Now Hiring, Clinton Email Handlers

Posted on September 8, 2015September 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

This appears as though a payroll cost to hire these people could be in the range of $500,000. Send the bill to the Clinton Foundation.

(By the way, as you read below, Janice Jacobs was the woman who did the Lois Lerner, IRS emails)

Is it only me that wonders how come no one is talking about a search warrant or gathering the meta-data from Hillary’s Blackberry phone, her iPhone and her iPad? It is notable, all photos of Hillary communicating have been through portable devices and not on a laptop or desktop computer. Hello???

As the world turns in Washington DC, the State Department is spun out of control.

Exclusive: U.S. to shift 50 staff to boost office handling Clinton emails

The U.S. State Department plans to move about 50 workers into temporary jobs to bolster the office sifting through Hillary Clinton’s emails and grappling with a vast backlog of other requests for information to be declassified, officials said on Tuesday.

The move illustrates the huge administrative burden caused by Clinton’s decision to use a private email address for official communications as secretary of state and a judge’s ruling in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that they be released.

Clinton on Tuesday for the first time apologized for her use of private email, telling ABC News: “That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that.” The news channel reported the comment before broadcast of the full interview at 6:30 p.m. ET.

The extra staff will not work on the monthly, court-ordered release of Clinton emails, which are being handled by about 20 permanent, and 30 part-time, workers, officials said. The new staff will fill in for those workers and may also handle other Clinton FOIA requests.

The front-runner to be the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2016 election has been heavily criticized since it emerged in March that she used the private set-up rather than a government-issued email address.

In a notice to employees on Sept. 2, the State Department advertised for people with skills in coordinating and assessing FOIA requests and deciding if information may be declassified and released to the public.

The notice, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, is entitled “Enhancing Transparency: Immediate Detail Opportunities At State” and calls for workers to apply for reassignment for 9 to 12 months. Applications are due on Thursday and the agency plans to make selections by Sept. 18.

In addition to filling in for workers pulled from their normal duties to handle the crush of work from the Clinton emails, officials said the extra staff would help the department grapple with a surge in FOIA requests more generally, related litigation and a huge backlog of information requests.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he was naming Ambassador Janice Jacobs to serve as the State Department’s “transparency coordinator” to help the agency respond to FOIA and congressional requests more efficiently.

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The agency had an overall backlog of 10,045 FOIA requests at the end of fiscal year 2014 on Sept. 30, up about 15.8 percent from the previous year, according to its FOIA reports.

There is more of course…..

Lawsuit asks how Clinton lawyer got OK to store classified emails

A new lawsuit is demanding that the State Department explain how Hillary Clinton’s private attorney, David Kendall, got permission from the State Department to retain copies of Clinton’s emails after the agency determined some of them were classified.

The suit was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington by freelance journalist David Brown, who sent State a Freedom of Information Act request last month asking for all records about the decision to allow Kendall to retain a thumb drive containing copies of about 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to State in December.

Kendall said in a letter to Congress recently that on July 8, the State Department provided him and his law partner Katherine Turner with a safe to hold the drive. He said both he and Turner have “TOP SECRET” clearances.

After a request from the FBI to return all copies of the emails, Clinton instructed Kendall to give up the thumb drive, which he did in early August.

Lawyers who represent clients in national security cases say it’s highly unusual for a private attorney to be given permission to hold classified records.

“If one of us tried to do this, we’d have our clearance yanked that very day and have a search warrant served on us and something different happened here,” said Brown’s attorney Kel McClanahan. “Not only agree did [State] allow him to maintain these records, but it’s unclear if they even pushed back. … We decided somebody needs to get to the bottom of what exactly happened here. What is it: favoritism or did David Kendall somehow satisify some requirement that others of us never even knew to aim for?”

Kendall and the Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the case.

State agreed to “expedite” Brown’s FOIA request, but has not released any records about the agency’s decisionmaking on the issue, according to Brown’s complaint (posted here).

A State spokesman declined to comment, citing a policy of not commenting on ongoing litigation.

Brown’s work has appeared previously in the Atlantic and just Tuesday on the New York Times op-ed page. The former Army paratrooper is–under the pseudonym D.B. Grady–also the co-author with Marc Ambinder of a 2013 book on government secrecy, “Deep State.”

Example: Depths of Chinese Hacking the U.S.

Posted on September 8, 2015September 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

Former Top FBI Lawyer and Counterintelligence Official Admits Chinese Hacked His Home Computer

September 8, 2015

China Allegedly Hacked Top Former FBI Lawyer

Jeff Stein, Newsweek

Marion “Spike” Bowman, a top former FBI lawyer and U.S. counterintelligence official who heads an influential organization of retired American spies, says a hacker from China penetrated his home computer, beginning with an innocent-looking email last spring.

“It was an email supposedly from a woman in China, and I exchanged correspondence with her a couple of times,” says Bowman, who was deputy general counsel to three FBI directors between 1995 and 2006. “She sent me a document that a friend of hers had supposedly written, in English, and wanted my opinion on it,” he tells Newsweek. She also sent him her picture.

“I never got around to replying, so I never heard from her again,” says Bowman, who went on to become deputy director of the National Counterintelligence Executive, which is tasked with developing policies to thwart foreign spies and terrorists.

But then, a week ago, he says, he got another message from China via his email account at George Washington University, where he has lectured on national security law since 2003.

“It was apparently from a university in China asking me come to speak at a conference on the environment”—not even remotely one of his areas of expertise, Bowman says. He called the FBI.

After a forensic examination of his machine, the FBI told him “they had found a malware type that’s designed to find out what’s on my computer,” Bowman says. “It wasn’t anything to infect it.” Still, just being able to read the contents of a target’s computer can reveal lots of valuable information like emails and documents, contact files with phone numbers and other personal data, like home addresses.

“Somebody who really knows what they’re doing” can wreak havoc, he says.

The FBI didn’t tell him exactly who was behind the hack, he says, “but they think they identified the woman” in a picture she sent along with one of her emails last spring. “It was somebody that they knew,” Bowman says. “I didn’t inquire any further.”

Before joining the FBI, Bowman was a Navy lawyer assigned to advise SEAL teams on clandestine operations, among other sensitive matters. His portfolio at the FBI gave him intimate knowledge of the details of operations to counter threats from foreign spy agencies.

“I still carry lots of deep Cold War secrets in my head,” he says, although not on his computer. But he is still very active in national security circles as chairman of the board of directors of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, an organization with several thousand members nationwide, about half of them former CIA personnel.

Bowman’s revelation follows several months of bad news about the vulnerability of government computers to foreign hackers, the latest being a report published Monday saying that Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies are “aggressively aggregating and cross-indexing hacked U.S. computer databases” to catch American spies working overseas. China-based hackers breached about 22 million files held by the federal Office of Personnel Management, officials say.

“At least one clandestine network of American engineers and scientists who provide technical assistance to U.S. undercover operatives and agents overseas has been compromised as a result” of the Russian and Chinese exploitation of the files, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing two U.S. officials.

The story, Bowman says, was “pretty much on target.”

*** It obviously is much worse than we know for the Obama administration to sign off on a sanction and or other consequence ahead of the Xi’s visit to the United States next week.

U.S. may punish Chinese hacking before Xi’s visit

Imposing sanctions before this month’s summit could derail other priorities.

Top government officials are floating the idea of retaliating within the next week to Chinese cyberattacks, possibly by imposing targeted sanctions on some officials and firms, people familiar with the discussions say. But outside experts say it would be wiser to wait until after this month’s White House summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“I heard from one person that it could be as early as next week,” Jim Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Strategic Technologies Program, told POLITICO. He added, “I still think it would be best to wait for the summit.”

Calls for U.S. retalation to Chinese hacking have risen to a furor since the China-linked breach of highly sensitive security clearance forms from 21.5 million current and former federal employees, disclosed in June.

But imposing sanctions before the late-September summit would risk derailing a serious conversation on cyber issues along with myriad other topics, including China’s economic troubles, Chinese belligerence in the South China Sea and cooperation on climate change.

Some China watchers even suspect that the White House is trying to improve its bargaining position in advance of the summit by floating the possibility of sanctions in a serious way.

“My sense is that they’re floating the idea to try to create some kind of leverage in the meetings,” said Adam Segal, a China scholar and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

If the White House did impose sanctions before the meeting, it would be deeply embarrassing to the Chinese and to Xi personally and risk the Chinese doing something to downgrade the summit’s importance, Segal said. “I think if they’re going to do it before the summit, they’ve got to be prepared for the summit to really take a downward turn,” he said.

Business leaders are also dubious about imposing sanctions before Xi’s visit.

The White House should use the summit “as an opportunity to engage in effective dialogue on the cyber issue. If sanctions jeopardize that opportunity, we’d rather see them put it off,” the leader of a major industry organization said in an interview, speaking without attribution because he was speculating about government policy.

If the White House ultimately imposes targeted sanctions, the association leader added, the sanctions should be “based on transparent, credible evidence that’s legally sound.” They should also be designed with a clear path forward that, ultimately, leads to fewer China-linked cyberattacks, he said.

“Most business executives we’ve spoke with felt the indictments against Chinese PLA officers didn’t meet that test,” he added, referring to the May 2014 U.S. indictments of five hackers employed by China’s People’s Liberation Army. That was the Obama administration’s most significant diplomatic strike against Chinese hacking to date.

“[The indictments] didn’t seem to advance anything and they seemed to increase tension rather than reduce it around the issue,” the official said.

In the wake of the OPM hacks, some political leaders have called for much more belligerent responses to Chinese hacking. They include GOP White House contenders Mike Huckabee, who has urged the U.S. to hack back against the communist nation, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has suggested canceling the Obama-Xi summit entirely.

But even cyber hawks warned that aggressive action could backfire in advance of the summit.

“I think everything is going to basically be on hold until the Iran deal goes through and until after President Xi comes to meet with [President Obama],” said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), who was formerly ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee.

Ruppersberger added that “we have to eventually draw a line on cyberattacks,” and that the U.S. bargaining position relative to China may be improved now because of the tailspin in the Chinese stock market and other financial difficulties.

The White House has routinely declined to speak publicly about the possibility of sanctioning China for cyberattacks or any more forceful follow-up to the PLA indictments. Press secretary Josh Earnest has said several times that Obama plans to raise cyber concerns with Xi during their summit.

“There’s no doubt that the president will certainly raise, as he has in every previous meeting with his Chinese counterpart, concerns about China’s behavior in cyberspace,” Earnest said during an Aug. 26 news conference.

White House officials have determined they must respond to China’s hacking of OPM, but have been debating for months what the appropriate response should be and when to impose it, Lewis said.

The option of targeted cyber sanctions, which Obama created by executive order in April, has long been on the table along with additional indictments or some form of diplomatic protest, he said.

White House officials have fingered China for the OPM hack anonymously but have not done so, thus far, on the record.

A forceful response to the OPM hack and to Chinese theft of U.S. companies’ intellectual property and trade secrets has also been delayed by more pressing diplomatic priorities, Lewis said, including securing Chinese cooperation for a deal to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program

“This administration has done more than any other on cybersecurity, but, in a lot of cases, it ends up being No. 2 because of the need to get agreement on other things,” Lewis said. “Cyber always ends up coming in second place, particularly when it comes to China.”

Iran, al Qaeda, Obama and Death of Americans

Posted on September 8, 2015September 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

How Many US Troops Were Killed By Iranian IEDs in Iraq?

DefenseOne: Explosively formed penetrators — a particularly deadly form of roadside bomb — killed 196 American soldiers in Iraq over a five-and-a-half-year period, according to recently declassified Pentagon documents.

That’s about half as many deaths as lawmakers have attributed to the bombs, which U.S. officials say were largely supplied by Iran’s elite Quds Force.

The carnage wrought by EFPs returned to the news over the summer, as opponents of the nuclear deal with Iran cited Tehran’s behind-the-scenes actions against U.S. troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom as a reason to scuttle the agreement. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who is also running for president, and others in Congress have said that EFPs had killed more than 500 troops.

“I understand that the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency has a classified list of roughly 500 American soldiers who were murdered by Iranian IEDs,” Cruz said at a July 29 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

But data from U.S. Central Command, which runs U.S. military operations in the Middle East, suggests the actual toll is far less. According to the first comprehensive accounting, between November 2005 and December 2011, 1,526 EFPs killed a total of 196 U.S. troops and injured 861.

Between October 2006 and September 2007, EFPs killed 97 U.S. troops and wounded more than 300 soldiers. EFP attacks peaked in March, April and May 2008, near the end of the American troop surge, when 200 of the bombs were detonated. The deadliest month was April 2008, when EFPs killed 15 U.S. soldiers.

The Pentagon attributes the presence of EFPs in Iraq to the Quds Force, the special forces arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard led by Qasem Suleimani. Various EFP “factories” were found throughout Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Still, the exact degree to which Iran bears culpability for arming Shia militias in Iraq with EFPs and related equipment is a matter of some dispute.

“We weren’t always able to attribute the casualties that we had to Iranian activity, although many times we suspected it was Iranian activity, even though we didn’t necessarily have the forensics to support that,” Gen. Joseph Dunford, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at his July 9 confirmation hearing. During the hearing, Dunford said the numbers of American soldiers killed by Iran “has been recently quoted as about 500.”

A few weeks later at the July 29 hearing, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the outgoing Joint Chiefs chairman, said “several hundred” American forces were killed by EFPs.

The arrival of EFPs on the Iraqi battlefield around 2005 came as a shock to U.S. planners. Along with more run-of-the-mill improvised explosive devices, the deadly bombs drove a crash effort to create and deploy vehicles with far better armor.

Whereas most roadside bombs send energy and shrapnel in all directions, EFPs work more like cannons. The force of the blast molds a concave metal disc, called a liner, into a “formed penetrator” which is propelled at up to 3,000 meters per second. The effect is incredibly destructive, even to up-armored Humvees.

“You can do as much or more damage with a 5-pound EFP, which is aimed, as with a 200-pound conventional IED,” a Pentagon analyst told Los Angeles Times writer Andrew Cockburn in 2007. The analyst speculated that the cost to construct such a device was about $30 or less. They’ve been around since at least World War II, when resistance elements in Europe used them against Germans, Cockburn wrote.

***Worse, in 2011, the Obama administration made an accusation and continued to deal in back channels for a nuclear deal.***

Obama Administration Accuses Iran of ‘Secret Deal’ With Al Qaeda

FNC: WASHINGTON — The Obama administration accused Iran on Thursday of entering into a “secret deal” with an Al Qaeda offshoot that provides money and recruits for attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Treasury Department designated six members of the unit as terrorists subject to U.S. sanctions.

The U.S. intelligence community has in the past disagreed about the extent of direct links between the Iranian government and Al Qaeda. Thursday’s allegations went further than what most analysts had previously said was a murky relationship with limited cooperation.

David S. Cohen, Treasury’s point man for terrorism and financial intelligence, said Iran entered a “secret deal with Al Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory.” He didn’t provide any details of that agreement, but said the sanctions seek to disrupt Al Qaeda’s work in Iraq and deny the terrorist group’s leadership much-needed support.

“Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world today,” Cohen said in a statement. “We are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism.”

Treasury said the exposure of the clandestine agreement would disrupt Al Qaeda operations by shedding light on Iran’s role as a “critical transit point” for money and extremists reaching Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“This network serves as the core pipeline through which Al Qaeda moves money, facilitators and operatives from across the Middle East to South Asia,” it said..

Treasury said a branch headed by Ezedin Abdel Aziz Khalil was operating in Iran with the Tehran government’s blessing, funneling funds collected from across the Arab world to Al Qaeda’s senior leaders in Pakistan. Khalil, the department said, has operated within Iran’s borders for six years.

Also targeted by the sanctions is Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, appointed by Osama bin Laden as Al Qaeda’s envoy in Iran after serving as a commander in Pakistan’s tribal areas. As an emissary, al-Rahman is allowed to travel in and out of Iran with the permission of government officials, the statement claimed.

The sanctions block any assets the individuals might have held in the United States, and bans Americans from doing any business with them.

No Iranian officials were cited for complicity in terrorism. The others targeted were Umid Muhammadi, described as a key planner for Al Qaeda in Iraq’s attacks; Salim Hasan Khalifa Rashid al-Kuwari and Abdallah Ghanim Mafuz Muslim al-Khawar, Qatar-based financial supporters who’ve allegedly helped extremists travel across the region; and Ali Hassan Ali al-Ajmi, a Kuwait-based fundraiser for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The action comes a day after the top U.S. commander for special operations forces said Al Qaeda is bloodied and “nearing its end,” even as he warned that the next generation of militants could keep special operations fighting for a decade to come.

Navy SEAL Adm. Eric T. Olson said bin Laden’s killing on May 2 was a near-fatal blow for the organization created by bin Laden and led from his Pakistan hide out. He said the group already had lost steam because of the revolts of the Arab Spring, which proved the Muslim world did not need terrorism to bring down governments, from Tunisia to Egypt.

Treasury’s public allegations against Iran may reflect part of a strategy to expand the pressure on smaller, less well-established offshoots of Al Qaeda as the weakening of the group’s leadership threatens to make its activities more disparate. Washington already has re-focused much attention on Al Qaeda’s Yemen-based branch, which has attempted to bomb a U.S.-bound jetliner and cargo planes in recent years.

But the exact nature of Iran’s relationship with Al Qaeda remains disputed in Washington, with different branches of the intelligence community disagreeing about whether Iran is supporting Al Qaeda as a matter of policy, according to one U.S. official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Some hardline militants backing Al Qaeda, members of Islam’s majority Sunnis, see the Shiite Islam dominant in Iran as heretical, and they view Tehran’s regional ambitions as a greater threat than the West. Sunni insurgents in Iraq have used car bombs and suicide attacks against Shiite targets, killing thousands since 2003, as well as targeting Shiite militias allied to Iran.

Since 2001, Iran has appeared a somewhat reluctant host for senior Al Qaeda operatives who fled there after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, keeping them under tight restrictions. After an initial period of cooperation with the West, Iran now seems to be a more comfortable haven even if it remains on the edge of Al Qaeda’s orbit.

Western officials point to the release earlier this year of an Iranian diplomat who was held for 15 months after being kidnapped by gunmen in Pakistan.

In negotiations for the diplomat’s freedom, they say Iran promised better conditions for dozens of people close to Osama bin Laden who were being held under tight security. These included some of the terror chief’s children and the network’s most senior military strategist, Saif al-Adel.

Still, the life of the Al Qaeda-linked exiles in Iran continues to be very much a blind spot for Western intelligence agencies. Few firm details have emerged, such as how much Iran limits their movements and contacts.

The Temerity of Mook, Podesta and Hillary in Campaign Policy

Posted on September 8, 2015September 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

Beyond the whole server-gate email hell scandal, the Hillary campaign policy team led by Robby Mook and John Podesta; they concocted a campaign finance reform plan that leaves one shuddering and in shock.

Hillary Clinton set to unveil campaign finance proposal

“We have to end the flood of secret, unaccountable money.”

NEW YORK — Kicking off a post-Labor Day push to rally support as Bernie Sanders maintains momentum and Joe Biden contemplates a White House bid of his own, Hillary Clinton on Tuesday will unveil a three-pronged campaign finance proposal that her team hopes will help her appeal to unconvinced liberals.

The policy platform — which largely reflects principles that Clinton regularly mentions on the campaign trail, to reliable cheers from Democrats — calls for the overturning of 2010’s Citizens United v FEC decision that paved the way for the creation of super PACs; the implementation of a more rigorous political spending disclosure regime; and a new public matching system for small donations to presidential and congressional campaigns.

“We have to end the flood of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political system, and drowning out the voices of too many everyday Americans,” Clinton said in a statement. “Our democracy should be about expanding the franchise, not charging an entrance fee. It starts with overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and continues with structural reform to our campaign finance system so there’s real sunshine and increased participation.”

The Democratic front-runner, who raised the most campaign funds of any candidate on either side of the aisle in the second quarter ($47.5 million), regularly rails against the Citizens United decision on the stump, using it as an example of the malfunctioning political system. She also frequently insists that she would use overturning the decision as a litmus test for appointing Supreme Court justices, a line that delights progressive voters, and a point that is included in her new proposal.

But portions of her plan are anathema to Republican candidates and their colleagues in Congress, and Clinton is not the only Democrat making such noises on the campaign trail. Sanders, for example, has also pushed public financing for campaigns.

To further complicate matters, a collection of liberal groups have questioned Clinton’s close ties to Wall Street and its big-money donors due to her time as first lady and as a senator from New York — not to mention the existence of Priorities USA Action, the primary super PAC backing her bid, which raised $15.6 million in the first half of 2015.

Still, her plan amounts to liberal red meat, hitting a handful of points championed by campaign finance reformers. And it comes as her campaign appears set to fight back more aggressively against Sanders’ surge and the negative headlines about her private email arrangement.

Clinton’s campaign finance proposal includes a plan to provide matching funds for small donations, along with lower limits for contributions to candidates who opt into the system. Campaigns would only be eligible to receive up to a certain level of the public matching funds, and they would have to raise a minimum number of small donations in the first place to qualify. The specific numbers and dollar figures are yet to be determined.

The campaign’s plan, which will come alongside a new video to be released on Tuesday, also formally repeats the candidate’s plan to only appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Citizens United — a case that was originally brought over an anti-Clinton video in 2008. It also reiterates her support for a constitutional amendment that would “establish common sense rules to protect against the undue influence of billionaires and special interests and to restore the role of average voters in elections.”

The third prong of the plan includes a proposal to force outside groups with large political spending budgets to disclose their largest donors in a timely fashion, as well as to disclose “significant transfers between” such groups. It also supports a proposal in front of the Securities and Exchange Commission to force publicly traded companies to disclose political spending to shareholders.

As a Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to move on many of these proposals, Clinton also says she would sign an executive order that would require federal contractors to disclose their own political spending.

Clinton is set to campaign in the swing states of Ohio and Wisconsin this week, after an address explaining her support of the Iran agreement in Washington on Wednesday.

*** Now for just one interesting fact on Hillary and Bill:

Nemazee is well connected by the way.

There’s a Lot More to Arrested Financier Hassan Nemazee’s Past Than Just Being a ‘Clinton Fundraiser’

2009: Nemazee was much more than just a Clinton fundraiser — he was a bipartisan financier of the influence bazaar that American politics has become

WhoWhatWhy.com reports exclusively on the background of Hassan Nemazee, the top Hillary Clinton fundraiser who was arrested and charged with forging loan documents. Early media accounts cast the event as an embarrassment for Ms. Clinton and the Democratic Party involving the financial misdoings of one prominent backer. Actually it is much more. Behind the Nemazee arrest lies a sprawling cautionary tale of presidents, would-be presidents, and the shadow world of wealthy operators who cozy up to them for their own gain. It reaches into the Bush operation as well as that of the Clintons, and is a microcosm of an influence bazaar that has gone global along with the economy.

On August 25th, Hassan Nemazee, a top fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, was arrested and charged with forging loan documents in order to borrow $74 million from Citibank. He could face up to 30 years in prison. Early media accounts cast the event as an embarrassment for Ms. Clinton involving the financial misdoings of one prominent backer. Actually it is much more.

Behind the Nemazee arrest lies a sprawling cautionary tale of presidents, would-be presidents, and the shadow world of wealthy operators who cozy up to them for their own gain. It reaches into the Bush operation as well as that of the Clintons, and is a microcosm of an influence bazaar that has gone global along with the economy.

Hassan Nemazee, who served as a finance director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, began raising sizable sums for the Democratic National Committee in the mid-nineties. In 1998, in the midst of the Lewinsky affair, Nemazee collected $60,000 for Bill Clinton’s legal defense fund in $10,000 increments from relatives and friends.

The following year, President Clinton nominated the money manager and investor to be ambassador to Argentina. Then an article in Forbes raised questions about his business practices. Among other things, Nemazee, an Iranian-American, had magically turned himself into an “Hispanic” by acquiring Venezuelan citizenship in order to fulfill the minority-ownership requirement of a California public pension fund. The nomination was withdrawn.

That embarrassment did not, however, hamper Nemazee’s rise within the Democratic Party. By 2004 he was New York finance chair for John Kerry’s campaign, and in 2006 he served under Senator Chuck Schumer as the national finance chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). During this period the committee raised about $25 million more than its Republican counterpart.

By 2008, Nemazee was one of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, and was being publicly touted as a top foreign policy adviser. When another major fundraiser, a clothing manufacturer named Norman Hsu, was arrested and unmasked as a swindler, it was Nemazee who was trotted out to defend Ms. Clinton and argue that she knew little about Hsu.

But she should have known plenty about Nemazee. In 2005, Nemazee and his business partner, Alan Quasha, went deep into the Clinton circle to hire Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton confidante and former chairman of the Democratic Party, for Carret Asset Management, their newly acquired investment firm. During the interregnum between McAuliffe’s party chairmanship and the time he officially joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign as chairman, Nemazee and Quasha set McAuliffe up with a salary and opened a Washington office for him. There he worked on his memoirs and laid the groundwork for Ms. Clinton’s presidential bid.

In March 2007, Nemazee, at the behest of McAuliffe, threw a dinner for Ms. Clinton at Manhattan’s swank Cipriani restaurant, which featured Bill Clinton and raised more than $500,000. In 2008, after Barack Obama gained the nomination, Nemazee raised a comparable sum for him.

But it is not fair to characterize Nemazee as an embarrassment to Democrats alone. Nemazee’s profile is considerably more complicated. For legal representation in his current troubles, for example, Nemazee has retained Marc Mukasey, a partner in Rudolph Giuliani’s law firm and the son of Michael Mukasey, who served as George W. Bush’s last Attorney General.

There’s more than choice of counsel involved. Before moving into the Democratic camp, Nemazee had backed such Republican senators as Jesse Helms, Sam Brownback and Alfonse D’Amato. None could be described as Clinton fans. Nemazee’s business partner, Alan Quasha, who specializes in buying up troubled companies, has also played both sides of the partisan divide. Quasha gave to both Bush and Al Gore in 2000, and in the 2008 race gave to Republicans Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani as well as Democrats Barack Obama and Chris Dodd.

The strikingly trans-partisan and trans-national nature of this high-stakes influence game is best exemplified by the relationship between Quasha’s oil company, Harken Energy, and George W. Bush. Harken provided a home for Bush in the 1980’s when his own oil businesses failed, offering him handsome compensation and a solid financial base from which to enter politics. Bush was named to the Harken board and received a range of benefits from the company while devoting most of his time to his father’s presidential campaign and then his own outside career efforts.

Harken is a curious outfit. Its early funding sources were opaque, and its investors and board members had a dizzying array of connections into global power centers — and ties to the Saudi leadership and the former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the Shah of Iran, as well as to the Swiss Bank, UBS, which has been charged by the US government with providing cover for Americans who were evading taxes.

Around the time George W. Bush joined its board, Harken received an unusual and sizable cash infusion from the Harvard Management Company, which handles Harvard University’s endowment, the largest in the nation. Robert G. Stone, Jr., a figure with ties to US intelligence and to the Bushes, was head of the Harvard board of overseers that approved financial strategies. Former employees of Harvard Management have recently made highly-publicized charges that the company engaged in Enron-style investment practices. (Prior to going to work for Nemazee and Quasha, Terry McAuliffe had publicly criticized Bush for his financial dealings with Harken, disparaging that company’s own Enron-like accounting. Both Quasha and Nemazee, like Bush, have Harvard degrees, and both have sat on prestigious Harvard committees in recent years.)

Nemazee’s role as a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton can be better understood through his own Iranian connections. His father was a shipping magnate who was close with the Shah of Iran and served as the Shah’s commercial attaché in Washington; Nemazee was a founding member of the Iranian-American Political Action Committee, a lobbying group. Recent strains have been reported between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over policy toward Iran. Clinton has advocated a harder line toward the Islamic fundamentalists who took over when the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, while Obama has stressed dialogue.

With Nemazee’s arrest for financial fraud certain to attract some sustained coverage, it remains to be seen whether it will be treated as yet another isolated case of financial wrongdoing, or lead to a deeper look at the influence bazaar that American politics has become.

Pope Francis is Breaking the Catholic Doctrine, Revolt at Vatican

Posted on September 8, 2015September 8, 2015 by Denise Simon

On the very same day that the Kentucky clerk, Kim Davis is ordered released from jail by a local judge for adhering to her inalienable rights to her belief system, a religious debate is underway throughout America.

Anyone remember the Obama administration suing the Little Sisters of the Poor due to Obamacare and birth-control?

Inalienable rights, cannot be surrendered, sold, suspended or transferred at the behest of any government and Kim Davis stood stern.

Meanwhile, while so many issues challenge America, one place to normally seek stability, sense or morality is church, but such is not the case with the Catholic Church or the Vatican.

Due to Pope Francis and what most of the media is not saying, the Papacy and the Vatican is in crisis, in Rome and honestly across the globe.

The edge of a movement is underway at home and worldwide, the rise of the moral and religious compass.

A Conservative revolt is brewing in the Vatican as Pope Francis introduces more inclusive measures

VATICAN CITY — On a sunny morning earlier this year, a camera crew entered a well-appointed apartment just outside the 9th-century gates of Vatican City. Pristinely dressed in the black robes and scarlet sash of the princes of the Roman Catholic Church, the Wisconsin-born Cardinal Raymond Burke sat in his elaborately upholstered armchair and appeared to issue a warning to Pope Francis.

A staunch conservative and Vatican bureaucrat, Burke had been demoted by the pope a few months earlier, but it did not take the fight out of him. Francis had been backing a more inclusive era, giving space to progressive voices on divorced Catholics as well as gays and lesbians. In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist” liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority. “One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the French news crew.

Papal power, Burke warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to change teaching (or) doctrine.”

Burke’s words belied a growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that governs the Roman Catholic Church.

This month, Francis makes his first trip to the United States at a time when his progressive allies are heralding him as a revolutionary, a man who only last week broadened the power of priests to forgive women who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal sin” of abortion during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in December. On Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum-seekers risking all to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.

Yet as he upends church convention, Francis also is grappling with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews, including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.

The conservative rebellion is taking on many guises, in public comments, yes, but also in the rising popularity of conservative Catholic websites promoting Francis dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative clerics seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news media, aimed at Vatican reformers.

In his recent comments, Burke was also merely stating fact. Despite the vast powers of the pope, church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal reformers, the bruising theological pushback by conservatives is complicating efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into tangible changes.

“At least we aren’t poisoning each other’s chalices anymore,” said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, a liberal British priest and Francis ally appointed to an influential Vatican post in May. Radcliffe said he welcomed open debate, even critical dissent within the church. But he professed himself as being “afraid” of “some of what we’re seeing”

Rather than stake out clear stances, the pope is more subtly, often implicitly, backing liberal church leaders who are pressing for radical change, while dramatically opening the parameters of the debate over how far reforms can go. For instance, during the opening of a meeting of senior bishops last year, Francis told those gathered, “Let no one say, ‘This you cannot say.’ ”

We have a serious issue right now, a very alarming situation where Catholic priests and bishops are saying and doing things that are against what the church teaches

Since then, liberals have tested the boundaries of their new freedom, with one Belgian bishop going as far as calling for the Catholic Church to formally recognize same-sex couples.

Conservatives counter that in the climate of rising liberal thought, they have been thrust unfairly into a position in which “defending the real teachings of the church makes you look like an enemy of the pope,” a senior Vatican official said on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely.

“We have a serious issue right now, a very alarming situation where Catholic priests and bishops are saying and doing things that are against what the church teaches, talking about same-sex unions, about Communion for those who are living in adultery,” the official said. “And yet the pope does nothing to silence them. So the inference is that this is what the pope wants.”

A measure of the church’s long history of intrigue has spilled into the Francis papacy, particularly as the pope has ordered radical overhauls of murky Vatican finances. Under Francis, the top leadership of the Vatican Bank was ousted, as was the all-Italian board of its financial watchdog agency.

One method of pushback has been to give damaging leaks to the Italian news media. Vatican officials are now convinced that the biggest leak to date — of the papal encyclical on the environment in June — was driven by greed (it was sold to the media) rather than vengeance. But other disclosures have targeted key figures in the papal cleanup — including the conservative chosen to lead the pope’s financial reforms, the Australian Cardinal George Pell, who in March was the subject of a leak about his allegedly lavish personal tastes.

More often, dissent unfolds on ideological grounds. Criticism of a sitting pope is hardly unusual — liberal bishops on occasion challenged Benedict. But in an institution cloaked in traditional fealty to the pope, what shocks many is just how public the criticism of Francis has become.

In an open letter to his diocese, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote: “In trying to accommodate the needs of the age, as Pope Francis suggests, the Church risks the danger of losing its courageous, countercultural, prophetic voice, one that the world needs to hear.” For his part, Burke, the cardinal from Wisconsin, has called the church under Francis “a ship without a rudder.”

Even Pell appeared to undermine him on theological grounds. Commenting on the pope’s call for dramatic action on climate change, Pell told the Financial Times in July, “The church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters.”

In conservative circles, the word “confusion” also has become a euphemism for censuring the papacy without mentioning the pope. In one instance, 500 Catholic priests in Britain drafted an open letter this year that cited “much confusion” in “Catholic moral teaching” following the bishops’ conference on the family last year in which Francis threw open the floodgates of debate, resulting in proposed language offering an embraceable, new stance for divorced or gay Catholics.

That language ultimately was watered down in a vote that showed the still-ample power of conservatives. It set up another showdown for next month, when senior church leaders will meet in a follow-up conference that observers predict will turn into another theological slugfest. The pope himself will have the final word on any changes next year.

Conservatives have launched a campaign against a possible policy change that would grant divorced and remarried Catholics the right to take Communion at Mass. Last year, five senior leaders including Burke and the conservative Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna, Italy, drafted what has become known as “the manifesto” against such a change. In July, a DVD distributed to hundreds of dioceses in Europe and Australia, and backed by conservative Catholic clergy members, made the same point. In it, Burke, who has made similar arguments at Catholic conferences, issued dire warnings of a world in which traditional teachings are ignored.

The pope does not have the power to change teaching (or) doctrine

But this is still the Catholic Church, where hierarchical respect is as much tradition as anything else. Rather than targeting the pope, conservative bishops and cardinals more often take aim at their liberal peers. They include the German Cardinal Walter Kasper, who has suggested that he has become a proxy for clergy members who are not brave enough to criticize the pope directly.

Yet conservatives counter that liberals are overstepping their bounds, putting their own spin on the pronouncements of a pope who has been more ambiguous than Kasper and his allies are willing to admit.

“I was born a papist, I have lived as a papist, and I will die a papist,” Caffarra said. “The pope has never said that divorced and remarried Catholics should be able to take Holy Communion, and yet, his words are being twisted to give them false meaning.”

Some of the pope’s allies insist that debate is precisely what Francis wants.

“I think that people are speaking their mind because they feel very strongly and passionately in their position, and I don’t think the Holy Father sees it as a personal attack on him,” said Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich, considered a close ally of the pope. “The Holy Father has opened the possibility for these matters to be discussed openly; he has not predetermined where this is going.”

Stefano Pitrelli contributed to this report.