Presumptuous Politics : Oct 28, 2016

Friday, October 28, 2016

Democrat Voter Fraud Cartoons

'Make Soros happy': Inside Clinton team's mission to please billionaire VIP

Newly revealed emails posted by WikiLeaks show top aides to Hillary Clinton went out of their way to keep a certain VIP happy: Uber-liberal billionaire George Soros.
The emails, hacked from the account of Clinton Campaign Chairman and Soros ally John Podesta, disclose that Clinton was advised to do fundraisers simply to make Soros “happy.” They also indicate the 85-year-old Hungarian-born heavyweight, through his top aides, freely reached out to Podesta to make Soros’ wishes clear on issues ranging from trade to migration to the Supreme Court.
In one instance, trusted Clinton adviser Huma Abedin wrote to now-Campaign Manager Robby Mook on Oct. 7, 2014, to tell him Clinton was having dinner with Soros. Abedin said she expected Soros would eventually ask Clinton to appear at a fundraiser for America Votes, one of the many liberal organizations Soros helps fund, and Abedin wanted to know how to proceed.
“I would only do this for political reasons (ie to make Soros happy),” Mook replied.
NEW REPORTS REVEAL SOROS INFLUENCE
During her time as secretary of state, Clinton was forwarded from Soros’ aides on Jan. 23, 2011 a message he wrote specifically for her addressing “a serious situation” in Albania. Soros even included two actions that “need to be done urgently.” One of the suggestions was appointing “a mediator such as Carl Bildt, Martti Ahtisaari or Miroslav Lajcak…”
Clinton received the email the next day. On Jan. 27, Lajcak met Albanian leaders for a mediation effort.
Just hours after Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was reported dead on Feb. 13, 2016, the president of the Soros-founded Open Society Foundations also emailed Podesta.
“Remember our discussion of Wallace Jefferson, [former] Chief Justice in Texas?” Chris Stone asked cryptically.
Podesta replied: “Yup.”
Most of the Soros-related correspondences with Podesta came via Michael Vachon, an adviser and spokesman for Soros, who frequently emailed Podesta to schedule phone calls and meetings and relay his boss’ policy positions. Many of the messages were brief or mysterious.
On Feb. 23, 2015, Vachon wrote to Podesta that he needed to tell him something “separately, important, timely but certainly not urgent.” In a message dated Jan. 13, 2009, Vachon thanked Podesta for meeting with Soros the previous day.
“He found it extremely useful,” Vachon wrote.
Other emails show a stream of Soros’ policy beliefs being passed to Podesta: An invitation to the screening of a film about climate change at Soros’ house in July 2015; a short documentary based on Soros’ essays about Ukraine in January 2015; a Soros-authored piece titled “Recapitalize the Banking System” in October 2008.
On March 7, 2016, Vachon sent Podesta a memo regarding “TPP and Malaysia’s Corruption Crisis.” The document criticized President Obama for making “visible compromises” in his quest to get a deal for the Trans Pacific Partnership completed. Podesta was ostensibly set to discuss the memo with Soros and his son, Alexander, during a dinner later that month. Six days later, Vachon got even more specific.
“In general I think George is more interested in talking about policy than the campaign per se,” Vachon wrote. “In a separate email I will send you George’s latest thinking on the migration crisis, which he is spending a lot of time on. His other big preoccupation these days is Ukraine.”
While Vachon said Soros wasn’t interested in discussing “the campaign per se” at that dinner, his involvement in the 2016 election is extensive. As of July, Soros had donated $25 million to help elect Clinton and other Democrats, Politico reported.

Judge Napolitano: What happened to the FBI? It's been corrupted by Obama and his team

When FBI Director James Comey announced on July 5 that the Department of Justice would not seek the indictment of Hillary Clinton for failure to safeguard state secrets related to her email use while she was secretary of state, he both jumped the gun and set in motion a series of events that surely he did not intend. Was his hand forced by the behavior of FBI agents who wouldn’t take no for an answer? Did he let the FBI become a political tool?
Here is the back story.
The FBI began investigating the Clinton email scandal in the spring of 2015, when The New York Times revealed Clinton’s use of a private email address for her official governmental work and the fact that she did not preserve the emails on State Department servers, contrary to federal law. After an initial collection of evidence and a round of interviews, agents and senior managers gathered in the summer of 2015 to discuss how to proceed. It was obvious to all that a prima-facie case could be made for espionage, theft of government property and obstruction of justice charges. The consensus was to proceed with a formal criminal investigation.
Six months later, the senior FBI agent in charge of that investigation resigned from the case and retired from the FBI because he felt the case was going “sideways”; that’s law enforcement jargon for “nowhere by design.” John Giacalone had been the chief of the New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., field offices of the FBI and, at the time of his "sideways" comment, was the chief of the FBI National Security Branch.
The reason for the "sideways" comment must have been Giacalone’s realization that DOJ and FBI senior management had decided that the investigation would not work in tandem with a federal grand jury. That is nearly fatal to any government criminal case. In criminal cases, the FBI and the DOJ cannot issue subpoenas for testimony or for tangible things; only grand juries can.
Giacalone knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would be toothless, as it would have no subpoena power. He also knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would have a hard time persuading any federal judge to issue search warrants. A judge would perceive the need for search warrants to be not acute in such a case because to a judge, the absence of a grand jury can only mean a case is “sideways” and not a serious investigation.
As the investigation dragged on in secret and Donald Trump simultaneously began to rise in the Republican presidential primaries, it became more apparent to Giacalone’s successors that the goal of the FBI was to exonerate Clinton, not determine whether there was enough evidence to indict her. In late spring of this year, agents began interviewing the Clinton inner circle.
When Clinton herself was interviewed on July 2 -- for only four hours, during which the interviewers seemed to some in the bureau to lack aggression, passion and determination -- some FBI agents privately came to the same conclusion as their former boss: The case was going sideways.
A few determined agents were frustrated by Clinton’s professed lack of memory during her interview and her oblique reference to a recent head injury she had suffered as the probable cause of that. They sought to obtain her medical records to verify the gravity of her injury and to determine whether she had been truthful with them. They prepared the paperwork to obtain the records, only to have their request denied by Director Comey himself on July 4.
Then some agents did the unthinkable; they reached out to colleagues in the intelligence community and asked them to obtain Clinton’s medical records so they could show them to Comey. We know that the National Security Agency can access anything that is stored digitally, including medical records. These communications took place late on July 4.
When Comey learned of these efforts, he headed them off the next morning with his now infamous news conference, in which he announced that Clinton would not be indicted because the FBI had determined that her behavior, though extremely careless, was not reckless, which is the legal standard in espionage cases. He then proceeded to recount the evidence against her. He did this, no doubt, to head off the agents who had sought the Clinton medical records, whom he suspected would leak evidence against her.
Three months later -- and just weeks before Clinton will probably be elected president -- we have learned that President Barack Obama regularly communicated with Clinton via her personal email servers about matters that the White House considered classified. That means that he lied when he told CBS News that he learned of the Clinton servers when the rest of us did.
We also learned this week that Andrew McCabe, Giacalone’s successor as head of the FBI Washington field office and presently the No. 3 person in the FBI, is married to a woman to whom the Clinton money machine in Virginia funneled about $675,000 in lawful campaign funds for a failed 2015 run for the Virginia Senate. Comey apparently saw no conflict or appearance of impropriety in having the person in charge of the Clinton investigation in such an ethically challenged space.
Why did this case go sideways?
Did President Obama fear being a defense witness at Hillary Clinton’s criminal trial? Did he so fear being succeeded in office by Donald Trump that he ordered the FBI to exonerate Clinton, the rule of law be damned? Did the FBI lose its reputation for fidelity to law, bravery under stress and integrity at all times?
This is not your grandfather’s FBI -- or your father’s. It is the Obama FBI.

Podesta relative earned six-figure fees lobbying Clinton's State Dept. during his tenure there

EXCLUSIVE: Amid the tumult of the 2016 presidential campaign, John Podesta is best known as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the individual from whose private account WikiLeaks is presently publishing some 50,000 hacked emails.
Released in daily batches, these documents have laid bare the inner workings and tensions of the Clinton campaign in an unprecedented way, while also offering insights into the operations of the Clinton Foundation and the State Department in the years when Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, served as secretary of state.
At that time, when Clinton was traveling to a record number of foreign countries, Podesta, a former White House chief of staff under President Clinton, held dual titles at the State Department: as a senior advisor – entitled to an annual salary of $130,000 never paid him, the department maintains – and as a member of a prestigious foreign policy advisory board Secretary Clinton created. Records obtained from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management show Podesta’s tenure at State extended from Sept. 25, 2011 to Jan. 4, 2014.
For several months in 2012, Clinton’s final year as secretary of state, Raytheon, the leading defense contractor, hired Podesta’s sister-in-law, Heather Podesta, as a lobbyist, federal records show.
Raytheon was looking to enlarge its share of foreign military sales – transfers of advanced weapons systems to other countries that are reviewed and approved by the Department of State, then implemented by the Department of Defense – and was beefing up its lobbying operation to accomplish that goal before Secretary Clinton left office.
On the LD-2 lobbying disclosure form completed by her company, Heather Podesta + Partners, LLC, in July 2012, the veteran lawyer and Democratic fundraiser listed in the space provided for a description of her lobbying activities, “Engaged the Executive Branch on the economic benefits of foreign military sales.” In the space requesting the specific locales of her lobbying, Ms. Podesta listed the White House and the State Department.
At the same time, Raytheon retained two other lobbyists, John Merrigan and Matt Bernstein, both associated with the powerhouse D.C. law firm DLA Piper. All three of these lobbyists, including Ms. Podesta, were major donors or bundlers to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 campaigns. Federal records show they have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton’s campaigns and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying her State Department.
In the final three quarters of 2012, DLA Piper earned some $360,000 in lobbying fees from Raytheon, courting the State Department and other agencies, while Ms. Podesta, within that same time frame, received $100,000 from Raytheon for the same purpose.
The gambit appears to have worked: Records maintained by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arm of the Defense Department that coordinates the transfers of weapons systems once they have received State’s approval, show Raytheon as a prime contractor in at least seventeen foreign military sales in 2012, worth an estimated total of $26 billion. Of those contracts, three with the Gulf nation of Qatar – for missile defense, Apache attack helicopters and other materiel – accounted for $19 billion.
An email from a Clinton Foundation official released earlier this month, in the sixth of Wikileaks’ postings of John Podesta’s emails, revealed that in 2011, the Qatari government had pledged $1 million to the foundation to help former President Clinton celebrate his birthday. In return, the email said, the Qataris sought a “five-minute” audience with Mr. Clinton.
The individual at the State Department who was statutorily entrusted to approve foreign military sales was Andrew Shapiro, the assistant secretary of state for political and military affairs. Prior to his nomination to that job, Shapiro had served as Clinton’s national security adviser in her Senate office. Today, Shapiro is a partner in a Washington consulting firm whose other co-founders include Philippe Reines, Clinton’s longtime press aide.
After Clinton stepped down as secretary of state in February 2013, Raytheon discontinued the services of Heather Podesta + Partners, and ceased its use of DLA Piper at State.
While experts do not believe any laws were broken, the affair illustrates how Washington worked in the first Obama term, and particularly at the Clinton State Department. The Raytheon operation bears some similarity to a pop-up store that materializes to serve a seasonal need, such as Halloween candy or July Fourth fireworks, then vanishes once that need has been met.
“I think this is as close an example of pay-to-play as we’ve seen,” said Raj Shah, deputy communications director at the Republican National Committee. “And that's why [Raytheon] made these hires [of Heather Podesta, Merrigan and Bernstein]. … Their experience was getting access to Hillary Clinton and raising money for her.”
“The ultimate responsibility, of course, rests on the Cabinet official. In this case, it'd be the secretary of state,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby at a briefing with reporters Wednesday. “But we do it in close coordination with DOD. … The only considerations that are factored into the foreign military sales program is the furtherance of foreign policy objectives of the United States of America and not the efforts by external groups to lobby, as you say, or to influence that decision.”
Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, told Fox News that the nominee “never took action as secretary of state because of any donations and any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
In a statement, Raytheon said its lobbying practices and policies are fully disclosed and comply with all federal, state and local laws. DLA Piper did not respond to a request for comment. And Heather Podesta sent Fox News a one-sentence email saying: “I never lobbied the Secretary or John Podesta on this matter.”

Emails show Clinton campaign sought to 'bern' Sanders with poolside pic

John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, could barely contain himself when a Clinton aide emailed him a picture of a shirtless Bernie Sanders lounging at an exclusive resort on Marta’s Vineyard.
“Can we tweet?” Podesta wrote in a 2015 email, according to a recent Wikileaks dump. Clinton staffers shared the email, and snarky remarks.
“Omg,” Brian Fallon, Cinton’s press secretary, wrote. “I think we shd (sic) give to NY Post.”
Just days after the campaign caught wind of the picture of Sanders in the shade during a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee retreat at Martha’s Vineyard, gossip maven Perez Hilton posted the picture on Facebook.
Not known for his political accumen, Hilton stumbled on the perfect caption: “I wonder what @MikeBloomberg would think about this??? @BernieSanders lounges at elite Martha’s Vineyard pool, summer 2015, after helping raise money from Wall Street lobbyists.”
It was not clear if Team Clinton sought to publicize the photo to show Sanders, a champion of the working class, at an exclusive locale or if the goal was to circulate an unflattering picture of a septuagenarian in a swimsuit.
In an MSNBC report titled, “Bernie Sanders a regular at high-dollar donor retreats,” it was pointed out that Sanders was once even “spotted chatting sociably for close to an hour with a financial services lobbyist who was in a hot tub while the senator sat nearby.”
Through much of the primary, Clinton sought to distance herself from Wall Street. In some of their most heated debates, Sanders appeared to land some punches that tied her to banks.
“I stood up against the behaviors of the banks when I was a senator,” Clinton said during an April debate. “I called them out on their mortgage behavior.”
“Oh my goodness, they must have been really crushed by this,” Sanders said.
A spokesman for Sanders did not immediately respond to an email from FoxNews.com about the picture. But since losing the nomination fight, Sanders has embraced the Clinton campaign and said “I am determined to implement the agenda of the Democratic Party platform which was agreed upon by her campaign.”
Sanders supporters were not always so forgiving. One commenter replied to the picture on Hilton’s Instagram account, “Hillary put you up to that one…lol nice try! Ps I’m glad Hillary can love the gay community for 3 years and that’s enough for you (sic) turn your back on someone who has been fighting for equality for decades.”
Kenneth Corcoran, 61, a machinist in New Hampshire, said this kind of campaigning is what turns him off from national politics. The former Sanders supporter said he is on top of the issues and has followed the WikiLeaks dump and has been unsatisfied with her explanations.
“If I’m in a particularly foul mood on [election] day, I may vote Trump,” he said. “Just to stick a pen in the Clintons.”