In a two-page memo to The Washington Post, Trump outlined for the first time how he would seek to force Mexico to pay for his 1,000-mile border fence, which Trump has made a cornerstone of his presidential campaign and which has been repeatedly scoffed at by current and former Mexican leaders. Read about Trump’s plan
Mexico Payment Plan for the Wall <— Full text here.
If anyone believes that Hillary herself will be crafting the responses to the 25 questions, you need to think again. Hillary likely wont even be in the same room, a fleet of lawyers will assume the task in full.
Personally, I have several additional questions that should be asked. 1. How many servers, where are they and what is being used today? 2. Where did you received classified and top secret communications? 3. Where are the communications between you, Mrs. Clinton and the Pentagon and or the White House? 4. Where are the communications regarding Syria, Russian and Iran? 5. Where are all the hardcopies of top secret materials that were delivered to you on a daily basis assuring all were placed in burn bags? 6. Where are the communications regarding the countless waivers to law you signed and list what they were and why?
Hillary Clinton to explain to court who ‘recommended’ secret email account
WashingtonTimes: Hillary Clinton will get a chance to explain why she continued to use her secret home email account for government business in defiance of repeated security warnings from her underlings — just some of the 25 questions she’ll have to answer, in writing and under oath, to a federal court.
Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm, submitted the 25 questions to Mrs. Clinton Tuesday, and she now has a month to respond under the procedure set by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
Among the questions are who “recommended” that she use a secret email account in the first place, whether she ever told the officials responsible for archiving records that she had the secret account, and what steps she took after attempts to hack her account.
Mrs. Clinton could also have to answer whether she destroyed work-related emails.
“These are simple questions about her email system that we hope will finally result in straightforward answers, under oath, from Hillary Clinton,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement as he released the 25 questions.
Mrs. Clinton eschewed a state.gov account during her time in office and instead used an account tied to a server she kept at her home in New York. That arrangement effectively thwarted open-records laws and shielded her communications from public view for more than six years.
After prodding by Congress, the State Department demanded she return her emails, and she turned over about 30,000 messages she said were work-related, and said she deleted another 30,000 that were personal — and then wiped her server.
The FBI, after a yearlong investigation, recovered thousands of work-related messages it said Mrs. Clinton failed to turn over, and said there may have been others that investigators were unable to recover thanks to Mrs. Clinton’s thoroughness in wiping the server.
Judicial Watch had tried to force Mrs. Clinton to testify in person under oath but Judge Sullivan ruled against that, instead saying that the former Cabinet official, senator and first lady, and current Democratic presidential candidate, could testify in writing.
The questions are supposed to focus on the creation, use and handling of Mrs. Clinton’s emails under open-records laws.
Mrs. Clinton has said she thought her messages were being captured because she regularly emails fellow employees on their official State Department accounts. She estimated to Congress that as many as 95 percent of the messages should have been stored that way.
But her campaign has been unable to back up that number, and Judicial Watch said that has little bearing on the other messages Mrs. Clinton exchanged with those outside of the State Department, whose mail wasn’t part of the department’s system.
“What was your understanding about how such emails would be maintained, preserved, or searched by the Department in response to FOIA requests?” Judicial Watch said in one of its questions to Mrs. Clinton.
The FBI turned over some 15,000 messages it recovered that it said Mrs. Clinton didn’t turn over to the government. It’s unclear how many of those are personal, but at least several dozen are related to the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, department lawyers told a federal judge Tuesday.
The State Department is now fending off a barrage of requests to go through the 15,000 messages and release them ahead of the election.
The campaign of GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump said the surfacing of additional Benghazi emails was troubling.
“Hillary Clinton swore before a federal court and told the American people she handed over all of her work-related emails. If Clinton did not consider emails about something as important as Benghazi to be work-related, one has to wonder what is contained in the other emails she attempted to wipe from her server,” said Jason Miller, a spokesman for the campaign.
*****
“These are simple questions about her email system that we hope will finally result in straight-forward answers, under oath, from Hillary Clinton,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
In his opinion ordering Clinton to answer written questions under oath Judge Sullivan wrote:
The Court is persuaded that Secretary Clinton’s testimony is necessary to enable her to explain on the record the purpose for the creation and operation of the clintonemail.com system for State Department business.
In its July 2016 request to depose Hillary Clinton, Judicial Watch argued:
Secretary Clinton’s deposition is necessary to complete the record. Although certain information has become available through investigations by the Benghazi Select Committee, the FBI, and the State Department Inspector General, as well as through Plaintiff’s narrowly tailored discovery to date, significant gaps in the evidence remain. Only Secretary Clinton can fill these gaps, and she does not argue otherwise.
***
To [Judicial Watch’s] knowledge, Secretary Clinton has never testified under oath why she created and used the clintonemail.com system to conduct official government business. Her only public statements on the issue are unsworn.
Judge Sullivan also ordered that Judicial Watch may depose the former Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-IRM”) John Bentel by October 31.
The questions and deposition arise in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before Judge Sullivan first filed in September 2013 seeking records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton. The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system. (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)).
Judicial Watch has already taken the deposition testimony of seven Clinton aides and State Department officials.
For further information on this case, click here.
Maybe the FBI as well given Hillary? Spooky dude and his billons have twisted the system across the country. Perhaps he reached the White House as well, given the commuted sentences of criminals where Obama used his pen to release hundreds of felons. Is Soros paying senators on the Judiciary Committee for votes on Supreme Court Justice nominations?
It is no wonder violent felons never serve out their prison terms much less do the District Attorneys bother with the cases to begin with as noted by criminals on the streets with case files that are a mile long only to offend again.
NYMag
Politico: Progressives have zeroed in on electing prosecutors as an avenue for criminal justice reform, and the billionaire financier is providing the cash to make it happen.
While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system.
The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.
His money has supported African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial. It is by far the most tangible action in a progressive push to find, prepare and finance criminal justice reform-oriented candidates for jobs that have been held by longtime incumbents and serve as pipelines to the federal courts — and it has inspired fury among opponents angry about the outside influence in local elections.
“The prosecutor exercises the greatest discretion and power in the system. It is so important,” said Andrea Dew Steele, president of Emerge America, a candidate-training organization for Democratic women. “There’s been a confluence of events in the past couple years and all of the sudden, the progressive community is waking up to this.”
Soros has spent on district attorney campaigns in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas through a network of state-level super PACs and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each named a variation on “Safety and Justice.” (Soros has also funded a federal super PAC with the same name.) Each organization received most of its money directly from Soros, according to public state and federal financial records, though some groups also got donations from nonprofits like the Civic Participation Action Fund, which gave to the Safety and Justice group in Illinois.
The Florida Safety and Justice group just poured nearly $1.4 million — all of which came from Soros and his 527 group — into a previously low-budget Democratic primary for state attorney in Central Florida before Tuesday’s vote. The group is backing Aramis Ayala, a former public defender and prosecutor, in her campaign against incumbent Jeff Ashton, whose jurisdiction covers over 1.6 million people across two counties in metro Orlando.
One TV ad from Florida Safety and Justice boosts Ayala, touting her “plan to remove bias so defendants charged with the same crime receive the same treatment, no matter their background or race.” The Soros-funded group is also attacking Ashton with ads saying he “got rid of protections that helped ensure equal treatment regardless of background or race. … Take two similar traffic incidents that happened on the same night. A white man got off with a slap on the wrist, while the black man faces prison.”
Opponents of Soros’ favored candidates have laced into the billionaire, saying that his influence has wildly tipped the scales of local elections and even charging that he made residents less safe.
“As a candidate and citizen of Caddo Parish, if an outsider was that interested in the race, I wanted to know exactly what he had in mind for the criminal justice system if he were to win,” said Dhu Thompson, a Louisiana attorney who lost a district attorney race to a Soros-backed candidate, James Stewart, in 2015. Soros gave over $930,000 — more than 22 times the local median household income — to the group boosting Stewart.
“I know some of his troubling opinions on social issues, especially the criminal justice system,” Thompson said. “I’ve never known him as an individual who was very strong on some of our crime and punishment issues. I felt it was very detrimental to the safety of Caddo Parish, and that’s why I took such a strong stand against him.”
A Soros representative declined to comment on his involvement in the DA races.
Progressive operatives and activists say that the recent uptick in news coverage of racial justice issues, especially police-involved deaths of African-Americans, helped sparked intense new interest in the powerful role of district attorneys, who did not indict officers in some high-profile cases. So has the longer-term reform push to shrink the U.S. prison population and promote treatment over punishment for drug users.
Reform groups have spent years advocating criminal justice policies and legislation that would reduce incarceration rates. Liberal donors have long given to policy-focused nonprofits; the Soros-chaired Open Societies Foundation, for example, works on drug policy and criminal justice reform and has supported other reform groups like the California-based Alliance for Safety and Justice — which, despite its similar name, has had no involvement in district attorney races, a spokeswoman said.
Prosecutorial discretion gives district attorneys a huge say in the charges and sentences that defendants face. But reform efforts have not traditionally focused on harnessing that power.
“They are often a very invisible part of the criminal justice system and the political system,” said Brenda Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an arm of the progressive Women Donors Network. “Many people can’t name their district attorney. It’s not an office people think about a lot.”
Carter’s group commissioned research in 2015 that found that 95 percent of elected local prosecutors in the U.S. are white and three-quarters overall are white men. It also highlighted a Wake Forest University study that found that a vast majority of prosecutors — 85 percent — run for reelection unopposed.
“I found that to be shocking, and I think people are waking up to the untapped potential for intervention in these seats to really change the day-to-day realities of criminal justice,” Carter said. “It’s been really gratifying for us to see the research taken up and run with by different groups around the country.”
Armed with that knowledge, progressive groups including Color of Change began researching potentially interesting district attorney races around the country, multiple sources said. (The organization declined to comment.)
“It’s hard to find this information!” exclaimed Steele, the Emerge America president. “You can’t just Google ‘hot DA races.’ So part of the issue is identifying what potential races there are.”
Soros’ spending started on these races about a year ago, when he put over $1 million into “Safety and Justice” groups that helped elect two new district attorneys in Louisiana and Mississippi and reelect a third — Hinds County, Miss., DA Robert Shuler Smith — who has since been charged by the Mississippi attorney general with improperly providing information to defendants.
The other Mississippi district attorney Soros’ spending helped elect, Scott Colom, has now represented a four-county stretch of the eastern part of the state for eight months. Colom said in an interview that he has focused on prosecuting violent crime in his new position while trying not to burden local prisons with first-time, low-level drug offenders.
“I’ve expanded the charges eligible for pre-trial diversion,” Colom said, adding that the number of people in the program in his jurisdiction has doubled since he took office seven months ago. “It’s all focused on the individual person, on trying to find a plan with the best chance possible of avoiding criminal behavior.”
“I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who think prison is too nice and we need to spend more on it,” Colom continued. “But it seems like a large majority of people out there get it and realize there have to be priorities. Just because a fella commits a crime doesn’t mean the best outcome is sending them to jail. … As much as possible, I want to take people from being tax burdens to taxpayers.”
After the Louisiana and Mississippi races, Soros next piled money into two of the biggest jurisdictions in the country: Houston’s Harris County (his lone losing effort so far) and Chicago’s Cook County, where he funded one of several groups that helped Kim Foxx defeat incumbent state’s attorney Anita Alvarez in a high-profile primary campaign dominated by the 13-month delay between the police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the indictment of the police officer involved.
In late spring, $107,000 from a Soros-funded New Mexico super PAC helped Raul Torrez win his Democratic district attorney primary by a 2-to-1 margin in Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County. Torrez’s Republican opponent dropped out of the general election soon after, citing the potentially exorbitant cost of opposing the Soros-backed candidate in the general election.
While Soros has spent heavily in 2015 and 2016, a broader national push into local prosecutor campaigns is expected to intensify in the next few years, thanks to longer-term planning and candidate recruitment. A Safety and Justice group has already organized in Ohio, according to campaign finance filings there. But it has not yet disclosed raising or spending any money.
“There’s been a realization that there’s not very much we can do this year, when you’re coming up to an election,” said Steele. “You have to have the right candidates. That’s a big piece of the puzzle and why I’m part of this conversation. … A lot of the conversations I’m having are about 2017 and 2018, about looking forward to next year in Virginia and other places.”
That means more local candidates should prepare for the shock of one of the biggest donors in American politics flooding their neighborhoods with ads.
Colom, the Mississippi prosecutor, says he has never met Soros — like other district attorney candidates supported by the Democratic billionaire this year. He said there was no hint that hundreds of thousands of dollars were coming to aid his campaign until advertising started pushing the same criminal-justice reform message that Colom had been touting — albeit on a much cheaper scale.
“The first I heard of it, someone told me they liked my radio ad, and I was thinking, that doesn’t sound like one of mine,” Colom said.
President Obama’s Record of Dismantling Immigration Enforcement
The Obama administration’s strategy is to count on the fact that the public and the media will not take notice of each individual and incremental step they are taking to undermine immigration enforcement and grant de facto amnesty to as many illegal aliens as possible. This report exposes the strategy and the policy objectives behind it.
***
This report details how the Obama administration has carried out a policy of de facto amnesty for millions of illegal aliens through executive policy decisions. Since 2009, the Obama administration has systematically gutted effective immigration enforcement policies, moved aggressively against State and local governments that attempt to enforce immigration laws, and stretched the concept of “prosecutorial discretion” to a point where it has rendered many immigration laws meaningless. Remarkably, the administration has succeeded in doing all this without much protest from Congress.
Thus, despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution grants Congress plenary authority over immigration policy, the Executive Branch is now making immigration policy unconstrained by constitutional checks and balances.
This report chronologically highlights the process that has unfolded over Obama’s presidency. A review of the Obama administration’s record shows:
• The administration’s conscious effort to end policies that effectively enforce and deter illegal immigration. This includes the cessation of meaningful worksite enforcement against employers who hire illegal aliens and the removal of the illegal workers. It also includes ending effective partnership programs with state and local governments, such as the 287(g) program, that provide a structure through which state and local agencies may enforce immigration laws.
• The administration’s intimidation of State and local governments determined to enforce federal immigration laws. President Obama has turned the Department of Justice into the administration’s attack dog, filing lawsuits against states that pass their own immigration enforcement laws. When lawsuits fail, the Department’s Civil Rights division launches meritless investigations designed to harass local governments and officials who attempt to enforce the law.
The administration’s brazen efforts to grant amnesty to illegal aliens through executive fiat. First, ahead of his 2012 reelection bid, President Obama created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an amnesty program for so-called DREAMers that granted deferral from deportation and work authorization.
Then, after winning reelection, President Obama teamed up with the Gang of Eight to ram a mass amnesty guest worker bill through Congress despite the overwhelming objections from the American people. After that effort failed, President Obama claimed he had even more executive power—despite saying 22 times he did not—and expanded DACA and created the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), an executive amnesty program for the illegal alien parents of citizen children.
• The administration’s dependence on illegal alien advocates to make U.S. immigration policy for the Executive Branch. President Obama has placed strident amnesty advocates in key positions throughout his administration. These appointees have worked openly with advocacy groups to shape a series of policies that amount to backdoor amnesty.
• Outright deception on the part of the administration designed to convince the American public that immigration laws are being vigorously enforced. The Obama administration repeatedly engages in efforts to inflate its record of deporting illegal aliens. These deceptive practices include the release of data that is later exposed to be inaccurate. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security carefully select data to claim that our “borders are more secure than ever,” even as violence along the southern border escalates to alarming proportions.
Continue here where the timeline begins in full summary. This 98 page report is comprehensive and is a stellar job by FAIR, The Federal for American Immigration Reform.
Explore the Videos in this Series, by Topic
UAM BORDER SURGE
SUING THE STATES
FAILURE TO SECURE THE BORDER
DECLINE IN WORKSITE ENFORCEMENT
EXECUTIVE AMNESTY
DEPORTATION DECEPTION
Huma wears Prada and Dolce & Gabbana.
(Adapted from this essay)
Steadily burgeoning evidence indicates that one of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s closest aides, Huma Abedin, despite Ms. Clinton’s protestation, was inadequately vetted for either family, or personal ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Diligent, open source investigation has already uncovered and documented numerous alarming connections. One can reasonably infer that a serious, formal Congressional investigation of the overall extent of Muslim Brotherhood influence operations—as requested by Representatives Bachmann, Gohmert, Franks, Westmoreland, and Rooney—might yield even more disturbing findings.
Pending these sorely needed Congressional inquiries—replete with their probing investigative tools—much can still be gleaned from the public record. For example, over the past 33 years, Huma Abedin’s family has been responsible for the editorial production of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA)’s academic journal, known as Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Journal, from 1979-1995, and Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs [JMMA], from 1996. till now, starting with family patriarch Syed Z. Abedin’s, and Huma’s mother, Saleha Abedin’s, founding involvement since 1979, and subsequently joined by Huma’s brother Hassan Abedin (1996 to present), Huma herself (1996 to 2008), and Huma’s sister, Heba (married name Khalid, or Khaled; 2002 to present).
Syed Abedin, in the inaugural edition of the IMMA journal, gives an effusive tribute to one of his IMMA co-founders, Dr. Abdullah Omar Nasseef, Chairman of the IMMA. During his concurrent tenure as Secretary-General of the Muslim World League—a combined Saudi Wahhabi, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated organization—in July, 1988, Naseef also created the Rabita Trust, and became its chairman. On October 12, 2001, then President George W. Bush’s Executive Order named Rabita Trust as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity, and the US Treasury Department froze its assets, while Naseef was still serving as the Trust’s chairman. Nasseef remained on the IMMA journal Editorial Board through 2003, overlapping Huma Abedin’s tenure for 7-years (i.e., 1996-2003).
The current (April/May 2012) issue of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs journal (JMMA) features two essays, introduced with lavish praise by Editor Saleha Abedin, which champion, unabashedly:
One of these JMMA essays repeats, approvingly, Qutb’s pejorative characterization of the West as a “disastrous combination of avid materialism, and egoistic individualism.” Abul Hasan Nadwi, was a founding member of the Muslim World League, a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference (now Cooperation), a member of the World Supreme Council of Mosques, and a member of the Fiqh Council of Rabita. In a triumphal 1951 manifesto extolling Islamic supremacism, Nadwi had proclaimed “Behold the world of man looking with rapture at the world of Islam as its savior, and behold the world of Islam fixing its gaze on the Arab world as its secular and spiritual leader. Will the world of Islam realize the hope of the world of men? And will the Arab world realize the hope of the Muslim world?” Citing Nadwi with admiration, the same JMMA article opines, “[T]he confrontation has taken the shape of an ‘Islamic project’ in the Muslim world against Western modernity…. The war that has been declared against Western modernity now seeks a new modernity…unlike Western modernity.”
Another featured essay from the current issue of the JMMA is a fitting complement to the journal’s endorsement of the global Islamic supremacist agenda. This essay endorses the so-called “innovative” application of the “Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities,” living, for example, in the West, whose stated purpose is, “enforcement of shari’ah on the Muslim communities.” However, by the essay’s own expressed standard: “The theory of the Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities is most easily clarified by shedding light on its founders.”
The two founders of this legal doctrine, as the essay notes, are Yusuf al-Qaradawi of Qatar, and Taha Jabir al-Alwani of Virginia, USA.
Qaradawi has publicly advocated:
Al-Alwani, writing as president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a think tank created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, stated, regarding a (then) new English translation of the classic Shafiite manual of Islamic jurisprudence Reliance of the Traveller, “from a purely academic point of view, this translation is superior to anything produced by orientalists in the way of translations of major Islamic works.” Notwithstanding al-Alwani’s glowing tribute, Reliance of the Traveller sanctions open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic Caliphate; rejection of bedrock Western liberties—including freedom of conscience and speech—enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and even Muslim women to subservient chattel (who must be segregated and undergo female genital mutilation); and barbaric punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption. Moreover,
The Abedin family “academic” journal is a thinly veiled mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sharia-supremacist agenda. One can now add this conclusive, public record evidence to a host of other bona fide justifications for the Congressional inquiry demanded by Representative Bachmann, and her four intrepid colleagues.