Clinton Foundation Donor’s Flight

Posted on March 25, 2016March 25, 2016 by Denise Simon

Bombshell: Clinton Foundation Donor’s Flight From Justice Aided by Hillary Allies

Clinton donor smeared a decorated DEA agent and helped crooked Venezuelan friends escape justice

Observer: Recent news reports indicate that the FBI is investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for granting favors to her family’s foundation donors and for its systematic accounting fraud. In January, the Sunday Times of London cited former Judge Andrew Napolitano, a conservative libertarian and frequent Fox News guest, as saying that the FBI was taking evidence “seriously” and that Hillary “could hear about that soon from the Department of Justice.”

It’s hard to believe that the Obama administration and its hideously politicized Justice Department would ever indict Ms. Clinton, given that President Barack Obama picked her for secretary of state and its clear favoritism toward her in the presidential race. But there is massive evidence that shows financial abuses—including money laundering—at the Clinton Foundation and overwhelming evidence that donors were helped by Ms. Clinton.

To take one of so many examples, there’s the case of Clinton Foundation donor Claudio Osorio—who is now housed at a federal prison serving 12 years for fraud—who in 2010, with Ms. Clinton’s (and Bill Clinton’s) help, won a $10 million loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

The loan was granted to an Osorio firm called InnoVida, which was supposed to build houses in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Instead, Osorio pocketed the money and used it to underwrite his lavish lifestyle and to pay off politicians. For political muscle, Osorio—who also had close ties to Jeb Bush, who sat on the board of a bank he owned—paid a lobbyist and major Hillary fundraiser named Jonathan Mantz.

Claudio Osorio’s mugshot. (Wikimedia Commons)

And that leads me to another Clinton Foundation donor Ms. Clinton helped out who happened to use Mr. Mantz (who now runs Ms. Clinton’s presidential campaign Super PAC) and apparently with the same great effect: Gonzalo Tirado, a crooked Venezuelan financier.

Mr. Tirado was president of and ran Venezuelan operations for the famously corrupt Stanford Bank, which was headquartered in Antigua and was named for its American founder, Allen Stanford. He and Mr. Stanford came to be extremely close and “were like father and son,” one well-placed source told me.

Mr. Stanford’s name may ring a bell as he was sentenced to prison for 110 years for committing an $8 billion Ponzi scheme. In 2006, the Hugo Chavez government was asked to investigate Mr. Tirado by scandal-plagued, pro-Wall Street New York Congressman Gregory W. Meeks, a member of the House Committee on Financial Services and a major recipient of cash and perks from jailbird Allen Stanford. Mr. Tirado was charged with tax evasion and theft, The Hill newspaper reported.

As I’ll detail below—and I uncovered this story with help from the National Legal and Policy Center, a Virginia-based watchdog group—Tirado soon fled for Miami to avoid prosecution and petitioned the State Department, through Mr. Mantz, for political asylum. It’s not clear if he won asylum—and he doesn’t seem to merit it as he had no record of political opposition to the Chavez government—but it is clear that he was allowed to remain in the U.S. and live a life of luxury.

(Mr. Tirado, who did not reply to a request for comment, has kept a low profile as of late. His last reported sighting came in 2014, when he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide, or at least claimed he intended to kill himself.)

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) announces his endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. (Photo Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Incredibly, the Obama administration not only failed to help the Chavez government investigate Mr. Tirado, but it also indicted a legendary former DEA agent named Tom Raffanello, a one-time head of the DEA’s Miami office and the agency’s chief of congressional affairs during Bill Clinton’s first term as president.

Mr. Raffanello’s subsequent prosecution, which ended in abysmal failure, almost surely was prompted and abetted by Mr. Tirado, a secret FBI informant. Unsurprisingly, the vindicated Mr. Raffanello had few kind words for Mr. Tirado or Ms. Clinton during a recent interview.

“Tirado believed in buying influence,” Mr. Raffanello said of the crooked financier. “He wouldn’t give away 10 cents that he didn’t think he’d get back a dollar on. That was his entire philosophy.”

As for Ms. Clinton, he said that during her years in the Obama administration the “prevailing wisdom in Miami at the time, among people in high profile civil and criminal defense circles, was that giving money to the Clinton Foundation was very helpful. She was secretary of state and a potential future president. I’m sure that’s the same thinking now.”

(Ms. Clinton’s presidential campaign did not reply to a request for comment.)

Up until 2006, life was cushy for pampered, wealthy, jet-setting Gonzalo Tirado, who was running the Stanford Bank’s Venezuela operations. Events took a turn for the worse when an internal Stanford Bank audit discovered that he had fleeced about $5 million from the company.

Mr. Tirado’s actions did not sit well with Stanford, and the Venezuelan beat a hasty exit from his job. He soon opened a bank of his own and lured in a few local investors. His new enterprise went down the tubes, and the defrauded locals, who were very close to the Chavez government, looked to it for help, leading to an investigation of Mr. Tirado.

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. (Photo Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images)

At the same time, the Chavez government was investigating Mr. Tirado at the behest of Stanford, through his hand-picked emissary, Congressman Meeks. (See this Wikileaked cable for more on the topic and on Mr. Tirado’s feud with the Venezuelan government.) That led to the filing of criminal charges against Mr. Tirado, as noted above. (The Venezuelan embassy in Washington did not reply to a request for comment.)

Mr. Tirado, apparently a conscienceless paranoid who felt no remorse for his actions, became convinced that Stanford Bank was monitoring his activities and tapping his phone and was the source of all of his troubles. Perhaps sensing he was in deep trouble, he fled Venezuela for Miami.

Mr. Tirado began spending money like a drunken sailor. He purchased at least two luxury estates in the Miami area. He also became a major investor in several companies, including a security firm called Command Consulting Group for which he recruited as a front man W. Ralph Basham, a former senior official with the Department of Homeland Security under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Command Consulting Group, “an international security and intelligence consulting firm that provides advisory services to governments, corporations, and high net worth individuals,” according to its website, and whose top officials include a number of other former senior government terror and security veterans, is currently run out of an office in Washington. (Mr. Basham did not reply to a request for comment.)

As 2009 dawned, life could hardly have been better for the pampered Mr. Tirado. There was just one small problem: He needed to stay in the U.S. to avoid being sent back back to Venezuela, where he was sure to face trial and imprisonment. To stay in the U.S., Mr. Tirado needed the continued indulgence of the U.S. State Department.

Fortunately for Mr. Tirado, the U.S. government had been hostile to Venezuela ever since the South American nation of 31 million moved to the left in 2002, when Chavez was elected to the first of his three terms.

(Note and disclosure: Chavez died in 2013, and the country is now led by his former vice president, Nicolás Maduro. Despite its flaws, the country’s socialist government has made remarkable strides in bettering the lives of Venezuela’s poor majority. In 2004, I met Chavez as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and I consider him to be the greatest force for democratic change in modern Latin American history with the possible exception of Che Guevera.)

The George W. Bush administration had regularly conspired with the rancid political opposition, which Chavez displaced from power, and had sought to destabilize and overthrow the Chavez government with the help of local Venezuelan surrogates. Incoming President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, were rabid opponents of Chavez’s as well, but Mr. Tirado didn’t want to count on that alone.

Jonathan Mantz. (BGR Group)

Knowing how the corrupt U.S. political system works, he hired an American lobbyist, Jonathan Mantz, to game the asylum process for him while he took it easy and spent his loot in America.

Mantz then worked at BGR, the firm of Republican Haley Barbour, the famously overweight former Mississippi governor and one of the most prominent of all GOP lobby shops. He had previously worked as finance director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and for the laughably corrupt New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine.

Mr. Mantz, who had no real qualifications to be a lobbyist other than his ability to raise money—and who did not reply to a request for comment—had drummed up cash for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Currently Mr. Mantz chairs Hillary’s 2016 Super PAC, Priorities USA Action. Mr. Tirado paid BGR $350,000.

Now sufficiently motivated, Mantz went to work lobbying Hillary’s State Department to let Tirado stay in Miami. Meanwhile, the crooked Mr. Tirado donated between $5,000 and $10,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to its website. As is its custom, the foundation does not state when the donation was made and declined to answer questions about the money it took from Mr. Tirado.

Coincidentally or not, Mr. Tirado was one four of Mr. Mantz’ clients who donated to the Clinton Foundation during his brief 16-month career as a lobbyist.

Thomas Raffanello. (LinkedIn Profile)

Now let’s discuss the story of former DEA agent Thomas Raffanello, at which point this story becomes even more outrageous.

Mr. Raffanello worked for the DEA for more than three decades. He left in 2004 and went to work as the head of security for the Stanford Bank. “We set up cameras to prevent bank robberies and generally provided security at bank offices and functions,” Mr. Raffanello told me last weekend during the course of several lengthy phone interviews. “I was based in Miami but had offices in Caracas, Quito, Antigua and a few other places.”

Mr. Raffanello said Allen Stanford “couldn’t balance a checkbook” and described him as “a spoiled billionaire.” When I asked him why he went to work for Stanford in the first place he said, “I did due diligence. I called several associates, including the former head of DEA in Miami before me and several former assistant U.S. attorneys who worked for him. No one ever gave me a bad word; they said he was eccentric but a straight shooter. Madeleine Albright worked for him, and the former president of Switzerland was one of his board members.”

Stanford Bank collapsed and was put into receivership in 2010, at which point Mr. Raffanello left the company. But well before then Mr. Tirado—who, a source told me, had become an FBI informant—had become convinced that Mr. Raffanello was the source for all of his problems with the Chavez government and its investigation into him. Hence, he began a smear campaign against Mr. Raffanello in Venezuela and the United States.

As I mentioned above, it was Congressman Meeks—who currently supports Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and who took in more money from Stanford than any single member of Congress other than Charles Rangel and Pete Sessions of Texas—who prompted the Chavez government to look into Mr. Tirado.

But the paranoid Mr. Tirado, certain Mr. Raffanello was to blame, paid Venezuelan writers to place stories saying Mr. Raffanello worked for the CIA, Mr. Raffanello told me. That led to the Chavez government questioning Mr. Raffanello for alleged corruption involving the Stanford bank, though it determined the allegations were groundless and never charged him.

“Venezuela is like Casablanca,” Mr. Raffanello said. “If you tell a story twice it becomes the truth. It became impossible for me to go to Venezuela because I feared I’d get picked up by law enforcement.”

“I thought I was going to get Shanghaied, but you can’t make something out of nothing.” — Thomas Raffanello.

Meanwhile, Mr. Raffanello said, Mr. Tirado told the FBI and the Justice Department that he was trying to arrange Mr. Tirado’s kidnapping and was spying on him. “The guy knows how to play the game, and he played it at a high level because he had plenty of money,” Mr. Raffanello said.

About a year after Mr. Raffanello left Stanford Bank, he was indicted by the Obama Justice Department for allegedly shredding Stanford Bank documents. The case went to trial in Miami in 2010. On February 10 of that year, as the jury was deliberating, Judge Richard Goldberg interrupted its deliberations and unilaterally acquitted Raffanello (and another defendant), saying the evidence against him was “substantially lacking.”

It is highly unusual for a person to escape conviction after being indicted by a federal grand jury, let alone for the government to be humiliated in court as it was in the Raffanello case. Stunned federal prosecutors begged the judge to at least allow the jury to render a verdict because the acquittal would prevent them from appealing a verdict.

The judge dismissed their plea, and Mr. Raffanello’s ordeal was over. “I thought I was going to get Shanghaied, but you can’t make something out of nothing,” he said.

To sum up here, a corrupt Venezuelan banker hired a lobbyist close to Hillary Clinton, made a donation to her family’s foundation and has been allowed to live in the United States without fear of prosecution in his homeland. At a time that Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, the Obama Administration staged what can only be described as a political prosecution of an honest man and long-time government employee.

Mr. Raffanello has concluded this about Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “I learned a lot about her and her family when I was in the government, and how they are put together,” he said. “She is a person who will say and do anything in order to get elected president. I don’t think she’s going to win, but there’s nothing she won’t do while trying.”

Operation Hemorrhage

Posted on March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

It has been said often, either fight the enemy in a true war theater on the battlefield with real war tactics or fight them at home. Brussels and Paris and in the United States in Boston and San Bernardino to mention a few, the hybrid war gets real expensive. These costs are rarely measured or questioned. We are also not measuring the cost of freedoms are giving up. Add in the cost of the cyber war…..well….going back much earlier than 9-11-01 the costs cannot be calculated.

Operation Hemorrhage: The Terror Plans to Wreck the West’s Economy

The Western economy is a key underlying target in attacks like the one that the Islamic State perpetrated in Brussels.

DailyBeast: Every European who flies frequently knows the airport in Zaventem, has spent time in the ticketing area that was strewn with blood, limbs, broken glass, battered luggage and other wreckage.

It was another attack on aviation that pulled the United States into the conflict sometimes known as the “global war on terror” in the first place. Since then, airports and airplanes have remained a constant target for Islamic militants, with travelers being encumbered by new batches of security measures after each new attack or attempt.

After the ex-con Richard Reid managed to sneak a bomb aboard a transatlantic flight in December 2001, but failed to detonate the explosives, American passengers were forced to start removing their shoes on their way through security. After British authorities foiled a 2006 plot in which terrorists planned to bring liquid explosives hidden in sport drink bottles aboard multiple transatlantic flights, authorities strictly limited the quantity of liquids passengers were allowed to carry. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck explosives hidden in his underwear onto a flight on Christmas Day 2009, he ushered in full-body scans and intrusive pat-downs.

Those are the misses. There have been hits, too. In August 2004, two female Chechen suicide bombers, so-called “black widows,” destroyed two domestic Russian flights. In January 2011, a suicide bomber struck Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in an attack that looked almost identical to the one that rocked the airport in Brussels: the bomber struck just outside the security cordon, where the airport is transformed from a “soft” target to a “hard” one. Just months ago, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS)—the perpetrator of the Brussels attacks—destroyed a Russian passenger jet flying out of Egypt’s Sinai, killing 224 people.

The targeting of airports and airplanes has been so frequent that in lighter times—back when the terrorists seemed so much worse at what they do—some pundits openly mocked their continuing return to airplanes and airports. In one representative discussion from early 2010, a well-known commentator described jihadists as having a “sort of schoolboy fixation” with aviation.

But the reason for this targeting, of course, is neither mysterious nor quixotic, and it’s one the jihadists have explained for themselves. Following the November Paris attacks, ISIS released an infographic boasting that its slaughter on the streets of Paris would force Belgium “to strengthen its security measures … which will cost them tens of millions of dollars.” Moreover, the group claimed, “the intensified security measures and the general state of unease will cost Europe in general and France in specific tends of billions of dollars due to the resulting decrease in tourism, delayed flights, and restrictions on freedom of movement and travel between European countries.”

And that was before the group successfully attacked the Brussels airport, despite those costly new security measures.

Even before 9/11, jihadists saw bleeding the American economy as the surest path to defeating their “far enemy.” When Osama bin Laden declared war against the “Jews and crusaders” in 1996, he emphasized that jihadist strikes should be coupled with an economic boycott by Saudi women. Otherwise, the Muslims would be sending their enemy money, “which is the foundation of wars and armies.”

Indeed, when bin Laden first had the opportunity to publicly explain what the 9/11 attacks had accomplished, in an October 2001 interview with Al Jazeera journalist Taysir Allouni, he emphasized the costs that the attacks imposed on the United States. “According to their own admissions, the share of the losses on the Wall Street market reached 16 percent,” he said. “The gross amount that is traded in that market reaches $4 trillion. So if we multiply 16 percent with $4 trillion to find out the loss that affected the stocks, it reaches $640 billion of losses.” He told Allouni that the economic effect was even greater due to building and construction losses and missed work, so that the damage inflicted was “no less than $1 trillion by the lowest estimate.”

In his October 2004 address to the American people, dramatically delivered just before that year’s elections, bin Laden noted that the 9/11 attacks cost Al Qaeda only a fraction of the damage inflicted upon the United States. “Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event,” he said, “while America in the incident and its aftermath lost—according to the lowest estimates—more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of Al Qaeda defeated a million dollars.”

Al Qaeda fit the wars the United States had become embroiled in after 9/11 into its economic schema. In that same video, bin Laden explained how his movement sought to suck the United States and its allies into draining wars in the Muslim world. The mujahedin “bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt,” bin Laden said, and they would now do the same to the United States.

Just prior to 2011, there was a brief period when jihadism appeared to be in decline. Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that later became ISIS, had all but met with defeat at the hands of the United States and local Sunni uprisings. Successful attacks were few and far between.

Valentin Bianchi/AP

Representative of those dark times for jihadists, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a special issue of its online magazine Inspire celebrating a terrorist attack that claimed no victims. In October 2010, jihadists were able to sneak bombs hidden in printer cartridges onto two cargo planes. Due to strong intelligence efforts, authorities disabled both bombs before they were set to explode, but the group drew satisfaction from merely getting them aboard the planes.

“Two Nokia phones, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the lead article in that special issue of Inspire boasted. “On the other hand this supposedly ‘foiled plot’, as some of our enemies would like to call [it], will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures.” The magazine warned that future attacks will be “smaller, but more frequent”—an approach that “some may refer to as the strategy of a thousand cuts.”

The radical cleric Anwar Al Awlaki, writing in Inspire, explained the dilemma that he saw gripping Al Qaeda’s foes. “You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package in the world,” he wrote, “or you do nothing and we keep trying again.”

Even in those days when the terrorist threat loomed so much smaller, the point was not a bad one. Security is expensive, and driving up costs is one way jihadists aim to wear down Western economies.

Unfortunately, Al Qaeda’s envisioned world of smaller but more frequent attacks proved unnecessary for the jihadists. Less than two months after the special issue of Inspire appeared that celebrated an at best half-successful attack, the revolutionary events that we then knew as the “Arab Spring” sent shockwaves through the Middle East and North Africa.

This instability would help jihadism reach the current heights to which it has ascended, where the attacks are not only more frequent but larger. Unfortunately, the United States—blinded at the time by the misguided belief that revolutions in the Arab world would devastate the jihadist movement—pursued policies that hastened the region’s instability. The damages wrought by these policies are still not fully appreciated.

The silver lining to the jihadist economic strategy is that they, too, are economically vulnerable. The damage inflicted on ISIS’s “state” by coalition bombings and other pressures forced the group to slice its fighters’ salaries at the beginning of this year. But as Al Qaeda watches its flashier jihadist rival carry out gruesome attacks on Western targets and get bombarded in return, it discerns further proof of the wisdom of its strategy of attrition.

As it watches these two sets of foes exhaust each other, Al Qaeda believes that its comparative patience will pay off. It believes that its own time will come.

2 Days After Benghazi, Back to Fundraising

Posted on March 22, 2016March 22, 2016 by Denise Simon

Judicial Watch: New Clinton Documents Raise Questions on Benghazi, Clinton Foundation

Two days after Benghazi attack, Libyan president sought meeting with Bill Clinton through Clinton Foundation event

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released 276 pages of internal State Department documents revealing that within two days of the deadly terrorist attack on Benghazi, Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf, the president of Libya’s National Congress, asked to participate in a Clinton Global Initiative function and “meet President Clinton.” The meeting between the Libyan president and Bill Clinton had not previously been disclosed. The documents also show Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff coordinated with the Clinton Foundation’s staff to have her thank Clinton Global Initiative project sponsors for their “commitments” during a Foundation speech on September 25, 2009.

The Judicial Watch documents were obtained as a result of a federal court order in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the State Department on May 28, 2013, (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-00772)).

In September 13, 2012, al-Magariaf advisor Dr. Fathi Nuah wrote to the Clinton Foundation’s Director of Foreign Policy Amitabh Desai: “Dr. Almagariaf will be addressing the United Nations this September in New York as the Libyan Head of State, and he expressed a wish to meet President Clinton and to participate at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting for New York as well.”

Four hours later, Desai emailed Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills asking, “Would USG [U.S. Government] have concerns about Libyan President being invited to CGI [Clinton Global Initiative]? Odd timing, I know.” Mills emailed back: “We would not have issues.”

Four days later, on September 17, Desai emailed Mills again, saying, The Libyan president is “asking for a meeting with WJC [William Jefferson Clinton] next week.” Desai asked, “Would you recommend accepting or declining the WJC meeting request?”

The State Department apparently had no objection to the meeting, because on September 26, Desai emailed Mills, “He had a v good meeting with Libya …” Hillary Clinton and al-Magariaf did not have a meeting until September 24.

An August 2009 email chain including Hillary Clinton’s then- Chief of Staff Huma Abedin, Mills, then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Jake Sullivan shows that the State Department coordinated with Clinton Foundation staff on how Mrs. Clinton to thank Foundation supporters/partners for their “commitments.” Mills asks Desai for a “list of commitments during whole session so she can reference more than those just around her speech.”

Caitlin Klevorick, Senior Advisor to the Counselor and Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State who previously worked at the Foundation, notes: “one question is if we want to see if there is a decent mass of fs [funds] related commitments to announce together at closing as a ‘mega’ commitment.”

The State Department material includes background information made by Clinton Foundation partners, which include Foundation donors Nduna Foundation, Grupo ABCA, and Britannia Industries. Other CGI partners noted in the State Department documents include a federal agency (the Centers for Disease Control) and various United Nations entities, which also receive U.S. taxpayer funds.

The transcript of Hillary Clinton’s speech on the State Department Internet site confirms that then-Secretary of State did thank those making “exceptional commitments” to her husband’s foundation:

And so I congratulate all who helped to put on this (inaudible) CGI [Clinton Global Initiative]. I especially thank you for having a separate track on girls and women, which I think was well received for all the obvious reasons. (Applause.) And this is an exceptional gathering of people who have made exceptional commitments to bettering our world.

The documents also point to a chain of emails that show Haim Saban, a top Clinton donor, sought to entice Bill Clinton into to travelling to Damascus in 2009 to meet with a high-level Syrian delegation. The meetings were part of the Saban Forum. Evidently, the trip never took place.

As previously reported, a June 2012 email chain discusses a “firm invitation for President Clinton” to speak at a Congo conference, hosted in part by the controversial Joseph Kabila. Bill Clinton is offered $650,000 in fees and expenses, concerning which, as Desai emails Mills and others, “WJC wants to know that state [sic] thinks of it if he took it 100% for the foundation.”

This lawsuit had previously forced the disclosure of documents that provided a road map for over 200 conflict-of-interest rulings that led to at least $48 million in speaking fees for the Clintons during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. Previously disclosed documents in this lawsuit, for example, raise questions about funds Clinton accepted from entities linked to Saudi Arabia, China and Iran, among others.

Judicial Watch’s litigation to obtain these conflict of interest records is ongoing. The State Department has also yet to explain why it failed to conduct a proper, timely search in the 20 months between when it received Judicial Watch’s request on May 2, 2011, and the February 1, 2013, date Secretary Clinton left office.

“These new State Department documents show Hillary Clinton and her State aides were involved in fundraising for the Clinton Foundation. It is also incredible that the Libyan president would call and meet Bill Clinton through the Clinton Foundation before meeting Hillary Clinton about Benghazi,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked hand in glove with the Clinton Foundation on fundraising and foreign policy. Despite the law and her promises to the contrary, Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into the DC office of the Clinton Foundation.”

Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuit has become particularly noteworthy because it has been reported that the Clinton Foundation, now known as the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, accepted millions of dollars from at least seven foreign governments while Mrs. Clinton served as Secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation has acknowledged that a $500,000 donation it received from the government of Algeria while Mrs. Clinton served as Secretary of State violated a 2008 ethics agreement between the foundation and the Obama administration. Some of the foreign governments that have made donations to the Clinton Foundation include Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman, have questionable human rights records.

Links to the full production of documents can be found here.

Judge to WH: Unseal Records of Trump Business Partner?

Posted on March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

This site has published articles here and here about Felix Sater, a mafia linked frauster that is/was a partner of Donald Trump. It seems this unsavory character is known to many in New York and Washington DC including Attorney General, Loretta Lynch as well as Senator Jeff Sessions. Seems some interesting powers are working phones to determine future damage to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and others with their fingerprints on the matter.

Judge Wants US to Protect Trump Associate’s Secret History

ABC: A U.S. judge is urging the Obama administration to protect from public disclosure federal court records related to the once-secret criminal history of a former Donald Trump business partner.

In a highly unusual order prompted by The Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Brian M. Cogan said that unless the Justice Department acts before April 18, he will decide whether to make the court files public under the assumption that federal prosecutors don’t care.

The case involves Felix Sater, a Trump business associate who had pleaded guilty in a major Mafia-linked stock fraud scheme and cooperated with the government. The AP reported in December that, even after learning about Sater’s background, Trump tapped Sater for a business development role in 2010 that included the title of senior adviser to Trump. Sater received Trump Organization business cards and was given an office within the Trump Organization’s headquarters, on the same floor as Trump’s own.

“It seems to me that the government has a unique interest in keeping documents that relate to cooperation agreements under seal,” the judge wrote in his order. “The government should speak and assert its position as to whether the public’s right to access each document in the record is outweighed by a compelling need for secrecy.”

Lawyers for the AP had asked the judge to justify sealing a five-year criminal contempt proceeding in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Not only did Cogan seal all documents in the contempt case, he also initially sealed the AP’s request that he unseal his justification for their sealing. When The New York Times asked the judge to unseal the AP’s request to unseal the sealing order, that request was sealed, too. Late last week, he made the requests by the AP and the newspaper publicly accessible — but ordered that the parties to the case file any response to them under seal.

The defendants in the contempt case, Frederick Oberlander and Richard Lerner, are attorneys whom the government said revealed once-secret court records about Sater’s crimes and cooperation. Sater’s lawyers, who once included Leslie Caldwell, now the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, have said that Sater’s cooperation was vital to national security and disclosures about his past put him in danger.

Oberlander and Lerner said they never revealed sealed records. Some of what they had been ordered not to disclose is already publicly available in the Congressional Record, they said.

“We wish that people could inspect the documents, because it would reveal judicial and prosecutorial misconduct of the highest levels,” Oberlander told the AP.

Also at issue in the case are statements that U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch — formerly the top prosecutor in Cogan’s district — made about Sater’s case before the Senate confirmed her last year. Oberlander and Lerner said the government improperly permitted Sater to use his status as a secret cooperator to commit new crimes and avoid paying restitution to past victims, who are owed millions of dollars.

In February 2015, Lynch told Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, of the Senate Judiciary Committee that information about Sater’s restitution “remains under seal,” and that the Justice Department would never waive victims’ right to restitution as part of a cooperation agreement. Court records already publicly available at the time showed that Sater was not ordered to pay restitution and the government never requested it. One of Sater’s attorneys said in a statement at the time that the government had waived restitution payments partly out of gratitude to Sater.

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Melanie Newman, told the AP that Lynch’s comments were accurate because some documents related to restitution in Sater’s case remain under seal.

Oberlander told the AP that the original cooperation agreement Sater signed in 1998, which has been publicly available since 2013, said Sater acknowledged that the penalty for his crime included roughly $60 million in restitution payments to victims.

The New York judge has twice asked the Justice Department to pursue contempt charges against the two lawyers who revealed Sater’s cooperation. In both cases, local federal prosecutors recused themselves over unspecified conflicts of interest after consulting with Justice Department officials in Washington. They referred the case to federal prosecutors in Albany, New York, who likewise did not act.

In his latest order, Cogan again urged prosecutors to go after Oberlander and Lerner.

“One would think that the desire to ensure that further informants cooperate in government investigations should also motivate the government to take swift action against individuals who seek to expose the identity of informants, their proffered criminal history and the details of their cooperation,” the judge wrote.

Sater’s attorney, Robert Wolf, said the judge was right.

“Mr. Sater shares and supports the court’s frustration and outrage as to why these rogue lawyers have not yet been criminally prosecuted,” Wolf said in a statement. He credited Sater with providing information that “potentially saved tens of thousands, if not millions, of our citizens’ lives.”

Sater pleaded guilty in 1998 to one count of racketeering for his role in a broad stock fraud scheme involving the prominent Genovese and Bonanno crime families, according to court records. Five years earlier, a New York State court had sentenced Sater to more than a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass.

Cuba: Where is Barack and the Pope on This?

Posted on March 20, 2016March 20, 2016 by Denise Simon

Traveling with a delegation of about 80, Barack Obama has arrived in Cuba, something no sitting president has done since Calvin Coolidge. It is not clear who Obama will have meetings with, but his first stop was the recently fully opened U.S. embassy.

Meanwhile, there are real things going on in Havana that many are ignoring especially media and the entire diplomatic delegation. Obama calls this a new day in relations but it is hardly so when it comes to human rights.

The Pope played a large role in re-starting talks but it all began in earnest at the Nelson Mandela funeral.

The average salary for Cubans is $20.00 USD per month. All monies that flow into the island have two destinations, the Castro regime and the military.

Facts about Cuba: Venezuela ships 100,000 barrels of oil to Cuba a day. Only a few years ago, Putin forgave $32 billion in Cuban debt. Cuba has a long history of human rights violations such that John Kerry’s advance trip, ahead of Obama’s was cancelled due to major disputes with diplomatic personnel. Cuba’s military is known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces and all people between the ages of 17-28 have mandatory service.

Russia has an intelligence and spy base in Lourdes, Cuba as does China which is located in Bejucal, Cuba. Both of these bases spy on telecom transmissions, phone, satellite ad internet.

Chinese telecommunications spybase in Bejucal, Cuba Bejucal Lourdes

Meanwhile……

Violent Arrests of Pro-Democracy Activists Precede Obama Landing in Cuba

Hours before President Barack Obama landed in Havana to meet with high-ranking members of the island’s repressive communist regime, more than 50 pro-democracy dissidents were beaten and arrested, shoved into buses to be shipped into the nation’s jails to prevent them from disturbing official activities.

Breitbart: At least 50 of those arrested are members of the Ladies in White, a mostly-Catholic dissident group comprised of the wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters of prisoners of conscience. The Ladies in White members joined a larger group of anti-communist dissidents in Havana following their weekly attendance at Mass. Service this Sunday is especially important to Catholics as they celebrate Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week.

“It was brutal, there are people with fractures and contusions,” Antonio Rodiles, leader of the dissident group Estado de SATS, told the Spain-based Diario de Cuba. “They hit us with everything.” The newspaper notes that Rodiles spoke to them via telephone, and the chaos of mass arrests happening around him threatened to drown out his own voice on the phone. Rodiles was subsequently arrested.

In addition to the 50 members of the Ladies in White and Antonio Rodiles, Danilo Maldonado, an artist known as “El Sexto,” was arrested in the fray.

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Maldonado was recently released from prison after serving a ten-month sentence for painting the names “Fidel” and “Raúl” on the backs of two pigs for an Animal Farm-themed art project.

The protesters all carried signs and chanted slogans directed at President Obama, calling for him to reconsider his friendly stance towards dictator Raúl Castro. The Ladies in White marched holding a sign reading “Obama, Nothing Has Changed Here.” Another group of dissidents held a sign reading “Obama, traveling to Cuba is not fun. No more violations of human rights.”

While Sunday’s arrests yielded much more dramatic images due to the unusually high number of media representatives on the island for President Obama’s visit, there is evidence that the communist government has been working all week to keep the nation’s most vocal opponents of communism silent. On Saturday, a man named Ciro Alexis Casanova Pérez was arrested for placing a sign on his window reading “Neither Obama nor Castro, Freedom for Cuba.” He was taken to the hospital after his arrest for severe body aches, a sign he was beaten by police during his arrest.

Pérez was among more than 200 arrested yesterday, according to Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) leader José Daniel Ferrer, who attested to the arrest of 209 members of his group in Oriente, the eastern end of Cuba. In contrast, the Cuban government arrested about 250 dissidents throughout the entirety of Pope Francis’ visit in September.

In addition to those taken to jail, at least one is being held under house arrest without charge. The man: Zaqueo Báez, who made international headlines in September for daring to approach Pope Francis’ vehicle in Havana and say the word “freedom” within earshot of the pontiff. Báez was beaten severely in front of the pope and taken to prison, facing criminal charges for disturbing the peace. Pope Francis later denied any knowledge of the incident despite his proximity to it.

The Cuban dissident community has loudly opposed President Obama’s visit, arguing that his presence on the island would embolden the Cuban government to act more violently against pro-democracy activists. “These sorts of visits bring a lot of collateral damage,” dissident Marta Beatriz Roque said in February.

Studies of Castro regime behavior following President Obama’s announcement in December 2017 that he would be establishing diplomatic ties with the Castro dictatorship show that Havana has become more oppressive and violent against those who demand to live in a democratic society. “There has been no substantial improvement in regard to human rights and individual freedoms on the island… [The Cuban government] has adapted its repressive methods in order to make them invisible to the scrutinizing, judgmental eyes of the international community, but it has not reduced the level of pressure or control over the opposition,” a report by the Czech NGO People in Need concluded in December.