails

“I’m getting calls from people (press and former USG lawyers) asking whether State lawyers actually approved letting Secretary Clinton use a State [BlackBerry] for official business using a personal email account, and then to keep the emails,” he continued.

“Marcie [sic] Harf is implying that State approved this practice (and this suggests that L approved it, though she didn’t say so specifically). As someone who wants to defend L’s reputation, I would urge you to defend the credibility of L as good and careful administrative lawyers, and don’t let the spokesman give L a bad name. I can’t believe that L would have approved this, and you shouldn’t let Marcie Harf imply that you did.”

“L” refers to the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser which, according to its website, “furnishes advice on all legal issues, domestic and international, arising in the course of the Department’s work.”

The emails were released to TheDC just as the State Department’s press shop is facing intense scrutiny after spokesman John Kirby admitted that an agency official ordered the excision of eight minutes of video from a Dec. 2, 2013 press briefing discussing nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

The State Department has refused to conduct a detailed investigation of the matter, leaving the identity of the official who ordered the deletion to remain a mystery.

As the two top agency spokeswomen at the time, Harf and her colleague Jen Psaki have been suggested as being behind the order. Both have denied any involvement in the deletion.

Visek responded to Bellinger’s advice, writing: “Thanks for the heads up. I’ll reach out to PA and try to make sure they understand.”

“PA” is a reference to the bureau of public affairs.

“Marcie [sic] hasn’t specifically said that L approved the practice, but she’s strongly suggested that it’s all fine which is why people are calling me to ask ‘Did L really approve this’? And I have responded, I can’t believe they did — they are careful lawyers,” Bellinger wrote back.

In those initial days after Clinton’s email practices were revealed, Harf and her fellow spokeswoman Jen Psaki led a clear-cut effort to downplay the burgeoning scandal.

At one point during the March 3, 2015 daily press briefing, Harf, who now serves as senior advisor for communications for Sec. of State John Kerry, exclaimed that “I was a little surprised — although maybe I shouldn’t have been — by some of the breathless reporting coming out last night.”

She came under criticism from many in the press for her dismissive responses to questions about the email setup.

State Department officials declined for months to answer questions about who may have approved Clinton’s email setup.

The arrangement was managed by Bryan Pagliano, who was hired by the State Department as an information technology specialist in May 2009.

The questions of whether any State Department sub-agencies signed off on the Clinton email setup was finally answered last month in a State Department inspector general’s report.

The watchdog found that Clinton did not seek approval for the system from anyone at the department. The report also noted that officials with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security would not have okayed the system even if Clinton had asked for permission to use it.

The office of the legal adviser also had no input on the system. The report did note, however, that a State Department official named John Bentel told two information technology staffers not to ask questions about Clinton’s server. He allegedly told the staffers that the legal adviser had approved the system. Reached by email for comment, Bellinger said he would let his emails speak for themselves.

State Department Office of Legal Adviser emails by Chuck Ross

Former US attorney: Clinton aides’ legal strategy is ‘red flag’

FNC: Four central figures in the FBI’s criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices are all using the same lawyer, a move described as a “red flag” by a former U.S. attorney who now runs a government watchdog group.

Lawyer Beth Wilkinson is representing: Clinton former chief of staff Cheryl Mills; policy adviser Jake Sullivan; media gatekeeper Philippe Reines; and former aide Heather Samuelson, who helped decide which Clinton emails were destroyed before turning over the remaining 30,000 records to the State Department.

“I think it would be a real red flag,” Matthew Whitaker, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, or FACT, told Fox News, in reference to the legal defense. He suggested having a single lawyer would help the four Clinton aides align their stories for FBI interviews.

“The benefit is to have one lawyer’s brain have all the knowledge of the various pieces and parts, and so each of those potential targets or subjects of the investigation get to share information across that same attorney — and quite frankly get their story to sync up and understand what other people know of the situation,” he said.

Wilkinson is a well-respected Washington, D.C., attorney who successfully argued in favor of the death penalty for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing case. Wilkinson has deep ties in Washington and is married to former NBC “Meet the Press” host David Gregory, who is now a regular political commentator on CNN.

Asked for comment, there was no immediate response from Wilkinson’s office. It has been their practice not to respond to press inquiries on this case.

Whitaker was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa by President George W. Bush in June 2004 and held the position until November 2009, when President Obama’s appointed replacement was confirmed. He said the legal set-up presents challenges for FBI investigators in the Clinton probe.

“All you’re trying to do is seek the truth, and when someone is sharing a lawyer, you worry that the interview that you just did an hour ago with that attorney has been shared with the next witness and they can fix or reconcile their story to be the same,” Whitaker explained.

While apparently unusual, the legal representation has not been openly challenged by Justice Department officials.

A different perspective, presented by a leading defense attorney who asked not to speak on the record, is that the four Clinton aides plan to present a united front and do not fear criminal liability.

Politico first reported in April on the legal representation; since then, Mills and Wilkinson blocked questions about Clinton IT specialist Bryan Pagliano – another key figure in the probe – during a civil suit deposition in Washington. Pagliano, who struck an immunity deal with the Justice Department last year, is now seeking to assert his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions in the same Judicial Watch proceedings.

Clinton told ABC News on Sunday that her email practices were in line with those of her predecessors. In a Friday radio interview with KNX 1070, Clinton said there is “absolutely no possibility” she’d be indicted.

Whitaker’s group FACT also is seeking the emails of Dennis Cheng, Clinton’s former deputy chief of protocol at the State Department, whose records may reveal a great deal about the possible intersection between Clinton Foundation work and Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Cheng was the point person for senior foreign government officials. Only a handful of Cheng emails were among the more than 30,000 pages made public by the State Department.

According to his State Department biography, Cheng also served as Clinton’s national finance director when she was a senator, her New York finance director for her 2008 presidential campaign, and as a consultant to the William J. Clinton Foundation.

The FBI probe into Clinton’s email use is not the first time her record-keeping has faced federal scrutiny. Long before she became a secretary of state, Clinton’s billing records and documents tied to her work as a partner in the Rose Law Firm on behalf of the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and Capital Management Services came under question. Those missing records from her work as a lawyer were at the crux of investigations by three separate federal agencies which cost taxpayers $65 million. A special committee’s report on the matter (page 155) said it received computer printouts of the billings in January 1996, “discovered under mysterious circumstances in the Book Room of the White House Residence.”

Clinton is still represented by the same lawyer who defended her throughout the in the 1980’s and 1990’s, David Kendall.

Does the Kremlin Really Have Hillary’s Emails?

Posted on June 6, 2016June 6, 2016 by Denise Simon

Wouldn’t you love to read the most recent and current emails between Sidney and Hillary right now?

Putin’s Army Of Internet Trolls Is Influencing The Hillary Clinton Email Scandal

Paul Roderick Gregory/Forbes

The Hillary Clinton email scandal broke more than three years ago—on March 19, 2013—with the Russian news service RT’s publication of Sidney Blumenthal’s emails to the then-Secretary of State. What most American journalists don’t realize is that Putin’s internet army continues to influence the evolution of the story.

My article on the Blumenthal emails, published on the same day, attracted 361,000 viewers, meaning the story was not a secret. The mainstream press ignored the story, only to see it burst upon the 2016 election scene where it occupies daily headlines. As I pointed out in my more recent piece entitled “What if Vladimir Putin Has Hillary’s Emails,” the Clinton campaign and the country could be sorely damaged if Hillary’s emails (including those she deemed “personal”) are in Kremlin hands. Even if they are not, Putin can gain leverage simply from the suspicion that he has them.

Despite the New York Times’ weak assurances that there is “no evidence of hacking,” experts agree, including a former defense secretary and head of the CIA, that Kremlin cyber forces most likely hacked Hillary’s emails, which we now know include a number of top secret documents.

I have been following the Russian and English language blogosphere using Google searches like “Does Putin/the Kremlin have Hillary’s emails?” Included are rumor-mills such as Sovershenno sekretno.ru (“Completely secret”) and kompromat.ru (“Compromising material”). In a country that thrives on gossip and rumors, even on delicate matters such as the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the Russian search yields absolute silence. The Kremlin is holding information about any possession of Hillary’s emails as close to the vest as possible.

Not that the Kremlin is not enjoying Hillary’s discomfort. The FBI investigation, the testimony of the hacker Guccifer, and the release of the state-department Inspector General report are covered daily and with glee. My own Forbes articles are prominently featured. Russia’s information technologists have elevated me from a moronic paid Forbes hack to a distinguished scholar writing for a respected publication. My words seem to count when I suggest that Putin has outsmarted Hillary Clinton.

Contrary to the Russian media silence, the U.S. media began buzzing with the May 6 publication on an obscure conspiracy-oriented website (whatdoesitmean.com) entitled “Kremlin War Erupts over Release of Top Secret Hillary Clinton Emails.” The article, written under the exotic pseudonym of Sorcha Faal, claims that a faction within the Kremlin wants Hillary’s email cache released. Fox News pundits (Sean Hannity and Judge Anthony Napolitano) cited the article as evidence that Putin has the Clinton emails. Their comments were triumphantly and derisively panned by Media Matters, who pointed out that the same website published articles on British jets fighting UFOs and a new planet threatening existence on earth.

Both Fox News and Media Matters, in my view, are both unwitting victims of a classic Putin troll attack. Whereas Washington works on the basis of leaks, Kremlin information technologists first plant their narrative in an obscure blog (like whatdoesitmean.com) and then use its blogosphere network to cascade the story until it reaches more mainstream outlets. In this case, they struck gold with references by major figures on Fox News. With the Kremlin’s psychological operations, no one knows fact from fiction (Is this just some crackpot or the Kremlin?) and first impressions tend to stick, even if the story is proven false.

There are good reasons to believe that a Putin troll attack is at work here.

First, it spins an alternate-world narrative that serves Kremlin interests in a number of ways. The Sorcha Faal article explains to the world that, yes, the Kremlin does have Hillary’s emails, thanks to Russia’s vigilant cyber forces, who obtained them in a perfectly legitimate way. After they detected hacker Guccifer’s attempted hacking of their own RT, they claim to have followed him as he attacked Hillary’s server and ended up coincidently with the cache of Hillary’s emails. The lesson: Russia has good cyber security; the incompetent U.S. does not.

The even more important message is that the CIA, knowing that the Kremlin has damaging secrets (such as the truth of Benghazi), launched a false Panama Papers operation to discredit Putin’s inner circle. The Panama Papers gambit was fabricated as a threat to prevent Russia from revealing the contents of Hillary’s emails. Thus, revelations about financial misdeeds of Putin’s inner circle can be written off as a CIA disinformation counter attack.

The story’s lightning-fast spread through the blogosphere is a second reason for believing in an organized troll attack. Faal’s crazy headline stories that Media Matters derides do not spread through the blogosphere. Granted that the Clinton email story is hot, its cascading through the internet smells of a planned operation by Putin’s troll army.

In the case of the Clinton emails, the Kremlin appears to be using its classic “Madeline Albright declaration” approach. In the Albright case, an obscure and unidentified blogger, “Natalia 1001,” made the unsubstantiated claim that then Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, had declared that Siberia, with its rich resources, should belong to the United States, not to Russia. This false claim was repeated by multiple sources (including an FSB mind reader) until it has become an integral part of the Putin doctrine that the U.S. is an aggressive power intent on Russia’s demise.

We are no closer to proof of whether Putin has Hillary’s emails or not. What we have is a troll attack that lays out a Kremlin narrative linking the Clinton emails to the Panama Papers. We expect the Kremlin to build on this narrative as time passes. In either case, Putin is sitting in the catbird seat. The mere suspicion that he has the email cache gives him leverage over the U.S. election. Those who argue that Clinton’s use of an insecure private server is a minor dereliction do not understand the consequences of having the Secretary of State’s correspondence in the hands of a hostile nation.

We can expect the Kremlin to use Hillary’s email scandal to its advantage. It is up to Putin to determine the timing, which will be most likely related to the U.S. election cycle. Let’s hope that Donald Trump uses this lesson to retract his favorable comments about Vladimir Putin.

State Dept Blocking Hillary’s Emails on TPP

Posted on June 6, 2016June 6, 2016 by Denise Simon

It was several months ago that there was a major controversy on the Transpacific Partnership Pact. Everyone was and sorta is against it, when no one especially knew why as none of the text has been released that spells out any controversy. It is quite curious that even the leader of WikiLeaks put out a reward for anyone to provide chapters of the trade pact. Many in Congress have not even seen the documents while others have to go to a special room and read under an ‘eyes only’ condition.

If Hillary has a position in electronic communications over the trade deal, it is a legitimate part of her vetting but now we have John Kerry the current Secretary of State apparently running interference for Hillary or….for the trade deal….or both. It appears this is once again a case where FOIA requests on certain topics and certain people are forwarded to the White House for pre-approval, so in this case, the Obama top leadership could have their fingerprints on this matter as well.

The other curious item is, are these emails part of a separate Hillary release that is unknown to us?

This is like trying to nail jello to a wall. Could it be that Hillary’s emails prove she is against the TPP?

State Department Blocks Release Of Hillary Clinton-Era TPP Emails Until After The Election

IBTimes: Trade is a hot issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. But correspondence from Hillary Clinton and her top State Department aides about a controversial 12-nation trade deal will not be available for public review — at least not until after the election. The Obama administration abruptly blocked the release of Clinton’s State Department correspondence about the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after first saying it expected to produce the emails this spring.

The decision came in response to International Business Times’ open records request for correspondence between Clinton’s State Department office and the United States Trade Representative. The request, which was submitted in July 2015, specifically asked for all such correspondence that made reference to the TPP.

The State Department originally said it estimated the request would be completed by April 2016. Last week the agency said it had completed the search process for the correspondence but also said it was delaying the completion of the request until late November 2016 — weeks after the presidential election. The delay was issued in the same week the Obama administration filed a court motion to try to kill a lawsuit aimed at forcing the federal government to more quickly comply with open records requests for Clinton-era State Department documents.

Clinton’s shifting positions on the TPP have been a source of controversy during the campaign: She repeatedly promoted the deal as secretary of state but then in 2015 said, “I did not work on TPP,” even though some leaked State Department cables show that her agency was involved in diplomatic discussions about the pact. Under pressure from her Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Clinton announced in October that she now opposes the deal — and has disputed that she ever fully backed it in the first place.

While some TPP-related emails have been released by the State Department as part of other open records requests, IBT’s request was designed to provide a comprehensive view of how involved Clinton and her top aides were in shaping the trade agreement, and whether her agency had a hand in crafting any particular provisions in the pact. Unions, environmental organizations and consumer groups say the agreement will help corporations undermine domestic labor, conservation and other public interest laws.

If IBT’s open records request is fulfilled on the last day of November, as the State Department now estimates, it will have taken 489 days for the request to be fulfilled. According to Justice Department statistics, the average wait time for a State Department request is 111 days on a simple request — the longest of any federal agency the department’s report analyzed. Requests classified as complex by the State Department can take years.

Earlier this year, the State Department’s inspector general issued a report slamming the agency’s handling of open records requests for documents from the Office of the Secretary. Searches of emails “do not consistently meet statutory and regulatory requirements for completeness and rarely meet requirements for timeliness,” the inspector general concluded.

Last year, a Government Accountability Office report found that at the agencies it surveyed, there was not political interference in responding to open records requests. However, last month, a conservative group filed a lawsuit alleging that an Obama administration directive has deliberately slowed the response to open records requests that deal with politically sensitive material.

Nate Jones of the National Security Archive told IBT that whether or not the State Department’s move to delay the release of TPP-related correspondence is politically motivated, it reflects a systemic problem at the agency.

“In my opinion it is more incompetence than maliciousness, but either way, it is a gross error by FOIA processors to not get these documents out before the election,” said Jones, whose group helps journalists obtain government records. “Their inefficiency is doing great harm to the democratic process.”

Judge Orders More Hillary Emails to be Released

Posted on June 2, 2016June 2, 2016 by Denise Simon

Judge orders Obama administration to release new Clinton emails

TheHill: A federal judge has ordered the Obama administration to release new emails connected to Hillary Clinton before Democratic National Convention in July.

In an order late on Wednesday, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson told the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to hand over to the Republican National Committee (RNC) whatever records it could as part of an RNC’s open-records lawsuit on July 11.

After that, USAID will need to consult with the State Department about hundreds of other pages of documents, which could be released at some point in the future.

The RNC sued the aid agency in March, seeking two sets of communications: those between USAID officials and former aides at the State Department, as well as those between USAID and private domain names associated with Clinton, former President Bill Clinton and others including the Clinton Foundation. The effort appeared to be related to allegations that the former secretary of State’s family foundation had undue influence on USAID.

The RNC lawsuit was one of several it has filed seeking records connected to Clinton, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, in a preview of a battle sure to last through the general election.

Before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, USAID has claimed that it has discovered approximately 3,300 pages of records that it might be able to hand over to the Republican Party organization. But roughly 2,600 of those reportedly need to be cleared with the State Department before they can be released.

In her order on Wednesday, Jackson said USAID should release to the RNC what it can by July 11 and determine a schedule for releasing the rest.

The time frame would put the release of the first batch of emails just one week before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 18 and two weeks before the Democratic convention begins on July 25.

Critics of Clinton, however, will likely be wary of the State Department, which is notoriously slow at responding to Freedom of Information Act requests and has been buried underneath a barrage of demands related to Clinton’s email history in recent months.

Separately late on Wednesday, the Obama administration filed a motion trying to kill a different RNC open-records lawsuit targeting the State Department. That suit is seeking email messages from a slew of Clinton’s former top aides.

*****

WashingtonTimes: Hillary Clinton used a personal email account for official business during her tenure in the U.S. Senate and carried the practice over once she was at the helm of the State Department, an aide to the presumptive Democratic nominee for president said in sworn testimony released Tuesday.

Cheryl Mills, Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff during the White House hopeful’s four-year stint with the State Department, said her former boss relied on a personal email account provided by AT&T for about three months after being sworn in as secretary of state by President Obama in January 2009.

“Secretary Clinton continued a practice that she was using of [sic] her personal email,” Ms. Mills testified Friday, according to a transcript of her remarks released this week by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group currently suing the State Dept. over Mrs. Clinton’s use of a nongovernmental email system while in office.

Ms. Mills’ admission comes amid an active FBI probe launched to investigate Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email account while secretary of state, in addition to the Judicial Watch lawsuit. Leaked emails released to the media in 2013 first indicated that Mrs. Clinton used an account hosted at “clintonemail.com” in lieu of a government-provided account, raising questions regarding security concerns and, as argued by some, possible efforts to conceal correspondence from Freedom of Information Act requests.

As revealed through Friday’s sworn testimony, however, Mrs. Clinton relied on a separate, nongovernmental account through as late as April 2009 before she abandoned her AT&T account and began communicating through the clintonemail.com account.

“So Secretary Clinton used — always used one email account when she was using an email account,” Ms. Mills testified. “So when she initially arrived [at the State Dept.] she was continuing to use the AT&T accounts, and then transitioned to the .Clinton email, or Clintonemail.com account. And during her tenure those were the two addresses, if you will, that she used.”

“I don’t know that I could articulate that there was a specific discussion as opposed to her continuation of the practice she had been using when she was a senator. … I don’t have a specific memory of the conversations that may or may not have occurred. I know that I understood she was going to be using her personal email and that’s what she did,” Ms. Mills testified.

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, tweeted Wednesday that Mrs. Clinton’s was likely not the only lawmaker on Capitol Hill to use personal email accounts for official business, but said it nevertheless poses “a huge cybersecurity problem.”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, acknowledged last year that his personal Gmail address is listed on his congressional business card in lieu of a government-provided email account, but explained to ABC News at the time that members of Congress are not subject to the Federal Records Act.

Mr. Chaffetz, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform, has overseen the federal investigation concerning the 2011 terrorist attack in Benghazi, and he has been among the most vocal critics in Congress with respect to Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email account in communicating official business in the immediate aftermath of the assault.

Prepare for Biden, Kerry or even Bloomberg?

Posted on June 1, 2016June 1, 2016 by Denise Simon

The Hillary camp is in full implosion and they are panicked over Bernie. There major ad buys in place in California where Hillary is trailing Sanders. If Sanders does win California….her camp officially breaks. But wait, there is more. There are at least 3 investigations going on in Hillary’s realm, the Foundation, Benghazi and lastly the email/server scandal.

So, the text messages are flying, the phone calls are burning the DC wires and meetings behind closed doors are underway…..now what? A hybrid brokered Democrat conventions? But there is a big push to remove the DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

It is quite curious how Obama has maintained his distance in the Democrat election cycle. Could there be a Sanders Warren ticket?