State Department releases over 3,000 Clinton emails on New Year's Eve

Hillary Clinton tops list of worst ethics violators of 2015

 

 

The State Department on Thursday released over 3,000 of Hillary Clinton's personal emails from her time as Secretary of State, marking the last of the major document dumps of the year.
Still, the agency said Thursday that it will fall short of the mandate to release 82 percent of Clinton’s total emails by the end of 2015, blaming the holiday schedule and the sheer number of documents involved.
“We have worked diligently to come as close to the goal as possible, but with the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule we have not met the goal this month,” the State Department said in a statement. “To narrow that gap, the State Department will make another production of former Secretary Clinton’s email sometime next week.”
The latest batch of 3,105 emails includes 275 documents upgraded to "classified" since they landed in the former Secretary's personal inbox. That brings the total number of classified docs found in the emails to 1,274. A State Department official told Fox News on Thursday that two of those emails were upgraded to "secret," while most of the others were upgraded to "confidential."
The newly released emails reveal Clinton and one of her closest aides, Jake Sullivan, had an exchange in September 2010 that showed considerable confusion over her email practices.
"I'm never sure which of my emails you receive, so pls let me know if you receive this one and on which address you did," she wrote to Sullivan on a Sunday morning.
A few hours later Sullivan responded: "I have just received this email on my personal account, which I check much less frequently than my State Department account. I have not received any emails from you on my State account in recent days — for example, I did not get the email you sent to me and (Assistant
Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Jeff) Feltman on the Egyptian custody case. Something is very wrong with the connection there."
Sullivan added, "I suppose a near-term fix is to just send messages to this account — my personal account — and I will check it more frequently."
Clinton also cited trouble with her BlackBerry in January 2012, according to one of her emails. "Sorry for the delay in responding," she wrote to Jamie Rubin, a diplomat and journalist, saying her BlackBerry was having "a nervous breakdown on my dime!"
In another exchange, Billionaire George Soros, a major donor to liberal causes, confided to a former Clinton aide that he made the wrong choice in supporting Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries over Clinton.
Soros told Neera Tanden during a dinner sponsored by Democracy Alliance, a liberal group, that he "regretted his decision in the primary — he likes to admit mistakes when he makes them and that was one of them," Tanden told Clinton in a May 2012 email. "He then extolled his work with you from your time as First Lady on."
Tanden also said Soros had been "impressed that he can always call/meet" with Clinton on policy issues but he hadn't yet met with Obama. Soros has been a major donor to Priorities USA, a pro-Clinton Democratic super PAC.
Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus seized upon the news of the upgraded emails as another reason the 2016 presidential candidate couldn't be taken at her word.
"With more than 1,250 emails containing classified information now uncovered, Hillary Clinton's decision to put secrecy over national security by exclusively operating off of a secret email server looks even more reckless," he said in a statement on Thursday.
"When this scandal first broke, Hillary Clinton assured the American people there was no classified material on her unsecure server, a claim which has since been debunked on a monthly basis with each court-ordered release. With an expanded FBI investigation underway and new details emerging about the conflicts of interest her server was designed to conceal, Hillary Clinton has shown she lacks the character and judgement to be president during this critical time for our country."
The State Department, however, reminded that the classifications were retroactive. "The information we upgraded today was not marked classified at the time the emails were sent," the official said.
By court order, the State Department is required to release as many of her emails as they can in a single installment on the last weekday of every month. It released over 7,000 on Nov. 30.
The State Department also said in its statement that most of the documents will have incomplete data fields on the FOIA website, citing “an effort to process and post as many documents as possible.” This means that many of the documents will not have full completed fields for “Subject,” “To,” or “From.” The statement says that that data will be added in January.
Clinton has been under fire through much of 2015 about her use of a private, unsecured email server as secretary of state, specifically over the security of her server, and her incomplete retention of her emails. Clinton claims that she has turned over all work-related emails and has only deleted private or personal emails. She also claims that she never sent or received emails marked classified.
The State Department has released installments of her emails every month since May.
The last batch in November, contains 328 emails deemed to have classified information. According to the State Department, that brought the total number with classified information to 999. The emails also covered the tumultuous period before and after the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi terror attacks. On the night of the attacks, the communications show Clinton notifying top advisers of confirmation from the Libyans that then-Ambassador Chris Stevens had died.
The final installment is expected just before the Iowa caucuses in February.

bill clinton cartoon

Donald Trump blasts Bill Clinton as 'one of the great abusers of the world'

Donald Trump launched new attacks against Bill and Hillary Clinton Wednesday as the war of words between both campaigns heated up.
The GOP hopeful told about 2,000 supporters in Hilton Head Island, S.C. that he was forced to fight back against the Clinton camp after the Democratic frontrunner accused him of displaying a "penchant for sexism."
Trump blasted the former president, saying, "And [Hillary] wants to accuse me of things. And the husband's one of the great abusers of the world. Give me a break. Give me a break. Give me a break."
"She came out saying [Trump] has a ‘penchant for sexism’… now she is playing with that card,” Trump explained. "I had no choice, but I had to mention her husband's situation," a reference to Bill Clinton’s previous extramarital relationships.
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters that Bill Clinton's past is in play during the election.
“Hillary brought up the whole thing with [calling Trump] sexist," he said. "She’s got a major problem [that] happens to be right in her own house. We'll go after the ex-president … it’ll come out well for us”.
Trump also acknowledged that his own personal "indiscretions" — including an affair with Marla Maples, who later became his second wife — were fair game.
The Clintons and the Trumps had been on friendly terms for years. The Clintons attended Trump's wedding to his third wife, Melania, and the couples' daughters, Ivanka and Chelsea, are friends. Trump came to Bill Clinton's defense when the Monica Lewinsky scandal was unfolding, calling efforts to impeach him "nonsense."
But in recent days, the rival campaigns have become increasingly hostile.
Trump first stirred controversy during a Michigan rally on Dec. 21, when he claimed Clinton got "schlonged" in the 2008 Iowa caucuses by Barack Obama. Clinton made her "penchant for sexism" claim in response to the real estate mogul's statement, but Trump said his remark was not meant to be vulgar.
Clinton's deputy communications director Christina Reynolds said Monday that Clinton "won't be bullied" by Trump and plans to "stand up to him, as she has from the beginning of his campaign" when he insults women and other groups.

In an effort to shape Clinton's image with the electorate Wednesday, Trump called the former secretary of state "low-energy", a label he has previously reserved for former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
He went further suggesting "no women" want to vote for Clinton in 2016. This drew loud cheers from the crowd.
”She won't win," said Trump, who added that he would "love, love having a woman president " — just not Hillary Clinton, whom he described as "horrible" and hard to listen to.
"I just have to turn off the television so many times. She just gives me a headache," he said.
Clinton leads Trump 46.3 percent to 41.3 percent in the latest Real Clear Politics average of recent polls.
Trump has predicted that a general election matchup with Clinton could lead to one of the largest voter turnouts in recent history.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Push for convention to amend Constitution energized by Rubio backing

Marco Rubio is getting behind a state-based effort to amend the Constitution with term limits and other restrictions on the federal government -- energizing the movement as the Republican presidential candidates try to woo Tea Party-aligned voters. 
The Florida senator joins a handful of other GOP candidates in backing the push, an against-the-odds campaign being waged by conservative advocacy groups and state lawmakers. He went all in at a campaign stop Tuesday in Iowa, where caucus-goers will decide the first-in-the-nation nominating contest in roughly four weeks.
“My first day in office I will announce I am a supporter,” said Rubio, after months of expressing tepid support.
In doing so, he is lending his name to a grassroots movement seeking what is essentially a national convention to amend the Constitution. Various groups have various goals, but Rubio specifically supports using the process to impose a congressional balanced-budget amendment and place term limits on Supreme Court justices and members of Congress.
He vowed if elected to “put the weight of the presidency” behind the effort.
Americans frustrated with what they consider Washington morass, insularity and gridlock point out that Article V of the Constitution says Congress must call a convention when two-thirds of state legislatures file an “application.”
The minimum 34 states appear to have given some measure of support. But the effort has been delayed for years over such issues as rules for a convention and how the petitions were approved and worded to meet varying agendas.
Rubio -- in third place in most national polls behind front-runner Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz -- is not the first 2016 GOP White House contender to champion the effort.
Fellow candidates including Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson have also expressed some level of interest or support.
But the backing of a top-tier candidate like Rubio appears to have ignited some in the GOP base.
“I’ve never been more excited about our prospects for achieving real governmental reform as I am right now,” Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Convention of States Project and president of Citizens for Self-Governance, said Wednesday.
“It is gratifying when a national-level leader like Sen. Marco Rubio acknowledges that it is imperative for the citizens to act to take power away from Washington, D.C., and return it to the people.”
Kasich is arguably the GOP candidate at the forefront of the effort. And as a fiscal conservative, he wants to use the effort expressly to force Washington to pass balanced budgets.
Though Rubio appeared Tuesday on stage to endorse the idea, he had expressed concerns earlier about state delegates uniting at a convention to rewrite the Constitution, which could jeopardize closely held First and Second Amendment rights.
After the rally, he also suggested that Congress doesn't have the will to impose term limits or pass a balanced budget amendment. As for how a convention might play out, he told reporters his campaign is “looking” at the specifics.
Concerns about rewriting the Constitution are not unfounded.
The Constitutional Convention, held in Philadelphia in 1787, was purportedly to revise the Articles of Confederation. But the roughly four-month-long meeting resulted in George Washington and other organizers drafting the Constitution.
Rubio also said he’s following the lead of former Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn, who joined the effort after retiring last year from Congress.
“Marco Rubio knows that the answers to American’s lack of confidence in Washington can only be fixed through an Article V,” Coburn said in a statement. “He also knows that Washington will not fix itself.”

Brawl breaks out in GOP race, below the Trump tier

A nasty battle has broken out in the Republican presidential field, and it doesn’t involve Donald Trump.
As the calendar draws closer to the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, the second tier of GOP candidates – along with the super PACs supporting them – are unloading on each other in a blitz of ads, videos, tweets, stump speeches and interviews. The acrimony is at a level until now unseen, in a race dominated by vitriolic squabbles between Trump and whichever candidate of the moment displeases him.
Now, with Trump training his focus on Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, the rest of the pack is fighting to rise above. The latest round involves Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
The super PAC backing Bush is out with a new ad blasting Rubio for missing a Senate meeting after the Paris terror attacks – and another contrasting Bush’s gubernatorial record against those of Christie and Kasich.
“Politics first, that’s the Rubio way,” the first ad says, slamming Rubio for fundraising while missing meetings and hearings on the Hill.
Rubio has long battled criticism of his attendance record in the Senate. In 2015, he has missed about 35 percent of roll call votes, according to GovTrack.us. That's more than any of the other senators running for president.
“Dude, show up to work,” Christie told a crowd in Iowa Tuesday, ribbing Rubio for missing a spending bill vote.
Rubio, speaking with Fox News, defended his missed votes on Wednesday. He said Washington is “completely broken” and “more than half the things that happen in Washington are just for show or for talk.”
As for Christie, he said, “He’s never in New Jersey. He’s gone half the time.”
On Tuesday, Rubio also fired back against the pro-Bush ad, charging that Bush is getting “increasingly negative in his attacks.”
Right to Rise USA, the pro-Jeb Bush super PAC, is spending $1.4 million on the ad buy which begins airing this week in the Hawkeye State.
While these fights are playing out in Iowa, many of these candidates are fighting even harder for New Hampshire.
Right now, Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz are jockeying for the lead in Iowa, with the rest of the field far behind. But while Trump also leads in New Hampshire, five candidates – Rubio, Christie, Cruz, Kasich and Bush – are tangled up in a close race below him in that state. Candidates like Christie and Kasich especially, who have struggled to gain traction elsewhere, are banking on a breakout performance in New Hampshire to gain momentum in the race.
This could explain why Kasich’s campaign and its aligned super PAC are firing back hard at Bush.
In response to the latest ad, Kasich press secretary Rob Nichols said: “The latest ad from Jeb’s team forgot to check the box for ‘Which governor is living in the past because he has no new ideas for fixing anything?’ You only attack those you fear and who’s beating you, so this latest attack by Jeb on Gov. Kasich only reaffirms the governor’s strength in New Hampshire. It’s actually flattering.”
The Kasich campaign also put out a cheeky video casting Bush as out of touch with the times.
“Jeb loves the good ole’ days,” the video declares, before showing vintage footage of things like Sony’s Betamax and the “Macarena,” the 1994 hit by Los Del Rio.

US reportedly preparing fresh sanctions over Iran ballistic missile program

The U.S. is preparing to impose financial sanctions on Iran for the first time since this past summer's agreement on Tehran's nuclear program, according to a published report. 
The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. officials, reported that the sanctions would be aimed at companies and individuals in Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong for their alleged role in developing Iran's ballistic missile program.
The sanctions would forbid U.S. or foreign nationals from conducting business with the blacklisted firms, as well as freeze any assets the companies or individuals hold inside the American financial system.
The Wall Street Journal reports that part of the justification for the sanctions is ongoing ties between Iran and North Korea, including the alleged purchase of components from a North Korean firm and the dispatching of Iranian technicians to North Korea since 2013 to develop a rocket booster.
According to the Journal, if the Treasury Department goes through with the sanctions, it would do so in the face of defiance from Iran, which claims that any new sanctions would be viewed by the country's supreme leader as a violation of the nuclear deal. For its part, the Treasury says it retains the right to punish Iranian entities allegedly involved in missile development, international terrorism, and human rights abuses.
A senior U.S. official told the Associated Press that Congress is being informed about deliberations over whether to impose sanctions.
The report on the planned sanctions comes one day after U.S. defense officials slammed Tehran for conducting what it called a "highly provocative" rocket test near two U.S. warships last week in the Strait of Hormuz.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, responded to Saturday's incident with renewed criticism of the nuclear agreement.
"A rush to sanctions relief threatens to embolden an increasingly aggressive Iranian regime that has no intention of normalizing relations with the West or of retreating from a malign policy intended to destabilize the Middle East," McCain said in a statement released Wednesday.
In the months since the deal was agreed to this past July, Iran has conducted missile tests criticized by the U.S., as well as aired footage on state television of an underground missile base.
Iran has claimed its ballistic missile program is for defense purposes only and doesn't violate international law.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe Cartoon

Former NY Gov. George Pataki announces he will end 2016 GOP presidential bid

Former New York Gov. George Pataki announced late Tuesday he is suspending his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination
"While tonight is the end of my journey for the White House as I suspend my campaign for president, I am confident we can elect the right person. Someone who will bring us together and who understands that politicians including the president must be the people’s servant and not their master," Pataki said in a video announcing his decision. "I know the best of America is still ahead of us."
 
Pataki, who led New York through the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, failed to gain traction in a crowded field of candidates during an election season that has so far favored outsiders like billionaire businessman Donald Trump.
"If we're truly going to make America great again, we need to elect a president who will do three things: Confront and defeat radical Islam, shrink the size of Washington, and unite us again in our belief in this great country," Pataki said.
GOP presidential candidate and Texas Sen. Tex Cruz said in a statement Tuesday night he was "grateful" for Pataki's service to New York, particularly while serving as Governor on Sept. 11th.
"He brought experience and knowledge to the race for the Republican nomination, and as a result, helped prepare our eventual nominee to win in November and take back the White House," Cruz said.
Bruce Breton, a local elected official and member of Pataki's New Hampshire steering committee, told the Associated Press that Pataki called him Tuesday afternoon to say he'd be exiting the race. Breton said Pataki's campaign struggled to raise money and garner media attention.
"He said he couldn't get any traction. He worked hard, it's just a different type of year," Breton said.
Pataki had hung his hopes on doing well in early-voting New Hampshire, but he has barely registered in state or national polls.
He also never made it onto a main GOP debate stage.
In November, Pataki told USA Today that he would drop out if another candidate who could unite the party emerged.
"If someone emerged who I believe could unite the party and lead the country and win the election, then there's no need to run," he said.
Pataki announced his candidacy by video in May.
"America has a big decision to make about who we're going to be and what we're going to stand for. The system is broken," he said then. "The question is no longer about what our government should do, but what we should do about our government, about our divided union, about our uncertain future."