Presumptuous Politics : Oct 1, 2016

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Obama Iran Cartoons

Obama admin ripped over ‘secret’ deal aiding Iranian banks

Who is the most crooked, Obama or Clinton?

Crooked See more synonyms on Thesaurus.com

1. winding, devious, sinuous, flexuous, tortuous, spiral, twisted. 3. misshapen. 4. unscrupulous, knavish, tricky, fraudulent.

The Obama administration is coming under tough new criticism for its dealings with Tehran after a Wall Street Journal report claimed the U.S. agreed to sign a “secret document” lifting international sanctions on Iranian banks just as the regime was releasing four American prisoners.
House Speaker Paul Ryan on Friday called on Obama to provide “an immediate explanation.”
According to the Journal, the Obama administration agreed to support removing United Nations sanctions on the banks well in advance of the 2023 date agreed upon in the nuclear deal. The early removal of sanctions on Bank Sepah and Bank Sepah International reportedly was part of a broader list of “tightly scripted agreements,” including the controversial prisoner exchange and transfer of $1.7 billion in cash to Iran that Republicans characterize as a “ransom.”
Ryan said the move violated the nuclear deal.
“This story grows more disturbing with each passing day," Ryan, R-Wis., said in his statement. “It now appears that on the same day American hostages were freed from Iran, the administration not only agreed to the $1.7 billion cash ransom payment, but violated a key term of the nuclear deal by prematurely lifting ballistic missile sanctions.”
The White House downplayed the details, though, as old news.
“I'd note that this information is not new and was reported on back in January,” a National Security Council official said.
A senior administration official said the U.S. was “comfortable” removing the bank from the U.N. sanctions list since the U.S. was already removing Bank Sepah from its own “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.” The official said the bank will still be cut off from the U.S. financial system, and the U.S. government has the ability to “quickly re-impose” sanctions if needed.
The Treasury Department designated both banks as facilitators of Iran’s nuclear program in January 2007 but sanctions were not to be lifted until 2023.
“Bank Sepah is the financial linchpin of Iran's missile procurement network and has actively assisted Iran's pursuit of missiles capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction," said Stuart Levey, Treasury's under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence (TFI), in his 2007 statement initiating the sanctions.
The series of newly revealed agreements, including delivering millions to Iran in cash payments, has angered Republicans on Capitol Hill.
The Treasury Department has conceded it made two wire transfers to Iran in July 2015 and April 2016 despite claims that sanctions prevented non-cash payments to Iran.
“These wire payments contradict the Administration’s claim that American sanctions laws prevented payment to Iran in any other form than cash, and raise questions about why they agreed to pay in cash over more transparent and accountable methods,” wrote Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., in a Thursday column in The Hill.
Members of Congress reportedly were kept in the dark about the secret deal and Pentagon officials admitted in recent congressional testimony that they did not participate in the cash and prisoner transfers.
"We weren’t involved in this," Secretary of Defense Ash Carter testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September.
"I don’t know all the details of it, and the chairman and I were not involved in that. It is a decision that was taken by the law-enforcement and diplomatic [agencies]," added Carter.

Mic Dropped: Debate commission admits 'issues' with Trump’s audio

Mic was dropped but it was a accident, yeah right :-)

The Commission on Presidential Debates admitted Friday there were indeed issues with Donald Trump’s audio at Monday’s debate – four days after the Republican nominee complained about sound issues inside the venue and was mocked for it by Hillary Clinton.
“Regarding the first debate, there were issues regarding Donald Trump's audio that affected the sound level in the debate hall,” the CPD said in a short statement Friday afternoon.
While Trump already has taken a drubbing from political analysts for aspects of his performance Monday, the unusual -- and belated -- statement from the commission boosts his claim that he was having microphone problems.
"I was a little bit upset that the microphone in the room wasn’t working," Trump told reporters Monday night.
The next day, he continued to bring up the sound issues.
"My microphone in the room, they couldn’t hear me," Trump said on Fox and Friends. "I wonder if it was set up that way,” he added. “It was terrible."
Trump said there had been no issue with the microphone before the debate, and suggested a more sinister motive at play.
“I don’t want to believe in conspiracy theories of course, but it was much lower than hers and it was crackling,” he said.
Clinton mocked the complaints at the time.
“Anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night,” she told reporters Tuesday.
Some in the Trump campaign also have suggested the audio problems are why Trump’s microphone picked up on his breathing so acutely. During the early part of the debate, he was mocked on social media for what sounded like sniffling. Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean even questioned whether it was a sign he's a "coke user" (for which Dean was also ridiculed).
However, the CPD’s short statement only referred to issues inside the hall, and not how it came across on television.
Trump mentioned the issue again late Friday, telling a crowd in Michigan: "When you have 100 million people watching, what do you do, stop the show? It was bad, I wonder why."

Key Hillary Clinton aide repeatedly misplaced sensitive info, according to reports

A top aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found herself in hot water in 2013 with the agency’s security and law enforcement arm when she lost classified information while accompanying her boss on a diplomatic trip to Moscow, an incident that the FBI revisited earlier this year when it probed Clinton’s own problems handling sensitive data.
Monica Hanley, Clinton’s “confidential assistant” at the state department, was reprimanded and given “verbal counseling” by Diplomatic Security after she left classified material behind in the Moscow hotel, FBI documents show. The FBI spoke to Hanley, 35, in January as a part of its investigation into Clinton’s handling of top-secret and classified information when she was Secretary of State.
“Diplomatic Security takes exposure of classified information very seriously,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy research at the Center for Immigration Studies, who formerly worked for the State Department. “Part of their job is to look for classified material that people have left out. You can lose your security clearance if you’re caught more than once, and that means you might lose your job. It’s a big deal.”
During her trip with Clinton to Russia, Hanley was given a “diplomatic pouch” that held Clinton’s briefing book and schedule for her Russian trip. Hanley brought the pouch and its contents into the Russian hotel suite, which she shared with Clinton, but she left behind some of those classified documents, the FBI report revealed.
Diplomatic Security, which protects the Secretary of State in the U.S. and abroad as well as high-ranking foreign dignitaries and officials visiting the United States, found the classified document in that suite during a routine sweep after Clinton and Hanley left the hotel. Agents subsequently informed Hanley “the briefing book and document should never have been in the suite.”
Despite having top secret clearance and being one of just three people working for Clinton with access to the top-secret communication room called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, in Clinton’s residences in Washington and New York, Hanley had other lapses with State Department records.
After Clinton’s longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal was the target of an email hack in the spring of 2013, Clinton’s email company, Platte River Network, advised Clinton to change her personal email address, because he had been frequently corresponding with Clinton and her aides. Because Clinton did not want to lose her old emails, Hanley was given an extra Apple MacBook from President Bill Clinton’s Harlem, N.Y., office, and directed to transfer over all four years of Clinton’s emails. She completed the virtual process from her own apartment, which she said took several days because of the volume.
Hanley made another backup of the emails on a thumb drive, but the FBI report said that is lost. “Hanley also recalled transferring the emails to a thumb drive but could not recall what happened to the thumb drive,” the report stated.
The laptop remained in Hanley’s apartment. Hanley moved at least once, and brought the MacBook with her to her new apartment, but she never recovered the thumb drive, the FBI report said.
After Hanley left the State Department in 2014, she realized she still had the laptop in her desk drawer, and she mailed it back to Platte River Network with directions to migrate the emails back to Clinton’s existing server and return the MacBook to Clinton’s current aide.
When the FBI first contacted Hanley in November, 2015, to schedule an interview, she reached out to Clinton’s current aide to ask for the whereabouts of the laptop, but the assistant told Hanley “she did not recall receiving it from Platte River Network.” Also missing were all of Clinton’s emails sent and received between January and March 2009, the FBI report showed.
The entire Clinton team used unsecured BlackBerry phones to communicate and Clinton also used her iPad to review email and news reports. Several of Clinton’s old BlackBerry phones that Hanley purchased also were not turned over to the FBI.
Justin Cooper, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton who also played a key role in setting up Hillary Clinton's email system, told FBI agents that he took Clinton’s discarded phones and would either break them in half or smash them with a hammer but there was no accounting of the number of phones discarded or where they were located.
While critics note Clinton’s hardware wasn’t safeguarded, neither were her emails. When Clinton's server and email system went down during a storm, Hanley created a gmail account for Clinton to use while Clinton was in Croatia. Hanley, like other State Department employees, often used unsecured private email accounts instead of their State Department email, allegedly because the wireless connection in the plane they traveled in didn’t sync with the State Department account.
The Inspector General, who at the direction of Congress, looked into whether Clinton and her team mishandled classified information, referred the case to the FBI because it determined classified and top secret documents were part of the record. The State Department subsequently designated 22 of the messages from Clinton’s account as “top secret,” which means they could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to national security if they are disclosed.
But on July 5, FBI director James Comey announced that the FBI had closed its investigation into Clinton’s use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State without recommending charges against anyone involved. The Attorney General immediately accepted the FBI’s recommendation not to prosecute. The FBI released 189 pages of its report on the investigation last Friday.

It's Alive: FBI files reveal how Clinton server was created in K Street lab

68 years

Born October 26, 1947

If Hillary Clinton’s ‘homebrew’ server ever got the Mary Shelley treatment, IT specialist Bryan Pagliano would make a fine Dr. Frankenstein – FBI documents reveal new details about how he painstakingly created the machine over a series of months while working in a room along Washington’s storied K Street.
According to files released last Friday evening, Pagliano worked to design and build the now-infamous server inside a room once used as part of Clinton’s campaign headquarters. On the street known as Washington’s power corridor, Pagliano even used computer remnants from Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential bid, where he had worked as an IT specialist.
The story of how the server came into existence became clearer thanks to witness interviews known as 302s. Though they were highly redacted, the bureau files include new details Pagliano revealed in a June 24 interview with the FBI.
In that interview, Pagliano said it was longtime Clinton Foundation aide Justin Cooper who asked him to build the server “in the fall of 2008” and that Pagliano completed the work in early 2009. (Pages 155, 163)
After the server’s completion in the makeshift lab on K Street, Pagliano stated that he “rented a minivan and drove to Chappaqua New York to install the email server in the Clinton residence.”
Pagliano and Cooper were separately interviewed by the FBI five times during the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s use of private server and private email for government business while secretary of state. According to the reviewed documents, Pagliano was interviewed first on Dec. 22, 2015 and again six months later on June 21, 2016.
Cooper was interviewed three times -- once in 2015 and twice in 2016 -- and appeared before Congress. Pagliano was one of five people who received limited immunity from the Justice Department, has taken the Fifth and refused to testify before Congress.
In his interviews with the FBI, Pagliano said that “he could not recall any existing computer systems at the Chappaqua residence other than the Apple server described previously to the FBI.”
Widely published reports including one in the New York Times indicated that Clinton was informally announced as Obama’s choice of secretary of state on Nov. 22, 2008, with her formal nomination on Dec. 1. After working in her 2008 presidential campaign, Pagliano joined Clinton in the State Department as an employee and IT specialist, but he also continued to work on the homebrew server he built.
Pagliano, though, insisted to the FBI that he “believed the email server he was building would be used for private email exchange with Bill Clinton aides.”
In addition, it was during his second interview with the FBI in June, that Pagliano suddenly “recalled being given a list of user names and passwords that Cooper asked to be transferred from Cooper’s Apple server to Pagliano’s system.” (Page 164)
The 302 continued, “Pagliano did not recall transferring an account for Hillary Clinton and does not know how her account was installed on the server he built.”
Justin Cooper did not work for the State Department but stated in his March 2016 interview that he registered the domain, clintonemail.com, because he handled financial issues for the Clintons. Cooper continues to works for Clinton Foundation entities which include Teneo.
Despite handing out limited immunity deals to five people including Pagliano, FBI Director James Comey has stated that Clinton’s actions with her email practices were “extremely careless” -- but not criminal. As a presidential candidate once again, Hillary Clinton continues to refer to the server and her use of private email as “a mistake.”
Strikingly, Cooper also said in his March interview that Hillary Clinton “had Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF’s) in both her New York residence as well as her residence in the District of Columbia (DC).”
In his last interview with the FBI in June, Cooper suddenly remembered there were also two identical iMac computers inside what were supposed to be tightly secured rooms used to review classified materials. The interview states, “Cooper recalled a personally-owned iMac computer in the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) of both the Washington, DC and Chappaqua, NY residences of Hillary Clinton.”
Cooper added he did not have the combination to open the SCIF and admitted: “The SCIF doors at both residences were not always secured.” This on its face is a direct violation of security protocol.
Cooper added further insight into close aide Huma Abedin’s access to the SCIFs by stating “Abedin was frequently there but did not know if Abedin could access the SCIF when it was secured.”
Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.