In 2000, Bill and Hillary Clinton owed millions of dollars in legal debt. Since then, they’ve earned over $130 million. Where did the money come from?

In his New York Times bestselling books Extortion and Throw Them All Out, Schweizer detailed patterns of official corruption in Washington that led to congressional resignations and new ethics laws.

In Clinton Cash, he follows the Clinton money trail, revealing the connection between their personal fortune, their “close personal friends”, the Clinton Foundation, foreign nations, and some of the highest ranks of government.

Schweizer reveals the Clinton’s troubling dealings in Kazakhstan, Colombia, Haiti, and other places at the “wild west” fringe of the global economy. In this blockbuster exposé, Schweizer merely presents the troubling facts he’s uncovered. Meticulously researched and scrupulously sourced, filled with headline-making revelations, Clinton Cash raises serious questions of judgment, of possible indebtedness to an array of foreign interests, and ultimately, of fitness for high public office.” (Clinton Cash)

The pivotal event that began to unravel the mystery of Mena was the death of Don Henry age 16, and Kevin Ives age 17. The story expanded to encompass the lies of the US Government concerning the Iran-Contra Affair. Two teenagers stumble upon a major drug smuggling operation. The boys are brutally murdered and their bodies are placed on railroad tracks to give the appearance of a train accident. Soon, crime scene eyewitnesses vanish and investigations are shut down.

The grieving parents are stunned. Corruption involving high-level officials from Arkansas to Washington is documented in this incredible true-life story. Why were numerous county, state, and federal government investigations blocked? Why was a thirty-month federal-grand-jury investigation abruptly shut down? Why did the FBI tell one boy’s grieving parents, “You should accept the fact that a crime has not been committed?” This story of murder, drugs, corruption, and cover-ups, involves high-ranking government officials, reaching up to the most powerful office in the world. It shows that interference from sinister political allies continues to protect these criminals from prosecution. (Source: The Michelle Moore Show/Rumble)

Released in 1996, this documentary made by Pat Matriciana of Integrity Films is an irrefutable account of a corrupted Arkansas under Governor Bill Clinton.  The corruption was systemic throughout law enforcement as well as public and political officials at every level and from both political parties, enabling the immediate implementation of a cover-up of the murders of Kevin and Don and the perpetuation of outrageous lies at every turn.  Linda and Jean had editorial control over the contents of the video, and they went to great lengths to be absolutely accurate. They got it right for the most part, but the passage of 23 years has uncovered events that are more disturbing but closer to accurate.  After the release of the documentary, Saline County Deputy Sheriff John Brown (predominant in the last 3rd of the video), turned against Linda and Jean.  They don’t know why. Was he  threaten?  Was he blackmailed? They don’t know.  He never gave them an explanation.  See John Brown’s page.

During the making of the video, the FBI opened its own two-year investigation during which time a great deal more was learned.  The FBI has released 2,000+ documents under FOIA, but admit to having 15,000 more.  Although many of the documents  received are heavily redacted, one thing is clear, the FBI knows who killed the boys and law enforcement was involved in the cover-ups.  Our researcher, Ron, created a one-page collage from the documents that speaks volumes.  See FBI Collage.

(ID Files, 5/19/2019)

Hear the ‘Fat Lady’ Sing…..

This revealing documentary contains rare and unauthorized footage of a C-123 code-named “The Fat Lady” – The plane that nearly brought down the Reagan/Bush Administration when it was shot down in Nicaragua loaded with guns while piloted by an ex_air American crew. Her her astonishing life story. For the first time ever The Fat Lady sings….

The Mena Connection takes you into the dark history of CIA’s covert operations in Arkansas – Back to a time in which a young Governor, desperate to build power base from which to launch a bid for the Presidency, made a pact with the real power brokers behind America’s secret government.

All in the name of National Security, Bill Clinton ‘rented’ his state to CIA for covert arms manufacturing and shipment – at a time in which Congress had banned support for Nicaraguan Contras. The illegal activity led to subversion of our Judicial System, which then allowed drugs and drug profits to freely flow through America’s heartland.

Follow the trials and tribulations of former CIA asst Terry Reed and his family as they valiantly attempt to bring this saga to Federal Court. Told through a multitude of interviews and rare footage. The Mena Connection tells of those individuals whose lives have been changed forever as a result of the ongoing cover-up and containment of what is perhaps America’s darkest secret – the successful, silent coup that set up the unelected, elitist micro-government now firmly enriched in power.

Diana West (Credit: public domain)

(Timeline editor’s note: With many thanks to Diana West for allowing us to republish her Robert Mueller timeline in its entirety. We believe it’s important to provide information on some of the more powerful officials who are/were in charge of the various investigations we are covering in this timeline. We also intend to include career timelines on James Comey and Rod Rosenstein.)

“Robert Mueller became Director of the FBI exactly one week before 9/11. No account of his Bureau tenure is complete without underscoring his shocking obstruction of efforts to bring to light information about key cells of the Saudi-centered conspiracy and terror attacks against the United States: in San Diego, explained here by Andrew Cockburn, and in Sarasota, explained here by Dan Christensen.

From the very start, FBI Director Mueller was not one to follow evidence where it leads. Instead, as the 9/11 record shows, he was one to divert others from where evidence leads.

The following chronology draws from compilations by Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist (MH), GlobalResearch.org (GR) and my own (DW).

1991:GR: As chief of DOJ Criminal Division, Mueller fails to prosecute the BCCI scandal aggressively

2001: GR: Quashes FBI investigation that might have prevented 9/11

Colleen Rowley (Credit: public domain)

Ret. FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley elaborates: “Although he bore no personal responsibility for intelligence failures before the attack, since he only became FBI Director a week before, Mueller denied or downplayed the significance of warnings that had poured in yet were all ignored or mishandled during the spring and summer of 2001. Bush administration officials had circled the wagons and refused to publicly own up to what the 9/11 Commission eventually concluded, “that the system had been blinking red.” Failures to read, share or act upon important intelligence, which a FBI agent witness termed “criminal negligence” in later trial testimony, were therefore not fixed in a timely manner. (Actually some failures were never fixed.)

2001:GR: Concurs with decision to okay exit (escape?) of Saudi persons connected to Bin Laden. As noted above, Mueller misleads, deflects, blocks scrutiny of Saudi cells in San Diego and Sarasota.

2001: Paul Sperry reported at WorldNetDaily: “Despite a shortage of Arabic translators, the FBI turned down applications for linguist jobs from nearly 100 Arabic-speaking Jews in New York following the World Trade Center attacks.” The New York FBI office had solicited applications from a charity working with Arab Jews, but Washington “headquarters made the final cuts.”  

2001: MH: Mueller’s FBI botches “the anthrax killer case, wasting more than $100 million in taxpayer dollars, destroying the lives of multiple suspects, and chasing bad leads using bad methods.”

2002 – 2008: MH on the Dr. Steven Hatfill Case

The FBI absolutely bungled its investigation into the Anthrax attacker who struck after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Carl Cannon goes through this story well, and it’s worth reading for how it involves both Comey and his dear ‘friend’ and current special counsel Robert Mueller. The FBI tried in the media its case against Hatfill. Their actual case ended up being thrown out by the courts.

Scooter Libby (Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

2003: Rep. Gohmert: The Framing of Scooter Libby

The entire episode was further revealed as a fraud when it was later made public that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald, FBI Director Mueller, and Deputy Attorney Comey had very early on learned that the source of Plame’s identity leak came from Richard Armitage. But neither Comey nor Mueller nor Fitzgerald wanted Armitage’s scalp. Oh no. These so-called apolitical, fair-minded pursuers of their own brand of justice were after a bigger name in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney or Karl Rove. Yet they knew from the beginning that these two men were not guilty of anything.

Nonetheless, Fitzgerald, Mueller and Comey pursued Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, as a path to ensnare the Vice President. According to multiple reports, Fitzgerald had twice offered to drop all charges against Libby if he would ‘deliver’ Cheney to him. There was nothing to deliver.

Is any of this sounding familiar? Could it be that these same tactics have been used against an innocent Gen. Mike Flynn? Could it be that Flynn only agreed to plead guilty to prevent any family members from being unjustly prosecuted and to also prevent going completely broke from attorneys’ fees? That’s the apparent Mueller-Comey-Special Counsel distinctive modus-operandi.

2004: MH: “Another black mark on Mueller’s record at the FBI was the pursuit of what the bureau dramatically claimed was an Israeli spy ring operating out of the Pentagon. … It turned out that the bureau had gone after a policy analyst who had chatted with American lobbyists at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Charges were also pursued against two AIPAC employees. Those charges were later dropped and the sentence of the first person was dropped from 13 years to 10 months of house arrest and some community service.”

2006: Rep. Louie Gohmert writes in his searing 48-page brief on Mueller: “…the Robert Mueller-led FBI took horrendously unjust actions to derail Curt Weldon’s re-election bid just weeks before the vote.” After an anonymously sourced national story appeared claiming that an investigation into illegal activities by Weldon and his daughter was underway, the FBI staged a 7am raid on the home of Weldon’s daughter. All of this generated negative headlines, and Weldon lost his re-election bid — but there was no follow-up — no questioning, no grand jury, no investigation, nothing. It was all theater staged to destroy an FBI and Clinton administration critic. Jack Cashill reports here.

Gohmert writes: “Please understand what former FBI officials have told me: the FBI would NEVER go after a member of Congress, House or Senate, without the full disclosure to and blessing of the FBI Director. Even if the idea on how to silence Curt Weldon did not come from Director Mueller himself, it surely had his blessing and encouragement, though and, at best, his silence and inaction.”

2008: Rep. Gohmert writes:

Ted Stevens (Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

Mueller’s FBI [put Sen. Ted] Stevens in its cross-hairs, pushing to get an indictment that came 100 days before his election, and engaging in third world dictator-type tactics to help an innocent man lose his election, after which he lost his life.

As reported by NPR, after the conviction and all truth came rolling out of the framing and conviction of Senator Stevens, the new Attorney General Eric Holder, had no choice.

He “abandoned the Stevens case in April 2009 after uncovering new and ‘disturbing’ details about the prosecution…”

Unfortunately for Ted Stevens, his conviction came only eight days before his election, which tipped the scales on a close election.

… Under Director Mueller’s overriding supervision, the wrongdoer who helped manufacture the case stayed on and the whistleblower was punished. Obviously, the FBI Director wanted his FBI agents to understand that honesty would be punished if it revealed wrongdoing within Mueller’s organization.

2008: DW: Mueller’s FBI publishes Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon. This lexicon is devoid of all words necessary to discuss, describe, understand and thus think about jihad, i.e., Islamic terrorism.

The words “Islam,” “Muslim,” “jihad,” “Muslim Brotherhood,” even “al-Qaeda” — all of which appear in the 9/11 Commission Report — have disappeared entirely from the lexicon of FBI analysis. Instead, agents must focus on the literally meaningless concept of “violent extremism.” As if that’s not mentally paralyzing enough, the FBI definition of violent extremism includes this: “An analytical judgment that an individual is a ‘violent extremist,’ ‘extremist,’ or ‘radical’ is not predication for any investigative action or technique.”

2008: DW: Mueller’s FBI misses the warning signals that Maj. Hassan was preparing for jihad violence in 2009. Too busy studying their see-no-Islam lexicons?

2010: DW: Hamas operative and HLF trial unindicted co-conspirator Kifah Mustapha gets FBI VIP treatment — invitations to top-secret National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and FBI training center at Quantico during a six-week “Citizen’s Academy” hosted by the FBI as part of its “outreach” to the Muslim community.

2010: DW: Mueller’s FBI rolls up “Ghost Stories,” a decade-long FBI counterintelligence operation targeting deep-cover Russian “illegals” attempting to bore into elite US political circles. In June 2010, mid-Russian “reset,” the FBI arrests ten Russian agents and hastily deports them because one Russian had gotten “too close” to a sitting cabinet official/future presidential candidate: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Thus, in 2010, without a single indictment or anything comparable, Mueller’s FBI did its part in deporting from American soil a network of high-value SVR operatives for political reasons; in 2018, without any expectation of prosecution, Mueller’s Special Counsel office indicted a network of Russian Internet hooligans on Russian soil, also for political reasons.

Photo illustration (Credit: Yahoo News/AP/Getty Images)

2010: DW: As Congress was considering the Uranium One sale, Mueller’s FBI allegedly hides from Congress evidence it had collected showing that Russian officials were engaged in a bribery scheme aimed at growing their atomic energy business inside the United States.

2012: DW: Mueller’s FBI purges 100s of documents in “islamophobia” purge. There would be a similar purge of military training docs and trainers under JCC Dempsey. Mueller attends announcement at a meeting at FBI HQ with Arab and Muslim groups. More on this purge at Judicial Watch:

2013: DW: Boston Marathan attack. As with the Ft. Hood attack, Mueller’s see-no-Islam FBI was unable to interpret information passed from Russia about the “radical” Chechin Muslim Tsarnaevs. Too busy studying see-no-Islam training materials?

September 4, 2013: Mueller’s last day at the FBI. Enter James Comey.

(Diana West, 4/19/2018)

“President Clinton gave the go-ahead in February to a U.S. company’s satellite launch in China despite staff concerns that granting such approval might be seen as letting the company “off the hook” in a Justice Department investigation of whether it previously provided unauthorized assistance to China’s ballistic missile program.

Documents released by the White House yesterday also show, however, that the State Department and other agencies had determined that the launch by Loral Space and Communications Ltd. was in “the national interest” and recommended approval.

This week, in an indication that the initial White House fears of criticism were well-founded, congressional Republicans cited the Justice Department warning in alleging Clinton jeopardized the nation’s security in granting a waiver. They suggested that the decision to do so was influenced by campaign contributions from Loral Chairman Bernard L. Schwartz.

Bill Clinton greets Loral chairman, Bernard Schwartz, in this undated photo. (Credit: The Associated Press)

The documents made available to reporters yesterday were handed over to Congress as the administration sought to buttress its contention that while Justice reservations were given due consideration, the decision to grant the waiver was made on its merits.

“These documents reflect the serious policymaking on national-interests grounds that goes into satellite waivers,” said White House spokesman Michael McCurry. “They also make clear that those who are taking political cheap shots should butt out.”

But the documents also demonstrated how Loral sought to use its connections to pressure the White House for a decision. Obtaining the required presidential approval was critical for Loral, which faced the loss of a hugely lucrative satellite sale and tens of millions of dollars in penalties if Clinton did not act before a contractual deadline with the Chinese. The company found significant support for its plight within the White House. Numerous officials there noted Loral’s financial interest in a speedy approval of the waiver.

The documents indicate that Schwartz, who has given more than $1 million to the Democratic Party since 1995, planned to raise the issue directly with National Security Adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger at a state dinner for British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Feb. 5.

However, Loral Vice President Thomas Ross wrote to Berger a week later that Schwartz “missed you in the crowd” and was not able to make his case. Instead, Ross, who served as a senior National Security Council official earlier in the Clinton administration, pleaded in his Feb. 13 letter for speedy action by the president.

“If a decision is not forthcoming in the next day or so we stand to lose the contract,” Ross wrote. “In fact, even if the decision is favorable, we will lose substantial amounts of money with each passing day.”

Five days later, Clinton granted his approval, despite what Berger advised him were Justice concerns that the move “could have a significant adverse impact” on its ongoing criminal investigation. The Justice Department was looking into whether Loral illegally provided sensitive missile technology information to the Chinese following the 1996 crash of a Chinese rocket carrying a Loral satellite.

In making the documents available for reading at the White House late yesterday afternoon, the administration limited the number of reporters who could examine them and declined to make copies, citing concerns by White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff that they were sensitive.

Special presidential waivers for satellite launches in China are required as part of the sanctions imposed on Beijing following the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising. A total of 11 such waivers, covering 21 launches of U.S.-made satellites, have been granted — two by President Bush and nine by Clinton.

The House and Senate this week announced investigations into the the Loral waiver, as well as into the broader question of whether national security has been violated in sending U.S. high technology to China. (Read more: The Washington Post, 5/23/1998)  (Archive) (Further resource links)  (Archive)

The year Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas, the Arkansas state prison board awarded a hefty contract to a Little Rock company called Health Management Associates (HMA). The company got $3 million a year to run medical services for the state’s awful prison system, which had been excoriated in a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court as an “evil place run by some evil men.”

HMA not only made money from providing medical care to prisoners, but it also started a profitable side venture: blood mining. The company paid prisoners $7 a pint to have their blood drawn [about half what urban skid road blood suckers pay for winos’ blood]. HMA then sold the blood on the international plasma market for $50 a pint, with half of that going to the Arkansas Department of Corrections.

Since Arkansas is one of the states that does not pay prisoners for their labor, prisoners were frequent donors at the so-called “blood clinic”. Hundreds of prisoners sold as much as two pints a week to HMA. The blood was then sold to pharmaceutical companies, such as Bayer and Baxter International; to blood banks, such as the Red Cross; and to so-called blood fractionizers, which transform the blood into medicines for hemophiliacs.

HMA’s contract with the Arkansas DOC and its entry into the blood market came at the same time as the rise of AIDS in the United States. Regardless, HMA did not screen the torrents of prison blood, even after the Food and Drug Administration issued special alerts about the higher incidence of AIDS and hepatitis in prison populations.

The Cummins Unit is an Arkansas Department of Corrections prison in unincorporated Lincoln County, Arkansas. (Credit: Arkansas Department of Corrections)

When American drug companies and blood fractionizers stopped buying blood taken from prisoners in the early 1980s, HMA turned to the international blood market, selling to companies in Italy, France, Spain and Japan. But the prime buyer of HMA’s tainted blood, drawn largely from prisoners at the Cummings Unit in Grady, Arkansas, was a notorious Canadian firm, Continental Pharma Cryosan Ltd.

Cryosan had a shady reputation in the medical industry. It had been nabbed importing blood taken from Russian cadavers and relabeled as from Swedish volunteers. The company also marketed blood taken from Haitian slums.

Cryosan passed the tainted Arkansas prison blood on to the Canadian Red Cross and European and Asian companies. The blood was recalled in 1983 after the contamination was discovered by the FDA. But less than one-sixth of the blood was recovered. In Canada alone more than 7,000 people have died from receiving contaminated blood, many of them hemophiliacs. More than 4,000 of these died of AIDS. Another 40,000 people in Canada have contracted various forms of hepatitis.

Former President Bill Clinton campaigning for Senator Mark Pryor, at lectern, on one of his numerous trips back to Arkansas, October 2014. (Credit: William DeShazer/The New York Times)

A $300 million class action suit has been filed on behalf of the Canadian victims of Cryosan’s tainted blood. According to one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, David Harvey, the suit names Bill Clinton and officials at the Arkansas DOC as defendants.

Cryosan’s former president, Ted Hecht, doesn’t believe his company did anything wrong. “Don’t look upon me as a villain in the piece. We supplied US-government licensed product and never denied its origins,” he told the Ottawa News , which first broke the story in September, 1998. “I never forced anyone to buy my product. If they didn’t want it, they didn’t have to buy it. I didn’t shove it down their throats.”

Hecht may have a point. His plasma packages were labeled, “ADC, Grady Arkansas”. But the Arkansas DOC and its contractor, HMA, have few excuses. They oversaw a shoddily-run prison blood-drawing operation that cross-contaminated prisoners and let loose on the global blood market thousands of pints of plasma they had good reason to believe may have been contaminated with lethal disease.

Dr. Francis “Bud” Henderson founded HMA in the 1970s. As the company began to expand, he brought in a Little Rock banker named Leonard Dunn to run the firm, while he served as its medical director. Dunn was a political ally and friend of the Clintons. He was appointed by Clinton to sit on the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission and served as finance chair of Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign. Later that same year, Dunn bought the famous Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan from Clinton’s business partner James McDougal. Dunn now serves as chief of staff to Arkansas Lt. Governor, Winthrop Rockerfeller.

In 1983, the Food and Drug Administration stripped HMA of its license to sell blood after it found that the company failed to exclude donors that had tested positively for hepatitis B, often a precursor of HIV. A state police report compiled as part of an investigation into the company’s operations at the Cummings Unit noted that the FDA pulled the HMA’s license to sell blood “for falsifying records and shipping hot blood.” The report goes on to say that “the suspension was for collecting and shipping plasma which had been collected from donors with a history of positive tests for [hepatitis B] … the violations were directly related to using inmate labor in the record and donor reject list.”

Dunn’s ties to Clinton served HMA well. He and Arkansas DOC officials convinced the FDA that the fault lay with a prison guard who was taking kickbacks from rejected prisoners in order to let them get back into the blood trade. The license was quickly restored and the tainted blood once more began to flow.

That didn’t end the investigations, however. HMA’s contract was up for renewal by the prison board and its slipshod record posed a big problem for the firm. When investigators began probing the company’s practices, including allegations of prisoner abuse, Dunn repeatedly boasted of his ties to Bill Clinton. (Read more: Prison Legal News, 5/15/1999)  (Archive)

(Timeline editor’s note: This story was brought to my attention by @seacaptim)

(Timeline editor’s note: This entry takes us to the beginning of our timeline and still seems relevant today. Even in 1999, the media was unwilling to ask the Clintons tough questions and they were never held accountable for the Chinagate scandal. Our team appreciates Mr. Sperry’s  fearless spirit and continued coverage of the Clintons through the years.)

President Clinton bans Investor’s Business Daily reporter Paul Sperry from the White House after an impromptu interview on the Chinagate scandal during a picnic for the press on the South Lawn in 1999.

WATCH: President Clinton bans Investor’s Business Daily Washington bureau chief Paul Sperry from White House after impromptu interview on CHINAGATE scandal during a picnic for the press on the South Lawn in 1999. Helen Thomas rebukes Joe Lockhart over ban.https://t.co/QfRYg0Men2

— Paul Sperry (@PaulSperry30) July 11, 2022

Paul Sperry wrote of his experience and his article was originally published as the cover story for WorldNet Magazine (later renamed Whistleblower) in February 2000:

(…) It was my turn to meet the celebrity president. As he approached me, I politely, if coolly, asked him when he would hold his next formal press conference. It had been several months since his last and he’s had fewer than any recent president. I admit I was trying to agitate the proper forum for questions about the FBI agents’ charges. But, to me, this was still a rather innocuous question, even within the supposedly neutral zone of a party. A relevant question, too, given the gathering. Other hard-nosed reporters surely were wondering when they’d get another crack at Clinton.

Or so I thought. My simple question was rewarded with boos and hisses from the adoring Clinton groupies around me. So much for the adversarial press.

But that was nothing compared with Clinton’s reaction to my inquiry about his next press confab. In an instant, his 100-watt charm shut off, replaced by a taunting belligerence. “Why?” he barked.

Bill Clinton spars with Paul Sperry at a White House picnic when asked about Chinagate. (Credit: Fox News)

“Because the American people have a lot of unanswered questions,” I replied, struggling to hold my bladder. At that point, he moved back down the rope, pulling up square in front of me, and demanded, “Like what?”

“Well, like illegal money from China and the campaign-finance scandal …”

What happened over the next 10 minutes was nothing short of a “scene.” The party-goers collapsed in around us. I watched the blood rush to Clinton’s gargantuan face as he launched into a tirade against ex-Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour, the FBI, Bob Dole and Republicans in general. All the while, he tried to belittle me by making faces (to get a rise out of his fans) and intimidate me by getting in my face.

And now I can see how he can do that to people. Clinton’s not just intellectually intimidating, he’s physically imposing. He’s tall (6-2) and big-boned.

Luckily, I’m the same height and was able to stand toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye with him. I’ll never forget the maniacal look in his bloodshot eyes. There was a moment, fleeting, where I sensed he wanted to try to take a swipe at me. I was getting full frontal Clinton. His volcanic temper, hidden so well from the public by his handlers, erupted less than 12 inches from my eyes.

Clinton always is game for a debate. That I asked him hard questions at a party wasn’t what ticked him off. It’s what I asked him about. He clearly doesn’t want to talk about the mother of all scandals — Chinagate.

He also may have been thrown by my grasp of the facts. I’d been tracking the Beijing-tied Lippo Group’s influence in the Clinton White House since 1996 and have been suspicious of the probity of Attorney General Janet Reno’s special task force since she let John Keeney Sr. set it up — a month after the election — to look into Lippo’s influence.

Keeney’s son is none other than a defense attorney for John Huang, the former Lippo executive and convicted Clinton-Gore fund-raiser. Junior, who’s also a long-time Democratic National Committee lawyer, cut Huang a deal with daddy’s old task force that got him no jail time and immunity from prosecution for espionage.

Clinton also was unprepared for my tenacity. Other reporters may back down after he singes their eyebrows with a verbal fusillade. Dummy me, I hung in there for more abuse, challenging his answers, following up with more questions. Which only made him madder. (Read more: WND/Archive, 9/24/2000)

We are pleased to include some of Jeff Carlson’s work in our Investigations Timeline and appreciate the awesome job he does gathering evidence and then making sense of the FBI/DOJ/FISA abuse scandals. He has saved us countless hours in research and his ability to keep names, dates and events organized is second to none.

I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank him for giving us special permission to republish some of his work, and love that we share a common goal to educate the masses the best way we can.

His blog is at themarketswork and is often published at The Epoch Times as well.

Here is a handy list he compiled of individuals with possible involvement or affiliation in Trump surveillance, the Steele Dossier and/or the Russia narrative.

Individuals have been placed into the following groups:

• Resignations/Firings – Department of Justice (Non-FBI)
• Resignations/Firings – FBI
• FBI/DOJ Watch List
• FBI – Assignments Away from FBI Headquarters
• Other Notable Retirements
• Intelligence Officials – United States
• Intelligence Officials – Britain
• Intelligence Officials – Australia
• Obama Officials
• Clinton Campaign/DNC
• Devin Nunes – List of Individuals referred to Joint Task Force for open-setting interviews
• Clinton Confidants
• Perkins Coie
• Sea Island Meeting – Never Trump
• Websites/Blogs – Lawfare, Just Security, Moscow Project
• Think Tanks – Center for American Progress, Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution
• Crowdstrike
• Fusion GPS’ (Bean LLC) Principals and Key Staff
• Fusion Affiliations
• Christopher Steele Connections
• Hakluyt – UK private Intelligence firm
• Penn Quarter Group
• Papadopoulos Related
• Trump Tower Meeting
• Individuals Relating to Magnitsky Act
• Oleg Deripaska Connections
• Mueller Team
• Congress
• FISA Court Judges
• Print Reporters

Treat this post as a work in progress. Names will be added as we move forward.

To the extent you believe something to be materially wrong or missing, let me know. I will attempt to verify.

Work. In. Progress.

(A Listing of Participants, Jeff Carlson, 5/01/2018)

Conservative Treehouse has been very generous in allowing us to republish some of their work and we would like to thank them publicly for saving us countless hours in research, and for sharing in a common goal to awaken the masses the best way we can. They have a stellar research team that is doing deep dives into IG Reports, FBI Reports, Congressional testimonies, text messages, emails…where there is information or a document to be found, they’re on it.

They also have an excellent video production team and so I’d like to introduce some of their work that you will find peppered throughout our timelines. In this series of videos, CT reports on the DOJ OIG Horowitz Report and their findings on the Clinton email investigation and the Weiner laptop.

You can find all of their excellent work at: Conservative Treehouse

“This is the first of a series of reports on the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the investigation of Hillary Clinton by the FBI and Justice Department. This report focuses on DOJ’s legal interpretation that virtually assured Clinton would not be prosecuted. And that, as the IG reports states, the FBI and DOJ knew that “by September 2015.”

This is the second in a series of reports on the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the investigation of Hillary Clinton by the FBI and Justice Department.

This is the third in a series of reports on the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the investigation of Hillary Clinton by the FBI and Justice Department.

This is the fourth in a series of reports on the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the investigation of Hillary Clinton by the FBI and Justice Department.

Peter Strzok, the FBI’s lead Investigator in the Clinton email investigation, never intended to investigate the laptop before the election. The evidence, in his own words, is in the report by the Inspector General. In addition, the IG report includes a jaw dropping contradiction regarding the investigation of the laptop. Strozk says one thing. The FBI’s computer experts say another. It calls into question the entirety of the laptop investigation.

Footage from a 2001 report by ABC News‘ Brian Ross about a disgruntled donor shows  Clinton talking about how she had chosen to avoid email for fear of a paper trail.

“As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that, you know, why would I —- I don’t even want -— why would I ever want to do e-mail?” she’s seen on tape telling Peter Paul on a home video captured at a fundraiser.

“Can you imagine?” she said.

Hillary’s largest, unreported donor, Peter Paul (www.hillcap.org), published home videos that prove Hillary knew him well and solicited illegal contributions from him while running for the Senate.

“According to new details about the Clinton-era “Pardongate,” the last of several scandals that plagued the administration and further sullied the former president’s reputation as he left office, the Democrat pushed for so many pardons to help his wife and cronies that lawyers running the eleventh-hour operation resorted to internet searches to determine the “fitness” of applicants.

“None profited more than Hillary Rodham Clinton,” said Sinclair Broadcast investigative reporter Mark Hyman in his upcoming book, Pardongate: How Bill & Hillary Clinton and Their Brothers Profited from Pardons.

He told Secrets that 50 of Clinton’s eventual 457 clemency approvals directly aided allies of Hillary Clinton, including many that helped in her 2000 New York Senate victory that paved the way for her two failed presidential campaigns.

“It was Hillary Rodham Clinton who was the key influence behind the worst of the worst pardons and commutations that disgraced the office of the president, undermined the legal system and demonstrated that justice could be sold,” Hyman wrote in his Post Hill Press book, out later this month.

“Imagine to what extent a ‘President’ Hillary Rodham Clinton would thoroughly abuse the legal system to turn loose unrepentant, hardened criminals; reward wealthy donors; enrich her family and friends, and turn the executive clemency process into a glorified eBay get-out-of-jail-free card,” he added.

(Read more: Washington Examiner, 6/05/2020)   (Archive)

Michael Woods (Credit: CSpan)

“In 2001, the FBI implemented new protection for US citizens after federal agents got caught repeatedly submitting incorrect information to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to obtain wiretaps.

The “Woods Procedures,” named for the FBI agent who helped devise them, were supposed to be strict checks and balances that required every fact submitted in support of a wiretap application be verified all the way to the top of the FBI. If a single fact wasn’t verifiable, the application was supposed to be withdrawn or the “fact” removed.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz found the FBI violated multiple Woods Procedures rules in the agency’s multiple, controversial wiretaps of former Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

Read the entire Woods Procedures document here.

(Read more: Sharyl Attkisson, 1/4/2020)  (Archive)

Peter Schweizer’s new book Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win tells the story of how Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband Richard Blum was part owner of a Chinese firm that allegedly sold computers with spyware chips to the U.S. military. The military has never been able to calculate how much sensitive data these computers allowed China to steal.

A hefty chapter of Red-Handed is devoted to tracking Feinstein’s long and expensive relationship with Communist China. The senator has made herself very, very useful to Beijing — so useful that she actually tried to excuse the Tiananmen Square massacre by suggesting China only called in combat troops to murder thousands of demonstrators because it ran out of cops.

Then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein meets with Chinese Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian at Diaoyutai State Guest House in Beijing on November 9, 1984. (Neal Ulevich/AP)

In a total coincidence that could not possibly have been related in any way to Feinstein’s friendship with the tyrants of Beijing, her husband did a great deal of lucrative business with Chinese companies, including entities run by the Communist government and linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

One of those deals saw Blum becoming a major investor in a computer company that was founded by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), an institution tied to both the Chinese government and the PLA. The company was originally called Legend, but is better known by its second name, Lenovo.

Lenovo grew into a major player in the worldwide computer marketplace after it acquired IBM’s line of personal computer products in 2005. Lenovo’s deal to buy IBM’s business included $350 million in investments from three American private equity firms. One of them was Richard Blum’s Newbridge Capital.

Some lawmakers worried Lenovo’s purchase of IBM’s personal computer line could jeopardize U.S. national security and transfer advanced American computer technology to China. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, was not one of them.

It did not take long for security agencies across the Western world — including the U.S., U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — to discover security vulnerabilities in Lenovo products and ban them from sensitive operations. The U.S. State Department announced it would not allow Lenovo computers to connect to its classified networks in 2006, barely a year after the IBM acquisition.

Somehow Lenovo still managed to sell a large number of laptop computers to the U.S. military, which discovered that many of those machines included motherboard chips that “would record all the data that was being inputted into that laptop and send it back to China,” as a computer operations manager for the U.S. Marines in Iraq put it.

A year after that testimony was delivered, Blum sold his stake in Lenovo.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) with her husband Richard Blum at an election night event in San Francisco on November 6, 2018. (Credit: Jeff Chiu/AP)

The Pentagon released an audit in 2019 that found the Department of Defense (DoD) still has not formally banned computers from Lenovo, now the largest personal computer company in China, even though the Department of Homeland Security and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Directorate have both identified the machines as cyberespionage risks. The U.S. Air Force purchased 1,378 Lenovo products worth $1.9 million as recently as 2018. (Breitbart, 1/26/2022)   (Archive)

In September 2015, Clinton’s future deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin will be interviewed under oath by the House Benghazi Committee. She will reveal that when she had an email or other computer problem while working on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, or even earlier working as an aide when Clinton was a senator, Abedin would turn to Justin Cooper for help. “I usually called Justin. He was our go-to guy. He always was, you know, ‘I’m having a problem, can you help me fix it,’ and he always did…” She would also call on Cooper whenever Clinton was having an email problem.

Cooper will also be the person who suggests she get a clintonemail.com email account on Clinton’s private server shortly before Clinton becomes secretary of state, and then sets it up for her. This suggests his involvement managing Clinton’s private server starts early. Cooper is a longtime aide to Bill Clinton, but he apparently never has a government job or security clearance. (House Benghazi Committee, 10/21/2015)

The Nation publishes a photo of McCain and Rick Davis, celebrating his seventieth birthday in Montenegro in August 2006. On the same day, the Queen K, a mega yacht owned by Oleg Deripaska, is moored in the same bay. (Credit: The Nation

(…) “In fact, McCain’s drama involved the same foreign lobbyist Paul Manafort; one of the same Russian oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska; the same Russian diplomat, Sergey Kislyak, and the same wily Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, that now dominate the current Trump controversy.

The FBI has said that there is no evidence to date that Trump ever met with a Russian figure banned from the United States.

McCain actually met twice with Deripaska, a Russian businessman and Putin ally whose visa was blocked by the United States amidst intelligence community concerns about his ties to Moscow. The meetings were arranged by Manafort and his lobbying firm partner Rick Davis, who later would become McCain’s campaign manager, according to interviews and documents. Deripaska, a metals magnet, is president of United Company RUSAL, and is considered to be one of the richest men in the world worth an estimated at $5.1 billion, according to Forbes.“My sense is that Davis and Manafort, who were already doing pro-Putin work against American national interests, were using potential meetings with McCain — who didn’t know this and neither did we until after the fact — as bait to secure more rubles from the oligarchs,” John Weaver, one of McCain’s top advisers at the time, told Circa in an interview this month.

Then Governor of Virginia Mark Warner, Senator John McCain, David Gergen and John Sununu are captured during the session ‘The Future of US Leadership’ at the Annual Meeting 2006 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 27, 2006. (Credit: Flickr)

(…) “In 2006, Davis and Manafort arranged two meetings with McCain and Deripaska in group settings while the senator was overseas on official congressional trips.

The first occurred in January 2006 in Davos, Switzerland, where McCain had traveled with fellow Republicans for a global economics conference.

When McCain and his other Senate colleagues, John Sununu and Saxby Chambliss, arrived at an apartment for drinks, Davis was present as a host with Deripaska by his side. A group of about three dozen then went to dinner, McCain and Deripaska included.”

(…) “Davis was McCain’s campaign manager in both 2000 and 2008. Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager for a brief time, resigned in August 2016, over questions of prior work with Ukrainian political parties.

During the 2008 campaign, the Davis Manafort firm disclosed through its U.S. partner Daniel J. Edelman Inc., that it was working for the political party in Ukraine supporting Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by Putin.

“Davis Manafort International LLC is directed by a foreign political party, the Ukraine Parties of Regions, to consult on the political campaign in Ukraine,” the January2008 ForeignAgent Registration Act filing showed.

The work included developing “a communications campaign to increase Prime Minister Yanukovych’s visibility in the U.S. and Europe,” the report added, indicating that Davis and Manafort were being paid a $35,000 a month retainer for the work that began in spring 2007.” (Read more: Circa, 6/21/2017)

In December 2007, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. was filed at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. A special three-judge panel (as specified in BCRA) sided with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that under the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act Hillary: The Movie could not be shown on television right before the 2008 Democratic primaries.

Another provision in BCRA specified that constitutional appeals from the District Court must be immediately filed directly with the U.S. Supreme Court. Citizens United did so on August 18, 2008. Oral arguments were heard on March 24, 2009; a decision was expected sometime in the early summer months of 2009.

In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the spending limits in the McCain-Feingold Act were unconstitutional under the First Amendment; which allowed essentially unlimited independent expenditures by non-profit organizations. Contrary to popular belief, the FEC still limits corporate campaign contributions. (Wikipedia)

Ariuna Namsrai (Credit: APCO Worldwide)

(…) In another message sent from his State Department email account, Winer also touted Steele to an executive at APCO Worldwide, Ariuna Namsrai.“Ariuna, my friend Chris Steele from London is in town and working on Russian matters as always,” Winer emailed Namsrai on Nov. 20, 2014. “I thought it might make sense for the two of you to get together if you had any time tomorrow.”

“Great to hear from you!” she enthused in reply. “I met Chris before so it’s nice to hear that he is in DC.” In the same email, Namsrai asks, “Chris — what time is convenient for you?”

The arrangements having been made for Namsrai to meet with Steele, she closed by saying, “Miss you Jonathan, and hope to see you soon! Hugs, Ariuna.”

As one lawyer who specializes in federal employment law told RealClearInvestigations, it is “wildly inappropriate” for a State Department official to be recommending contractors to lobbyists with business before the department.

But there’s more to it. Who, after all, is Ariana Namsrai, with whom Winer is on a “hugs” basis? She is APCO’s managing director for Russia. Born in Mongolia, she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

APCO is of particular interest because Winer was a senior director and “business diplomacy consultant” for the firm from May 2008 to August 2013. After he left the State Department in 2017, Winer returned to APCO as a “senior counselor.”

During his first stint, Winer worked with Namsrai representing a Russian nuclear power company called Techsnabexport. Or at least they did their best to make it appear they were primarily working for that company when they were actually working for the Russian government.

APCO’s 2011 Foreign Agents Registration Act filing names Techsnabexport as the “foreign principal” for which it was working. The firm described their client as “an open joint-stock company wholly owned by the JSC Atomenergoprom.” In the fine print, one discovers that the company in turn is “wholly owned by State corporation for Atomic Energy, ‘Rosatom,’ which is wholly owned by the Russian government.”

A “Contract for Lobbying Services and Consulting Services” was drawn up by APCO in April 2010, a copy of which was attached as a secondary appendix to the FARA filing. The “Scope of Work” includes “Creating and promoting a new image of State Atomic Energy Corporation ‘Rosatom,’” supporting “the interests of Rosatom in the USA,” and overcoming “existing political and trade barriers.”

In October 2010, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States approved Rosatom’s controversial acquisition of Uranium One, a Canadian company with extensive mining projects in the U.S.

Namsrai did not respond to emails from RealClearInvestigations asking why APCO listed Techsnabexport as its “foreign principal” client and not the official Russian state nuclear power enterprise, Rosatom, and whether Steele performed any work for the company.” (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 8/25/2020)  (Archive)

According to the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM), department employees are allowed to send most Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) information unencrypted over the Internet only when necessary.

In August 2008, the FAM is amended to further toughen the rules on sending SBU information on non-department-owned systems at non-departmental facilities – such as Clinton’s later use of a private email server. Employees have to:

• ensure that SBU information is encrypted
• destroy SBU information on their personally owned and managed computers and removable media when the files are no longer required
• implement encryption certified by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST)

The FBI will later determine that SBU information was frequently and knowingly sent to and from Clinton’s private server, but none of these steps were taken. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Jacqueline Newmyer-Deal (Credit: public domain)

A company whose president is “best friends” with Chelsea Clinton received more than $11 million in contracts over the last decade from a highly secretive Department of Defense think tank, but to date, the group lacks official federal approval to handle classified materials, according to sensitive documents TheDCNF was allowed to review.

Jacqueline Newmyer, the president of a company called the Long Term Strategy Group, has over the last 10 years received numerous Defense Department contracts from a secretive think tank called Office of Net Assessment.

The Office of Net Assessment is so sensitive, the specialized think tank is housed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and reports directly to the secretary.

To date, the Long Term Strategy Group has received $11.2 million in contracts, according to USAspending,gov, a government database of federal contracts.

USASpending.gov chart for Long Term Strategy Group between 2008-2020

But after winning a decade of contracts from the Office of Net Assessment, the federal agency is only now in the process of granting clearance to the company. Long Term Strategy Group never operated a secure room on their premises to handle classified materials, according to the Defense Security Service, a federal agency that approves secure rooms inside private sector firms. Long Term Strategy Group operates offices in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass.

(…) Clinton and Newmyer first met each other while attending Sidwell Friends School, an exclusive private Quaker school in the nation’s capital. They were in each other’s weddings, and in 2011 Chelsea referred to Newmyer as her “best friend.”

In numerous emails, Chelsea’s mom, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actively promoted Newmyer and attempted to assist her in securing Defense Department contracts.

Secretary Clinton put Newmyer in contact with Michèle Flournoy, then-President Barack Obama’s undersecretary of defense, according to the emails from Clinton’s private email server released by the Department of State under a lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Hillary followed up in a July 19, 2009 email, asking Newmyer, “By the way, did the DOD contract work out?”  (Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/27/2017)  (Archive)

The Mac OS X Logo (Credit: Apple)

Justin Cooper is an aide to former President Bill Clinton, and he is the administrator for the private server located in the Chappaqua, New York, house where Bill and his wife Hillary live. Cooper will later be interviewed by the FBI, and he will say that the decision is made to replace the server because the current server (being run on an Apple OS X computer) is antiquated and people using it are having email troubles.

At the recommendation of Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin, Cooper contacts Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign as an information technology specialist, to build a new server system and to assist Cooper with administrating it. Pagliano was getting rid of the computer equipment from Clinton’s presidential campaign, so it is decided to use some of this equipment for the new server at the Chappaqua house.

According to a later FBI interview, Hillary Clinton “told the FBI that at some point she became aware there was a server in the basement of her Chappaqua residence. However, she was unaware of the transition from the Apple server managed by Cooper to another server built by Pagliano and therefore, was not involved in the transition decision.”

Between the fall of 2008 and January 2009, Pagliano gets computer equipment from Clinton’s former presidential campaign headquarters, and also works with Cooper to buy additional necessary equipment.

Clinton becomes secretary of state on January 20, 2009, and begins using a clintonemail.com email address around that time, which is hosted on the old Apple server. The new server won’t be operational until March 2009. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Michael Froman (Credit: public domain)

“According to emails released by WikiLeaks yesterday, which came from a hack of the email account of John Podesta, a co-chair of Obama’s 2008 Transition Team,  we learn that despite the obvious fact that Citigroup was both corrupt and derelict in handling its own financial affairs, Barack Obama gave executives of that bank an outsized role in shaping and staffing his first term.

In an email dated Saturday, October 18, 2008, Michael Froman, using his official Citigroup email address of fromanm@citi.com, sent the following email to Obama’s advisors:

“Review Teams

“Attached is the latest version of the Agency Review teams. It is a closely held document, so please treat it with the same sensitivity as ours. If you all could take a quick look at the lists for the agencies in your area, that would be helpful. I think the hope is that, while there are no guarantees, some of the people on these lists might make their way into the agencies ultimately. Our role, therefore, is to check whether there is much overlap between the names here and the names were seeing/generating for sub-cabinet positions in each agency. There doesn’t need to be total overlap, but if there is a total disconnect, it would probably be better to rectify that now vs. later.

“I hate to ask, since I just send you another long spreadsheet to check, but if you could do this tomorrow and get back to Lisa (copied here) and myself, that would be great. Thanks.”

Froman had served in the Clinton administration and moved to Citigroup along with Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin. (Rubin would collect compensation of $126 million during his decade at the bank after helping to deliver the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, legislation that had previously prevented Citigroup from owning an insured bank along with high-risk brokerage and investment banking.) According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Froman was a Managing Director of Citigroup Management Corp. from 1999 to 2009.

Obama appointed Froman to the position of U.S. Trade Representative in 2013. This is how Politico sums up how trade deals are being deliberated under his command:

“If you want to hear the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the Obama administration is hoping to pass, you’ve got to be a member of Congress, and you’ve got to go to classified briefings and leave your staff and cellphone at the door.

“If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving.”

According to the WikiLeaks emails released yesterday, Froman began plotting who would serve in the Obama administration long before the election results came in.

In an email to John Podesta dated September 18, 2008, Froman wrote:

“Mark Gittenstein called to say he was in the process of inserting people into all of the work streams and indicated that Ron Klain would be their representative on the Personnel Working Group. I know and like Ron and am happy to work with him. Do let me know how you’d like to handle information flow, role in decisionmaking, etc. Thanks.”

In another email dated October 15, 2008, Froman further shows he is playing a pivotal role in personnel issues. He writes to Podesta and Obama advisor Pete Rouse:

“Please see attached. Pete, need to chat with you today about a time-sensitive Treasury issue. Please call at your convenience. 917-499-[xxxx]. John, got some feedback that Blair could well be interested in DNI. Also, spent some more time with Oszag last night and think he could be enticed to the NEC. Also, spent 2 hours (!) with Gene yesterday.”

Another email suggests that Podesta allowed Froman to screen  potential new hires. Podesta wrote to Froman on October 13, 2008 to inquire:

“Subject: Gerald Corrigan

“Rahm raised as possible Treasury Deputy. Said he didn’t know him, but his name had been raised by others. You probably do. Worth considering?”

Froman responded: “Yes, though quite a bit out of date.”

Froman was not the only Citigroup executive to be tapped to shape Obama’s first term. In an email dated just five days after Obama won the 2008 election, Daniel Tarullo, an Obama advisor who now sits as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and functions in the quasi-role as supervisor of the too-big-to-fail bank holding companies like Citigroup, emailed Jack Lew at Citigroup. Lew was Chief Operating Officer of the very division that toppled the bank. Tarullo tells Lew the following:

“Jack – Here’s what I wanted to speak with you about: (1) possibility of meeting in Chicago to brief BO/JRB on budget/stimulus. People have been talking about Wed, Thur, or Fri, but nothing yet firmly set to my knowledge. Assuming it goes forward, how should we present (in 90 minutes for both!) the key issues? (2) your willingness to do some oversight on what Jason is doing on budget preparation, at least until such time as we have an OMB Director designate. Dan”

Robert Rubin was also contacted on November 1, 2008 at his official Citigroup email address by Tarullo. The same email was copied to another Clinton Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, who was then at a hedge fund, DE Shaw. The email indicates that Tarullo was seeking the opinion of Rubin, Summers and others in Obama’s closely knit circle as to whether Obama should attend a G20 Summit as President Elect. (Clip on the top tab “attachments” to read the full memo.) (Read more: Wall Street On Parade, 10/11/2008)

Emails published by Wikileaks that were purportedly hacked from an account belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta suggest a top national security advisor to President Obama struggled to obtain a security clearance.

Cassandra Butts and Ben Rhodes (Credit: public domain)

“An email from late October 2008 appears to show the FBI denied an interim security clearance for Ben Rhodes during the Obama administration transition period, prior to the 2009 inauguration. Rhodes now serves as the White House Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and has played a key role advising President Obama on national security matters, including the Iran nuclear agreement.

In an email dated October 29, 2008, Obama transition team lawyer Cassandra Butts informed Podesta that the FBI told her they were unlikely to approve a request to provide Rhodes with an interim security clearance.

“The FBI has indicated that they are inclined to decline interim security clearance for Benjamin Rhodes who is OFA senior speechwriter and national security policy person,” Butts wrote. “They have not shared an explanation as to why. If his interim status is denied, the FBI will still undertake a full-clearance process review of his application post-election and make a final determination.”

She added, “In terms of our options, we could ask the FBI for an explanation on the denial and make a determination if it is worth pushing to obtain an interim status, or we can wait for the full review post-election.”

Butts appears to have sent a follow up email to Podesta later that evening informing him the transition team had decided not to challenge the denial.

(…) She then seemingly explained that Rhodes was the only person denied a clearance out of close to 200 people who applied.

“For your information, out of the approximately 187 people who we have moved through the process Benjamin was the only person declined interim status,” the Butts email stated.” (Read more: Law & Crime, 11/03/2016)

The FBI’s top agent in Chicago told Illinois State Police (ISP) officials that an imam under consideration to be the agency’s first Muslim chaplain wouldn’t pass a background test if it were up to his agency.

That comment came before the State Police initially approved Imam Kifah Mustapha‘s appointment in 2009, a move they later rescinded after the Investigative Project on Terrorism published an article documenting Mustapha’s connections to a Hamas-support network.

Mustapha is suing the ISP claiming it violated his 1^st and 4^th Amendment rights in withdrawing its offer for the chaplain’s position. The suit claims the IPT report was flawed and the state had no legitimate grounds to reject him. As part of the lawsuit, Mustapha wants to see ISP and FBI records related to their background check of him.

Former FBI Chicago Special Agent-in-Charge Rob Grant (Credit: public domain)

The U.S. Attorney’s Office argued those records are protected from disclosure, in a motion filed Wednesday. In it, the government said FBI Chicago Special Agent-in-Charge (SAC) Rob Grant had “several” conversations with ISP officials before Mustapha’s appointment in which he advised the ISP of Mustapha’s worrisome background.

“In each conversation, SAC Grant stated that Mustapha would not pass an FBI background check if he applied for an FBI chaplain position and then proceeded to explain the bases for his opinion,” the motion said.

Mustapha’s supporters say the ISP’s decision was “based on suspicion and paranoia,” which they blame on the IPT report. The story cited internal documents from the support network, called the Palestine Committee, which became public during a 2008 prosecution, and other court records.

Grant’s statements to ISP officials conducting the background check indicate the IPT story was not the first time the police had heard of Mustapha’s questionable background.

There is no reason to believe the information in the conversations could help prove Mustapha’s claim that the ISP’s decision was based on “discriminatory” reasons, wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Johnson. “Indeed, SAC Grant’s advice to ISP that Mustapha would not pass an FBI background check if he applied for an FBI chaplain position strongly suggests just the opposite.”

The government motion focuses on whether Mustapha’s lawyers can obtain material for discovery in the litigation and not on the factual nature of the issues that caught the ISP’s attention. Attorneys with the Council on American-Islamic Relations are representing Mustapha.

Kifah Mustapha (Credit: YouTube)

He was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five former officials. In 2008, a Dallas jury convicted the defendants on more than 100 counts tied to illegally funneling money to Hamas. Mustapha served as a paid Holy Land Foundation employee from 1996 until the group’s assets were frozen by the federal government in 2001.

Mustapha also served as a member of a volunteer committee for the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). In testimony given in another case, Mustapha recalled donating money to HLF and “maybe” IAP. Like the Holy Land Foundation, the IAP was an arm of the Palestine Committee, which was created to promote the Hamas agenda financially and politically in the United States.

Additionally, Mustapha sang in a band that performed at HLF fundraisers. In one video, submitted as evidence in the HLF trial, Mustapha sings, “O mother, Hamas for Jihad. Over mosques’ loudspeakers, with freedom. Every day it resists with stones and the dagger. Tomorrow, with God’s help, it will be with a machine gun and a rifle.”

The FBI’s Grant, meanwhile, is known for his outreach in the Chicago Muslim community. In 2009, he attended a meeting of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago (CIOGC) to assure members that the FBI doesn’t targets mosques for investigations.

“The FBI unequivocally does not plant informants in mosques or any other houses of worship,” Grant said. He urged attendees to report any FBI agents acting in an inappropriate manner.

Though Grant predicted Mustapha could not pass an FBI background check, Mustapha was allowed to tour the National Counterterrorism Center and FBI headquarters in September 2010.

“If we thought he was a security risk, we wouldn’t have included him,” on the tour, which is part of the FBI’s Citizens’ Academy, said Chicago FBI spokesman Ross Rice.

According to the FBI Citizens’ Academy website, “Because of the classified investigative techniques discussed, nominees must also undergo a background check and get an interim security clearance.”

For a detailed profile of Mustapha’s ties to Hamas-linked groups, click here. (Read more: Investigative Project on Terrorism, 5/27/2011)  (Archive) 

Ernie Milner, division chief for SMART Testing and Implementation, and Kevin Gatlin, division chief for SMART Messaging, in the State Department SMART lab in Newington, VA. (Credit: American Diplomacy / University of North Carolina)

In 2009, the first year Clinton is secretary of state, the State Department begins using the State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset (SMART), which allows employees to electronically tag emails to preserve a copy for posterity. This allows employees to easily comply with record keeping regulations, instead of having to print out copies of each email.

Although most of the State Department starts using SMART in 2009; the Office of the Secretary elects not to use the SMART system to preserve emails, partly due to concerns that the system would “allow overly broad access to sensitive materials.” (This quote is from an FBI report, but the name of the official who said it is redacted.)

Representatives from the Executive Secretariat (which includes Clinton’s office) ask to be the last to receive the SMART rollout. Ultimately SMART is never used by the Executive Secretariat Office or Clinton for the rest of Clinton’s four-year tenure.

This leaves printing out each email as the only approved method by which the Clinton or her staff in the Office of the Secretary could preserve emails for record keeping. But when Clinton leaves office in February 2013, she won’t even do that.

Remarkably, when Clinton will be interviewed by the FBI in July 2016, the FBI summary will indicate: “Clinton was not aware how other State [Department] staff maintained their records and was unaware of State’s State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset (SMART).” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

SMART will have security and cost overrun problems for the rest of Clinton’s tenure, and beyond.

In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI, the bureau asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.

Yes, that’s the same Deripaska who has surfaced in Mueller’s current investigation and who was recently sanctioned by the Trump administration.

The Levinson mission is confirmed by more than a dozen participants inside and outside the FBI, including Deripaska, his lawyer, the Levinson family and a retired agent who supervised the case. Mueller was kept apprised of the operation, officials told me.

Some aspects of Deripaska’s help were chronicled in a 2016 book by reporter Barry Meier, but sources provide extensive new information about his role.

They said FBI agents courted Deripaska in 2009 in a series of secret hotel meetings in Paris; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary, and Washington. Agents persuaded the aluminum industry magnate to underwrite the mission. The Russian billionaire insisted the operation neither involve nor harm his homeland.

“We knew he was paying for his team helping us, and that probably ran into the millions,” a U.S. official involved in the operation confirmed.

One agent who helped court Deripaska was Andrew McCabe, the recently fired FBI deputy director who played a seminal role starting the Trump-Russia case, multiple sources confirmed.

Deripaska’s lawyer said the Russian ultimately spent $25 million assembling a private search and rescue team that worked with Iranian contacts under the FBI’s watchful eye. Photos and videos indicating Levinson was alive were uncovered.

Then in fall 2010, the operation secured an offer to free Levinson. The deal was scuttled, however, when the State Department become uncomfortable with Iran’s terms, according to Deripaska’s lawyer and the Levinson family.

FBI officials confirmed State hampered their efforts.

“We tried to turn over every stone we could to rescue Bob, but every time we started to get close, the State Department seemed to always get in the way,” said Robyn Gritz, the retired agent who supervised the Levinson case in 2009, when Deripaska first cooperated, but who left for another position in 2010 before the Iranian offer arrived. “I kept Director Mueller and Deputy Director [John] Pistole informed of the various efforts and operations, and they offered to intervene with State, if necessary.”

FBI officials ended the operation in 2011, concerned that Deripaska’s Iranian contacts couldn’t deliver with all the U.S. infighting. Levinson was never found; his whereabouts remain a mystery, 11 years after he disappeared.” (Read more: The Hill, 5/14/2018)  (Archive)

In a September 2016 Congressional hearing, Justin Cooper will reveal some information about how Clinton’s use of a private email account on her private server begins. He will state: “Secretary Clinton was transitioning from her presidential campaign and Senate role and had been using primarily a BlackBerry for email correspondence. There were limitations to her ability to use that BlackBerry as well as desire to change her email address because a number of people have received her email address over the course of those activities. So we created with a discussion, I believe, with [Clinton aide] Huma Abedin at the time [about] what domains might be of interest. We obtained a domain and we added it to the original server used by President Clinton’s office for [Hillary Clinton] to use with her BlackBerry at the time…”

Note that Cooper registers three domain names on January 13, 2009, so this discussion must have occurred before then.

Representative Mark Meadows (Credit: public domain)

Representative Mark Meadows (R) will ask Cooper in the hearing: “So, your testimony here today is that Huma Abedin said that she would prefer to have Ms. Clinton’s email on a private server versus a server that was actually managed by someone else? That’s your testimony?”

Cooper will reply, “My testimony is that that was communicated to me.”

He will also clarify that when it came to talking to Abedin, “I don’t recall conversations with her about the setting up of the server.” But he also will say, “At some point I had a conversation with her about the setting up of an email account for Secretary Clinton on the server.” (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

However, in Abedin’s April 2016 FBI interview, she will say nothing like this. In fact, she will deny even knowing the server existed until it was mentioned in the media, despite her having an email account hosted on the server for the entire duration of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state and at least three email exchanges that show her discussing the server during that time. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

(…) Alexander Djerassi, who is Ghislaine Maxwell’s nephew, was a high-ranking official in Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Here is Alexander Djerassi’s bio from his time as an associate with the Carnegie Endowment:

“Alexander Djerassi was a nonresident associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focused on Tunisia and U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East and North Africa. From 2009 to 2012, Djerassi was chief of staff and special assistant in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, covering U.S. relations with Arab states, Israel, and Iran. He worked on matters relating to democratization and civil society in the Arab world, the Arab uprisings, and Israeli-Palestinian peace. Djerassi has served as a U.S. representative to the Friends of Libya conferences, Friends of the Syrian People conferences, U.S.-GCC Strategic Coordination Forum, and several UN General Assemblies.”

(…) Dale Djerassi, who gave $8,200 to Clinton’s “New York Senate 2000” committee in June, participated in the bizarre “St. Batman Crucifixion” in Woodside, Calif., in 1994.

The performance art piece was a re-enactment of the crucifixion of Jesus, featuring a naked man wearing a Batman medallion and mask being tied to a giant cross by Djerassi and another man.

For the sake of posterity, and art, the event was photographed and can be viewed on the web (BatmanCrucifixion).  (Read more: National File, 12/07/2019)  (Archive)

A sample address with the “H” as it appears in an email sent by Clinton. (Credit: public domain)

A September 2016 FBI report will indicate that “some Clinton aides and senior-level State [Department] employees were aware Clinton used a personal email address for State business during her tenure [as secretary of state]. Clinton told the FBI it was common knowledge at State that she had a private email address because it was displayed to anyone with whom she exchanged emails. However, some State employees interviewed by the FBI explained that emails from Clinton only contained the letter ‘H’ in the sender field and did not display her email address.”

The report also notes, “The majority of the State employees interviewed by the FBI who were in email contact with Clinton indicated they had no knowledge of the private server in her Chappaqua residence.”

Even Clinton’s closest aides like her chief of staff Cheryl Mills and deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin will claim they didn’t know, though there is evidence that suggests otherwise (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

While Clinton is secretary of state, she has an office on the seventh floor of State Department headquarters, in an area often referred to as “Mahogany Row.” Her office and the surrounding area is considered a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). Mobile devices such as BlackBerrys are not allowed in SCIF rooms, because they can be taken over by hackers and used to record audio and video.

But according to a September 2016 FBI report, “Interviews of three former DS [Diplomatic Security] agents revealed Clinton stored her personal BlackBerry in a desk drawer in a [Diplomatic Security] post which was located within the SCIF on Mahogany Row. State personnel were not authorized to bring their mobile devices into [the post], as it was located within the SCIF.”

A view from the 8th floor balcony at the State Department. (Credit: Thomas V. Dembski)

However, according to Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin, Clinton would leave the SCIF to use her BlackBerry, often visiting the eighth floor balcony to do so. Former Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell will later tell the FBI that he never received any complaints about Clinton using her BlackBerry inside the SCIF.

In contrast to the above evidence, in her July 2016 FBI interview, Clinton will claim that after her first month as secretary of state, she never brought her BlackBerry into the SCIF area at all, because she had been clearly told not to do that. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Clinton presents a letter of congratulations and signed photo to Chief Culinary Specialist Oscar Flores during his retirement ceremony aboard the USS Makin Island on April 1, 2010. (Credit: Chief Mass Communication Specialist John Lill / US Navy)

A September 2016 FBI report will mention that the FBI determined “hundreds of emails” were sent by Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin and other State Department staffers to a member of Bill Clinton’s staff so he could print them out for Clinton. His name will be redacted, but he is almost certainly Oscar Flores, because the report will mention that he is a member of the US Navy Reserves, which Flores is at the time.

Some of these emails will later be determined to contain information classified at the “confidential” level, including six email chains forwarded by Abedin and one email chain forwarded by Clinton.

But the FBI will determine that Flores received a security clearance at the “secret” level on October 25, 2007 from the Defense Department. Furthermore, although Flores retires from the US Navy Reserves in September 2010, there is no indication his security clearance is deactivated at that time. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Clinton boards the State Department jet while using her BlackBerry, date and location are unknown. (Credit: Andrew Harnik / The Associated Press)

This is according to a September 2016 FBI report. The report indicates that Clinton and her immediate staff were repeatedly “notified of foreign travel risks and were warned that digital threats began immediately upon landing in a foreign country, since connection of a mobile device to a local network provides opportunities for foreign adversaries to intercept voice and email transmissions.”

Additionally, the State Department has a Mobile Communications Team responsible for establishing secure mobile voice and data communications for Clinton and her team wherever they travel. But even so, Clinton and her staff frequently use their private and unsecure mobile devices and private email accounts while overseas.

The number of Clinton emails sent or received outside the US will be redacted in the FBI report. Although it will mention that “hundreds” were classified at the “confidential” level, additional details are redacted. Nearly all mentions of “top secret” emails are redacted in the report, so it’s impossible to know if any of those are sent while Clinton is overseas.

The report will mention that some emails between Clinton and President Obama are sent while Clinton is overseas. However, the exact number will be redacted. None of these overseas emails between them will be deemed to contain classified information. According to the report, “Clinton told the FBI that she received no particular guidance as to how she should use President Obama’s email address…”

The details of the FBI’s report on Clinton’s July 2016 FBI interview will indicate that Clinton emailed Obama on July 1, 2012 from Russia. However, it is not clear if she sent the email from on the ground or on a plane. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

In March 2015, after it becomes public knowledge that Clinton exclusively used a private email account for all her email usage, she will claim she did this for “convenience,” so she wouldn’t have to carry two personal devices at once.

During a trip to the Middle East, Clinton is seen using two Blackberrys while being filmed for a National Geographic documentary called “Inside the State Department” on June 15, 2010. (Credit: National Geographic)

However, in 2016, Justin Cooper, an aide to Bill Clinton who helps manage the Clinton private server, will claim otherwise. In an FBI interview, “Cooper stated that he was aware of Clinton using a second mobile phone number. Cooper indicated Clinton usually carried a flip phone along with her BlackBerry because it was more comfortable for communication and Clinton was able to use her BlackBerry while talking on the flip phone.”

However, in Clinton’s 2016 FBI interview, “she did not recall using a flip phone during her tenure [as secretary of state], only during her service in the Senate.” In their FBI interviews, Clinton’s aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills “advised they were unaware of Clinton ever using a cellular phone other than the BlackBerry.”

According to FBI investigators, Clinton has “two known phone numbers… which potentially were used to send emails using Clinton’s clintonemail.com email addresses.” One is associated with her BlackBerry usage. Toll records associated with the other phone number “indicate the number was consistently used for phone calls in 2009 and then used sporadically through the duration of Clinton’s tenure and the years following. Records also showed that no BlackBerry devices were associated with this phone number.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

In March 2015, after it becomes public knowledge that Clinton exclusively used a private email account for all her email usage, she will claim she did this for “convenience,” so she wouldn’t have to carry two personal devices at once.

A 2009 Blackberry Bold 9700 (left) and a 2013 Blackberry 9720. (Credit: public domain)

However, the FBI will later determine that Clinton actually used in succession 11 email-capable BlackBerrys while secretary of state. She uses two more BlackBerrys with the same phone number after her tenure is over. The FBI will not be able to obtain any of the BlackBerrys to examine them.

The FBI will later identify five iPad devices associated with Clinton which might have been used by Clinton to send emails. The FBI will later obtain three of the iPads. They will only examine two, because one was a gift that Clinton gave away as soon as she purchased it.

Clinton aide Monica Hanley often buys replacement BlackBerrys for Clinton from AT&T stores. Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who helps run Clinton’s private server, usually sets up the new devices and then syncs them to the server so she can access her email inbox. According to an FBI interview with Clinton aide Huma Abedin, “it was not uncommon for Clinton to use a new BlackBerry for a few days and then immediately switch it out for an older version with which she was more familiar.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

The FBI will later determine that Clinton uses 11 BlackBerrys while secretary of state and two more using the same phone number after she leaves office. In a 2016 FBI interview, “Clinton stated that when her BlackBerry device malfunctioned, her aides would assist her in obtaining a new BlackBerry, and, after moving to a new device, her old SIM cards were disposed of by her aides.”

Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who helps manage Clinton’s private server, will later tell the FBI that he “did recall two instances where he destroyed Clinton’s old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer.”

However, according to Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Monica Hanley, “the whereabouts of Clinton’s devices would frequently become unknown once she transitioned to a new device.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Hillary’s signature on the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). (Credit: public domain)

The non-disclosure agreement (NDA) concerns “sensitive compartmented information” (SCI), which is a type of “top secret” classification. In signing the agreement, Clinton acknowledges any “breach” could result in “termination of my access to SCI and removal from a position of special confidence and trust requiring such access as well as the termination of my employment or any other relationships with any department or agency that provides me with access to SCI.” (US Department of State, 11/5/2015)

This is one of two NDAs Clinton signs on this day.

It will later be revealed that out of the over 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department in December 2014, three of them were deemed “top secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information.”

Here is Hillary Clinton’s complete State Department schedule as Secretary of State 2009-2011.

(CNBC, 8/30/2016)  (Archive)

Clinton emails former Secretary of State Colin Powell two days after she is sworn in as secretary of state, and asks about his use of a BlackBerry while he was secretary of state from January 2001 to January 2005. A full copy of the email will be released on September 7, 2016.

Clinton writes: “I hope to catch up soon [with] you, but I have one pressing question which only you can answer! What were the restrictions on your use of your BlackBerry? Did you use it in your personal office? I’ve been told that the DSS [Diplomatic Security] personnel knew you had one and used it but no one fesses up to knowing how you used it! President Obama has struck a blow for Berry addicts like us. I just have to figure out how to bring along the State Dept. Any and all advice is welcome.”

Powell replies to Clinton, “I didn’t have a BlackBerry. What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient.)  So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels.”

Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton (Credit: Jonathan Ernst / Getty Images)

Powell also warns Clinton,  “there is a real danger. If it is  public that you have a BlackBerry and it is  government and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may beome an official record and subject to the law.” (US Senate, 9/7/2016)

Powell further writes, “Reading about the President’s BB [BlackBerry] rules this morning, it sounds like it won’t be as useful as it used to be.” Powell is referring to a New York Times article published the day before, regarding Obama winning the fight to use a BlackBerry during his presidency.  (New York Times, 01/22/09)

Powell further advises Clinton, “Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”

Clinton emails back the same day,  “[I] want to thank you for all the advice about Berries, security, and life on the seventh floor [of State Department headquarters]! I hope we’ll have a chance to visit in person sometime soon.” (US Senate, 9/7/2016)

In a 2016 FBI interview, “Clinton [will indicate] to the FBI that she understood Powell’s comments to mean any work-related communications would be government records, and she stated Powell’s comments did not factor into her decision to use a personal email account.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Clinton’s decision to use a private email account on a private server had already been made before this email exchange.

The first Apple iPad (Credit: public domain)

Around February 2009, the NSA refuses to make a BlackBerry for Clinton that’s secure enough to use in SCIF rooms, citing security concerns. (Highly classified materials can only be read in SCIF rooms, and Clinton’s office in State Department headquarters is a SCIF room.)

According to a September 2016 FBI report, at roughly the same time, Clinton’s executive staff also ask about the possibility of Clinton using an iPad to read her emails in her office. But “this request was also denied due to restrictions associated with the Secretary’s office being in a SCIF.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

However, the FBI will fail to mention that the iPad won’t actually be announced by Apple until January 2010, and won’t be released until a couple of months after that, making the above claim impossible. (Apple.com, 1/27/2010)

Clinton will buy an iPad and begin using it a couple of months after it comes out, in July 2010.

In FBI Vault Hillary R. Clinton Part 36 of 36 release, the following email was found confirming her use of an iPad after she was officially told she could not use one.

Clinton talks on a flip phone in Washington, DC on November 14, 2006. (Credit: Karen Bleir / Agence France Presse / Getty Images)

An email sent to or received by Clinton on this day has the subject heading: “Re: New cell.” It won’t be found in the over 30,000 Clinton emails given to the State Department in December 2014. Thus, the details are known because she will be asked about it in her July 2016 FBI interview.

According to a later FBI report, “Clinton stated she was familiar with the phone number ending in [redacted] referenced in the email. She believed the number was that of her BlackBerry because she did not recall using a flip phone during her time at State, only while in the Senate.”

However, in the FBI Clinton email investigation final report, evidence will be mentioned that Clinton actually had two phone numbers. One was for her BlackBerry, which she used just for emails, and one for her flip phone, which she used for phone calls. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov receives a “reset” button from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Geneva Switzerland, March, 2009. (Credit: CNN)

“As Hillary Clinton was beginning her job as President Obama’s chief diplomat, federal agents observed as multiple arms of Vladimir Putin’s machine unleashed an influence campaign designed to win access to the new secretary of State, her husband Bill Clinton and members of their inner circle, according to interviews and once-sealed FBI records.

Some of the activities FBI agents gathered evidence about in 2009 and 2010 were covert and illegal.

A female Russian spy posing as an American accountant, for instance, used a false identity to burrow her way into the employ of a major Democratic donor in hopes of gaining intelligence on Hillary Clinton’s department, records show. The spy was arrested and deported as she moved closer to getting inside State, agents said.

Other activities were perfectly legal and sitting in plain view, such as when a subsidiary of Russia’s state-controlled nuclear energy company hired a Washington firm to lobby the Obama administration. At the time it was hired, the firm was providing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in pro bono support to Bill Clinton’s global charitable initiative, and it legally helped the Russian company secure federal decisions that led to billions in new U.S. commercial nuclear business, records show.

Agents were surprised by the timing and size of a $500,000 check that a Kremlin-linked bank provided Bill Clinton with for a single speech in the summer of 2010. The payday came just weeks after Hillary Clinton helped arrange for American executives to travel to Moscow to support Putin’s efforts to build his own country’s version of Silicon Valley, agents said.

There is no evidence in any of the public records that the FBI believed that the Clintons or anyone close to them did anything illegal. But there’s definitive evidence the Russians were seeking their influence with a specific eye on the State Department.

“There is not one shred of doubt from the evidence that we had that the Russians had set their sights on Hillary Clinton’s circle, because she was the quarterback of the Obama-Russian reset strategy and the assumed successor to Obama as president,” said a source familiar with the FBI’s evidence at the time, speaking only on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.” (Read more: The Hill, 10/22/2017)

James Comey states in a July 5, 2017 press conference, his agency will recommend the US Department of Justice (DoJ) not to press official charges against Hillary Clinton. (Credit: MSNBC)

“A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.

The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant “courtesy copy” for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found that virtually all of Clinton’s emails were sent to a “foreign entity,” Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, said at a July 12 House Committee on the Judiciary hearing. He did not reveal the entity’s identity, but said it was unrelated to Russia.

Two officials with the ICIG, investigator Frank Rucker and attorney Janette McMillan, met repeatedly with FBI officials to warn them of the Chinese intrusion, according to a former intelligence officer with expertise in cybersecurity issues, who was briefed on the matter. He spoke anonymously, as he was not authorized to publicly address the Chinese’s role with Clinton’s server.

Among those FBI officials was Peter Strzok, who was then the bureau’s top counterintelligence official. Strzok was fired this month following the discovery he sent anti-Trump texts to his mistress and co-worker, Lisa Page. Strzok didn’t act on the information the ICIG provided him, according to Gohmert.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 8/27/2018)

The Seagate Expansion External Hard Drive (Credit: Seagate)

When Clinton’s first server is upgraded with a new server in March 2009, a Seagate external hard drive is attached to the server to store back-up copies of all of its data.

Bryan Pagliano, who manages the server at the time, will later tell the FBI that daily changes are backed up onto the hard drive every day, and a complete back-up is made once a week. As space on the hard drive runs out, backups are deleted on a “first in, first out” basis.

This continues until June 2011. That month, Pagliano travels from Washington, DC, where he works in the State Department, and goes to where the server is, in Chappaqua, New York. Pagliano replaces the Seagate external hard drive with a Cisco Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, also to store backups of the server.

The Cisco FS 5500 and 5700 Series Integrated NAS. (Credit: Cisco)

It is unclear what becomes of either back-up device or the data they contained. The FBI’s September 2016 final report on the Clinton email investigation will only mention: “The FBI was unable to forensically determine how frequently the NAS captured backups of the Pagliano Server.” But the report will also complain about the “FBI’s inability to recover all server equipment,” and there will be no mention of any data recovered from either back-up device. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Also in September 2016, Justin Cooper, who helped Pagliano manage the server, will be asked about these hard drives at a Congressional hearing. He will say he only heard about them from reading the FBI final report. (He claims he handled customer service while Pagliano handled the technical aspects.)

He will also be asked if FBI agents ever came to the Clinton’s Chappaqua house to seize any equipment. Cooper worked as an aide to Bill Clinton in the house, but he will say he is unaware of the FBI ever coming to the house. (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

Justin Cooper, an aide to former President Bill Clinton, has been working with Bryan Pagliano, who worked as a computer technician on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, to build a new private server located in the Clintons’ Chappaqua, New York, house. Some time in March 2009, Pagliano and Cooper met at the Chappaqua house to physically install the server and related equipment in a server rack in the basement.

Once the new server is up and running, Pagliano migrates the email data from the old server to the new one. Pagliano will later be interviewed by the FBI, and he will claim that after the migration, no email content should have remained on the old server. He will tell the FBI that he only transferred clintonemail.com email accounts for Clinton aide Huma Abedin and others (whose names will later be redacted), and he was unaware of and did not transfer an email account for Hillary Clinton.

However, Clinton emails using a clintonemail.com domain address start getting sent in January 2009, showing she must had had an account on the old server since that time. Cooper will also later be interviewed by the FBI, and he will say he believed Clinton had a clintonemail.com email account on the old server and Abedin did not. The FBI will be unable to obtain the old server to analyze it, so the dispute has not been fully resolved.

The Dell Power Edge 2900 (Credit: public domain)

This new server will be used for the rest of Clinton’s term as secretary of state, then will be replaced in 2013. Later in March 2009, the old server is repurposed to serve as a personal computer for household staff at Clinton’s Chappaqua house. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

The Washington Post will later report, “The server was nothing remarkable, the kind of system often used by small businesses, according to people familiar with its configuration at the end of her tenure. It consisted of two off-the-shelf server computers. Both were equipped with antivirus software. They were linked by cable to a local Internet service provider. A firewall was used as protection against hackers.” (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016)

According to the FBI, the new server initially consists of the following equipment: “a Dell PowerEdge 2900 server miming Microsoft Exchange for email hosting and management, a Dell PowerEdge 1950 server miming BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for the management of BlackBerry devices, a Seagate external hard drive to store backups of the Dell PowerEdge 2900 server, a Dell switch, a Cisco firewall, and a power supply.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

In 2015, Hillary Clinton will say of her server, “It was sitting there in the basement. It was not any trouble at all.” (The Wall Street Journal, 9/27/2015)

Bryan Pagliano (left), Justin Cooper (right) (Credit: public domain)

In March 2009, Clinton’s private email server is replaced by a larger one built by her computer technician Pagliano. Cooper had been the only person with administrative access for the previous server, but now both him and Pagliano have administrative accounts on the new one.

Pagliano handles all software upgrades and general maintenance. He works at the State Department in Washington, DC, and there is only evidence of him going to Chappaqua, New York, to directy work on the server three times: in March 2009, to install the server; in June 2011, to upgrade the equipment; and in January 2012, to fix a hardware issue.

By contrast, in a later FBI interview, Cooper will describe his role as “the customer service face.” He can add users or reset passwords on the email server. He also works at the Chappaqua house as an aide to former President Bill Clinton, so it is much easier for him to physically interact with the server there.

Cooper and Pagliano both handle the selection and purchase of server-related items.

In a later FBI interview, Hillary Clinton will state “she had no knowledge of the hardware, software, or security protocols used to construct and operate the servers. When she experienced technical issues with her email account she contacted Cooper for assistance in resolving those issues.”

The roles of Cooper and Pagliano will be phased out in mid-2013, with the Platte River Networks company winning a contact to manage Clinton’s server on May 31, 2013.

When Clinton’s computer technician Bryan Pagliano is interviewed by the FBI in December 2015, he will recall a conversation with a person whose name is redacted that takes place at the beginning of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. According to the FBI, this person “advised he would not be surprised if classified information was being transmitted to Clinton’s personal server.”

Pagliano joins the State Department in May 2009, and he also is the main person to manage problems with the server. But there is no mention of him taking any action about this warning or passing it on to anyone else. The unnamed person also gives Pagliano advice on how to improve the server security that goes unheeded as well. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

An email entitled “Message from the Secretary on FOIA” goes out in Clinton’s name to the entire State Department. In it, she encourages full cooperation responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. “As a Department, we should respond to requests in a timely manner, resolve doubts in favor of openness, and not withhold information based on speculative or abstract fears. Preserving the record of our deliberations, decisions, and actions will be at the foundation of our efforts to promote openness.” (US Department of State, 6/18/2015)

Ironically, Clinton will not turn over any work-related emails (which are official records) when she leaves the department in February 2013, and FOIA requests for any of her emails will be ignored until the controversy over her use a private server becomes front-page news in March 2015.

Chris Cillizza (Credit: Institute of Politics and Public Service)

Clinton writes in an email: “Dear Lauren [Jiloty] and Huma [Abedin], I have just realized I have no idea how my papers are treated at State. Who manages both my personal and official files? […] Are there personal files as well as official ones set up? […] I think we need to get on this asap to be sure we know and design the system we want.”

Abedin replies, “We’ve discussed this. I can explain to you when I see [you] today.” (US Department of State, 5/31/2016)

In June 2016, Chris Cillizza will write in the Washington Post: “[T]his email to Abedin—which came at the start of her four-year term in office—suggests a bit more active agency than Clinton has previously let on. ‘I think we need to get on this asap to be sure we know and design the system we want,’ doesn’t strike me as Clinton simply wanting convenience and following the instructions of her IT people on how to make that happen. It reads to me as though Clinton is both far more aware of the email setup and far more engaged in how it should look than she generally lets on publicly.” (The Washington Post, 6/28/2016)

In her July 2016 FBI interview, Clinton will be asked about this email. According to the FBI, “Clinton stated this email pertained to how her ‘files’ were going to be treated at [the] State [Department]. Clinton relayed while in the Senate, she maintained a personal and official paper file. This process was not implemented through Senate procedure or guidance but through Clinton’s own personal process. Clinton was not aware how other State staff maintained their records and was unaware of State’s State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset (SMART).” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

A State Department official (whose name is later redacted) sends an email to Clinton. The unnamed official had been sponsored by Clinton for a security position but had failed the security tests, and so he directly appeals to her for assistance.

Clinton forwards the email to her chief of staff Cheryl Mills and her deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin and asks them, “Could you follow up on this?”

It is unknown what becomes of the official’s request. However, Mills then complains in an email just to Abedin, “Personally, I think this is outrageous that staff go straight to her on this stuff.”

Abedin replies to Mills, “This is unbelievable. And she also should not be giving her email to everyone [because] she will get stuff like this.”

Mills then responds back, “She’s not giving her email to new people. People who emailed her old Senate address are still being forwarded to her new address. Most of her Senate staff had access to that address. Justin [Cooper] can fix it but I need her berry [BlackBerry] and she takes that thing to every toilet, to the shower, so [it’s] hard to get my hands on that thing…” (US Department of State, 6/9/2016)

Clinton arrives for the start of the first plenary session of the Fifth Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago on April 18, 2009. (Credit: Kevin Coombs / Reuters)

Clinton’s deputy secretary of state Huma Abedin is attending a conference in the country of Trinidad and Tobago. State Department aide Melissa J. Lan, who is also at the conference, emails her to borrow Clinton’s day book binder, a presumably sensitive document containing Clinton’s daily schedule.

Abedin replies: “Yes. It’s on the bed in my room. U can take it. My door is open. I’m in the lobby.”
(US Department of State, 6/30/2016)

Douglas Band sends an email with the subject heading “A favor” to Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin. At the time, Band is both working for the Clinton Foundation and serving as a personal aide to former President Bill Clinton. Band writes that it was “important to take care of” – but the name of the person and several following lines of text are later redacted.

The April 22, 2009 email from Doug Band to Huma Abedin and her response. (Credit: public domain)

Abedin responds, “We have all had him on our radar. Personnel has been sending him options.” The person may somehow be related to Clinton Foundation work being done in Haiti, because Band’s email includes a forward of an email from a person whose name is redacted, but who had just returned from a trip to Haiti involving charity work.

Upon becoming secretary of state earlier in 2009, Clinton promised to avoid any possible conflict of interest between State Department work and Clinton Foundation work. (CBS News, 8/10/2016) (US Department of State, 6/30/2016)

Gilbert Chagoury, Chairman of The Chagoury Group (left), Bill Clinton (center) and Ronald Chagoury, Chief Executive Officer (right) attend the Eko Atlantic City Dedication Ceremony in Lagos, Nigeria on February 21st, 2012. (Credit: public domain)

Douglas Band sends an email to Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin. At the time, Band is both working for the Clinton Foundation and serving as a personal aide to former President Bill Clinton. Band asks for the State Department’s “substance person” in Lebanon to contact Gilbert Chagoury. “As you know, he’s key guy there and to us and is loved in Lebanon. Very imp [important].”

Abedin responds that the “substance person” Is “Jeff Feltman,” a former US ambassador to Lebanon. “I’m sure he knows him. I’ll talk to Jeff.”

Fifteen minutes later, Band sends another email to Abedin, writing, “Better if you call him. Now preferable. This is very important.” After some redacted text, he adds, “He’s awake I’m sure.”
(US Department of State, 6/30/2016)

CBS News will late call Chagoury “a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire philanthropist who was one of the Clinton Foundation’s top donors.” He gave between $1 and $5 million to the foundation. In addition, he pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. He was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for money laundering,  but agreed to a plea deal and repaid $66 million.

Upon becoming secretary of state earlier in 2009, Clinton promised to avoid any possible conflict of interest between State Department work and Clinton Foundation work. (Judicial Watch, 8/12/2016) (CBS News, 8/10/2016)

In August 2016, a spokesperson for Chagoury will claim that Chagoury had been seeking to contact someone in the State Department to offer his perspective on the coming elections in Lebanon, and had not been seeking official action by the State Department. (Politico, 8/11/2016)

Jeffrey Farrow (Credit: Mauricio Pascual)

Palau is a single island with a population of only 20,000. The lobbyist, Jeffrey Farrow, had worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. But it’s not known how he got her new email address, which she started using after becoming secretary of state in January 2009.

Farrow begins emailing Clinton in June 2009, at a time when the US is deciding how much financial aid to give Palau, and while Palau becomes the first country to accept prisoners from the US military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba. Farrow talks about how Palau is going to take 17 Guantanamo prisoners and then suggests that US aid to the country is “far too low.” Clinton forwards the emails to her aide Jake Sullivan and asks him to “do some recon outreach and advise what, if anything, we should do.”

In an October 30, 2009 email, Farrow again asks for more US aid to Palau. Clinton forwards that email to Sullivan and other aides with the note, “As I have said repeatedly, I do not want to see Palau shortchanged.” In September 2010, the US announces a large multi-year aid package to Palau worth over $250 million. (Politico, 7/1/2015)

In a September 2010 email, Farrow praises Clinton and Sullivan for helping to get the aid package done, and jokingly promises Clinton a medal and a free vacation in Palau. (US Department of State, 9/30/2015) Farrow also forwards a thank you letter from Palau President Johnson Toribiong in April 2011, belying Clinton’s claim that she only ever had email contact with one foreign official, from Britain.  (US Department of State, 10/30/2015) (US Department of State, 10/30/2015)

Doug Band (Credit: Vanity Fair)

Clinton confidant and private citizen Sid Blumenthal sends Clinton an email with the subject heading, “My role, Germany, Iran, etc.” He writes: “I spoke with Doug Band yesterday, discussed things with him, and we will go from there. It would be helpful if you and I speak soon to define parameters of what projects I should pursue. We should discuss your speech to the Council, among other things.”

Band is a close personal aide to Hillary’s husband Bill Clinton, and also works at the Clinton Foundation. Blumenthal then writes about other matters relating to Germany and Iran. Clinton speaks at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) two weeks later. (US Department of State, 12/31/2015) (US Department of State, 6/30/2015)

In May 2015, Clinton will downplay the link between herself and Blumenthal when she was secretary of state, saying, “He sent me unsolicited emails which I passed on in some instances.” Blumenthal is paid a $120,000 yearly salary by the Clinton Foundation despite not doing any charity work there, but Clinton will deny that is compensation for his emailed intelligence reports. (Real Clear Politics, 5/20/2015)

(Credit: Wikileaks)

“Emails from 2009 have surfaced that reveal Hillary Clinton knew about — and possibly covered up — the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party’s Wuhan Institute of Virology while she was in office as President Obama’s secretary of state.

In a leaked State Department cable obtained from Wikileaks, Clinton warned that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could lead to “biological weapons proliferation concern.”

The email was sent in June of 2009 from the State Department to all embassies in member nations.

It is dated just before the Australia Group plenary session in Paris, which took place from September 21st to September 25th, 2009.

According to Human Events, “The Australia Group is an international export control forum organized to prevent the spread of technologies and research that could be used in chemical and biological weapons.

“All Five Eyes nations are members of the group, including the EU, India, Japan, and South Korea.

“China is not a member of the group.”

Clinton’s cable states: “We believe it is important to focus on emerging chemical and biological technologies, trends in the trade of CBW-related goods and threats.”

In reference to France, Clinton writes: “The U.S. believes participants would benefit from hearing about your experiences assisting China in setting up a Biosafety Level-4 (BSL-4) laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the export control and intangible technology transfer perspectives.

“We are particularly interested to know how China plans to vet incoming foreign researchers from countries of biological weapons proliferation concern.”

Broadly discussing China’s biological weapons program, Clinton’s cable noted:

“The U.S. believes AG members would be interested in any information you can share related to China and North Korea, specifically information related to:

• China’s Institutes of Biological Products (locations in Beijing and Wuhan), to include overhead imagery analysis, if possible. 
• Your perceptions of the CBW proliferation activities by Chinese entities. 
• Your perceptions of Chinese government efforts to enforce its export control rules.” 

Of course, Clinton kept these concerns to herself once the coronavirus pandemic hit, even referring to allegations that it leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the very lab she expressed concerns about — as racist.” (Read more: Slay News, 12/20/2021)  (Archive)

Bill Clinton meets with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, 2010. (Credit: Mikhael Metzel/The Associated Press)

“Fifteen months before the 13 members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, approved the sale of the Canadian company Uranium One to Russia’s nuclear arm giant Rosatom, the FBI began investigating persons who were connected to the Russian state corporation. The FBI said in court documents and in interviews conducted by Circa that by 2010 they had gathered enough evidence to prove that Rosatom-connected officials were engaged in a global bribery scheme that included kickbacks and money laundering. FBI officials said the investigation could have prevented the sale of Uranium One, which controlled 20 percent of U.S. uranium supply under U.S. law.

The deal which required approval by CFIUS, an inter-agency committee that reviews transactions that leads to a change of control of a U.S. business to a foreign person or entity that may have an impact on the national security of the United States. At the time of the Uranium One deal the panel was chaired by then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and included then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-Attorney General Eric Holder.

By the time CFIUS approved the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom the FBI’s investigation had already gathered substantial evidence of bribery and kickbacks against a Russian national, Vadim Mikerin, who was then a top official with Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary, according to court documents. The FBI said while at Tenex, which was located in Maryland, Mikerin was involved in multiple bribery and kickback schemes.

(…) The Justice Department didn’t move forward an indictment with prosecution of bribery by people tied to Rosatom, through subsidies and other entities, until 2014 after CFIUS approved the sale of Uranium One, leaving the American public without knowledge of the Russian company’s allegedly illegal actives as it went to procure one-fifth of U.S. uranium supply.

(…) “A Russian state-owned enterprise responsible for selling Russian nuclear materials, contracted with a U.S. public relations expert in 2009 to provide public relations and marketing consulting services to TENEX in the United States,” states a court warrant. “The contractor approached the FBI and received authorization to participate in the scheme.”

Victoria Toensing, a lawyer for the FBI informant, said her client “is not only afraid of the Russian people, but he is afraid of the US government because of the threats the Obama administration made against him.”

“My client was providing information for a couple years before this really got voted on by CFIUS, and here’s the rub. High-ranking law enforcement officials in the Obama Administration knew that there was corruption in this company and that information about the corruption in this Russian entity never made it to CFIUS, evidently, because CFIUS authorized the purchase in 2010.” -Victoria Toensing, lawyer (Video interview at source link)

(…) One of the points of contention for people investigating Clinton’s connections with Russia and the Uranium One deal was a $500,000 payment given to Bill Clinton by the Russian bank Renaissance Capital for a speech he gave in Moscow in June 2010. Analysts at Renaissance Capital, who paid the Bill Clinton for the speech, spoke highly of Uranium One’s stock saying in July 2010 research report that it was “the best play” in the uranium markets. The speech by Bill Clinton and the 2010 research report by Renaissance Capital happened while CFIUS, of which Hillary Clinton was a sitting member, was looking at the Uranium One sale to Rosatom. A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton did not return calls seeking comment and no evidence has been presented the speech payment made to Bill Clinton had any connection to the passage of the deal. Officials at Renaissance Capital could not be reached immediately for comment.At the time of the investigation did any of the U.S. law enforcement, intelligence or other agencies involved in the case inform the CFIUS board of the ongoing investigation? If not, why not? If they were informed, why did they make the decision they did to approve the Uranium One transaction? Did the president, himself, know?,” a U.S. official who worked counterintelligence cases related to Russia told Circa.

During the time of the FBI’s investigation which began in 2009, Tenex was able to expand its American foothold with $6 billion in new utility contracts, according to documents and news reports obtained by Circa.

The case being built against Mikerin in 2010 was under the supervision of Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, then an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general. According to court documents, the case was also handled by then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who is currently the deputy FBI director under Trump. The Department of Justice and the FBI would not comment on the bribery investigation of Mikerin.” (Read more: Circa, 10/17/2017)

Clinton attends a meeting with New York Stock Exchange president Duncan Niederauer and various business leaders on September 21, 2009. (Credit: public domain)

In June 2016, the Associated Press will finally gain access to some planning schedules from when Clinton was secretary of state. A comparison of these planning schedules with Clinton’s official calendar from that time will show that at least 60 meetings with Clinton’s donors and other outside interests were omitted. The Associated Press will give one specific example of a meeting on this day that is omitted from the calendar, even though the names of attendees to other meetings on the same day are not. Clinton meets with 13 major business leaders for a private breakfast discussion at the New York Stock Exchange:

• David M. Cote, CEO of Honeywell International Inc.;
• Fabrizio Freda, CEO of the Estee Companies Inc.;
• Lewis Frankfort, chair of Coach Inc.;
• Robert Kelly, CEO of the New York Bank of Mellon;
• Ellen Kullman, CEO of DuPont;
• Harold McGraw III, chair of McGraw Hill Companies;
• Duncan Niederauer, CEO of  the New York Stock Exchange;
• Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo;
• Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks Corp;
• Steven Schwarzman, chair of the Blackstone Group;
• James Taiclet, chair of the American Tower Corp.;
• James Tisch, president of Loews Corp.; and
• John D. Wren, CEO of Omnicom Group.

All the companies represented except Coach Inc. lobby the US government in 2009. Four companies—Blackstone, Honeywell, Omnicom, and DuPont—lobby the State Department that year. All the companies except for American Tower and New York Bank of Mellon donate to the Clinton Foundation, and two attendees—Schwarzman and Frankfort—personally donate to the foundation. Four of the companies—PepsiCo, the Blackstone Group, DuPont, and Honeywell International Inc.—also donate to what the Associated Press calls “Clinton’s pet diplomatic project of that period,” the US pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. (The Associated Press, 6/24/2016)

“As COVID Origin Secrets Near Declassification, Wuhan Lab’s Ties to China Military Burst into Focus”

LD: Story linked below is MAJOR review of WEB of participants in origin of COVID.
STRONGLY RECOMMEND READING.
STICK w/me HERE https://t.co/abAzsxQW7G via @JustTheNews

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(3) LD: When did the USAID funded research on viral gain of function begin? We read, “Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) reported (https://t.co/B9z6dr9Ya3) that his team uncovered a second pot of money that EcoHealth Alliance routed to the Wuhan lab from USAID. “Between October 2009

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(5) https://t.co/6mta0uuaVC
“As the entire development community was trying to gauge the impact of the ascension of Rajiv Shah to the top position at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the nominee himself gave the most detailed look yet into his intellectual

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(7) State and the NSC when it came to matters related to the structure of USAID and its relationship with the State Department.”
“Shah will report to directly to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, . . “

LD: OH WOW! So Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State had DIRECT control

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(9) with pandemic potential that can move between animals and people.” LD: Hey now. A 2009 launch of a program to detect viruses for which Tony Fauci et al had already begun research on w/funding provided by USAID itself. See how this works? Did somebody say it smells like

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(11) (formerly Global Viral Forecasting Inc.), Smithsonian Institution, and Wildlife Conservation Society with support from Columbia and Harvard universities.” There is that EcoHealth Alliance again. Involved right from the get go. Metabiota? What do we learn about this outfit?

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(13) LD: Looks like Metabiota was involved in a LOT more than just implementing the PREDICT program for USAID but the connections to Burisma and Ukraine are for another thread.
What were the universities involved in supporting PREDICT? Oh yes, Columbia and Harvard. When did we

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(15) Health; The Harvard AIDS Institute; The Harvard Medical School . . ” Cha-ching
LD: Back to USAID 2009. Who ran it while reporting directly to Hillary Clinton? An individual named Rajiv Shah. Where was he prior to that role? From his LinkedIn profile: https://t.co/g5LsUZVOeQ

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(17) Back to John Solomon’s fabulous story and a concluding comment: ” . . . an essential question has already arisen from the documents reviewed by Just the News: How could multiple federal agencies dispense taxpayer monies to Chinese institutions linked to research and military

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(19) without political overseers’ blessing.”
Administrative State? National Security risk? Yes, folks, this is The center of The Swamp aka Deep State.
But where was the IG at State during this time? Oh, that’s right as the WSJ highlights: https://t.co/kbOnRiNaXG

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(21) to the efforts my partner and I undertook going back to late 2015. We shared EXTENSIVE DOCUMENTED EVIDENCE from August 2017 to mid-2019 (prior to our winning appeal to bring our case into the US Tax Court) that laid out much of this roadmap for federal agencies to pursue

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(23) I have never been more confident that meaningful justice will prevail in US Tax Court Docket 4865-19W: Doyle, Moynihan v IRS and that as Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers we will gain victory in that process and diabolical efforts like this will be fully exposed and

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

(24) the PUBLIC WILL WIN.

Please follow our efforts, share our account + monitor our case linked in our Pinned Tweet: https://t.co/35vXqFnsX9

— Clinton Foundation Whistleblowers (@CFWBers) March 17, 2023

Hunter Biden’s closest business partner made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015, including a sitdown with then-Vice President Joe Biden in the West Wing.

Visitor logs from the White House of former President Barack Obama reviewed by The Post cast further doubt over Joe Biden’s claims that he knew nothing of his son’s dealings.

Eric Schwerin (Credit: Twitter)

Eric Schwerin met with Vice President Biden on November 17, 2010 in the West Wing, when he was the president of the since-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners.

The logs also reveal that Schwerin met with various close aides of both Joe and Jill Biden at key moments in Hunter’s life when he was striking multi-million dollar deals in foreign countries, including China. Yet President Biden has long insisted he had no involvement in his son’s foreign affairs. “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” he said in 2019.

”Not everyone gets to meet the Vice President of the United States in the White House. The press should be asking why Hunter Biden’s business associates — like Eric Schwerin — had that privilege and were given access to the Obama White House,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin). “This is additional evidence that Joe Biden lied when he said he never discussed Hunter’s foreign business dealings. It’s well past time for the corporate media to demand the truth from Joe Biden. The corruption of Biden Inc. must be exposed.”

Of all Hunter Biden’s business associates, Schwerin had the most intimate access to the vice president’s personal finances.

His deep involvement in the personal and professional lives of both Bidens were first revealed in emails contained on a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair store in April 2019.

Hard drive emails show he was involved in Joe Biden’s personal taxes and discussed the vice president’s financial future with him.”

(…) The Schwerin White House visits included:

• Meeting with Joe Biden aide Evan Ryan (10/28/2009)
• Meeting with Jill Biden special assistant Meg Campbell (2/13/2010)
• Meeting with Joe Biden assistant Michele Smith (10/24/2010)
• Meeting with Joe Biden (11/17/2010)
• Meeting with Joe Biden assistant Kellen Suber (8/22/2011)
• Meeting with Jill Biden aide Betsy Massey (3/31/2012)
• Meeting with Joe Biden assistant Michele Smith (2/7/2012)
• Meeting with Joe Biden’s Director of Administration Faisal Amin (3/28/2013)
• Meeting with Joe Biden assistant Kathy Chung (5/20/2013)

(Read more: New York Post, 4/23/2022)  (Archive)

UPDATE:

Fox News discovers, according to visitor logs, that Eric Schwerin made 8 additional White House visits in 2016.

Fox News reports:

Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner Eric Schwerin visited the White House at least eight times in 2016, meeting with then-Vice President Biden’s chief of staff Steve Ricchetti, who currently serves as Biden’s White House counselor, and an assistant in Biden’s office who used to work at the investment firm Schwerin and Hunter managed.

Those eight additional visits, in addition to 19 previously known Schwerin visits, bring his total number of White House visits during the Obama-Biden administration to 27.

Schwerin, the president of since-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners, visited Ricchetti at least twice in 2016. The two visits occurred in room 272 on Feb. 29 and room 276 on Aug. 17 at the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB), according to the 2016 White House visitor logs.

Ricchetti has been a longtime adviser to President Biden and served as his chief of staff from 2013 to 2017. He now serves as Biden’s White House counselor.

Schwerin also met with Anne Marie Person, who served as a general assistant at Rosemont until 2014 before joining Biden’s office, at least three times between February and June 2016, a Fox News Digital review found. According to White House visitor logs, Schwerin met her in Biden’s “West Wi[ng]” office on Feb. 24, April 8, and June 9. It is unclear if Biden was present for the meetings. (Archive)

Interpol Graphic

“No presidential statement or White House press briefing was held on it. In fact, all that can be found about it on the official White House Web site is the Dec. 17 announcement and one-paragraph text of President Obama’s Executive Order 12425, with this innocuous headline: “Amending Executive Order 12425 Designating Interpol as a public international organization entitled to enjoy certain privileges, exemptions, and immunities.”In fact, this new directive from Obama may be the most destructive blow ever struck against American constitutional civil liberties. No wonder the White House said as little as possible about it.

There are multiple reasons why this Obama decision is so deeply disturbing. First, the Obama order reverses a 1983 Reagan administration decision in order to grant Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization, two key privileges. First, Obama has granted Interpol the ability to operate within the territorial limits of the United States without being subject to the same constitutional restraints that apply to all domestic law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. Second, Obama has exempted Interpol’s domestic facilities — including its office within the U.S. Department of Justice — from search and seizure by U.S. authorities and from disclosure of archived documents in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by U.S. citizens. Think very carefully about what you just read: Obama has given an international law enforcement organization that is accountable to no other national authority the ability to operate as it pleases within our own borders, and he has freed it from the most basic measure of official transparency and accountability, the FOIA.

The Examiner has asked for but not yet received from the White House press office an explanation of why the president signed this executive order and who among his advisers was involved in the process leading to his doing so. Unless the White House can provide credible reasons to think otherwise, it seems clear that Executive Order 12425’s consequences could be far-reaching and disastrous. To cite only the most obvious example, giving Interpol free rein to act within this country could subject U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence personnel to the prospect of being taken into custody and hauled before the International Criminal Court as “war criminals.”

As National Review Online’s Andy McCarthy put it, the White House must answer these questions: Why should we elevate an international police force above American law? Why would we immunize an international police force from the limitations that constrain the FBI and other American law-enforcement agencies? Why is it suddenly necessary to have, within the Justice Department, a repository for stashing government files that will be beyond the scrutiny of Congress, American law enforcement, the media, and the American people? (The Washington Examiner, 12/30/2009)  (Archive)

(…) “In the first year of his administration (December 29, 2009, to be exact), President Obama issued Executive Order 13526, entitled “Classified National Security Information.” It explains what information is deemed classified if its disclosure would cause “damage to the national security.” Beyond that, whether the classified information is categorized as “top secret,” “secret,” or “confidential” depends on how serious the damage would be.

With that as background, the order makes clear that there is one category of information that is automatically deemed classified: information from foreign governments. Section 1.1(d) of the executive order decrees: “The unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security.”

The reason for this is plain: It is not just the often sensitive nature of diplomatic communications; it is the fact that, in order to protect our national security, the United States must rely on intelligence from foreign governments; if our government does not keep that information strictly confidential, the foreign governments will be unwilling to share it – endangering American lives. As Secretary of State, Clinton not only knew this elementary rule; it was her duty to ensure that the rule was followed throughout her department.

After an artist prints out 62,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails as part of an art exhibition titled “HILLARY: The Hillary Clinton Emails” in Venice, Italy, the former Democratic presidential nominee shows up and spends an hour reading them. She even poses for a picture that she posted on Twitter and jokes that someone should “alert the House GOP.” (Credit: Reuters)

As has been clear from the beginning, and is now patent after the latest disclosure of a subset of 6,000 of the emails Clinton deigned to preserve, at least 125 of which reportedly contain classified information, the emails Clinton sent, received and stored via her private server system were rife with information from foreign governments. This information was born classified. It makes no difference that these emails were not stamped “top secret”; all national security officials with security clearances know that foreign government information is deemed classified and must be handled as such. Period.

Indeed, since it is the State Department that deals most directly with foreign governments, the Secretary of State has the highest obligation and interest when it comes to assuring them that the information they share with the U.S. government is being handled with appropriate care.” (Read more: National Review, 9/01/2015)

It will remain publicly unknown until the video is leaked to Fox News in October 2016.

A photo capture of Clinton as she appears in the 2010 cybersecurity video. (Credit: Fox News)

In the video, Clinton says that employees have a “special duty” to recognize the importance of cybersecurity. “The real key to cybersecurity rests with you. Complying with department computing policies and being alert to potential threats will help protect all of us.”

According to a later account by Fox News, “Clinton goes on in the video to underscore the important work the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security and IT department were doing to guard against cyber-attacks. She warns hackers try to ‘exploit’ vulnerabilities and penetrate department systems. She then urges staffers to log onto the internal cybersecurity awareness website or subscribe to their ‘cybersecurity awareness newsletter.’”

Representative Jason Chaffetz (R), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will later find the video ironic, given Clinton’s own security issues with her private email server. He will say, “Hillary Clinton needs only to look into the mirror to find the biggest cybersecurity risk.”

Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon will say, “This is not new. It has been widely reported that during Clinton’s tenure the State Department issued these kinds of warnings about possible cybersecurity to employees. These warnings were more than appropriate given that it was subsequently confirmed that State’s email was hacked.” (Fox News, 10/22/2016)

(Dept of State/FOIA release, 9/03/2019)

Cheryl Mills forwards an Agence France Presse article to Hillary Clinton on January 22, 2010, titled “Trafficking Fears as Haiti Children Go Missing.”

Clinton responds, “As predicted.”

One week later on January 29, 2010, Clinton friend, Laura Silsby,  is arrested in Haiti for suspected child-trafficking.

Clinton Emails/Wikileaks

Laura Silsby, left, leaves a courthouse in Port-au-Prince, Monday, May 17, 2010. (Credit: Esteban Felix/The Associated Press)

“In the first week of February, former President Bill Clinton accepted an expanded role as special envoy for Haiti, on behalf of the United Nations, to lead the coordination of international earthquake recovery and reconstruction efforts. One of Clinton’s first tasks in Haiti, however, was to put out the fire of a child abduction scandal involving American citizens.

On January 29, 2010, less than three weeks after the earthquake, Haitian authorities arrested ten U.S. Baptist missionaries for attempting to take 33 children by bus across the border into the Dominican Republic without proper documentation. A week later, the missionaries were charged with child kidnapping and criminal association. While the missionaries claimed good intentions and ignorance of Haitian laws, Haitian prosecutors argued that there had been intentional wrong doing. In the course of a month, President Clinton brokered the release of all the missionaries, except for the group leader, Laura Silsby.

Suspicions about Silsby’s intent to smuggle or traffic the children to the Dominican Republic further increased, when on March 19, 2010, Silsby’s legal advisor, Jorge Torres-Puello, an American-Dominican living in the Dominican Republic as a fugitive was arrested and accused of human trafficking. U.S. authorities revealed that Torres-Puello was “linked to a network that trafficked in Haitian and Central American children and [was]wanted in the United States, El Salvador and Costa Rica.” (Read more: Shani R. King/Harvard Human Rights Journal/2012)

“Hillary has a long history of interest in Ms. Silsby. Wikileak emails dating back till at least 2001 have been found in her archives discussing Laura’s NGO. Laura had claimed she planned to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, but authorities in the country said she never submitted an application for this purpose. They instead located to Haiti.” (Wikileaks, 2/12/2010), (Wikileaks, 2/17/2010), (Michael Smith News, 11/04/2017)

“Judge Bernard Saint-Vil has dropped kidnapping charges against all 10 American missionaries detained for trying to take children out of the country after the Jan. 12 earthquake. But the only missionary still in jail, Laura Silsby, the group’s leader, still faces a charge of organizing the illegal transportation of 33 children in the chaos after the disaster, the judge said Monday. The charge carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison. Judge Saint-Vil did not explain his decision.” (New York Times, 4/26/2010)

“The last of 10 Americans detained while trying to take 33 children out of Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake was freed Monday when a judge convicted her but sentenced her to time already served in jail.

Laura Silsby, the organizer of the ill-fated effort to take the children to an orphanage being set up in the neighboring Dominican Republic, returned to her cell briefly to retrieve belongings before quickly heading to the Port-au-Prince airport.” (Read more: Idaho Press-Tribune, 5/17/2010)

Contrary to reports in the media, the crowd-sourced investigation labeled by some as “Pizzagate” did not begin with internet sleuths digging through the Wikileaks  Podesta Files releases looking for pizza parlors and encoded language discussing human trafficking. It began with the shocking discovery that Hillary and Bill Clinton provided assistance to convicted child trafficker, Laura Silsby, resulting in a reduced sentence for child trafficking.

Silsby was arrested at the Haitian border attempting to smuggle 33 children out of Haiti without documentation. Her sentence and charges were reduced after an intervention by Bill Clinton. In the aftermath of Silsby’s arrest, her originally retained lawyer Jorge Puello was arrested in connection with an international smuggling ring accused of trafficking women and minors from Central America and Haiti. The revelation of this news in November was either ignored by the Western media or attacked by Clinton controlled publications.

I. Hillary Clinton Intervened Politically on Behalf of Laura Silsby

Laura Silsby is the former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge. Emails from her organization can be found in Wikileaks’ Hillary Clinton Email Archive discussing the NGO before her arrest. Silsby’s organization also appears in Clinton’s emails, soliciting donations for their “ministry.” The Refuge was founded by Silsby and Charisa Coulter, both attendees of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho. Silsby was reported to have a history of bad debts and unpaid wages.

Laura had claimed she planned to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, but a State Department diplomatic cable revealed that authorities in the country said she never submitted an application for this purpose. They instead located to Haiti.

On January 29, 2010, Silsby was arrested with nine other American nationals attempting to steal 33 children from the country, most of whom were not even orphans and had families according to some reports. CNN reported on February 9, 2010 that this was not the first time Silsby had attempted to traffic children out of Haiti. Haitian police acting on a tip had intercepted Silsby in an earlier, separate attempt to remove 40 children out of the country. She was turned back at the Haitian border. For a brief period, Haitian authorities were considering adding a new kidnapping charge based on this evidence.

Hillary and Bill Clinton took an extraordinary interest in Silsby’s case from the moment she was arrested and almost immediately stepped in on her behalf. The Harvard Human Rights Journal stated that one of Bill Clinton’s first acts as special envoy for the United Nations in Haiti “was to put out the fire of a child abduction scandal involving American citizens.” On February 7th, 2010, The Sunday Times reported that Bill Clinton had intervened to strike a deal with the Haitian government, securing the release of all co-conspirators except for Silsby. Prosecutors ultimately sought a six-month sentence in Silsby’s case, reducing charges for conspiracy and child abduction to mere “arranging irregular travel.” A shockingly light penalty given the circumstances of her arrest, which would likely not have been possible but for the intervention of the Clintons in Silsby’s case.

On February 9th, 2010 Hillary Clinton consulted with Counselor Cheryl Mills and other attorneys in an email discussing the U.S. Government’s “options” regarding the arrested Americans. The heavily redacted memo attached to that email does not reveal what these “options” consisted of. However, the State Department’s American Citizens Services is only authorized to offer lists of local, English speaking attorneys to Americans arrested or detained abroad. To go beyond that authorization is a severe violation of protocol and is illegal. Additional emails reveal that the State Department was involved with making statements on the Silsby scandal and preparing to assist Silsby’s co-conspirators with their return to the United States, although this is consistent with State Department protocol in these situations. (Read more: Disobedient Media, 1/25/2017) 

Jorge Puello (Credit: public domain)

On February 11th, the New York Times reported that Silsby’s original lawyer, Jorge Puello, was suspected of leading an international human trafficking ring involving women and minors. According to the Harvard Human Rights Journal, Puello was ultimately arrested in an investigation being lead by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in connection with the ring. He was wanted in the United States, El Salvador and Costa Rica for his involvement with a network trafficking Central Americans and Haitians.

At the time of his arrest, his wife was already imprisoned in El Salvador and “faced charges of presumed sexual exploitation of minors and women.” Puello was ultimately sentenced to three years in federal prison for “alien smuggling.” Another surprisingly light sentence given the original charges he was sought for. It it not known at this time whether or not Laura Silsby was associated with Puello’s criminal enterprise. (Read more: Disobedient Media, 1/25/2017) 

(…) The head of the Salvadoran border police, Commissioner Jorge Callejas, said in a telephone interview that he was investigating accusations that a man with a Dominican passport that identified him as Jorge Anibal Torres Puello led a human trafficking ring that recruited Dominican women and under-age Nicaraguan girls by offering them jobs and then putting them to work as prostitutes in El Salvador.

Mr. Puello said he did not even have a passport. When Mr. Callejas was shown a photograph taken in Haiti of Mr. Puello, Mr. Callejas said he thought it showed the man he was seeking. He said he would try to arrest Mr. Puello on suspicion of luring women into prostitution and taking explicit photographs of them that were then posted on Internet sites. “It’s him, the same beard and face,” Mr. Callejas said in an interview on Thursday. “It has to be him.”

Judge Saint-Vil also said he thought that the photo of the trafficking suspect in a Salvadoran police file appeared to be the same man he had met in court. He said he intended to begin his own investigation into whether a trafficking suspect had been working with the Americans detained in Haiti.

“I was skeptical of him because he arrived with four bodyguards, and I have never seen that from a lawyer,” the judge said in an interview. “I plan to get to the bottom of this right away.”

The judge said he would request assistance from the Department of Homeland Security to look into Mr. Puello’s background. A spokesman for the department said American officials were playing a supporting role in the investigation surrounding the Americans, providing “investigative support as requested.”

An Interpol arrest warrant has been issued for someone named Jorge Anibal Torres Puello, according to the police and public documents.

There were questions about whether Mr. Puello, the adviser, who said the Central Valley Baptist Church in Idaho had hired him to represent the Americans, was licensed to practice law. Records at the College of Lawyers in the Dominican Republic listed no one with his name.

Mr. Puello said he had a law license and was part of a 45-member law firm. But his office in Santo Domingo turned out to be a humble place, which could not possibly fit 45 lawyers. Mr. Puello’s brother Alejandro said that the firm had another office in the central business district, but he declined to provide an address.

Mr. Puello said in the interview that he had been representing the Americans free of charge because he was a religious man who commiserated with their situation. “I’m president of the Sephardic Jewish community in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “I help people in this kind of situation. We’re not going to charge these people a dime.”

But other lawyers for the detainees said that the families had wired Mr. Puello $12,000 to pay for the Americans’ transportation out of Haiti if they were released, and that they had been told by Mr. Puello in a conference call late Tuesday that he needed an additional $36,000. Mr. Puello said that he had not participated in a conference call.

One lawyer for the families said that Mr. Puello had told him that he was licensed to practice law in Florida, but the lawyer said he had checked and found no such record. Mr. Puello said in the interview that he had never said he was licensed in Florida.

Mr. Puello said that he had been born in Yonkers, N.Y., and that his mother was Dominican. He said that his full name was Jorge Puello and that he had no other names. But then in a subsequent interview he said his name was Jorge Aaron Bentath Puello. He said he was born in October 1976, and not in October 1977, which the police report indicates is the birth date of the suspect in the Salvadoran case.

The report said the police had found documents connected to the Sephardic Jewish community in a house in San Salvador where the traffickers had held women. (The New York Times, 2/12/2010)

A secret NSA map obtained exclusively by NBC News shows the Chinese government’s massive cyber assault on all sectors of the U.S economy, including major firms like Google and Lockheed Martin, as well as the U.S. government and military. (Credit: NBC News)

“China’s cyber spies have accessed the private emails of “many” top Obama administration officials, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and a top secret document obtained by NBC News, and have been doing so since at least April 2010.

The email grab –- first codenamed “Dancing Panda” by U.S. officials, and then “Legion Amethyst” –- was detected in April 2010, according to a top secret NSA briefing from 2014. The intrusion into personal emails was still active at the time of the briefing and, according to the senior official, is still going on.

In 2011, Google disclosed that the private gmail accounts of some U.S. officials had been compromised, but the briefing shows that private email accounts from other providers were compromised as well.

The government email accounts assigned to the officials, however, were not hacked because they are more secure, says the senior U.S. intelligence official.

The senior official says the private emails of “all top national security and trade officials” were targeted.

The Chinese also harvested the email address books of targeted officials, according to the document, reconstructing and then “exploiting the(ir) social networks” by sending malware to their friends and colleagues.

The time period overlaps with Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account while Secretary of State from Jan. 21, 2009 to Feb. 1, 2013. The names and ranks of the officials whose emails were actually grabbed, however, were not disclosed in the NSA briefing nor by the intelligence official.” (Read more: NBC News, 8/10/2015)

Laura Graham and Bill Clinton (Credit: Getty Images)

Twitter sleuth @15poundstogo uncovers a State Dept FOIA email dated May 17, 2010, written by longtime Clinton acquaintance and former employee, Bob Bash who worked as a senior consultant with James Lee Witt Associates. The email states Mr. Witt had a personal conversation with Bill Clinton about Smartmatic voting machines and Haiti’s elections. Bash follows up with an email in the hopes of furthering the discussion on behalf of Mr. Witt and Smartmatic.

Bash addresses the email to Laura Graham,  a senior executive at the Clinton Foundation. Graham surfaced in Wikileaks emails for sending nearly 150 messages to Clinton’s top aides at the State Department over a two-year period, despite Clinton agreeing to keep State Department and Foundation business separate.

Graham forward’s the email to Cheryl Mills stating Bill Clinton cannot “engage on this issue” (except he already spoke to Mr. Witt about Haiti and Smartmatic machines).

I never heard of Smartmatic before tonight. But here’s something on it from the State Department’s foia records: pic.twitter.com/sIXT2ieTYB

— Brennan’sOrangeJumpsuit (@15poundstogo) November 15, 2020

State Department/Link

Aside from the deal for Haiti, there is also speculation about the “successful” election in the Philippines:

Wait, was it *THIS* successful Phillipines election that Cheryl Mills was supposed to tell Hillary Clinton about?https://t.co/lhicuBpP0w

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) December 17, 2020

“The parent company of *Cambridge Analytica* said in 2010 that it was not only involved in the Philippine presidential elections, it also boasted that it ‘successfully won the election FOR their candidate.'”

No! It couldn’t be THIS election!https://t.co/6V9TtwwI2b

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) December 17, 2020

“And almost two-thirds of the candidates in Haiti’s presidential election have called for the country’s election to be scrapped amid allegations of FRAUD”…

Oh, no, not HAITI too! What are the odds??https://t.co/YWstKS2tmN pic.twitter.com/gaIeBU8MHC

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) December 17, 2020

Less than two years later, on November 19, 2012, Smartmatic publishes this press release:

“The government of Haiti announces it is partnering with Smartmatic to continue efforts toward the modernization, consolidation and upgrading of the country’s civil and identity registry system.

(…) One key aspect of this project is the fact that Smartmatic will transfer all the required technology knowledge to Haiti as the process unfolds. In the near future, the Caribbean nation will possess not only a state-of-the-art civil identity registry system, but all the technology and know-how for its continued development.

“We at Smartmatic are focused on our projects having a significant social value for citizens in the countries where we operate. We firmly believe this will improve the quality of life of Haitians”, stated Antonio Mugica, Smartmatic’s CEO.

(…) The project will begin immediately with a one-year implementation phase, in which Smartmatic is to deploy 700 registration units to biometrically capture face photographs and the full 10 fingerprints from Haitian citizens. Of these, 600 units will be distributed across the national territory, and the remaining 100 among foreign missions abroad. Additionally, Smartmatic will provide associated services, such as project management, technical support, capacity building, to create the necessary infrastructure for Haiti to have a world-class national biometric enrollment platform.

In December 2014, HaitianTruth.org writes:

SMARTMATIC deployed a new Identity Management System with a biometric component that recorded the citizens’ 10 fingerprints and generated a 14-digit NIN.

About the system implemented by SMARTMATIC Since November 2018, a myriad of misleading and inconsistent reports has been published on Haiti’s National Identification Management System. The so-called experts cited in these reports claimed that the old system deployed by SMARTMATIC could still work for many years, and therefore, should not be replaced. This is totally false because since the Venezuelan company put this system into production in December 2014, which cost 53.5 million U.S dollars to the Haitian State. The only evaluation, made by an external expert, was conducted by a consultant from UNDP in January 2017.

The UNDP’s Expert spent 2 weeks at ONI assessing the system and, in his conclusions, he established that the citizen’s data in the identification system put in place by SMARTMATIC are inconsistent and unreliable due to mostly caused by a partial unplanned data migration from the two(2) fingerprints (old system from OAS) to the ten (10) fingerprints (new system from SMARTMATIC). It was then, therefore, recommended to replace this system. (Haitian Truth.org, 9/22/2019)

Payback: Obama presented Lugar with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2013. (Credit: Getty Images)

“U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar applauded the opening of the Interim Central Reference Laboratory in Odessa, Ukraine, this week, announcing that it will be instrumental in researching dangerous pathogens used by bioterrorists.

The level-3 bio-safety lab, which is the first built under the expanded authority of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, will be used to study anthrax, tularemia and Q fever as well as other dangerous pathogens.

“The continuing cooperation of Nunn-Lugar partners has improved safety for all people against weapons of mass destruction and potential terrorist use, in addition to advancements in the prevention of pandemics and public health consequences,” Lugar said.

Lugar said plans for the facility began in 2005 when he and then-Senator Barack Obama entered a partnership with Ukrainian officials. Lugar and Obama also helped coordinate efforts between the U.S and Ukrainian researchers that year in an effort to study and help prevent avian flu.

The Nunn-Lugar Act, which established the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, was established in 1991. Since that time it has provided funding and assistance to help the former Soviet Union dismantle and safeguard large stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The program has also been responsible for destroying chemical weapons in Albania, Lugar said.” (Archive-BioprepWatch, 6/18/2010)

(Timeline editor’s note: The original link to this article no longer exists but was archived before it disappeared. Also, we find it stunning that the American taxpayers would help pay for a bio-lab in what is infamously known to be one of the most corrupt countries in Europe.)

Bill Clinton makes a cool half a million after giving a speech to Renassaince Capital on June 29, 2010. (Credit: public domain)

“In December 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hillary Clinton opposed the Magnitsky Act while serving as secretary of state. Her opposition coincided with Bill Clinton giving a speech in Moscow for Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank—for which he was paid $500,000. “Mr. Clinton also received a substantial payout in 2010 from Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank whose executives were at risk of being hurt by possible U.S. sanctions tied to a complex and controversial case of alleged corruption in Russia.

Members of Congress wrote to Mrs. Clinton in 2010 seeking to deny visas to people who had been implicated by Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was jailed and died in prison after he uncovered evidence of a large tax-refund fraud. William Browder, a foreign investor in Russia who had hired Mr. Magnitsky, alleged that the accountant had turned up evidence that Renaissance officials, among others, participated in the fraud.” The State Department opposed the sanctions bill at the time, as did the Russian government. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pushed Hillary Clinton to oppose the legislation during a meeting in St. Petersburg in June 2012, citing that U.S.-Russia relations would suffer as a result.

The Wall Street Journal report continued, “A few weeks later [June 29, 2010], Bill Clinton participated in a question-and-answer session at a Renaissance Capital investors conference. He was paid $500,000. After the appearance, Mr. Clinton received a personal thank-you call from Vladimir Putin, then the Russian prime minister, the government news agency TASS reported.”

A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton denied the connection between her stance against the bill and Bill Clinton’s paid speech, but the conflict of interest is undeniable. During the presidential election, the Clinton campaign even took measures to stop a story reporting the link. An email released by Wikileaks from a Clinton Campaign [staffer]  and Chair John Podesta in May 2015 noted, “With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRC’s opposition to the Magnitsky bill to a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow.” (Read more: The Observer, 7/13/2017)

Justin Cooper (Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images)

According to a September 2016 FBI report, Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who is helping to manage Clinton’s private server, contacts a Secret Service agent at some point during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. It is not clear when this happens, but apparently it is not long after the server begins to be frequently targeted by brute force hacking attacks around the middle of 2010.

Cooper will be asked about this in a September 2016 Congressional hearing shortly after the FBI report is published. He will say, “when we first experienced some of the repeated failed login attempts, I reported them to the Secret Service. … There was an instance where we shared some logs with [them]. … The Secret Service looked at logs from the server and made some recommendations to [server manager Bryan] Pagliano about the possible origins of those failed logins and some techniques he might use to mitigate that problem.” (The Secret Service agent will give advice on improving the server’s security that will not be followed.)

However, when Cooper is asked by Representative Blake Farenthold (R), “Did you turn over the logs and notifications that you received to the FBI, the emails of brute force attacks?” Cooper will say the FBI was not contacted.

Representative Jody Hice (Credit: Twitter)

Additionally, when Representative Jody Hice (R) will ask if Cooper consulted with any other “department or agency in the government,” Cooper will say, “No. No consultations of that type.” He will also specifically mention the State Department wasn’t consulted. (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

It’s possible that Pagliano contacted others, but the FBI will interview both Cooper and Pagliano in its investigation and then will mention only the contact with the Secret Service in its final report.

The number of hacking attacks steadily grows through the rest of Clinton’s time in office. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Blake Farenthold (Credit: Bill Clark / Congressional Quarterly)

Bryan Pagliano, the manager of Clinton’s private server while she is secretary of state, will be interviewed by the FBI in December 2015. According to an FBI report, he will claim that the server suffered no known security breaches. However, “he was aware there were many failed login attempts, which he referred to as brute force attacks. He added that the failed attempts increased over the life of the [server], and he set up the server’s logs to alert [Justin] Cooper when they occurred. Pagliano knew the attempts were potential attackers because the credentials attempting to log in did not match legitimate users on the system. Pagliano could not recall if a high volume of failed login attempts emanated from any specific country.”

The FBI report will explain, “A brute force attack is a trial-and-error method used to obtain information, such as a password… In a brute force attack, passwords may be attempted manually or automated software can be used to generate a large number of consecutive guesses as to the targeted information.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who helped Pagliano manage the server, will be asked about brute force attacks in a September 2016 Congressional hearing. He will respond, “I can’t say with any specificity how many had happened. They happened with some limited frequency over the period of, I’d say the last two and a half years, while she was in office. But we had developed systems to tamper these down.”

Representative Blake Farenthold (R) will ask Cooper that if the brute force attacker managed to enter the correct user name and password, “you wouldn’t have been notified, would you? You would have thought it was Mrs. Clinton or some legitimate user actually getting in?”

After further questioning, Cooper will admit that he only looked at failed attempts and didn’t check for related successful log-ins. (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

After Bryan Pagliano sets up Clinton’s new private server in January 2009, he sets up Internet Protocol (IP) filtering on the firewall, once a firewall is established in late March 2009. Pagliano will later tell the FBI that he tried to review the firewall log files once a month.

The US Secret Service Badge (Credit: public domain)

At some point, Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who is helping Pagliano manage the server, puts Pagliano in contact with a US Secret Service agent. The timing of this is not clear. However, in a September 2016 Congresssional hearing, Cooper will say it happened after Clinton’s server started to get frequent “brute force” hacking attacks, and that begins around the middle of 2010.

This agent recommends that Pagliano should also perform outbound filtering of email traffic. According to a September 2016 FBI report, “Pagliano further considered, but ultimately did not implement, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or two-factor authentication to better secure administrative access to the server system by him and Cooper.”

The FBI report will explain: “‘VPN’ is a private network that runs on top of a larger network to provide access to shared network resources, which may or may not include the physical hard drives of individual computers… VPN offers an additional layer of security by encrypting the data traveling to the private network before sending it over the Internet. Data is then decrypted when it reaches the private network. … ‘Two-factor authentication’ is a method of confirming a user’s claimed identity by utilizing a combination of two different components…” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016) (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

Clinton speaks in New York, while then Congressperson Anthony Weiner looks on in 2000. (Credit: Reuters)

Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, writes to Clinton in an email, “OK I will [redacted] just FedEx secure cell phone from [Washington] DC. Anthony leaving office to bring me to airport now so hopefully will make it just in time.”

Four hours later, Clinton responds, “Maybe one of Anthony’s trusted staff could deliver secure phone?”

“Anthony” is a reference to Anthony Weiner, who is both Abedin’s husband and a member of Congress at the time. He will resign one year later, due to a sex scandal.

The Associated Press will later comment, “The emails show the degree of trust Clinton had for Weiner before he was hit by scandal.”

It is unclear where Clinton is on this day. State Department schedules list no public events for her between July 27, 2010 and August 2, 2010. But the Associated Press will also note, “The use of secure cell phones is commonplace among State Department staff when traveling to countries with advanced cyber-espionage capacities, such as China or Russia.”

These emails will be released in November 2016. They were not part of the 30,000 work-related emails Clinton turned over in December 2014, even though they are clearly work-related. It will be one of thousands of emails deleted by Clinton that were later recovered by the FBI.

After the release, State Department spokesperson Mark Toner will say it is unclear how the phone might have been delivered, or if it was at all. He will suggest that, in theory, sending a secure phone through FedEx could have been appropriate if the necessary safeguards were taken. “In 2010, secure cell phones were available to State Department employees, and they could be configured in such a way as to render them suitable for transport. When configured in this manner, the device would be inoperable until paired with additional components.” (The Associated Press, 11/3/2016)

Dexter Filkins (Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Matt Lussenhop, a press officer at the US embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, sends an email to over a dozen other US officials. The email is sent to Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, who emails it to Clinton. Lussenhop’s email concerns an article that New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins is about to get published. Filkins contacted the embassy in Kabul to get quotes for his story, which alleges that Muhammed Zia Salehi, an aide to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, is on the payroll of the CIA. The email is two paragraphs long, but the first paragraph will later be completely redacted and deemed classified at the “secret” level, the level below “top secret.” (US Department of State, 2/29/2016)

The article will be published in the Times two days later, on August 25, 2010. (The New York Times, 8/25/2010)

Matt Lussenhop (Credit: public domain)

In Clinton’s July 2016 FBI interview, she will be asked about this email. According to the FBI, “Clinton stated she did not remember the email specifically. [She] stated she was not concerned the displayed email contained classified information [redacted] but stated she had no reason to doubt the judgment of the people working for her on the ‘front lines.'”  (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Salehi was arrested by Afghan police in July 2010, one month before the Times article about him, due to a US government wiretap on him as part of an anti-corruption case. But he was released the next day on the orders of Karzai. In 2013, Foreign Policy will confirm that not only was Salehi working for the CIA, but he actually was an intermediary who was giving secret CIA cash payments to Karzai. (Foreign Policy, 5/4/2013)

Given that this is one of a small number of emails Clinton will be asked about in her FBI interview, as well its classification at the “secret” level, it stands to reason that Lussenhop confirmed Salehi’s CIA connection.

The FBI on Thursday defended its inclusion of a Chicago Muslim cleric tied in the past to the terrorist groups Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood in a group that recently visited the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and FBI headquarters.

Ross Rice announces his retirement from the FBI on September 27, 2012. (Credit: public domain)

Ross Rice, FBI spokesman in Chicago, acknowledged in an interview that Kifah Mustapha, imam of the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Ill., was named as an unindicted co-conspirator during a Hamas funding trial six years ago.

However, Mr. Mustapha “has never been convicted of a crime and never charged with a crime,” Mr. Rice said.

“If we thought he was a security risk, we wouldn’t have included him” in the FBI’s Citizens Academy program, Mr. Rice said.

Mr. Mustapha took part in the six-week program at the FBI’s Quantico, Va., facility, which included a three-day visit to Washington, where a group of 30 people, including the cleric, visited the NCTC and FBI headquarters, Mr. Rice said.

Mr. Mustapha is listed in court papers as one of more than 240 unindicted co-conspirators, including people and organizations, that were named in the 2004 terrorism-funding trial of the Dallas-based charity Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

The Justice Department charged the group and its top officials with illegally funding the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which has carried out bombing attacks in Israel. The NCTC website states that Hamas was behind “high-profile terrorist attacks” against civilians in Israel.

The foundation and five former leaders were found guilty in November 2008 of giving more than $12 million to Hamas. The investigation and trial also produced large numbers of documents from the group and its affiliates that disclosed a covert plan by the Muslim Brotherhood to subvert the U.S. government and create an Islamic state.

The list of co-conspirators identified Mr. Mustapha as among 53 people who were members of the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, a group set up to funnel funds to Hamas. Another document identified him as the Holy Land Foundation’s agent in Illinois.

Mr. Mustapha was named a Muslim chaplain for the Illinois State Police in December, but was dismissed in June after failing a background check that disclosed his past ties to the Holy Land Foundation.

State police spokesman Sgt. Isaiah D. Vega confirmed that Mr. Mustapha is no longer a chaplain.

“Due to information revealed during the background investigation, Sheik Kifah Mustapha’s appointment as a volunteer ISP chaplain was denied,” he said, declining to comment further because the matter is the subject of a lawsuit.

The Muslim advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations, also identified as a co-conspirator.

Mr. Rice said Mr. Mustapha was “an employee” of the Holy Land Foundation, but that his participation in the FBI outreach program was welcome.

“His application was reviewed and vetted by our office,” Mr. Rice said. “He is a very influential leader of the Palestinian community here and imam of the largest mosque and was a welcome addition.”

Mr. Mustapha declined to comment on the visits or whether he has any link to Hamas.

An NCTC spokesman referred questions to the FBI, and an FBI headquarters’ spokesman referred questions to Mr. Rice.

The visits were first reported by Andrew Breitbart’s website Big Peace, which included a photograph of Mr. Mustapha and 18 other people inside the NCTC.

Sheikh Kifah Mustapha (third from left) as well as other top Muslim terrorist operatives tour the National Counterterrorism Center.  A Department of Homeland Security official said Mustapha is on “the highest watch list they have.” (Photo Credit: Breitbart via FBI)

A video of Mustapha asking for donations:

Mr. Rice said that during the recent Washington visit, Mr. Mustapha was escorted the entire time as he visited the NCTC headquarters near Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia and the FBI headquarters building.

“He’s very sympathetic to the mission of the FBI and has pledged his support,” Mr. Rice said.

A former FBI agent said Mr. Mustapha several years ago was listed in the FBI’s database as a member of Hamas. “This is a known senior Hamas guy,” the former agent said of Mr. Mustapha.

Asked if Mr. Mustapha is listed by the FBI as a Hamas member, Mr. Rice said, “not that I’m aware of.” (Read more: Washington Times, 9/30/2010)  (Archive)

Adam Waldman (Credit: public domain)

“Waldman began working for Deripaska in 2009 to help the billionaire with visa issues, according to lobbying disclosures filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The State Department revoked Deripaska’s visa in 2006 because of concerns about ties to Russian organized crime.

Deripaska pays Waldman $40,000 per month plus expenses for the contract, which is still active. He has yet to obtain a U.S. visa.

(…) In Oct. 2010, Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, hired Waldman as part of the campaign to help Deripaska as well as to serve as his legal counsel in Washington, D.C.

Waldman’s FARA disclosures show that his work for Lavrov involves engaging “in correspondence and meetings with U.S. policymakers” as well as acting “as counsel” to the Russian diplomat “on political and legal matters as requested, including issues related to diplomatic matters.”

(Credit: efile.fara.gov)

Adam Waldman FARA filing for work for Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Waldman received no compensation from Lavrov, according to FARA filings.

One of Waldman’s filings includes a Sept. 15, 2010 letter sent by Lavrov thanking him for his work for Deripaska.

“A persistent state of limbo regarding Mr. Deripaska’s ability to travel freely between our two countries has become an impediment to the promotion of mutually advantageous contacts between the business communities of the two countries,” Lavrov wrote.

FARA records show that the relationship between Waldman and Lavrov was terminated on May 31, 2017. (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/09/2018)  (Archive)

(Credit: public domain)

“Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

The racketeering scheme was conducted “with the consent of higher level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, one agent declared in an affidavit years later.

Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.

The first decision occurred in October 2010, when the State Department and government agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States unanimously approved the partial sale of Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian nuclear giant Rosatom, giving Moscow control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply.” (Read more: The Hill, 10/17/2017)

Annie Medaglia (l) of the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, moderates a June 1 discussion with Todd Foley of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE); Amos Hochstein of the US State Department; and Adnan Z. Amin of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). (Credit: Larry Luxner/Atlantic Council)

(…) Between his visits to Congress (and well-connected think tanks) to apprise decision makers of Putin’s energy antics, [Amos] Hochstein was Biden’s right-hand man meeting with numerous world leaders. He frequently flew to Ukraine (and other nations) with Biden to work out energy deals.

But Hochstein had a secret.

Time and again, Biden’s advisor failed to mention that he had witnessed Putin’s energy strategy firsthand. Hochstein communicated Putin’s energy dominance strategy in the oil and gas sectors very effectively, but he never mentioned Russia’s attempts to corner the global uranium market. It was something he had assisted personally.

While working as a U.S. lobbyist in the private sector, Hochstein had advised Rosatom’s subsidiary: Tenex.

Hochstein became a revolving door extraordinaire early in his Beltway career. As he weaved in and out of the private sector, his positions (and profits) rose substantially. From 2001 to 2007, Hochstein worked in various capacities at Washington lobbying powerhouse Cassidy & Associates. In 2006, then-Governor Mark Warner (D-Va.) hired Hochstein to serve as a senior policy advisor. Hochstein purportedly left Cassidy in January 2007 to join Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign, according to a press release by the firm. …

Yet, Hochstein continued to work for Cassidy’s deep-pocketed foreign clients, even while he was employed by Governor Warner and Senator Dodd’s presidential campaign. In 2006, Russian nuclear corporation Tenex asked Doug Campbell (unaware that he was an FBI operative) to find a Beltway lobbying powerhouse to help further their interests.

By March 2006, Campbell found himself meeting with Hochstein, who ensured that Tenex hired Cassidy & Associates. Cassidy claimed that Hochstein left the firm in January 2007, but Hochstein continued to meet with Putin’s top nuclear officials throughout 2007 and 2008 while he was working with powerful Democrats.

Did Warner and Dodd know that Hochstein was simultaneously serving Russian interests? Hochstein’s public bios make no mention of his work on behalf of Tenex, although he does acknowledge returning to Cassidy in August 2008 (and remaining there until 2011).

Before long, he was directly advising Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her successor John Kerry, and finally Vice President Biden (and even President Obama). His LinkedIn profile is meticulously manicured to show no overlap between his public and private sector gigs, but, in fact, Hochstein advised multiple public officials and simultaneously worked to advance foreign interests while on the payroll of Cassidy.

According to the Obama White House’s visitor records, Hochstein visited more than 150 times between December 2010 and September 2016, including several trips to the Situation Room. His first visits occurred while he was still working with Cassidy.” (Read more: Just the News, 7/13/2020)  (Archive)

On November 4, 2010, a longtime Biden family friend from Delaware, Kevin Justice, had a meeting in D.C. with the Office of the Vice President. At the time, Justice was the president of a construction company called HillStone International. A couple of weeks after the meeting, HillStone hired James as an executive vice president, despite the fact that James had no experience in the housing construction industry.

Do you notice the pattern?

(This deal is thoroughly documented in Breitbart News Senior Contributor Peter Schweizer’s book Profiles in Corruption.)

James’s company profile touted his only experience that really mattered: “James Biden was the finance chairman of his . . . brother’s bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware and successfully enlisted the support of national unions, political leaders and financiers across the country.”

James joined HillStone at a fortuitous time: the firm was negotiating a massive contract in war-torn Iraq to build 100,000 homes. This was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project, as Schweizer reported in Profiles in Corruption. HillStone also got a $22 million construction contract from the U.S. State Department. The company’s founder, David Richter, told investors at a private meeting that it really helps to have “the brother of the Vice President as partner.” For the years James worked with HillStone, the firm “accumulated contracts from the federal government for dozens of projects, including projects in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mozambique, and elsewhere.”

Yes, Mozambique… and “elsewhere.”

On February 14, 2023, the Daily Mail reported that James Biden admitted in legal filings that he was hired by Hill International, the parent company of HillStone, to “negotiate with Saudis over a secret $140 million deal” because of his relationship to Vice President Joe Biden, who at the time was leading delegations to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal (right) meets with Vice President Joe Biden in Riyadh on October 27, 2011. ((Credit: AFP via Getty Images)

The case documents reveal that on at least two occasions, “Jim told a former senior U.S. Treasury official working as a private investigator” that he was “often sent to meetings to represent Hill because ‘of course, the [Biden] name didn’t hurt.’” Hill CEO Irvin Richter further confided “that he selected Biden because KSA [the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] would not dare stiff the brother of the Vice-President who would be instrumental to the deal.”

Jim’s wife, Sara, also claimed in official affidavits that “Joe and his brother ‘told each other everything.’”

Lamentably, this influence peddling is as legal as it is flagrant.

In the system Joe Biden built, influence peddling is legal for anyone willing to put in a little effort to find one of any number of loopholes. (Read more: Breitbart, 10/22/2023)  (Archive)

An email sent or received by Clinton on this day has the subject title ‘‘MbZ call – 7:15am.” Very little is publicly known about its content, such as who sends or receives it, because it will not be included in the over 30,000 work-related emails Clinton will give to the State Department in December 2014. But the FBI will recover the email through other means and ask Clinton about it in her July 2016 FBI interview.

Clinton gestures as she delivers a statement about WikiLeaks on November 29, 2010. (Credit: Yuri Gripas / Reuters)

According to the FBI summary of that interview, “Clinton stated she recalled the time period of the WikiLeaks disclosures because it was a difficult time for State. She spent long hours on the phone with foreign diplomats addressing the WikiLeaks disclosures and ensuring no one was in danger as a result of the disclosures. Regarding the specific email, Clinton did not know why it was not in the approximately 30,000 emails produced to [the] State [Department] and, based on its content, would expect it to be considered work-related.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

From Clinton’s comments, it can be surmised the email deals with the disclosure of 250,000 State Department cables by WikiLeaks, which actually takes place two days later, on November 28, 2010.

Ironically, Clinton makes a public speech on November 29, 2010, that contradict her private reassurances to foreign diplomats that no one was endangered by the leaks. She says, “The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems… So whatever are the motives in disseminating these documents, it is clear that releasing them poses real risks to real people, and often to the very people who have dedicated their own lives to protecting others.” (US Department of State, 11/29/2010)

An honor guard outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. (Credit: Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

“The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.

Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.

But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources.

Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.’s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.

Assessing the fallout from an exposed spy operation can be difficult, but the episode was considered particularly damaging. The number of American assets lost in China, officials said, rivaled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years. (New York Times, 5/20/2017)

“Judicial Watch announced today that the State Department provided a previously hidden email which shows that top State Department officials used and were aware of Hillary Clinton’s email account.

On December 24, 2010, Daniel Baer, an Obama State Department deputy assistant secretary of state, writes to Michael Posner, a then-assistant secretary of state about Clinton’s private email address:

Baer: “Be careful, you just gave the secretary’s personal email address to a bunch of folks …”

Posner answers: “Should I say don’t forward? Did not notice”

Baer responds: “Yeah-I just know that she guards it pretty closely”

Mr. Posner had forwarded Clinton’s email address, which was contained in an email sent to State Department senior leadership, about WikiLeaks.

It appears the State Department produced this email in 2016 in redacted form, blacking out Clinton’s personal email address and the discussion about Clinton’s wanting to keep her email address closely guarded.

Judicial Watch sought the email after a former top Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) State Department official testified to Judicial Watch about reviewing it between late 2013 and early 2014.

The testimony and the email production comes in discovery granted to Judicial Watch on the Clinton email issue in a FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Clinton also faces potential questioning under oath in this lawsuit.

Despite a recent court order requiring production of the email, the DOJ and State Departments only produced it 10 days ago after Judicial Watch threatened to seek a court order to compel its production.

“Judicial Watch just caught the State Department and DOJ red-handed in another email cover-up – they all knew about the Clinton email account but covered up the smoking-gun email showing this guilty knowledge for years,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 9/30/2019)

In July 2016, the State Department will reveal some limited details about 22 “top secret” emails involving Clinton. One email chain is sent sometime in 2011, and involves two “top secret” emails. The first is sent by Clinton to her aide Jake Sullivan, and the second is Sullivan’s reply. The content of the emails remain unknown. (Vice News, 7/22/2016)

In July 2016, the State Department will reveal some limited details about 22 “top secret” emails involving Clinton. One email chain is sent sometime in 2011, and involves seven “top secret” emails. The chain begins with an email from Clinton’s aide Jake Sullivan to Clinton. It goes back and forth, with three emails from Clinton to Sullivan, and three more emails from Sullivan to Clinton. The content of the emails remains unknown. (Vice News, 7/22/2016)

In July 2016, the State Department will reveal some limited details about 22 “top secret” emails involving Clinton. One email chain is sent sometime in 2011, and involves two “top secret” emails. The chain begins with an email written by an unnamed State Department official. It makes its way to Sullivan, who forwards it to Clinton. Clinton then sends a reply to Sullivan. The contents of the emails remain unknown. (Vice News, 7/22/2016)

In July 2016, the State Department will reveal some limited details about 22 “top secret” emails involving Clinton. One email chain is sent sometime in 2011, and involves five “top secret” emails. The chain begins with an email from Clinton’s aide Jake Sullivan to Clinton. The chain goes back and forth, with two emails from Clinton to Sullivan, and two more emails from Sullivan to Clinton. The contents of the emails remain unknown. (Vice News, 7/22/2016)

In July 2016, the State Department will reveal some limited details about 22 “top secret” emails involving Clinton. One email chain is sent sometime in 2011, and involves two “top secret” emails. The chain begins with an email written by an unnamed State Department official. It makes its way to Sullivan, who forwards it to Clinton. There is no known reply from Clinton. The contents of the emails remain unknown. (Vice News, 7/22/2016)

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton secretly meets Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril and discussed ways the US can aid efforts to depose embattled Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi. (Credit: Agency France Presse)

Under pressure from allies and growing calls for military intervention in Libya, the Obama administration on Monday held its first high-level talks with the Libyan opposition and introduced a liaison to deal full time with their ranks. But it remained undecided about exactly how much support to lend a group it still knows little about while turmoil and uncertainty increase across the Arab world.

In Paris, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton held a late-night, 45-minute meeting with a senior Libyan opposition figure after discussing the widening crisis with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, along with British Prime Minister David Cameron, meanwhile, stepped up calls for world powers to isolate Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi with a no-fly zone, amid diplomatic differences over how much backing to give rebels.

After Qaddafi is deposed, Clinton walks before a news conference with Mahmoud Jibril, head of Libya’s National Transitional Council on October 18, 2011. Clinton is also quoted to have said in this visit regarding Qaddafi’s removal, “We hope he will be captured or killed soon.” (Credit: Suhaib Salem/Reuters)

Clinton’s closed-door meeting with opposition figure member Mahmoud Jibril in a luxury Paris hotel was shrouded in secrecy until it happened, with neither the time nor the identity of her interlocutors announced beforehand.

Neither Jibril, an official in the newly formed Interim Governing Council based in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, nor Clinton appeared or made any comments about their talks. Jibril met with Sarkozy in Paris last week before photographers and journalists.

Jibril was introduced to Clinton by the administration’s new point man for the Libyan opposition, Chris Stevens, who was until recently the deputy chief of mission at the now-shuttered U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. Also at the meeting was Gene Cretz, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, who left his post for consultations in early January and has not returned.

“They had a private and candid conversation about ways in which the United States can assist the Libyan people in their efforts against the Qaddafi regime,” Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines said after the talks.

Although the meeting might have been a deciding factor in the administration’s approach to the opposition no announcements were made after and the mystery surrounding it underscored the administration’s lack of clarity as to who is who in the movement that has sprung up to topple Qaddafi from the perch he has held for 42 years.” (Read more: CBS News, 3/14/2011)  (Archive)

A March 27, 2011, intelligence brief on Libya, [archived here], sent by long-time close adviser to the Clintons and Hillary’s unofficial intelligence gatherer, Sidney Blumenthal, contains clear evidence of war crimes on the part of NATO-backed rebels. Citing a rebel commander source “speaking in strict confidence” Blumenthal reports to Hillary [emphasis mine]:

Under attack from allied Air and Naval forces, the Libyan Army troops have begun to desert to the rebel side in increasing numbers. The rebels are making an effort to greet these troops as fellow Libyans, in an effort to encourage additional defections.

(Source Comment: Speaking in strict confidence, one rebel commander stated that his troops continue to summarily execute all foreign mercenaries captured in the fighting…).

While the illegality of extra-judicial killings is easy to recognize (groups engaged in such are conventionally termed “death squads”), the sinister reality behind the “foreign mercenaries” reference might not be as immediately evident to most.

While over the decades Gaddafi was known to make use of European and other international security and infrastructural contractors, there is no evidence to suggest that these were targeted by the Libyan rebels.

There is, however, ample documentation by journalists, academics, and human rights groups demonstrating that black Libyan civilians and sub-Saharan contract workers, a population favored by Gaddafi in his pro-African Union policies, were targets of “racial cleansing” by rebels who saw black Libyans as tied closely with the regime.[1]

The 30,000 people living in a town in northern Libya have been driven out of their homes, in what appears to have been an act of revenge for their role in the three-month siege of the city of Misrata. (Credit: BBC)

Black Libyans were commonly branded as “foreign mercenaries” by the rebel opposition for their perceived general loyalty to Gaddafi as a community and subjected to torture, executions, and their towns “liberated” by ethnic cleansing. This is demonstrated in the most well-documented example of Tawergha, an entire town of 30,000 black and “dark-skinned” Libyans which vanished by August 2011 after its takeover by NATO-backed NTC Misratan brigades.

These attacks were well-known as late as 2012 and often filmed, as this report from The Telegraph confirms:

After Muammar Gaddafi was killed, hundreds of migrant workers from neighboring states were imprisoned by fighters allied to the new interim authorities. They accuse the black Africans of having been mercenaries for the late ruler. Thousands of sub-Saharan Africans have been rounded up since Gaddafi fell in August.

It appears that Clinton was getting personally briefed on the battlefield crimes of her beloved anti-Gaddafi fighters long before some of the worst of these genocidal crimes took place.

Blumenthal Intel Brief, 3/27/2011

(Read more: Foreign Policy Journal, 1/06/2016)  (Archive)

(Credit: Wall Street Journal Graphic)

(…) “The deteriorating security situation in Libya generally, and Benghazi specifically, was a dominant theme in the emails. Clinton defenders have sought to insulate her from criticism of inadequate security before the attacks by suggesting that decisions about security for U.S. diplomatic personnel were made well below her level. There are many reasons to be skeptical of those claims. The emails make clear that Clinton was deeply involved in virtually every aspect of Libya policy; one internal State Department email lays out the many ways she drove administration decision-making on Libya. Was Clinton a deeply engaged, hands-on manager of every aspect of Libya policy other than security?

If Clinton wasn’t involved in security decisions, the emails make clear that she should have been. Reports that Clinton received and circulated, from both official and unofficial channels, demonstrate the dire security challenges for Americans in Libya.

It’s not just Blumenthal’s emails that raise additional questions. An email sent at 9:17 a.m. on September 15, 2012—four days after the fatal attack in Benghazi—by an aide advises Clinton that Dan Pfeiffer, the director of communications at the White House, “has some sensitive items that he would like to personally show you when he arrives.” Clinton slept in and missed the meeting and wrote back later in the morning to request that Pfeiffer return to brief her. It’s possible that these “sensitive items” had nothing to do with Benghazi. But the request for a meeting came after a flurry of emails the previous evening between officials from the White House, the State Department, and various national security agencies. Those emails concerned edits to the administration’s much-discussed Benghazi “talking points” and included strong objections from the State Department’s “building leadership” to some of the language. White House officials emailed the group to assure everyone that the objections would be addressed the following morning at a meeting of the Deputies Committee.

Clinton testifies to the House Select Committee on Benghazi in January 2013. (Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press)

An email sent to several top administration officials, including top Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, at 11:08 that same morning is introduced this way: “Per the discussion at Deputies, here are the revised TPs for HPSCI [talking points for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]. Let me know what you think.” The language in the revised talking points is redacted in its entirety.

Given what we know about the various iterations of the talking points, it’s unlikely that these redactions conceal anything not already known. But as that example suggests, what’s missing from the emails is often as provocative as the content. On April 8, 2011, Clinton forwarded a Blumenthal email to Sullivan. In the version of that email released by the State Department, most of Clinton’s note is redacted. It reads: “FYI. [Redacted].” But the same email was obtained and published by the New York Times before the State Department release, and in that version, the sentence is unredacted. It reads: “FYI. The idea of using private security experts to arm the opposition should be considered.”

Why did the State Department—or Clinton herself—want that sentence redacted? That’s unclear. And there may well be an innocent explanation. But the note raises additional questions. Did the idea of supplying arms to the Libyan opposition through private security experts receive the consideration Clinton wanted? Did it happen? Was Blumenthal involved?

Beyond these questions, the Select Committee on Benghazi notes several “inexplicable gaps” in Clinton’s email records “during key times of her involvement with Libyan policy.” There are no emails between September 14 and October 21, 2011, five weeks surrounding Clinton’s trip to Libya. (The committee notes that this was when a “now-famous picture of Clinton on her BlackBerry was taken.”) There is another gap between October 21, 2011, and January 5, 2012, “when the State Department was extending the Benghazi mission for another year.” And a third major gap occurs between April 27 and July 4, 2012, a period of “increased security” when the U.S. compound and the British ambassador were both attacked.

It’s hardly necessary to be a conspiracy-minded conservative to be skeptical of the claim that Clinton—who, by the State Department’s own account, drove Libya policy—neither sent nor received any Libya-related emails during these long stretches of heavy Libya-related policy-making.

Perhaps the most important effect of these latest emails is the simplest one. They demolish the claim that we already know the answers to the important questions about the attacks and the administration’s response.” (Read more: The Washington Examiner, 6/08/2015 )  (Archive)

(…) The latest court-ordered dump of her email, just placed online by the State Department, brings more troubles for Team Hillary. This release of over 3,000 pages includes 66 “Unclassified” messages that the State Department subsequently determined actually were classified; however, all but one of those 66 were deemed Confidential, the lowest classification level, while one was found to be Secret, bringing the total of Secret messages discovered so far to seven. In all, 1,340 Hillary emails at State have been reassessed as classified.

“But the biggest problem may be in a just-released email that has gotten little attention here, but plenty on the other side of the world. An email to Ms. Clinton from a close Clinton confidant late on June 8, 2011 about Sudan turns out to have explosive material in it. This message includes a detailed intelligence report from Sid Blumenthal, Hillary’s close friend, confidant and factotum, who regularly supplied her with information from his private intelligence service. His usual source was Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA senior official and veteran spy-gadfly, who conveniently died just before EmailGate became a serious problem for Hillary’s campaign.”

However, the uncredited June 8 memo, which Mr. Blumenthal labeled as “Confidential”—his personal classification system, apparently—but which the State Department has labeled Unclassified, doesn’t appear to be from Drumheller, whose assessments were written just like CIA intelligence reports. This is not.

Remarkably, the report emailed to Hillary by “sbwhoeop,” which was Mr. Blumenthal’s email handle, explains how Sudan’s government devised a clandestine plan, in coordination with two rebel generals, to secure control of oil reserves in the disputed region of Abyei. This is juicy, front-page stuff, straight out of an action movie, about a region of Africa that’s of high interest to the American and many other governments, and the report is astonishingly detailed.

Its information comes from a high-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and Mr. Blumenthal’s write-up repeatedly states the sources—there turn out to be more than one—are well-placed and credible, with excellent access. It’s the usual spytalk boilerplate when you want the reader to understand this is golden information, not just gossip or rumors circulating on the street, what professionals dismiss as “RUMINT.” Needless to add, this is generating a lot of talk in Sudan, where the media is asking about this shady affair—and how Mr. Blumenthal, who’s not exactly an old Africa hand, knew all about it.

But the most interesting part is that the report describes a conversation “in confidence” that happened on the evening of June 7, just one day before Mr. Blumenthal sent the report to Secretary Clinton. It beggars the imagination to think that Mr. Blumenthal’s private intelligence operation, which was just a handful of people, had operators who were well placed in Sudan, with top-level spy access, able to get this secret information, place it in a decently written assessment with proper espionage verbiage, and pass it all back to Washington, D.C., inside 24 hours. That would be a feat even for the CIA, which has stations and officers all over Africa.

In fact, the June 8, 2011 Blumenthal report doesn’t read like CIA material at all, in other words human intelligence or HUMINT, but very much like signals intelligence or SIGINT. (For the differences see here). I know what SIGINT reports look like, because I used to write them for the National Security Agency, America’s biggest source of intelligence. SIGINT reports, which I’ve read thousands of, have a very distinct style and flavor to them and Blumenthal’s write-up matches it, right down to the “Source Comments,” which smack very much of NSA reporting and its “house rules.”

But is this an NSA assessment? If so, it would have to be classified at least Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, a handling caveat that applies to most SIGINT, and quite possibly Top Secret/SCI, the highest normal classification we have. In that case, it was about as far from Unclassified as it’s possible for an email to be. (Read more: The Observer, 1/09/2016) (Archive)

“Republican investigators are raising the alarm over a newly released Hillary Clinton email that shows the former secretary of state directing a top staffer to send sensitive information on an unsecured network for convenience.

In a June 2011 email exchange, Clinton told her top policy staffer Jake Sullivan to send a talking points document — which was scheduled to be forwarded over State’s secured network — over a nonsecure fax line after “stripping” some information from them. The messages were included in a large batch of Clinton emails released around 2 a.m. Friday morning.

Her instructions came after staffers said they were having problems with the secure fax machine and therefore couldn’t get Clinton the documents she was asking for.

“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” Clinton wrote. “Non-paper” is a diplomatic term for a discussion draft or memo that does not represent the official position of a government or negotiator.

(…) An earlier exchange between Sullivan and Clinton also included a discussion of State’s secure email system. Sullivan told Clinton in February 2010 that he couldn’t send her a Mideast peace-related statement by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Clinton seemed irritated: “It’s a public statement! Just email it,” she wrote.

Sullivan responded by explaining it was impossible to send her the information she wanted because it was stuck in State’s classified system: “Trust me, I share your exasperation. But until ops converts it to the unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it. I can’t even access it,” Sullivan wrote.” (Read more: Politico, 1/6/2017)  (Archive)

New leaked audio released by James O’Keefe of Project Veritas shows WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleading with the U.S. State Department to take action to protect national security interests from an upcoming document leak.

(Video: James O’Keefe@JamesOKeefeIII/Twitter 12/16/2020)

In the audio, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange talked with Cliff Johnson, an attorney with the U.S. State Department, in 2011. He called to warn them about a potentially dangerous dump of classified documents that would be hitting the public soon.

“We have intelligence that the State Department Database Archive of 250,000 diplomatic cables (communications) including declassified cables is being spread around and is to the degree that we believe that within the next few days that it will become public and we’re not sure but the timing could be imminently or within the next few days to a week, and there may be some possibility to stop it,” Assange explained to Johnson.

The State Department under Hillary Clinton did not seem too concerned with stopping the leak. Veritas pointed out that WikiLeaks had intended to release the redacted cables to protect national security concerns while letting the public understand the parts of the documents that had journalistic merit before a breach occurred.” (Read more: Big League Politics, 12/16/2020)  (Archive)

“Another private email address surfaces in the Wikileaks Podesta emails, and it apparently belongs to Chelsea Clinton aka Anna James. Most notable in her conversation with John Podesta right before Thanksgiving, 2011, is an admission to their “technology was all compromised” during a recent visit to China.

In June 2011, Google Inc. publicly warned that hackers based in China were targeting the Gmail email accounts of senior US officials. (The Wall Street Journal, 6/2/2011

On July 26, 2011, Clinton shows awareness of the problem through a joke.

Another State Department official sends Clinton an email, and some confusion results about the official’s two email accounts.

Clinton writes, “I just checked and I do have your state but not your Gmail – so how did that happen. Must be the Chinese!”

US Department of State, 9/3/2015)  (Wikileaks, 11/20/2011)  (Thompson Timeline, 7/26/2011)

Bevan Cooney (l) and Hunter Biden (Credit: public domain)

“Newly obtained emails from a Hunter Biden business partner lay out in detail how the Vice President’s son and his colleagues used their access to the Obama-Biden administration to arrange private meetings for potential foreign clients and investors at the highest levels in the White House. These never-before-revealed emails outline how a delegation of Chinese investors and Communist Party officials managed to secure a private, off-the-books meeting with then-Vice President Joe Biden.

In a 2011 email, Hunter Biden’s business associates also discussed developing relations with what one called “China Inc.” as part of a “new push on soft diplomacy for the Chinese.” These emails are completely unconnected to the Hunter Biden emails being released by the New York Post.

These and more explosive never-before-revealed emails were provided to Schweizer by Bevan Cooney, a one-time Hunter Biden, and Devon Archer business associate. Cooney is currently in prison serving a sentence for his involvement in a 2016 bond fraud investment scheme.

In 2019, Cooney reached out to Schweizer after becoming familiar with the revelations in his 2018 book Secret Empires. Cooney explained that he believes he was the “fall guy” for the fraud scheme and that Archer and Hunter Biden had avoided responsibility.

Archer, who was also convicted in the case, saw a federal judge vacate his conviction. But an appellate court overturned the lower court judge’s ruling, reinstating Archer’s conviction in the case. Archer, Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, awaits sentencing.

Cooney, their associate who is currently serving a prison sentence on his conviction in the matter, later re-established contact with Schweizer through investigative journalist Matthew Tyrmand. From prison, Cooney provided Schweizer with written authorization, his email account name, and password to his Gmail account to retrieve these emails. He authorized, in writing, the publication of these emails— notable because it is the first time a close associate has publicly confirmed Hunter’s trading on his father’s influence.

The emails offer a unique window into just how the Biden universe conducted business during the Obama-Biden Administration. These associates sought to trade on Hunter Biden’s relationship with, and access to, his father and the Obama-Biden White House in order to generate business.

For instance, on November 5, 2011, one of Archer’s business contacts forwarded him an email teasing an opportunity to gain “potentially outstanding new clients” by helping to arrange White House meetings for a group of Chinese executives and government officials. The group was the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the delegation included Chinese billionaires, Chinese Communist Party loyalists, and at least one “respected diplomat” from Beijing. Despite its benign name, CEC has been called “a second foreign ministry” for the People’s Republic of China—a communist government that closely controls most businesses in its country. CEC was established in 2006 by a group of businessmen and Chinese government diplomats.

Re China Entrepreneurs Club… by Breitbart News

(Read more: Breitbart, 10/16/2020)  (Archive)

The Washington Times on October 17, 2020 adds:

(…) Breitbart reported that subsequently, the CEC secretary-general Maggie Cheng said the 30-person delegation did meet with the vice president.

The China Entrepreneur Club is an exclusive list of who’s who in the country’s communist-industrial complex. Some hold senior positions in the ruling Communist Party.

Breitbart said party members include Wang Zhongyu, an engineer and diplomat; Ma Weihua, who heads China Merchants Bank; and Jiang Xipei, chairman of the Far East Holding Company.

The CEC issued a press release on Dec. 1, 2011, on its return to China summarizing its tour of America. The press release said the delegation stopped in Washington but did not mention that it visited the White House.

An unverified CEC Twitter account says it joined in April and has 23 followers. The chairman is Jack Ma, a Communist Party member, multi-billionaire, and co-founder of the technology giant Alibaba.

The Nov. 14, 2011, CEC White House visit was followed by stepped-up activity in China by Hunter Biden, Archer, and their Rosemont Seneca Partners.

“Hunter Biden and Devon Archer engaged in numerous financial transactions with Chinese nationals who had deep connections to the Communist Chinese government,” said the Senate Republican report spearheaded by Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

In 2011, at the time of the White House visit, Hunter Biden was networking with state-owned Chinese companies through the Boston firm Thornton Group.

At some point, Hunter Biden hooked up with Ye Jianming, chief of China Energy Co. He worked out a deal to receive $10 million a year for “introductions alone,” he said in an email published by the New York Post.

“The records acquired by the Committees show consistent, significant and extensive financial connections among and between Hunter Biden, James Biden, Sara Biden, Devon Archer, and Chinese nationals connected to the Communist regime and PLA as well as other foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds,” the Senate Republican report concluded.

James and Sara are Joe Biden’s brother and sister-in-law.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Laura Graham during a visit to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Jan. 30, 2011. (Credit: Getty Images)

“In a December 2011 email, Bill Clinton’s closest aide, Doug Band, told other Clinton aides that he had to talk foundation COO, Laura Graham, out of driving her car into the water on Staten Island because she was under such stress caused by “wjc and cvc as well as that of her family.” The reference appears to be to William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton and Chelsea Victoria Clinton.

“She was on staten island in her car parked a few feet from the waters edge with her foot on the gas pedal and the car in park. She called me to tell me the stress of all of this office crap with wjc and cvc as well as that of her family had driven her to the edge and she couldn’t take it anymore,” Band wrote to Hillary Clinton’s then-State Department chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, along with Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, John Podesta, and Justin Cooper, the aide who helped set up and maintain Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Band said he reached her brother and her shrink, and Graham pulled back. She was the foundation COO and is now an adviser to the foundation.

Band also wrote how “stress” at the Clinton Foundation directly caused “very serious health issues” for board chairman Bruce Lindsey.

“But I’m sure Chelsea is more concerned with a mostly false story in the distinguished ny post about mf global and teneo not her role in what happened to laura/bruce, what she is doing to the organization or the several of stories that have appeared in the ny post about her father and a multitude of women over the years,” Band wrote.” (Read more: New York Post, 10/10/2016)  (Archive)

Deputy Secretary of State William Burns (Credit: Reuters)

In July 2016, the State Department will reveal some limited details about 22 “top secret” emails involving Clinton. One email chain is sent sometime in 2012, and involves two “top secret” emails. The chain begins with an email written by an unnamed State Department official to other unnamed department officials. It makes its way to Sullivan, who forwards it to Clinton, Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills, and Deputy Secretary of State William Burns. Clinton then replies to Sullivan. Then there’s another back and forth between Clinton and Sullivan. The contents of the emails remain unknown. (Vice News, 7/22/2016)

In July 2016, the State Department will reveal some limited details about 22 “top secret” emails involving Clinton. One email chain is sent sometime in 2012, and involves two “top secret” emails. The chain begins with an email written by an unnamed State Department official. It makes its way to Sullivan, who forwards it to Clinton and Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills. There is no known reply from Clinton. The content of the emails remain unknown. (Vice News, 7/22/2016)

“A photograph has emerged showing former Vice President Joe Biden posing with oligarch Kenes Rakishev of Kazakhstan, who once reportedly explored business with Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

(Credit: public domain)

The photo, first published last year at an anti-corruption website called the Kazhakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery (KIAR), purports to show Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, together with Kazakhstan’s former prime minister, Karim Massimov, at far right.

At far left, the photo shows Kenes Rakishev, described as “a relative and junior partner of [oligarch] Timur Kulibayev.”

Rakishev’s personal website identifies him as an “international businessman, investor and entrepreneur.” It adds that he is “regarded as one of the most influential businessmen in Kazakhstan,” with “business interests spanning technology, oil & gas, finance, shipbuilding, and metals & mining industries.”

Rakishev and Hunter Biden once reportedly explored business opportunities together. The UK Daily Mail reported Oct. 16:

The Mail can reveal that between 2012 and 2014, Hunter worked as a sort of go-between for Kenes Rakishev, a self-styled ‘international businessman, investor and entrepreneur’ with close family connections to the kleptocratic regime of his homeland’s despotic former president Nursultan Nazarbayev.

(…) Emails passed to this newspaper via anti-corruption campaigners from the Central Asian country reveal that Biden Jr held extensive meetings with Rakishev, who was looking to invest a portion of his personal fortune in New York and Washington DC. He also travelled to the Kazakh capital of Astana to hold business discussions.

Hunter Biden then attempted to persuade Rakishev to buy into a Nevadan mining company, brokering a series of meetings with the firm, before convincing him to invest a cool million dollars with Alexandra Forbes Kerry, the film-maker daughter of Democrat Senator and former Presidential candidate John Kerry.

The Daily Mail also reported that Hunter Biden and Rakishev became friends, and that Hunter Biden traveled to Astana (now Nur-Sultan), the capital of Kazakhstan. The two also “dined together at luxury restaurants in New York and Washington DC,” the Daily Mail noted.

Rakishev was recently named in a U.S. Senate report (pg 70) into Hunter Biden’s foreign business activities, which noted that the oligarch gave $142,300 to Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner, ostensibly for a car:

Archer received $142,300 from Kenges Rakishev of Kazakhstan, purportedly for a car, the same day [in 2014] Vice President Joe Biden appeared with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arsemy Yasenyuk and addressed Ukrainian legislators in Kyiv regarding Russia’s actions in Crimea.

Hunter Biden was spotted leaving his $130,000+ Porsche Panerama GTS in Manhattan, heading to lunch at the Waldorf Astoria on January 27, 2020. (Credit: public domain)

Breitbart contributor Peter Schweizer reported in his 2019 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, that the Morgan Stanley account into which the “car” funds were paid was “controlled by Archer and received large sums of money from foreign entities.”

According to court documents cited by Schweizer, that account received funds from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma; from the Chinese company Bohai Harvest RST (BHR); and from a company controlled by Rakishev, Novatus Holdings.

Investigative journalist Matthew Tyrmand provided Breitbart News with an email from early 2014 in which Archer indicated that he would be hosting Kazakhstan’s “Secretary of State” in Washington, DC.

The email came via Tyrmand from Bevan Cooney, a former business partner of Hunter Biden and Devon Archer, who is currently serving time in federal prison for a 2016 conviction in a bond fraud scheme.” (Read more: Breitbart News, 10/20/2020)  (Archive)

‘Al Qaeda Is on Our Side’: How Obama-Biden team empowered terrorists in Syria
Aaron Maté, 2/20/2022

“Hours after the Feb. 3 U.S. military raid in northern Syria that left the leader of ISIS and multiple family members dead, President Biden delivered a triumphant White House address.

The late-night Special Forces operation in Syria’s Idlib province, Biden proclaimed, was a “testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they hide around the world.”

Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi: Before he was killed by U.S. forces in February the ISIS leader operated from an Al Qaeda safe haven in Syria. (Credit: U.S. Government/Reuters)

Unmentioned by the president, and virtually all media accounts of the assassination, was the critical role that top members of his administration played during the Obama years in creating the Al Qaeda-controlled hideout where ISIS head Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, as well as his slain predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, found their final refuge.

In waging a multi-billion dollar covert war in support of the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, top Obama officials who now serve under Biden made it American policy to enable and arm terrorist groups that attracted jihadi fighters from across the globe. This regime change campaign, undertaken one decade after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11, helped a sworn U.S. enemy establish the Idlib safe haven that it still controls today.

A concise articulation came from Jake Sullivan to his then-State Department boss Hillary Clinton in a February 2012 email: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”

Jake Sullivan: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria,” the then-State Dept. official – and current national security adviser – told Hillary Clinton in a Feb. 2012 email. (Credit: The Associated Press)

Their efforts to remake the Middle East via regime change, not just in Syria but earlier in Libya, led to the deaths of Americans – including Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials in Benghazi in 2012; the slaughter of countless civilians; the creation of millions of refugees; and ultimately, Russia’s entry into the Syrian battlefield.

Contacted through their current U.S. government agencies, none of the Obama-Biden principals offered comment on their policy of supporting an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency in Syria. (Read more: RealClearInvestigations, 4/20/2022)  (Archive)

Owner, Telman Ismailov ahead of the opening party of the Mardan Palace hotel in Antalya, Turkey. (Credit: Zak Hussein/Getty Images)

“When his father was the second most powerful man in the world, Hunter Biden met in Russia with at least four oligarchs closely aligned with Vladimir Putin — including one who is now wanted for murder in the country, The Post has learned.

The meeting with Telman Ismailov took place on Feb. 17, 2012 at the Moscow headquarters of AST Group, his vast holding company which once owned a publishing house, a tour company, and had a telecom division, according to the Moscow Times.

Ismailov was accused in 2017 by Russian authorities of paying $2 million for the murder of two entrepreneurs a year earlier, Agence France-Presse reported. Vladimir Savkin, a shopping mall magnate and Yury Brilev, founder of Lyublino Motors, were both bumped off on the Novorizhskoye highway in Moscow, allegedly over a business dispute with Ismailov, according to the Investigative Committee of Russia, the country’s primary federal investigations agency.

A lawyer for Ismailov did not respond to request for comment from The Post about either the alleged murders or the Hunter Biden meeting, but told Radio Free Europe that the charges were bogus and “a result of political and economic persecution by the Russian Federation.” In February he was granted asylum by Montenegro.

It’s unclear what Hunter Biden wanted with Ismailov, but the trip was part of a two-day meet and greet between Hunter and wealthy oligarchs in the country — which at least in part focused on seeking foreign cash for Rosemont Realty, an offshoot of Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Partners. The investment company was co-founded by Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and Chris Heinz.

The flurry of meetings raises questions about what matters were discussed and whether the oligarchs sought any untoward access to Hunter Biden’s father. On Feb. 22, 2012 — just days after returning from Russia — Hunter Biden met with Vice President Biden at his home in the Naval Observatory, his calendar shows.

(…) The other billionaire oligarchs penciled into Hunter Biden’s calendar — which The Post found on a hard drive Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer repair store in April 2019 — included Sergey Chemezov, the CEO of the Russian state-owned conglomerate Rostec (formerly Rostekhnologii); Vladimir Yevtushenkov, President of the Russian Holding company Sistema; and Samuel S. Karapetyan, a Russian real estate baron. (Read more: New York Post, 6/25/2022)  (Archive)

Today, Monday 27 February, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example:

“[Y]ou have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control… This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase” – CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on the medical condition of the President of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez.

The material contains privileged information about the US government’s attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor’s own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks. There are more than 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. The emails also expose the revolving door that operates in private intelligence companies in the United States. Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money. The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.

The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients. For example, Stratfor monitored and analyzed the online activities of Bhopal activists, including the “Yes Men”, for the US chemical giant Dow Chemical. The activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. The disaster led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage. (Wikileaks, 2/27/2012)  (Archive)

Eric Holder (Credit: public domain)

Eric Holder, the US attorney general from 2009 until 2015, writes a memo during the 2012 US presidential race outlining Justice Department policy on how to avoid interfering in elections. It states that department employees (which includes the FBI) “must be particularly sensitive to safeguarding the department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality, and nonpartisanship.” If an employee is “faced with a question regarding the timing of charges or overt investigative steps near the time of a primary or general election,” that person should contact the department’s public integrity section “for further guidance.”

The department has had such policies for decades, and they usually are restated every presidential election, but the memo adds clarity to them. (The Washington Post, 10/29/2016) (US Department of Justice, 3/9/2012)

This department policy will be tested in 2016, when the FBI reopens an investigation into Clinton’s emails just 11 days before Clinton is on the ballot for the US presidential election.

There is an email chain this day started by Clinton, with all emails in it between Clinton, Justin Cooper, Bryan Pagliano, and Oscar Flores. Cooper (a Bill Clinton aide) and Pagliano (a State Department official) are jointly managing Clinton’s private server, with Cooper doing more of the customer service and Pagliano more of the technical aspects. Flores helps manage Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York, where the server is located.

Clinton begins the email chain with the subject heading “Help!” She writes: “Once again, I’m having BB [BlackBerry] trouble. I am not receiving emails although people are getting ones I send but I get their replies on my IP [iPad]. I’ve taken out the battery and done what I know to do but with no luck yet any ideas?”

Cooper sends two replies trying to solve the problem, with Clinton giving a short reply to one of them.

Hillary Clinton (Credit: Robert Shiro / The Associated Press) and Bryan Pagliano (Credit: Fox News)

Then Pagliano writes, “Let me take a look at the server to see if it offers any insight. iPhone is not much different from iPad, however in both cases the security landscape is different from the BlackBerry. -Bryan”

Then Clinton replies, “Thanks again. I’m back in business.” (US Department of State, 10/12/2016)

None of these five emails will be included in the 30,000 work-related emails Clinton gives the State Department in December 2014, even though the inclusion of Pagliano, a department official, in the chain makes them work-related. (One email that will be included is simply Pagliano wishing Clinton a happy birthday in 2012.) Instead, one of the emails in the chain will be later recovered by the FBI from Clinton’s deleted emails (with the text of the other four emails included in the reply).

These emails will be released to Judicial Watch on October 12, 2016, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, and Judicial Watch will make them public on October 19, 2016. (US Department of State, 10/12/2016)

Ironically, in the same time frame, on October 13, 2016, Clinton’s written responses to a court deposition will be made public. In one answer, she will write: “Secretary Clinton states that she does not recall having communications with Bryan Pagliano concerning or relating to the management, preservation, deletion, or destruction of any emails in her clintonemail.com email account.” (Judicial Watch, 10/13/2016)

All of the emails between Clinton and Pagliano many never be found, since the FBI could only recover about half of Clinton’s deleted emails, and the file containing all of Pagliano’s emails from his time working at the State Department was mysteriously lost.

(…) “Within the 99-page opinion from Judge Rosemary Collyer  she noted none of this FISA-702 database abuse was accidental. In a key footnote on page 87: Collyer outlined the years of unlawful violations was the result of “deliberate decisionmaking“:

This specific footnote, is key to peeling back the onion.

Note the phrase: “([redacted] access to FBI systems was the subject of an interagency memorandum of understanding entered into [redacted])”.  This sentence exposes an internal decision; withheld from congress and the FISA court by the Obama administration; and outlines a process for access and distribution of surveillance data. Note: “no notice of this practice was given to the FISC until 2016“.

We feel confident we’ve now found the source of the “memorandum of understanding” that lies at the heart of the issue.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder (Credit: Olivier Douliery/Getty Images)

In March 2012 the Obama administration through Attorney General Eric Holder made changes to the exploitation of intelligence databases as noted in this Wall Street Journal article later in the year:

(December 2012 – WSJ) Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.

Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation.

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans “reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information” may be permanently retained.

The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.  (more)

The 2012 changes, instituted by Eric Holder, permitted files of specific Americans to be generated under the auspices of potential terror threats.  The NSA databases could be exploited by the National Counterterrorism Center to extract content that would be contained within these files on targeted Americans.

Keep in mind this is early 2012, John Brennan is Deputy National Security Advisor and Asst. to President Obama for Homeland Security.

When Attorney General Eric Holder empowered the National Counterterrorism Center with this new authority, the office assigned to the data-collection was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC).  The founder of the TTIC was John Brennan:

On 1 May 2003, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) opened its doors. Led by its first Director, John Brennan, TTIC filled its ranks with approximately three dozen detailees from across the US Government (USG) and was mandated to integrate CT capabilities and missions across the government. (link)

Also note the date of this DOJ Memorandum is March 2012:

Under the new rules issued in March, the National Counterterrorism Center, known as NCTC, can obtain almost any database the government collects that it says is “reasonably believed” to contain “terrorism information.”  (link)

The March 2012 date is right before the IRS scandal hit the headlines.

The IRS targeting scandal is where the term “Secret Research Project” originated as a description from the Obama team. It involved the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder and the FBI under Robert Mueller. It never made sense why Eric Holder requested over 1 million tax records via CD ROM, until overlaying the timeline of the FISA abuse:

The IRS sent the FBI “21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The transaction occurred in October 2010 (link)

Why disks? Why send a stack of DISKS to the DOJ and FBI when there’s a pre-existing financial crimes unit within the IRS. All of the evidence within this sketchy operation came directly to the surface in spring 2012.

Here’s how it looks:

♦ In 2010 Eric Holder asked the IRS to send him the records of 501(c) non profit groups and individuals representing conservative voters. [LINK] Lois Lerner sent the DOJ 1.1 million pages of 501(c)(4) tax filing data. Including a very specific set of “33 Schedule B attachment files”. The Schedule B’s were specific to Large Conservative 501(c)(4) groups operating and organized to oppose the agenda of President Obama. The Schedule B’s include the donor lists of specific people and sub-groups attached to the 501(c)(4).

The IRS sent the FBI “21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The transaction occurred in October 2010 (link)

♦ In 2012 Eric Holder authorizes the use of government databases to search records of Americans and assemble “files” on potential targets. [Link] “The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior.”

♦ In the period of 2012 through April 2016, According to FISA Judge Rosemary Collyer, there were tens of thousands of illegal (“non-compliant”) search queries of the NSA database targeting Americans.  The search results were unlawfully “extracted” to unknown entities.  Eighty-five out of every hundred searches were illegal (85% non-compliant rate).

Consider purposeful actions, as a political targeting operation, by weaponizing the systems of government.  Steps:

• First, identify the targets (IRS Database).
• Second, research the targets (NSA Database).
• Third assemble files on the targets (DOJ Authorization).
• Fourth use the files to leverage/destroy your opposition.

We now have evidence of the first three steps; and my hunch is if we apply hindsight a lot of unusual activity will now make sense.  We have been living inside the fourth step for a few years.  We noticed the consequences… but we only had suspicions, until now.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 5/28/2019)

***

On December 12, 2012, the Wall Street Journal publishes a timeline of events regarding the National Counterterrorism Center controversy:

Dec. 25, 2009 – On Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian man, boarded a flight to Detroit from Amsterdam wearing explosives sewn into his undergarments. His bomb didn’t properly detonate. He eventually pleaded guilty to terror-related charges.

Jan. 7, 2010 – The White House issued a report about the attempted bombing, citing the need to strengthen the watchlisting process.

May 18, 2010 – The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the Christmas Day bombing concluded that “NCTC was not organized adequately to fulfill its mission.”

Feb 24, 2011 – In February 2011, Homeland Security staffers began corresponding about their concerns about the proposed NCTC guidelines, including issues with “oversight/compliance” and difficulty stripping down “what you need to focus on as the problems.”

March 4, 2011 – By March, Justice Department was on its “third round of edits” with NCTC. DHS Associate General Counsel Matthew L. Kronisch encouraged Homeland Security colleagues to submit their comments soon.

March 7, 2011 – In a heated exchange, an official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – whose name was redacted – said that several Homeland Security comments “suggest a potential lack of understanding” and “would eviscerate the authorities” of the counterterrorism center.

March 11, 2011 – Homeland Security Associate General Counsel Matthew Kronisch expressed “little expectation of resolving our concerns” but requested a meeting with the Office of Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice.

May 12, 2011 – Homeland Security Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan and Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Margo Schlanger elevated their concerns to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano in a memo titled “How Best to Express the Department’s Privacy and Civil Liberties-Related Concems over Draft Guidelines Proposed by the Office of The Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center.”

June 17, 2011 – Ms. Callahan expressed frustration with the process, stating that she “non-concurred” on “operational examples,” and that the examples were “complete non-sequiturs” and “non-responsive.”

November 8, 2011 – “I’m not sure I’m totally prepared with the firestorm we’re about to create,” Margo Schlanger wrote in an e-mail to Mary Ellen Callahan in November, referring to the fact that the two wanted to push for further privacy protections in the guidelines. Others in the department were willing to agree to the counterterrorism proposal.

March 7, 2012 – Staffers for the Homeland Security Privacy and Civil Rights and Civil Liberties offices’ prepared talking points for the “Deputies Committee meeting” at the White House to discuss the guidelines.

March 22, 2012 – But right after the meeting the guidelines were finalized and quietly released with a statement from the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper who cited the Abdullmutallub failures. “Following the failed terrorist attack in December 2009, representatives of the counterterrorism community concluded it is vital for NCTC to be provided with a variety of datasets from various agencies that contain terrorism information,” said Clapper, “The ability to search against these datasets for up to five years on a continuing basis as these updated Guidelines permit will enable NCTC to accomplish its mission more practically and effectively than the 2008 Guidelines allowed.”

April 2, 2012 – Homeland Security staffers began preparing the terms under which they would hand over the “six DHS datasets associated with the revised NCTC AG Guidelines.”

(Wall Street Journal, 12/12/2012)

Clinton meets with King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia on March 30, 2012. (Credit: US Embassy Riyadh)

Clinton travels to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from March 30 to 31, 2012. (US Department of State, 3/30/2012)

This is notable because a September 2016 FBI report will reveal that Clinton regularly used her unsecure BlackBerry while outside the US, including sending and/or receiving “hundreds” of emails containing classified information. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Furthermore, in August 2010, it was reported that Research in Motion (RIM), the company that makes BlackBerrys, agreed to locate three computer servers within Saudi Arabia, “putting them under the jurisdiction of local security forces,” according to an article at the time by the Register.

Headquarters of Research In Motion (RIM) located in Waterloo, Ontario (Credit: public domain)

The effective result is that the Saudi government was able to intercept emails that have to briefly pass through the servers. RIM did not want to agree to this, but the Saudi government briefly suspended BlackBerry service until RIM gave in. Even emails sent through Saudi Arabia using personal encryption keys could be easily intercepted due to this agreement. (The Register, 8/9/2010)

Clinton is sent emails virtually every day, and her days in Saudi Arabia are no exceptions. One email classified at the “confidential” level is sent to Clinton on March 31, 2012, though it’s not clear if she is in Saudi Arabia at the time or not. The email concerns politics in Sudan and South Sudan. (US Department of State, 1/29/2016)

In 2011-2012, Secretary of State Clinton was busy drumming up support for an attack on Syria, and supporting armed ‘rebel’ terrorists in Syria. (Credit: IB Times)

“Wikileaks’ exposure of Hillary Clinton’s emails reveals that US intrusion in the Syrian Civil War is really all about Iran and Israel and is part of a master plan that started with Hillary’s advice to enter the Libyan Civil War. Hillary’s War is another expensive American adventure in nation building as the US inserts itself into another civil war, ostensibly to restrain ISIS (or “ISIL” as the Obama Admin. prefers); but Obama’s manner of fighting this war supports Wikileaks‘ revelation that US involvement is all about regime change.

According to this massively revealing document pillaged from Hillary Clinton’s email archives, Obama needed to bring down Assad’s regime in order to calm Israel into accepting the eventual nuclear agreement he was working out with Iran. So, US involvement in the Syrian Civil War is even less about Assad than it is about Iran and Israel — at least in the State Department’s strategizing.

Connect the dots: First, Hillary counseled the president to establish regime change in Libya, the easiest target for such change. Then, with that success weighing on Assad’s fears, the State Department advised seeking regime change in Syria, emphasizing to the president that overthrowing the Assad regime would be essential to his establishment of a nuclear agreement with Iran. The theory was that Assad’s newfound fears from the regime change in Libya coupled with US empowered opposition in his own country, would get him to step down. Underlying the whole plan for regime change in Syria is the motive of weakening Iran, calming Israel and transforming the entire Middle East.

(Note if you look it up that the Wikileaks document shows dates that refer to when the document was unclassified, not when written. The date of the State Department’s creation of this document can be determined by its content: “the talks between the world’s major powers and Iran that began in Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May.” The switch from past tense to future tense dates the document sometime between April, 2012, which is when the talks began in Istanbul, and May, 2012, when they continued in Baghdad.)

That same document provides evidence the connection between Hillary’s War in Libya and the next war in Syria clearly became a part the Department of State’s strategy under Hillary: (Note how it states that Libya was an easier case, following the wording in the advice Hillary had been given by Blumenthal about overthrowing Qaddafi as a way to make regime change in Syria more accomplishable.) (Read more: The Great Recession Blog, 10/09/2016)

Shawn Henry (Credit: Chip Somodeville/Getty Images)

“One of the FBI’s top cyber experts, Shawn Henry, has joined a new company, CrowdStrike, which bills itself as a “stealth-mode security start-up.” Amid the established field, CrowdStrike is taking a ninja approach, advertising for “kick a** coders, consultants and experts” to help companies in their “pursuit of the enemy.”

In a mission statement and video message posted on the company’s website, Henry explained his decision to retire from the FBI last month at the age of 50. He said he can “continue to hunt the adversary” from the private sector as well as he did as an FBI agent and senior executive. He also said he relishes working “with meat-eaters again, not vegetarians – not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he said.

CrowdStrike was founded by two executives from McAfee, the software security maker. Its website has a menacing look with a flying bird logo that bears a striking resemblance to the ubiquitous insignia of “The Hunger Games,” which has grossed more than $330 million since its release.” (Read more: CBS News, 4/19/2012)

FBI Deputy Assistant Director Steven Chabinsky will  join the company as senior vice president for legal affairs and chief risk officer on September 6, 2012. (Read more: Reuters, 9/6/2012)

Leon E. Panetta talks with Clinton at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, April 18, 2012. (Credit: Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo/DOD )

A memo sent to Hillary Clinton that WikiLeaks made public in 2016 has not gotten the attention it deserves. Now is the time. After President Donald Trump tweeted that he was pulling American troops out of Syria, Clinton joined his vociferous critics who want more war in Syria.

“Actions have consequences, and whether we’re in Syria or not, the people who want to harm us are there & at war,” Clinton tweeted in response to Trump. “Isolationism is weakness. Empowering ISIS is dangerous. Playing into Russia & Iran’s hands is foolish. This President is putting our national security at grave risk.”

Actions indeed have consequences.

The memo shows the kind of advice Clinton was getting as secretary of state to plunge the U.S. deeper into the Syrian war. It takes us back to 2012 and the early phase of the conflict.

At that point, it was largely an internal affair, although Saudi arms shipments were playing a greater and greater role in bolstering rebel forces. But once the President Barack Obama eventually decided in favor of intervention, under pressure from Clinton, the conflict was quickly internationalized as thousands of holy warriors flooded in from as far away as western China.

The 1,200-word memo written by James P. Rubin, a senior diplomat in Bill Clinton’s State Department, to then-Secretary of State Clinton, which Clinton twice requested be printed out, begins with the subject of Iran, an important patron of Syria.

The memo dismisses any notion that nuclear talks will stop Iran “from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program—the capability to enrich uranium.” If it does get the bomb, it goes on, Israel will suffer a strategic setback since it will no longer be able to “respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today.” Denied the ability to bomb at will, Israel might leave off secondary targets and strike at the main enemy instead.

Consequently, the memo argues that the U.S. should topple the Assad regime so as to weaken Iran and allay the fears of Israel, which has long regarded the Islamic republic as its primary enemy. As the memo puts it:

“Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly.  Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted.”

This document, making the case to arm Syrian rebels, may have been largely overlooked because of confusion about its dates, which appear to be inaccurate.

The time stamp on the email is “2001-01-01 03:00” even though Clinton was still a New York senator-elect at that point. That date is also out of synch with the timeline of nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

But the body of the email gives a State Department case and document number with the date of 11/30/2015. But that’s incorrect as well because Clinton resigned as secretary of state on Feb. 1, 2013.

Central to the Great Debate

Consequently, anyone stumbling across the memo in the Wikileaks archives might be confused about how it figures in the great debate about whether to use force to bring down Syrian President Bashir al-Assad. But textual clues provide an answer. The second paragraph refers to nuclear talks with Iran “that began in Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May,” events that took place in 2012. The sixth invokes an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour conducted with then-Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak “last week.” Since the interview took place on April 19, 2012, the memo can therefore be dated to the fourth week in April.

The memo syncs with Clinton’s thinking on Syria, such as calling for Assad’s overthrow and continuing to push for a no-fly zone in her last debate with Donald Trump even after Gen. Joseph Dunford had testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that it could mean war with Russia.

The memo was sent to her shortly before Clinton joined forces with then-CIA Director David Petraeus to push for an aggressive program of rebel military aid.” (Read more: Consortium News, 1/14/2019)

Victor Pinchuk, Leonid Kuchma, Bill Clinton, and Olena Pinchuk attend the 4th Yalta Summit in June 2007. (Credit: Pinchuk Foundation)

“Emails made public Tuesday show a Ukrainian businessman and major Clinton Foundation donor was invited to Hillary Clinton’s home during the final year of her diplomatic tenure, despite her spokesman’s insistence in 2014 that the donor never crossed paths with Clinton while she served as secretary of state.

Amid scrutiny of Clinton’s ties to Pinchuk in 2014, the Democratic nominee’s spokesman, Nick Merrill, said Pinchuk had never met with Clinton during that time. He told the New York Times that, “from Jan. 21, 2009, to Feb. 1, 2013,” the Ukrainian businessman “was never on her schedule.”

Pinchuk, who has given up to $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, appeared on the guest list that was sent between Dennis Cheng, an executive at the foundation, and Huma Abedin, then Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department, ahead of a June 2012 dinner. Abedin noted in a subsequent email that the gathering would be hosted in Clinton’s home.

Pinchuk’s dinner invitation was exposed in a series of emails obtained by Citizens United.” (Read more: Washington Examiner, 8/24/2016)  (WSJ Archive)

An assembly of government reports and public records now indicates political exploitation of the NSA database, for weaponized intelligence surveillance of politicians, began mid-2012.  After an initial attempt to exploit IRS records, the legal tool used to access the NSA database was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or FISA.

With research files on the ’15, ’16 and ’17 political surveillance program; including information from the Mueller report and information from the IG Horowitz report; in combination with the Obama-era DOJ “secret research project” (their words, not mine); we are able to overlay the Obama-era domestic IC operations & gain a full understanding of how political surveillance was conducted over a period of four to six years.

The FISA-702 database extraction process, and utilization of the protections within the smaller intelligence community, became the primary process only after a previous DOJ effort ran into trouble. The established record from the 99-page FISC opinion rendered by Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer on April 26, 2017, helps explain the details.

I would strongly urge everyone to read the FISC report because Judge Collyer outlines how the DOJ, which includes the FBI, had an “institutional lack of candor” in responses to the FISA court.  Very specifically, the court outlined how the Obama administration was continually lying to the court about both their activity and the rate of fourth amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures of U.S. persons’ private information. These violations continued for multiple years throughout Obama’s terms.

Unfortunately, due to intelligence terminology, Judge Collyer’s brief and ruling is not an easy read for anyone unfamiliar with the FISA processes outlined. The complexity also helps the media avoid discussing, and as a result, most Americans have no idea the scale and scope of the issues. So we’ll try to break down the language.

For the sake of brevity and common understanding, CTH will highlight the most pertinent segments showing just how systemic and troublesome the unlawful electronic surveillance was.

Early in 2016, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers was alerted of a significant uptick in FISA-702(17) “About” queries using the FBI/NSA database that holds all metadata records on every form of electronic communication.

The NSA compliance officer alerted Admiral Mike Rogers who then initiated a full compliance audit on/around March 9th, 2016, for the period of November 1st, 2015, through May 1st, 2016.

While the audit was ongoing, due to the severity of the results that were identified, Admiral Mike Rogers stopped anyone from using the 702(17) “about query” option and went to the extraordinary step of blocking all FBI contractor access to the database on April 18, 2016 (keep these dates in mind).

Here are some significant segments:

The key takeaway from these first paragraphs is how the search query results were exported from the NSA database to users who were not authorized to see the material. The FBI contractors were conducting searches and then removing, or ‘exporting’, the results. Later on, the FBI said all of the exported material was deleted.

Searching the highly classified NSA database is essentially a function of filling out search boxes to identify the user-initiated search parameter and get a return on the search result.

FISA-702(16) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (“702”), and the “16” is a checkbox to initiate a search based on “To and From“. For example, if you put in a date and a phone number and check “16” as the search parameter the user will get the returns on everything “To and From” that identified phone number for the specific date. Calls, texts, contacts, etc. Including results for the inbound and outbound contacts.

FISA-702(17) is a search of the system returning a U.S. person (702), and the “17” is a checkbox to initiate a search based on everything “About” the search qualifier. For example, if you put a date and a phone number and check “17” as the search parameter the user will get the returns of everything about that phone. Calls, texts, contacts, geolocation (or GPS results), account information, user, service provider, etc. As a result, 702(17) can actually be used to locate where the phone (and user) was located on a specific date or sequentially over a specific period of time which is simply a matter of changing the date parameters.

And that’s just from a phone number.

Search an IP address “about” and read all data into that server; put in an email address and gain everything about that account. Or use the electronic address of a GPS enabled vehicle (about) and you can withdraw more electronic data and monitor in real-time. Search a credit card number and get everything about the account including what was purchased, where, when, etc. Search a bank account number, get everything about transactions and electronic records, etc. Just about anything and everything can be electronically searched; everything has an electronic ‘identifier’.

The search parameter is only limited by the originating field filled out. Names, places, numbers, addresses, etc. By using the “About” parameter there may be thousands or millions of returns. Imagine if you put “@realdonaldtrump” into the search parameter? You could extract all following accounts who interacted on Twitter, or Facebook, etc. You are only limited by your imagination and the scale of the electronic connectivity.

As you can see below, on March 9th, 2016, internal auditors noted the FBI was sharing “raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information”.

In plain English, the raw search returns were being shared with unknown entities without any attempt to “minimize” or redact the results. The person(s) attached to the results were named and obvious. There was no effort to hide their identity or protect their 4th amendment rights of privacy:

But what’s the scale here? This is where the story really lies.

Read this next excerpt carefully.

The operators were searching “U.S Persons”. The review of November 1, 2015, to May 1, 2016, showed “eighty-five percent of those queries” were unlawful or “non-compliant.”

85% !! “representing [redacted number].”

We can tell from the space of the redaction the number of searches was between 1,000 and 9,999 [five digits]. If we take the middle number of 5,000 – that means 4,250 unlawful searches out of 5,000.

The [five digit] amount (more than 1,000, less than 10,000), and 85% error rate, was captured in a six month period, November 2015 to April 2016.

Also, notice this very important quote:

”many of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges.”

This tells us the system users were searching the same phone number, email address, electronic “identifier”, or people, repeatedly over different dates.

Specific people were being tracked/monitored.

Additionally, notice the last quote: “while the government reports it is unable to provide a reliable estimate of” these non-lawful searches “since 2012, there is no apparent reason to believe the November 2015 [to] April 2016 coincided with an unusually high error rate”.

That means the 85% rate of unlawful FISA-702(16)(17) database abuse has likely been happening since 2012.

2012 is an important date in this database abuse because a network of specific interests is assembled that also shows up in 2016/2017:

• Who was the 2012 FBI Director? Robert Mueller.  The same Mueller selected by the FBI group to become a special prosecutor in 2017.
• Who was Robert Mueller’s chief-of-staff? Aaron Zebley.  The same Aaron Zebley, who became one of the lead lawyers on the Mueller special counsel.
• Who was the 2012 CIA Director? John Brennan.
• Who was the 2012 ODNI? James Clapper.
• Remember, the NSA is inside the Pentagon (Defense Dept) command structure. Who was Defense Secretary? Ash Carter.

Now it becomes important to remember in 2016:

• Who wanted NSA Director Mike Rogers fired? Brennan, Clapper, and Carter.
• And finally, who wrote and signed-off-on the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and then lied about the use of the Steele Dossier? John Brennan, James Clapper

Tens of thousands of searches over four years (since 2012), and 85% of them are illegal. The results were extracted for?…. (I believe this is all political opposition use, and I’ll explain why momentarily.)

OK, that’s the stunning scale; but who was involved?

Private contractors with access to “raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to FBI’s requests“:

And as noted, the contractor access was finally halted on April 18th, 2016.

None of this is a conspiracy theory.

All of this is laid out inside this 99-page opinion from FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer who also noted that none of this FISA abuse was accidental in a footnote on page 87: “deliberate decisionmaking“:

This specific footnote, if declassified, would be key. Note the phrase: “([redacted] access to FBI systems was the subject of an interagency memorandum of understanding entered into [redacted])”, this sentence has the potential to expose an internal decision; withheld from congress and the FISA court by the Obama administration; that outlines a process for access and distribution of surveillance data.

Note also: “no notice of this practice was given to the FISC until 2016“, that is important.

Important summary of this aspect: •The FISA court identified and quantified tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the FISA-702(16)(17) system dating back to around 2012.  •The NSA database was repeatedly used by persons with contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown number of entities. •The same people had multiple searches performed against their private information from November of 2015 to May of 2016, the exact time of the Republican presidential primary.

The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and surveillance operation, and we are not the only one to think that’s what this system is being used for.” (Read more: Conservative Treehouse, 3/09/2020)  (Archive)

Cheryl D. Mills speaks during a commitment workshop titled “Haiti: Lessons for the Future” at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting on September 24, 2012. The CGI logo is in the background. (Credit: Reuters)

On June 19, 2012, Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills travels from Washington, DC, to New York City. The next day, she interviews two high-level business executives in order to help the Clinton Foundation find a new leader.

When Clinton became secretary of state, she and the Clinton Foundation agreed to abide by rules specially created in an agreement with the Obama administration not to “create conflicts or the appearance of conflicts for Senator Clinton as Secretary of State.”

When news of this trip is made public in August 2016, Clinton’s campaign will claim that any work Mills did for the Clinton Foundation, such as this trip, was strictly voluntary.

The two executives interviewed by Mills had worked at Pfizer and WalMart, companies that CNN points out “have been huge donors to Foundation, and have worked with the Clinton Global Initiative.” However, neither of them get the job. (CNN, 8/11/2016)

Hillary Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal (Credit: Zumey Press and Evangelical Press Association)

Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal sends Clinton an email with the subject heading: “H: Here it is: latest, latest intell on MB/SCAF inside deal. Sid.” “MB” stands for the “Muslim Brotherhood,” who recently took power in Egypt, and “SCAF” stands for the “Supreme Council of the Armed Forces” of Egypt. The email alleges to contain inside intelligence about political intrigues in that country.

Clinton forwards the email to her aide Jake Sullivan with the comment: “Fyi [For your information]. Worth forwarding.”

Sullivan replies, “Will do. Wonder who his source is.”

Clinton answers, “Former US intell w continuing contacts.” (US Department of State, 1/7/2016)

The FBI will ask her about this in a July 2016 interview. The State Department later marked the email unclassified and left it entirely unredacted. But presumably the FBI is interested in her “Former US intell w continuing contacts” comment, which indicates she knows Blumenthal’s emails are mainly based on intelligence from former CIA official Tyler Drumheller, and she might have some knowledge of Drumheller’s contacts.

But Clinton’s answer doesn’t appear to address that. According to the FBI, “Clinton commented it was a confusing time in Egypt and [the] State [Department] was trying to obtain all of the intelligence it could on Egypt. However, she had no concerns regarding the classification of the email.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Clinton meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in St. Petersburg, Russia, on June 29, 2012. (State Department)

It has been reported that Clinton and President Obama exchanged 18 emails in the four years of Clinton’s secretary of state tenure. However, very few details have been released about any of them, except for this one. This email is an exception because when Clinton will be interviewed by the FBI in July 2016, she will be asked about the email, apparently since it was sent from Russia. A September 2016 FBI report will mention it is sent on July 1, 2012 and that the subject line is: “Fw: Congratulations!”

Additionally, an FBI summary of her interview will mention, “Clinton stated she received no particular guidance as to how she should use the president’s email address [redacted]. Since the foregoing email was sent from Russia, Clinton stated she must have sent it from the plane.”

Elsewhere in the FBI report, it will be mentioned that the FBI was unable to determine whenever Clinton sent emails overseas while on the ground or in an airplane because the State Department didn’t give the FBI detailed enough information about her travel schedule. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin will be asked about this email in an April 2016 FBI interview, though it will be described as “an email chain dated June 28, 2012, with the subject ‘Re: Congratulations!'” According to the FBI summary, “Abedin did not recognize the name of the sender. Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be a pseudonym used by [President Obama], Abedin exclaimed ‘How is this not classified?’ Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email. Abedin provided that she did not go on the trip to St. Petersburg [Russia] and noted that security protocols in St. Petersburg were not necessarily the same as they were in Moscow, where they were not allowed use to their BlackBerrys.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/23/2016)

Based on Abedin’s comments, it appears probable that Clinton sends an email in the chain with her BlackBerry from St. Petersburg, Russia, though it is unclear if she is on an airplane at the time or not, or if the plane is flying on on the ground.

Accordng to some basic details that will be revealed about the Clinton-Obama emails in September 2016, it appears Obama emails Clinton on June 28, 2012, then Clinton replies to him on June 28, 2012, which coincides with her time in St. Petersburg, on June 28 and 29, 2012. Then her aide Monica Hanley sends an email to Obama on July 1, 2012. It is not clear why this Hanley email will later be included in a list of Obama-Clinton emails or why the FBI wil refer to a July 1, 2012 email in Clinton’s FBI interview instead of the June 28, 2012 Clinton email mentioned in the Abedin FBI interview. (Vice News, 09/15/16) (Vicc News, 09/15/16)

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (Credit: Lintao Zhang / The Associated Press)

Clinton is sent an email by State Department official Monica Hanley regarding a phone call to United Nations/Arab League Joint Special Envoy for Syria Kofi Annan. The email is a call sheet to help Clinton with her talking points while speaking to Annan. The first paragraph starts with the text: “(C) Purpose of Call.”  The “(C)” is an official code known as a “portion marking,” and it indicates the information is classified at the “confidential” level. Other sections of the email are marked with (SBU), a code meaning “sensitive but unclassified.” (US Department of State, 11/30/2015)

This is the second time it is known Clinton received an email clearly marked as classified, after getting another one from Hanley in April 2012.  (US Department of State, 1/29/2016) This email’s existence won’t be publicly noticed until after FBI Director James Comey will comment on July 5, 2016 that a very small number of Clinton’s emails were marked classified at the time. (The New York Times, 7/5/2016)

Jared Cohen (Wikipedia)

“While it appears that the civil war in Syria is finally winding down, it is quite apparent that Washington and the military-industrial-Congressional complex most definitely did not get the result that it had hoped for; the removal of Bashar al-Assad and the end of the Assad family regime.

Looking back and with thanks to Google and WikiLeaks, we can the see the lengths that the “Deep State” which includes America’s technology sector was willing to take to help the Obama Administration and, in particular, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, achieve one of its/her key goals in the Middle East.

Now that we have a clear understanding of why the uprising in Syria was so important (i.e. Israel needed it to assure its nuclear primacy in the region), as promised, here is one of Hillary Clinton’s emails dated August 3, 2012 which clearly shows us how Google was willing to help the Secretary achieve her goals in Syria:

The original email was from Jared Cohen, then a director at Google Ideas and now CEO at Jigsaw, the renamed Google Ideas.  Here is his entire resume from the Council on Foreign Relations website where he is touted as one of the great “global thinkers” whatever that might be:

Mr. Cohen was one of the very few members of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s Policy Planning Staff that remained when Hillary Clinton took over in 2009 under the Obama Administration.  He left this position on September 2, 2010, taking a position with the Council on Foreign Relations and was also hired as the first director of Google Ideas (aka Jigsaw) in October 2010.  For those of you who are not aware of Jigsaw, it is a technology incubator that was created by Google with the mantra that it is using its capabilities to build “tools to make the world safer.” (Read more: Russia-Insider, 3/16/2019)

Lt. General Michael Flynn (Credit: public domain)

“Despite warnings about the consequences from senior U.S. officials, the Obama administration made a “willful decision” to support al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other jihadist terror groups in Syria, according to former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief Michael Flynn. That deliberate aid to Islamic terrorists battling Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad played a crucial role in the rise of the “Islamic State” (ISIS or ISIL). While multiple top U.S. officials have already admitted that Obama’s so-called anti-ISIS coalition helped create, arm, and fund ISIS, Flynn is the highest-ranking administration official to publicly discuss the U.S. role in spawning the savage terror group now slaughtering Christians and other minorities across the Middle East. Almost incredibly, the establishment press and Congress have largely ignored the explosive revelations — even as the White House steps up its military aid to jihadist “rebels” in Syria with air support and training.

Speaking during an in-depth interview on Al Jazeera, the Qatari government-sponsored broadcaster, DIA chief Flynn was asked about a 2012 report produced by his agency. The document, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Judicial Watch, contained a number of revelations that should have seen a wide array of senior administration officials prosecuted under U.S. anti-terrorism laws. The secret report confirms what The New American has been reporting almost from the start of the war in Syria: The globalist-backed “revolution” against Assad was a “holy war” being led by al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other jihadist terrorists. The document also highlights the fact that the West and its Sunni Islamic dictator allies were supporting those same forces, and that they wanted to see the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic state in parts of Syria.

(…) During the Al Jazeera Head to Head interview, Lieutenant General Flynn (Ret.), who also served as a commander of the shadowy terror-war assassination squad known as the “Joint Special Operations Command” (J-SOC), confirmed the enormity of the revelations in the document. Despite attempts to downplay the 2012 document by the establishment media, Flynn said he “paid very close attention” to the report when it crossed his desk, and that “the intelligence was very clear.” He also said he had warned the administration against supporting jihadists in Syria. But the White House ignored the warnings, and instead continued providing material support — weapons, PR, communications, funding, training, international legitimacy, and more — to those officially designated terrorist organizations. An everyday U.S. citizen could face decades in prison, or worse, for doing the same actions.” (Read more: New American Magazine, 8/11/2015)

(Timeline editor’s note: The DIA report mentioned by Lt. General Flynn, lists Hillary Clinton as one of many Obama administration officials who were recipients of this report.)

“Hillary Clinton passed along to the White House advice from close personal adviser Sid Blumenthal on how President Barack Obama would do well to use a looming natural disaster as a tool for his reelection bid, despite Blumenthal’s disgraced standing with the Obama administration.

“H: FYI. In case you or Bill have use for this. Done quickly am in spirit of John Lennon (“I read the news today, oh, boy”). Sid,” Blumenthal wrote in the subject line of his email, sent Aug. 26, 2012, two days before Hurricane Isaac made landfall in Louisiana.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walks with President Barack Obama on Sept. 12, 2012, where he spoke about the death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. (Credit: AP)

Documents released today confirm the Obama administration knew weapons were flowing out of Benghazi, Libya, to Syrian rebels in 2012 even though the rebels had well-publicized ties to al-Qaeda and other extremist groups.

Previous reports, including one by WORLD in 2013, have linked U.S. involvement in Libya to arms flowing into Syria, but the new documents provide the first verification that contradicts administration officials and congressional Democrats who maintained there was no evidence to support it. The documents provide further confirmation that the CIA and the State Department—under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—received immediate intelligence that the attack was committed by al-Qaeda- and Muslim Brotherhood-linked brigades, even as Clinton and other officials claimed it was the result of rioting against a Muslim-bashing video.

“Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya, to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria,” says an October 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document released with heavy redactions. It notes the activity took place weeks before terrorists attacked the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, killing four Americans in September: “The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were [500] sniper rifles, [100] RPGs, and [400] 125 mm and 155 mm howitzers missiles.”

Judicial Watch, a Washington, D.C., watchdog group, obtained the cache of more than 100 documents after filing a lawsuit in federal court. The judge who ordered the release, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is a 2013 appointee of President Barack Obama.

“These documents are jaw-dropping,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said. “No wonder we had to file more FOIA lawsuits and wait over two years for them.”

Administration officials—including the CIA’s former acting director in sworn congressional testimony last year—have argued that initial intelligence showed no evidence of a pre-planned attack at Benghazi. But new documents undercut that assertion. A DIA memo dated September 12, 2012, says the attack was planned at least 10 days in advance to “kill as many Americans as possible” in revenge for a U.S. air strike that killed a militant leader in Pakistan and to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

Snippet from DIA memo linked above and  dated September 12, 2012)

That document, also heavily redacted, was circulated to top administration officials, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, four days before U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice went on several national television shows claiming the attack was the result of a spontaneous protest.

Clare Lopez, a member of the Citizens Commission on Benghazi—a group of former intelligence officers, military personnel, and national security experts—told me it comes as no surprise that Benghazi was a retaliatory attack since al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a video had called on the “sons of Libya” to avenge his deputy’s death. Lopez said the Judicial Watch release is “very significant,” because it “begins to peel back a little more of the layers of the onion about what was going on in Benghazi, and why that mission [facility] was there.”

Lopez, a former CIA officer who is now a vice president at the Center for Security Policy, said the commission has confirmed it was not the CIA but the State Department that managed the gun-running operation. According to Lopez, the department put up between $125,000 to $175,000 for each surface-to-air missile it funneled out of Libya to the Syrian battlefield.

The new revelations raise the stakes in the ongoing Benghazi investigation, which threatens to extend deep into the 2016 presidential campaign season. Republican members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, created a year ago following another Judicial Watch release, say the administration is stalling in its production of documents. Democrats have accused Republicans of moving at a “glacial pace” to unnecessarily drag out the probe.

Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 race, has agreed to testify before the panel, but the Republicans who control the committee say they won’t call her until they receive all relevant documents.

Monday’s disclosure includes startling detail showing that U.S. intelligence agencies know about militant activities down to the measurements of a room where al-Qaeda collects documents in Libya. The militants responsible for the Benghazi attacks controlled large caches of weapons “disguised by feeding troughs for livestock” and trained “almost every day focusing on religious lessons and scriptures including three lessons a day of jihadist ideology.”

A DIA report from August 2012 detailed the “dire consequences” of unfolding events in the Middle East, and predicted the rise of ISIS and a possible caliphate 17 months before Obama called the group a “JV team.”

“This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI [al Qaeda Iraq] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters,” the document reads. “ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.”

Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, fell to ISIS last year, and Ramadi fell last week. (World News Group, 5/18/2018)  (Archive)

“Among the thousand cuts Donald Trump delivered to Hillary Clinton en route to her political death was the accusation that she was cozy with the repressive Sultan of Brunei. A 2012 email released Thursday by the U.S. State Department seems to back him up.

In the message, Clinton aide Huma Abedin told the then-presidential candidate that Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, worth a reported $20 billion, wanted to see her and husband Bill for an intimate ‘family style dinner.

Brunei government officials ‘say [the] sultan sees wjc [William Jefferson Clinton] as part of his family and this is treating you in this “informal” way,’ she wrote.

The sultan’s embrace of brutal Muslim Sharia law to guide his nation’s criminal justice system made him the center of controversy two years later when Hollywood celebrities discovered that it criminalized homosexuality – and imposed a potential death penalty for ‘sodomy.

The Sultan of Brunei (left) invites Clinton to an intimate dinner in September 2012. (Credit: Agence France Presse/Getty Images)

The criminal code there also requires stoning to death for adultery, the amputation of limbs for theft, and flogging for abortion and alcohol consumption.

Former ‘Tonight’ show host Jay Leno led a group of picketers outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, which the sultan owns, saying that ‘evil flourishes when good people do nothing, and that is pretty much what this is. This is not complicated. These are not crazy left-wing wacko people.

Daytime TV host Ellen DeGeneres boycotted the hotel, and other sultan-owned properties. So did businessman Richard Branson and Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

Trump raised the issue in a June 2015 speech, saying that Clinton ‘accepted $58,000 in jewelry from the government of Brunei when she was Secretary of State – plus millions more for her foundation.

The Sultan of Brunei has pushed oppressive Sharia law, including the punishment of death by stoning for being gay. The government of Brunei also stands to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Hillary’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she would absolutely approve if given the chance.

The September 2012 email from Huma Abedin lays out the plan for Clinton to visit with the sultan in a more intimate setting than he would allow with most other world leaders.

Clinton, it emerged later, followed the ethics rules requiring her to turn the jewelry over to the federal government for its archives. But Clinton Foundation records show gifts totaling between $1 million and $5 million from the sultan.

Trump also blasted the foundation for taking ‘up to $25 million from Saudi Arabia, where being gay is also punishable by death. Hillary took millions from Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and many other countries that horribly abuse women and LGBT citizens.

Huma Abedin’s email to Clinton noted a previous ‘visit’ with the sultan by Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton – and Hillary’s mother Dorothy Howell Rodham, who had died in 2011. (Read more: Daily Mail, 1/06/2017)

“When distress reports reached U.S. Intelligence in Langley and the Pentagon that the American ambassador to Benghazi and dozens of his diplomatic personnel were under terrorist attack in Libya on Sept. 11 2012, CIA and Defense Department officials scrambled an immediate response.

Officials moved quickly to assemble a counter-terrorism team of professionals to dispatch to Benghazi. That little-known but elite squad, known as the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), is, in fact, the government’s sole inter-agency, on-call and short-notice team trained to respond to any terror-related incident in the world.

But not this time. Not in Benghazi.

Robyn Gritz (Credit: Twitter)

FEST agents intent on rescuing the stranded Americans from the siege on the U.S. diplomatic compounds in Benghazi — including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens – were told to stand down, according to shocking revelations by FBI agents and CIA sources who spoke to True Pundit.

Robyn Gritz, a decorated FBI agent who previously served as the Bureau’s official attaché to the CIA prior to Benghazi, recalls the troubling details surrounding the stand-down order.

Gritz details the FBI counter-terrorism division’s initial emergency meeting to discuss the unfolding events in Benghazi. In the meeting led by now FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, he briefed agents about the violent attacks in Benghazi. McCabe was assistant director of anti-terrorism at the time but running the FBI’s response to Benghazi, sources confirm.

Gritz was already briefed by her Defense Department contacts who instructed her to prepare FBI personnel for the FEST plane.

“I said I got a call from DOD, people that actually put the FEST plane together and I was offered six slots for FBI but I can probably get eight,” she said, recalling the FBI’s initial Benghazi meeting. “McCabe said: ‘No, we don’t need your help with that Robyn or help from DOD.’

“I explained to him that I was the only SSA (Supervisory Special Agent) sitting in this room that has deployed FBI on a FEST plane to a U.S. Embassy under major attack. In Yemen, there were terrorists driving around blowing shit up. And it didn’t stop when we got on the ground. And the same thing happened in Beirut. But McCabe told us all in the meeting the FBI was standing down.”

Gritz led the FBI’s FEST contingency in 2008 in the terror attack on the American Embassy in Yemen. The al Qaeda-affiliated attack – almost four years to the day of the Benghazi siege — killed 18 people.

After the 2012 meeting where Gritz was spurned by McCabe, the FBI veteran said she was barred from further Benghazi briefings and the FBI’s anti-terrorism email chain on the Benghazi attacks. While Gritz was not directly assigned to McCabe’s task force, CIA had sought out her expertise to staff FEST for Benghazi, and Gritz happily volunteered to help McCabe and Mueller in the Bureau’s response. But she was basically told to mind her own business. Regardless, FBI agents quietly sought her counsel on Benghazi but did so in secret away from McCabe and Mueller.

For seasoned FBI agents, McCabe’s stand-down order was hard to process. McCabe told the room – after several emotional eruptions — then-FBI Director Robert Mueller had approved the official “stand down for now” stance, another FBI official familiar with the meeting confirmed.”  (Read more: The True Pundit, 1/17/2018)  (Archive)

(…) Joking about being called ‘liars’ after being caught lying about the Benghazi terrorist attack says a lot about the Obama-Clinton team’s contempt for the rule of law and those four innocent Americans murdered in Libya September 11, 2012. The documents also show that Ben Rhodes, the Obama White House official who created the false story for Susan Rice to use on Benghazi, was planning to orchestrate again an ‘evolving’ explanation about the Benghazi attack by the Intelligence Community in time for then-President Obama’s reelection. You can see how this manipulation is a prelude to Obama’s extensive abuse of the “intelligence community” during the next election to go after President Trump!

Ben Rhodes, right, speaks as Susan Rice listens during the White House Daily Briefing on March 21, 2014. (Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

(…) “It’s hard to keep your story straight if you’re making it up as you go along, which was the modus operandi of Obama fabricator Ben Rhodes.

The Justice Department released 80 pages of records showing top Obama White House officials scrambling to “evolve” its false claims that September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. Government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, began “spontaneously” in response to an anti-Muslim video on the Internet.

The emails reveal top Obama White House official Ben Rhodes and Clinton State Department Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan joking about being called “liars” and “leakers.”

Tommy Vietor (Credit: CSpan screenshot)

On September 16, 2012, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice appeared on five Sunday television talk shows claiming the Benghazi attack was incited spontaneously by an anti-Muslim Internet video. The newly released records show a redacted official’s email from September 27 to then-Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and then-NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor, copying then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, saying, “What’s the plan here?” Rhodes responds:

Broader plan is IC [intelligence community] acknowledgment of an evolving assessment of what took place, which happens to be true (unlike just about everything else we’ve seen reported on Benghazi.)

Further along in the email thread, an official whose name is redacted, says, “Everyone know [sic] Susan [in her TV appearances] was using not just IC approved guidance, but IC created.”

Additionally, Rhodes says to Sullivan and other redacted officials:

“At least you’re only a liar. Could be worse – we’re liars and also allegedly leakers. So you’ve got that going for you, which is something.”

Jake Sullivan (Credit: public domain)

Sullivan replies: “We’re only lying footsoldiers [sic]. You’re lying masterminds. That’s cooler.”

A redacted official replies to Sullivan: “I prefer that we go by henchmen. Has more of a Marvel comic sinisterness to it. There should be a cable show where all the guests, and the anchor, have to wear polygraphs. Or, when there’s a dispute between source, the aggrieved parties take a poly, with some neutral third party rendering judgment. The Biggest Liar.”

Rhodes says to Sullivan: “I’d like to go on television and tell everybody what I think…. Look at it this way. I[t] could be worse. You could be a career bureaucrat whose greatest thrill in life is leaking half-truths, self-justifications and outright lies to the likes of Eli Lake, Kim Dozier, and whoever picks up the phone at Fox News.”

Judicial Watch

We previously uncovered that on September 14 Rhodes and other Obama administration officials were attempting to orchestrate a campaign to “reinforce” President Obama and to portray the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack as being “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy.” Also included were numerous emails sent during the assault on the Benghazi diplomatic facility. The contemporaneous and dramatic emails describe the assault as an “attack:”

Eric Pelofsky (Credit: LinkedIn)

September 11, 2012, 6:41 PM – Senior Advisor Eric Pelofsky, to Susan Rice:

As reported, the Benghazi compound came under attack and it took a bit of time for the ‘Annex’ colleagues and Libyan February 17 brigade to secure it. One of our colleagues was killed – IMO Sean Smith. Amb Chris Stevens, who was visiting Benghazi this week is missing.  U.S. and Libyan colleagues are looking for him…

At 8:51 pm, Pelofsky tells Rice and others that “Post received a call from a person using an [sic] RSO phone that Chris was given saying the caller was with a person matching Chris’s description at a hospital and that he was alive and well.  Of course, if he were alive and well, one could ask why he didn’t make the call himself.”

Later that evening, Pelofsky emailed Rice that he was “very, very worried.  In particular that he [Stevens] is either dead or this was a concerted effort to kidnap him.”  Rice replied, “God forbid.”

(Read more: Judicial Watch, 6/26/2020)  (Archive)

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton honor the victims of the Benghazi terrorist attacks at Andrews Air Force Base on September 14, 2012. (Credit: public domain)

“Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained more than 100 pages of previously classified “Secret” documents from the Department of Defense (DOD)and the Department of State revealing that DOD almost immediately reported that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was committed by the al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood-linked “Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman” (BCOAR), and had been planned at least 10 days in advance. Rahman is known as the Blind Sheikh, and is serving life in prison for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist acts.  The new documents also provide the first official confirmation that shows the U.S. government was aware of arms shipments from Benghazi to Syria.  The documents also include an August 2012 analysis warning of the rise of ISIS and the predicted failure of the Obama policy of regime change in Syria.

(…) A Defense Department document from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), dated September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, details that the attack on the compound had been carefully planned by the BOCAR terrorist group “to kill as many Americans as possible.”  The document was sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Obama White House National Security Council.  The heavily redacted Defense Department “information report” says that the attack on the Benghazi facility “was planned and executed by The Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman (BCOAR).”  The group subscribes to “AQ ideologies:”

The attack was planned ten or more days prior on approximately 01 September 2012. The intention was to attack the consulate and to kill as many Americans as possible to seek revenge for U.S. killing of Aboyahiye ((ALALIBY)) in Pakistan and in memorial of the 11 September 2001 atacks on the World Trade Center buildings.

“A violent radical,” the DIA report says, is “the leader of BCOAR is Abdul Baset ((AZUZ)), AZUZ was sent by ((ZAWARI)) to set up Al Qaeda (AQ) bases in Libya.”  The group’s headquarters was set up with the approval of a “member of the Muslim brother hood movement…where they have large caches of weapons.  Some of these caches are disguised by feeding troughs for livestock.  They have SA-7 and SA-23/4 MANPADS…they train almost every day focusing on religious lessons and scriptures including three lessons a day of jihadist ideology.”

The Defense Department reported the group maintained written documents, in “a small rectangular room, approximately 12 meters by 6 meters…that contain information on all of the AQ activity in Libya.”

(Azuz is again blamed for the Benghazi attack in an October 2012 DIA document.)

Hillary Clinton appears before a Senate committee to testify on the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya. (Credit: Jack Gruber/USA Today)

The DOD documents also contain the first official documentation that the Obama administration knew that weapons were being shipped from the Port of Benghazi to rebel troops in Syria. An October 2012 report confirms:

Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.

During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the ((Qaddafi)) regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The Syrian ports were chosen due to the small amount of cargo traffic transiting these two ports. The ships used to transport the weapons were medium-sized and able to hold 10 or less shipping containers of cargo.

The DIA document further details:

The weapons shipped from Syria during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s and 125mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.  The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea – 125mm and 200ea – 155 mm.]

The heavily redacted document does not disclose who was shipping the weapons.” (Read more: Judicial Watch, 5/18/2015)

Clinton with Libyan rebels upon her departure from Tripoli in Libya on October 18, 2011. (Credit: Reuters)

“Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained more than 100 pages of previously classified “Secret” documents from the Department of Defense (DOD)and the Department of State revealing that DOD almost immediately reported that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was committed by the al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood-linked “Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman” (BCOAR), and had been planned at least 10 days in advance. Rahman is known as the Blind Sheikh, and is serving life in prison for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist acts.  The new documents also provide the first official confirmation that shows the U.S. government was aware of arms shipments from Benghazi to Syria.  The documents also include an August 2012 analysis warning of the rise of ISIS and the predicted failure of the Obama policy of regime change in Syria.

The documents were released in response to a court order in accordance with a May 15, 2014, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against both the DOD and State Department seeking communications between the two agencies and congressional leaders “on matters related to the activities of any agency or department of the U.S. government at the Special Mission Compound and/or classified annex in Benghazi” (Judicial Watch v U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of State(No. 1:14-cv-00812)).

Spelling and punctuation are duplicated in this release without corrections.

A Defense Department document from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), dated September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, details that the attack on the compound had been carefully planned by the BOCAR terrorist group “to kill as many Americans as possible.”  The document was sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Obama White House National Security Council.  The heavily redacted Defense Department “information report” says that the attack on the Benghazi facility “was planned and executed by The Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman (BCOAR).”  The group subscribes to “AQ ideologies:”

The attack was planned ten or more days prior on approximately 01 September 2012. The intention was to attack the consulate and to kill as many Americans as possible to seek revenge for U.S. killing of Aboyahiye ((ALALIBY)) in Pakistan and in memorial of the 11 September 2001 atacks on the World Trade Center buildings.

“A violent radical,” the DIA report says, is “the leader of BCOAR is Abdul Baset ((AZUZ)), AZUZ was sent by ((ZAWARI)) to set up Al Qaeda (AQ) bases in Libya.”  The group’s headquarters was set up with the approval of a “member of the Muslim brother hood movement…where they have large caches of weapons.  Some of these caches are disguised by feeding troughs for livestock.  They have SA-7 and SA-23/4 MANPADS…they train almost every day focusing on religious lessons and scriptures including three lessons a day of jihadist ideology.”

The Defense Department reported the group maintained written documents, in “a small rectangular room, approximately 12 meters by 6 meters…that contain information on all of the AQ activity in Libya.”

(Azuz is again blamed for the Benghazi attack in an October 2012 DIA document.)

The DOD documents also contain the first official documentation that the Obama administration knew that weapons were being shipped from the Port of Benghazi to rebel troops in Syria. An October 2012 report confirms:

Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.

During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the ((Qaddafi)) regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The Syrian ports were chosen due to the small amount of cargo traffic transiting these two ports. The ships used to transport the weapons were medium-sized and able to hold 10 or less shipping containers of cargo.

The DIA document further details:

The weapons shipped from Syria during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s and 125mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.  The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea – 125mm and 200ea – 155 mm.]

The heavily redacted document does not disclose who was shipping the weapons.

Another DIA report, written in August 2012 (the same time period the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria), said that the opposition in Syria was driven by al Qaeda and other extremist Muslim groups: “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The growing sectarian direction of the war was predicted to have dire consequences for Iraq, which included the “grave danger” of the rise of ISIS:

The deterioration of the situation has dire consequences on the Iraqi situation and are as follows:

This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI [al Qaeda Iraq] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters. ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.

Some of the “dire consequences” are blacked out but the DIA presciently warned one such consequence would be the “renewing facilitation of terrorist elements from all over the Arab world entering into Iraqi Arena.”

From a separate lawsuit, the State Department produced a document created the morning after the Benghazi attack by Hillary Clinton’s offices, and the Operations Center in the Office of the Executive Secretariat that was sent widely through the agency, including to Joseph McManus (then-Hillary Clinton’s executive assistant).  At 6:00 am, a few hours after the attack, the top office of the State Department sent a “spot report” on the “Attack on U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi” that makes no mention of videos or demonstrations:

Four COM personnel were killed and three were wounded in an attack by dozens of fighters on the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi beginning approximately 1550 Eastern Time….

The State Department has yet to turn over any documents from the secret email accounts of Hillary Clinton and other top State Department officials.

“These documents are jaw-dropping. No wonder we had to file more FOIA lawsuits and wait over two years for them.  If the American people had known the truth – that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other top administration officials knew that the Benghazi attack was an al-Qaeda terrorist attack from the get-go – and yet lied and covered this fact up – Mitt Romney might very well be president. And why would the Obama administration continue to support the Muslim Brotherhood even after it knew it was tied to the Benghazi terrorist attack and to al Qaeda? These documents also point to a connection between the collapse in Libya and the ISIS war – and confirm that the U.S. knew remarkable details about the transfer of arms from Benghazi to Syrian jihadists,” stated Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch president.  “These documents show that the Benghazi cover-up has continued for years and is only unraveling through our independent lawsuits. The Benghazi scandal just got a whole lot worse for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.” (Judicial Watch, 5/18/2015)

Clinton testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee re the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, on January 23, 2013. (Credit Saul Loeb/Agence France Presse/Getty Images)

“Judicial Watch made public on Oct. 21, a 2012 email chain showing multiple senior U.S. State Department executives used then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unsecured private email to discuss the most sensitive details of the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, died in the assault, which within hours was attributed by the Obama White House to an internet video that critically portrayed Islam and its founder, Mohammed.

(…) The first email in the long chain, dated Sept. 29, 2012, was from Jacob Sullivan, Clinton’s then-senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, to Clinton and copied to Mills.

The email was also forwarded to Philippe Reines, who was Clinton’s then-deputy assistant secretary of state for communications. The occasion for Sullivan’s email was Clinton’s need for Benghazi information to use in a forthcoming telephone call to an unidentified U.S. senator.

After first apologizing for a briefing that apparently angered Clinton, Sullivan then said “the White House and [then-White House national security adviser] Susan [Rice] were not making things up. They were going with what they were told by the IC [intelligence community].

“The real story may have been obvious to you from the start (and indeed I called it an assault by heavily armed militants in my first statement), but the IC gave us very different information. They were unanimous about it.”

Sullivan’s comment that “the real story may have been obvious to you from the start” indicates Clinton suppressed her initial view that the attack had been planned beforehand and instead, for several days afterward, she publicly attributed it to “spontaneous” protests sparked by the internet video.” (Read more: The Epoch Times, 10/21/2019)  (Archive)

Aurelia Fedenisn ( Credit: CBS News)

“CBS News‘ John Miller reports that according to an internal State Department Inspector General’s memo, [dated October 2012], several recent investigations were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS News cited eight specific examples. Among them: allegations that a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail “engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries” — a problem the report says was “endemic.”

The memo also reveals details about an “underground drug ring” was operating near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and supplied State Department security contractors with drugs.

Aurelia Fedenisn, a former investigator with the State Department’s internal watchdog agency, the Inspector General, told Miller, “We also uncovered several allegations of criminal wrongdoing in cases, some of which never became cases.”

In such cases, DSS agents told the Inspector General’s investigators that senior State Department officials told them to back off, a charge that Fedenisn says is “very” upsetting.

“We were very upset. We expect to see influence, but the degree to which that influence existed and how high up it went, was very disturbing,” she said.

In one specific and striking cover-up, State Department agents told the Inspector General they were told to stop investigating the case of a U.S. Ambassador who held a sensitive diplomatic post and was suspected of patronizing prostitutes in a public park.

The State Department Inspector General’s memo refers to the 2011 investigation into an ambassador who “routinely ditched … his protective security detail” and inspectors suspect this was in order to “solicit sexual favors from prostitutes.”

Sources told CBS News that after the allegations surfaced, the ambassador was called to Washington, D.C. to meet with Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, but was permitted to return to his post.

Fedenisn says “hostile intelligence services” allow such behavior to continue. “I would be very surprised if some of those entities were not aware of the activities,” she said. “So yes, it presents a serious risk to the United States government.”

A draft of the Inspector General’s report on the performance of the DSS, obtained by CBS News, states, “Hindering such cases calls into question the integrity of the investigative process, can result in counterintelligence vulnerabilities and can allow criminal behavior to continue.” (Read more: CBS News, 6/10/2013)

US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman, with his wife in Brussels, was investigated over claims he solicited prostitutes and minor children. (Credit: Zuma Press)

The following day, Foreign Policy writes, “In a fast-developing story, U.S. ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman has been named as the diplomat accused of soliciting “sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children,” according to State Department documents obtained by NBC News. Gutman denied the allegations, in a statement to The Cable and other outlets.

“I am angered and saddened by the baseless allegations that have appeared in the press and to watch the four years I have proudly served in Belgium smeared is devastating,” he said. “At no point have I ever engaged in any improper activity.” (Read more: Foreign Policy, 6/11/2013)

On June 17, 2013, Foreign Policy writes, “The State Department investigator who accused colleagues last week of using drugs, soliciting prostitutes, and having sex with minors says that Foggy Bottom is now engaged in an “intimidation” campaign to stop her.

Last week’s leaks by Aurelia Fedenisn, a former State Department inspector general investigator, shined a light on alleged wrongdoing by U.S. officials around the globe. But her attorney Cary Schulman tells The Cable that Fedenisn has paid a steep price: “They had law enforcement officers camp out in front of her house, harass her children and attempt to incriminate herself.”

Fedenisn’s life changed dramatically last Monday after she handed over documents and statements to CBS News alleging that senior State Department officials “influenced, manipulated, or simply called off” several investigations into misconduct. The suppression of investigations was noted in an early draft of an Inspector General report, but softened in the final version.

Erich Hart, general counsel to the Inspector General, did not reply to a request for comment. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said last week that “we hold all employees to the highest standards. We take allegations of misconduct seriously and we investigate thoroughly.” She also announced that the department would request additional review by outside law enforcement officers on OIG inspection processes.” (Read more: Foreign Policy, 6/17/2013)

The State Department is responding to claims that officials may have covered up alleged illegal and inappropriate behavior by department personnel, while an ambassador is accused of “routinely” soliciting sexual favors. NBC’s Chuck Todd reports. (Today, 6/11/2013) 

(Credit: public domain)

“More details are coming to light days after the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell on June 2nd, 2020. The woman famous for her attachments to the late Jeffrey Epstein is turning out to have been perhaps more of the mastermind than first thought. Property connections and submarine operations aren’t typical and a wild plot to have the UN issue passports for the ocean is just weird. Her family history alone puts her in a league above most other illicit international operators. Ghislaine Maxwell’s company TerraMar appears to tie much of it together.

After her arrest this month on child sex trafficking crimes, multiple plaintiffs have connected her to highly evolved pedophile and human trafficking rings. After the death of Robert Maxwell, her father, in 1991 she moved to a Manhattan Property owned by Lynn Foreseter de Rothschild, whose husband is the British mega banker Evelyn Robert de Rothschild. The property is also listed as the base for TerraMar.

The TerraMar Project was a non-profit company that Ghislaine Maxwell started in 2012. Jeffrey Epstein and various other high power financiers funded the venture. The company described itself as an ocean conservation group but it shut down by 2019 over sex trafficking crimes stemming from Epstein’s arrest. It was only six days after Jeffrey Epstein was brought into custody that the firm announced it was shutting down permanently.

TerraMar didn’t last long but its short life was full of suspicious activity. The company had immediate support from globalist organizations including the Clinton Foundation. Maxwell attended multiple United Nations (UN) meetings and even spoke to the council as the founder of TerraMar. Ghislaine and another man from the company’s Board of Directors, Scott Borgerson, spoke in Washington DC at a special event sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.

(Read more: Repub.li, 7/07/2020)  (Archive)

Media Matters Logo (Credit: public domain)

Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal sends Clinton an email with the message, “Got all this done. Complete refutation on Libya smear. Philippe can circulate these links. Sid.” The email also includes links to four recent Media Matters stories questioning aspects of the House Benghazi Committee’s investigation of the government’s response to the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack that is very critical of Clinton and her State Department. For instance, one of the stories, published the same day Blumenthal’s email is written, has the title: “Right-Wing Media’s Libya Consulate Security Mythology Falls Apart.”

None of the articles have a Blumenthal by-line, but his “got this done” comment suggests he is somehow involved in making them. Media Matters is a pro-Clinton media watchdog group chaired by David Brock, who will later head Clinton’s main Super PAC for her 2016 presidential campaign.

Clinton replies with the message “Passing on,” and forwards the email to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines, as Blumenthal requested. (US Department of State, 11/30/2015) (Media Matters, 10/10/2012) (Media Matters, 10/10/2012) (Media Matters, 9/26/2012) (Media Matters, 10/9/2012)

In June 2015, Blumenthal will reveal under oath that he was paid around $200,000 a year by Media Matters for a part-time consulting beginning in late 2012, or around the time of this email. (Fox News, 6/19/2015) (The Los Angeles Times, 6/27/2016)

In early 2009, President Obama banned Clinton from giving Blumenthal a State Department job, but this email suggests the ban was not entirely effective.

Jeremy Bash (left) Leon Panetta (right) (Credits: public domain)

Jeremy Bash, who is chief of staff to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at the time, sends an email to four other US officials, including Clinton aides Jake Sullivan and Cheryl Mills. Sullivan then forwards the email to Clinton. The email has the subject heading: “This a.m. Green on Blue.” That is an idiom referring to when police attacks soldiers. The email refers to an Afghan police officer triggering a suicide vest and killing or wounding 14 Americans or Afghans, including one dead American.

The email will later be classified at the “secret” level, suggesting some important classified information in it, but its redactions make it difficult to understand. There is no indication of a reply from Clinton. (US Department of State, 1/29/2016)

In Clinton’s July 2016 FBI interview, she will be specifically asked about this email, again suggesting something unusual about it. However, her answer will also be heavily reacted. For instance, “Clinton believed she would be speculating if she were to state what [redacted] meant when he referred to [redacted].” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Dario Lorenzetti (public domain)

On February 4, 2016, NBC News will reveal that the email concerns undercover CIA officer Dario Lorenzetti. He died in the suicide attack described in the email. Lorenzetti’s CIA connection was leaked to the media by anonymous officials four days after his death and was widely reported in the news media, although his CIA cover was not lifted until later.

According to NBC News, in the redacted portions of the email, it seems Bash was trying “to preserve the CIA officer’s cover. But some of the language he used, now that Lorenzetti is known to have been a CIA officer, could be read as a US government acknowledgement that CIA officers pose as State Department personnel in a specific country, Afghanistan — something widely known but not formally admitted.” This is why the email is classified at the “secret” level.

Bash ends the email by instructing a CIA spokesperson to “please lash up with [redacted].” NBC News will indicate the missing word is “presumably either the spy agency or one of its employees.” (NBC News, 2/4/2016)

This may be the phrase that the FBI asked Clinton about, and to which she replied that “she would be speculating if she were to state what [redacted] meant when he referred to [redacted].” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

NBC News will also interview Bash about this email. Bash will claim that the email “did not reference the individual’s name, employer, nor any identifying description or information.” Additionally, once the CIA posthumously lifted Lorenzetti’s cover, “the original unclassified email could be read to confirm the general use of cover, prompting the redactions we now see. But any suggestion that this email contained confirmation about the person or his cover, or any inappropriate information, is flat wrong.” (NBC News, 2/4/2016)

It’s 3:00 a.m. on November 7, 2012.

With the painfully close presidential election now down to who wins the battleground state of Ohio, no network dares to call the race and risk repeating the mistakes of 2000 when a few networks jumped the gun on picking a winner.

As the magic boards used by the networks go ‘up close and personal’ on every county in the Buckeye State, word begins to circulate that there might be a snafu with some electronic voting machines in a number of Cincinnati based precincts. There have already been complaints that broken machines were not being quickly replaced in precincts that tend to lean Democratic and now, word is coming in that there may be some software issues.

Hart Intercivic logo

The network political departments get busy and, in short order, discover that the machines used in Hamilton County, Ohio—the county home of Cincinnati— are supplied by Hart Intercivic, a national provider of voting systems in use in a wide variety of counties scattered throughout the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Hawaii, Colorado and Ohio.

A quick Internet search reveals that there may be reason for concern.

A test conducted in 2007 by the Ohio Secretary of State revealed that five of the electronic voting systems the state was looking to use in the upcoming 2008 presidential election had failed badly, each easily susceptible to chicanery that could alter the results of an election.

As reported in the New York Times, “At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.”

We learn that one of the companies whose machines had failed was none other than Hart Intercivic.

With television time to fill and no ability to declare a winner so that the long night’s broadcast can be brought to a close, the staffs keep digging for relevant information to keep the attention of their viewers—and that is when it gets very real.

H.I.G. Capital headquarters in Miami, Florida

It turns out that Hart Intercivic is owned, in large part, by H.I.G. Capital—a large investment fund with billions of dollars under management—that was founded by a fellow named Tony Tamer. While it is unclear just how much H.I.G. owns of Hart Intercivic, we do learn that H.I.G. employees hold at least two of the five Hart Intercivic board seats.

A little more digging turns up a few tidbits of data than soon become ‘the story’.

Tony Tamer, H.I.G.’s founder, turns out to be a major bundler for the Mitt Romney campaign,  along with three other directors of H.I.G. who are also big-time money raisers for Romney.

Indeed, as fate would have it, two of those directors—Douglas Berman and Brian Schwartz— were actually in attendance at the now infamous “47 percent” fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida.

(…)  And finally, we learn that H.I.G. is the 11^th largest of all the contributors to the Romney effort.

Did I say “finally”? My bad…because there is, indeed, more.

Can you guess who is reported to have a financial relationship with H.I.G. Capital?

Paul Ryan, an investment partner with Solamere Capital, chats with Tagg Romney at a Solamere event. (Credit: Solamere Capital)

Numerous media sources, including Truthout, are reporting that Solamere Capital—the investment firm run by Mitt Romney’s son, Tagg, and the home of money put into the closely held firm by Tagg’s uncle Scott, mother Anne and, of course, the dad who might just be the next President of the United States—depending upon how the vote count turns out, in our little tale, in the State of Ohio—have shared business interests with H.I.G. either directly or via Solamere Advisors which is owned, in part, by Solamere Capital, including a reported investment in H.I.G. by either Solamere Capital or Solamere Advisors.

Lee Fang, in his piece for The Nation exploring the government related activities of various companies in which Solamere has an interest writes-

“Meanwhile, HIG Capital—one of the largest Solamere partners, with nearly $10 billion of equity capital—owns a number of other firms that are closely monitoring the federal government. ”

While the Cincinnati scenario is —at this point—fiction, the rest of this story is all too true, including the part where the voting machines to be used in Hamilton County will be those provided by Hart Intercivic.

And while I am not suggesting conspiracies or that anyone would get involved in any foul play here, most particularly the GOP candidate for President, how is it possible that so many people could exercise so much bad judgment?

The sanctity of voting in America is supposed to be one of our most important virtues. So concerned are we with a ‘clean’ process that James O’Keefe has made a career entrapping, video taping and destroying those sympathetic to Democratic Party candidates and causes who cross the line when it comes to the voting process. And that’s just fine. If Mr. O’Keefe can legitimately expose someone engaging in voter fraud, he most certainly should call them out.

So, why would these individuals who serve on the board of directors of Hart Intercivic go out of their way to make a contribution to any political candidate given the critical importance of their company remaining above reproach when it comes to the political process? And why would those who run the company that owns Hart Intercivic be giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to a political candidate? And why would a political candidate and his family have a financial relationship with a company that owns a chunk of the voting machine company that will be counting the actual votes given to that political candidate or his opponent? (Read more: Forbes, 10/20/2012)  (Archive) h/t @seacaptim

Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital also became part owners of the Smartmatic voting machines in 2010:

This is the longeest down time by far during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The only other significant outage is for three days during Hurricane Irene in August 2011. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

On December 6, 2012, the non-profit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) files a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, asking for records that show the number of Clinton’s email accounts. (US Department of State, 7/29/2016)

Brock Johnson (Credit: Facebook)

Five days later, State Department official Brock Johnson sends an email to Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills about this. It has the subject heading: “FW: Significant FOIA Request.” This email will be made public in July 2016 due to a different FOIA request by Judicial Watch.

Johnson writes in his email: “FYI [For your information] on the attached FOIA request from: ‘The request by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) ask for “records sufficient to show the number of email accounts of or associated with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton.”‘” Then he forwards an email to him about the request, and also includes the entire request as an attachment. (US Department of State, 7/29/2016)

A snippet of Brock Johnson’s email to Cheryl Mills. (Credit: public domain)

It appears likely that Mills then forwards this email to Clinton, because Clinton will be interviewed by the FBI in July 2016, and she will be asked about over a dozen specific emails sent to her, and she will be asked about an email sent on the same date, December 11, 2012, with the exact same subject heading, “FW: Significant FOIA Report.” If Clinton is sent the email, it isn’t included in the over 30,000 work-related emails Clinton will give to the State Department in December 2014.

According to a later FBI report, “Clinton stated she did not recall the specific request and was not aware of receiving any FOIA requests for information related to her email during her tenure as secretary of state. [The] State [Department] had a FOIA department and Clinton relied on the professionals in that department to address FOIA matters.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Although it has not been confirmed Clinton gets the email, there’s no doubt Mills does. And even though Mills is very aware of Clinton’s private email address since she frequently sends emails to it, she doesn’t take any action and merely has an aide monitor the progress of CREW’s request.

Melanie Sloan (Credit: CREW)

Melanie Sloan, the executive director of CREW, will later say, “Cheryl Mills should have corrected the record. She knew this wasn’t a complete and full answer.”

In May 2013, the State Department will respond to CREW, “no records responsive to your request were located.” Other requests for Clinton’s records will meet the same fate until the House Benghazi Committee finds out about her private email account in 2014.

Steve Linick, the State Department’s inspector general, will conclude in a 2016 report that the State Department gave an “inaccurate and incomplete” response about Clinton’s email use to CREW and in other similar cases. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016) (The Washington Post, 1/6/2016)

American Bridge Logo (Credit: public domain)

When Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal will be questioned by the House Benghazi Committee in June 2015, he will reveal that in addition to the $120,000 a year he is paid for working at the Clinton Foundation, starting at “the very end of 2012,” he is also paid about $200,000 a year consulting part-time for Media Matters and related organizations. He will also say at the time of the interview that he is still being paid that much or even more.

Media Matters is a pro-Clinton media watchdog group chaired by David Brock, who also will run Clinton’s main Super PAC in her 2016 presidential campaign. Additionally, Blumenthal will say he works for Correct the Record, American Bridge, and American Independent Institute, which also are pro-Clinton organizations run by Brock.

In June 2016, when this information is publicly revealed by accident in a document released by Congressional Democrats, the Los Angeles Times will call Blumenthal’s part-time salary an “eye-popping amount of money” which “exposes once again the absurd amounts of money people in the orbit of the Clintons sometimes seem to rake in just for, well, being in the orbit of the Clintons.” (The Los Angeles Times, 6/27/2016) (Fox News, 6/19/2015)

The Tor Logo (Credit: public domain)

This is according to a FBI report that will be released in September 2016. It is known the staffer whose account gets breached is female, but her name will be redacted. The unnamed hacker uses the anonymity software Tor to browse through this staffer’s messages and attachments on the server.

The FBI will call this the only confirmed “successful compromise of an email account on the server.” But the FBI will not be able to determine who the hacker is or how the hacker obtained the staffer’s username and password to access her account. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

Wired will later comment, “The compromise of a Bill Clinton staffer—who almost certainly had no access to any of then-Secretary Clinton’s classified material—doesn’t make the security of those classified documents any clearer. But it will no doubt be seized on by the Clintons’ political opponents to raise more questions about their server’s security.”

Dave Aitel (Credit: Immunity)

Clinton’s computer technician Bryan Pagliano is in charge of monitoring the server’s access logs at the time.

But Dave Aitel, a former NSA security analyst and founder of the cypersecurity company Immunity, will later comment that the breach shows a lack of attention to the logs. “They weren’t auditing and restricting IP addresses accessing the server. That’s annoying and difficult when your user is the secretary of state and traveling all around the world… But if she’s in Russia and I see a login from Afghanistan, I’d say that’s not right, and I’d take some intrusion detection action. That’s not the level this team was at.” (Wired, 9/2/2016)

When Pagliano is interviewed by the FBI in December 2015, he will claim that he knew of no instance when the server was successfully breached, suggesting he didn’t know about this incident. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

And when Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton aide who helped Pagliano manage the server, will be asked about the incident in September 2016, he will say he knew nothing about it until he read about it in the FBI report released earlier that month. (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

In a July 2016 FBI interview, “Clinton [will state] that she received no instructions or direction regarding the preservation or production of records from [the] State [Department] during the transition out of her role as secretary of state in early 2013. Furthermore, Clinton believed her work-related emails were captured by her practice of sending emails to State employees’ official State email accounts.”

A May 2016 State Department inspector general report will conclude this wasn’t a proper method, and Clinton should have printed and filed her emails when she left office. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

FBI Vault Home Page for Hillary Clinton Emails Parts 1 – 41

Hillary Rodham Clinton served as U.S. Secretary of State from January 21, 2009 to February 1, 2013. The FBI conducted an investigation into allegations that classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on a personal e-mail server she used during her tenure.

FBI Records: The Vault – Hillary Clinton

Twitter user @walkafyre provides an alternative way to read all of the FBI Clinton vault releases:

Welcome to the MYE Files

This site was created to better organize and research the FBI files related to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, code-named “Midyear Exam,” or “MYE” for short, which have been released by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). This site provides users the ability to research and organize the MYE documents released under FOIA in a more structured environment. For additional information on how an FBI’s case system is organized, FOIA procedures, or the structure/organization of this site, please visit the About section using the tab above.

At the end of Clinton’s tenure of secretary of state in February 2013, her private server is still being managed by Bryan Pagliano and Justin Cooper, with Pagliano doing most of the technical work and Cooper doing most of the customer service work. The management of the server will be taken over by the Platte River Networks (PRN) computer company in June 2013. It seems possible that the server is not as actively managed in the months in between.

Justin Cooper testifies to the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee on September 13, 2016. (Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images)

In September 2016, Cooper will be questioned by a Congressional committee. Representative Jason Chaffetz (R) will ask him, “[Y]ou stepped back from the day-to-day activities with the Clintons about the time of the transition, is that correct? As she left office?”

He will reply, ‘Yes.”

When asked about his knowledge of what happened to server security after the hacker known as Guccifer broke into the email account of a Clinton confidant and publicly exposed Clinton’s email address on the server in March 2013, Cooper will reply, “At that point in time I was transitioning out of any role or responsibility with the server as various teams were selecting Platte River Networks to take over the email services and I don’t know that I had any sort of direct response.”

Additionally, when Cooper will be asked about his contact with PRN, he will say, “My interaction was handing over user names and passwords and that was the totality of the interaction I’ve had. I’ve never had interaction with them.” (US Congress, 9/13/2016)

It is not known if Pagliano similarly cuts down his involvement with managing the server during this time, since he has refused to publicly comment about his experiences. The FBI has mentioned nothing about the management of Pagliano or Cooper during this time period. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

“As congressional Republicans prepare to release a House Intelligence Committee report that paints former President Barack Obama as a “vengeful narcissist” who sought to punish his political enemies with the efficiency of a Russian KGB operative, a 2013 statement from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has resurfaced that supports the image of Obama as a heavy-handed tyrant.

Waters’ odious remarks came during a 2013 interview with journalist Roland Martin as the pair were discussing the future of the Democratic Party post-Obama. The California liberal lauded Obama’s efforts at establishing a “database [that] will have information about everything on every individual.”

Just five months after the Martin interview, Obama was exposed by NSA leaker Eric Snowden for operating a massive government surveillance program which targeted just about every American to ever use a cellular or communicate from the internet. The Washington Post described the program as a massive expansion of President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.

Yet, Americans were ignorant of this program at the time of Waters’ interview, explaining why the implications of her remarks were never addressed by the mainstream media. The discussion turned to the database seemingly without provocation. Speaking about Obama’s last term in office, Martin said that Democratic lawmakers “better get what you can while he’s there because, look come 2016, that’s it.”

Watch the exchange below:

The ramifications of Waters’ comments were compounded by events on Capitol Hill this week. The House Intelligence Committee released a memo to the rest of their colleagues in Congress which alleged that Obama may have turned U.S. Intelligence agencies into his own partisan political enforcers.

Although lawmakers are currently forbidden from discussing the contents of the memo, sources close to the House-led investigation say that the report reviews Obama’s use of FISA surveillance against his political enemies. After viewing the memo in a classified setting, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said, “You think about, ‘is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That’s how alarming it is.” (Read more: Conservative Institute, 1/30/2018)

“Something that has gone unnoticed in all the talk about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails is the content of the original leak that started the entire investigation to begin with. In March of 2013, a Romanian hacker calling himself Guccifer hacked into the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal and leaked to Russia Today four e-mails containing intelligence on Libya that Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton.

For those who haven’t been following this story, Sidney Blumenthal is a long time friend and adviser of the Clinton family who in an unofficial capacity sent many “intelligence memos” to Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State. Originally displayed on RT.com in Comic Sans font on a pink background with the letter “G” clumsily drawn as a watermark, no one took these leaked e-mails particularly seriously when they came out in 2013. Now, however, we can cross reference this leak with the e-mails the State Department released to the public.

The first three e-mails in the Russia Today leak from Blumenthal to Clinton all appear word for word in the State Department release. The first e-mail Clinton asks to have printed and she also forwards it to her deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan. The second e-mail Clinton describes as “useful insight” and forwards it to Jake Sullivan asking him to circulate it. The third e-mail is also forwarded to Jake Sullivan. The fourth e-mail is missing from the State Department record completely.

The original Blumenthal email released by Guccifer and missing from Clinton’s emails. (Credit: Guccifer)

This missing e-mail from February 16, 2013 only exists in the original leak and states that French and Libyan intelligence agencies had evidence that the In Amenas and Benghazi attacks were funded by “Sunni Islamists in Saudi Arabia.” This seems like a rather outlandish claim on the surface, and as such was only reported by conspiracy types and fringe media outlets. Now, however, we have proof that the other three e-mails in the leak were real correspondence from Blumenthal to Clinton that she not only read, but thought highly enough of to send around to others in the State Department. Guccifer speaks English as a second language and most of his writing consists of rambling conspiracies, it’s unlikely he would be able to craft such a convincing fake intelligence briefing. This means we have an e-mail from a trusted Clinton adviser that claims the Saudis funded the Benghazi attack, and not only was this not followed up on, but there is not any record of this e-mail ever existing except for the Russia Today leak.

Why is this e-mail missing? At first I assumed it must be due to some sort of cover up, but it’s much simpler than that. The e-mail in question was sent after February 1st, 2013, when John Kerry took over as Secretary of State, so it was not part of the time period being investigated. No one is trying to find a copy of this e-mail. Since Clinton wasn’t Secretary of State on February 16th, it wasn’t her job to follow up on it. (Read more: William Reynolds, 3/07/2016)

Monica Hanley (Credit: Bolton-St. Johns)

In the spring of 2013, Clinton aide Monica Hanley works with Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper to create an archive of Clinton’s emails. Clinton aide Huma Abedin will later tell the FBI that the archive was created as a reference for the future production of a book. Whereas Hanley will later tell the FBI that the archive was created as a security precaution after Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal had his email account broken into on March 14, 2013, publicly exposing Clinton’s email address.

Cooper gives Hanley an Apple MacBook laptop from the Clinton Foundation and helps her through the process of remotely transferring Clinton’s emails from Clinton’s server to the laptop and a thumb drive. These two copies of the Clinton emails are intended to be stored in Clinton’s houses in Chappaqua, New York, and Whitehaven, Washington, DC. However, Hanley will tell the FBI that this doesn’t happen because she forgets to give the laptop and the thumb drive to Clinton’s staff.

Nearly a full year will pass before Hanley finds the laptop again. She will send it though the mail, only to apparently have it get permanently lost somehow. It is unclear what happens to the thumb drive, but it will not be seen again either. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

On March 14, 2013, the Romanian hacker known as Guccifer broke into the email account of Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal and learned Clinton’s private email address and thus her clintonemail.com server domain.

A September 2016 FBI report will reveal that “An examination of log files [of Clinton’s server] from March 2013 indicated that IP addresses from Russia and Ukraine attempted to scan the server on March 15, 2013, the day after the Blumenthal compromise, and on March 19 and March 21, 2013. However, none of these attempts were successful, and it could not be determined whether this activity was attributable to [Guccifer].” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

On March 14, 2013, the Romanian hacker nicknamed Guccifer broke into the email account of Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal and made Clinton’s private email address public. Cheryl Mills was Clinton’s chief of staff until January 2013, when both she and Clinton left the State Department. But Mills continues to assist Clinton, and in August 2016 she will mention in written answers to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that she was concerned at this time how the Guccifer hack could impact the running of Clinton’s private email server.

She says she discussed the issue with Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s computer technician “in or around March 2013, when the email account of Sidney Blumenthal was compromised by a hacker known as Guccifer. As I recall, these discussions involved whether this event might affect Secretary Clinton’s email.”

Clinton changed her email address several days after the Guccifer hack was discovered. However, the server continued to operate and her new email address was also hosted on the same server. It is still unknown whether Pagliano or anyone else took any other security steps in response to the hack. (Politico, 8/10/2016)

“Judicial Watch today released new documents from the U.S. Department of State showing the Podesta Group working on behalf of the pro-Russia Ukrainian political group “Party of Regions.” The new documents also show longtime Obama and Clinton counselor John Podesta lobbying on behalf of his brother’s firm.

Judicial Watch obtained the documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department filed on November 20, 2017, (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:17-cv-02489)). The lawsuit was filed after the State Department failed to respond to a September 13, 2017, FOIA request for:

• All records of communication between any official, employee, or representative of the Department of State and any principal, employee, or representative of Podesta Group, Inc.
• All records produced related to any meetings or telephonic communications between any official, employee, or representative of the Department of State and any principal, employee, or representative of Podesta Group, Inc.
• All records regarding the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine.
• The FOIA request covers the timeframe of January 1, 2012 to the present.

A March 28, 2013, email from now-Deputy Executive Secretary in the Office of the Secretary of State Baxter Hunt shows the Podesta Group, led by Tony Podesta, a Clinton bundler and brother of Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta, represented the Party of Regions, a pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine.

In the March 2013 email, to a number of officials including then-U.S. Foreign Service Officer John Tefft (who would go on to be U.S. Ambassador to Russia in 2014) and State Department director for the Office of Eastern Europe Alexander Kasanof, Hunt writes:

See below, I also stressed to them the need for GOU to take concrete steps to get new SBA with IMF and avoid PFC/loss of GSP. Podesta Group is noted among host of Ukraine lobbyists in article I’ll forward in article on low side.

• Ben Chang and Mark Tavlarides of the Podesta Group, which is representing the Party of Regions, told us they were working with Klyuyev on a visit he plans to make to Washington in early May. They are working to broaden the POR’s contacts on the Hill, including setting up a meeting for Klyuyev with Chris Smith, and have advised Kyiv to stop trying to justify their actions against Tymoshenko in Washington. They also noted that during his recent meeting with former EC President Prodi, HFAC Chairman Ed Royce said that Congress would not be enacting sanctions legislation against Ukraine.

The Party of Regions served as the pro-Kremlin political base for Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia in 2014.

Like Paul Manafort, who is currently under indictment in the errant special counsel Russia investigation, the Podesta Group had to retroactively file Foreign Agent Registration Act disclosures with the Justice Department for Ukrainian-related work. The filing states that the Podesta group provided for the nonprofit European Centre for a Modern Ukraine “government relations and public relations services within the United States and Europe to promote political and economic cooperation between Ukraine and the West. The [Podesta Group] conducted outreach to congressional and executive branch offices, members of the media, nongovernmental organizations and think tanks.” Unlike Manafort and his partner Rick Gates, the Mueller special counsel operation hasn’t indicted anyone from the Podesta Group. (Read more: Judicial Watch, 5/17/2018)

On December 6, 2012, the non-profit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, asking for records that show the number of Clinton’s email accounts.

Anne Weismann (Credit: public domain)

On this day, State Department official Sheryl Walter sends a response letter to CREW’s chief counsel Anne Weismann that states “no records responsive to your request were located.” No details or reasons are given. (US Department of State, 8/29/2016)

In fact, Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills was informed about this FOIA request while Clinton was still secretary of state, and she knew Clinton’s private email address was responsive to the request, but she took no action and merely had another official monitor the progress of the request. Clinton may have been sent an email about it as well.

Also, in the months since the FOIA request was made, Clinton’s exact email address was revealed to the media, due to the Guccifer hack of a Clinton associate in March 2013. But the department’s “no response” reply would mean she used no email address for work.

Steve Linick, the State Department’s inspector general, will conclude in a 2016 report that the State Department gave an “inaccurate and incomplete” response about Clinton’s email use in this case and in other similar cases. (The Washington Post, 3/27/2016) (The Washington Post, 1/6/2016)

Clinton sends an email to former Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, former Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, State Department official Jeffrey Feltman, Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin. Many of the email recipients continue to advise Clinton after leaving the department at the same time she did, around February 2013.

From left to right, William Burns (Credit: public domain) Kurt Campbell (Credit: public domain) Jeffrey Feltman (Credit: PatrickTsui / FCO)

In the email, Clinton recalls “remember how after US signed 123 deal [with] UAE [the United Arab Emirates] and we were in Abu Dhabi [the capital of the UAE].” This is a reference to a 2009 pact between the US and the UAE to share nuclear energy information and materials, with the UAE also agreeing not to pursue building a nuclear weapon. Much of the rest of the email is unintelligible because it is heavily redacted for containing information that is later considered classified, at the “confidential” level.

The email will be made public in August 2016 due to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents sent by Clinton after her tenure as secretary of state ended to officials still at the State Department. This is the only email in response to the FOIA request sent or received by Clinton later deemed classified.

Department spokesperson John Kirby will later comment: “I am not going to speak to the content but I would point you to that one of the FOIA exemptions here we used was 1.4B which is foreign government information. And as we previously explained, while foreign government information may be protected from public release, both the executive order on classification and the foreign affairs manual acknowledge that foreign government information can often be maintained on unclassified systems.” (NBC News, 9/1/2016) (US Department of State, 6/26/2016)

Datto Cloud engineer Charles Lundblad (left) chats with CEO and founder of Datto, Austin McChord, at the firm’s Norwalk, CT headquarters. (Credit: Erik Traufmann / Hearst Connecticut Media)

On May 31, 2013, Platte River Networks (PRN) takes over management of Clinton’s private server. On the same day, PRN buys a Datto SIRIS S2000 data storage device, which is made by Datto, Inc. Over the next month, this is attached to Clinton’s server to provide periodic back-up copies of the data on the server. PRN sends a bill for the device to Clinton Executive Service Corp. (CESC), which is a Clinton family company.

CESC employees work with PRN employees on how the Datto device is configured. Datto offers a local back-up and a remote back-up using the Internet “cloud.” CESC asks for a local back-up and specifically requests that no data be stored in the Internet cloud at any time.

However, due to an apparent misunderstanding, back-up copies of the server will be periodically made both locally and in the cloud. This will only be discovered by PRN as a whole in August 2015. (US Congress, 9/12/2016)

However, despite internal PRN emails from August 2015 indicating many PRN employees didn’t know about the Datto cloud back-up until that time, the FBI will later find evidence that an unknown PRN employee deleted data from the cloud back-up in March 2015, meaning that at least one PRN employee had to have known about the cloud back-up by that time.

After Platte River Networks (PRN) is selected to manage Clinton’s private email server on May 31, 2013, the company decides to immediately relocate the server and then also replace it with a better one.

The founders of Platte River Network: Brent Allshouse (left) and Treve Suavo (right). (Credit: Platte River Networks)

PRN assigns two employees to manage the new server (which will be the third server used by Clinton). The FBI will later redact the names of these two employees, but it is known that one of them works remotely from his home in some unnamed town and will handle the day-to-day administration of the server, and the other one works at PRN’s headquarters in Denver, Colorado, and handles all hardware installation and any required physical maintenance of the server. Media reports will later name the two employees as Paul Combetta, who works from Rhode Island, and Bill Thornton.

The employee at PRN’s headquarters (who logically would be Thorton) works with Clinton’s computer technician Bryan Pagliano to help with the transition. Around June 4, 2013, this person is granted administrator access to the server, as well as any accompanying services.

Equinix Logo (Credit: public domain)

On June 23, 2013, this person travels to Clinton’s house in Chappaqua, New York, shuts down the server, and transports it to a data center in Secaucus, New Jersey, run by Equinix, Inc. This older server will stay at the Equinix facility until it is given to the FBI on October 3, 2015.

The PRN headquarters employee (still likely to be Thornton) turns the old server back on in the Equinix data center so users can continue to access their email accounts. Then he spends a few days there setting up a new server. When he leaves, all the physical equipment for the new server is successfully installed except for an intrusion detection device, which Equinix installs later, once it gets shipped.

Meanwhile, the PRN employee who works remotely (Combetta) does his remote work to get the new server online. Around June 30, 2013, this employee begins to transfer all the email accounts from the old server to the new one. After several days, all email accounts hosted on the presidentclinton.com, wjcoffice.com, and clintonemail.com domains are transferred. However, PRN keeps the old server online at the Equinix data center along with the new server to ensure email continues to be delivered. But the old server no longer hosts email services for the Clintons.

According to an FBI report made public in September 2016, “The new Clinton email server hosted email for [Hillary] Clinton, President Clinton, [redacted], and their respective staffs.”

The Dell PowerEdge R620 (Credit: public domain)

This same FBI report will explain that the new server consists of the following equipment: “a Dell PowerEdge R620 server hosting four virtual machines, including four separate virtual machines for Microsoft Exchange email hosting, a BES for the management of BlackBerry devices, a domain controller to authenticate password requests, and an administrative server to manage the other three virtual machines, a Datto SfRlS 2000 to store onsite and remote backups of the server system, a CloudJacket device for intrusion prevention, two Dell switches, and two Fortinet Fortigate 80C firewalls.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

The FBI report will not make entirely clear what happens to the data on the old server. But a September 2015 Washington Post article will assert that after PRN moved all the data onto a new server, everything on the original server was deleted until it is “blank.” However, it was not wiped, which means having the old files overwritten several times with new data until they can never be recovered. (The Washington Post, 9/12/2015)

The Datto SIRIS S2000 (Credit: Datto, Inc.)

In June 2013, Platte River Networks (PRN) takes over management of Clinton’s server. Late in the month, they replace the server with a new one and then transfer the data to it. They subcontract with the company Datto, Inc. and purchase a device called the Datto SIRIS S2000 to make periodic back-ups of all the data on the new server. The first such back-up takes place on June 24, 2013.

But data is still being transferred from the old server to the new one. The June 29, 2013 back-up will later prove to be the most important one for FBI investigators, as it apparently is the first one after the data transfer is completed. From that point onwards, emails from Clinton’s four years as secretary of state are likely to only get lost from the server, not added.

The FBI will later report that all of Clinton’s emails at the start of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, from January 23, 2009 to March 17, 2009 were missing from the over 30,000 emails Clinton handed over. But the FBI’s Clinton investigation recovered some these emails because they were “captured through a Datto backup on June 29, 2013. However, the emails obtained are likely only a subset of the emails sent or received by Clinton during this time period.”

Clinton’s first server was replaced around March 18, 2009 by the same server that PRN then decided to replace in June 2013. But presumably some of the emails on the first server were transferred to the second server, from instance by being in email inboxes, and then were transferred again by PRN to the newest (and third) server.

One thing that isn’t clear is how many of the emails from after March 18, 2009 were recovered by the FBI. It also isn’t clear if the FBI recovered emails from a Datto device attached to the new server, or if it was from a copy of the data that Datto kept in the “cloud,” over the Internet. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

According to an unnamed Platte River Networks (PRN) employee, Clinton’s server has encryption protection to combat hackers, but the individual emails have not been protected with encryption. With PRN taking over management of the server in June 2013, this employee will later tell the FBI that “the Clintons originally requested that email on [Clinton’s] server be encrypted such that no one but the users could read the content. However, PRN ultimately did not configure the email settings this way, to allow system administrators to troubleshoot problems occurring within user accounts.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)

2013 Broadcasting Board of Governors / Washington Forum (Credit: public domain)

For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?

Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It’s viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran, self-immolation in Tibet, human trafficking across Asia, and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.

The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 1970s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they “should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” Fulbright’s amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such “propaganda” should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. “from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.”

Zorinsky and Fulbright sold their amendments on sensible rhetoric: American taxpayers shouldn’t be funding propaganda for American audiences. So did Congress just tear down the American public’s last defense against domestic propaganda?

BBG spokeswoman Lynne Weil insists BBG is not a propaganda outlet, and its flagship services such as VOA “present fair and accurate news.”

“They don’t shy away from stories that don’t shed the best light on the United States,” she told The Cable. She pointed to the charters of VOA and RFE: “Our journalists provide what many people cannot get locally: uncensored news, responsible discussion, and open debate.”

A former U.S. government source with knowledge of the BBG says the organization is no Pravda, but it does advance U.S. interests in more subtle ways. In Somalia, for instance, VOA serves as counterprogramming to outlets peddling anti-American or jihadist sentiment. “Somalis have three options for news,” the source said, “word of mouth, al-Shabab, or VOA Somalia.”

This partially explains the push to allow BBG broadcasts on local radio stations in the United States. The agency wants to reach diaspora communities, such as St. Paul, Minnesota’s significant Somali expat community. “Those people can get al-Shabab, they can get Russia Today, but they couldn’t get access to their taxpayer-funded news sources like VOA Somalia,” the source said. “It was silly.”

Lynne added that the reform has a transparency benefit as well. “Now Americans will be able to know more about what they are paying for with their tax dollars — greater transparency is a win-win for all involved,” she said. And so with that we have the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which passed as part of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, and went into effect this month.

But if anyone needed a reminder of the dangers of domestic propaganda efforts, the past 12 months provided ample reasons. Last year, two USA Today journalists were ensnared in a propaganda campaign after reporting about millions of dollars in back taxes owed by the Pentagon’s top propaganda contractor in Afghanistan. Eventually, one of the co-owners of the firm confessed to creating phony websites and Twitter accounts to smear the journalists anonymously. Additionally, just this month, the Washington Post exposed a counter-propaganda program by the Pentagon that recommended posting comments on a U.S. website run by a Somali expat with readers opposing al-Shabab. “Today, the military is more focused on manipulating news and commentary on the Internet, especially social media, by posting material and images without necessarily claiming ownership,” reported the Post.

But for BBG officials, the references to Pentagon propaganda efforts are nauseating, particularly because the Smith-Mundt Act never had anything to do with regulating the Pentagon, a fact that was misunderstood in media reports in the run-up to the passage of new Smith-Mundt reforms in January.

One example included a report by the late BuzzFeed reporter Michael Hastings, who suggested that the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act would open the door to Pentagon propaganda of U.S. audiences. In fact, as amended in 1987, the act only covers portions of the State Department engaged in public diplomacy abroad (i.e. the public diplomacy section of the “R” bureau, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors.)

But the news circulated regardless, much to the displeasure of Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), a sponsor of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. “To me, it’s a fascinating case study in how one blogger was pretty sloppy, not understanding the issue and then it got picked up by Politico‘s Playbook, and you had one level of sloppiness on top of another,” Thornberry told The Cable last May. “And once something sensational gets out there, it just spreads like wildfire.”

That of course doesn’t leave the BBG off the hook if its content smacks of agitprop. But now that its materials are allowed to be broadcast by local radio stations and TV networks, they won’t be a complete mystery to Americans. “Previously, the legislation had the effect of clouding and hiding this stuff,” the former U.S. official told The Cable. “Now we’ll have a better sense: Gee some of this stuff is really good. Or gee some of this stuff is really bad. At least we’ll know now.” (Foreign Policy, 7/14/2013)  (Archive)

(CNN graphic)

(…) Reggie Walton is the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose 11 members are appointed directly by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Revelations of broad spying by the National Security Agency have drawn unusual attention to the Court, which The New York Times reported Sunday “has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data.”

(..) He has drawn little notice for his role in shaping the nation’s secret law — even his Wikipedia page barely mentions the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But since his appointment to the court in 2007, the FISA Court has dramatically expanded the ability of the federal government to use controversial techniques to gather intelligence on Americans both at home and abroad that have outraged civil libertarians.

Walton serves as the court’s public face to the very limited extent that it has one — typically, in low-grade sparring with Congress. Because the vast majority of the court’s rulings are sealed, it is impossible to know which rulings expanding NSA’s authority Walton has written. But it is clear that during his time on the court those powers have increased significantly.

That comfort with government power fits neatly with some elements of his career.

(…) “While I certainly have reservations about PRISM (and the FISA court in general), Judge Walton certainly does not strike me as the type who would rubber-stamp the DOJ’s requests,” Walton’s former clerk said.

As for the question of transparency and greater public scrutiny of the court’s activities, don’t look for Walton to become a champion of openness.

In a March letter to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Diane Feinstein, Walton said that there are certain circumstances under which judges on his court can release their opinions and committed to ensuring they know of those opportunities. But Walton is clearly not going to push the boundaries of the classification process, bluntly warning that “I would not anticipate many such cases given the fact-intensive nature of [these] opinions.” (Read more: Buzzfeed, 7/07/2013)  (Archive)

Joe Biden makes remarks at the opening of the US-China Strategic And Economic Dialogue in Washington DC. on July 10, 2013. (Credit: Voice of America video clipping)

When Joe Biden was Vice President, he told an audience at a US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue meeting that he had the “great pleasure” of spending “a fair amount of time with President Xi,” after Xi was made president of China.

“I congratulated him on his elevation, I asked if he could possibly help me,” Biden then joked, in a clip which can still be viewed on the Obama White House YouTube page, according to the NY Post.

And as American Thinker frames it:

During the 2016 campaign, candidate Trump made a joke about asking Russia for help in finding Hillary Clinton’s deleted (and bleach-bitted) emails from her private server, and that was taken as evidence for launching an FBI investigation and subsequent special counsel probe on non-existent “collusion” with Russia. Yet back in 2013, Joe Biden, whose son was hauled around on Air Force Two to help him make lucrative deals with foreign powers including China, openly “joked” about asking Beijing for help becoming president, and we are only hearing of it this weekend:

Then, months after Biden’s July 2013 comments, he flew with son Hunter on Air Force Two, landing in Beijing where he would meet with Hunter’s Chinese partners at BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Co, according to the New York Post.

(Read more: Zero Hedge, 9/06/2020)  (Archive)

“Fox News host Laura Ingraham did a deep dive into Rep. Adam Schiff’s, D-Calif., connections to Ukraine on Tuesday’s episode of “The Ingraham Angle,” and asked why these revelations were ignored by other news outlets.

Ingraham said it was discovered that Schiff had close ties to a Ukranian arms dealer who moved his corporation into the lawmaker’s California district. The arms dealer then held a fundraiser for the House Intelligence Committee chairman, which could suggest a quid pro quo situation between them, as Schiff traded political capital for campaign cash.

“Here’s something no one in the media is covering — Adam Schiff’s ties to Ukraine. How deep do they go?” she asked.

“First, I want you all to meet Soviet-born arms dealer Igor Pasternak… the founder and CEO of worldwide arrows corporation. Pasternak grew up in the Ukraine, but some 25 years ago, his company moved to a location near Schiff’s district in southern California.

“Since that time, Pasternak continued to receive lucrative surveillance and weapons deals from Ukraine’s government. Here’s where Schiff enters the picture — in 2013, Pasternak hosted a fund-raiser for Schiff. No big deal, right? That’s until you realize how Adam Schiff’s priorities completely shifted.

“Now before this time, Schiff rarely, if ever, mentioned Ukraine. But after the fundraiser, he used multiple television appearances to basically demand that we send money and arms to them.” (Read more: Fox News, 10/02/2019)  (Archive)

Pasternak stood to make a tidy sum if Democrats could grease the wheels for him in Ukraine. And they did exactly that.

From the Illustrated Primer: