Category Archives: Treasury

Did Obama Miss that Ayatollah Tweet to Barack?

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Iran’s supreme leader tweeted a graphic Saturday that appears to depict President Obama holding a gun to his head as Britain relaxed its travel advice to the nation, citing decreased hostility under the Iranian government.

“US president has said he could knock out Iran’s military. We welcome no war, nor do we initiate any war, but..” reads the caption above the tweet sent by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on @khamenei_ir, his English language account.

Khamenei’s account has not been verified by Twitter but is widely believed to be the supreme leader’s based on its content, which often rails against the United States and Israel. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani also has an unverified Twitter account, @HassanRouhani.

The latest tweet on Khamenei’s account mirrors a similar one sent July 17 that didn’t contain an image, but said: “US pres. said he could knock out Iran’s army. Of course we neither welcome, nor begin war, but in case of war, US will leave it disgraced.”

That tweet came just three days after the United States and other world powers reached a historic agreement with Iran that called for limits on Tehran’s nuclear program in return for lifting economic sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy.

Meanwhile, the British government eased its travel advice to Iran on Saturday, saying it no longer advises “against all but essential travel to the rest of Iran” and has “updated our advice to provide greater clarity on the risks that may affect British nationals traveling to Iran.”

The government still maintains its advice to avoid travel in some areas, particularly along Iran’s borders. “Our policy is to recommend against travel to an area when we judge that the risk is unacceptably high. We consider that continues to be the case for specific areas of Iran, notably along Iran’s borders with Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in a statement.

“But we believe that in other areas of Iran the risk to British nationals has changed, in part due to decreasing hostility under President Rouhani’s government,” he added.

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Congress Alarmed by Iran Pact’s Secret Understandings

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As the White House campaign to persuade Congress about the wisdom of its Iran nuclear deal moves into its second week, important components of the complex agreement are emerging that will be shrouded from the public and in some cases from the U.S. government itself.

The existence of these secret clauses and interpretations could undermine the public’s trust in the Barack Obama administration’s presentations about the nuclear pact. Already Republicans and other critics of the deal have seized on the side agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency as a weakness in the deal closed last week in Vienna.

The controversy began on Wednesday when Secretary of State John Kerry told House lawmakers behind closed doors that he neither possessed nor had read a copy of two secret side deals between the IAEA and Iran, according to Representative Mike Pompeo, a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee who was inside the session. Congress hasn’t seen those side agreements either.

“Kerry told me directly that he has not read the secret side deals,” Pompeo told us in an interview. “He told us the State Department does not have possession of these documents.”

In other cases, secret understandings were provided to legislators. Congress on Monday was given a set of non-public interpretations of the Iran deal, according to House and Senate staffers who have seen the documents. These were part of 18 documents the White House provided to Congress as required under legislation passed this spring that gives Congress 60 days to review the Iran deal.

Of the 18 documents, six are classified or confidential, the staffers told us. These include secret letters of understanding between the U.S. and France, Germany and the U.K. that spell out some of the more ambiguous parts of the agreement, and classified explanations of the Iran deal’s provisions that commit other countries to provide Iran with research and development assistance on its nuclear program. There is also a draft of the U.S. statement to be made public on the day the Iran agreement formally goes into effect.

Those are the secret understandings Congress and the administration have put on paper. But in the case of the side agreements with the IAEA, Congress and the executive branch may not have all the facts. In Wednesday’s closed session, Kerry sparred with Pompeo, who last weekend traveled with Republican Senator Tom Cotton to Vienna last weekend to meet with IAEA officials. Those agency representatives told the lawmakers the that two secret side deals covered how the IAEA would be able to inspect the Parchin military complex and how the IAEA and Iran would resolve concerns about the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program.

The briefing for lawmakers was classified, but the Kerry-Pompeo exchange was not. Pompeo pressed Kerry on the details of the side agreements between the IAEA and Iran. Kerry acknowledged he didn’t know all of the specifics.

A statement distributed by the State Department on Wednesday disputed the characterization that the agreements between Iran and the IAEA were “secret.” Instead, it described them as “technical arrangements” and said U.S. experts were “comfortable with the contents,” which the State Department would brief to Congress if asked.

“It is standard practice for the IAEA and member states to treat bilateral documents as ‘safeguards confidential,'” the State Department statement said. “This is a principal the United States has championed throughout the IAEA’s existence to protect both proprietary and proliferation sensitive information. We must be able to ensure that information given to the IAEA does not leak out and become a how to guide for producing nuclear materials that can be used in nuclear weapons, and that countries know their patented or proprietary information won’t be stolen because they are released in IAEA documents.”

But while these agreements may be standard operating procedure in the case of other IAEA nuclear inspections, with Iran it’s potentially more serious. On Thursday, during an open session before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Senator James Risch said his understanding was that one of the IAEA-Iran side agreements would allow Iran to take its own environmental samples at Parchin. Speaking around the specifics, Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the committee, compared this arrangement to the NFL allowing athletes suspected of taking steroids to mail in their own urine samples.

Kerry and others have told Congress that the agreement about Parchin and the understandings about IAEA inspections in general are largely technical and do not weaken a strong agreement. Needless to say, Pompeo disagrees. “Kerry gave no indications they are seeking these documents and there is no indication he is the least bit worried he doesn’t have access to this. The Ayatollah knows what’s in the deal but we don’t,” he told us, referring to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

For the Obama administration, not having copies of the side agreements between Iran and the IAEA is convenient. The law requires it to give Congress all the documents it possesses and only those documents. If the side agreements are outside the reach of Kerry, they are outside the reach of Congress and the American people.

On the other hand, that fact undermines Obama’s argument that the overall deal can be verified and is transparent. Already Iranian leaders have publicly spoken about the Iran deal in terms vastly different from their American counterparts. The existence of secret understandings of that deal will only exacerbate this tension over time.

 

The Plot to Kill Saudi Ambassador and the Border Patrol Helicopter

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In 2011, intelligence officials uncovered a plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador during his trip to the United States. He was to be blown up while he dined in a Washington DC restaurant.

Not come more was in the media after the initial news item on it. Years later, it is time to take another look due to a helicopter that was operated by Customs and Border patrol in Laredo, Texas that was shot at by ground fire and had to make an emergency landing.

This post brings home two points. 1) Iran is a mortal enemy of Saudi Arabia and does attempt to kill anywhere in the world. 2) The Iranian killing force al Quds has fully integrated with a drug cartel, Los Zetas that operates inside our southern neighbor, Mexico and had free access in the United States.

Neither terror group are on any U.S. terror list…let that sink in…

FreeBeacon in part:

The helicopter, part of USCBP’s Office of Air and Marine, was struck by gunfire on its side and on the rotor blade. The pilot was forced to make an emergency landing.

The law enforcement officers on the helicopter spotted the traffickers along the river during a routine flight around 5:00 P.M. local time June 5.

“The pilot was able to make a safe landing; there were no injuries,” said USCBP spokesman Daniel Hetlage, adding that U.S. and Mexican authorities are continuing to investigate. He declined to elaborate.

“I understand that they were chasing some people with bundles of marijuana,” Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar told the Laredo Morning Times. “People are getting desperate and crossing narcotics across the border.”

The helicopter that took fire was an EC-120, a medium-range turbine engine-powered aircraft.

A U.S. official said the helicopter attack was unusual but not unprecedented. The incident was not widely reported at the time and highlights the increasing danger of porous U.S. borders and widespread drug trafficking that takes place across them, the official said.

U.S. border security problems are expected to be a major topic of debate during the presidential election campaign.

The area near Laredo is a major transit route for Zetas drug runners.

Joel Vargas, head of intelligence for the international association InterPort Police, said the recent escape of Mexican drug kingpin El Chapo Guzman will re-energize drug cartel cells in Mexico that are battling the major Sinaloa drug cartel.

“The partnership between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, even with their own internal fighting going on, makes the border town of Laredo, Texas, a powder keg,” Vargas said. “El Chapo will re-attempt to take back not only Laredo, Texas, but also consolidate control of El Paso, Texas.”

A month after the U.S. helicopter was forced down by gunfire, Mexican authorities killed six drug runners near Mexico’s Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas.

The six suspects had fired on a Mexican Blackhawk helicopter, hitting it several times.

The Mexican helicopter incident July 6 involved an armed convoy of suspected Zetas drug cartel members.

According to U.S. officials, the Zetas are a well-armed organization. Authorities in Guatemala have captured M-16 and AK-47 rifles and grenades from Zetas operating in that country.

The Zetas also make extensive use of social media. The group has posted photos of beheadings it has carried out against members of rival drug gangs. It has also claimed responsibility for killing several bloggers who they say had exposed some of the group’s members.

The Zetas were implicated in an Iranian plot in 2011 to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, a paramilitary and covert action force, attempted to recruit Zetas members to conduct attacks against the United States.

The Quds force also has been seeking to collaborate with Zetas in setting up transit routes that will be used to smuggle Afghan heroin into the country.

As a result of the 2011 plot, the Obama administration placed Quds Force commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani, on the list of designated terrorists.

The Iran nuclear agreement reached in Vienna earlier this included Soleimani on a list of Iranians who would have sanctions against them lifted in the future.

***

From TWS in part:

The revelation that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its Quds Force had plotted to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States – by blowing him up as he dined at a Washington restaurant – is a stark reminder of the nature of the Tehran regime and its ambitions. But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the story is that Iran’s thugs are developing a strategic partnership with Mexico’s most violent thugs: Los Zetas may only be the second-largest drug cartel in the Drug Enforcement Administration’s rankings, but they’re probably the most lethal. The gang is said to have formed around a platoon’s worth of deserters from Mexico’s special operations forces, and became the elite troops of another Mexican drug organization, the Gulf Cartel. The leader of that cartel got himself arrested, and the Zetas moved out on their own.


The Zetas have shot their way to prominence ever since, in turf wars with other gangs and in a number of spectacular massacres. This past August, the Zetas conducted a mounted raid on the Casino Royale – yes, the Casino Royale – in Monterrey in Nuevo Leon. After gunning down a few gamblers and guards at the entrance, they then doused the premises with gasoline and set the entrance ablaze. New reports indicate that more than 60 were killed, and another 35 trapped inside the building. The purpose of the attack appears to be simple retaliation for the Calderon government’s crackdown on the cartels, to demonstrate vividly that Mexican security forces – 3,000 were sent to restore order in Monterey – could not control what amounts to an insurgent group. The attack was mostly an act of political symbolism.


The alliance with the Zetas is only the tip of the Iranian iceberg in Latin America. As Roger Noriega and Jose Cardenas have recently written, “Iran has made the Western Hemisphere a priority….The real game changer has been the alliance developed between Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.” In addition to the Quds Force, Iran often operates through Hezbollah, which has established networks in the Lebanese communities that have long-standing enclaves in the trading and port cities of South America. In addition to Chavez, Iran has established closer ties to the Bolivian government of Evo Morales’s and Rafael Correa’s regime in Ecuador.

No one has tracked the increasing strategic cooperation between Iran, other anti-America states, international criminal, and narco-gangs than Douglas Farah of the International Assessment and Strategy Center. Recently, he testified to the House Homeland Security Committee that:

We see the further empowerment, training and technological support [to] the oppressive security apparatuses in the increasingly undemocratic Bolivarian states provided by the Iran-Hezbollah-IRGC/Quds Force combine….[They] are the sharpest edge of the sword at present, and the one most openly aimed at the United States, and the one least tractable to diplomacy.  More details are here.

White House Signed a National Security Waiver for Iran Deal

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On August 14, 2012, Barack Obama signed H.R. 1905 into law the’ Iran Threat Reduction and Syrian Human Rights Act of 2012′.

The he signed a National Security Waiver for the sake of the escalating talks with Iran seeking a deal defined early as the JPOA, the Joint Plan of Action. Sanctions of several key factors were lifted by his waiver signature.

While we cannot determine the date of the waiver, it was noted by Senator Marco Rubio in 2015, directly after the State of the Union address and picked up by CNN:

Republican presidential candidates have said they’d undo President Barack Obama’s Iran deal.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Sunday on “State of the Union” that he’d revoke the national security waiver under which Obama is implementing the deal, effectively re-instituting U.S. sanctions against Iran.

“We will not use the national security waiver to hold back U.S. sanctions against Iran — especially not as a result of this flawed deal that he is pursuing,” Rubio said.

 

Due to the president having extraordinary authority, he took full advantage as noted below:

Revises Presidential Waiver Authority. The Act preserves the President’s general authority to waive sanctions against non-U.S. persons.  However, the Act revises and raises the standard under which the President may exercise the general waiver authority. First, energy-related sanctions can only be waived if the waiver is “essential to the national security interests of the United States.” Second, weapons of mass destruction (WMD)-related sanctions can only be waived if the waiver is “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Furthermore, the President’s “permanent” waiver authority is removed and replaced with a one-year renewable waiver authority.

The full summary of the Act, the sanctions and details are found here.

The White House soon went into full pro Iran deal mode using the White House website to push the soon to be successful results of the work he deployed John Kerry along with the P5+1 team to accomplish.

Under the framework for an Iran nuclear deal Iran's uranium enrichment pathway to a weapon will be shut down

What Iran’s Nuclear Program Would Look Like Without This Deal

As it stands today, Iran has a large stockpile of enriched uranium and nearly 20,000 centrifuges, enough to create 8 to 10 bombs. If Iran decided to rush to make a bomb without the deal in place, it would take them 2 to 3 months until they had enough weapon-ready uranium (or highly enriched uranium) to build their first nuclear weapon. Left unchecked, that stockpile and that number of centrifuges would grow exponentially, practically guaranteeing that Iran could create a bomb—and create one quickly – if it so chose.
This deal removes the key elements needed to create a bomb and prolongs Iran’s breakout time from 2-3 months to 1 year or more if Iran broke its commitments. Importantly, Iran won’t garner any new sanctions relief until the IAEA confirms that Iran has followed through with its end of the deal. And should Iran violate any aspect of this deal, the U.N., U.S., and E.U. can snap the sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy back into place.
Here’s what Iran has committed to:

Under the framework for an Iran nuclear deal Iran's uranium enrichment pathway to a weapon will be shut down

Heck, check the White House website and read the rest of the mess.

There are so many details and caveats omitted that even the House of Representatives has begun listing them.

Speaker of the House, John Boehner’s office has been watching the new twitter handle established by the White House to address head on all the misconceptions of the Iran deal.

@TheIranDeal is throwing out some real whoppers
July 24, 2015|Cory Fritz
The White House launched a new Twitter handle this week to help sell President Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran.  So far its effort to “set the record straight” is offering nothing more than baseless claims:

CLAIM: “Thanks to the #IranDeal, Iran has agreed to provide the IAEA with the information necessary to address PMD.”

FACTS:  Iran has consistently delayed, obstructed and denied inspectors access to key information, and the proposed nuclear agreement will not compel Iran to come clean about its past activities.

“Tehran should already have made a full declaration under its obligations that predated the [July 14] accord, but the IAEA has found that Iran repeatedly failed to do so… Now the new agreement calls again on Iran to cooperate, but it offers no reason to believe that the Iranian regime will end its recalcitrance,” William Tobey, a former deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security administration wrote in the Wall Street Journal. More from the Speaker’s office on the Iran deal is here.

 

Hillary’s Team Denies Classified Emails

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As the probe continues on Hillary Clinton’s email history and her private server, one must question how a Secretary of State in four years never electronically interacted in classified communications.

If this is accurate when it comes to her private email server, then where did classified communications occur?

Hillary was a lawyer and so is Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and he too used a private email for official business and did the former Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, who also created an alias.

Clearly there is a real pattern in the Obama administration where abuse and waivers are the culture of corruption and obstruction of procedures and law. Imagine how many others use non official communications systems.

Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account

NYT’s

WASHINGTON — Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.

The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” The memo was written to Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management.

It is not clear if any of the information in the emails was marked as classified by the State Department when Mrs. Clinton sent or received them.

But since her use of a private email account for official State Department business was revealed in March, she has repeatedly said that she had no classified information on the account.

The Justice Department has not decided if it will open an investigation, senior officials said. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

At issue are thousands of pages of State Department emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account. Mrs. Clinton has said she used the account because it was more convenient, but it also shielded her correspondence from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.

She faced sharp criticism after her use of the account became public, and subsequently said she would ask the State Department to release her emails.

The department is now reviewing some 55,000 pages of emails. A first batch of 3,000 pages was made public on June 30.

In the course of the email review, State Department officials determined that some information in the messages should be retroactively classified. In the 3,000 pages that were released, for example, portions of two dozen emails were redacted because they were upgraded to “classified status.” But none of those were marked as classified at the time Mrs. Clinton handled them.

In a second memo to Mr. Kennedy, sent on July 17, the inspectors general said that at least one email made public by the State Department contained classified information. The inspectors general did not identify the email or reveal its substance.

The memos were provided to The New York Times by a senior government official.

The inspectors general also criticized the State Department for its handling of sensitive information, particularly its reliance on retired senior Foreign Service officers to decide if information should be classified, and for not consulting with the intelligence agencies about its determinations.

In March, Mrs. Clinton insisted that she was careful in her handling of information on her private account. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said. “There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”

In May, the F.B.I. asked the State Department to classify a section of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that related to suspects who may have been arrested in connection with the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The information was not classified at the time Mrs. Clinton received it.

The revelations about how Mrs. Clinton handled her email have been an embarrassment for the State Department, which has been repeatedly criticized over its handling of documents related to Mrs. Clinton and her advisers.

On Monday, a federal judge sharply questioned State Department lawyers at a hearing in Washington about why they had not responded to Freedom of Information Act requests from The Associated Press, some of which were four years old.

“I want to find out what’s been going on over there — I should say, what’s not been going on over there,” said Judge Richard J. Leon of United States District Court, according to a transcript obtained by Politico. The judge said that “for reasons known only to itself,” the State Department “has been, to say the least, recalcitrant in responding.”

Two days later, lawmakers on the Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks said they planned to summon Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff to Capitol Hill to answer questions about why the department has not produced documents that the panel subpoenaed. That hearing is set for next Wednesday.

“The State Department has used every excuse to avoid complying with fundamental requests for documents,” said the chairman of the House committee, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina.

Mr. Gowdy said that while the committee has used an array of measures to try to get the State Department to hand over documents, the results have been the same. “Our committee is not in possession of all documents needed to do the work assigned to us,” he said.

The State Department has sought to delay the hearing, citing continuing efforts to brief members of Congress on the details of the nuclear accord with Iran. It is not clear why the State Department has struggled with the classification issues and document production. Republicans have said the department is trying to use those processes to protect Mrs. Clinton.

State Department officials say they simply do not have the resources or infrastructure to properly comply with all the requests. Since March, requests for documents have significantly increased.

Some State Department officials said they believe that many senior officials did not initially take the House committee seriously, which slowed document production and created an appearance of stonewalling.

State Department officials also said that Mr. Kerry is concerned about the toll the criticism has had on the department and has urged his deputies to comply with the requests quickly.

Wheels up on the Crowded Obama Plane to Kenya

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On Africa trip, Air Force One will be crowded for once

WaPo:

Twenty House and Senate members will accompany President Obama on this week’s trip to Africa, according to White House officials, the latest sign of the White House’s effort to build a closer rapport with Congress.

The group — which includes 19 Democrats and one Republican, Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) — will be evenly divided between the outbound and return flight. Flake and two of his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee on African affairs, Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), will join seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus on Thursday night’s flight to Nairobi. The Democratic House members include Karen Bass (Calif.), G.K. Butterfield (N.C.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (Tex.), Barbara Lee (Calif.), Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), Charles B. Rangel (N.Y.) and Terri Sewell (Ala.)

[READ: Why Sen. Jeff Flake is the one Republican journeying to Africa with Obama]

On the return flight from Ethiopia, the president will host 10 CBC members: Democratic Reps. Emanuel Cleaver (Mo.), John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), Al Green (Tex.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Tex.), Robin Kelly (Ill.), Gwen Moore (Wis.), Donald Payne (N.J.), Cedric Richmond (La.) and Bennie Thompson (Miss.).

Asked Wednesday about why the president was bringing along such a large congressional contingent to Kenya and Ethiopia, his national security adviser Susan Rice told reporters, “Well, obviously we want to strengthen and sustain what I’ve referred to repeatedly as a strong bipartisan consensus around support for Africa, Africa’s development, peace and security there.”

Rice added that last month the administration was focused on renewing the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a trade bill that received overwhelming support in the House and Senate. “But obviously we have many, many issues that are important that we need Congress’s support on — legislation that will support and codify some of the most significant initiatives, including in the health and agriculture and power sectors, as well as we have a nominee on the Hill that very much needs to be confirmed for USAID administrator,” she said.

***     

He will become the first sitting president to be hosted by Kenya or Ethiopia, his second stop on a four-day trip beginning on Friday.

Though the visit aims to boost US security and economic ties, many Kenyans view his arrival as a native son’s homecoming.

Mr Obama will spend private time with family members, say White House officials.

But his itinerary does not include travel to the village of Kogelo where his father is buried, despite a local witchdoctor’s predictions otherwise.

Mr Obama last visited Kenya – an important US ally against Somali Islamist group al Shabaab – while serving as a US senator in 2006.

In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, he will preside over the Global Entrepreneurship Summit and pay tribute to the victims and survivors of the 1998 US embassy bombing.

He will also dine with President Uhuru Kenyatta, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Those charges were dropped in March, but the case prevented Mr Obama from going to Kenya.

Mr Obama will also give a speech to the Kenyan people in Nairobi.

Valerie Jarrett, an Obama aide, said: “Just as anybody is curious about their heritage, visiting Kenya provides him an opportunity to make that personal connection.”

The Kenyan authorities have filled potholes, repaired pavements and planted greenery along the route where the presidential motorcade will pass.

Street vendors’ stalls are creaking with Obama memorabilia such as T-shirts, portraits and DVDs.

In the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa he will become the first US president to address the African Union.

Activists have raised concerns in a letter to Mr Obama about his trip to East Africa because of alleged human rights violations.

US National Security Adviser Susan Rice said the US President wouldn’t hesitate to raise human rights concerns during the trip.

Mr Obama has chided African countries over gay rights, but Mr Kenyatta says it is a “non-issue” that won’t be on the agenda for the visit.

Mr Obama’s critics say he has done less for Africa than his predecessor, George W Bush, whose Aids relief programme made him a hero on the continent.

But Mr Obama’s advisers point to his own initiatives on electricity, agriculture and trade.

The US President wrote about his Kenyan roots in his best-selling 1995 autobiography Dreams From My Father.

Debunked “birther” conspiracy theories once held he was actually born there, and ineligible to be US President.

Mr Obama will spend private time with family members, say White House officials, per Sky News

 

But his itinerary does not include travel to the village of Kogelo where his father is buried, despite a local witchdoctor’s predictions otherwise.

Mr Obama last visited Kenya – an important US ally against Somali Islamist group al Shabaab – while serving as a US senator in 2006.

In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, he will preside over the Global Entrepreneurship Summit and pay tribute to the victims and survivors of the 1998 US embassy bombing.

He will also dine with President Uhuru Kenyatta, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Those charges were dropped in March, but the case prevented Mr Obama from going to Kenya.

Mr Obama will also give a speech to the Kenyan people in Nairobi.