Cuba Cartoons

Cuba denies visas for House lawmakers

Lessons from Cuba: Why people are seduced by socialism

Cuba is refusing to approve visa applications for members of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, according to the committee's chairman.
Members were hoping to leave on Friday afternoon to examine lagging security in the country's airports, which are set to begin making flights to the U.S. this year. The lawmakers were forced to cancel when their applications were denied that morning.
"We wanted to look at their airport security ... because TSA has been backchanneling to us that it's not adequate," said Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. "So I attempted to go down there to just look at them, there were five of us, and they denied our visas."
Officials say Cuba is set to begin making 110 daily flights into the U.S. from 10 airports in the country this fall, but lack security measures that include scanners and bomb-sniffing dogs.

Clinton's State Dept. calendar missing scores of entries

An Associated Press review of the official calendar Hillary Clinton kept as secretary of state identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors, loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded or were listed without the names of those she met.
The missing entries raise new questions about how Clinton and her inner circle handled government records documenting her State Department tenure -- in this case, why the official chronology of her four-year term does not closely mirror other more detailed records of her daily meetings.
At a time when Clinton's private email system is under scrutiny by an FBI criminal investigation, the calendar omissions reinforce concerns that she sought to eliminate the "risk of the personal being accessible" -- as she wrote in an email exchange that she failed to turn over to the Obama administration but was subsequently uncovered in a top aide's inbox.
The AP found the calendar omissions by comparing the 1,500-page historical record of Clinton's daily activities as secretary of state with separate planning schedules often supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The AP obtained the planning schedules as part of its federal lawsuit against the State Department. At least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were not listed in her calendar, the AP's review found.
No known federal laws were violated and some omissions could be blamed on Clinton's highly fluid schedule, which sometimes forced cancellations at the last minute. But only seven meetings found in Clinton's planning schedules were replaced by substitute events listed on her calendar. More than 60 other events listed in Clinton's planners were omitted entirely in her calendar, tersely noted or described only as "private meetings" -- all without naming those who met with her.
Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Thursday night that the multiple discrepancies between her State Department calendar and her planning schedules "simply reflect a more detailed version in one version as compared to another, all maintained by her staff."

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Merrill said that Clinton "has always made an effort to be transparent since entering public life, whether it be the release of over 30 years of tax returns, years of financial disclosure forms, or asking that 55,000 pages of work emails from her time as secretary of state be turned over to the public.

Hillary Clinton's Email Controversy | Graphiq

Clinton's State Department calendar omitted the identities of a dozen top Wall Street and business leaders who met with her during a private breakfast at the New York Stock Exchange in September 2009, minutes before she appeared in public at the exchange to ring the market's ceremonial opening bell.
State Department planning schedules from the same day listed the names of all Clinton's breakfast guests -- most of whose firms had lobbied the government and donated to her family's global charity, the Clinton Foundation. The event was closed to the press and merited only a brief mention in her calendar, which omitted all the names -- among them Blackstone Group Chairman Steven Schwarzman, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and then-New York Bank of Mellon CEO Robert Kelly.
The missing or heavily edited entries in Clinton's calendar also omitted private dinners with political donors, policy sessions with groups of corporate leaders and "drop-bys" with old Clinton campaign hands. Among those whose names were omitted from her calendar were longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal, lobbyist and former Clinton White House chief of staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty and Clinton campaign bundler Haim Saban.
The AP first sought Clinton's calendar and schedules from the State Department in August 2013, but the agency would not acknowledge even that it had the material. After nearly two years of delay, the AP sued the State Department in March 2015. The department agreed in a court filing last August to turn over Clinton's calendar, and provided the documents in November. After noticing discrepancies between Clinton's calendar and some schedules, the AP pressed in court for all of Clinton's planning material. The U.S. has released about one-third of those planners to the AP, so far.
The State Department censored both sets of documents for national security and other reasons, but those changes were made after the documents were turned over to the State Department at the end of Clinton's tenure.
The documents obtained by the AP do not show who logged entries in Clinton's calendar or who edited material. Clinton's emails and other records show that she and two close aides, deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin and scheduling assistant Lona J. Valmoro, held weekly meetings and emailed almost every day about Clinton's plans. According to the recent inspector general's audit and a court declaration made last December by the State Department's acting executive secretary, Clinton's aides had access to her calendar through a government Microsoft Outlook account. Both Abedin and Valmoro were political appointees at the State Department and are now aides in her presidential campaign.
Unlike Clinton's planning schedules, which were sent to Clinton each morning, her calendar was edited after each event, AP's review showed. Some calendar entries were accompanied by Valmoro emails -- indicating she may have added those entries. Every meeting entry also included both the planned time of the event and the actual time -- showing that Clinton's calendar was being used to document each meeting after it ended.

With Clinton at helm, State Dept. got 'prestigious' award for record-keeping

What a Joke!

At the same time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was storing emails on a personal server in violation of the rules, her department twice received a "prestigious" award for its record-keeping practices -- an honor that, in retrospect, has watchdogs scratching their heads.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) gave the so-called Archivist Award to the State Department in 2010 and again in September 2012, toward the end of Clinton's tenure.
During the 2012 ceremony, NARA Chief Records Officer Paul Wester described the honor, also bestowed upon the Treasury Department, as “prestigious.”
How did State merit such recognition?
According to NARA spokesman John Valceanu, the award was “specifically focused” on its work related to the management of inactive paper records stored in the State Department records center.
But at the time both awards were given, Clinton was skirting records rules with her email practices, according to a recent and highly critical inspector general report.

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“It is ironic, to say the least, that the National Archives and Records Administration presented awards to the State Department for their record-keeping practices while Secretary Clinton was violating the law by using a private email server,” said Alfred J. Lechner, Jr., president of Cause of Action Institute, a public interest law firm suing over department record-keeping.
At the beginning of Clinton's tenure, the department started using State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset (SMART), a system that let employees preserve emails through their department accounts without having to print and file them the old-fashioned way for record-keeping purposes.
Clinton chose not to use it. While the Democratic presidential candidate claimed all along that her emails were being captured on the government accounts with which she corresponded, the IG report said that was not an “appropriate method of preserving any such emails that would constitute a Federal record.”
Further, the IG indicated Clinton potentially violated federal law when she left State without handing over her emails.
“At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act,” said the IG report.
The report also cited officials affirming that her private email set-up would not have been approved had she sought permission.
At the time, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the report still showed “how consistent her email practices were with those of other Secretaries and senior officials,” while urging steps to improve record-keeping. Though no official had a known set-up quite like Clinton's, the IG report did cite former Secretary of State Colin Powell as well for not turning over records when he left.
Lechner, a former judge, has joined with conservative watchdog Judicial Watch to file a lawsuit against U.S. Archivist David S. Ferriero and Secretary of State John Kerry for the alleged failure to carry out statutory obligations to ensure records were preserved.
They filed a joint brief on Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia arguing that some email records from Clinton’s private server have yet to be recovered by the department in accordance with the Federal Records Act (FRA).
NARA’s Valceanu says they were in the dark about Clinton’s email practices at the time of the award.
“At that time, NARA was not aware of the use of non-governmental email accounts by Secretaries of State, which we only found out about in March 2015, when the New York Times article was published,” he said in a statement to FoxNews.com.
NARA was not completely unaware of potential record-keeping problems, however, according to an email released by the Archives’ chief counsel.
In a Dec. 11, 2012 email to colleagues, Wester asked for a meeting to talk about concerns that an effort was afoot to take her records to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark.
“Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans for taking her records from State to Little Rock,” Wester wrote. “Tom then got to asking questions about what we are doing to make sure everyone leaving the Administration does not leave with Federal records. I told him we are aware of the issue and are working on it.”

Lawsuit seeks to unbind RNC delegates from backing Trump

A Virginia delegate to this summer's Republican National Convention filed a lawsuit Friday challenging a state law which commits him to backing presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Carroll B. Correll, who served as a campaign co-chair for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in Virginia's 10th congressional district, is seeking class action status for his suit on behalf of the commonwealth's 49 Republican delegates and 110 Democratic delegates.
At issue is a Virginia law that states "Delegates and alternates shall be bound to vote on the first ballot at the national convention for the candidate receiving the most votes in the primary unless that candidate releases those delegates and alternates from such vote."
Correll, who argues in his complaint that Trump is "unfit to serve" as President, claims the law violates his right to free speech. He's seeking an injunction that would exempt him from criminal penalties under Virginia law or possible retaliatory litigation by Trump for backing another candidate on the first ballot.
Trump won Virginia's primary in March, narowly defeating Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and scooping 17 delegates in the process.
Correll's attorneys, who filed the lawsuit in the Eastern District of Virginia, have asked for the case to be expedited in the hope of getting a ruling for the start of the convention in Cleveland July 18.

Clinton Email Cartoons

Clinton failed to hand over key email to State Department

WASHINGTON –  Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday. The disclosure makes it unclear what other work-related emails may have been deleted by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
The email was included within messages exchanged Nov. 13, 2010, between Clinton and one of her closest aides, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin. At the time, emails sent from Clinton's BlackBerry device and routed through her private clintonemail.com server in the basement of her New York home were being blocked by the State Department's spam filter. A suggested remedy was for Clinton to obtain a state.gov email account.
"Let's get separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible," Clinton responded to Abedin.
Clinton never used a government account that was set up for her, instead continuing to rely on her private server until leaving office.
The email was not among the tens of thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. Abedin, who also used a private account on Clinton's server, provided a copy from her own inbox after the State Department asked her to return any work-related emails. That copy of the email was publicly cited last month in a blistering audit by the State Department's inspector general that concluded Clinton and her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup violated federal standards and could have left sensitive material vulnerable to hackers.
"While this exchange was not part of the approximately 55,000 pages provided to the State Department by former Secretary Clinton, the exchange was included within the set of documents Ms. Abedin provided the department in response to our March 2015 request," State Department spokesman John Kirby told The Associated Press on Thursday.

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Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said she provided "all potentially work-related emails" that were still in her possession when she received the 2014 request from the State Department.
"Secretary Clinton had some emails with Huma that Huma did not have, and Huma had some emails with Secretary Clinton that Secretary Clinton did not have," Fallon said.
Fallon declined to say whether Clinton deleted any work-related emails before they were reviewed by her legal team. Clinton's lead lawyer, David Kendall, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The November 2010 email was among documents released under court order Wednesday to the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch, which has sued the State Department over access to public records related to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's service as the nation's top diplomat between 2009 and 2013. The case is one of about three dozen lawsuits over access to records related to Clinton, including one filed by the AP.
Before turning over her emails to the department for review and potential public release, Clinton and her lawyers withheld thousands of additional emails she said were clearly personal, such as those involving what she described as "planning Chelsea's wedding or my mother's funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations."
Clinton has never outlined in detail what criteria she and her lawyers used to determine which emails to release and which to delete, but her 2010 email with Abedin appears clearly work-related under the State Department's own criteria for agency records under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
Dozens of the emails sent or received by Clinton through her private server were later determined to contain classified material. The FBI has been investigating for months whether Clinton's use of the private email server imperiled government secrets. Agents recently interviewed several of Clinton's top aides, including Abedin.
As part of the probe, Clinton turned over the hard drive from her email server to the FBI. It had been wiped clean, and Clinton has said she did not keep copies of the emails she choose to withhold.
On Wednesday, lawyers from Judicial Watch, a conservative legal organization, questioned under oath Bryan Pagliano, the computer technician who set up Clinton's private server. A transcript released Thursday shows Pagliano repeatedly responded to detailed questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as he did last year before a congressional committee.
Dozens of questions Pagiliano declined to answer included who paid for the system, whether there was technical help to support its users and who else at the State Department used email accounts on it. Pagliano also would not answer whether he discussed setting up a home server with Clinton prior to her tenure as secretary of state, according to the transcript.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the November 2010 email cited in the inspector general audit was one of more than a dozen work-related emails that his group identified that Clinton sent or received but later failed to turn over the State Department.
"Contrary to her statement under oath suggesting otherwise, Mrs. Clinton did not return all her government emails to the State Department," Fitton said. "Our goal is to find out what other emails Mrs. Clinton and the State Department are hiding."

Ex-Clinton official got Boeing bucks while pushing Iran nuke pact – before $25B jet deal

A former top Clinton administration diplomat who used his political sway to garner support for the Iran nuclear deal apparently was being bankrolled the entire time by Boeing -- which is set to make billions off a jet deal with Tehran now that sanctions have been lifted.
Thomas Pickering, who also served as co-chairman of the board examining the Benghazi attack response, publicly pushed for the nuclear deal before its approval last year. He did so by penning op-eds, writing to high-level officials and even testifying before Congress.
With the deal in place, Boeing has since moved forward on a $25 billion deal with Iran Air made possible by the nuclear agreement.
While Pickering never denied being on Boeing’s payroll during the talks, he didn’t regularly disclose it either, according to a new report in The Daily Beast. And that’s the problem, transparency advocates say.
“In Pickering’s case, he has a direct connection to Boeing, which I think should be disclosed,” Neil Gordon, an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, told The Daily Beast. “I think it’s necessary for the public debate. It’s necessary for the public to fully realize the participants’ financial interests. Some of them might have a direct financial stake in a particular outcome.”
Pickering was a former top State Department official in the Bill Clinton administration, and before that ambassador to Russia. He also served as ambassador to the United Nations, Israel and elsewhere in prior administrations.
When Pickering testified before the House Armed Services Committee on June 16, 2014, the biography provided to committee members touted his military and government services but did not list his business ties.
Pickering also sent a July 7, 2015 letter to lawmakers urging them to back the nuclear deal but reportedly did not make his association with Boeing known. The letter was cited by the media, lawmakers and the White House in the push to sell the nuclear deal to the public.
In op-eds for The Washington Post and Tablet, he also made the case for the deal but again did not disclose his ties.
He confirmed to The Daily Beast that he was a Boeing employee from 2001 to 2006 (which was more widely known) and later worked as a "direct consultant" from 2006 to 2015.
Earlier this month, Boeing reached a tentative agreement to sell passenger planes to Iran’s state-run carrier, Iran Air. The deal is the first major business venture after sanctions were eased against Tehran last year and is seen by many as a groundbreaking test for other American companies looking to profit from Iran’s untapped economy.
The deal is still in its early stage and will likely face scrutiny from U.S. trade regulators and lawmakers.
“It’s tragic to watch such an iconic American company make such a terribly short-sighted decision,” Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., told FoxNews.com in a statement. “If Boeing goes through with this deal, the company will forever be associated with Iran’s chief export: radical Islamic terrorism. The U.S. Congress will have much to say about this agreement in the coming days.”
Roskam and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, sent a letter to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg last week raising concerns about Tehran’s history of using commercial planes to support "hostile actors."
“We strongly oppose the potential sale of military-fungible products to terrorism’s central supplier. American companies should not be complicit in weaponizing the Iranian Regime,” the lawmakers wrote.
Boeing wrote back saying it would follow the lead of the U.S. government with regards to working with Iran Air and that “any and all contracts with them will be contingent upon continued approval.”
“And as we have stated repeatedly, should the U.S. Government reinstate sanctions against the sale of commercial passenger airplanes to Iranian airlines, we will cease all sales and delivery activities as required by U.S. law,” Tim Keating, Boeing senior vice president, wrote.
Five years ago, the Obama administration slapped sanctions on Iran Air, claiming the company used passenger and cargo planes to transport rockets and missiles to places such as Syria, sometimes disguised as medicine or spare parts. In other cases, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps took control of flights carrying sensitive cargo.
Although U.S. officials never said such conduct ended, the administration used a technicality to drop those sanctions as part of last year's seven-nation nuclear deal. The agreement also allowed the Treasury Department to license American firms to do business in Iran's civilian aviation sector. The changes enable Boeing to sell up to 100 aircraft to Iran Air, by far the most lucrative business transaction between the U.S. and Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and U.S. Embassy hostage crisis.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said the sale and any possible future deals depend on Iran's good behavior.
The U.S. could revoke the license for the deal if planes, parts or services are "used for purposes other than exclusively civil aviation end-use" or if aircraft are transferred to individuals or companies on a U.S. terrorism blacklist, Kirby said.
Any suggestion "that we would or will turn a blind eye to Iran's state sponsorship of terrorism or their terrorist-supporting activities is completely without merit," Kirby said.
The details of the arrangement between Boeing and Iran Air aren't entirely clear. Iran's Transportation Minister Abbas Akhoundi said it could match the $25 billion package between the Islamic Republic and Boeing's European rival, Airbus. Iran Air has stated its interest in purchasing new Boeing 737s -- single aisle jets that typically fly up to five hours. It also wants 777s -- larger planes that can carry passengers for 12 hours or more.
But if Iran Air continues supporting Iranian military or Revolutionary Guard operations, it would put the Obama administration or any successor in a bind.
Revoking the license and suspending future plane transfers risks angering the Iranians, who've already complained about not receiving sufficient benefit for their nuclear concessions. It also could mean billions in lost revenue for a large American company with more than 130,000 employees in the United States.