Category Archives: Presidential campaign

Obamaphones Back in the News, the Scandal was a Secret

Posted on by

Primer: Remember YOU, the taxpayer are subsidizing this program.

FNC/WSJ: The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion last year to provide phones to low-income Americans, but a Wall Street Journal review of the program shows that a large number of those who received the phones haven’t proved they are eligible to receive them.

The Lifeline program—begun in 1984 to ensure that poor people aren’t cut off from jobs, families and emergency services—is funded by charges that appear on the monthly bills of every landline and wireless-phone customer. Payouts under the program have shot up from $819 million in 2008, as more wireless carriers have persuaded regulators to let them offer the service.

The FCC on the Lifeline program.

FCC Kept ‘Obamaphone’ Fraud Under Wraps Until After It Expanded Program

Commissioners were instructed not to reveal $5 million fine until day after controversial Lifeline expansion vote

 Tom Wheeler / APTom Wheeler / AP

Federal regulators were instructed to keep a massive fraud investigation under wraps until a day after a controversial vote to expand a program that was allegedly used to bilk taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars, one those regulators claims.

The Federal Communications Commission on Friday announced that it would seek $51 million in damages from a cell phone company that allegedly defrauded the federal Lifeline program of nearly $10 million.

The commission’s five members unanimously backed the Notice of Apparent Liability (NAL), but Republican commissioner Ajit Pai parted from his colleagues in a partial dissent. According to Pai, he and other commissioners were told not to reveal the details of its investigation until April 1, a day after the FCC voted to expand the Lifeline program.

“Commissioners were told that the Notice of Apparent Liability could not be released or publicly discussed until April 1, 2016, conveniently one day after the Commission was scheduled to expand the Lifeline program to broadband,” Pai wrote. “That’s not right.”

Pai did not say who issued that directive. However, it had the effect of preventing public knowledge of widespread fraud in the Lifeline program ahead of a contentious vote on expanding it despite persisting concerns about a lack of internal safeguards.

FCC spokesman Will Wiquist insisted that the timing was completely coincidental. “The timing of the enforcement action was in no way related to the timing of the vote on the program modernization,” he said in an email.

Lifeline has faced controversy over enrollment requirements that its critics say are too lax and vulnerable to fraud. The service, which subsidizes cell phone plans for low-income Americans, allows beneficiaries to enroll using cards issued for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a welfare program that has also faced fraud allegations.

Critics of the Lifeline program began calling its subsidized cell phones “Obamaphones” early in the Obama administration in response to viral YouTube videos of beneficiaries thanking the president for their free phones. The program was actually created under President Ronald Reagan.

The FCC’s NAL last week accused cell phone provider Total Call Mobile, which provides Lifeline services in 19 states, of “systematic and egregious misconduct” and “widespread enrollment fraud.”

According to the commission, Total Call employees enrolled tens of thousands of duplicate Lifeline beneficiaries and pocketed the extra subsidies. The FCC caught onto the scheme when the company enrolled an undercover FCC investigator in the program without asking for any eligibility documentation.

“Since 2014, Total Call has requested and received an estimated $9.7 million dollars in improper payments from the Universal Service Fund for duplicate or ineligible consumers despite repeated and explicit warnings from its own employees, in some cases compliance specialists, that company sales agents were engaged in widespread enrollment fraud,” the FCC said in a news release.

A common means of fraudulent enrollment was the repeated use of a single SNAP identification card, according to the FCC. That drew the ire of Commissioner Michael O’Reilly, who said the use of SNAP cards as Lifeline verification mechanisms is woefully inadequate.

“I must once again lodge my extreme frustration that the Commission continues to rely on SNAP as an entry point in the Lifeline program, and has the gall to claim that it is a highly accountable program, when it is painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that SNAP is riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse,” he wrote in a partial dissent in the Total Call case.

Despite those ongoing concerns, the FCC recently voted to expand the Lifeline program to include subsidies for 3G wireless broadband service.

That vote followed a contentious debate over the scope of the expansion and its accompanying price tag. The commission approved the expansion by a narrow 3-2 vote on March 31, a day before the FCC announced its Total Call NAL.

The existence of a massive ongoing Lifeline fraud investigation might’ve affected public perception of that vote, if not the vote itself, leading Pai to call the muzzling of commissioners on the Total Call investigation “conveniently” timed.

Pai also objected to commission delays that he said prevented it from sanctioning Total Call for the full scale of its apparent misconduct.

“Even though [the FCC] identified 32,498 intra-company duplicates, we pursue only 2,587. Even though we have evidence that Total Call Mobile bypassed federal safeguards to enroll 99.8% of its subscribers, we hold the company liable for only 16%,” Pai wrote.

“Under these circumstances, our precedent suggests that a forfeiture of at least $84,295,910 would have been appropriate. Yet the Commission settles for something much less.”

Even as the FCC was investigating this pattern of alleged fraud, Total Call was pouring money into its new Washington lobbying operation. According to disclosure forms, it hired lobbyists with the firm ML Strategies in June of last year, a month after the FCC subpoenaed the company.

ML Strategies has reported collecting $120,000 in fees from Total Call to lobby Congress and the FCC on “general issues related to the Lifeline program.”

The FCC’s investigation is not Total Call’s first time running afoul of federal regulators: the commission issued a $12,000 NAL in 2010 accusing the company of failing to abide by regulations on hearing aid compatibility.

Its sister companies have faced far larger fines for more egregious offenses.

Total Call Mobile is wholly owned by prepaid phone card company Total Call International, which is wholly owned by Japanese telecommunications giant KDDI. KDDI is also the sole shareholder of Locus Telecommunications.

The FCC has targeted Locus in numerous enforcement actions over the past decade, and sought fines reaching into the eight figures.

The FCC levied a $5 million penalty against the company in October “for deceptively marketing its prepaid telephone calling cards.” Previous Notices of Apparently Liability sought fines from the company of $5 million, $330,000, $25,000, $23,000, and $12,000.

Russia Flying Simulated Attacks on U.S. Destroyer

Posted on by

A phone call or a strongly worded letter yet from the White House? nah

WASHINGTON, April 13 (Reuters) – The White House is aware of Russian planes flying dangerously close to a U.S. guided missile destroyer in the Baltic Sea on Tuesday and continues to be concerned about such behavior, a spokesman said on Wednesday.

“The White House is aware of the incident,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at a daily briefing. “This incident … is entirely inconsistent with the professional norms of militaries operating in proximity to each other in international water and international airspace.”

Russian attack aircraft just flew within 30 feet of a U.S. Navy ship

 

MilitaryTimes: In one of the most aggressive actions in recent memory, Russian warplanes conducted “simulated attacks” on the a U.S. Navy vessel in the Baltic Sea on Tuesday, repeatedly flying within 30 feet of the ship, according to a defense official.

Sailors aboard the destroyer Donald Cook said the aircraft flew low enough to create wake in the sea waters surrounding the ship, and the ship’s commanding officer said the incident was “unsafe and unprofessional,” the defense official said.

“This was more aggressive than anything we’ve seen in some time,” according to the defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because U.S. officials have not officially disclosed the incidents.

Sailors aboard the ship described the Sukhoi Russian Su-24 as “wings clean,” meaning there were no visible bombs or armaments on the aircraft, the defense official said.

The nature of the overflight as a “simulated attack” may violate a 1973 treaty between the U.S. and Russia that specifically prohibits this type of maneuver, the defense official said.

The maneuver was one of several aggressive moves by Russian aircraft on Monday and Tuesday.

Shortly after leaving the Polish port of Gdynia, near Gdansk, on Monday, the Donald Cook at was sea in international waters conducting flight operations with a Polish helicopter, part of routine joint training exercises with the NATO ally.

During those flight operations, a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 combat aircraft appeared and conducted about 20 overflights, coming within 1,000 yards of the ship at an altitude of about 100 feet, the defense official said. In response, the commander of the Donald Cook suspended flight operations.

On Tuesday, the Donald Cook was underway in the Baltic Sea when a Russian helicopter —a Ka-27 Helix —made seven overflights and appeared to be taking photographs of the U.S. Navy ship, the defense official said.

Shortly after the helicopter left the area, an Su-24 began making “very low” overflights with a “simulated attack profile,” the defense official said. The aircraft made a total of 11 passes.

The ship’s commander repeatedly tried to make radio contact with the Russian aircraft but received no response, the defense official said.

After a formal investigation, the incident may prompt the U.S. government to formally lodge a complaint — or “demarche” — with Moscow, the defense official said.

While Russian aircraft during the past couple of years have conducted numerous aggressive overflights that Navy officials deemed “unprofessional,” the incident on Tuesday was the first to be deemed “unsafe,” the defense official said.

In 1973, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a treaty aimed at preventing incidents at sea. That treaty specifically prohibits “simulating attacks,” according to the U.S. State Department’s website.

The aircraft likely came from a Russian military installations in Kalingrad, an enclave of Russian territory on the Baltic Coast nestled between Poland and Lithuania.

This is the SU-24 up close in action.

Dewey Clarridge Died, What More you Need to Know

Posted on by

Personally, I have been talking about the matter of the Saudis and the Pakistanis nuclear weapons program.

By the way, the New York Times had no use for Clarridge.

Duane R. Clarridge, Brash Spy Who Fought Terror Networks, Dies at 83

Mark Mazzetti

New York Times

April 11, 2016

Duane R. Clarridge, a pugnacious American spy who helped found the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, was indicted and later pardoned for his role in the Iran-contra scandal, and resumed his intelligence career in his late 70s as the head of a private espionage operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, died on Saturday in Leesburg, Va. He was 83.

His lawyer, Raymond Granger, said the cause was complications of laryngeal and esophageal cancer.

Mr. Clarridge was an unflinching champion of a brawny American foreign policy and of the particular role played by the C.I.A.’s clandestine service — a cadre he likened to a secret army that “marches for the president” and ought to be subjected to as little outside scrutiny as possible.

Mr. Clarridge, widely known by his nickname Dewey, delighted in the role of rogue. He often arrived at work in white Italian suits or safari jackets and bragged to other C.I.A. officers about the brilliant ideas he had conceived while drinking the previous night.

“If you have a tough, dangerous job, critical to national security, Dewey’s your man,” Robert M. Gates, the former director of central intelligence and later defense secretary, was quoted as saying in “Casey,” a 1990 biography of William J. Casey, the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief during the Reagan administration, by Joseph E. Persico. “Just make sure you have a good lawyer at his elbow — Dewey’s not easy to control.”

He spent years overseas as an undercover officer, but perhaps his most consequential effort at the spy agency was the creation of the Counterterrorism Center (then called the Counterterrorist Center) in 1986 after a string of attacks the previous year, including the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the massacres at El Al ticket counters in Rome and Vienna carried out by the Abu Nidal Organization.

Up to that point, the C.I.A. had devoted little effort to understanding international terrorism, and Mr. Clarridge persuaded Mr. Casey to create the center with an unusual arrangement: having undercover spies and intelligence analysts working together to try to dismantle terrorist networks. Within a year, C.I.A. operations had significantly weakened the Abu Nidal organization.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Counterterrorism Center has grown into a behemoth, the heart of a spy agency transformed by years of terrorist hunting.

Mr. Clarridge’s efforts against international terrorism came as he was becoming ensnared by investigations into the Reagan administration’s efforts to use proceeds from secret arms sales to Iran to arm the contras, a Nicaraguan rebel group battling troops of the country’s socialist government, known as the Sandinistas.

Mr. Clarridge had been in charge of the C.I.A.’s covert war in Nicaragua in the early 1980s (he told his colleagues that his idea to mine the harbors of Nicaragua in 1983 came while he was drinking gin at home) and had developed a close relationship with Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was running the Iran-contra operation from his perch at the National Security Council.

According to the final report by Lawrence E. Walsh, the independent counsel investigating the Iran-contra affair, Mr. Clarridge testified that he had no knowledge that cargo ships sent to Iran to help secure the release of American hostages contained any weapons. He also denied trying to solicit money from foreign countries to circumvent a congressional prohibition against financing the contras.

“In both instances,” the report said, “there was strong evidence that Clarridge’s testimony was false.”

He was indicted on a charge of perjury in 1991, three years after he had retired from the agency. President George Bush pardoned him on Christmas Eve 1992, along with five other Iran-contra figures. He had the pardon framed, and he eventually hung it in the front hallway of his home near San Diego so it would be the first thing visitors saw upon entering his house.

But the scandal embittered him, and he used his 1997 memoir, “A Spy for All Seasons,” to settle some old scores. He lamented in the book that the C.I.A. had lost its swagger since the end of the Cold War, becoming a risk-averse organization that was beholden to lawyers and was degenerating “into something resembling the style, work ethic and morale of the post office.”

He joined the C.I.A. in 1955, after getting degrees from Brown and Columbia, and served undercover  in Nepal, India and Italy before being promoted to run the Latin America division in 1981.

He is survived by a daughter, Cassandra; two sons, Ian and Tarik; and five grandchildren. His first marriage ended in divorce; his second wife, Helga, died before him.

More than two decades after his retirement from the C.I.A., Mr. Clarridge began working as a government contractor when military officials in Kabul hired him and a small team to gather information about militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Using sources in the region — he identified them only by cover names, such as Waco and Willi — he would turn their field dispatches into reports he sent to the military command by encrypted email.

Mr. Clarridge worked for a security firm hired by The New York Times in December 2008 to assist in seeking the release of a reporter, David Rohde, who had been kidnapped by the Taliban. Mr. Rohde escaped on his own seven months later, but Mr. Clarridge used his role in the episode to promote his spy network to military officials.

The Pentagon canceled the contract in 2010 after the private spying operation was revealed.

But two years later, after Mr. Clarridge had moved into a retirement home in Northern Virginia, he told a reporter that he still had his “network” intact for the future.

In November 2015, Mr. Clarridge was back in the news when The Times identified him as an adviser to Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and Republican candidate for president, who had come under criticism for statements he made about foreign affairs during debates. Asked about the candidate’s foreign policy acumen, Mr. Clarridge was typically impolitic.

“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” he said.

 

 

Recall the Chatter About Being Prosecuted as a Climate Changer Denier?

Posted on by

The standing is being set for this to happen. How did we get here?

Subpoenaed Into Silence on Global Warming

By

Bloomberg: The Competitive Enterprise Institute is getting subpoenaed by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands to cough up its communications regarding climate change. The scope of the subpoena is quite broad, covering the period from 1997 to 2007, and includes, according to CEI, “a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information.”

My first reaction to this news was “Um, wut?” CEI has long denied humans’ role in global warming, and I have fairly substantial disagreements with CEI on the issue. However, when last I checked, it was not a criminal matter to disagree with me. It’s a pity, I grant you, but there it is; the law’s the law.

(I pause to note, in the interests of full disclosure, that before we met, my husband briefly worked for CEI as a junior employee. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)

Speaking of the law, why on earth is CEI getting subpoenaed? The attorney general, Claude Earl Walker, explains: “We are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent market where consumers can make informed choices about what they buy and from whom. If ExxonMobil has tried to cloud their judgment, we are determined to hold the company accountable.”

That wasn’t much of an explanation. It doesn’t mention any law that ExxonMobil may have broken. It is also borderline delusional, if Walker believes that ExxonMobil’s statements or non-statements about climate change during the period 1997 to 2007 appreciably affected consumer propensity to stop at a Mobil station, rather than tootling down the road to Shell or Chevron, or giving up their car in favor of walking to work.

State attorneys general including Walker held a press conference last week to talk about the investigation of ExxonMobil and explain their theory of the case. And yet, there sort of wasn’t a theory of the case. They spent a lot of time talking about global warming, and how bad it was, and how much they disliked fossil fuel companies. They threw the word “fraud” around a lot. But the more they talked about it, the more it became clear that what they meant by “fraud” was “advocating for policies that the attorneys general disagreed with.”

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman gave the game away when he explained that they would be pursuing completely different theories in different jurisdictions — some under pension laws, some consumer protection, some securities fraud. It is traditional, when a crime has actually been committed, to first establish that a crime has occurred, and then identify a perpetrator. When prosecutors start running that process backwards, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re looking at prosecutorial power run amok.

And that approaches certainty when attorneys general start sending subpoenas to think tanks  that ExxonMobil might have supported. What exactly would the subpoena prove? That ExxonMobil supported opinions about climate change? That the opinions tended to be congruent with its own interests? That this opinion might have been wrong, and if so, might have encouraged wrong beliefs in others? This is a description of, roughly, every person or organization in the history of the world, not excluding attorneys general. It’s also not illegal. Especially since, as the New York Times points out, “the company published extensive research over decades that largely lined up with mainstream climatology.” This isn’t preventing consumers from buying into a Ponzi scheme; it’s an attempt to criminalize advocacy.

I support action on climate change for the same reason I buy homeowner’s, life and disability insurance: because the potential for catastrophe is large. But that doesn’t mean I’m entitled to drive people who disagree with me from the public square. Climate activists have an unfortunate tendency to try to do just that, trying to brand dissenters as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.

It’s an understandable impulse. It seems easier to shut down dissenters than to persuade people to stop consuming lots and lots of energy-intensive goods and services.

But history has had lots and lots of existentially important debates. If you thought that only the One True Church could save everyone from Hell, the Reformation was the most existentially important debate in human history. If you thought that Communist fifth columnists were plotting to turn the U.S. into Soviet Russia, that was also pretty existentially important. We eventually realized that it was much better to have arguments like these with words, rather than try to suppress one side of them by force of law.

Unfortunately those who wield the law forget that lesson, and we get cases like the CEI subpoena, intended to silence debate by hounding one side. The attorney general doesn’t even need to have the law on his side; the process itself can be the punishment, as victims are forced to spend immense amounts on legal fees, and immense time and money on complying with investigations. (And if the law were on the attorney general’s side in a case like this, then that’s a terrible law, and it should be overturned.)

Prosecutors know the damage they can do even when they don’t have a leg to stand on. The threat of investigation can coerce settlements even in weak cases.

The enemies of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and ExxonMobil should hold their applause. In a liberal democracy, every guerrilla tactic your side invents will eventually be used against you. Imagine a coalition of Republican attorneys general announcing an investigation of companies that have threatened state boycotts over gay-rights issues, and you may get a sense of why this is not such a good precedent to set.

The rule of law, and our norms about free speech, represent a sort of truce between both sides. We all agree to let other people talk, because we don’t want to live in a world where we ourselves are not free to speak. Because we do not want to be silenced by an ambitious prosecutor, we should all be vigilant when ambitious prosecutors try to silence anyone else.

POTUS Made the Guarantee Twice, Not Political Cover

Posted on by

Chris Wallace asked Obama about Hillary’s email and server. In Obama’s answer he made the guarantee twice there would be no political cover for Hillary. He went on to describe that the White House never got involved in cases where there were ongoing investigations. What???

Barack Obama also defended his decisions to play golf….and his timing was not in question. Too bad Chris could not ask him about not joining other leaders in Paris and instead sent John Kerry later accompanied with James Taylor to perform ‘You’ve Got a Friend’. Sheesh really?

EXCLUSIVE: Obama vows no influence in Clinton email probe, defends terror fight

FNC: President Obama repeatedly vowed there would be no political influence over the Justice Department’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state — in a wide-ranging interview with “Fox News Sunday” in which he also ardently defended his efforts to defeat the Islamic State and other terror groups amid criticism about his perceived indifference.

“I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case,” Obama told “Fox News Sunday.” “Nobody is above the law. How many times do I have to say it?”

His remarks came less than three months after White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest publicly downplayed a possible indictment for Clinton.

Obama praised Clinton’s tenure running the State Department from 2009 to 2013 and said he still doesn’t think the emails to and from her private server breached national security.

However, he acknowledged, as Clinton has done, that her using the  private server was not a good idea, in part after revelations that roughly 2,000 of the emails included classified information.

“There’s carelessness in terms of managing emails, that she has owned, and she recognizes,” Obama told Fox News’ Chris Wallace, in his first interview with the cable network since 2008.

Obama defended efforts to stop the growing international terror threat and his response to terrorists.

“My No. 1 job is to protect the American people,” Obama said, in an interview taped Friday at the Unversity of Chicago, where he was a professor. “My No. 1 priority right now is defeating ISIL (the Islamic State.) … I’m the guy who calls the families, or meets with them, or hugs them, or tries to comfort a mom, or a dad, or a husband, or a kid, after a terrorist attack. So let’s be very clear about how much I prioritize this: This is my No. 1 job.”

Obama also defended his actions after several deadly attacks, including playing a round of golf after American James Foley was beheaded and going to a baseball game in Cuba after the Brussels terror bombings last month, for which the Islamic State has claimed responsibility.

“In the wake of terrorist attacks, it has been my view consistently that the job of the terrorists, in their minds, is to induce panic, induce fear, get societies to change who they are. And what I’ve tried to communicate is, “You can’t change us. You can kill some of us, but we will hunt you down, and we will get you.

“And in the meantime, just as we did in Boston, after the marathon bombing, we’re going to go to a ballgame. And do all the other things that make our life worthwhile.  … That’s the message of resilience. That we don’t panic, that we don’t fear, we will hunt you down and we will get you.”

The president also dug in on his position that the GOP-controlled Senate should vote on whether to confirm his nomination to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.

He argued lawmakers have a constitutional responsibility and suggested that Garland would pass the confirmation process.

“I think that if they go through the process, they won’t have a rationale to defeat him,” Obama said.

The president nevertheless acknowledged that congressional Republicans are in a tough election-year position, considering he’s out of office in about nine months, with the possibility the next president could be a Republican who will make his own nomination.