Category Archives: Treasury

Oh Look, a Second Hillary Email Server

Posted on by

WashingtonPost: Datto’s work on the Clinton e-mail system became public Tuesday when the Republican chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee sent the company a lengthy letter seeking information about the role it and other firms played in managing the Clinton e-mail system.

Datto was hired to provide backups for the Clinton e-mail accounts starting in May 2013 by Platte River Networks, the Colorado-based tech firm hired earlier that year by the Clinton family to manage the system after Hillary Clinton concluded her term as secretary.

Senator Ron Johnson and a small committee is on the case.

Second IT firm agrees to give Clinton’s server data to FBI

WASHINGTON

Hillary Clinton hired a Connecticut company to back up her emails on a “cloud” storage system, and her lawyers have agreed to turn whatever it contains over to the FBI, a personal familiar with the situation said Tuesday.

The disclosure came as a Republican Senate committee chairman, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, also asked the firm to turn over to the committee copies of any Clinton emails still in its possession.

There were conflicting accounts as to whether the development could lead to recovery of any of Clinton’s more than 31,000 personal emails, which she said she deleted from her private server upon turning over her work-related emails to the State Department, at its request, in December 2014.

Congressional Republicans have voiced skepticism as to whether the 30,940 business emails that the Democratic presidential candidate handed over represented all of those related to her position as secretary of state. The FBI is separately investigating whether Clinton’s arrangement put classified information at risk but has yet to characterize it as a criminal inquiry.

Datto Inc., based in Norwalk, Conn., became the second data storage firm to become entangled in the inquiry into Clinton’s unusual email arrangement, which has sparked a furor that has dogged her campaign. In August, Clinton and the firm that had managed her server since June 2013, Colorado-based Platte River Networks, agreed to surrender it for examination by the FBI.

On Friday, Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, and Platte River agreed to allow Datto to turn over the data from the backup server to the FBI, said the person familiar with Datto’s storage, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Datto said in a statement that “with the consent of our client and their end user, and consistent with our policies regarding data privacy, Datto is working with the FBI to provide data in conjunction with its investigation.”

The source said, however, that Platte River had set up a 60-day retention policy for the backup server, meaning that any emails to which incremental changes were made at least 60 days prior would be deleted and “gone forever.” While the server wouldn’t have been “wiped clean,” the source said, any underlying data likely would have been written over and would be difficult to recover.

Since Clinton has said she deleted all of her personal emails, the configuration might complicate any attempt by FBI forensics experts to resurrect emails from the backup. However, Bloomberg reported recently that the FBI has recovered some of Clinton’s emails, apparently from the server they seized from Platte River.

In laying out facts gathered by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which he chairs, Johnson offered the first public confirmation that Clinton or her representatives had arranged for a backup of her email server after she left office in early 2013.

His letter also cited internal emails recounting requests in late 2014 and early 2015 from Clinton representatives for Colorado-based Platte River Networks, the firm managing Clinton’s primary server, to direct Datto to reduce the amount of her emails it was backing up. These communications led a Platte River employee to air suspicions that “this whole thing really is covering up some shaddy (sic) shit,” according to an excerpt of an email cited by Johnson.

The controversy seems sure to come up on Oct. 22, when Clinton is scheduled to testify to a House committee investigating the fatal 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. It was the panel’s chairman who first declared last March that she had “wiped” her server clean based on a letter from Clinton’s attorney.

Spokesmen for Clinton’s campaign declined to respond to requests for comment about Johnson’s letter Tuesday.

On May 31, 2013, four months after Clinton left office, the Clinton Executive Service Corp., which oversaw her email server contracts, hired Platte River to maintain her account. Its New Jersey-based server replaced the server in her New York home that had handled her emails throughout her tenure as secretary of state.

Several weeks ago, Platte River employees discovered that her private server was syncing with an offsite Datto server, he said.

When Datto acknowledged that was the case, a Platte River employee replied in an email: “This is a problem.”

Johnson said that “Datto apparently possessed a backup of the server’s contents since June 2013.”

Upon that discovery, Platte River “directed Datto to not delete the saved data and worked with Datto to find a way to move the saved information . . . back to Secretary Clinton’s private server.”

The letter also noted that Platte River employees were directed to reduce the amount of email data being stored with each backup. Late this summer, Johnson wrote, a Platte River employee took note of this change and inquired whether the company could search its archives for an email from Clinton Executive Service Corp. directing such a reduction in October or November 2014 and then again around February, advising Platte River to save only emails sent during the most recent 30 days.

Those reductions would have occurred after the State Department requested that Clinton turn over her emails.

It is unclear why Secretary Clinton’s representatives apparently directed (Platte River) to reduce the backup time period of her emails around the same time period or in the months following the State Department’s request.

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, in letter to Datto

It was here that a Platte River employee voiced suspicions about a cover-up and sought to protect the company. “If we have it in writing that they told us to cut the backups,” the employee wrote, “and that we can go public with our statement saying we have had backups since day one, then we were told to trim to 30 days, it would make us look a WHOLE LOT better,” according to the email cited by Johnson.

In the letter to Austin McChord, Datto’s CEO, Johnson asked the firm to produce copies of all communications it had relating to Clinton’s server, including those with Platte River and the Clinton firm.” He also asked whether Datto and its employees were authorized to store and view classified information and for details of any cyberattacks on the backup server.

In an ongoing review of Clinton’s work emails, the State Department and intelligence agencies have found more than 400 containing classified information, including at least two declared “Top Secret,” the most sensitive national security data. Clinton has said none of the emails were marked classified during her tenure although some communications by their nature are classified at creation.

In other developments, the State Department is asking Clinton to search again for any emails, regardless of format, from the first two months of her tenure, according to a document filed Tuesday by the State Department in response to a lawsuit about her emails.

The request to Clinton attorney David Kendall, dated Oct. 2, comes weeks after the State Department obtained a series of emails that Clinton did not turn over despite her claim that she sent the agency all her work-related correspondence.

To the extent her emails might be found on any internet service and email providers, we encourage you to contact them.

Patrick Kennedy, under secretay of state for management

The chain of emails, dating from Jan. 10, 2009 to Feb. 1, 2009, were exchanged with former Gen. David Petraeus when he headed the military’s U.S. Central Command, responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and mostly relate to personnel matters.

“These emails are now in our possession and will be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said last week. “Furthermore, we asked the IG to incorporate this matter into the review Secretary Kerry requested in March. We have also informed Congress of this matter.”

Clinton said she was unable to turn over emails she sent or received from late January to March 18, 2009, because she continued to use the AT&T Blackberry account she had when she was a senator. But after the Petraeus emails surfaced and showed she had not turned over emails sent or received on her new account, aides said said she could not turn over emails because they had not been captured on her private server.

Clinton’s campaign and Kendall did not immediately respond to questions about Johnon’s letter or the State Department’s new request.

 

Dems Move to Stop Benghazi Cmte, But not so Fast

Posted on by

Congresswoman Louise Slaughter of NY is on the move attaching an amendment to shut down the Gowdy led Benghazi Committee to another piece of legislation where a new select committee would be created to investigate Planned Parenthood.

The State Department is not trusting Hillary. They are asking Hillary to check again, where are ALL the emails.

State Dept. tells Hillary Clinton to search for more emails

WashingtonTimes: The State Department has instructed former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton go back to her Internet companies and try to recover email messages from any personal email accounts that she used during her time in government, saying it appears she didn’t turn over all of her documents.

In a letter to Clinton lawyer David E. Kendall, the department said it has become aware of messages Mrs. Clinton sent to other government officials in her first few months in office, but which she did not turn over as part of the more than 30,000 emails she did relinquish last December.

Mrs. Clinton had previously said she used a personal email account — the same one she kept as a senator — to do government business during the first couple of months she was at the State Department. Her campaign said she no longer had access to those messages.

But after some of those messages were produced from the Defense Department, the State Department realized it had a problem.

“As a result, I ask that you confirm that, with regard to her tenure as secretary of state, former Secretary Clinton has provided the department with all federal records in her possession, regardless of their format or the domain on which they were stored or created, that may not otherwise be preserved in the department’s recordkeeping system,” Patrick F. Kennedy, under secretary of state for management, said in the letter, dated Oct. 2.

“To the extent her emails might be found on any internet service and email providers, we encourage you to contact them.” Mr. Kennedy wrote.

Mrs. Clinton’s email practices have become a major problem for her presidential aspirations.

During her time as secretary she rejected use of an account on State Department servers, instead using her personal email for several months, then switching over to an account she kept on a server at her home in New York.

Some of her top aides, likewise, did their business on non-State.gov accounts. The arrangement meant that many key communications have been shielded from public disclosure for years, thwarting the intent of open-records laws.

Mrs. Clinton has said her goal was “convenience” for herself, not an effort to circumvent those laws.

Mills shared now-classified info with Clinton Foundation

Politico: Hillary Clinton’s No. 2 at the State Department twice forwarded information to the Clinton Foundation that was later deemed classified, the latest instance of former Clinton staff transmitting now-classified information.

According to a new email chain shared with POLITICO by Citizens United, Cheryl Mills — Clinton’s former chief of state at State — forwarded State Department background information about Rwanda and the Congo to the Clintons’ philanthropic organization. Citizens United, a conservative activist group, obtained the messages via a Freedom of Information act lawsuit.

Former President Bill Clinton was visiting Africa, including Rwanda, around the time that Mills sent the email, which was mostly redacted. Former president Clinton was also considering giving Rwandan President Paul Kagame a plenary role at the Clinton Global Initiative, according to the emails.

“Fyi for [Bill] since he is in contact w/Kagame,” Mills wrote in an email chain dated July 28, 2012, forwarding to the foundation a message originally written to State employees under the subject “Developments in the Eastern Congo.”

“Thanks,” Ami Desai, the foundation’s director of foreign policy, wrote back. “He has been talking about giving Kagame a plenary role at CGI.”

The information in the 2012 emails was classified by the State Department in July of this year because of national security and foreign policy reasons, according to the documents. The classification specifically related to foreign government information and intelligence activities, sources or methods, according to the redaction labels.

Mills’ lawyer Beth Wilkinson of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, Mills’ legal team has argued that she did nothing wrong because the messages were not marked classified when she had originally sent them.

Meanwhile, the FBI is currently investigating whether classified information was ever mishandled via Hillary Clinton’s private email server. For months, Clinton maintained that she did not have classified information on her homemade email server, until government watchdogs unveiled that she did. After those reports, the campaign maintained that Clinton had not received messages that were “marked” classified at the time.

The State Department has agreed with that assessment, but the intelligence community inspector general does not and has argued many of the emails were indeed classified at the time in 2012.

Beyond the classification issue, Republicans and other transparency groups have questioned whether the foundation’s work, funded in part by foreign donors, ever influenced what happened at the State Department. Or if the foundation received preferential treatment.

Mills sat on the foundation’s board before becoming the department’s No. 2 official and returned to the board after leaving State in 2013. And she appeared to continue to advise the foundation while at State, according to other emails revealed by the Citizens United lawsuit. Republicans say those connections between Mills and the Clinton Foundation raise questions about whether the relationship was too close.

“The fact that these two email chains — which are now classified — were sent only 16 days apart, makes it appear as if the sharing of sensitive government information with the Clinton Foundation was a regular occurrence,” David Bossie, president of Citizens United, said in a statement. “Time will tell as more emails become public.”

The emails are just the latest in a series of communications by Clinton and top staff being publicly released due to ongoing lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act, which have forced the State Department to ask Clinton and her top brass to turn in email records from years before. The messages are just now becoming public.

The Washington Free Beacon last week reported the first instance of an email suggesting Mills shared now classified information. That email chain dated July 11, 2012 seems to be intended for Clinton specifically. Johnie Carson, an assistant secretary of state for the bureau of African affairs, asked Mills what she thought about them encouraging Bill Clinton to use his trip to Rwanda on July 18, 2012 to “in his private conversations with Kagame to quietly encourage him to defuse the tension with the DRC” and “terminate any [direct] or indirect to support to DRC.”

A chunk of the email about the situation in Rwanda is now classified.

Mills forwarded it to Ami: “See below and attacked points which I requested for WJC.”

 

 

 

 

Anything Illegal, Under Obama is Accelerated to Legal

Posted on by

US government deports fewest immigrants in nearly a decade

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration deported fewer immigrants over the past 12 months than at any time since 2006, according to internal figures obtained by The Associated Press as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton called Obama’s deportation policies too harsh.

Deportations of criminal immigrants have fallen to the lowest levels since President Barack Obama took office in 2009, despite his pledge to focus on finding and deporting criminals living in the country illegally. The share of criminal immigrants deported in relation to overall immigrants deported rose slightly, from 56 percent to 59 percent.

The overall total of 231,000 deportations generally does not include Mexicans who were caught at the border and quickly returned home by the U.S. Border Patrol. The figure does include roughly 136,700 convicted criminals deported in the last 12 months.

Total deportations dropped 42 percent since 2012.

In a Miami interview with Spanish-language TV network Telemundo, Clinton promised to be “less harsh and aggressive” than Obama in enforcing immigration laws.

“The deportation laws were interpreted and enforced, you know, very aggressively, during the last six and a half years, which I think his administration did in part to try to get Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform,” Clinton said in the weekend interview.

In the first two full budget years under the Obama administration, the U.S. deported more people year over year, until reaching its 2012 peak. Those increases, which started under the administration of President George W. Bush, were small, rising just a few percentage points each year. Nevertheless, the record deportations in 2012 led immigration advocates to criticize Obama as the “deporter-in-chief.”

After multiple bills to overhaul immigration laws failed in Congress during Obama’s first term, he made administrative changes aimed at narrowing the population of immigrants targeted for deportation. The focus since then has been on criminals, and the overall number of deportations has steadily declined.

The Homeland Security Department has not yet publicly disclosed the new internal figures, which include month-by-month breakdowns and cover the period between Oct. 1, 2014, and Sept. 28. The new numbers emerged as illegal immigration continues to be sharply debated among presidential candidates, and has been a special focus of Republican Donald Trump.

And they come as Obama carries out his pledge from before his 2012 re-election to narrowly focus enforcement and slow deportations after more than a decade of rising figures.

The biggest surprise in the figures was the decline in criminal deportations. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson last year directed immigration authorities anew to focus on finding and deporting immigrants who pose a national security or public safety threat, those who have serious criminal records, and those who recently crossed the Mexican border. The decline suggests the administration has been failing to find criminal immigrants in the U.S. interior, or that fewer immigrants living in the U.S. illegally had criminal records serious enough to justify deporting them.

“With the resources we have … I’m interested in focusing on criminals and recent illegal arrivals at the border,” Johnson told Congress in April.

Roughly 11 million immigrants are thought to be living in the country illegally.

Obama has overseen the removal of more than 2.4 million immigrants since taking office, but deportations have been declining steadily in the last three years. Removals declined by more than 84,000 between the 2014 and 2015 budget years, the largest year-over-year decline since 2012.

The Homeland Security Department has in the past attributed the steady decline to changing demographics at the Mexican border, specifically the increasing number of immigrants from countries other than Mexico and the spike in unaccompanied children and families caught trying to cross the border illegally in 2014. The majority of the children and tens of thousands of people traveling as families, mostly mothers and children, came from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

The Border Patrol historically sends home Mexican immigrants caught crossing the border illegally, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement must fly home immigrants from other countries. That process is more expensive, complicated and time-consuming, especially when immigrants fight their deportation or seek asylum in the United States.

Arrests of border crossers from other countries also dropped this year, along with the number of unaccompanied children and families. As of the end of August, the Border Patrol arrested about 130,000 immigrants from countries other than Mexico, about 34,500 unaccompanied children and roughly 34,400 people traveling as families.

More than 257,000 immigrants from countries other than Mexico were apprehended at the border during the 2014 budget year, including more than 68,000 unaccompanied children and tens of thousands of family members. It was the first time that immigrants from other countries outnumbered those from Mexico.

Ahhhh….it gets worse, much worse. Tomorrow, America loses her full identity but gains new voters.

The Obama administration is launching a campaign to accelerate the conversion of millions of immigrants to citizenship. The nation’s immigration agencies will spend big bucks on “outreach” activities and the Naturalization process will be streamlined.

Breitbart: The goal is to add several million new citizens to the voter rolls by November 2016.

If you think the Naturalization process is governed by law and long-established rules so we need not worry about shortcuts and wholesale fraud – wake up. This is the Obama Administration we are talking about. If you think immigration law enforcement was politicized, wait until you see what citizenship fraud looks like. It will become very politically incorrect to question any immigrant’s right to vote.

The fact that newly naturalized citizens routinely vote Democrat more than Republican by 3-to-1 is, no doubt, a pure coincidence and has nothing to do with the desire to “expedite” the creation of new citizens.

By law, a legal immigrant can apply for citizenship and begin the Naturalization process after five years.

  • There are over 8.8 million immigrants now eligible.
  • Another 5 million will become eligible in the next four years.
  • Approximately 1.5 million each year will become eligible over the next decade.
  • Between now and 2024, almost 20 million immigrants could become citizens and join the voter rolls.

The citizenship application form, the N-400 Form, is available online, and an army of lawyers is waiting to help the 13 million eligible immigrants. There will be taxpayer-financed mobile units roaming the rural parts of America to be sure no one is overlooked. Uncle Sam wants YOU!

Historically, only about 60 percent of legal immigrants eventually became citizens, and different nationalities have sought citizenship at different rates. Millions of legal immigrants have been content to work and live in the United States without seeking citizenship. Now, there will be a bilingual multimedia campaign to remind them it is their duty to become voters, and jumping through the hoops will be made incredibly easy.

The Yearbook of Immigration Statistics provides a wealth of historical data about immigration and Naturalizations. For example, it tells us that legal immigrants from Mexico have always had one of the lowest rates of Naturalization. Could that be the reason the Obama appointees at the USCIS came up with an expensive PR campaign to educate, encourage and facilitate more Naturalizations?

  • Is it pure coincidence that more than 30 percent of those 8.8 million immigrants now eligible for citizenship are Mexican-born, or that more than 70 percent of Mexican legal immigrants register as Democrats if they become citizens?
  • Would the USCIS bureaucrats have discovered this urgent need for an “outreach campaign” if 80 percent of those 8.8 million were from Europe instead of Latin America and Asia?

No one will argue with the right of legal permanent residents to become citizens by following the lawful process for Naturalization. We all have parents, grandparents or great-grandparents who did that, and we are glad they did.  What raises red flags and rocket flares is not those aspirations but the motives, methods and malevolence of a lawless White House. Will Obama’s lawyers at USCIS bring the same passion and creative circumventions of law to the Naturalization rules and procedures as they have to other parts of immigration law?

In fact, we all know there will be fraud disguised as “expedited enfranchisement” on a massive scale so that the maximum number of new voters can be added to the rolls. And like other immigration benefits, once awarded, the new legal status dare not be taken away.

But the story does not end in 2016 or 2024. A September Pew Research Center report predicts 59 million new immigrants between now and 2065 if present trends continue —and that projection does NOT count 10-20 million illegal aliens given legal status and eventual citizenship through another amnesty.

But wait; there’s more fun and games in store. If Obama succeeds in his plans, his model for “facilitating” expedited citizenship will inevitably become the “new normal.” By 2065, those 59 million new immigrants will produce about 50 million new citizens of foreign birth –and 35 million new Democrats.

Optimists will paint a more rosy scenario. However, optimists will have to contend with the lasting effects of the Obama administration’s official abandonment — in the June “New Americans” manifesto — of assimilation as an integral, necessary element of immigration. You see, it is now officially considered xenophobic and racist to expect immigrants to adopt American values and adapt to American institutions. After all, every progressive knows that constitutionalism and the rule of law are mere artifacts of history, not anchors against the periodic storms of tyranny.

It is not an exaggeration to say that under Obama, the Naturalization process – becoming a citizen—no longer requires becoming an American. The real tragedy and the real crime of the Obama plan for accelerated Naturalization of millions flows from the redefinition of citizenship as a triumph of multiculturalism.

Obama’s most radical goal has not been the transformation of our economy, our foreign policy, or our place in the world. Obama aims to transform what it means to be an American.

Given the lack of resistance and absence of Republican leadership in opposition to those ideas, by the time those 50 million former immigrants cast a vote in 2065, it won’t matter which party wins the election.

 

 

 

IRGC Commander Plotted out Russian Action in Syria

Posted on by

From the U.S. Treasury terror list noted in 2011:

10/11/2011
SOLEIMANI, Qasem (a.k.a. SALIMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SOLAIMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SOLEMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SOLEYMANI, Ghasem; a.k.a. SOLEYMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SULAIMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SULAYMAN, Qasim; a.k.a. SULEMANI, Qasem); DOB 11 Mar 1957; POB Qom, Iran; citizen Iran; nationality Iran; Diplomatic Passport 008827 (Iran)  issued 1999 (individual) [SYRIA] [NPWMD] [IRGC] -to- SOLEIMANI, Qasem (a.k.a. SALIMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SOLAIMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SOLEMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SOLEYMANI, Ghasem; a.k.a. SOLEYMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SULAIMANI, Qasem; a.k.a. SULAYMAN, Qasim; a.k.a. SULEMANI, Qasem); DOB 11 Mar 1957; POB Qom, Iran; citizen Iran; nationality Iran; Diplomatic Passport 008827 (Iran)  issued 1999 (individual) |[SDGT] [SYRIA] [NPWMD] [IRGC]|
Page Image

During the Iranian negotiations Iran was plotting, punking all of the P5+1 members. The head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Commander Soleimani, who has sanctioned travel restrictions violated the sequestration and traveled to Moscow twice. The plotting begins including maps and tactics.

Guessing here that once again, Obama missed his presidential daily briefing on his specially designed iPad, but the distribution list included many others such as John Kerry, Susan Rice, and global military command centers.

Crickets….

How Iranian general plotted out Syrian assault in Moscow

By Laila Bassam and Tom Perry

 Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Soleimani stands at the frontline during offensive operations against Islamic State militants in the town of Tal...

BEIRUT (Reuters) – At a meeting in Moscow in July, a top Iranian general unfurled a map of Syria to explain to his Russian hosts how a series of defeats for President Bashar al-Assad could be turned into victory – with Russia’s help.

Major General Qassem Soleimani’s visit to Moscow was the first step in planning for a Russian military intervention that has reshaped the Syrian war and forged a new Iranian-Russian alliance in support of Assad.

As Russian warplanes bomb rebels from above, the arrival of Iranian special forces for ground operations underscores several months of planning between Assad’s two most important allies, driven by panic at rapid insurgent gains.

Soleimani is the commander of the Quds Force, the elite extra-territorial special forces arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and reports directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Senior regional sources say he has already been overseeing ground operations against insurgents in Syria and is now at the heart of planning for the new Russian- and Iranian-backed offensive.

That expands his regional role as the battlefield commander who has also steered the fight in neighboring Iraq by Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia against Islamic State.

His Moscow meeting outlined the deteriorating situation in Syria, where rebel advances toward the coast were posing a danger to the heartland of Assad’s Alawite sect, where Russia maintains its only Mediterranean naval base in Tartous.

“Soleimani put the map of Syria on the table. The Russians were very alarmed, and felt matters were in steep decline and that there were real dangers to the regime. The Iranians assured them there is still the possibility to reclaim the initiative,” a senior regional official said. “At that time, Soleimani played a role in assuring them that we haven’t lost all the cards.”

“SEND SOLEIMANI”

Three senior officials in the region say Soleimani’s July trip was preceded by high-level Russian-Iranian contacts that produced political agreement on the need to pump in new support for Assad as his losses accelerated.

Their accounts suggest planning for the intervention began to germinate several months earlier. It means Tehran and Moscow had been discussing ways to prop up Assad by force even as Western officials were describing what they believed was new flexibility in Moscow’s stance on his future.

Before the latest moves, Iran had aided Assad militarily by mobilizing Shi’ite militias to fight alongside the Syrian army, and dispatching Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps officers as advisors. A number of them have been killed.

Russia, an ally of Damascus since the Cold War, had supplied weapons to the Syrian army and shielded Damascus diplomatically from Western attempts to sanction Assad at the United Nations.

Their support did not prevent rebels – some of them backed by Assad’s regional foes – from reducing Assad’s control of Syria to around one fifth of its territory in a four-year-long war estimated to have killed 250,000 people.

The decision for a joint Iranian-Russian military effort in Syria was taken at a meeting between Russia’s foreign minister and Khamenei a few months ago, said a senior official of a country in the region, involved in security matters.

“Soleimani, assigned by Khamenei to run the Iranian side of the operation, traveled to Moscow to discuss details. And he also traveled to Syria several times since then,” the official said.

The Russian government says its Syria deployment came as the result of a formal request from Assad, who himself laid out the problems facing the Syrian military in stark terms in July, saying it faced a manpower problem.

Khamenei also sent a senior envoy to Moscow to meet President Vladimir Putin, another senior regional official said. “Putin told him ‘Okay we will intervene. Send Qassem Soleimani’. He went to explain the map of the theater.”

RESIDENT IN DAMASCUS

Russian warplanes, deployed at an airfield in Latakia, began mounting air strikes against rebels in Syria last week.

Moscow says it is targeting Islamic State, but many of Russia’s air strikes have hit other insurgents, including groups backed by Assad’s foreign enemies, notably in the northwest where rebels seized strategically important towns including Jisr al-Shughour earlier this year.

In the biggest deployment of Iranian forces yet, sources told Reuters last week that hundreds of troops have arrived since late September to take part in a major ground offensive planned in the west and northwest.

Around 3,000 fighters from the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah have also mobilized for the battle, along with Syrian army troops, said one of the senior regional sources.

The military intervention in Syria is set out in an agreement between Moscow and Tehran that says Russian air strikes will support ground operations by Iranian, Syrian and Lebanese Hezbollah forces, said one of the senior regional sources.

The agreement also included the provision of more sophisticated Russian weapons to the Syrian army, and the establishment of joint operations rooms that would bring those allies together, along with the government of Iraq, which is allied both to Iran and the United States.

One of the operations rooms is in Damascus and another is in Baghdad.

“Soleimani is almost resident in Damascus, or let’s say he goes there a lot and you can find him between meetings with President Assad and visits to the theater of operations like any other soldier,” said one of the senior regional officials.

Syria’s foreign minister said on Monday that the Russian air strikes had been planned for months.

 

Here Comes Another Obama Prison Break

Posted on by

Just consider, that giving a pass to drug and narcotic offenders, promotes more lawlessness and the laws on the books become inert. Further, what are the prospects for the business and economic outlook for America and compare that to other competitive countries. The implications are surfacing. Of particular note, we cannot begin to estimate how many of those being released are illegal aliens.

How to Deal With the Retroactive Drugs Minus Two AmendmentThe Sentencing Commission voted to reduce by two levels the base offense levels for drug offenses subject to the Drug Quantity Table at USSG § 2D1.1(c), and to make parallel changes to the quantity tables at § 2D1.11 for chemical precursors. See Amendment 3, Reader Friendly Amendments to the Sentencing Guidelines (eff. Nov. 1, 2014).1 The amendment will take effect November 1, 2014 unless disapproved by act of Congress.2 This two-level reduction in the base offense level is one reason that the sentences of many (though not all) drug offenders would be lower if imposed today. See How a Sentence for a Drug Offender May Be Lower if Imposed Today.

On July 18, 2014, the Commission voted to make this “drugs minus two” amendment retroactive. Unless Congress disapproves it, beginning November 1, 2014, inmates who were already sentenced can ask courts to retroactively reduce their sentences, and courts can rule on those requests, but no one can be released before November 1, 2015.3 The Commission estimates that 46,376 inmates could benefit from the retroactive amendment, and that the average reduction will be 25 months.4 Thus, your clemency client may be eligible for a retroactive sentence reduction under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(2), which provides that when a defendant was “sentenced to a term of imprisonment based on a sentencing range that has subsequently been lowered by the Sentencing Commission,” “the court may reduce the term of imprisonment, after considering the factors set forth in section 3553(a) to the extent that they are applicable, if such a reduction is consistent with applicable policy statements issued by the Sentencing Commission.”

Justice Department about to free 6,000 prisoners, largest one-time release

WaPo: The Justice Department is set to release about 6,000 inmates early from prison — the largest ever one-time release of federal prisoners — in an effort to reduce overcrowding and provide relief to drug offenders who received harsh sentences over the past three decades.

The inmates from federal prisons nationwide will be set free by the department’s Bureau of Prisons between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2. Most of them will go to halfway houses and home confinement before being put on supervised release.

The early release follows action by the U.S. Sentencing Commission — an independent agency that sets sentencing policies for federal crimes — which reduced the potential punishment for future drug offenders last year and then made that change retroactive.

The commission’s action is separate from an effort by President Obama to grant clemency to certain nonviolent drug offenders, an initiative that has resulted in 89 inmates being released early.

The panel estimated that its change in sentencing guidelines eventually could result in 46,000 of the nation’s approximately 100,000 drug offenders in federal prison qualifying for early release. The 6,000 figure, which has not been reported previously, is the first tranche in that process.

“The number of people who will be affected is quite exceptional,” said Mary Price, general counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, an advocacy group that supports sentencing reform.

The Sentencing Commission estimated that an additional 8,550 inmates will be eligible for release between this Nov. 1 and Nov. 1, 2016.

The releases are part of a shift in the nation’s approach to criminal justice and drug sentencing. Along with the commission’s action, the Justice Department has instructed its prosecutors not to charge low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who have no connection to gangs or large-scale drug organizations with offenses that carry severe mandatory sentences.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously for the reduction last year after holding two public hearings in which they heard testimony from former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., federal judges, federal public defenders, state and local law enforcement officials, and sentencing advocates. The panel also received more than 80,000 public comment letters with the overwhelming majority favoring the change.

Congress did not act to disapprove the change to the sentencing guidelines, so it became effective on Nov. 1, 2014. The commission then gave the Justice Department a year to prepare for the huge release of inmates.

The policy change is referred to as “Drugs Minus Two.” Federal sentencing guidelines rely on a numeric system based on different factors, including the defendant’s criminal history, the type of crime, whether a gun was involved and whether the defendant was a leader in a drug group.

The sentencing panel’s change decreased the value attached to most drug-trafficking offenses by two levels, regardless of the type of drug or the amount.

An average of about two years is being shaved off eligible prisoners’ sentences under the change. Although some of the inmates who will be released have served decades, on average they will have served 8 1/2 years instead of 10 1/2 , according to a Justice Department official.

“Even with the Sentencing Commission’s reductions, drug offenders will have served substantial prison sentences,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said. “Moreover, these reductions are not automatic. Under the commission’s directive, federal judges are required to carefully consider public safety in deciding whether to reduce an inmate’s sentence.”

In each case, inmates must petition a judge who decides whether to grant the sentencing reduction. Judges nationwide are granting about 70 sentence reductions per week, Justice officials said. Some of the inmates already have been sent to halfway houses.

In some cases, federal judges have denied inmates’ requests for early release. For example, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth recently denied requests from two top associates of Rayful Edmond III, one of the District’s most notorious drug kingpins.

Federal prosecutors did not oppose a request by defense lawyers to have the associates, Melvin D. Butler and James Antonio Jones, released early in November. But last month Lamberth denied the request, which would have cut about two years from each man’s projected 28 1/2 -year sentence.

“The court struggles to understand how the government could condone the release of Butler and Jones, each convicted of high-level, sophisticated and violent drug-trafficking offenses,” Lamberth wrote. The Edmond group imported as much as 1,700 pounds of Colombian cocaine a month into the city in the 1980s, according to court papers.

Critics, including some federal prosecutors, judges and police officials, have raised concerns that allowing so many inmates to be released at the same time could cause crime to increase.

But Justice officials said that about one-third of the inmates who will be released in a few weeks are foreign citizens who will be quickly deported.

They also pointed to a study last year that found that the recidivism rate for offenders who were released early after changes in crack-cocaine sentencing guidelines in 2007 was not significantly different from offenders who completed their sentences.

“Prison officials and probation officers are working hard to ensure that returning offenders are adequately supervised and monitored,” Yates said.

Federal prison costs represent about one-third of the Justice Department’s $27 billion budget. The U.S. population has grown by about a third since 1980, but the federal prison population has increased by about 800 percent and federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent over capacity, Justice officials said.

Last week, a group of senators introduced a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill, the first such legislation in decades. Although some advocates say it doesn’t go far enough, the measure, which is supported by a coalition that includes the Koch brothers and the American Civil Liberties Union, would shorten the length of mandatory-minimum drug sentences that were part of the tough-on-crime laws passed during the war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s.

If passed by Congress and signed by Obama, the reforms would apply retroactively, allowing inmates who were previously incarcerated under mandatory minimums an opportunity for release.

“It’s a remarkable moment,” Price said. “Over the past several years, the tone of the discussion about incarceration has changed dramatically. We have come to the realization that our punitive approach to drug crimes is not working and has produced significant injustices.”