Presumptuous Politics

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

'Quid pro quo': FBI files show top State official tried to 'influence' bureau on Clinton emails

A senior State Department official proposed a “quid pro quo” to convince the FBI to strip the classification on an email from Hillary Clinton’s server – and repeatedly tried to “influence” the bureau’s decision when his offer was denied, even taking his plea up the chain of command, according to newly released FBI documents.
Fox News first reported Saturday that the FBI interview summaries and notes, known as 302s, contained allegations of a quid pro quo. Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who initially told Fox News of the claim, called it a “flashing red light of potential criminality.”
Documents published Monday morning confirm the account. Notes from an interview with an unnamed FBI official reveal the State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy tried to horse-trade with the FBI, offering additional slots for the bureau overseas if they would de-classify a particular email marked “SECRET.”
According to the documents, an unnamed individual said he was “pressured” to “change the classified email to unclassified.”
“[Redacted] indicated he had been contacted by PATRICK KENNEDY, Undersecretary of State, who had asked his assistance in altering the email’s classification in exchange for a ‘quid pro quo,’” the 302 states. “[Redacted] advised that in exchange for marking the email unclassified, STATE would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more Agents in countries where they are presently forbidden.”
At a subsequent meeting at the State Department regarding the classification review of Clinton’s materials where Kennedy presided, someone asked whether any of the emails in question were classified.
“Making eye contact with [redacted] KENNEDY remarked, ‘Well, we’ll see,’” the document says. The official, according to one account, was “attempting to influence the FBI to change its markings.”
Kennedy allegedly asked at that point who else he could speak with and was referred to Michael Steinbach, then a top official with the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. Kennedy “continued to pressure the FBI to change the classified markings on the email to unclassified,” the document says. “STEINBACH refused to do so.”
The document says Kennedy then asked about whether the FBI would be making a public statement and was told they would not. Shortly afterward, the story about the email contents broke in the press and Clinton publicly denied having sent classified emails on her server.
In the wake of the document release, House Oversight Committee Chairman Chaffetz and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., have written letters to Secretary of State John Kerry and Inspector General Steve Linick seeking Kennedy’s removal and a misconduct investigation.
"We find Under Secretary Kennedy's actions extremely disturbing. Those who receive classified intelligence should not barter in it - that is reckless behavior with our nation's secrets,” they said in a statement. “Someone who would try to get classification markings doctored should not continue serving in the State Department or retain access to classified information. Therefore, President Obama and Secretary Kerry should immediately remove Under Secretary Kennedy pending a full investigation."
State Department spokesman Mark Toner on Monday denied the “quid pro quo” allegation.
At a press briefing, he said, “[Kennedy] contacted the FBI to understand what their rationale was for requesting an upgrade of this particular information.”
A spokesperson at the FBI provided a lengthy statement to Fox News on Saturday night ahead of the document release -- disputing Chaffetz's characterization and stating that, while the conversation did happen, the two issues discussed were not connected.
The FBI account is as follows:
“The FBI determined that one such email was classified at the Secret level. A senior State Department official requested the FBI re-review that email to determine whether it was in fact classified or whether it might be protected from release under a different FOIA exemption. A now-retired FBI official, who was not part of the subsequent Clinton investigation, told the State Department official that they would look into the matter. Having been previously unsuccessful in attempts to speak with the senior State official, during the same conversation, the FBI official asked the State Department official if they would address a pending, unaddressed FBI request for space for additional FBI employees assigned abroad. Following the call, the FBI official consulted with a senior FBI executive responsible for determining the classification of the material and determined the email was in fact appropriately classified at the Secret level.”
According to the FBI, “The classification of the email was not changed, and it remains classified today. Although there was never a quid pro quo, these allegations were nonetheless referred to the appropriate officials for review."
The FBI documents fueled GOP allegations about Clinton’s handling of classified material.
“These documents further demonstrate Secretary Clinton’s complete disregard for properly handling classified information. This is exactly why I called on DNI Clapper to deny her access to classified information,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement. “Moreover, a senior State Department official’s attempt to pressure the FBI to hide the extent of this mishandling bears all the signs of a cover-up.”
Kennedy appears in other sections of the FBI documents as well. According to another FBI interview, Kennedy wanted some information changed to an obscure code known as B9 to “allow him to archive the document in the basement of DoS [Department of State] never to be seen again.”
The State Department inspector general also told the FBI Kennedy’s “tone and tenor were definitely not positive when dealing” with their office.

Melania Trump calls husband's comments 'offensive,' says attacks on Bill Clinton 'justified'

Melania Trump, wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, spoke out for the first time Monday since a videotape was released of her husband making lewd comments about women in 2005, saying, "we are moving on."
Trump made the comments to Fox News' Ainsley Earhardt in an interview to air in full Tuesday morning on "Fox & Friends."
“Those words, they were offensive to me and they were inappropriate,” Trump told Fox News. “And he apologized to me. And I expect -- I accept his apology. And we are moving on.”
She also said that it's fair for the media and her husband to bring up former President Bill Clinton's infidelities amid his wife's presidential campaign.
“They're asking for it. They started,” Trump said, referring to nude images from the 1990s published by the New York Post earlier this year. “They started from the beginning of the campaign putting my picture from modeling days."
"That was my modeling days and I'm proud what I did. I worked very hard,” she added.

Trump says FBI records on Clinton reveal 'criminal act,' State Dept. official should resign

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Monday night at a campaign rally in Wisconsin that newly released FBI records reveal "a criminal act" he claims is worse than Watergate while calling for a senior State Department official to resign.
"This is one of the great miscarriages of justice in the history of our country," he said.
Newly released FBI documents revealed Monday that a senior State Department official proposed a “quid pro quo” to convince the FBI to strip the classification on an email from Hillary Clinton’s server – and repeatedly tried to “influence” the bureau’s decision when his offer was denied, even taking his plea up the chain of command.
Fox News first reported Saturday that the FBI interview summaries and notes, known as 302s, contained allegations of a quid pro quo. Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who initially told Fox News of the claim, called it a “flashing red light of potential criminality.”
Documents published Monday morning confirm the account. Notes from an interview with an unnamed FBI official reveal the State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy tried to horse-trade with the FBI, offering additional slots for the bureau overseas if they would de-classify a particular email marked “SECRET.”
Trump accused the State Department Monday night of "trying to cover up Hillary's crimes of sending classified information on a server our enemies could easily access."
He also blasted Kennedy, saying his actions were a sign of a "cover-up."
"The FBI documents show that Under-Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy made the request for altering classification as part of a 'quid pro quo,' in other words a deal," Trump told supporters. "This is felony corruption. Under-Secretary Kennedy needs to resign."
Before his rally, Trump described the actions by the State Department to Fox News' Carl Cameron as "a criminal act," while also hurling criticisms at fellow Republicans.
"It's a crime, and I hear the Republicans are going to hold hearings after the election, why would you hold them after the election? We want to hold those hearings before the election," Trump said. "It's a criminal act and it's incredible that they can do this and get away with it."
When asked if he was taking shots at Republicans again, Trump pushed back as to why hearings should be held sooner.
"I mean, you'd think you'd hold these hearings frankly immediately, this is serious stuff," Trump told Fox News. "This is big stuff. This is Watergate."
When asked further by Cameron about his recent public hostility with Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, who represents Wisconsin, Trump said he was "trying to unite the party."
"I mean every once in a while Paul will stand up and say he disagrees with this or that," he told Fox News. "For instance when I talked about a rigged election, when I talk about the press taking people with no case whatsoever and putting them on the front pages."
Before Trump took the stage at his rally, the crowd broke into chants of "Paul Ryan sucks," the Associated Press reported.
The man introducing Trump on Monday, Wisconsin GOP Chairman Brad Courtney, was reportedly briefly drowned by the chant.
While continuing to discuss his plan to reform government, the Republican nominee claimed he'll "end government corruption" if he's elected to the White House.
Trump said he wants to ban executive branch officials from lobbying the government for five years after they leave the White House -- and wants Congress to do the same for members and their staffs.
He also wants to expand the definition of lobbyist and is calling for a lifetime ban on senior executive branch officials lobbying on behalf of foreign governments.

Monday, October 17, 2016

Dumb Democrat Cartoons

Newt Gingrich: Hillary's dangerous dream of open borders

We finally know why Hillary Clinton refused to release the transcripts of her paid speeches to bankers and special interests: When her staff assembled a list of the most damaging comments in those transcripts, they must have seen immediately that they could not afford for the material ever to be made public.
In one speech, Hillary described how politicians often “need both a public and a private position.” She elaborated that at times, Abraham Lincoln had a public position that was different from the private, secret goal he was actually pursuing.
The list of speech excerpts, in emails made public this month by WikiLeaks, didn’t require us to look far to discover Hillary Clinton’s own secret goal.
In a secret, $225,000 speech to Brazilian bankers in 2013, she let her mask down revealed the goal she truly wants to pursue.

Hillary’s dream of open borders would send the wages and incomes of millions of Americans into a free fall.

“My dream,” she said, “is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”
In other words, open borders and open trade for the entire hemisphere—all of the countries in North and South America.
Not just her hope. Not just her wish. Her dream.
Let’s consider the implications of Hillary’s dream.
Hillary wants an open border with Canada and an open border with Mexico, our two closest neighbors.
She also wants open borders with and among all of the countries in Central America and South America.
In addition to open borders with all of those countries, she us to have open trade with them, so that all of their people can choose to live and work in the United States if they please.
There are about 210 million people in North America outside the United States, including the entire populations of Mexico and Canada.
There are 42 million people in Central America—the seven countries from Guatemala to Panama, some of which are among the most violent places on Earth.
There are 422 million people in South America—more than the entire population of the United States.
How many of those roughly 675 million people do you think would like to come and work in the U.S.?
Hillary’s dream of open borders would send the wages and incomes of millions of Americans into a free fall. At the same time, it would mean an explosion of welfare costs for the states and federal government.
Hillary’s dream would literally drive Americans, and America, bankrupt.
But it’s not just our jobs and our economy that Hillary’s dream would destroy.
Consider what else this radical vision of open borders would mean.
It would mean we’d have no capacity to stop terrorists from entering the United States. ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorists could come in through any one of more than two dozen countries, and make their way freely to the U.S.
We’d have no capacity to stop Mexican heroin and Columbian cocaine, or gangs, like the violent and vicious MS-13 from El Salvador.
And it would mean no capacity to stop the spread of diseases from around the world into the United States.
For most Americans, this isn’t a dream. It’s a warning of a future that could be all too real. Because if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, she’d have the power to make these ambitions a reality. She would only have to continue and expand President Obama’s policies of deliberate non-enforcement of our immigration laws.
There would be no check on Hillary’s power to realize her dream of open borders—and for millions of families, that would mean the destruction of the American dream.
Newt Gingrich, a Republican, was speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. He is the author of the new novel "Treason" (Center Street, October 11) and co-author, with his wife Callista Gingrich, of "Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation's History and Future" (Center Street, May 17, 2016).

North Carolina GOP headquarters firebombed

A Republican party headquarters in North Carolina was firebombed and a nearby building was vandalized and those responsible were still on the loose, authorities said Sunday.
The Charlotte Observer reported that the inside of the Orange County Republican Party headquarters in Hillsborough was severely damaged from the attack Saturday and an adjacent building was marked with spray pained graffiti reading “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else.” No one was injured.
“The office itself is a total loss,” state GOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse said. “The only thing important to us is that nobody was killed, and they very well could have been.”
He said Republican offices around the state were re-examining their security.
The walls over the multi-room office were covered in black char, and a couch against a wall had been burned down to its springs. Shattered glass covered the floor, and a melted campaign yard signs showed warped lettering. According to WNCN-TV, a bottle of flammable liquid was thrown through the front window of the office.
The violent act in the key battleground state was condemned by public figures across the political spectrum.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president said on Twitter that the attack "is horrific and unacceptable. Very grateful that everyone is safe."
Republican nominee Donald Trump blamed the act on Democrats in a tweet and also he encouraged local Republicans, saying: "With you all the way, will never forget. Now we have to win. Proud of you all!"
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said in a tweet that the firebombing was “clearly an attack on Democracy.”
At a news conference, Woodhouse urged Republicans to respond peacefully by turning out to vote in November. He said he'd received messages of support from Democrats.
Orange County GOP chairman Daniel Ashley told reporters that no one had previously made violent threats against the office several miles from the town's historic square. The GOP office is several doors down from a shuttered ice rink in what was once a frontier-themed amusement park that is now a retail complex known as The Shops at Daniel Boone.
Tom Stevens, mayor of the town about 40 miles northwest of Raleigh, said that it was fortunate the fire didn't burn the office and other adjacent buildings that are decades old to the ground.
Stevens, a Democrat, said the act doesn't represent the character of Orange County, which also includes much of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina campus. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 3-1 margin in the county that picked President Barack Obama by a lopsided margin in the 2012 election.
"I'd like to believe we aspire to respect hearing differing views," Stevens said in an interview. "This is very troubling."
Stevens said he wasn't aware of any leads on suspects. Police and officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were investigating.

WikiLeaks: Podesta lamented that a Muslim, not a white man, named as killer in 2015 massacre

Top Hillary Clinton aides were upset a Muslim man was publicly named as the shooter in a 2015 massacre that left 14 people dead, and a longtime Clinton confidant even expressed regret that the terrorist wasn’t a white man, according to purported emails released by WikiLeaks on Sunday.
The emails were part of a trove of messages stolen from the gmail account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, who has had a long association with the Democratic presidential nominee and her husband, former President Bill Clinton. The email chain began on Dec. 2, when digital operative Matt Ortega forwarded a tweet from MSNBC host Christopher Hayes that named one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., attack as Sayeed Farook. Consultant Karen Finney forwarded the email to Podesta, commenting, “Damn.”

Podesta responded: “Better if a guy named Sayeed Farouk [sic] was reporting that a guy named Christopher Hayes was the shooter.”
Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, gunned down 14 people and injured 22 in a terror attack during a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center on Dec. 2. The attackers pledged their allegiance to ISIS before dying in a shootout with police later in the day.
But Podesta’s written lament of the shooter’s ethnicity underscores a long-running aversion in the Clinton campaign – and many in the Democratic party at large – to associating terrorist acts with any aspect of the Islamic religion.
In a 154-page debate prep book that was developed two months after the San Bernardino attacks, and also unearthed in the WikiLeaks document dump, topic 47 is devoted to “Should we call this Islamic terrorism?” Nowhere in the suggested seven-point answer does “Islamic terrorism” make an appearance. Instead, it’s suggested that Clinton call the enemy “radical jihadists.”
“Now, of course there are those who twist Islam to justify mass murder,” point three begins. “But we can’t buy into the same narrative that these barbaric, radical jihadists use to recruit new followers. Declaring war on Islam or demonizing the Muslim-American community is not only counter to our values – it plays right into the terrorists’ hands.”
Point seven states: “Radical jihadists underestimate us. We won’t turn on each other or turn on our principles. We will keep our country safe and strong, free and tolerant. And we will defeat those who threaten us.”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made a concerted effort to note that Clinton and President Obama don’t use Trump’s preferred descriptive term, “Radical Islamic terrorism.” Obama held a lengthy press conference earlier this year to specifically address why he refused to link Islam and terrorism. But in the wake of the Orlando nightclub terror attack in June, and amid more Trump prodding, Clinton relented somewhat.
“Whether you call it radical jihadism or radical Islamism, I’m happy to say either,” she said at the time. “I think they mean the same thing.”
The latest email release was the ninth day this month that emails from Podesta's account were revealed on WikiLeaks. So far, about 12,000 of 50,000 alleged emails have been released.

Hillary Clinton backers worried about Clinton Foundation scandals

Notable revelations in 9th WikiLeaks dump of Podesta emails

Hillary Clinton’s aides and supporters expressed concern about public perception of the Clinton family’s charitable enterprise, with one left-leaning pundit writing that Clinton seemed unaware of the “danger” of her “money problem,” according to purported emails disclosed by Wikileaks on Sunday.
Opinion columnist Brent Budowsky was chiefly concerned with the potential damage that could be caused by the publication of Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book “Clinton Cash,” emails show. The bestseller explored whether there was a relationship between donations made from foreign entities to The Clinton Foundation and the contracts that were approved by then-Secretary of State Clinton for foreign companies. Hillary Clinton has denied the allegations of quid pro quo.
“I have been vigorously criticizing the Schweizer book, but I absolutely believe the Clintons have a money problem, and they are not fully aware of the danger of this,” Brent Budowsky wrote in an April 26, 2015, email to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
Budowsky warned that congressional Republicans could try to ensnare Clinton in “a long-term perjury trap and endless cycles of news stories.” He was also troubled the public could grow weary “talking about Clinton issues and may simply want to move on.”
“The net net of everything HRC has done since leaving the State Department is that her trust numbers have fallen dramatically,” Budowsky wrote.
Budowsky advised ending “ALL foreign donations to the foundation NOW.”
Bill Clinton announced in August that, if Hillary won the presidency, the foundation would cease to accept foreign or corporate money and Bill would resign from the board. Hillary Clinton has not served on the board since April 2015.
“The views I express here represent the overwhelming majority of private views of Democrats I know, but I am not convinced they have expressed this to her, as directly as I am expressing this here……” Budowsky wrote.
But it may have initially appeared to Podesta that Budowsky’s worries were unfounded. A May 2015 New York Times poll apparently found that controversies regarding The Clinton Foundation since the publication of Schweizer’s book were gaining little traction with the public. Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri sent an email to Podesta advising him of a conversation she recently had with an unnamed individual who had access to an early version of the Times poll and its accompanying story.
“He also said the foundation story wasn’t breaking through with real people,” Palmieri wrote.
But internal polls taken just two months later painted a different picture.
“Secretary Clinton’s top vulnerability tested in this poll is the attack that claims as Secretary of State she signed off on a deal that gave the Russian government control over 20 percent of America's uranium production, after investors in the deal donated over $140 million to the Clinton Foundation,” a June report from the Benenson Strategy Group concluded. “Half of all likely voters (53 percent) are less likely to support Clinton after hearing that statement and 17 percent are much less likely to support her after that statement.”
Sunday’s release was the ninth day of WikiLeaks’ steady disclosure of purported emails stolen from Podesta. The anti-secrecy website has said it has 50,000 of Podesta's emails, though only about 12,000 have been made public so far.