Category Archives: Presidential campaign

Showdown Looming Russia/Baltics/NATO

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Offering apologies from this site as in recent days, several items have been posted discussing Russian aggressions. There is a reason, perhaps many.

Today, May 12, 2016, the missile shield located in Romania went live and this has further angered Russia.

The missile interceptor station in Deveselu, southern Romania, will help defend NATO members against the threat of short and medium-range ballistic missiles — particularly from the Middle East, US assistant secretary of state Frank Rose told a news conference in Bucharest Wednesday.

 

But Russia has taken a dim view of the project, seeing it as a security threat on its doorstep.

“Both the US and NATO have made it clear the system is not designed for or capable of undermining Russia’s strategic deterrence capability,” Rose said.

“Russia has repeatedly raised concerns that the US and NATO defence are directed against Russia and represents a threat to its strategic nuclear deterrent. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Russia has a response and actually Britain did as well. Britain says Typhoon fighters intercepted three Russian military transport aircraft approaching Baltic states. The British fighters, scrambled from the Amari air base in Estonia, intercepted the Russian aircraft, which were not transmitting a recognised identification code and were unresponsive, the ministry said.

 

To add to the matter, the missile defense system slated for Poland that Barack Obama cancelled a few years ago is about to go live as well. This system was for the most part a private investment between U.S. contractors and European countries.

Poland chose the U.S. defense company’s bid over a rival European offering and one from the MEADS consortium led by Lockheed Martin Corp. LMT 1.05 % Officials also selected a unit of Airbus Group NV to supply 50 military helicopters—down from its previous plan for 70—over bids from U.S.-based Sikorsky and AgustaWestland, a European consortium. Poland has pledged to increase its military spending amid concerns that the smoldering separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine will erupt into a full-scale military conflict. Warsaw plans to return to its earlier policy of spending 2% of gross domestic product on its armed forces in 2016, after it scaled back spending in recent years to shore up its public finances. The missile shield is expected to be a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s long-running project to deter missile attacks in Europe. The project is hotly contested by Moscow, which argues its aim is to threaten Russia rather than to protect itself from a potential threat from Iran, as NATO has said in the past. More here from the WSJ.

*****

The US has switched on a missile shield in Romania that it sees as vital to defending itself and Europe from long-range missiles fired by rogue states, prompting anger from the Kremlin which believes the shield’s main goal is to weaken its own strategic nuclear capabilities.

The eventual missile shield will stretch from Greenland to the Azores, and will be ready by the end of 2018. On Friday, the US will break ground on a final site in Poland. The proposal was first agreed by the administration of George W Bush a decade ago and is a longstanding gripe for Moscow, despite repeated assurances from Washington that it is not aimed against Russia. Control of the missile shield will be handed over to Nato in July, with command and control run from a US airbase in Germany.

Poland is concerned Russia may retaliate further by announcing the deployment of nuclear weapons to its enclave of Kaliningrad, located between Poland and Lithuania. Russia has stationed anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles there, able to cover huge areas and complicate Nato’s ability to move around.

The Kremlin says the shield’s aim is to neutralise Moscow’s nuclear arsenal long enough for the US to strike Russia in the event of war. While US and Nato officials were adamant that the shield was designed to counter threats from the Middle East and not Russia, they remained vague on whether the radars and interceptors could be reconfigured to defend against Russia in a conflict. More from the Guardian.

Teach Younger Voters Hillary’s History

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This will not be in any chronological order:

Paula Jones lawsuit

ChinaGate

TrooperGate

Mena Airport Drug Scandal

Rose Law Firm

WhiteWater and Savings and Loan

Hillary’s Radical Summer, Black Panthers

Hillary’s College Thesis, Saul Alinsky

White House TravelGate

Vince Foster is Dead

HillaryCare

Bill, Jeffrey, Planes and Sin Island

Yes, Bill was Impeached

Clinton did Steal White House Stuff

Clinton Showdown with FBI Liaison

Bill Clinton let bin Ladin Go

Bill Ordered Sandy to Stuff the Documents in his Pants

Need more? Okay, one more?

They Stole all the ‘W’s…. lots of damage

  

Whitewater: Twelve Versions of Hillary Clinton Draft Indictment, 451 Pages, Withheld By National Archives

JudicialWatch: New details continue to emerge from Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act fight with the National Archives over the release of draft indictments of Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater case. According to the Archives, release of the indictments—drafted by an independent counsel examining the Clintons’ relationship to a corrupt Arkansas S&L and an alleged cover-up—would violate grand jury secrecy and Mrs. Clinton’s personal privacy. FOIA request denied.

Judicial Watch declined to take “no” for an answer, and so off to court we went. The case is now in the hands of a federal judge.

In the course of litigation, new facts have come to light. Under FOIA, the Archives must produce a “Vaughn Index”—a tantalizing and at times maddening document. A Vaughn Index is the government saying: we are not giving you the documents, but here is an “index” of what we are not giving you, and why we are not giving it to you. Your tax dollars at work.

In the National Archives Vaughn Index for the case, we learn that the government is sitting on at least twelve versions of the the draft indictment of Mrs. Clinton, including one “listing overt acts.” From the public record, we know that the Whitewater case centered around whether Mrs. Clinton, while First Lady, lied to federal investigators about her role in the corrupt Arkansas S&L, concealed documents (including material under federal subpoena), and took other steps to cover-up her involvment. Prosecutors ultimately decided not to indict Mrs. Clinton, concluding that they could not win the complicated, largely circumstantial case against such a high-profile figure.

The draft indictments range from three to forty pages—the former likely excerpts or “scraps” from longer documents, the Vaughn Index indicates. Some of the drafts doubtless are copies but many clearly are not. A total of 451 pages of draft indictments are being withheld by the Archives.

In its final brief in the case, Judicial Watch took a wrecking ball to the Archives’ grand jury secrecy and personal privacy claims. Judicial Watch noted “the truly enormous quantities of grand jury material already made public” in the independent counsel’s final report. Judicial Watch provided the court with a detailed list of grand jury and non-grand jury material that had already been made public. If there ever was a valid claim to grand jury secrecy in this closely scrutinized case, it is long gone.

The Judicial Watch brief noted that the Archives “fails to identify a single, specific privacy interest Mrs. Clinton still has in the draft indictments” following publication of the independent counsel’s report and “hundreds of pages of grand jury materials, non-grand jury materials, and independent counsel legal theories and analysis that are already in the public domain.”

A typical FOIA privacy claim centers on unwarranted invasions of personal privacy. But in Mrs. Clinton’s case, the brief noted, the Archives “makes no claims that disclosure of the draft indictments will reveal any particular personal, medical or financial information about Mrs. Clinton, much less anything intimate or potentially embarrassing.”

Mrs. Clinton of course is one of the most famous women in the world, a former First Lady, senator and secretary of state, and the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president of the United States. The findings of an investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton told the truth to federal investigators and withheld evidence under subpoena while she was First Lady is clearly matter of public interest as voters weigh her suitability for the highest office in the land.

ODNI Clapper: We Can’t Leave Town

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We can’t fix this. A couple of additional points to add:

  1. Iran was pretty much controlled until the Obama regime decided to formal a rogue country to be accepted around the globe and terminate sanctions giving Iran more money to behave with wild abandon. Now John Kerry is working personally to help the entire economy of Iran.
  2. We have arrived at a malfunction junction where the intersection between intelligence and politics crash and politics wins over the defeat of global jihad.

And then there is Russia.

‘The U.S. can’t fix it’: James Clapper on America’s role in the Middle East

WaPo: Early in his tenure as director of national intelligence, James Clapper could sometimes be heard complaining, “I’m too old for this [expletive]!” He has now served almost six years as America’s top intelligence official, and when I asked him this week how much longer he would be in harness, he consulted his calendar and answered with relief, “Two hundred sixty-five days!”

Clapper, 75, has worked in intelligence for 53 years, starting when he joined the Air Force in 1963. He’s a crusty, sometimes cranky veteran of the ingrown spy world, and he has a perspective that’s probably unmatched in Washington. He offered some surprisingly candid comments — starting with a frank endorsement of President Obama’s view that the United States can’t unilaterally fix the Middle East.

Given Clapper’s view that intelligence services must cooperate against terrorism, a small breakthrough seems to have taken place in mid-April when Clapper met with some European intelligence chiefs near Ramstein Air Base in Germany to discuss better sharing of intelligence. The meeting was requested by the White House, but it hasn’t been publicized.

“We are on the same page, and we should do everything we can to improve intelligence coordination and information sharing, within the limits of our legal framework,” said Peter Wittig, German ambassador to Washington, confirming the meeting.

The terrorist threat has shadowed Clapper’s tenure. He admitted in a September 2014 interview that the United States had “underestimated” the Islamic State. He isn’t making that mistake now. He says the United States is slowly “degrading” the extremists but probably won’t capture the Islamic State’s key Iraqi stronghold this year and faces a long-term struggle that will last “decades.”

“They’ve lost a lot of territory,” he told me Monday. “We’re killing a lot of their fighters. We will retake Mosul, but it will take a long time and be very messy. I don’t see that happening in this administration.”

Even after the extremists are defeated in Iraq and Syria, the problem will persist. “We’ll be in a perpetual state of suppression for a long time,” he warned.

“I don’t have an answer,” Clapper said frankly. “The U.S. can’t fix it. The fundamental issues they have — the large population bulge of disaffected young males, ungoverned spaces, economic challenges and the availability of weapons — won’t go away for a long time.” He said at another point: “Somehow the expectation is that we can find the silver needle, and we’ll create ‘the city on a hill.’” That’s not realistic, he cautioned, because the problem is so complex.

I asked Clapper whether he shared Obama’s view, as expressed in Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Atlantic, that America doesn’t need the Middle East economically as it once did, that it can’t solve the region’s problems and that, in trying, the United States would harm its interests elsewhere. “I’m there,” said Clapper, endorsing Obama’s basic pessimism. But he explained: “I don’t think the U.S. can just leave town. Things happen around the world when U.S. leadership is absent. We have to be present — to facilitate, broker and sometimes provide the force.”

Clapper said the United States still can’t be certain how much harm was done to intelligence collection by the revelations of disaffected National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. “We’ve been very conservative in the damage assessment. Overall, there’s a lot,” Clapper said, noting that the Snowden disclosures made terrorist groups “very security-conscious” and speeded the move to unbreakable encryption of data. And he said the Snowden revelations may not have ended: “The assumption is that there are a lot more documents out there in escrow [to be revealed] at a time of his choosing.”

Clapper had just returned from a trip to Asia, where he said he’s had “tense exchanges” with Chinese officials about their militarization of the South China Sea. He predicted that China would declare an “air defense identification zone” soon in that area, and said “they’re already moving in that direction.”

 

Asked what he had achieved in his nearly six years as director of national intelligence, Clapper cited his basic mission of coordinating the 17 agencies that work under him. “The reason this position was created was to provide integration in the intelligence community. We’re better than we were.”

After a career in the spy world, Clapper argues that intelligence issues are basically simple; it’s the politics surrounding them that are complicated. “I can’t wait to get back to simplicity,” he said, his eye on that calendar.

**** Sampling of how bad things are:

  1. Al Qaeda issued a call for Muslims to mobilize to fight in al Sham. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri urged Muslims to fight in Syria and for the factions in Syria to unify. Zawahiri described the Syrian uprising as the only one from the Arab Spring to have continued along the right path. He sought for Muslims to defend the gains made in Syria against other actors like Russia, Iran, and the West, and stated the objective of a governing entity establishing itself in the territory. Hamza bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s son, echoed the call for mobilization. He also called on Muslims to unify in Iraq and Syria and for those who cannot travel to conduct lone-wolf attacks.
  2.  A pro-Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) cell attempted to weaponize anthrax and plan a mass-casualty attack similar to the 2013 Westgate Mall attack, according to Kenyan and Ugandan authorities. The cell’s ringleader may have communicated with ISIS militants in Libya and Syria, indicating an expansion of ISIS’s influence in East Africa.  Governments seeking counterterrorism funding may also exaggerate ISIS’s presence, however.
  3. ISIS resumed a territorial growth strategy in Libya after planned offensives on its stronghold in Sirte stalled. ISIS militants seized strategically located towns from Misratan militias to the west of Sirte as part of efforts to expand its contiguous zone of control in central Libya. ISIS is also bolstered by the support of tribal leaders and elders, representing factions of a large tribal federation that has suffered since the fall of Qaddafi. These tribal leaders are aligning with ISIS against opponents in both the Libyan National Army bloc in the east and the Misratan bloc in the west in order to protect their political and economic interests. [See CTP’s backgrounder on forces in Libya and a forecast of ISIS’s courses of actions in Libya.] (From: The American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project )  Add in Russia’s building war on NATO….

Clinton Cash, Coming to a Theater Near You

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‘Clinton Cash’ doc set to stir up controversy as it debuts at Cannes

MSNBC: CANNES, France — A massive police force will be guarding the Cannes Film Festival this year. But the only scuffle on the horizon may come in response to the right-wing producers of a devastating new documentary about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s alleged influence peddling and favor-trading. That film, “Clinton Cash,” screens here May 16 and opens in the U.S. on July 24 — just before the Democratic National Convention.

The allegations are as brazen as they are controversial: What other film at Cannes would come up with a plot that involves Russian President Vladimir Putin wrangling a deal with the alleged help of both Clintons, a Canadian billionaire, Kazakhstan mining officials and the Russian atomic energy agency — all of which resulted in Putin gaining control of 20 percent of all the uranium in the U.S.?

MSNBC got an exclusive first look at “Clinton Cash,” the flashy, hour-long film version of conservative author Peter Schweizer’s surprise 2015 bestseller, which The New York Times called the “the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle.” The Washington Post said that ”on any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta denounced the book as a bunch of “outlandish claims” with “zero evidence.”

The film portrays the Clintons as a greedy tag team who used the family’s controversial Clinton Foundation and her position as secretary of state to help billionaires make shady deals around the world with corrupt dictators, all while enriching themselves to the tune of millions.

The movie alleges that Bill Clinton cut a wide swathe through some of the most impoverished and corrupt areas of the world — the South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, India and Haiti among others — riding in on private jets with billionaires who called themselves philanthropists but were actually bent on plundering the countries and lining their own pockets.

In return, billionaire pals like Frank Giustra and Gilbert Chagoury, or high-tech companies like Swedish telecom giant Ericsson or Indian nuclear energy officials — to name just a few mentioned in the film — hired Clinton to speak at often $750,000 a pop, according to “Clinton Cash.” When a favor was needed at the higher levels of the Obama administration to facilitate some of the deals, Hillary Clinton was only willing to sign off on them, the movie reports.

As a film, it powerfully connects the dots —  whether you believe them or not — in a narrative that lacks the wonkiness of the book, which bore a full title of “The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.”

It packs the kind of Trump-esque mainstream punch that may have the presumptive GOP nominee salivating. He recently declared, “We’ll whip out that book because that book will become very pertinent.”

The hour-long documentary is intercut with “Homeland”-style clips of the Clintons juxtaposed against shots of blood-drenched money, radical madrassas, villainous dictators and private jets, all set to sinister music.

Produced by Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, with Schweizer as the film’s talking head, the documentary might be easy to dismiss as just another example of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” the former secretary of state referenced so many years ago.

But what complicates matters for Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that the book resulted in a series of investigations last year into Schweizer’s allegations by mainstream media organizations from The New York Times and CNN to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, many of which did not dispute his findings — and in some cases gathered more material that the producers used in the film. More recently, some information uncovered in the Panama Papers has echoed some of Schweitzer’s allegations in the movie and book.

The Clinton campaign loudly denounced the book as a “smear project” last year and Schweizer’s publisher, the Murdoch-owned Harper Collins, had to make some corrections to the Kindle version. But the changes, in the end, involved seven or eight inaccuracies, some of which were fairly minor in the context of the larger allegations, Politico reported.

Neither the Clinton campaign nor the Clinton Foundation responded to calls and emails requesting comment about the film Tuesday.

One of the most damning follow-ups to Schweizer’s most startling accusation — that Vladimir Putin wound up controlling 20 percent of American uranium after a complex series of deals involving cash flowing to the Clinton Foundation and the help of Secretary of State Clinton — was printed in The New York Times.

Like Schweizer, the Times found no hard evidence in the form of an email or any document proving a quid pro quo between the Clintons, Clinton Foundation donors or Russian officials. (Schweizer has maintained that it’s next to impossible to find a smoking gun but said there is a troubling “pattern of behavior” that merits a closer examination.)

But the Times concluded that the deal that brought Putin closer to his goal of controlling all of the world’s uranium supply is an “untold story … that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.”

“Other news outlets built on what I uncovered and some of that is in the film,” Schweizer, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, told NBC News Tuesday. “To me the key message is that while U.S. politics has long been thought to be a dirty game, it was always played by Americans. What the Clinton Foundation has done is open an avenue by which foreign investors can influence a chief U.S. diplomat. The film may spell all this out to people in a way the book did not and it may reach a whole new audience.”

 

Justice Dept. $75K to Hillary Campaign

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Ah…exactly how does conflict of interest not become part of this discussion? At this point, when evidence and testimony piles up against Hillary, which it has for years going back to Arkansas, she has built her own Teflon wall. It is becoming clear that Hillary has with great effort and favors made an end run around the FBI investigation. Your thoughts? You gotta begin to wonder how come Bernie is not using this ammo on her campaign.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination on Wednesday, praising his former administration colleague’s plans to tackle a wide range of issues, from gun violence to college affordability.

“Our next president can’t shy away from building on the progress of President Obama, which is why Hillary Clinton is the candidate that we need in the White House,” Holder said, according to The Associated Press.More from Politico.

By the way, it has been suggested often that one of the San Antonion, Texas version of the Castro brothers could be on the short list for her VP….imagine if she chose Eric Holder, Tom Perez, Xavier Becerra, Deval Patrick, Corey Booker, Bill Richardson, Kamala Harris or Susan Rice?

Terrifying isn’t it?  Tim Kaine maybe?

 or John Podesta?  George Clooney?

Or maybe  Valerie Jarrett in exchange for Obama’s added protection for her Clinton Foundation and email-gate crimes.

Yikes…..

Hillary Rakes in Nearly $75,000 From Justice Department Employees

Calls continue for appointment of a special counsel

FreeBeacon: Hillary Clinton has received nearly $75,000 in political contributions from employees at the Department of Justice, the agency that would decide whether or not to act if the FBI recommended charges against Clinton or her aides following its investigation into her private email server.

Justice Department employees have given Clinton far more money than her rivals, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Donald Trump, according to a  review of federal campaign contributions for the 2016 presidential cycle.

Clinton collected $73,437 from individuals who listed the “Department of Justice” as their employer. Twelve of the 228 contributions were for $2,700, the maximum individual amount allowed by law.

The fundraising haul marks a dramatic increase over Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential run in 2008, when she took in 23 contributions totaling $15,930 from employees at the agency, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Trump, by comparison, has received little help from Justice Department employees, recording just two contributions for a total of $381.

Sanders has taken 51 donations totaling $8,900 from Justice Department employees.

David Bossie, president of the watchdog group Citizens United, told the Washington Free Beacon he is not surprised by the donations, and renewed his call for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special counsel to handle Clinton’s case.

“I’m not surprised in the least to see more evidence that shows the politicization of the Justice Department,” Bossie said in a statement to the Free Beacon. “How can Democrat political appointees fairly investigate someone who is about to become their nominee for president? That’s why last July I called on Attorney General Lynch to appoint an impartial special counsel to investigate the private Clinton email server.”

“Today, I renew my call that Attorney General Lynch must appoint a special counsel to determine if Hillary Clinton or her agents broke the law and compromised our national security,” he continued. “This investigation needs to be conducted free of political influence once and for all.”

Bossie has questioned whether Lynch could remain impartial due to her past political donations. Lynch gave $10,700 in contributions to Democratic candidates between 2004 and 2008.

Howard Krongard, who was inspector general for the State Department from 2005 to 2008, predicted earlier this year that even if the FBI referred Clinton’s case to the Justice Department for prosecution it would “never get to an indictment.”

Krongard said the case would have to go through “four loyal Democratic women,” including Lynch, top White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, who heads the department’s criminal division.

The FBI is expected to interview Clinton in the coming weeks about her email practices. Clinton maintains that she has not been contacted by the FBI about an interview. However, the FBI has interviewed Clinton’s aides, including top adviser Huma Abedin.

The Justice Department did not return a request for comment.

Update 05/10/16: After publication, former U.S. Attorney Matthew Whitaker, who directs the watchdog group Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, called for a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton. 

“The report out today that Hillary Clinton received almost $75,000 in political contributions from Justice Department employees is yet another reason why the Justice Department cannot and should not decide whether to bring a case against Hillary Clinton for her reckless handling of classified information while Secretary of State,” Whitaker said in a statement. “The decision of whether or not to bring a case against Clinton will be a difficult one for Attorney General Loretta Lynch, as I don’t believe she has the fortitude to oppose President Obama, who has publicly said Clinton’s behavior didn’t put our national security at risk.  Since this Administration has shown no ability to be impartial, looking the other way at every turn of this investigation, I’m renewing an urgent call for the appointment of a special counsel in this case.”