Category Archives: Whistleblower

Hey Comey, Your Friday Night DocDump Proves Intent

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One has to wonder if James Comey even read the 302’s he approved for release late Friday. Seems all kinds of people were in fact sounding alarms and telling the truth but the FBI did not see anything related to intent? Wow….Hillary’s own close and long time friend as well as attorney, Cheryl Mills is at the core of this whole matter, but yet we are told by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman, Jason Chaffetz that lil’ old Cheryl was given immunity. Full immunity? Good question, has anyone seen the immunity document granted by the Department of Justice? No…not yet.

 

All of us can officially declare that we have lost any hope for the Department of Justice practicing good law and sadly we can say that the Director of the FBI, James Comey too was part of this collusion. So, sit back and read these items if you can stand it. Fair warning…. this IS INTENT.

We will start with a Reuters piece in part:

A State Department employee, whose name was redacted, told investigators they believed senior department officials interfered with the screening of Clinton’s emails for public release last year in a way that helped Clinton.

The employee, who worked on the screening process, said there was pressure to obscure the fact they were finding classified information in the messages. John Kirby, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement the department “strongly disputes” the claim of interference. Clinton repeatedly said last year she never sent or received classified information, but now says she did not do so knowingly since the release of the FBI findings.

The employee also said the Defense Department told the State Department last year it had found about 1,000 emails between Clinton and David Petraeus in its records from his time as the director of the United States Central Command.

The State Department has said that Clinton did not include any of her emails with Petraeus when her lawyers screened and returned what they said were all her work emails in 2014. A single conversation of about 10 emails later emerged last year after the Defense Department provided it.

Spokesmen for Clinton have declined to discuss the omission, and did not respond to questions about the new interview summaries.

Kirby, the department spokesman, said he could not “speculate” whether the Defense Department had found more than just a single conversation between Clinton and Petraeus. “We can only speak to the records in our possession,” he said. Full article here.

Now for more disgusting details:

27 things we learned from Clinton’s FBI files

By Sarah Westwood, Washington Examiner:

A 189-page summary of interviews conducted in the year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server shed new light on the shifting stories Clinton’s aides told agents.

The report, which was made public Friday evening, came on the heels of House Republicans’ revelation that three additional witnesses had received immunity agreements from the Justice Department, bringing the total number of witnesses who were shielded from prosecution to five.

Here are 27 new details that emerged from the latest FBI documents.

Someone was messing with FOIA

After the public learned of Clinton’s private email use, Congress and watchdog groups began demanding the release of emails. The House Select Committee on Benghazi had already requested records related to the 2012 terror attack, and Freedom of Information Act cases that had been closed improperly began to come back to life.

But one witness told the FBI he “believed there was interference with the formal FOIA review process.”

That witness pointed to the collection of 296 Benghazi emails that were among the first records to emerge publicly from Clinton’s email trove. The unnamed individual told the FBI that State Department officials had “included redactions done for Clinton’s privacy but unrelated to national security.”

According to the witness, State Department officials at one point attempted to classify information in order to have an excuse to redact it even though the agency’s own Office of Legal Counsel thought the email was not worthy of classification.

The witness said he and other career officers, who were typically involved in the FOIA process and in responding to congressional inquiries, were “cut out of the loop” when Clinton’s emails needed processing. Instead, new staffers were “placed” by “top State officials” to take over the job of screening Clinton’s emails; the witness said the officials — whose identities were redacted — had “a very narrow focus on all Clinton-related items and were put in positions that were not advertised.”

FOIA reviews are supposed to be performed by career officials to prevent politics from affecting the government’s response, particularly in a case as politically fraught as the Clinton email situation.

Clinton deleted nearly 1,000 emails with Petraeus

In Aug. 2015, the Pentagon called the State Department and informed an unnamed official there that “CENTCOM records showed approximately 1,000 work-related emails between Clinton’s personal email and General David Petraeus.”

The FBI noted that “[m]ost of those 1,000 emails were not believed to be included in the 30,000 emails” that Clinton turned over to the State Department in Dec. 2014.

Officials felt ‘pressure’ not to classify any Benghazi emails

 

At least one witness told the FBI he felt “pressure” not to upgrade any information in a highly-anticipated batch of 296 emails related to Benghazi.

The witness said Patrick Kennedy, the State Department’s undersecretary for management, went to the FBI and “pointedly asked” the bureau “to change [its] classification determination” for a Benghazi email that had been marked classified.

The Benghazi-related emails were among the first records from Clinton’s private server to be made public.

Kennedy “categorically rejected” the notion that he would obstruct the FOIA process when he sat down with FBI agents in Dec. 2015.

Sidney Blumenthal advised more high-level officials

Clinton has often defended her relationship to longtime confidante Sidney Blumenthal by referring to his detailed missives — some of which are now at least partially classified — as unsolicited memos from an old friend.

But Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, told the FBI he also spoke directly with Blumenthal during his tenure.

Sullivan said he spoke by phone with Blumenthal and emailed with him occasionally, even acting as a go-between for Blumenthal and Clinton or other high-level officials.

Blumenthal’s controversial style prompted the Obama White House to ban him from working in the administration. However, Clinton’s private emails exposed the informal position he held within Clinton’s State Department.

 

Sullivan described Blumenthal as someone who “likes to help the cause.”

State Department officials definitely knew about the server

Many high-level agency staffers, including Kennedy, have claimed they knew nothing of Clinton’s private email server until they saw stories about it in the news.

A common defense for officials who could be implicated if they admitted prior knowledge of the network has been to acknowledge Clinton’s occasional use of a personal address to send messages but to deny awareness of the hardware that sat in her basement.

One unnamed witness who worked in the State Department’s IT office told the FBI he was aware of the server system since the day Clinton was sworn in.

That was because the witness was forced to work with Bryan Pagliano, the technology specialist who had built the server for Clinton, in order for the server to accommodate Clinton’s government work.

For example, the witness “interacted with [Pagliano] to keep [the server] communicating with State systems” during the “5-6 instances” in which Clinton’s private emails were intercepted by the government’s security systems before they could reach the .gov inboxes of her colleagues.

Although the witness helped Pagliano keep the server running remotely, the individual told the FBI “he did not know how the server was paid for or where it was physically located.”

At least three people had emails on the ‘clintonemail.com’ network

Besides Clinton, the only other individual known to have used an email address on the “clintonemail.com” domain was Huma Abedin, then her deputy chief of staff.

Justin Cooper, a former aide to Clinton’s husband and to the Clinton Foundation, told the FBI that at least one other person used an account on that network “as part of their association or work for Hillary Clinton.”

That person’s name, or multiple other names, were redacted by the FBI. Clinton has sworn under penalty of perjury that Cheryl Mills, her former chief of staff, did not use an account on the server.

Pagliano tried to sound the alarm

In a Dec. 2015 interview with the FBI, Clinton’s former IT aide said he had repeatedly attempted to warn her team about the potential record-keeping implications of her unauthorized network.

Pagliano said he had been called into a high-level State Department official’s office in summer 2009 and asked if he knew about the existence of a “clintonemail.com” domain in use by the former secretary of state.

When Pagliano relayed the incident to individuals whose names were redacted, an unidentified witness had a “visceral” reaction and “didn’t want to know anymore.”

One unidentified witness told Pagliano in 2009 that Clinton’s private email use “may be a federal records retention issue” and stated “that he wanted to convey this to Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, but could not reach them.”

Pagliano said he “then approached Cheryl Mills in her office and relayed [redacted]’s concerns regarding federal records retention and the use of a private email server.”

However, Mills dismissed the concerns by arguing other former secretaries of state had done the same thing — an assertion later proven false.

Witnesses were nervous about talking to the FBI

One former State Department aide told investigators she was worried Clinton would be angry if she learned the unnamed individual had spoken to the FBI.

At the end of her Dec. 2015 interview, the witness told agents “she had not mentioned the interview to Clinton or any of [her] contacts from [State Department].” That witness explained her concerns that Clinton and her staff “could be upset to learn she spoke with the FBI without telling them.”

President Obama used a fake name

During an interview with Abedin, FBI agents presented the longtime Clinton aide with a copy of an email from Obama to Clinton.

The president had used a pseudonym to communicate with Clinton on her private server.

“How is this not classified?” Abedin “exclaimed,” according to the FBI’s summary of its conversation with her.

Abedin explained that Clinton had notified the White House when she changed her primary email address because Obama’s network was set up to block unfamiliar accounts from sending him messages.

The new revelation has raised questions about the president’s claims to have had no knowledge of Clinton’s private email use before March 2014, since her private address had to be added manually to a list of accounts with permission to communicate with his own server.

FBI agents conducted interviews in Denver, San Francisco

FBI agents traveled to Denver in September of last year to question employees of Platte River Networks, the Colorado company Clinton hired in 2013 to manage her email network.

At least one employee of Platte River, Paul Combetta, was granted an immunity agreement in exchange for information.

Combetta was asked to delete emails in defiance of a preservation order for those documents that had been issued by the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Agents also traveled to San Francisco to question Lewis Lukens, a former State Department official during Clinton’s tenure.

Clinton’s team tried to mop up emails after NYT story

In March 2015, an unspecified individual from Clinton’s staff reached out to Platte River to determine how many emails existed and where those records were stored. The New York Times exposed Clinton’s private email use in a story on March 1 of that year.

Clinton’s team sprang into action in the immediate aftermath of that story, scrambling to account for the location of any email she might have sent during her State Department tenure in the days between the initial Times story and her first public statements on the controversy at a press conference on March 10, 2015.

Another unnamed employee at the firm said he received an email from Clinton’s staff on March 9 of that year but told FBI agents he “did not recall seeing” the preservation order attached to that email by David Kendall, Clinton’s primary attorney.

Yet another unnamed staffer from Platte River told investigators he genuinely believed the archive of Clinton’s emails “should still be on the server in possession of the FBI.”

He said only two people in the world had the authorization to delete an entire mailbox. The names of those two individuals were redacted.

A dated list of files on the server indicated the archive of Clinton’s emails was still on the server by the time the list was generated in Jan. 2015 — a month after the original batch of 30,000 emails was provided to the State Department.

But at some point over the next few months, someone scrubbed the archive from the server.

Staffers shattered discs that stored emails

After Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, asked a Platte River staffer in July 2014 to hand over all of Clinton’s correspondence with any address that ended in “.gov,” the employee burned the emails onto DVDs and prepared to ship them to Mills.

However, Mills said she didn’t want the discs to be transferred via mail and instead asked the tech specialist to arrange a “secure electronic transfer” of the emails. The Platte River staffer said he “destroyed the DVDs by breaking them in half” once the digital transfer was complete.

The July 2014 request came just two months after the House Select Committee on Benghazi was created

Witnesses pleaded the 5th during FBI interviews

One employee of Platte River was advised by the company’s lawyer to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to answer any further questions when FBI investigators started asking about what the technology specialist had discussed with Kendall.

The agents referred to documentation that the employee had spoken to Mills and Kendall on a March 31, 2015 conference call.

That employee used a digital deletion tool called Bleachbit to scrub emails from the server on the very same day.

The State Department timeline doesn’t fit

Multiple witnesses told the FBI that Mills asked them to round up all of Clinton’s work-related emails in July of 2014. The timing of the request described to investigators fits with the progression of the Benghazi committee’s probe.

But the State Department has said it did not ask Clinton for her emails until Oct. 2014, and claims it only did so because officials realized they had no emails from previous secretaries of state.

Clinton has long touted the fact that the State Department sent letters to other secretaries of state requesting copies of personal emails.

The new timeline confirmed by the FBI suggests it took Clinton’s staff five months to prepare her work-related emails for submission to the State Department. The 30,000 emails she ultimately provided were not given to the agency until early Dec. 2014.

Clinton relied on staff outside State

Justin Cooper, an aide to Clinton’s husband and a former Clinton Foundation adviser, supported Clinton’s staff during her time at the State Department.

Monica Hanley, Clinton’s assistant, told the FBI she would contact Cooper each time she needed to synch Clinton’s BlackBerry with the server that was partially under Cooper’s care.

What’s more, Hanley said she would contact Cooper — not anyone at the State Department — “when [she] needed reimbursement for items she purchased for Clinton.”

Like Pagliano, Cooper performed services for Clinton that were related to her State Department work but that were paid for out of the Clinton’s own pocket.

There’s a lost thumb drive with all the emails on it

Hanley was tasked with transferring all of Clinton’s emails onto a laptop Cooper provided from the Clinton Foundation. That laptop eventually got lost in the mail, a detail that was revealed in the 58 pages of notes the FBI released on Sept. 2.

But Hanley also transferred all of Clinton’s emails onto a thumb drive at the same time. She told the FBI she “could not recall what happened to the thumb-drive.”

The transfer came in spring 2013, shortly after longtime Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal’s inbox was breached by a Romanian hacker. Platte River advised the former secretary of state to change email addresses, touching off the shuffle of records onto devices that were ultimately lost.

Clinton’s attorney was cleaning up

In addition to the conference call with a Platte River employee that prompted that employee to suddenly invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, Kendall contacted Hanley in “March or April 2015,” shortly after the New York Times story was published.

Hanley did not describe what she and Kendall discussed, but she immediately cleaned out State Department records from her inbox after she spoke with him.

“Following her conversation with Kendall, Hanley searched the Gmail account she used while at [State Department] for any email communications with state.gov accounts and deleted emails associated with state.gov accounts,” the FBI wrote in its report.

An aide left classified documents in a Russian hotel room

Hanley was given “verbal security counseling” after she accidentally left a classified document and a sensitive “briefing book” in a Russian hotel suite she was using with Clinton.

Diplomatic security officers “found a classified document from the briefing book in the suite during a sweep following Clinton and Hanley’s departure” and later told Hanley “the briefing book and the document should never have been in the suite.”

Kennedy may have misled the inspector general

Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management with a history of blocking inspector general probes, assured State Department Inspector General Steve Linick that Clinton had turned over electronic copies of her emails in a July 2015 meeting with the watchdog.

Then, when Linick requested the electronic file for those emails, Kennedy said he only had hard copies.

Linick also referred the FBI to additional witnesses who alleged current employees at the State Department have been “meddling with the FOIA review process.” Other witnesses pointed to Kennedy as a potential interference in the document screening that took place before Benghazi-related records were provided to Congress.

During his internal probe of agency email practices, Linick said Pagliano refused to be interviewed by the inspector general’s team about his involvement with the Clinton network.

Clinton ‘could not use a computer’

Abedin told the FBI Clinton conducted most of her work in person or on paper due to her limitations with technology.

“Abedin explained that Clinton could not use a computer and that she primarily used her iPad or BlackBerry for checking emails,” the FBI wrote of its April interview with Abedin.

Another witness told the FBI Clinton had “little patience” for technology problems.

State officials weren’t buying Clinton’s email excuses

Clinton continues to stress the fact that most of the classified emails found on her server were only retroactively designated as such — that is, they were not classified at the time they were written, but merely upgraded to classified at a later date due to a change in circumstances regarding the information.

An unnamed witness told the FBI he had “heard the argument” but didn’t quite buy it.

“It was very rare for something that was actually unclassified to become classified years after the fact,” the witness told investigators.

Including the retroactively classified documents, there were more than 2,000 classified records on Clinton’s server.

Clinton left the doors of her SCIF open when she wasn’t home

The State Department had installed SCIFs, or areas designed for the secure consumption of classified material, in both her her New York and Washington, D.C. homes.

Clinton did not always keep those areas secure, however. Cooper told the FBI she was careless when it came to keeping the SCIFs locked.

“The SCIF doors at both residences were not always secured, including times when Clinton was not at the residences,” Cooper told the FBI, according to its summary of their second of three interviews with the former Clinton family aide.

State officials worried about Clinton and classified material from the start

Eric Boswell, assistant secretary for diplomatic security for most of Clinton’s tenure, said his team had concerns about how the incoming secretary of state and her staff would treat classified areas from the beginning of their tenures.

Specifically, diplomatic security personnel worried that Clinton and her team would use their BlackBerrys inside the SCIF that encompasses much of the seventh floor at State Department headquarters, an area known as “Mahogany Row.”

Clinton’s staff had asked for a classified-enabled BlackBerry upon joining the agency, but Boswell said no such device exists.

“There was some general concern within [State Department] security personnel that Clinton’s executive staff may try to use their Blackberries [sic] in the SCIF as they were almost all brought on to [State Department] from Clinton’s campaign team, and thus were very accustom to using their Blackberries [sic],” the FBI wrote in a summary of its Feb. 2016 interview with Boswell.

Clinton frequently used a flip phone

Clinton cycled through eight BlackBerry while she was secretary of state for a total of 13 devices throughout the life of her email server, the FBI revealed earlier this month.

But she also used a flip phone to make calls, Cooper said, because she found the device “more comfortable to talk on.”

The flip phone allowed her to check emails on her Blackberry while talking on the phone, Cooper told the FBI. He could not identify what model she used and it is unclear whether the FBI ever recovered any of the flip phones in Clinton’s possession.

Tech aides described ‘Hillary cover-up operation’

Platte River employees sent emails describing the ‘Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation’ after Clinton’s staff asked them to begin wiping emails in Dec. 2014.

The unnamed employee who authored the phrase told FBI agents that his reference to the “cover-up” was a joke.

Clinton created second personal account when server crashed

The former secretary of state set up a previously undisclosed email account to communicate when her private server system was down.

Hanley told FBI investigators that Clinton likely created the second private account — a “gmail.com” address — to send messages when her server crashed in 2011 during a trip to Croatia.

Clinton’s top aides were hacked

Stephen Mull, a top record-keeping official at the State Department, told the FBI that “sometime in 2011,” he learned from diplomatic security officers about “concern over the possibility that some personal email accounts of [State Department] employees were hacked.”

Mull said Sullivan, who was one of the aides most frequently in contact with Clinton on her email, was among those hacked in the breaches.

San Bernardino to New York: Deobandi Courtesy of Barack and Hillary

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Ahmad Rahami Posted Radical Videos in 2010, Went to Syria: Sources

   

Ahmad Khan Rahami spent time at Pakistan seminary tied to Taliban

Guardian: Exclusive: Suspect in New York and New Jersey bombings spent three weeks in 2011 at Kaan Kuwa Naqshbandi madrassa, source says, amid questions of terrorism links

Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man suspected of placing bombs in New York and New Jersey last weekend, spent time in a religious seminary in Pakistan closely associated with the Afghan Taliban, according to a government official.

The 28-year-old, who was born in Afghanistan but became a US citizen, spent time at the Kaan Kuwa Naqshbandi madrasa on his two visits to Pakistan, a security official working for the government of Balochistan province told the Guardian.

Rahami spent three weeks in 2011 receiving “lectures and Islamic education” at the school in Kuchlak, a dusty cluster of villages 20km north of Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, he said.

Kuchlak is a well-known hub for the Taliban, the Islamist movement that has waged a 15-year insurgency against local and Nato forces in nearby Afghanistan. It is home to many madrasas, the seminaries intimately linked with the Taliban, originally a movement of religious students.

US officials have revealed basic details about Rahami’s two visits to Pakistan, the first in 2011 when he spent a couple of months in Quetta and got married and almost a year in 2013 when he also made a car journey to Afghanistan.

But very little information has emerged from inside Pakistan about what Rahami did during his visits.

Related reading: U.S. State Dept/Pakistan Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

The government official, who did not wish to be named because he was speaking about a highly sensitive subject, said Pakistani security agencies have tried to “hide all the details of his visits to Quetta” and keep as much information as possible out of the media.

Rahami, he said, also visited other sensitive areas in the province, including Surkhab and Nushki, where former Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor was killed by a US drone in May.

Pakistan has long been accused of playing a “double game” with the US, both supporting the Nato counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and allowing the Taliban to use its territory a vital rear base.

A western expert on the Taliban said Abdul Samad, the Afghan owner of the Kuchlack madrasa, was an important local figure.

“The madrasa is a place where you have multiple Afghan Taliban going there and hanging out in [Samad’s] court, as well as active ISI officers,” he said, referring to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, an army-run spy agency.

“Samad is the kind of person who should have been shut down long ago but enjoys a high degree of protection,” he said.

Despite being part of the mystical, Sufi strain of Islam, which many hardliners abhor, Samad is highly respected by the movement, he said.

A Karachi-based cleric told the Guardian the school was a sizeable operation, with more than 200 students.

Despite several attempts to reach Samad for comment, the Guardian was unable to make contact with the madrasa.

Although the Taliban’s leadership is often described as the “Quetta Shura” many analysts consider Kuchlak to be the actual command centre for many senior members of the movement.

The Taliban’s white flags have been reportedly seen flying in the town’s graveyards and Shahbaz Taseer, a Pakistani kidnapped by militants in Lahore in 2011 and held for more than four years, was released in Kuchlak in March by the Taliban.

Rahami’s father Mohammad Rahami has said his son had grown increasingly interested in Islamist movements, watching Taliban and al-Qaida videos, and listening to their poetry. Rahami had also shown sympathy towards the Taliban, a former employer said.

Related reading: San Bernardino/ The Islamic Center of Riverside or Brooklyn

Given the Taliban has long avoided entanglement in international jihad, insisting it is interested only in forcing foreign troops out of Afghanistan, it is unlikely Rahami was operating under instruction when he planted his bombs. A notebook found on Rahami when he was captured after a shootout on Monday suggests he may have been inspired by the Islamic State group.

But the claim Rahami attended an important Taliban-sympathising madrasa could be embarrassing for Pakistan at a time the country is under intense international criticism, not least from India, which accused Pakistan this week of hosting “the Ivy League of terrorism”.

Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar, a spokesman for the Balochistan government, said that because more than 1 million Afghan refugees lived in the province it was “difficult to know what sort of activity is being conducted by some individuals”.

“Filtering out the terrorist influences in such a huge community is a very difficult task,” he said.

Nor could the government be expected to be aware of a US traveller such as Rahami, who has “deep links in the host community”.

“If he was not spotted by the CIA and FBI or Homeland Security, then this shows that it is really global problem,” he said.

*** The basis for the swap of the Taliban 5 out of Guantanamo for Bowe Bergdahl? It all seems Qatar was the core and interlocutor for the Taliban. Clinton and Obama managed the failed process.

Negotiations with the Taliban initiated by the United States were for getting all factions to talk to each other.  Why bother talking to the Taliban? The answer is that, as both President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear while I served as special representative, the war in Afghanistan is going to end politically and we would either shape that end or be shaped by it. If there is ever to be peace in Afghanistan, Afghans will need to talk to other Afghans about the future of Afghanistan. Since the Taliban today officially refuses to talk to Kabul’s representatives, getting to these talks might require a US effort to help open the door.

Those US-Taliban talks, which lasted from mid-2011 to March 2012, ultimately failed. While many details rightly remain classified, here are three of the lessons I learned sitting across the negotiating table from the Taliban that may be helpful to those who may seek to reopen the dialogue with them or others who need to talk to an insurgent group in some present or future conflict:

Set clear conditions and moral guidelines and stick to them. These need not be preconditions. Indeed, before talks with the Taliban began, Secretary Clinton made clear that while the US had no preconditions for talking to them, Washington would support reconciliation with only those insurgents who met three important end conditions: Break with al Qaeda, end violence, and live inside an Afghan Constitution that guarantees the rights of all individuals, especially women. Force must be backed by diplomacy, and diplomacy must be backed by force. Talking with the Taliban was part of the larger “diplomatic campaign” Secretary Clinton launched in 2011 to complement the military surge President Obama had ordered in 2009. This diplomatic campaign tried to harness all of the instruments of non-military power to support Afghanistan, such as development assistance, private-sector investment and support for civil society. As part of this effort, we organized international meetings in Istanbul, Bonn, Chicago and Tokyo, at which nations and international organizations pledged future political and material support for Afghanistan. These conferences were also designed to send the Taliban clear messages that the international community was committed to supporting Afghanistan beyond 2014. More here.

Last item of note: In part from Newsweek: The groups targeting the state follow the Deobandi interpretative tradition of Islam. This is important because this means that they share a significant common organizational infrastructure. For example, they rely on mosques and madrassas that adhere to the Deobandi tradition of Islam. When 9/11 happened and Pakistan was forced to work with the Americans, these Deobandi groups were furious. Many of these groups came to know Al-Qaeda through their association with the Taliban in Afghanistan. [The Afghan Taliban emerged from Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan.] And these Deobandi groups were furious that the Pakistani state was aiding the overthrow, not only of the Taliban government, but the only government in the world that was exercising a Deobandi version of Sharia [Islamic law]. After 9/11…[some] of these Deobandi groups began fracturing and disobeying the [Pakistani] state. That’s when the insurgency began. Over time these Deobandi organizations began calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban.

9/11: POTUS Vetoed JASTA, Ability to Sue Saudi Arabia

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House intel chairman threatens to subpoena bin Laden files

FNC: The Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee says he’s prepared to take what may be unprecedented action to get the remaining Usama bin Laden documents from the nation’s top military and intelligence agencies – and subpoena the files.

“If they don’t provide these documents to the committee by October 11th, then we’re going to have to subpoena them — which I don’t want to have to do but it appears like we’ve run out of all options,” Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told Fox News. “For the administration to basically mislead the American people for this many years is flat-out wrong.”

Nunes is seeking documents and relevant analysis, which is thought to comprise at least 50 reports. In a Sept. 22 letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and Defense Department Undersecretary for Intelligence Marcel Lettre, Nunes says the law required them to comply nearly two years ago based on Section 313 of the Intelligence Authorization ACT (IAA) for fiscal 2014. This section mandated a “complete declassification of the Abbottabad documents within 120 days.”  More here.

Meanwhile there appears to be enough votes to over-ride Obama’s veto on the ability to for the 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia.

FNC: With lawmakers eager to return home to campaign ahead of the November election, a vote could come as early as Tuesday. Even House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, an Obama ally, indicated support this week for an override, saying members believe the families “should have their day in court.”

Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer called the veto a “disappointing decision that will be swiftly and soundly overturned in Congress.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office said the Senate would take up the override “as soon as practicable in this work period.”

The Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act sailed through both chambers of Congress by voice vote, with final House passage coming just two days before Obama led the nation in marking the 15th anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. More here.

The passed legislation is known as JASTA, S.2040 – Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act was introduced by Senator Cornyn of Texas. It was presented to Barack Obama and was due for final record by 9/23/2016 if Obama did not take his veto action which he did at the last moment during the week of the United Nations General Assembly.

Related reading: House Intel Cmte has Declassified/Released the 28 Pages

Additionally:

Deleted official report says Saudi key funder of Hillary Clinton campaign

#USA2016

MEE: Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly said Saudi has enthusiastically funded Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign

Saudi Arabia is a major funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to become the next president of the United States, according to a report published by Jordan’s official news agency.

The Petra News Agency published on Sunday what it described as exclusive comments from Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman which included a claim that Riyadh has provided 20 percent of the total funding to the prospective Democratic candidate’s campaign.

Cold War Part 2: Spy Networks and Cyber Warfare

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Adding more spies and operatives…seems to be a global trend and not lost on Russia.

FP: Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Kommersant, is planning a major overhaul of the country’s security services. The Russian daily reported that the idea of the reforms is to merge the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which keeps an eye on domestic affairs. This new supersized secret service will be given a new name: the Ministry of State Security. If that sounds familiar, it should — this was the name given to the most powerful and feared of Joseph Stalin’s secret services, from 1943 to 1953. And if its combination of foreign espionage and domestic surveillance looks familiar, well, it should: In all but name, we are seeing a resurrection of the Committee for State Security — otherwise known as the KGB.

The KGB, it should be remembered, was not a traditional security service in the Western sense — that is, an agency charged with protecting the interests of a country and its citizens. Its primary task was protecting the regime. Its activities included hunting down spies and dissidents and supervising media, sports, and even the church. It ran operations both inside and outside the country, but in both spheres the main task was always to protect the interests of whoever currently resided in the Kremlin. With this new agency, we’re seeing a return to form — one that’s been a long time in the making.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Russian leaders sought to create a depoliticized security structure. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the reform of the KGB became an immediate, pressing issue. The agency was not reliably under control: The chairman of the KGB at the time, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had helped mastermind the military coup attempt aimed at overthrowing Mikhail Gorbachev that August. But new President Boris Yeltsin had no clear ideas about just how he wanted to reform the KGB, so he simply decided to break it into pieces.

The largest department of the KGB — initially called the Ministry of Security; then, later, the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK); then, even later, the FSB — was given responsibility solely for counter-espionage and counterterrorism operations. The KGB’s former foreign intelligence directorate was transformed into a new agency called the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR. The division of the KGB responsible for electronic eavesdropping and cryptography became the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information, or FAPSI. A relatively obscure directorate of the KGB that guarded secret underground facilities continued its functions under a new name: the Main Directorate of Special Programs of the President, or GUSP. The KGB branch that had been responsible for protecting Soviet leaders was renamed the Federal Protective Service, or FSO, and the Soviet border guards were transformed into an independent Federal Border Service, or FPS.

The main successor of the KGB amid this alphabet soup of changes was the FSK. But this new counterintelligence agency was stripped of its predecessor’s overseas intelligence functions. The agency no longer protected Russian leaders and was deprived of its secret bunkers, which fell under the president’s direct authority. It maintained only a nominal presence in the army. In its new incarnation, the agency’s mission was pruned back to something resembling Britain’s MI5: to fight terrorism and corruption. More here from FP.

Related reading: ‘Cyber Cold War’ rhetoric raises alarms

What is the United States doing?

IN 2015, as China and Russia boost their military presence in the resource-rich far north, U.S. intelligence agencies are scrambling to study potential threats in the Arctic for the first time since the Cold War, a sign of the region’s growing strategic importance.

Over the last 14 months, most of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have assigned analysts to work full time on the Arctic. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently convened a “strategy board” to bring the analysts together to share their findings.

In addition to relying on U.S. spy satellites orbiting overhead and Navy sensors deep in the frigid waters, the analysts process raw intelligence from a recently overhauled Canadian listening post near the North Pole and a Norwegian surveillance ship called the Marjata, which is now being upgraded at a U.S. Navy shipyard in southern Virginia.

****  And we are playing catch up in Washington DC and in key locations around the globe when it comes to Russia. Adding more technology is great and it does have value but not like that of having human intelligence in theater.

**** Decades After Cold War’s End, U.S.-Russia Espionage Rivalry Evolves

So what does Britain’s MI6 have to say?

Reuters: The Islamist terrorist threat to the West will endure for years to come because simply taking back territory from Islamic State will not solve the deeper global fractures which have fostered militants, Britain’s foreign intelligence chief has said.

In his first public comments outside Britain, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service said globalization, the information revolution, a deepening sectarian divide in the Middle East and failed states would ensure that terrorism remained a threat.

When asked by the Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan at a panel discussion in Washington whether the apex of the Islamist terrorist trajectory had been reached, MI6 chief Alex Younger said: “Regrettably this is an enduring issue which will certainly be with us for our professional lifetime.”

“I would have to forecast that whilst it is wholly desirable to remove territory you will have a persistent threat representing some of the deep fault lines that still exist in our world,” he said.

Islamic State militants have lost territory in Iraq and Syria though they have claimed responsibility for a range of attacks against the West.

His remarks were shown on a recording posted on Wednesday by the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the George Washington University.

Younger, as chief of MI6, is one of the West’s most powerful spies and rarely speaks in public. He was appointed in 2014 by then Prime Minister David Cameron.

MI6 operates overseas and is tasked with defending Britain and its interests.

Younger said terrorism was fueled by a host of fractures across the world.

“It is fueled by a deepening sectarian divide in the Middle East and there are some deep social, economic and demographic drivers to the phenomenon we know as terrorism,” he said.

Sadly, I have to include this item when it comes to Donald Trump. We already know that Hillary has her own vast spy network. But when Trump has Carter Page who is deeply connected to Moscow, more questions and investigations need to happen, and frankly they are. This all comes at the same time IT professionals are proving that Russia is indeed using cyber spy tactics effectively.

Obama Shut it Down to Hide it….

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Obama Administration Shut Down Whistleblower Program Revealing 1,811 Aliens From Terrorist Countries Granted Citizenship

Breitbart: Under the Obama administration, 1,811 aliens from terrorist countries were granted U.S. citizenship instead of being deported—and the Obama administration ended the program that uncovered the extensive fraud.

Originally, the Associated Press reported that the aliens’ fingerprints were not in searchable government databases, allowing them to apply for citizenship under different names and birthdays.

The scope of the problem is massive: “Fingerprints are missing from federal databases for as many as 315,000 immigrants with final deportation orders or who are fugitive criminals,” the Associated Press stated. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not reviewed about 148,000 of those immigrants’ files to add fingerprints to the digital record.”

Three of the aliens under final deportation orders who were granted citizenship gained access to secure commercial airliner areas and maritime facilities. Another is working as a law enforcement officer.

But the Obama administration shut down that program, the Office of Inspector General found:

In 2016, OPS [Office of Operations Coordination] eliminated Operation Janus and disbanded its staff, which raises concerns about the future ability of ICE [U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] and USCIS to continue identifying and prioritizing individuals for investigation. Since 2010 and until recently, Operation Janus identified these individuals, created watchlist entries to ensure law enforcement and immigration officials were aware of them, and coordinated DHS and other agencies’ activities related to these individuals. Two DHS employees outside of OPS said that without Operation Janus, it would be difficult to coordinate these cases and combat immigration fraud perpetrated by individuals using multiple identities. We received this information late in our review and cannot assess the future impact of this change.

ICE didn’t consistently log the digital fingerprints of illegal aliens their agents found until 2010—and federal prosecutors have repeatedly declined criminal cases that could end in the aliens being stripped of their citizenship.

The implications were not lost on one DHS whistleblower.

“If the Department of Homeland Security was serious about this, they would not have shut down the program that discovered this lapse in the first place,” whistleblower Philip Haney said on Fox and Friends Tuesday. “They say they’re addressing it, but they shut the program down that originally discovered it. It’s hard to effectively address it. But they say they have recommendations that the agencies are following, and they’re expecting a follow-up report.”

Haney believed that “high-level fraud” took place: “These individuals are from countries of concern, for terrorists. All of them. The report makes that quite plain. If you come to a law enforcement officer, and you don’t have your complete records, your fingerprints in particular, that could halt the process right there. How people came into the country, either legally or illegally, and accidentally gained citizenship is an impossible concept to me, as a law enforcement officer.”

**** Streamline

Border Patrol does not have guidance on using Streamline for aliens who express fear of persecution or return to their home countries, and its use of Streamline with such aliens is inconsistent and may violate U.S. treaty obligations.

In December 2005, Border Patrol began using Operation Streamline (the precursor to the current Streamline initiative) in response to an increase in illegal alien entries from countries other than Mexico in 2004 and 2005. Implemented in collaboration with and assistance from DOJ and the U.S. Courts, Streamline is a Border Patrol initiative where Border Patrol refers aliens entering the United States illegally for the first time or attempting reentry to DOJ for criminal prosecution. Border Patrol officials said the goal of Streamline is to reduce the rate of alien re-entry recidivism.

Before 2004, Border Patrol only referred a limited number of illegal entry aliens to DOJ for criminal prosecution. Historically, when apprehending aliens entering the United States illegally for the first time, Border Patrol would: immediately return most Mexican nationals to Mexico through the

Voluntary Return process, that is, departure without an order of

removal;

  • administratively detain and process aliens for formal removal from the

United States through the civil immigration system;

* issue a Notice to Appear in immigration court and release aliens on their

own recognizance pending their appearance; or

* refer to prosecution aliens deemed dangerous based on criminal history

or suspected of smuggling.

According to Border Patrol officials, in 2004 and 2005, illegal entry for Other Than Mexican (OTM) foreign nationals increased in Border Patrol’s Del Rio sector.2 Border Patrol could not use Voluntary Return procedures for OTMs because Voluntary Return is not an option for aliens from countries that do not have a contiguous border with the United States.

In addition, ICE had limited detention capacity to hold these aliens pending immigration hearings or removal, and Border Patrol did not have the authority or capacity to detain long-term OTMs it apprehended. As a result, Border Patrol released most OTMs into surrounding U.S. communities with a Notice to Appear in immigration court. This practice was commonly referred to as “catch and release.” The volume of OTM illegal alien entries continued to increase in the Del Rio sector, which Border Patrol attributed to the spread of information in some Central and South American countries about the practice of releasing OTMs into U.S. communities. Read more here from the Inspector General’s Report.