[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
I have worked in national security my entire life. Most of that has been in the intelligence community surrounded by classified information. For twenty years, I worked undercover in the Central Intelligence Agency, recruiting sources, producing intelligence and running operations. I have a pretty concrete understanding of how classified information is handled and how government communications systems work.
Nobody uses a private email server for official business. Period.
Full stop.
The entire notion is, to borrow a phrase from a Clinton campaign official, “insane.” That anyone would presume to be allowed to do so is mind-boggling. That government officials allowed Hillary Clinton to do so is nauseating.
Classified and unclassified information do not mix. They don’t travel in the same streams through the same pipes. They move in clearly well defined channels so that never the twain shall meet. Mixing them together is unheard of and a major criminal offense.
If you end up with classified information in an unclassified channel, you have done something very wrong and very serious.
Accidentally removing a single classified message from controlled spaces, without any evidence of intent or exposure to hostile forces, can get you fired and cost you your clearance. Repeated instances will land you in prison.
Every hostile intelligence agency on the planet targets senior American officials for collection. The Secretary of State tops the list. Almost anything the Secretary of State had to say about her official duties, her schedule, her mood, her plans for the weekend, would be prized information to adversaries.
It is very difficult, in fact, to think of much of anything that the Secretary of State could be saying in email that we would want hostile forces to know.
As we wait for more information on the latest revelations, let’s quickly note what we already know Hillary Clinton did.
While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email address for official business. Instead of using a State Department account, she used a personal email account, housed on a private server located in her home in Chappaqua, New York. The Department of State exercised zero control or oversight in this process. No government security personnel were involved in protecting them.
When the House Select Committee on Benghazi asked to see these emails, the Department of State said they did not have them. Clinton’s lawyers then went through all the emails on her server. They turned over 30,000 emails they decided were work related and deleted all of the rest.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 01 November 2016 07:00.
Amy Weiss, Kadzik, lobbyist Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta.
Zero Hedge, “John Podesta’s Best Friend At The DOJ Will Be In Charge Of The DOJ’s Probe Into Huma Abedin Emails” 31 Oct 2016:
Now that the FBI has obtained the needed warrant to start poring over the 650,000 or so emails uncovered in Anthony Weiner’s notebook, among which thousands of emails sent from Huma Abedin using Hillary Clinton’s personal server, moments ago the US Justice Department announced it is also joining the probe, and as
AP reported moments ago, “vowing to dedicate all needed resources to quickly review the over half a million emails in Clinton case.”
In the letter to Congress, the DOJ writes that it “will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” assistant attorney General Peter Kadzik writes in letters to House and Senate lawmakers.
Just the Facts @JTF_News
#BREAKING Senior DOJ official sends letter to lawmakers responding to request for more information about email review.#8days 9:36 PM - 31 Oct 2016 99 99 Retweets 67
So far so good, even if one wonders just how active the DOJ will be in a case that has shown an unprecedented schism between the politically influenced Department of Justice and the FBI.
In other words, the best friend of John Podesta, Clinton’s Campaign char, at the DOJ will be in charge of a probe that could potentially sink Hillary Clinton.
For those who missed it, this is what we reported previously:
The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign chairman met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, who is currently a top official at the US Justice Department serving as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs.
The post-Benghazi dinner was attended by Podesta, Kadzik, superlobbyist Vincent Roberti and other well-placed Beltway fixtures. The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the Wikileaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant. The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just one day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.
Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows. In another email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.
As the Daily Caller noted, the dinner arrangement “is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices.” As one former U.S. Attorney told the DC, the exchanges are another example of the Clinton campaign’s “cozy relationship” with the Obama Justice Department.
The hacked emails confirm that Podesta and Kadzik were in frequent contact. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.
“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.
“The kind of thing the American people are frustrated about is that the politically powerful have insider access and have these kind of relationships that ultimately appear to always break to the benefit of Hillary Clinton,” he added, comparing the Podesta-Kadzik meetings to the revelation that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met in private with Bill Clinton at the airport in Phoenix days before the FBI and DOJ investigating Hillary Clinton.
Kadzik’s role at the DOJ, where he started in 2013, is particularly notable. Kadzik has helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.
It gets better because, as we further revealed, if there is one person in the DOJ who is John Podesta’s, and thus the Clinton Foundation’s inside man, it is Peter Kadjik.
Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office. That history is cited by Podesta in another email hacked from his Gmail account. In a Sept. 2008 email, which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign. Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”
Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal. As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky. In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.
Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.
Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time. “He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe. Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.
Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.
Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon. To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001. A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”
The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon. On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon. She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.
Kadzik’s current role
In his current role as head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation. The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.
But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress. Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.
In a Feb. 1, 2016 letter in response to Kadzik, Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis noted that Kadzik had explained “that special counsel may be appointed at the discretion of the Attorney General when an investigation or prosecution by the Department of Justice would create a potential conflict of interest.”
DeSantis, a Republican, suggested that Lynch’s appointment by Bill Clinton in 1999 as U.S. Attorney in New York may be considered a conflict of interest. He also asserted that Obama’s political appointees — a list which includes Kadzik — “are being asked to impartially execute their respective duties as Department of Justice officials that may involve an investigation into the activities of the forerunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.”
It is unknown if Kadzik responded to DeSantis’ questions.
Kadzik’s first involvement in the Clinton email brouhaha came in a Sept. 24, 2015 response letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley in which he declined to confirm or deny whether the DOJ was investigating Clinton. Last month, Politico reported that Kadzik angered Republican lawmakers when, in a classified briefing, he declined to say whether Clinton aides who received DOJ immunity were required to cooperate with congressional probes.
Kadzik also testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the issue of classifications and redactions in the FBI’s files of the Clinton email investigation.
Finally, it is also worth noting that Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, currently at Weiss Public Affairs worked on the 1992 Clinton/Gore Campaign as a Press Secretary, and Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee, and a White House Deputy Assistant to the President/Deputy Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton.
* * *
And now it seems that Kadzik will be in charge of the DOJ’s “probe” into Huma Abedin’s emails. Which is why we are a little skeptical the DOJ will find “anything” of note.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 30 October 2016 15:44.
WP, “Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she doesn’t know how her emails wound up on her husband’s computer”, 29 Oct 2016:
Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she is unsure how her emails could have ended up on a device she viewed as her husband’s computer, the seizure of which has reignited the Clinton email investigation, according to a person familiar with the investigation and civil litigation over the matter.
The person, who would not discuss the case unless granted anonymity, said Abedin was not a regular user of the computer, and even when she agreed to turn over emails to the State Department for federal records purposes, her lawyers did not search it for materials, not believing any of her messages to be there.
That could be a significant oversight if Abedin’s work messages were indeed on the computer of her estranged husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is under investigation for allegedly exchanging lewd messages with a 15-year-old girl. So far, it is unclear what — if any — new, work-related messages were found by authorities. The person said the FBI had not contacted Abedin about its latest discovery, and she was unsure what the bureau had discovered.
According to federal law enforcement officials, investigators found thousands of messages on Weiner’s computer that they believe to be potentially relevant to the separate, Clinton email investigation. How they are relevant — or if they are significant in any respect — remains unknown.
Here’s what happened after the FBI said it would examine newly discovered emails linked to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
When they where informed of FBI re opening the investigation due to Weiner.
Weiner and a lawyer for Abedin did not return messages seeking comment. Clinton has called on the FBI to release more information and predicted nothing would emerge that would change the FBI’s conclusion that no charges were appropriate against her.
FBI Director James B. Comey wrote in a letter to lawmakers Friday that investigators would take “appropriate investigative steps” to determine if any of the messages contained classified information or if they could somehow advance the Clinton probe in another way.
Posted by DanielS on Tuesday, 25 October 2016 07:32.
DAILYKENN.com— “Elated Muslim lunatic celebrates winning suicide bomber drawing”, 21 Oct 2016:
You would have thought he just won the lottery. Video reveals a Muslim loon ecstatic over winning the role of suicide bomber.
The Muslim will get the opportunity to blow himself up and take the lives of others when he does.
White globalists do much the same. They are ecstatic about the prospects of destroying themselves while harming others through the destruction of Western culture.
Both are the victims of self-destructive thought reform.
Read more here: Sun, “JIHAD’S YOUR LOT: Warped ISIS fanatics celebrate after ‘drawing straws’ to win the chance to launch the next suicide bombing”, 21 Oct 2016:
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 21 October 2016 22:21.
Chinese President Xi Jinping called Rodrigo Duterte’s visit a “milestone” in ties, as he pulled out all the stops to welcome the Philippines’ leader.
Huffington Post, “Philippine President Duterte Announces ‘Separation’ From The U.S.”, 20 Oxt 2016:
BEIJING (Reuters) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced his “separation” from the United States on Thursday, declaring that it had “lost” and he had realigned with China as the two agreed to resolve their South China Sea dispute through talks.
Duterte made his comments in China, where he is visiting with at least 200 business people to pave the way for what he calls a new commercial alliance as relations with longtime ally the United States deteriorate.
His trade secretary, Ramon Lopez, said $13.5 billion in deals would be signed.
Duterte’s efforts to engage China, months after a tribunal ruling in the Hague over South China Sea disputes in favor of the Philippines, marks a reversal in foreign policy since the 71-year-old former mayor took office on June 30.
“America has lost now,” Duterte told Chinese and Philippine business people at a forum in the Great Hall of the People, attended by Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli.
“I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow and maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to (President Vladimir) Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world ― China, Philippines and Russia. It’s the only way,” he added.
“With that, in this venue, your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the UnitedStates,” Duterte said to applause. “I have separated from them. So I will be dependent on you for all time. But do not worry. We will also help as you help us.”
China has pulled out all the stops to welcome Duterte, including a marching band complete with batton-twirling band master at his official welcoming ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People, which most leaders do not get
Xi told Duterte their countries are now “brothers,” who can “appropriately handle disputes,” in an apparent nod to previous standoffs over the South China Sea.
RED CARPET WELCOME
President Xi Jinping, meeting Duterte earlier in the day, called the visit a “milestone” in ties.
Xi told Duterte that China and the Philippines were brothers and they could “appropriately handle disputes,” though he did not mention the South China Sea in remarks made in front of reporters.
“I hope we can follow the wishes of the people and use this visit as an opportunity to push China-Philippines relations back on a friendly footing and fully improve things,” Xi said.
Following their meeting, during which Duterte said relations with China had entered a new “springtime”, Chinese vice foreign minister Liu Zhenmin said the South China Sea issue was not the sum total of relations.
“The two sides agreed that they will do what they agreed five years ago, that is to pursue bilateral dialogue and consultation in seeking a proper settlement of the South China Sea issue,” Liu said.
China claims most of the energy-rich South China Sea through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. Neighbours Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims.
In 2012, China seized the disputed Scarborough Shoal and denied Philippine fishermen access to its fishing grounds.
Liu said the shoal was not mentioned and he did not answer a question about whether Philippinefishermen would be allowed there. He said both countries had agreed on coastguard and fisheries cooperation, but did not give details.
Duterte’s declaration of a separation with the U.S. comes after he called President Barack Obama a “son of a bitch” and told him to “go to hell” while alluding to severing ties with the old colonial power.
SEA ROW TAKES ‘BACK SEAT’
Duterte’s tone toward Beijing is in contrast to the language he has used against the United States, after being infuriated by U.S. criticism of his bloody war on drugs.
He has called U.S. President Barack Obama a “son of a bitch” and told him to “go to hell” while alluding to severing ties with the old colonial power.
On Wednesday, to the cheers of hundreds of Filipinos in Beijing, Duterte said Philippine foreign policy was veering toward China.
“I will not go to America anymore. We will just be insulted there,” Duterte said. “So time to say goodbye my friend.”
The same day, about 1,000 anti-U.S. protesters gathered outside the U.S. embassy in Manila calling for the removal of U.S. troops from the southern island of Mindanao.
Duterte on Wednesday said the South China Sea arbitration case would “take the back seat” during talks, and that he would wait for the Chinese to bring up the issue rather than doing so himself.
Xi said issues that could not be immediately be resolved should be set aside, according to the Chinese foreign ministry.
China has welcomed the Philippines approaches, even as Duterte has vowed not to surrender any sovereignty to Beijing, which views the South China Sea Hague ruling as null and void.
China has also expressed support for his drug war, which has raised concern in Western capitals about extrajudicial killing.
Duterte’s overtures to China have been accompanied by signs of improving business ties with the world’s second largest economy.
China’s Liu said Beijing will restore Philippine agricultural exports to China and provide financing for Philippine infrastructure.
Interesting that The Huffington Post made this the caption beneath the title of its article, though there is nothing in the article that discusses Russia -
“America has lost now,” Rodrigo Duterte said, flagging closer ties with China and Russia during a visit to Beijing.
There is a strange misconception circulating among some in the west that Russia and China are good friends, some speaking as if they are practically joined at the hip.
And speaking of NOT friends, there are some interesting facts to come about the history of The US in The Philippines - a history that will explain much as to why The Philippines would be eager to declare their separatism and The US the loser.