Hillary Cartoons

Hillary Clinton aides had access to State Dept. after she left, says key lawmaker

When Hillary Clinton resigned as Secretary of State in 2013, she negotiated continuing access to classified and top-secret documents for herself and six staffers under the designation "research assistants," according to a powerful senator who notes that Clinton was later deemed "extremely careless" with such information.
The staff apparently retained access even after Clinton announced her run for president in April 2015, according to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. The access was ostensibly granted to facilitate work on Clinton's memoir, but Grassley said he was only able to verify it after the Obama administration left the White House.

“It is so unimaginatively offensive that Hillary Clinton or her staff would have any access to classified or top secret information."
- Chris Farrell, Judicial Watch

“I have repeatedly asked the State Department whether Secretary Clinton and her associates had their clearances suspended or revoked to which the Obama Administration refused to respond,” Grassley wrote in a March 30 letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
“Recently, the State Department informed the Committee that six additional Secretary Clinton staff at State were designated as her research assistants which allowed them to retain their clearances after leaving the Department,” Grassley added.
The State Department has not yet responded it an inquiry from Fox News as to whether Clinton, or her staff, including then-chief of staff Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, her traveling chief of staff and former assistant, who went on to become the vice chair of her presidential campaign, and Jake Sullivan, her senior policy advisor, still have access to the classified and top-secret archives and systems.
Clinton could not immediately be reached for comment.
Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Thursday launched an inquiry into the matter, citing among his concerns FBI director James Comey’s July 5 announcement where he said the FBI found Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” Grassley also contended there is “evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information...”
During the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s use of a private server and her handling of top secret and classified information, Comey acknowledged there were seven email chains on Clinton’s server that were classified at the “Top Secret/Special Access Program level.” Another 2,000 emails on her private server were also found to have contained information deemed classified now, though not marked classified when sent. The server also contained 22 top-secret emails deemed too damaging to national security to be released.
Grassley wants more answers from the State Department now that Tillerson is in charge, including whether it ever investigated or sanctioned Clinton and her staff for mishandling information.
“It is unclear what steps the State Department has taken to impose administrative sanctions,” Grassley said. “Any other government workers who engaged in such serious offenses would, at a minimum, have their clearances suspended pending an investigation. The failure to do so has given the public the impression that Secretary Clinton and her associates received special treatment.”
Grassley said former Secretary of State John Kerry ignored his queries in 2015 and 2016.
In 2015, Cheryl Mills’ attorney said her client had access as late as Oct. 30 of that year, according to documents reviewed by Fox News. After leaving the State Department, Mills was an advisor to Clinton’s presidential bid. Heather Samuelson, a lawyer who worked under Mills and also was a staffer for Clinton in 2008 during her presidential run, also apparently retained an active Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearance, according to records reviewed by Fox News.
Chris Farrell, of Judicial Watch, a conservative Washington-based government watchdog group that has filed a number of lawsuits related to the Clinton email scandal, said it is “outrageous” that Clinton and her staff would have access after they left the state department, and may still have access, after such egregious behavior.
“It is so unimaginatively offensive that Hillary Clinton or her staff would have any access to classified or top secret information," Farrell said. "It is a mindblower.
“Any other government employee, I don’t care what department or agency they are from, would have had their access to classified and top secret information revoked and their clearance suspended, pending the outcome of an investigation into the mishandling of such information,” Farrell added.

Trump travel ban: Administration appeals Hawaii judge's new ruling blocking ban

President Trump’s administration on Thursday appealed the latest court ruling against his revised travel ban to the same court that refused to reinstate the original version.
A day earlier, U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii handed the government its latest defeat by issuing a longer-lasting hold on Trump’s executive order.
The Department of Justice filed the appeal with the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the appeals court had rejected Trump’s previous order. The court upheld the decision in a 3-0 ruling on Feb. 9. The main argument from the Trump administration was that judges do not have the authority to second-guess executive decisions on items like immigration and national security, the report said.
Watson’s decision came after the DOJ argued for a narrower ruling covering only the ban on new visas for people from six Muslim-majority countries. The department urged the judge to allow a freeze on the U.S. refugee program to go forward.
Government attorney Chad Readler said halting the flow of refugees had no effect on Hawaii and the state has not shown how it is harmed by the ban. Watson disagreed.
The administration says the executive order falls within the president’s power to protect national security and will ultimately succeed, while Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin likened the revised ban to a neon sign flashing “Muslim ban” that the government hasn’t turned off.
The White House believes Trump’s executive order is legal, necessary for national security and will ultimately be allowed to move forward, spokesman Sean Spicer said Thursday.
Watson’s indefinite hold is “just the latest step that will allow the administration to appeal,” Spicer said.

Congress OKs Planned Parenthood funding crackdown, as Pence breaks tie

Republican legislation letting states deny federal family planning money to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers squeezed narrowly through the Senate Thursday, rescued by an ailing GOP senator who returned to the Capitol after back surgery and a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence.

In Congress' latest clash mixing the politics of abortion, women's health and states' rights, Pence cast the decisive vote in a 51-50 roll call. The tally had been tied after two GOP senators, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski and Maine's Susan Collins, joined Democrats opposing the measure.

Senate approval sent the legislation to President Donald Trump, who was expected to sign it. The House voted its consent last month.

The bill erases a regulation imposed by former President Barack Obama shortly before he left office that lets states deny family planning funds to organizations only if they are incapable of providing those services. Some states have passed laws in recent years denying the money to groups that provide abortions.

Passage gives Republicans and anti-abortion groups a needed victory just six days after the party's highly touted health care overhaul disintegrated in the House due to GOP divisions. Besides erasing much of Obama's 2010 health care law, the failed House bill would have blocked federal funds for Planned Parenthood for a year.

There is already a ban on using federal funds for abortion except for rare instances.

Democrats assailed the legislation as an attack on women, two months after Trump's inauguration prompted a women's march on Washington that mushroomed into anti-Trump demonstrations around the nation.

"While Trumpcare was dealt a significant blow last week, it is clear that the terrible ideas that underpin it live on with Republicans in Congress," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., using a nickname for the failed House health care bill. Murray, among a stream of Democratic women senators who spoke, called the Senate measure "shameful" and "dangerous."

Republicans said the measure would give states more freedom to decide how to spend family planning funds. States would be free to divert money now going to groups that provide abortion to other organizations that don't, like community health centers.

"It substituted Washington's judgment for the needs of real people," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said of Obama's rule.

With Republicans holding 52-48 control of the Senate, the Collins and Murkowski defections could have derailed the bill because Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., has been absent since Feb. 20, when he had spinal surgery.

He had a second operation March 15 and has been recuperating in Georgia under doctor's orders. But he got permission to return to Washington for one day, his office said, and he did so using a walker.

"We didn't know at the time what it would be but it turned out to be the vice president's tie-breaker," Isakson told reporters after an earlier procedural vote.

The federal family planning program was created 1970 and in 2015 served 4 million clients at nearly 4,000 clinics. Most of the money is for providing services like contraceptives, family planning counseling, breast and cervical cancer screening and sexually transmitted disease prevention. It has a $286 million federal budget this year.

Most recipients are women, and two-thirds have incomes at or below the federal poverty level, around $12,000 for an individual. Six in 10 say the program's services are their only or most frequent source of health care.

Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, mocked Pence.

"Mike Pence went from yesterday's forum on empowering women to today leading a group of male politicians in a vote to take away access to birth control and cancer screenings," she said.

The Congressional Review Act has lets lawmakers undo regulations enacted in the last months of the Obama administration with a majority vote. Congress has already used the law to eliminate Obama regulations that strengthened protections for streams near coal-mining operations and prevented some people with mental disorders from gun purchases.

Under the Constitution, the vice president casts tie breaking votes. Pence broke his first tie on the nomination of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Ex-Trump adviser Carter Page rips 'false narrative' on Russia collusion

EXCLUSIVE: Former Trump adviser Carter Page, in a wide-ranging interview with Fox News, decried what he described as “propaganda” driven by a “false narrative” regarding his 2016 contacts with Russian officials, denying that he ever worked with them to help the campaign.
Page is one of several Trump associates being scrutinized amid multiple probes looking at Russia's interference in last year's campaign. As he prepares for interviews with the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, Page gave a categorical denial when asked by Fox News Chief Intelligence Correspondent Catherine Herridge whether he worked with the Russians to help the Trump campaign.
“Absolutely not,” he said, laughing. “I did nothing that could even possibly be viewed as helping them in any way.”
Asked whether he had worked with the Russians to hurt the Clinton campaign, he replied, “Absolutely not. In no way, shape or form.”
Still, Page acknowledged for the first time what he insists was a brief meeting with the Russian ambassador at the Republican National Convention – an admission sure to fuel foes of the Trump administration looking for evidence of Trump-Russia coordination.
Page, who described himself as an oil industry consultant and U.S. Naval Academy midshipman, was a relative unknown when the Trump campaign announced his hiring as a foreign policy adviser in March 2016. He would stay with the Trump team until September 2016, but says he left because “these stories kept coming out based on the dodgy dossier.”
Page appeared in the infamous “Trump Dossier” created by former British Intelligence operative Christopher Steele, working for a U.S. political research group called Fusion GPS on behalf of both Republicans and Democrats. “And so out of respect and out of doing what's best for the campaign, I thought it's best if I step aside and take a leave of absence at that at that point,” Page said.
In his opening statement before testimony by FBI Director James Comey and NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers last week, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., put Page at the center of an alleged web of collusion to help Russia interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Schiff went through a blow-by-blow of Page’s alleged pro-Russian activities, which Page answered in his exclusive interview.
“In early July,” Schiff said at the hearing, “Carter Page travels to Moscow on a trip approved by the Trump campaign. While in Moscow, he gives a speech critical of the United States and other western countries for what he believes is a hypocritical focus on democratization and efforts to fight corruption.”
While Trump campaign “people were okay with [the trip],” Page said, “the word 'approved' … can be misleading that I was actually authorized to go and represent the campaign. It had nothing to do with the campaign. I was going as a private citizen.” 
The oft-quoted line from the speech that was characterized as anti-American was, "Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.”
But Page told Fox News the line was taken out of context to make him look bad. “It was really about that concept of mutual respect and the way various countries including Russia, China and the United States, can work together for having a more constructive relationship primarily with the states of central Asia, such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan,” he said.
Schiff, at the hearing, pointed to another allegation from the dossier, that “Page also had a secret meeting with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, reported to be a former KGB agent and close friend of Russian President Putin.”
“I have never met Igor Sechin in my life,” Page countered. “Completely false. I've never met him in my entire life. I may have seen him at a conference once at a distance, but I've never shaken his hand.”
After his Moscow speech, Page attended the Republican National Convention last July in Cleveland. Steele and Schiff described how Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak met with Page – acting as a go-between on behalf of then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Then, according to Schiff, “Just prior to the convention, the Republican Party platform is changed, removing a section that supports the provision of lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine, an action that would be contrary to Russian interests.”
But Page told Herridge in the exclusive interview, “I was always very cautious. The only time, and you're the first person in the media that I'm saying this very directly to -- I said, ‘Hello,’ to him in passing, handed him my business card and never got a business card from him, as I did for many ambassadors in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.”
Page said the reason he never mentioned the passing encounter before was “out of respect for privacy for Ambassador Kislyak. And there were very direct rules that that was an off-the-record session.”
Still, Page asserted that, “Nothing happened between me and Ambassador Kislyak. That I can assure you.  I had no direct one-on-one material discussions with him in any way, shape or form.”
Page even denied the dossier allegation that Manafort appointed him as a coordinator with the Russians: “Totally false. Just like everything else about those allegations.”
For his part, Page argued that the attacks on the Trump administration by its political foes have harmed the U.S. political system more severely than the allegations that Russia meddled in the U.S. election.
“Liars and leakers in Washington and more broadly the political class in the United States actually had a much more negative impact,” Page said. “All of the discussions about the influence that the Russian government had on the U.S. election would actually pale in comparison to the much heavier influence that the U.S. government actually had in trying to hurt then-candidate Trump. That negative impact based on these complete lies has continued to put a dark shadow over the United States in general.”