Category Archives: Treasury

POTUS Green Climate Fund, Expands EPA

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The most harmful and unharnessed agency in the Federal government hurting the American people and business is the EPA. The recent Climate Change Agreement that Barack Obama announced with hundreds of other countries will cost the U.S. government $100 billion per year, paid to countries that cannot fund it themselves. It is called the Green Climate Fund, essentially a happy name for redistribution of wealth.

CBS: The path to good green intentions is strewn with obstacles that could waylay a $100 billion plan to help poorer countries fight climate change. These range from the adequacy of the fund’s size to its secrecy-minded operations. And it’s all part of a worldwide effort mandated by the Paris climate deal, whose overall cost could reach $16.5 trillion.

Part of the climate accord struck over the weekend in Paris, the Green Climate Fund will subsidize the developing nations in adopting such steps as carbon-free power generation and protections against global warming-linked catastrophes like hurricanes and rising seas.
Climate cleanup work is an expensive proposition. The total tab, focused on developed economies curbing their voluminous carbon emissions, is around $16.5 trillion, the International Energy Agency estimates. A switch from fossil fuels would entail a massive reordering of global energy production and delivery, moving toward renewable sources and greater energy efficiency, the agency said.

A deeper look at the EPA, including the fraud, collusion and propaganda.

E.P.A. Broke the Law by Using Social Media to Push Water Rule, Auditor Finds
 NYT’s WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” in violation of federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the general public to support President Obama’s controversial rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded.
The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report in The New York Times on the agency’s practices, served as a cautionary tale to federal agencies about the perils of getting too active in using social media to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.

It also emerged as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week.

“GAO’s finding confirms what I have long suspected, that EPA will go to extreme lengths and even violate the law to promote its activist environmental agenda,” Senator Jim Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee who is pressing to block the rule, said in a statement Monday. “EPA’s illegal attempts to manufacture public support for its Waters of the United States rule and sway Congressional opinion regarding legislation to address that rule have undermined the integrity of the rule-making process and demonstrated how baseless this unprecedented expansion of EPA regulatory authority really is.”
The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap to counter opposition to its water rule, which imposes new restrictions on how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency. said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule flagrant government overreach.

But in the E.P.A.’s counterattack, the G.A.O. says agency officials engaged in “covert propaganda” on behalf of Mr. Obama’s water policy by concealing the fact that its social messages were coming from the E.P.A. The agency essentially became lobbyists for its cause by including links that directed people to advocacy organizations.

Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but they are not allowed to engage in propaganda, which means covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.

As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of these laws, a 26-page report signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded, in an investigation requested by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

“EPA appealed to the public to contact Congress in opposition to pending legislation in violation of the grass-roots lobbying prohibition,” the report says. In a letter to the G.A.O. as the review was underway, Avi S. Garbow, the E.P.A.’s general counsel, said the agency had looked back at its social media campaign and concluded that it had complied with all federal laws, calling it “an appropriately far-reaching effort to educate the American public about an important part of EPA’s mission: protecting clean water.”
The rule in question has been adopted by the agency, but its implementation was suspended nationally in October by a federal appeals court, after opponents of the plan, who argue that it vastly increases the control of the federal government over land near surface waters, filed a lawsuit challenging it.

The G.A.O. report details two specific violations that took place as the E.P.A. was preparing to issue the final rule. The first violation involved the Thunderclap campaign in September 2014, in which the E.P.A. used a new type of social media tool to quickly reach out to 1.8 million people to urge them to support the clean-water proposal. Thunderclap, described as an online flash mob, allows large groups of people to share a single message together at the same time.

“Clean water is important to me,” the Thunderclap message said. “I support EPA’s efforts to protect it for my health, my family, and my community.”

The effort violated federal law, the G.A.O. said, because as it ricocheted through the Internet, many people who received it would not have known that it was written by the E.P.A., making it covert propaganda.

The agency separately violated the anti-lobbying law when one of its public affairs officers wrote a blog post saying he was a surfer and did not “want to get sick from pollution,” and included a link button to an advocacy group urging the public to “tell Congress to stop interfering with your right to clean water.”

The G.A.O. has instructed the E.P.A. to find out how much money was spent by staff involved in these violations and to report back.

Such findings by the G.A.O. are infrequent but not unprecedented. The G.A.O. concluded similarly that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid violated the anti-propaganda act in 2004 when it covertly paid for news videos distributed to television stations without disclosing that it had funded the work. The Department of Education, in 2005, was also found to have violated the same law when it hired a public relations firm to covertly promote the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Thomas Reynolds, who as communications director at the E.P.A. moved to add political campaign-style tactics to the agency’s public relations operation, has recently moved to the White House. Liz Purchia, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said the agency had not yet seen the report, which was issued Monday morning, and could not comment on it yet.

 

Bowe Bergdahl Full Court Martial Case Referred

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While Bowe Bergdahl’s defense team requested a lower level referral for his desertion case, such is not the outcome. He is formally being charged with in his court martial for desertion and abandoning his post as well as mis-behavior before the enemy.

The Republicans issued a 98 page report out of the House Armed Services Committee that concluded the Obama administration violated law by not giving Congress the mandatory 30 day notice of transfer of Guantanamo detainees to Qatar of which 5 were transferred in exchange for Bergdahls’s release.

Then there is the hypocrisy of the Obama administration with regard as to paying ransom for hostages.

But there is plenty more about the Bergdahl case and it includes the FBI, failed information and money.

Inside the Botched Rescue of Bowe Bergdahl

Shane Harris/DailyBeast: The U.S. government paid a ransom in the hopes of freeing the captive American soldier, a congressman alleges. But when the FBI went to get Bowe Bergdahl, he wasn’t there.
In late February of 2014, a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation traveled to the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, ready to bring home Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had been held for nearly five years by an ally of the Taliban.The operation wasn’t announced publicly. But within U.S. national security agencies, word spread that the most well-known American hostage, who had disappeared from his remote post in Afghanistan in 2009, was about to be released. It was a particularly anxious moment because the Taliban had recently broken off talks over a potential prisoner swap for Bergdahl.But the FBI wasn’t anticipating a prisoner exchange. Instead, according to a member of Congress and another individual who is knowledgeable about the operation, the U.S. government had sent money to Bergdahl’s captors in the hopes of freeing him.

The FBI’s representative waited. But Bergdahl never came. Any hopes for his homecoming were soon eclipsed by concerns that the information that prompted the rescue effort was false or misleading. Had the FBI been duped? Had the U.S. paid a ransom for Bergdahl and been cheated?
Bergdahl was eventually freed at the end of May 2014, in exchange for five Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. But the botched rescue operation three months earlier raised questions about whether the FBI, which is in charge of efforts to repatriate all Americans held hostage overseas, had received shoddy intelligence about where Bergdahl was being held and his condition, and if other efforts to recover Americans might also be the victim of bad intelligence.
“What we know is that non-DOD [Department of Defense] organizations, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), undertook the recovery mission,” Rep. Duncan Hunter, who has investigated the Bergdahl case and is a critic of the Obama administration’s hostage rescue efforts, wrote in a letter Friday to the Justice Department Inspector General.

“In fact, in February 2014, it was the FBI that disclosed to military officials that Bergdahl’s release was imminent; however, after several days, nothing happened,” Hunter said.
A copy of the letter describing the FBI’s lead role, which hasn’t been previously reported, was obtained by The Daily Beast.
What had prompted the FBI to send an emissary to a dangerous border region, all while efforts were under way, albeit in fits and starts, to conduct a prisoner swap?

Hunter wrote to the the Justice Department that a senior official has claimed that the U.S. government “paid [the] Haqqani Network for Bergdahl’s release and received nothing in return.” The Haqqani are a Taliban ally that operates along the border region, and have a history of negotiating for prisoners.

Based on his own sources and information he has seen, Hunter said, the person sent by the FBI to the border “awaited Bergdahl’s arrival following some form of discussion about facilitating a payment.”

President Obama and his top aides have said many times that the U.S. will not pay ransoms for hostages, despite the willingness of the Haqqani and other groups, including al Qaeda, to barter for the lives of their captives.

But that policy is at best a half-truth. In fact, the government has paid money to hostage takers and helped hostages’ families do the same, and that practice is likely to continue, according to kidnapping ransom experts and current and former U.S. officials.

But the administration has never said it paid a ransom for Bergdahl. Instead, officials have argued that the prisoner swap was the only viable option. The administration faced opposition to the swap in Congress, after senior intelligence officials told lawmakers that the five Taliban were likely to return to hostilities against the U.S. if they were freed. And the families of some civilian hostages questioned why the president was willing to exchange prisoners for a solider but not their loved ones.

Hunter has previously raised allegations that the U.S. government paid a ransom for Bergdahl and questioned whether any intermediaries absconded with the money. But the release of a scathing report on the prisoner swap last week by the House Armed Services Committee has fueled a new effort to learn if the U.S. tried to pay for Bergdahl’s return.

Bergdahl himself is also back in the public spotlight, as the subject of Season 2 of the acclaimed podcast Serial, which premiered last week.

Some of Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers have said the Army risked lives trying to rescue him, and have accused Bergdahl of desertion. And the soldier has become a lightning rod in the 2016 presidential election. The leading Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, has repeatedly called Bergdahl a traitor who abandoned his post and endangered other troops who tried to rescue him.

Allegations of failed rescue missions and secret ransoms would only deepen the controversy surrounding Bergdahl’s release.

The Defense Department’s inspector general looked into the allegations of a ransom payment and determined that none was paid. But the watchdog agency has no jurisdiction over the FBI and apparently only looked at whether Pentagon funds were used. Now, Hunter wants the Justice Department to investigate the FBI’s role and whether money came from there or other sources, and if such payments violated any laws.

Two sources familiar with the FBI-led operation in 2014 said it involved no exchange of prisoners, but that there was no reason to believe Bergdahl’s captors would let him go without getting something in return. Indeed, they had already been negotiating for a prisoner swap.

By late February, word of the plan was spreading throughout the corridors of government. On Feb. 27, the committee found, an email was sent around to personnel in the National Security Council, the Defense Department, and the State Department, about a report that “[i]n approximately 7-10 days, there is the possibility that the USG may be able to recover Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.”

The committee doesn’t identify the author of the email, but two knowledgeable sources said it refers to the FBI operation. There’s no indication from the committee’s report that anyone who received the message realized the operation was going nowhere, and that Bergdahl wasn’t about to be freed.

Some important details of the FBI-led operation remain unclear, including whether the person sent over the border was an FBI agent or a proxy.

A spokesperson for the FBI didn’t comment for this story.

But what is clear is that the Pentagon knew that the FBI was getting involved. How much military officials vetted the intelligence that prompted the bureau to go to the border, however, is an open question. Committee investigators claimed that senior military officials tried to obscure what they knew about the FBI plan, and to portray the five-for-one prisoner swap, which was backed by the administration, as the only real option being pursued.

The Defense Department “was aware of this operation and maintained situational awareness of it, but did not directly participate in it,” the Pentagon’s inspector general told the committee, referring to what sources told The Daily Beast was the FBI operation.

How closely the military and law enforcement worked together to recover Bergdahl is important for understanding whether more could have been done to secure his release without trading the five Taliban prisoners. There are also at least three Americans still being held by the Haqqani network, and understanding what has worked in the past—or hasn’t—could help speed their safe return.

The military was also pursuing a plan to rescue Bergdahl by force, the committee found, another option that apparently involved no prisoner swaps.

An email sent on Feb. 28, 2014, refers to a briefing and “slidedeck” that had been “evidently worked up by JSOC [the military’s Joint Special Operations Command], replete with a code name and an exfiltration plan,” according to the email’s anonymous author.

The email was sent to Michael Dumont, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia. After receiving it, he wrote to two senior colleagues with concerns that the plan might be exposed.

“For something that was to be very, very close hold and extremely sensitive, this is starting to get out. We need to somehow shut this down and get the info back under control,” Dumont told Rear Adm. Craig Faller, who was then director of operations at U.S. Central Command, and Army Brig. Gen. Robert White, then the director of the Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell for the Joint Staff.

The rescue plan was apparently never launched, and it’s not clear why. But Dumont’s email shows that the prisoner swap was not the only rescue operation on the Pentagon’s drawing board.

When the Armed Services Committee asked Dumont and other officials about alternate plans, they said they had no knowledge of them, a fact that “deeply concerned” the investigators considering there was an email trail and active discussion within several branches of government about multiple efforts, including the allegedly imminent release of Bergdahl to the FBI.

The committee asked Dumont how close any options besides the prisoner swap came to fruition. “Were you on the verge at some point [of recovering Sgt. Bergdahl]?”

Dumont responded, “During my tenure, I would say, no, we were not on the verge. Proposals that people were coming to talk to me about I thought were half-baked and ill-conceived and risky… I didn’t find anything that was viable.”

After Bergdahl was released, senior administration officials also said the trade was the only option to free him. Testifying before the Armed Services Committee in June 2014, then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was asked if the prisoner swap was the only non-military alternative to get Bergdahl.

“Yes…this was the one option that we had,” Hagel said, adding that there were no other “non-kinetic” alternatives that were “serious,” that is, options for freeing Bergdahl that didn’t involve the use of force.

The congressional investigators accused the Pentagon of misrepresenting those plans and how advanced they really were.

“The fact that the Committee did not learn about any prospective alternative recovery planning efforts until related information was produced in the course of this investigation additionally illustrates the fraught oversight relationship which exists between the Committee and the Department.”

The committee said it would continue investigating Bergdahl’s release.

Mainstream Media Starts Questioning Obama Policy….

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Political correctness got people killed and many others injured. Who started the policy of Islamic political correctness? Countless Muslim organizations in America.

From ABC News: Secret US Policy Blocks Agents From Looking at Social Media of Visa Applicants, Former Official Says

Fearing a civil liberties backlash and “bad public relations” for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end a secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, a former senior department official said.

“During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process,” John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis. Cohen is now a national security consultant for ABC News.

One current and one former senior counter-terrorism official confirmed Cohen’s account about the refusal of DHS to change its policy about the public social media posts of all foreign applicants.

A spokesperson for the DHS, Marsha Catron, told ABC News that months after Cohen left, in the fall of 2014, the Department began three pilot programs to include social media in vetting, but current officials say that it is still not a widespread policy. A review of the broader policy is already underway, the DHS said.

The revelation comes as members of Congress question why U.S. officials failed to review the social media posts of San Bernardino terrorist Tashfeen Malik. She received a U.S. visa in May 2014, despite what the FBI said were extensive social media messages about jihad and martyrdom.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., demanded Sunday that the U.S. immediately initiate a program that would check the social media sites of those admitted on visas.”

“Had they checked out Tashfeen Malik,” the senator said, “maybe those people in San Bernardino would be alive.”

Former DHS under-secretary Cohen said he and others pressed hard for just such a policy change in 2014 that would allow a review of publicly-posted social media messages as terror group followers increasingly used Twitter and Facebook to show their allegiance to a variety of jihadist groups.

Cohen said officials from United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) both pressed for a change in policy.

“Immigration, security, law enforcement officials recognized at the time that it was important to more extensively review public social media postings because they offered potential insights into whether somebody was an extremist or potentially connected to a terrorist organization or a supporter of the movement,” said Cohen, who left DHS in June 2014.

Cohen said the issue reached a head at a heated 2014 meeting chaired by Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, other top deputies and representatives of the DHS Office of Civil Liberties and the Office of Privacy.

“The primary concern was that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly and there were concerns that it would be embarrassing,” Cohen said in an interview broadcast on “Good Morning America” today.

Cohen said he and others were deeply disappointed that the senior leadership would not approve a review of what were publicly-posted online messages.

“There is no excuse for not using every resource at our disposal to fully vet individuals before they come to the United States,” Cohen said.

A former senior counter-terrorism official, who participated in the 2014 discussion, said, “Why the State Department and Homeland Security Department have not leveraged the power of social media is beyond me.”

“They felt looking at public postings [of foreign U.S. visa applicants] was an invasion of their privacy,” the official told ABC News. “The arguments being made were, and are still, in bad faith.”

Cohen said the disclosures by Edward Snowden about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance policies fed concern of bad public relations that would affect the U.S. government’s standing with civil rights groups and European allies.

“It was primarily a question of optics,” said Cohen. “There were concerns from a privacy and civil liberties perspective that while this was not illegal, that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly.”

Cohen said he and others were deeply troubled by the decision.

“If we don’t look and don’t review, we don’t know,” he said.

Officials said that because Malik used a pseudonym in her online messages, it is not clear that her support for terror groups would have become known even if the U.S. conducted a full review of her online traffic.

DHS’s Catron told ABC News the Department is “actively considering additional ways to incorporate the use of social media review in its various vetting programs,” while keeping an eye on privacy concerns.

“The Department will continue to ensure that any use of social media in its vetting program is consistent with current law and appropriately takes into account civil rights and civil liberties and privacy protections,” Catron said.

State Department records show that in 2014 the U.S. government issued nearly 10 million nonimmigrant visas, over 40,000 of which were K-1 fiancé visas like the one Malik used to enter the country.

From Ben Shapiro at DailyWire:

We already know that political correctness got Americans killed in San Bernardino. A neighbor of that delightful, non-suspicious, American-as-apple-pie couple Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik refused to report his suspicions of nefarious activity thanks to his fear of being labeled a racist.

That fear was legitimate – the same Obama administration that tells Americans to say something if they see something is now investigating the Irving Police Department for doing just that with a Muslim teenager who brought a device that looked like a bomb to school.

But at least you could make the case that it wasn’t directly the fault of the Obama administration that the neighbor didn’t call the cops.

Not any longer.

We knew last week that not only was Malik “screened” by the Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism squad, but that she passed a criminal and national security background check using an FBI database.

Now we know something more: we know that, according to a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis, the Obama administration actively prohibited its own agents from screening social media messages of foreign citizens applying for visas to enter the country. According to John Cohen, that official, “During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process.”

This is pure insanity. The same adminisitration that insists it must gather metadata from the entire population of the United States for security purposes refuses to screen the social messages of non-citizens with no American rights. Why? For public relations. Said Cohen:

Immigration, security, law enforcement officials recognized at the time that it was important to more extensively review public social media postings because they offered potential insights into whether somebody was an extremist or potentially connected to a terrorist organization or a supporter of the movement….The primary concern was that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly and there were concerns that it would be embarrassing.

He added, “it was primarily a question of optics. There were concerns from a privacy and civil liberties perspective that while this was not illegal, that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly.

Fourteen Americans died for optics. But that’s nothing new for the Obama administration, which has allowed thousands worldwide to die for optics.

Even Democrats acknowledge this is dangerous and idiotic policy. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) admitted as much, stating, “Had they checked out Tashfeen Malik, maybe those people in San Bernardino would be alive.”

This is why Donald Trump’s blanket ban on Muslim immigration until the government can “figure things out” has suddenly spiked in popularity. According to a Rasmussen poll released Friday, “46 percent of likely voters would favor a policy preventing Muslim immigrants from entering the country until tighter security screening procedures can be implemented, while 40 percent would oppose such a measure.”

This isn’t bigotry. It’s rational distrust of a government hell-bent on protecting its own public relations ass rather than the American people.

Political correctness kills. And the Obama administration is its headman.

Hillary’s Campaign Connect to Turkey’s Gulen

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Sheesh, this moderate Muslim thing in the United States has taken on additional wings of disgust and Hillary’s name continues to be in the equation….often.

It was December of 2014, that this site, FoundersCode wrote about the Gulen schools in America and some have been investigated by the FBI and closed.

Islamic Cleric May Be Laundering Taxpayer Money Into Clinton Campaign — Hillary Under Pressure To Return Donations

DailyCaller: A mysterious Turkish Islamic cleric — whose followers have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s family foundation and to her presidential campaign — is being accused of ordering the false imprisonment of three followers of a competing religious sect, according to documents filed in federal court earlier this week.

The cleric, Fethullah Gulen, has lived in Pennsylvania’s Pocono mountains since 1998, when he went into exile from Turkey amid accusations that he plotted to undermine the secular regime that was in place at the time.

But the 74-year-old has been able to wield control from that that secluded compound over his worldwide network of media organizations and charter schools — some 120 of which are in the U.S.

Gulen also maintains enormous power in Turkey, where he uses his strong following to quash political opponents, according to Robert Amsterdam, an attorney hired by the Turkish government to investigate Gulen.

Gulen and Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, were once allies against the nation’s secular regime. But the pair fell out publicly after a 2013 corruption investigation targeting Erdogan’s inner circle. The politician accused the cleric of coordinating the campaign. In turn, he’s reportedly asked President Obama to extradite Gulen to face charges back home.

It was against that backdrop that Amsterdam laid out during a press conference on Wednesday the claims made in a lawsuit against Gulen.

In the suit, three followers of the Dogan movement, which follows the interpretations of Mehmet Dogan and Said Nursi, claim Gulen ordered their arrest because they criticized the Gulen movement, also known as Hizmet. They also claimed that Gulenists planted false evidence to build the case against them.

According to the suit, Gulen’s alleged “targeted campaign of persecution” violates U.S. law.

But Amsterdam also laid out evidence against Gulen that lies closer to home, claiming that whistleblowers have come forward to shed light on how taxpayer-funded Gulen charter schools in the U.S. are operated.

He said that the whistleblowers have claimed that teachers proselytize to American students about the Gulen movement, which is considered to espouse a moderate form of Islam. He also said that teachers in those schools have claimed that Turkish teachers are given bonuses based on their indoctrination efforts. The ultimate reward is a trip to Gulen’s Pocono compound, Amsterdam claimed.

He also pointed to investigations conducted in several states and by the FBI which have found that the Gulen movement relies heavily on the H-1B visa system to fill its schools with Turkish teachers.

As Amsterdam noted Wednesday, in 2009, Gulen charter schools received more H-1B visas than Google, the massive tech company. He also pointed to audits conducted in some locales which showed that some of the taxpayer-funded Gulen schools have paid more for immigration attorneys for their Turkish teachers than they have for books.

“This is where American taxpayer money is going,” Amsterdam asserted, adding that “clearly, the United States didn’t need anything like that level of teachers.”

In turn, the teachers — largely males who often know little English — donate a large portion of their taxpayer-funded salaries to the Gulen movement.

And those funds are used, in part, to make the U.S. arm of the Gulen movement one of the “largest foreign interveners in American political activity,” Amsterdam claimed.

And perhaps the biggest beneficiary of those political funds is Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner.

As The Daily Caller reported last month, Gulenists have contributed heavily to Clinton’s presidential campaign and to the Clinton Foundation. (RELATED: Followers Of A Mysterious Islamic Cleric Have Donated Heavily To Hillary’s Foundation And Campaign)

Recep Ozkan, a businessman who has served as president of the Gulen-affiliated Turkish Cultural Center, contributed as much as $1 million to Clinton’s global charity in the third quarter of 2015. The Gulenist leader also contributed the maximum amount allowed under federal law to Clinton’s presidential campaign. He and another Gulen leader, Gokhan Ozkok, served as national finance co-chairs for Ready PAC, a political action committee created last year to support Clinton, TheDC found.

As a senator from New York, Clinton attended at least two functions at the Turkish Cultural Center.

The suspicious sourcing of the Gulenists’ contributions should compel Clinton to return them, Amsterdam told TheDC.

“Mr. Gulen has used his religious movement and network of charter schools to support political donations to Secretary Clinton and other politicians to build political support in the U.S. — support he uses to expand his massive charter school operation and attack the elected Government of Turkey,” Amsterdam said, adding that the donations are, “in part, taken from the salaries of teachers on H-1B visas.”

“The Clinton campaign and any other recipient of Gulen-linked donations should consider returning these funds as Senator Ayotte did.”

Last month, Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican, returned more than $43,000 in contributions given to her campaign by Gulenists in April 2014. As USA Today reported at the time, many of the contributors appeared not to have known who was receiving their contributions. Others could not be tracked down, raising suspicion over whether the payouts were legitimate.

Ayotte called on Clinton to follow her lead in returning contributions her campaign has received from Gulenists. The Clinton campaign has not responded to requests for comment.

 

 

 

 

 

More Hillary Emails are Missing Regarding her Server

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State Department can’t find emails of top Clinton IT staffer

The FBI has taken possession of Bryan Pagliano’s computer system.

Politico: The State Department has told Senate investigators it cannot find backup copies of emails sent by Bryan Pagliano, the top Hillary Clinton IT staffer who maintained her email server but has asserted his Fifth Amendment right and refused to answer questions on the matter.

State officials told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a recent closed-door meeting that they could not locate what’s known as a “.pst file” for Pagliano’s work during Clinton’s tenure, which would have included copies of the tech expert’s emails, according to a letter Chairman Chuck Grassley sent to Secretary of State John Kerry that was obtained by POLITICO.

The department also told the committee the FBI has taken possession of Pagliano’s government computer system, where traces of the messages are most likely to be found, according to the letter.

Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has been considering whether to grant Pagliano immunity in exchange for testimony on who approved Clinton’s private email setup and whether anyone raised any objections to the system. The controversy over her decision to bypass a government email address, which would have made her messages easier for reporters and the public to obtain, has dogged the presidential hopeful for much of the year, though it has subsided in recent weeks.

Pagliano — who worked for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, then followed her to the State Department — has refused to discuss Clinton’s email arrangement or his role in it, invoking his right against self-incrimination before the House Benghazi Committee earlier this fall.

Clinton had personally paid Pagliano to maintain her home-made server, which is also currently in the FBI’s possession. The agency has been investigating whether classified material was ever put at risk because she used her own server instead of the standard State email system. The State Department has designated about 1,000 of her emails as classified documents, which would never have been allowed on such a private system. Clinton’s representatives maintain that the emails were not classified at the time they were sent.

Pagliano’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.

Grassley had requested Pagliano’s emails to help inform his decision whether to grant Pagliano immunity.

“Given that the committee is unable to obtain [Pagliano’s] testimony at this time, I am seeking copies of his official State Department emails relevant to the Committee’s inquiry before proceeding to consider whether it might be appropriate to grant him immunity and compel his testimony,” Grassley’s letter states. It notes that such emails are a “top priority” in a list of several outstanding Clinton-related inquiries the panel has sent to the department.

The State Department said that while it has located a backup for emails Pagliano sent after Clinton left State, officials cannot find the file for the backup covering work he did while she was still there.

“The Department has located a .pst from Mr. Pagliano’s recent work at the Department as a contractor, but the files are from after Secretary Clinton left the State Department. We have not yet located a .pst that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” said Alec Gerlach, a State Department spokesman. “We are continuing to search for Mr. Pagliano’s emails which the Department may have otherwise retained. We will, of course, share emails responsive to Senator Grassley’s requests if we locate them.”

State, like many federal agencies, did not have a systematic email archiving system for years. When the server issue first arose in the spring, State acknowledged that it did not automatically archive the email traffic of senior employees — relying on them to make their own backups, or “.pst,” if needed. Under current rules, federal employees are responsible for ensuring their official emails are saved.

State has not asked Pagliano whether he has any official emails in his possession, as it has with other top Clinton staffers who used personal email for work. It is unclear if Pagliano’s Fifth Amendment rights would protect him from turning over such messages.

Grassley encouraged State to continue searching for Pagliano’s emails by looking at the back-up email files of other State employees he may have emailed about the Clinton server. He letter seeks “a full and detailed written explanation of why it failed to maintain an archive, copy, or backup of Mr. Pagliano’s email file,” among other requests related to the IT staffer’s emails.

While State hasn’t been able to meet Grassley’s requests so far, his letter did offer some rare praise for the department, commending Kerry and State for what Grassley called a “recent increase in cooperation and focus on the committee’s request.” The letter says Judiciary has prioritized 22 requests for information and received seven “fully complete responses” and nine “partially complete responses.”

And State, which has been bombarded by inquiries about Clinton’s email setup, seems to appreciate the recognition: “As Senator Grassley noted, the State Department has been working very closely with his staff to get him the requested information and documents, and we are making progress,” Gerlach added.

Grassley had been blocking the confirmation of about 20 of State’s Foreign Service nominees because the department hadn’t fulfilled various document requests, including those for another probe he’s conducting on the dual-employment status of top Clinton adviser Huma Abedin. Abedin advised Clinton while she was also working for a consulting company; Grassley has been asking for information about the arrangement since 2013.

Given State’s recent responsiveness, however, he recently dropped the 20 holds but maintained a block on two more high-level nominees: Brian James Egan to be a State legal adviser and David Malcolm Robinson to be assistant secretary for conflict and stabilization operations and coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization. In November, Grassley also added a third hold on another top-level Obama State Department nominee, Thomas Shannon Jr., to be undersecretary of state for political affairs.

Grassley in his recent letter, however, hinted that if State continues working with his committee at the current pace, he could be amenable to releasing his holds.

“Assuming the committee receives the additional items promised by your staff in yesterday’s meeting, I intend to take action to recognize this progress before Senators leave town for the holiday break,” he said, nodding specifically to any copies of Pagliano emails they could discover by searching other employee’s emails.